The Story of Eric Gilston:

Closer To Me Than My Jugular Vein

I tell you everything that is really nothing, and
nothing of what is everything. Do not be fooled by what I
am saying. Please listen carefully, try to hear what I am
saying with your heart. I have a story about a little boy
whose tranquil realm of thought, began to see the real
world as a soulless existence, which had to be overcome in
any external way possible. It was only until I discovered a
ritualization to which my service and praise, by discarding
sense-knowledge and action, fostered a consciousness of
unity with the absolute Being, and although this unity
cannot be perceived, it can be thought of more as a
process, which does not completely attain its goal in the
present. My everyday life began seeking short cuts to
attaining such altered states of mind to overcome the fear
to the perpetual pain and suffering I felt in my yearning
to remember or perhaps recapture this pure insight of
tranquility of unity with the absolute being. Which calls
to every conscious to be for yourselves what you are in
yourselves- reasonable. Pure insight is devoid of content,
and it is rather the pure vanishing of it; by the negative
movement towards what is negative to it and what is

reasonable to its essence; and this movement will

eventually ferment a realization itself too well not be
reasonable, which created a sort of nave consciousness
that abhorred despotism, capitalism, and the vanity in
which the scapegoat culture of American life prompted my
mind and hearts inner most dissatisfaction. Both the denial
of my own pure insight and my nave consciousness: where to
be in constant juxtaposition to each other throughout my
adolescent years.
For some reason or another I have a very vivid
recollection of my early childhood, although most Freudians
would say this is impossible. Those who follow his
predecessor, Jung, would postulate that such a mind is
subject to states that cannot be scientifically quantified
by the technologically profound methods in use today. More
precisely put, it is the dream-image inherent in Jungs,
Confrontation with the Unconscious that can beinternalized-in such that its interpretation of dreams
facts is the way in which one proceeds. Thus, it is the
perspicacity (clarity of vision or intellect which provides
a deep understanding and insight) of mine own dream-images
interpretations that have latently spilled my subconscious
thoughts unto reality itself, and perhaps if any
psychologically diagnosed normality is left in mine being

it resembles a schizothymic intuition. For I can remember

my earliest moments as a boy, even if they are deduced to a
surrealistic fantasia that is my life, as I know it to be.
That being said, I cannot fully explain to you how my
experiences are integrated into my everyday life,
experiences that are far beyond the visual and perceptual
world. My own confrontations with the unconscious have
spilled out into reality too many times to be ignored on
those peculiar experiences. But these experiences sacred me
and I tried to ignore them with drugs and alcohol I suppose
an introductory background too my life story is necessary
and must begin with some basic facets. I was born on April
15th 1988 in Greenland, New Hampshire to my mother Julie and
Father Richard. No son of any parents could ask for more
loving and devoted parents. Growing up in Greenland New
Hampshire, especially in the 1990s was a wonderfully
beautiful childhood experience, as any son of New England
could ask for. Being a son of a doctor and nurse gave me so
many opportunities and while I excelled in many areas, I
felt that I could never live up to their expectations. My
mind was always elsewhere full of day-dreams and a vivid
imagination mixed with ADD always made me feel somewhat out
of place, not an outcast per say rather a stranger, as
though I didnt belong. I did always feel at home in my

daydreams and imagination. I had an imaginary friend, early

in my years named zara or something with a Z I cannot
remember. When I entered kindergarten I acted and pretended
to be a dog.

I was also held back in kindergarten and felt

even more like an outcast.

My childhood was normal I suppose, maybe a little
abnormal, but ontologically speaking it was quite profound.
Many summer days were spent at the beach, picking
blueberries in August, apples use to grow from the orchard
across the stonewall in back of our house, but they stopped
growing years ago. Not much else compares to the summer
days spent in New Hampshires beautiful pastoral landscape.
It is where where I feel alive with a certain sense of
wanderlust that which permeates my entire being. In the
winters my family would spend weekends skiing, ice-skating
in Stratham Park, or would travel abroad to escape the
harshness of Januarys cold.
I attended a Montessori school in Stratham, which
resembles more of a farm then an institution of learning. I
loved the educational methods bestowed upon my early school
days, it especially catered to my ADD in visual approach to
hands on learning no grades you were responsible for youre
learning. I was definitely sheltered attending the school
from kindergarten to 8th grade. While it lacked the

structure and discipline I so dearly needed, it made up for

in the curriculum and educational methods. So many
effervescent and love filled memories come from those halls
and playgrounds. Even more so growing up in Greenland,
always outside doing something or other.
Although it always seemed I was getting in trouble, in
one way or another and learned to use my boyish charm to my
advantage in the midst of reading Shakespearean works and
20 page papers in 7-8th grade. I will never escape my
absolute nerdiness from whence my love for learning there
grew.

