the substance phase, and the larval-stage damage
We spent quantity time together again briefly for a few months the next year, during a period when we both experimented heavily with recreational substances.
Context
The E.T.A. adolescent-using economy seen from the far side of it, decades on: two of the two best ten-year-olds in Boston "experimented heavily," and where Orin walked away when puberty gave him a better appetite, Bain didn't walk away clean — a couple of bad methoxy-psychedelic trips at a "larval psychological stage" left permanent Disabilities that still make ordinary life an exceptional challenge. The datum the whole book circles: the drug taken young, at the stage when the self is still forming, doesn't just pass through — it leaves a shape, and the man is still living inside the shape it left.