Yeah, so there it is. Funny those mushrooms never talked to _me_ .... maybe
I just didn't take enough %^). The authors mention the "10 mg" level: I
assume that means 10 mg of pure psylocybin. I wonder how many mushrooms
that is? Hopefully someday I'll find out, in the meantime, happy shrooming ...
and remember, shroom safely - gerold
From: Scotto Moore <scotto@penguin.gatech.edu>
Subject: Terrence on the WOD
Date: Mon, 6 Jul 92 21:35:34 EDT
Terrence McKenna
Excerpted w/o permission from
"A Weekend With Terrence McKenna" Feb. 1992
Psilocybin actually erodes the ego. This is what is put against a lot of
psychedelics. They say, "These stoners, they don't punch the time clock, and
when you threaten to fire them, it seems to have no effect on them. I don't
know how to reach these people." Well, the way you reach them is you appeal to
something other than the ego.
Modern industrial civilization has very skillfully promoted certain drugs and
supressed others. A perfect example is caffeine. Caffeine -- I hate to tell
you this -- caffeine is a fairly dangerous drug. It isn't dangerous in that a
cup of coffee will kill you, but a lifestyle built around caffeine is not going
to -- you're not going to live to be a hundred years old, or even seventy,
unless you are statistically in the improbably group. Why is caffeine not only
tolerated but exalted? Because, boy, you can spin those widgets onto their
winkles just endlessly without a thought on your mind. It is *the* perfect
drug for modern industrial manufacturing. Why do you think caffeine, a
dangerous, health destroying, destructive drug, that has to be brought from the
ends of the earth, is enshrined in every labor contract in the Western world as
a right? The coffee break -- if somebody tried to take away the coffee break,
you know, the masses would rise in righteous fury and pull them down. We don't
have a beer break. We don't have a pot break. I mean, if you suggested,
"Well, we don't want a coffee break. We want to be a ble to smoke a joint at
eleven," they would say, "Well, you're just some kind of -- you're a social
degenerate, a troublemaker, a mad dog, a criminal." And yet, the cost health
benefit of those two drugs, there's no comparison. Obviously, pot would be the
better choice. The problem is, then you're going to be standing there
dreaming, rather than spinning the widgets onto the nuts. (laughter)
Coca leaves would be very good. I suspect in the near future we may see the
legalization of coca as a sop to the mentality that wishes to see cocaine...
Andy Weil, who's a good friend of mine -- we don't agree on everything, but --
a few years ago he had great enthusiasm for a coca chewing gum. And I never
got on the bandwagon because I didn't see that we needed another high focus
industrial stimulant on the market. But coca would be great, and certainly in
the Amazon, if you're a petrone, you encourage your workers to chew coca. I
mean, they're worthless without coca. Give them coca and put a machete in
their hands and they will just flail for hours at the bush.
Another example that's interesting, that shows how blinded and unaware we are
of how drugs have shaped our society...We all know that slavery ended in the
United States in the Civil War. And most people, if you question them, think
that slavery existed before the Civil War in many places back into ancient
times. This is not true at all. Slavery died in Western civilization with the
collapse of the Roman empire. During the Dark Ages and the medieval period, if
you owned a slave, you owned *one* slave. It was the equivalent of owning a
Ferrari or a Lamborghini. It was an index of immense wealth, and social
status, and that slave would be a houseboy, or a cook or something like that,
someone close in to you, taking care of you. It was inconceivable to use slave
labor in the production of an agricultural product, until Europe acquired an
insatiable desire for sugar.
Now, let's think about sugar for a moment. Nobody needs sugar. You can go
from birth to the grave without ever having a teaspoon full of white sugar.
You will never miss it. Throughout the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, sugar
was a drug, a medicine. It was used to pack wounds, to keep wounds septic.
And it was very expensive and there was very little of it. Nobody even knew
where it came from. It was called cane honey, because they knew it came from
some kind of jointed grass, but nobody had a clear picture of what sugar was.
Well, when you extract sugar from sugar cane, it requires, in pre-modern
technology, a temperature of about 130 degrees. You cannot -- free men will
not work sugar. It's too unpleasant. You faint, you die from heat
prostration. You have to take prisoners and you have to chain them to the
sugar vats. And so, before the discovery of America, in the fifty years before
the discovery of America, they began growing sugar cane in the east Atlantic
islands, Medeira and the Canary Islands. And they brought Africans, and sold
them into slavery specifically for sugar production.
