Psychedelic Aftershock: A Grunge Rocker’s Tale from the Borderlands
Title: Psychedelic Aftershock: A Grunge Rocker’s Tale from the Borderlands
It started with a blockade. Not of tanks or soldiers, but of silence—an invisible wall clamping down on the ports and trails that used to stream fentanyl and cocaine into the U.S. from Mexico. Overnight, the cartel economy was fractured, the opioid flood dammed. But supply shock breeds improvisation, and the underground didn’t sleep.
Instead of numbing, America started tripping.
In the absence of synthetic sedation, the pulse of the country shifted. LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca—the forgotten spirits of the 60s crept back in through cracked sidewalks and dim basements. The new psychonauts weren’t barefoot flower children. They were digital-age misfits, biohackers, and veteran grunge survivors like me.
I’d once ridden the distortion wave through sweat-soaked clubs and gutter-smoked tour vans in the ‘90s, just after Cobain cracked the scene wide open. I burned through amps and chances like paper in a barrel fire, until the edge caught up. Rehab gave me time, and time gave me another tool—code.
Now I split my days between threading OSINT pipelines and fingering out echoey licks on a strat that still smells faintly of stale beer and blood. There’s no stage anymore, but the algorithm feeds me headlines like it used to feed me chords: synthetic drought, mushroom boom, ketamine clinics, Zoom psychonauts.
Suddenly, my riffs—once too dark for the geriatrics playing Stones covers at state fairs—have found a new place in this resurgence. It’s a Doors remake, sure, but with crash symbols sampled through Python loops and wah pedals synced to stream latency.
The kids are peeling layers of reality in VR trips while I scrape old solos into new truths. I’m not sure if we’re saving ourselves or just exploring collapse through a prettier lens. But it beats waiting to fade into soft rock hospice.
The war on drugs twisted, turned, and flipped back on itself. And now, with fentanyl out and mushrooms in, I’m more relevant than I ever was on MTV.
This is post-grunge. This is post-retirement.
This is codepunk psychedelia.
And I’m just a riff-riding spy in the surveillance age,
still loud, still lucid—
still surfing.
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