Astral Biochemistry

This is your brain. This is drugs. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?

I grew up on this public service announcement, which to this day makes me laugh when I clicked on denaturation (biochemistry) and thought about it.

I made eggs for breakfast the next morning.

The public service announcement didn’t do much for me—I had a mother who was an R.N. and used to tell me horror stories about drug patients she treated who had lost their septum from snorting too much coke. This was lovely to tell your young child, but I have to hand it to her—it worked. Before I even knew what the vocabulary word septum meant, I vowed never to put anything up my nose, for fear of my nose collapsing.

As I was taking a trip down memory lane, I came across this parody.

I laughed even though my gay best friend died of addiction, because he would have seen the dark humor in it.

I watched a documentary about Taboo, the musical Broadway flop by Boy George produced by Rosie O’Donnell. Boy George was the face of God singing to me as a young child. I suppose it is rather odd for an eight-year-old to be having fantasies of hanging out with a drag queen…but it does explain my confusion with gender roles to this day. A colleague said I was “the patron saint of misfits.” As I was listening to Stranger in this World, I missed my gay best friend because being with him made me feel not so alone. He told me if he were straight, I would be the one.

When Facebook came out, our mutual friend posted pictures of our high school gang, but she avoided posting pictures of him. Sometimes I wish he could still have a Facebook avatar. I wish I could post on his wall, “Go see Next to Normal—you’ll love Alice Ripley even more than the Sideshow CD you made me.” Instead of sending my message into cyberspace, I send it out into astralspace and hope he gets the message.