Francis Heaney

Francis Heaney is the author of the humor collection Holy Tango of Literature. He is also a professional puzzle writer and editor (and a former editor-at-large for GAMES Magazine, as well as a former editor of the Enigma, the official publication of the National Puzzlers' League), the composer and co-lyricist (with playwright James Evans) of the Off-Off-Broadway musical We're All Dead, and the author of the webcomic Six Things.


 * "I took a lot of LSD in college. I also smoked pot although I gave it up fairly quickly; I didn't care for it. (It made me feel thick-headed.)


 * On one of the few occasions between when I'd gotten my body to overcome its resistance to inhaling smoke into its lungs and when I decided to just say, “No, I'd rather take these other drugs instead,” I and some friends of mine were high. Our R.A. came around selling acid, as was his wont. I bought a tab and assumed my friends would do likewise, since that's how things tended to go when acid was being sold. Somehow I didn't notice that I was the only one buying LSD until I had already taken it. Also, it had not been brought to my attention that marijuana and LSD interact in such a way as to make an acid trip much, much more intense.


 * I had never tripped alone, nor had I ever hallucinated as much as I would over the course of that night; I barely held it together. I just kept thinking, “Well, this will be over in eight hours,” which is how long a normal acid trip lasts. Apparently that's something else that changes when you take pot and acid at the same time!


 * The next morning, after I tried to get some sleep and failed, I went to the college library for a change of scenery and some distraction. The multicolored carpet there did indeed serve as a distraction, albeit a blinky and unwelcome one. I read some Harlan Ellison short stories (is there any better audience for a Harlan Ellison short story than a college student on LSD?), and eventually settled down in a study carrel with a copy of Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia, a book in which psychedelic mushrooms appear with surprising frequency.


 * Perhaps there's no better way to be on the wavelength of a man who spent so much time inside his head than being stuck in the middle of a 24-hour-long acid trip. It made me feel like, well, even if I never come down, maybe I can still build a career as an introspective eccentric. http://www.coudal.com/ftb/index.php?year=06&author=heaney