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Abstract

nobody else saw, not even me when reacquainted with the pulses of the everyday world.</p><p id="9c95">It may have been wandering, or boredom, or self-destructive behavior that led me into the bathroom at the blue level of Madison Square Garden with Keegan, a friend from boarding school. I was getting ready to drop two windowpanes of a four-way hit. Whatever I was seeking, I knew that, at the very least, this dose would provide a counter-irritant to douse the peat-fire of boredom and wanting burning in my guts.</p><p id="4657">Keegan asked me how many panes I wanted to take.</p><p id="c93a">I asked, “how many are you going to take”?</p><p id="9068">He said, “two”.</p><p id="46ca">I said, “I’ll take two, then.”</p><p id="b8c7">Soon after I took them he told me that he had dosed on this same acid two days before, which would mean that he had some resistance to the batch and was doubling his intake to make sure he got high. What it meant for me was that if the acid was any good I was going to get very high, and the acid was good.</p><p id="a94e">Whether what Keegan had done was “mean”, “unfair”, “stupid”, “dangerous”, “funny”, or “not a big deal”, wasn’t a question I asked at the time. It was two decades before I began to realize that some of my “friends” were not my friends. It may be of no surprise to people older than fifty that many of the people I once called “friends” were really transactional acquaintances forged in a furnace of boredom and need. At some point in my life (like, about age forty) there was the awful realization that some of the people I referred to as “friends” were simply people that let me hang out with them. They didn’t actively humiliate or shun me, and so, to my adolescent pollywog brain, they were “friends”, even if there was no reciprocity in our relationship.</p><p id="ba48">Keegan was not someone I hung onto. In the brutal pecking order of boarding school hierarchy he and I were roughly equal, though we shouldn’t have been. Keegan was smart and funny, but he was also overweight, messy, and occasionally obstinate, in the kind of peevish way that eventually stops making sense. In a milieu where sports, good looks, and emotional control counted in the calculation of your social credit score, I could fairly count Keegan as an “equal” despite the fact that he was a more compelling, charismatic, and engaging character than I was.</p><p id="9ded">Keegan had another strike against him that may be hard to explain nowadays. His parents were divorced and he was being raised by a single mother. Why that information reflected poorly on him is a topic for another serving of dreck, but there is no question that my dysfunctional, alcohol-soaked, “in-tact” nuclear family gave me a lift. Keegan’s mother, who was smart but stranded economically (though not so stranded that she couldn’t afford boarding school for her son) came to parent’s day alone, or didn’t come at all. While that information seems like it would be the last thing that teenage boys would care about, somehow it factored into the equation, and, in ways that confuse both logic and analysis, made it easier for us to take Keegan himself less seriously.</p><p id="6a81">As I look back at it, I don’t think Keegan was being a dick when he gave me the double dose. We can explain it away by using the euphemism, “he was being mischievous”. He saw it as a prank. Had he not died of a drug overdose when we were in our twenties, I am certain that today he would be willing to either apologize or explain to me why he didn’t need to apologize. I’m sorry he can’t do that.</p><h2 id="ba57">Part II: The Trip</h2><p id="4aa8">After dropping the acid in the bathroom, a metallic flush began on my tongue and filled my entire mouth while we were walking on the concourse towards our seats. I was seeing vivid color trails before any music started. When the Grateful Dead came out, I couldn’t quite fathom what was happening. All I saw was Gerry Garcia’s great gray set of hair mushrooming and breathing as he took the stage. His hair kept expanding until it filled more than a third of the Garden. Then then band began to play.</p><p id="6d9d">Here is the a recording in the concert. There is a crash at the beginning of the opening number, <i>Mississippi Half-Step</i>, which I clearly remember, though at the time, I couldn’t make any sense of it.</p> <figure id="f154"> <div> <div> <img class="ratio" src="http://placehold.it/16x9"> <iframe class="" src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2Fs_PakceAHxs%3Ffeature%3Doembed&display_name=YouTube&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Ds_PakceAHxs&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2Fs_PakceAHxs%2Fhqdefault.jpg&key=a19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=youtube" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" width="854"> </div> </div> </figure></iframe></div></div></figure><p id="06c9">Throughout the concert Keegan and I stayed in our seats. At one point a Deadhead “twirler” came up to our tier and spent what seemed like hours Grateful Dead dancing.</p> <figure id="9bcf"> <div> <div> <img class="ratio" src="http://placehold.it/16x9"> <iframe class="" src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FtmBIgvOYfLw&display_name=YouTube&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DtmBIgvOYfLw&image=http%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FtmBIgvOYfLw%2Fhqdefault.jpg&key=a19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=youtube" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" width="854"> </div> </div> </figure></iframe></div></div></figure><p id="ef40">I must have been smoking. I didn’t really smoke much as a kid, but I didn’t “not smoke” and since almost everyone in the world smoked, I sometimes did. Two girls came up to our seats and asked to bum a cigarette from me. I ha

