itchycoo park, flashbacks, panic

Here is one minute in my miserable mind at 11:23PM last night as I was trying to go to sleep:

The line... "it's all too beautiful"  pops into my head...  it's a line from a song, Itchykoo Park, a song recorded circa 1968...oh my, 40 some years ago.  (For those of you old enough to remember or care, the group who recorded the song, the Small Faces had an interesting pedigree...  the lead singer of the group left the Small Faces to form "Humble Pie" with Peter Frampton; he was replaced by none other than Rod Stewart, who, I believe, recorded with the group as "the Faces;" of course, then Rod Stewart went off to have his career. Their drummer went on to replace Keith Moon in the Who after Keith Moon's death.)

But I digress...  the line "it's all too beautiful" plays in my head from out of nowhere after 40 years... then comes the memory...  It's 1972 and I've ingested a tab of LSD and IT IS VERY,  VERY POTENT.  As I am prone to do, I wander off by myself around one in the morning, and I find myself sitting on the ground and looking down at a field somewhere on my college campus at the State University of New York at Albany.  I hear the song Itchycoo Park in my head; I'm hallucinating...and I have this instant "moment" where everything in the universe seems incredibly beautiful and perfect.  INCREDIBLY beautiful and perfect.   Did I mention INCREDIBLY BEAUTIFUL  and perfect.  Yes, totally INCREDIBLY BEAUTIFUL AND PERFECT. And then my 20 year old brain had this thought..."If I could stop time, I would live in this moment forever.  Nothing will ever be this perfect again."  Everything was just as it should be.  Every molecule of my being has this experience of the complete and total perfection of every thing in that one moment.  (By the way...I am NOT endorsing LSD...I had plenty more yucky, scary moments than I had moments like this; perhaps I'll write sometime about a horrific moment or two whilst under the influence of hallucinogens).   But that moment was undeniably one of those moments that made the whole LSD culture seem like a good idea...a Timothy Leary kind of moment.

But I digress....I am lying in my bed last night at 11:23PM, trying to get to sleep...the line "it's all too beautiful" plays in my head, and I remember the experience from 1972 sitting on that hill, LSD coursing through my brain, just as if it happened a few hours ago, and then.... I feel a wave of panic.....   you know, the sick feeling when your body dumps adrenaline in response to hearing a "crash" coming in the middle of the night because your cat knocked over a vase, or you are watching a creepy movie and it gets really quiet and a hand suddenly lurches out from the ground and grabs the innocent female, or you didn't hear the door open and someone walks up behind you and startles you... you know the feeling...

But I digress...I am lying in bed, hear the line from the song, have the "flashback" and then comes the wave of panic...and simultaneously comes this thought...  "the best days are all behind you... "
And that was the end of the minute.   But it took me a good hour and a half to regroup and get some sleep. I tell ya, if I forget that I am a child of God, I can really torment myself!