Now when we get American history, they tell you that slaves were used to
produce cotton and tobacco. In fact, this is not quite the truth. They had to
find things for slaves to do, because they brought so many slaves to the New
World to work sugar, and they had so many children, that then they just
expanded and said, "Well, we've used slaves to work sugar, we might as well use
them in cotton and tobacco production." In 1800, every ounce of sugar entering
England was being produced by slave labor of the most brutal and demeaning
sort. And there was very little protest over this. It was just accepted. To
this day, sugar cultivation in the third world is a kind of institutionalized
slavery. Christian, you know, the Popes, the kinds of Europe, all of Christian
civilization acquiesced in the bringing back of a practice that had been
discredited during the fall of Rome, in order to supply the insatiable need for
sugar. It was an addiction. It had no cultural defense whatsoever.
********
These things (psychedelics) have another quality which we haven't talked too
much about, which is, the psychedelics are the source of special information.
And these hierarchies want to control the information. I mean, in other words,
it's the pipeline to God problem. You know, the Protestant Reformation was a
whole effort to overthrow the Papal claim that you couldn't just pray. You had
to have theologians interpret scripture and dogma, and they would gently guide
you toward the right understanding, but that you weren't supposed to have a
direct relationship to spirit. You were supposed to leave that to experts.
So I think that's another issue, that the psychedelics empower, with gnosis,
true information. And every society is based on a lie of some sort. So having
people going around the official lie and getting in touch with reality turns
them into social dissidents. And you have to control that. I mean, that was
exactly what happened in the 1960's. What happened was, too many people were
getting stoned, and then checking out of the official canon of the culture.
And people just said, you know, "You can take that job and shove it." And this
was very alarming. Now every society can tolerate a certain amount of this.
You always have people who just aren't playing the game. But what happening in
the 1960's was that LSD entered the picture, and LSD is different from all
other psychedelics in one tremendously important quality, and that is:
A single skilled chemist, in a small apartment, with about $40,000 worth of
equipment, in a single long weekend, can produce forty to sixty million hits of
a drug. Forty to sixty *million* hits! This is a loaded gun at the head of
society. Now I wrote a book on growing mushrooms, and years ago grew mushrooms
quite a bit. And I can tell you, an absolutely dedicated mushroom grower,
working his ass off for six months, can produce maybe four or five thousand
hits of mushrooms. In other words, it's entirely a neighborhood phenomenon.
It doesn't affect the dials that measure the fate of society. But you produce
forty to sixty million hits of a drug, you have entered the realm of global
politics. You now probably have more power -- you and your friends probably
now have more power to affect the fate of the world than, let's say, the
government of Switzerland. Well, no, not Switzerland, they have the banks.
But -- the government of Finland, let's say. You have just shoved Finland out
of the way and taken your place in the hierarchy. So no government would put
up with that for a moment.
********
You see, the hidden issue, and it need not be hidden among us...the government
always tries to paint itself as the mother hen, concerned about her errant
chicks. And so, to keep you from crashing into other people on the freeway, to
keep you from leaping out of buildings or committing society, we have to
control these drugs. As a matter of fact, you know, this is absurd. More
people die because of alcohol than all illegal drugs combined in a given year.
The government is not your friend on this issue. The government is very
concerned to control the mass mind. And marijuana -- my God, since the British
Commission on Hemp, which was in 1889, I believe -- the British East India
Company commissioned a study of hemp -- they have spent millions and millions
and millions of dollars to find something, anything, you name it, wrong with
cannabis. There is nothing wrong with cannabis. It is the most thoroughly
tested, pawed over, and examined drug in human history. And they just come up
with the lamest stuff. I mean, they tell you, you know, you're gonna have
tits. Give me a break. They say, "You won't be motivated in your job." Like
your job is supposed to be the (pinnacle) against which all things are to be
measured.
And I think people on our side of this question have been tremendously naive,
because people just think, "We just have to convince them that it's harmless."
*It ain't harmless.* It is a knife poised at the heart of dominator values.
It would make the modern industrial assembly line, political loyalites, the
macho image projection -- all of these little tricks that they're running are
severely eroded by cannabis. And they will stop at nothing to eradicate it.