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d a pack of Marlboros, but I couldn’t find them in the Vietnam era army jacket I was wearing. I had taken the jacket off, so I just kept turning it over and over looking through various pockets, it began to look like a carnival ride of pickle green cubby-holes. The girls stared expectantly, Keegan kept up a running commentary under his breath that they couldn’t hear:</p><p id="c961">“They’re <i>still</i> waiting. The two girls are waiting patiently while the stoned kid paws at his jacket pockets and grunts. No, that’s a lighter, Gutbloom. A lighter is not a pack of cigarettes, even if you stare at it for a long, long, time. What’s this? Hurray! You found something. A ticket! which is also not a pack of cigarettes….” etc., etc.</p><p id="46a0">After I gave the girls cigarettes, they walked away, and then the ceiling of Madison Square Garden touched the floor.</p><p id="90b4">Forty years ago I might have been able to tell you the peculiar hallucinations that accompanied individual songs. Some of those visions still color my emotional reaction to those tunes if I listen to them now, which I seldom do.</p><p id="1111">More memorable is the image of Keegan and his younger brother, who met us after the concert, standing on a New York City street trying to figure out which way was east. I was quite certain I knew, and I pointed north and said, “That’s uptown”, then pointed south and said, “that’s downtown, so that,” pointing east, “must be east.” I don’t remember if they agreed.</p><p id="d787">We went into an arcade in Times Square named Playland.</p><figure id="4e7d"><img src="https://cdn-images-1.readmedium.com/v2/resize:fit:800/1*MPnG0QZ1e9-LcTsYgF3z0g.jpeg"><figcaption><a href="https://weber-street-photography.com/2015/08/01/playland-times-sq-1985/">“Playland” Times Sq. 1985, ©Matt Weber</a>. Used without permission.</figcaption></figure><p id="d46d">When I told my brother about my adventure a few weeks after the fact, he told me that Playland was one of the “crusiest places on the planet and I was lucky I wasn’t swarmed by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chickenhawk_(gay_slang)">chickenhawks</a>.” I wasn’t. No chickenhawks that I remember. No people. There were people, but I don’t remember them. I just remember the green lines of the video game and the sound that the tanks made when they materialized.</p><figure id="e2bc"><img src="https://cdn-images-1.readmedium.com/v2/resize:fit:800/1*wvY5F25mQqrqBt2iPefnlQ.gif"><figcaption></figcaption></figure><p id="bdd2">There was nothing epic about my trip to the land of Nod. All of the epic was inside my head. From the outside, we were just messy stoned kids wandering around the city.</p><p id="a983">We made it Grand Central Station before the last New Haven Line commuter train had departed for the suburbs. On it, we joined a group of Deadheads from Rye that Keegan knew. They were another dirty lot. One of them was even wearing a top hat. Someone had a tape recorder, and they were playing the concert we had just attended.</p><p id="5c29">An argument broke out between Keegan and someone else about whether the Dead had played the “Weather Report Suite” at the concert (they hadn’t).</p><p id="834d">I wasn’t a Deadhead and had no interest in the argument. At the time I wasn’t impressed by the Rye kids. My ignorance was so complete that I could arrogantly dismiss that which I knew nothing about on the thinnest shred of misunderstood and badly reasoned evidence. I only knew what I knew, which was painfully little, but I was certain <a href="https://readmedium.com/there-s-no-place-like-home-a218b7891be3">that my beloved suburb</a> was in every way superior to Rye, and, so, by the deductive process that renders simple ignorance into mindnumbingly cocksure adolescent arrogance, I figured that the kids from Rye were somehow “wanting” and I shouldn’t waste my time on them.</p><p id="c296">Little did I know that Rye was the town where Ogden Nash lived, where the Dick Van Dyke Show was set, and that gave us Nick Kroll. I thought it was simply the backdrop for <a href="https://playlandpark.org/">Rye Playland</a>. There was plenty I could have enjoyed in Rye.</p><p id="91f2">Some time in the morning we tumbled out onto the station platform and, still as a group, went to a downtown diner that was open. I had a plate of eggs that wiggled, breathed, and grew hairs. My mouth was full of the chemical taste of speedy acid and I knew that I would be awake for at least eight more hours.</p><p id="d68b">We left the wandering pack of Deadheads and made it back to Keegan’s house as dawn arrived. His mother was awake.</p><p id="d19a">Keegan went immediately downstairs.</p><p id="6e00">His mother and I talked for a long time in the kitchen. Mrs. Keegan was kind and interesting… interesting because she seemed genuinely interested in me. She, like my mother, was a Westover graduate, and I had the realization that she was just like one of my aunts… could be one of my aunts… sitting at the kitchen table and making deceptively sophisticated small talk. I didn’t know much, but I knew she was shrouding her concern for both me and her son in her subtle and psychologically-sophisticated set of questions. Her rejoinders to my answers were sagacious. I wish I could remember them.</p><p id="c82b">For all the Koans I could recite (“Why does the Buddha come from the East?”) or snippets of the Tao Te Ching I could burp out (“The name that can be named..”) I didn’t recognize one of the Masters even while she was instructing me. Of course I couldn’t see her. If I had, I would have had to recognize her sister rabbi who was in the kitchen at my house. These boddhisattvas, who understood, endured, and knew so much, were willing to put their own “desires” aside in an attempt to feed and care for pupa hell bent on fucking up their yet-to-be spun cocoons.</p><p id="d2f6">I wish I knew then what I know now. I had met the goddess on my non-ayahuasca trip.</p><p id="5733">But I didn’t know. I went downstairs into Keegan’s basement bedroom to smoke pot, listen to Jethro Tull, and watch the walls swim.</p></article></body>

