[imagesource:youtube/breakingconvention]
“This is the story of how I came to drill a hole in my head to get permanently high,” Joe Mellen’s memoir Bore Hole begins.
That opening line immediately sticks, but Mellen had to make three attempts at drilling a hole into his head before he eventually found the high he was after.
The nutter, who was a pioneer of experiments with LSD in the UK, has told how he learned about the ancient procedure, called trepanation, also known as trepanning, from a Dutch academic named Bart Huges in the 1960s.
His book tells the story of how he dropped out of the square life in 1963 to become a beatnik, looking for a more profound way to permanently alter his consciousness, notes a 2016 VICE article on the dude.
Mellen, who should be around 89 years old now, said when he met Bart, he thought he was the “sanest person” he’d ever met and so he become his disciple.
Trepanation is apparently an ancient procedure, where even skulls in Inca tombs in Peru were found with trepanation holes while it was still being done in parts of Kenya in 2016, according to Mellen.
It is basically a surgical operation in which a circle-shaped chunk of bone is scraped or drilled, then removed, from the human skull.
His book goes into graphic detail regarding his trepanation experiences, which Mellen acknowledges some readers may find upsetting:
“When I first heard about it I thought, This is ridiculous! And the idea that someone would do it to himself or herself was absurd. But you get used to ideas eventually, don’t you?”
This is his logic for why it might work:
“In my little book, Bore Hole, there is a big idea, and the big idea is that humans have a problem. The problem is the sealing of the skull, which happens when we are fully grown [between 18 and 21]. Before that, the skull is in separate plates and there is some give. Think of the brain as a pudding: It can expand and pulsate, but once the skull has completely sealed ’round it, it can no longer do that. The pulsation is suppressed and the blood passes through without pulsating. And this is why all of us want to get high. We want to get back to that youthful state of being where we have more spontaneity and more creativity and more life. This is what we miss. It’s paradise lost.”
Loose reasoning, but okay.
In 1967, two years after he first learnt about trepanning, Mellen made his first attempt. Strapped for cash, he couldn’t afford an electric drill, so he bought a hand trepan from a store that sold medical equipment. He said it felt like “attempting to uncork a wine bottle from the inside”, AKA it didn’t work.
After a year or so, he gave it another shot and succeeded in “removing some skull”, but not enough: “There was kind of a slurping sound as I took the trepan out and what sounded like bubbles”.
Mellen’s third and final attempt, in 1970, only took half an hour, including clean-up time:
“I was feeling great because I’d done it, but then I noticed after about an hour I started to feel a lightness, like a weight had been lifted off me. I did it in the evening and went to bed at 11pm feeling good, and I could still feel it when I woke up the next morning. And then I realised, ‘This is it. It’s done.’ ”
I guess the third time is the charm.
Anyway, please do not follow in this man’s bloody footsteps, it really doesn’t sound like a vibe.
[source:vice]
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