Look at the budget of the DEA -- what are they doing? They're giving, 65% is
dedicated to cannabis eradication. Heroin gets 20%, coke gets all the rest.
It's demonstrably absurd the way the money is spent, unless you have a secret
agenda of some sort. And if your agenda is to supress the evolution of
unwanted social attitudes in the American public, then you have to keep your
eye on cannabis very very closely. The new guy who heads the War on Drugs,
Martinez? This guy, I heard him on NPR this week, and his most passionate
moment in the half hour interview was, he said, "We have pushed the price of an
ounce of cannabis past the price of an ounce of gold, and we're going to keep
it that way." Nothing about eradication, talk about keeping the price high.
The fact that they refuse to tax it when they're starving for revenue shows
that there must be a secret agenda. It doesn't make any kind of sense.
When I wrote this book, I did a lot of research on an area I didn't know that
much about, which is, let's say from 1500 to the present, drugs of addiction.
And what I discovered is drug smuggling is like assassination. If the
government isn't involved, it never seems to really happen. And governments
have been using drugs for centuries as forms of secret revenue. This whole
sugar thing that I laid out to you, those were decisions made by the crown headsof Europe in collusion with the Pope. It wasn't common people who set those
policies in place.
During the 1960's, when the black ghettos began to come apart, suddenly number
three China white heroin was cheaper and more available than it had ever been
in any time in this history of the heroin problem in the United States. Why?
Because the CIA saw, you know, all these black guys are getting up, a bunch of
uppity niggers as the government calls them, you just smother it in heroin.
Get everybody either hooked or making money...
And they don't care really about the effects of drugs, and one group, one
faction will work against another. For example, I'm a great afficianado of
hashish, and hashish became very hard to get in the United States in the late
70's. But as soon as the Russians invaded Afghanistan, suddenly there was
massive amounts of excellent Afghani hashish, at prices that nobody had seen
for fifteen years. Well, the reason was, the CIA knows that hashish is not
really a problem. But what they wanted is, they wanted an income for the
mujahadin. And they had to pay for all these weapons. So they just started
bringing it in wholesale. And it wasn't even a smuggling operation. I mean, I
received reports from people who said, you know, "Smuggling? They're not
smuggling. They're unloading it on pier 39, union local 1030 is taking off,
you know, five hundred pound blocks of hashish by the tens of thousands." And
the day the Afghan war ended? They staged an enormous series of interlocking
busts on their own infrastructure, and they closed it down, and they pulled it
to pieces.
When Khomeni kicked out the Shah, the Iranian heroin business then fell under
the control of the mulahs, and at that point, suddenly cocaine emerges as a
major problem in the United States, because we just switched our supply lines.
We could no longer depend on Iranian heroin, because we couldn't depend on
these screwy Islamic fundamentalists, so we just turned toward all of these
company assets in Honduras and Ecuador and Columbia. Very, very cynical.
You know, it's only been a hundred and twenty years since the so called opium
wars. Very few people know what the opium wars, what was the issue in the
opium wars. Well, it turns out the British government wanted to deal opium in
China, and the Chinese Emperor told them to get lost. And they flipped. And
they sent naval units, and they laid siege to several Chinese cities, and they
forced the Chinese imperial court to agree that they could deal as much opium
as they wanted on the wharves of Shanghai...
The Japanese, when they invaded Manchuria in the Second World War, they
immediately began producing heroin and opium in vast amounts, not then as an
economic strategy, but as a strategy to break the will of the Chinese
population by encouraging addiction, and there was vast amounts of opium
addiction. If any of you saw "The Last Emperor," you recall that his mistress
was severely addicted to opium, and it depicted it in a number of scenes.
So governments have very cynically manipulated drugs, so that the drugs which
make it possible for capitalism to function are cheap and freely available, and
the drugs which erode dominator values, or cause people to question their
situation, are savagely supressed.
********
How can we win if we're taking psychedelics (which erode the ego)? I think
that what we have to say is that we must win by example. You know, the I Ching
says you must never confront evil directly, because then it learns how to
defend itself. The hippies were certainly no threat to the government as a
military force, but as an example, as a model for others to follow, I think
they scared them to death. They were probably very happy to see them all turn
into Weathermen and begin hurling molotov cocktails. *That* they understood.
They could relate to that. But flowers in the barrels of their guns spelled
ruin and defeat, and they knew it.
(More to come...)
