I had a bad bicycle accident once, bad enough on my smashed head that sometimes I would try to say someone's name and say another instead, even if I was really concentrating. During this time I was staying at Maison du Louis and Jen, who dressed my wounds in the kitchen and rented that Jenny Shimizu movie, Foxfire. Jen was strangely compelled by the film's other star, which did not presage good things for my hosts' marriage.
This was the night right after the accident, after a stranger in a passing car had driven me back to the Maison Albany and I had failed an online IQ test. There was something pressingly wrong with my head and I was having trouble speaking. It wasn't just names; there was a sensation that whatever sentence I was trying to say was out of countrol and I didn't know where it was supposed to go; there was a lot of stopping and fumbling. I was fearful, each second more than the last, as the aphasia writhed and did not relent, as my inability to form basic thoughts gathered into the evening. Making sentences was what I did. I was terrified.
However Joyce Carol Oatesy the movie is, Mazzy Star is on the track, and when that song came on -- I don't even remember now; was it "Halah" or "Fade"? -- I wasn't afraid for a couple of minutes. It's not that Mazzy Star is "soothing," exactly; the song wasn't oil on troubled waters. Instead, something in its weather matched my interior weather. Not the terror but the blankness; my thinking was becalmed, without dynamics, an upright coma. In this it did not resemble the world wired with activity, threat, desire. But for the Mazzy duration the world was as vacant and easy as my mind, I didn't feel all wrong, and I was so grateful for this that I wept, as I had wept the first time I ever got high on dope.
The corollary realization was that, for all the rigs that try, almost no band gets heroin right (and that includes VU, all my doxological cheries). And for this, Mazzy Star, which is good at essentially nothing else, gets called "psychedelic" by All Music Guide.
Transcend, dental medication! Twelve years before that I took two Percocets and read Jonathan Livingston Seagull, lying on a cot in a friend's girlfriend's apartment. There was so little in that experience that could be called experience that nothing seemed to be happening at all, and I thought being dead must feel just like that.