When Dr. Jessie prescribed more malaria meds for me, I switched to Damaprium. It continued the zany dreams but twisted my view of the world, making me paranoid, cruel, and megalomanic. In my dreams I become a godchild, I grow up as a shepherd-boy in the desert and become king, khan, pharoah. I raise empires and wage wars and erect monuments, I sire bloodlines that rule for centuries as I fade into the background. I grow tired of the extraordinary and seek an ordinary life, but after a single lifetime I am so crushed by the inevitable passing of my loved ones that I peel off of reality and cleft my very being unto the universe, I seek to destroy myself in the vibrations of every quark and antiquark. I am the dark matter that will bring it all back, chaos, the destroyer.

I return to earth as the meteor. A flash of light in the sky. Many people see me streak across the sky and they know I'm going somewhere so they hop on for a ride but they soon find out I'm not going up, I'm going down, baby, all the way. But if you look quickly, you will see something beautiful.

When I wake up, I can always tell the reality from the dream by how wether or not it's been a thousand years since I changed lives. I still see things, though- the thing about hallucinations is that they creep in where your eyes can't trust themselves, likewhen looking at a cloud- who knows what direction any part of a cloud could move? If you see it, you will believe it... and vice versa! I see bubbles freeze in place in a glass of beer. I see creatures in the bush at night- who is to say they aren't there? I suspect that the ones that run or fly away are real, and the black ones that rush at you and then disappear are hallucinations.

The drug has very definite effects. A constant headache like bad acid. Paranoia. Megalomania. An inability to distinguish between the specific and the general. This hypersensitivity has me feeling like the Rat Patrol has forgotten all about me and that makes me fire off crazy, lashing emails. Later my friend Bikefreeek sends me an email about his time in the Army where he experienced feelings identical to the ones I feel: Why don't they write? How can they be obsessed with such pettiness and appearances? Don't they know what I'm going through here? I seem to be suffering from a standard dose of reality.

But the drug has also made me hypersensitive to beauty- a full moon so bright you could tan by it, a few dozen green-and-yellow grasshoppers munching on a green and red pepper plant, and the SNAP of a hawk as she pulls out of a dive eight feet above my head while the crows complain and regroup and peck her from above, where she can't attack. The fact that any child who can walk and talk in Ghana will take your money and run and get a beer or a pack of cigarettes or a ketchup-pack of gin for you and bring back all of your change. The manic ventilation of funerals, the celebration, the acceptance of death that makes it easier to bear. A bold lizard licking up ants so close to me I can see the bright red mites in his ear.

I experience these pops where I suddenly conceive time on its scale, not on mine, and my mind can't handle it and I break down in tears.

I swing to these extremes, anger and joy, suspicion and trust. I amplify whatever is given to me. The hard part is watching it all happen in your rational mind, even being able to talk to people about it on Sunday Monday and Tuesday before the parasite launches a desperate charge on Wednesday and I take the drug and woosh. My friends begin to talk to me in a way that assumes nothing, free of sarcasm, and it really helps, it speaks to *me*, not him- him being that id-me that takes ahold when my control is loosened.