Faithfully keyed in by Scotto, who really should acquire a life somewhere
From: Scotto Moore <scotto@penguin.gatech.edu>
Subject: Terrence on Psychedelics and DMT (1)
Date: Wed, 8 Jul 92 19:58:54 EDT
Terrence McKenna
Excerpted w/o permission from
"A Weekend With Terrence McKenna," Feb 1992
Part One
One of the things I've discovered in trying to wage this kind of career is,
because we are talking about something invisible, an experience, and because we
can't all drop here in this room and compare notes...it's often hard to get
everybody to the same starting gate. People have entirely different notions of
what you actually mean when you say "a psychedelic experience." Most people,
even straight people, have had what they call a drug experience. They either
remember the time they drank a whole bottle of cough syrup, or the time that,
you know, they went in for minor surgery and were given an anesthetic, or the
time they had root canal work, and everybody eventually -- it's hard to life a
life where you don't eventually get your mind altered. This does not set you
up for the psychedelic experience, and because there's no consensus about this,
it's worthwhile talking about the gradations and what is really possible.
At the broadest level you have what are called altered states. And altered
states are any state different from the state you were just in, you know? So
if you have a double espresso, you enter an altered state. If you climb a
mountain in three minutes, you have an altered state. If you dive into cold
water, altered state. And there thousands -- you know, an infinitude of these
altered states. I mean, if states didn't alter, life would be pretty boring.
The moment to moment experience of being is an experience of altering states.
I'm horny, I'm sleepy, I'm pissed off, these are all altered states.
Then, as you close in through the concentric circle of this particular mandala,
you come to psychoactive, the impact of psychoactive drugs. Now we've
eliminated jumping into cold water, climbing mountains. Now we're firmly in
the domain of drugs, substances of some sort. And it includes foods. I mean,
you all know what an MSG flush is like. Chinese restaurant syndrome? That's a
metabolite, monosodium glutimate, being taken in excess amount and causing an
altered state. It's a kind of, you could think of it as a drug. Anything
which changes your mind can be abused as a drug. Jalapeno peppers are, in many
shamanic societies, people eat huge amounts of jalapeno peppers, and identify
the feeling as powr. And they say, "I am building my inner heat so that I can
cure," you know? It's a very conscious kind of thing.
Well, then there are the more traditional psychoactive states, states of
tranquility brought on my tranquilizers, halcion, valium, you know. There's a
million of these things, they come and go, prozac...or states of agitation,
methedrine, benzedrene, dexadrene, amphetamine, white sugar, caffeine,
theobromine, the active agent in cocoa and chocolate...and each one of these
things pushes you into a different state, which is largely emotive and rooted
in the body.
But when you get to the -- well, before we talk about the psychedelics... Then
there are drugs which are mental drugs which I don't consider psychedelic. My
definition of psychedelic is tighter than most people's. For instance, you may
know about datura. Datura is jimson weed and these ornamental plants with the
large, white, bell-like flowers. Well, if you make a tea out of the leaves,
root, flowers, or seed of that plant, it will turn you every which way but
loose. I mean, it is a completely disorienting, freaky kind of experience,
with loss of memory, confusion of sequence, delusion of reference, amnesia,
projective imagining, so forth and so on. To my mind, it is not a psychedelic
state. I call it a deliriant, or a confusant.
I remember -- I always usually end up telling this story. What put me off
datura was, years ago when I lived in Nepal, I had this English friend, and we
experimented with all kinds of drugs, and one day I was in the market buying
potatoes and tomatoes, the only two things you could get in Bodina at that
time. And I encountered this guy, adn we started just exchanging the news of
the day, and in the course of the conversation, I became aware that he thought
I was visiting him in his apartment. He was so lost in this stuff that he
didn't know we were out in the street in the market. He thought I had come by
his rooms. Well, I just said, that's too stoned. Nobody needs to be that
twisted around. I mean, you literally do not know what is happening.
To my mind, the psychedelics can be chemically defined, with very few
exceptions, as indoles. Now the only exception to this is mescaline.
