Blue Velvet & Ecstacy

'Gots to ask the question:
was I complicit in the premature frying of my own brain?
I sure hope not, but 'gots to wonder....

A recent study in Science magazine examined the intriguing possibility of a linkage between Young Onset PD and Ecstacy/MDMA usage - it was, however, thoroughly discredited once it became know the the unfortunate club monkees used in the study were injected with high doses of the wrong drug....
So the study in no way proves anything - but, conversely, does not disprove the nagging possibility of a causal link (see link for info on the now discredited study

http://www.mdma.net/toxicity/ricaurte.html

http://www.mdma.net/toxicity/retract.html

But back to the story. So, these days I live a clean and healthy lifestyle here in sunny California,
eat organic mostly, and no drug use for many years (not including of course the Azilect, ReQuip,baby Aspirin, Crestor, Co-Q10 and Neotine Creatine). I wasn't always so disciplined - back in my wild and frisky days as a New York musician I used a considerable amount of ecstacy over a ~ 3 year period while making the rounds of the downtown club scene. Did I inadvertently fry my own brain? I 'dunno...don't really have a 'freakin clue. So, just how did a nice Jewish boy from the Bronx get there? Easy.....

Working on a recording project with Steve A. and Kevin Z. (names changed to protect the guilty-as-hell) ,' headed out after the session to a place Kevin knew of, the MUDD club during its heyday, 1982 or thereabouts. Kevin had a few extra hits of something sent to him from a lab on the west coast....Ecstacy, the real deal, long before most anyone anywhere had heard of it. Always one for an adventure, washed it down with a Heinekin swig and away we go.

Nothing. Nope. Nothing.... Nothing....... Nothing...... and then

(20 minutes later) I turn into a complete, and surprisingly effective, dancing fool. You have to understand that I don't dance....playing music while others dance, yes, been there and done that, but I had rarely ventured onto any dance floor unless the occasional mandatory hokey-pokey at your cousins wedding sort of thing counts. But this, this was different.....

Before long I was holding it down with one, two, even three very hot, sultry and very naughty downtown hoochie-mamas - at least two of which were definately real women / as for the third, looked maybe like Ann Coulter with a hint of a 5 oclock shadow....but thats another story. Steve and Kevin stared in disbelief.....I had found a niche, a groove, a rhthmic place in the universe where I was completely at one......

Wasn't long till I bugged Kevin to hook me up with his connection - and for a year or two I was a regular at the MUDD, an irregular at local afterhours (open at 4am) and even the after-after hours ( recall seing sunlight at someplace aptly called 'The Nursery"). Supported this new habit by selling off the 40 or so crushed blue velvet tuxedo jackets with oversize black lapels my pal Jeff sold me cheap....insisted that they fell off the back of some truck, and who the hell was I to question his integrity?

So there I was, a snapshot in time, dark figure in blue velvet dancing provocatively into daylight with anonymous skanks from a lost era.

And, here I am, approaching fifty with the heebie jeebies, dancing with myself.......

All I know is that if/when this shit gets REALLY bad I think I'll pull off the patch, stop the stalevo, dust off my old blue velvet tux sit back and enjoy the sunset with a few ecstasy hits washed down by a cold frosty beer ....

If you live your life well, I hear everything looks better at closing time....