Why are you so obsessed with cats?
I get this question a lot, usually after someone sees my house (which contains a troublingly large amount of cat stuff—ceramic cat figurines, cat paintings, cat books, cat calendars, and an array of cat-related dishware). This is all the more confusing for people considering that I don’t actually have a living, breathing cat. So, what exactly turns a 35 year-old dude into a crazy cat lady? The answer is far from simple, but it has to do with two things well-known for altering lives and warping minds: Aphex Twin and LSD.
I went to college in rural Oklahoma, which is not a place known for having a thriving nightlife or for being a hotbed for musical subculture (other than the Flaming Lips, anyway). When I was in college we still didn’t have Mtv in my part of the state, nor did we have college radio. Or the internet. Think about that for two seconds: NO INTERNET. We might as well have been riding horses and buggies to class, basically. If I didn’t read about it in a music magazine, I didn’t know it existed. I did, however, have a small circle of friends from other places who were all sufficiently weird and were happy to introduce me to good music and illicit substances. This was also a time during which I expressed myself by wearing lots of kooky, ill-fitting thrift store outfits and listening to shitty grunge like it was my full-time job. This was the early 90’s. DJ culture--at least in rural Oklahoma--didn’t exist yet. The only vaguely cool acts that ever came to Oklahoma were industrial bands like Skinny Puppy and KMFDM, all of which came through due to Tulsa’s inexplicably large goth scene. Even so, Tulsa was a good 3 hour drive away from me.
Given the general lack of danger in my day to day college life, I remember being super excited when my friend Ginger started dating someone (a deadhead guy with the SAME NAME as me who was also in the army, drove a vintage muscle car, and lived in my dorm) who could easily hook us up with drugs. Of course, we were total rubes from a small town that had barely even been in the same room with weed, let alone taken LSD. So, we lied and said that we LOVED taking acid and wasted no time buying as much from him as we possibly could (paid for with my student loan dollars). Nevermind the fact that we had basically never touched drugs before. We were ready to break on through to the other side.
So, we decamped to Ginger’s trailer house (for reals, she lived in a sweet trailer house at the edge of town) and examined our newly purchased acid, which came printed with pictures of Jesus Christ on it. JESUS! I’d recently befriended an asian goth girl (a rare bird in Oklahoma City back in 1993) who had given me a copy of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92 and it became the chosen soundtrack for our night. This was probably the only good decision we made that day.
So, we put tabs of acid under our tongues and I quickly committed one of the worst mistakes a novice drug taker can make—after deciding that my acid wasn’t working, I decided to TAKE MORE. About two seconds after dropping my second hit of acid, the first one started to hit me like a runaway freight train. Ginger’s trailer house quickly became like portal to a frightening, liquid-filled dimension. Now, Aphex Twin records already sound like they are made with rubber bands and demon-possesed electronic equipment submerged at the bottom of the ocean, but as our trip started to switch into high gear, the music itself seemed to dictate what what happening. I repeatedly found myself repeating another drug taking no no--I looked at myself in the mirror. A lot. My face was a kind of shape-shifting nightmare vision that I could not stop looking at. Somehow this lead to Ginger and I braiding each other’s hair (I was sporting a shoulder-length Kurt Cobain bob) and paint our fingers red with cherry kool-aid powder. We also tried (unsuccessfully) to eat a slice of pizza. Basically, we lost our minds. The only saving grace was the Aphex Twin record on repeat—which was both beautiful and intermittently frightening to listen to—and the fact Ginger’s cat, Spamela (yes, she was really named after a can of Spam), had a litter of KITTENS, which we promptly set loose in the house with us. Every time one of us started to get frightened by the goings on (which was approximately every 2 to 3 minutes), the other one would grab a kitten and toss it onto the frightened person’s lap (or head or face or back) and shriek “KITTENS!” It was like that “Kittens Inspired by Kittens” video but with lots of sweating and crying….and it lasted about 17 hours or so.
Anyway, touching the kittens eventually became my safe space…and I kept thinking that there were at least a few hundred of them running around in the trailer with us and that they all desperately NEEDED TO BE TOUCHED. Also, the Aphex Twin record had taken on a new and frightening dimension—bigger, scarier, more non-human and tear-jerkingly beautiful. I kept announcing that Aphex Twin was “The future of music! The future of kittens!” and asking questions like “Is the music making this happen? What’s happening inside the music?” or just “Music! Music! Music!” and “There is something inside the music! I am seeing music! Kittens are music!”
Twelve to twenty-hour hours later, it was all nearly over. The kittens had been petted and fondled to the point of exhaustion (both theirs and ours), our voices were hoarse from hours of hysterical chattering, and the Aphex Twin had taken on the form of lullaby. We took sleeping pills and climbed into the giant bird’s nest we had made out of couch cushions and sleeping bags.
The upside to all this? Over the next few years, I would go on to seek out all of the Aphex Twin/Richard D. James-related records I could get my paws on. My consciousness had not exactly been expanded, but a new musical universe had kind of opened up. I started driving great distances to see DJ’s and take more drugs. Eventually most of the drugs got tiresome (I never need to take acid again, unless there is a car waiting to drive me immediately to Bellevue Mental Hospital), but chasing after new music essentially became the focus of my life.
The cat obsession stuck too. For weeks (years?) after we took acid that first time, I’d occasionally see kittens out of the corner of my eye, even though it was usually just a rock or a cup of coffee or a plastic bag blowing across the street. This didn’t make me afraid of kittens or cats though, it made me LOVE them. Also, to this day I have a powerful Pavlovian flashback reaction to hearing Aphex Twin. It reminds me of being young and ridiculous and easily amazed by new experiences. It also reminds me of a time when I could listen to music and love it with an intensity that made me feel like I was tripping, even when I wasn’t on drugs at all.
Aphex Twin - Rubber Johnny
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