Mescaline is not an indole. It's a phenylethylamine, or some people consider
it a cyclicized amphetamine, which is a phenylethylamine. I am not fond of
mescaline. It seems to me that to get to psychedelic levels with it, you have
to take so much that you're fairly rattled. It's hard on you, and it's hard on
you the next day. And many people who are great devotees of peyote, when you
question them very closely, it isn't the quality of the visions. It's some
more murky thing. It's that they like hanging out with Native Americans, they
like drumming all night, they love ceremonies, they like going to the
southwest, but it's not the quality of the visions. It's not that mescaline
can't do that, it certainly can. If you read these early researchers, like
Heinrich Cluvere, S. Weir Mitchell, Havloc Ellis, I mean, these are wonderful
descriptions of full-on psychedelic states. But they were using pure
mescaline, you know, and close to a gram a throw, which is a lot. Most people
when they take pure mescaline, if you actually measure the amount that they're
taking, they're taking well under what is clinically considered the effective
dose. If you look in the Murke manual or the P.D.R., the clinically
recommended dose of pure mescaline is 750 milligrams. Three quarters of a gram
of alkaloid! Very few people actually take that.
And this brings us to one of the issues around psychedelics. There are a lot
of wannabe experts running around who didn't take enough, because you have to
take a lot -- not a LOT -- but you have to take a frightening amount to get
into what it's really about. People who have taken, you know, 50 gamma of LSD
or 100 gamma of LSD or two grams of mushrooms or something like that, they are
not qualified to hold forth on the nature of the psychedelic experience,
because those doses don't deliver it to you. What they deliver is the
periphery of the psychedelic experience: accelerated thought processes, a kind
of depth and richness to cognition that is unfamiliar, an ability to analyze
situations from unusual perspectives, or to reach unexpected conclusions.
And I found this reluctance to come to grips with the full psychedelic
experience even among Amazonian shamen. I mean, people are reluctant to go the
full distance. We were with shamans at one point in Peru, ayahuasca shamans,
and I was aware of an admixture plant that was stronger than the admixture
plant that they were using. And I kept asking this guy, "What about so-and-so?
Why don't we do that?" And at first, all he would say was that it's not for
Christians, which was strange because he always knocked Christians. But I kept
pressing, and finally he said, "We just don't do it that way." And I said,
"Why not?" And he said, "Because it's mali bizarro." (laughter) You know? And
I said, "Isn't that what we're shooting for?" (laughter) Apparently not. A
curing shaman wants to be empowered to cure. He doesn't conceive of himself as
a Magellan of the phenomenological realm, who's setting out to circumnavigate
the mental universe in an evening.
And then, of the psychedelics, they deliver differing levels of this, and then,
what you always have to bear in mind when you listen to me talk about this is,
there are physiological differences among people, you know, in the same way
that person A can detect a compound X at one part in 10,000, but person B
cannot detect the same compound unless it's there in, you know, a thousand
parts in 10,000. We are genetically different in this area of drug receptors,
and it's even possible, although it is permissive of a kind of crypto-fascism,
to believe that there are shamanic lines, families, races even, that are more
or less inclined to this. The Irish are always singled out as special
offenders in this area. You know, the stereotype of the Irish is that they
have a peculiarly intense relationship to intoxication and to little people in
a nearby but invisible world. I don't put a lot of credence to this, but it's
very hard for me to tell because I can only sample myself, and I happen to be
Irish, although leavened with Sicilian genes to keep it from getting out of
hand.
So what you really have to do when you start exploring psychedelics is to try
and figure out, you know, what's the center of the mandala? What are people
talking about? What is it when it's really, when you arrive on the money? And
to my mind, the compound that is most interesting for doing that is DMT. DMT
is the most interesting of the psychedelics, because more issues are raised by
it than any other. Such issues as, I mean, I'll just run over some of them so
you get a feeling for it...
(End of Part One of Three)
Faithfully transcribed by Scotto of the Arthritic Fingers
From: Scotto Moore <scotto@penguin.gatech.edu>
Subject: Terrence on Pyschedelics and DMT (2)
Date: Wed, 8 Jul 92 20:53:34 EDT
Terrence McKenna
Excerpted w/o Permission from
"A Weekend With Terrence McKenna," Feb 1992
DMT is the strongest hallucinogen there is. If it's possible to get more
loaded than that, I don't want to know about it, and I say so when I'm there.
I say, "My God, if you can get more loaded than this, keep it away from me."
