mAPPLE_THOR(N)pe

ink sketch from photo, 5 min

This is another one of those where I was headed to bed and thought to myself- "I need something to post tomorrow!" So I sat down and did this quick thumbnail from a Robert Mapplethorpe photo that I had in a book that was sitting around. I remember reading an interview with Patti Smith about a time that Mapplethorpe gave her her first hit of acid, and they walked around New York during this huge garbage strike and there was garbage piled up everywhere and she freaked out. Sounded pretty heinous. That story always makes me think of the time that I was in Texas with some friends, and we brewed a big pot of thornapple leaves, drank the tea and then proceeded to have unspeakably surreal hallucinations for 2 days. Precognition, retrocognition, psychokinesis. I had a fairly in depth conversation with an old friend that had died 2 years earlier. Wild. Tropane alkaloids are really like nothing else on Earth, and I think the proper attitude one should have towards them is fear. I think the only reason that the Patti Smith story brings the Texas thing to mind is that Mapplethorp kinda sounds like thornapple, and, well, a freakout is a freakout.