Living in the World’s Most Polluted City

Unmasking Delhi’s Pollution Crisis: Causes and Consequences

Hello,

It’s with a heavy heart that I acknowledge the grim reality of living in the world’s most polluted city. The place I call home, Delhi, has been engulfed by a persistent cloud of smog and air pollution that we face daily. Let me share with you the recent air quality information I provided earlier.

Just a few days ago, a weather portal recorded an Air Quality Index (AQI) in Delhi’s Anand Vihar at an astonishing 999, and in Noida’s Sector 62, it reached 469. Many parts of Delhi saw AQI levels exceeding 500, making the air quality “severe” and “hazardous.”

The United States Ambassador to India, Eric Garcetti, drew parallels between the pollution in Delhi and his own childhood experiences in Los Angeles. Speaking at The Energy Transition Dialogues organized by the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) in the national capital, he reflected on how the polluted air in Delhi reminded him of his upbringing in Los Angeles. He shared that, just like his own childhood, when the air quality was severely compromised in Los Angeles, his daughter, too, was advised by her schoolteacher not to play outside on a day with poor air quality.

Delhi’s AQI oscillated between “very poor” and “severe” categories in November. (Source: Central Pollution Control Board)

As evident from the image above, the air quality in Delhi is progressively declining day by day. This concerning trend underscores the ongoing struggle the city faces in combating air pollution, highlighting the urgent need for comprehensive measures to address this critical issue.

Delhi’s AQI oscillated between “very poor” and “severe” categories in November. As you can see from the image above, the air quality is continuously deteriorating day by day in Delhi.

From the above image, you can observe the alarming increase in pollution levels. To put it into perspective, a scientific paper by Berkeley Earth suggests that the air quality in Delhi is equivalent to smoking 21 cigarettes a day for the average person. The air quality often exceeds 450, signifying that the average person is exposed to even more “cigarettes” worth of air pollution. The situation in Delhi surpasses the understanding of the common man, and the entire system is struggling to cope.

As the chart above illustrates, the ideal air quality falls within the “Good” to “Moderate” range, with AQI levels ranging from 0 to 100. However, in Delhi, the meter frequently surpasses 500, with an average above this alarming threshold. It’s essential to understand why, every year, during the months of October and November, Delhi’s air quality becomes the worst in the world.

Several factors contribute to the annual deterioration of air quality in Delhi:

Stubble Burning: In the neighboring states of Punjab and Haryana, farmers burn crop residues, primarily paddy straw, after the harvest season. This practice releases a significant amount of pollutants into the air. Stubble burning is particularly prominent in the months of October and November, contributing to the worsening air quality in Delhi.
Weather Conditions: During the winter months, Delhi experiences unfavorable meteorological conditions, such as temperature inversions. These conditions trap pollutants close to the ground, preventing them from dispersing into the atmosphere. As a result, the concentration of pollutants in the air increases, leading to smog and poor air quality.
Vehicle Emissions: Delhi has a high density of vehicles, and emissions from these vehicles significantly contribute to air pollution. The release of particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, and other pollutants from automobiles worsens the city’s air quality.
Industrial Emissions: Industrial activities in and around Delhi also release a substantial amount of pollutants into the atmosphere. Emissions from factories and manufacturing processes add to the pollution levels in the region.
Construction and Dust: Construction activities generate dust and particulate matter, which are released into the air. This dust, along with road dust, becomes airborne and contributes to the overall pollution load in the city.
Firecrackers: During festivals and celebrations, the use of firecrackers releases pollutants into the atmosphere. While this is more episodic than some other factors, it still worsens air quality during specific events.
Population Density: Delhi is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. The high population density results in increased emissions and pollution sources, adding to the air quality challenges.
Lack of Green Spaces: A scarcity of green spaces and trees in the city reduces its ability to naturally filter and clean the air.

Among these factors, stubble burning is a significant problem. Every year, farmers in Punjab, Haryana, and even Pakistan’s Punjab burn crop residues, contributing to the annual pollution crisis in Delhi. It’s a multifaceted issue, but understanding these contributing factors is crucial to finding effective solutions.

The situation in Delhi is a complex challenge that requires continued efforts to mitigate and ultimately eliminate the factors leading to the city’s poor air quality.