So that's it, it's the strongest. It's also the shortest acting. DMT when
smoked in most people is, return you to normal in under ten minutes. Under ten
minutes! Now, this is interesting because people who think there's nothing to
this should actually invest the ten minutes to find out what's, you know... A
ten minute DMT trip is worth twenty years of academic pharmacology, art
history, psychology and all this other malarky. Because then you just say,
"Okay, I got it, I got it..." Another very interesting thing about DMT is, it
occurs naturally in the human brain. Well, now what's going on here? He's
saying the strongest drug, the fastest drug, is the most natural drug? It
means that, you know, you don't have to sail off into 3-hydroxy-4-peridal-
enmethylmarubyshtick or something like that to get into the exotic realms. No
-- a human metabolite, which takes only ten minutes to undergo its entire
exfoliation and quenching, is the strongest of all.
Well, then, what is it? What does "strong" mean? What is a strong
psychedelic? You know, it's highly personal. Every psychedelic trip is. But
what happens on DMT for a large number of people -- I mean, we don't have any
statistics, but -- it is a completely confoundin experience. I mean, you may
have had the expectation, you might think if you had never had a psychedelic
experience that it sort of begins like the Bach B minor fugue, and goes from
there as you rise into the realms of light and union with the deity or
something like that. That's not what happens on DMT. What happens on DMT I
referred to this morning: a troop of elves smashes down your front door, and
rotates and balances the wheels on the afterdeath vehicle, present you with the
bill and then depart. (laughter) And it's completely paradigm shattering. I
mean, you know, union with the white light you could handle. (laughter) An
invasion of your apartment by jewelled self-dribbling basketballs from
hyperspace that are speaking demotic Greek is *not* something that you
anticipated and could handle. Sometimes people say, "Is DMT dangerous? It
sounds so crazy. Is it dangerous?" The answer is, only if you fear death by
astonishment. (laughter)
Remember how you laughed when this possibility was raised. And a moment will
come that will wipe the smile right off your face. (laughter)
One thing that endears DMT to me is, I like to say, it doesn't affect your
mind. It doesn't seem to affect your mind. In other words, you don't change
under the influence of DMT. You don't become a kinder, gentler person. YOu
don't sink into, you know, a line of drool from one corner of your mouth as you
sit there twitching. *You* don't change. What happens is, the world is
completely replace, instantly, 100 percent, it's all gone. And what is put in
its place, not one iota of what is put in its place was taken from this world.
So its a 100% reality channel switch. They don't even retain three dimensional
space and linear time. It's not like you go to an exotic place, Morroco or New
Guinea. It's like reality is swapped out for something else, and when you try
to say what it is, you realize that language has evolved in this world, and it
can serve no other, or it takes years of practice. So what you're looking at
is literally the unspeakable. The indescribably falls into your lap. And when
you try -- you're loaded, right, you're there, and you're trying to explain to
yourself what's happening, and so this is like you try to pour water over the
transdimensional objects in front of you, the water of language. And it just
beads up and flows off like water off a duck's back. You cannot say what's
there.
And I've spent, I don't know, twenty-five years fiddling with this. It's
become the compass of my inspiration, trying to say what is on the other side
of that boundary. Just two large tokes away at any given time is this
non-Euclidean, non-Newtonian, irrational, un-Englishable place, but it's not
smooth and empty and clear. That's not what gives it its indescribability.
What gives it is indescribability is its utter weridness, its alienness, its
power to astonish.
What happens to me when I smoke DMT is, there's a kind of going toward it.
There's a sequella of events which lead to the antechamber of the mystery. I
mean, you take a toke, you feel strange. Your whole body feels odd. You take
a second toke, all the oxygen seems to have been pumped out of the room.
Everything jumps into clarity. It's that visual acuity thing. You take a
third toke if you're able, and then you lay back, and you see this thing which
looks like a rose or a chyrsanthemum, this orange spinning flowerlike thing.
It takes about fifteen seconds to form, and it's like a membrane. And then,
you break through it. You break through it, and then you're in this place, and
there's an enormous cheer which goes up as you pass through this membrane.
Some of you may know the Pink Floyd song about how the gnomes have learned a
new way to say hoo-ray? They're waiting. And you burst into this place, and
you're saying, you know, "Geez, you know, this stuff is really speedy."
(laughter) That's like describing a Space Shuttle launching as noisy, you know?
(laughter) And you say, "Am I all right? Am I all right?" That's the first
question, and so then you run your mind around the track, and you say, "Hmm.
