Free The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss by Dennis McKenna Page A

the progress in minute detail, utterly engaged. Major fun was a few days out, and I was on it, monitoring the situation from morning till night.
    In retrospect, it’s a wonder the carneys didn’t chase me off more than they did, which wasn’t often. According to conventional wisdom, these people were apt to be thieves, sleaze balls, and bums. And yes, our parents warned us about the dangers of hanging out with them, of being abducted and forced into labor (or worse). But Happy Day Rides wasn’t just any sleazy carnival; it was our sleazy carnival, a “clean,” family-oriented operation that the town mostly welcomed. Whether their good reputation was deserved or not, I had no idea. What mattered to me were their fantastic machines, which created much happiness until they were broken down and carried off as quickly and quietly as they arrived, leaving a new faint grief over the approach of fall. Beyond that, there was Christmas to look forward to, and the autumn distraction of Halloween, but in the distorted time scale of boyhood consciousness, those events seemed as distant as the next glaciation.
    I may have had a touch of Asperger syndrome or perhaps even high-functioning autism as a child. I hazard this self-diagnosis because l loved to rock, and often did so, back and forth, in my chair, quite happily for hours. I remember the big rocking chair in the living room of my aunt and uncle’s ranch on the Crystal River, the place where we spent so many weekends. The chair was old and had a long back-and-forth arc to it and a very satisfying creak. As soon as we arrived on a Friday night, I’d head for the chair and start to rock and pretty much stay there for the duration, only stopping for meals or when my folks insisted I go outside and play in the beautiful forests and pastures. I enjoyed all that, but I was always happy to return. Unlike the present era, where the slightest behavioral anomaly is viewed as pathological, my rocking was seen as a little “quirky” but not really harmful, and anyway, “He’ll grow out it.” And I did.
    One lifelong characteristic that my rocking did reveal was a fondness for novel experience and stimulation. From an early age I was a junkie for proprioceptive novelty; I loved the feelings of floating and flying, of centrifugal acceleration and g-forces, of distorted body image and queasy stomach butterflies. The carnival rides, especially the Octopus and the Tubs Of Fun, delivered these sensations more reliably and intensely than I could induce in my chair, or on the swing set in the park, or in the occasional weightless episodes that Dad liked to indulge in when he took me up for a spin in his Piper Tri-Pacer. These were all cool and fun, but nothing delivered like the carnival rides! The rides were the ultimate cheap thrill (actually not so cheap to an eight-year-old, but I had saved my allowance).
    Looking back, I have to believe that much of my later interest in drugs originated from my early love for “funny feelings” accessed through the carnival and other DIY methods of altering consciousness. In his book The Natural Mind , Andrew Weil writes that it is almost universal for children of a certain age to spin themselves into a falling-down state of dizziness (I tried that, too) because they enjoy the unfamiliar feeling engendered by the disorientation and loss of balance. Indeed, Weil argues that the human brain and nervous system are hardwired to seek out novel perceptions, distorted body images, visionary episodes, and other forms of ecstatic experience, and this inbuilt proclivity explains much of our fondness for substances that can trigger these altered states. Much of this activity is motivated by a curiosity akin to a scientist’s; the individual is posting data points in the unmapped territory of possible sensation. Some people go in for extreme sports like bungee jumping or skydiving for similar reasons; others pursue novel sensations through drugs, and, of course,