Yet even though life was so blissful back then, I

can always remember feeling so very alone, always standing

apart from everyone, I guess a feeling of being
misunderstood even at such a young age with love all around
me. I only found peace in my dream visions out of the
night; they seemed like a comet that fades out of sight.
They provided me a comfort, which I felt a yearning to be
elsewhere, and of not belonging I found this yearning was
healed by my dreams, in which vivid worlds came into
being. Visions that would take many days and nights to
explain.
Each night, shortly after my head hit the pillow I
tried to find you loving me. But you seemed so far away
its only in my dreams. Your kiss would be my heavenly

bliss, and I hoped you would be near to me one day.

I soon

found that I could control these dreams, at least to some

extent, although fate and free will ebbed and flowed
between my reality and dream world. A sort of mystical
dance that I cheerfully took part in.
Yet I was soon to find this line between my dreams and
reality blurred to such and extent that would forever
change who I am. O beloved, I was but a boy, asleep my
couch, T.V blaring, when the fall breezes of the Allglorious blew the winds of destiny, servitude, and praise
entered my being. It was the fall of 95-96 whence thou
omnipotence glanced down upon me. The night was bright at
the start, and it came as quit a surprise, but when I
looked into your eyes I knew I had lost you, I knew that my
passions and desires were to fill my cup for many years to
come until it overflowed with schizyothmic insanity of my
intoxicated love for thee.
Thus a numen (which is a Latin term for "divinity", or
a "divine presence", "divine will" (etymologically, the
word means "a nod of the head", here referring to a deity
as it were "nodding", or making its will or its presence
known) first came to me that spring night. My father called
me from the basement where I lay on my couch, yelling me to
go upstairs to bed. I ascended the stairs and saw a bright

light outside my window. This was my first heirophany

hieros, sacred, + phainein, to show). The manifestation
of the divine or the sacred, especially in a sacred place,
object, or occasion. Manifestations of some particular
aspect may be named after the aspect revealed, e.g.
theophany (of divinity), kratophany (of power). Was
revealed unto me and became my first sign as Socrates
called his divine guide which got him killed on charges of
corrupting the youth. I fear I will succumb the same fate
for I have fallen and stumbled into the dark of Night. In
more simplistic terms I had an encounter of the third kind,
I saw and was watched by what many refer to as a UFO or
whatever you want to imagine it as. When my eyes adjusted
to the nights sky after ascending the stairs from my
basement I pressed my face against the window pane and
there in the trees in my backyard the illumination I saw as
I climbed turned into bright lights enveloped around a
translucent discuss shaped craft. I became paralyzed
literally by what I saw following the shivers of its soul
piercing watchfulness that embraced my entire being, chills
rain down my spine, fringed with fear the hairs that did
not even exist on the back of my neck stood up.
My reality was shaken, I knew what I saw could not be
explained by any scientific query because it defied the

laws of physics as I understood them to be in the world. I

remembered God speaking to me in my dreams, and it let me
go. It began to float upwards over my house and I ran to
the other window looking to see the direction it took, I
immediately saw the translucent discuss shape take off at
light speed like millennium falcon into the starlit night.
I could not go to sleep that night, lying awake all night
my mind scrambled to understand what I had experienced, for
once I knew and felt that I was not alone. Something was
watching over me. Although the experience frightened me
dearly as it seemed to be a sort of warning, so much so,
that I pushed the memory deep into my subconscious until I
finally was able to talk about it with friends during my
times at Hyde, at a clandestine club that a couple of the
older students started, which was basically dedicated to
discussing conspiracy theories, occult knowledge, and the
secrets of the universe.
At this time in my life, during Hyde years -where I
graduated from high school- drugs and alcohol had plagued
my life I was kicked out of proctor academy, attended
Portsmouth high school for one fall semester, but after
threatening charges of truancy as well as suspensions. One
time I was suspended for being high although I had not
been. They ended up finding one of my Adderall pills in my

pocket, which I had put there on account that I did not

want to take it that day. Principle something or other went
to such extremes to see if any of the beads from the
capsule had been removed, but they were not.

I made a

scene and was suspended for two weeks. Before PHS while
attending Proctor loll well it was like a hippy paradise
boarding school. I fit in quite well with the stoners of
which included almost the entire student body. EVERYONE
SMOKED AND DRANK!! The hockey team snorted cocaine and
sexual intercourse occurred on frequently. We made forts in
the surrounding woods to evade the teachers who took
frequent walks in the woods to try and catch people
smoking. I violated numerous rules there.
Not only did I excel in school, stoned as could be, I
also excelled in sports. I started selling and alcohol
early sophomore year, and made quite a bit of money. I was
the cool sophomore kid who always had weed and alcohol. I
sold to the entire student body and even got a bunch of
kids in trouble, well indirectly, but felt responsible
still. I enjoyed hanging out with hot senior girls and
goofing off in the northern new Hampshire woods smoking
pot, and going on the occasional mushroom trip snow shoe
adventure or wake and bake down by backwater river.

Winter

I quit the sky team to learn how to snowboard and instantly

was riding with the more advanced riders. We would always

smoke on the chairlift.
I first experienced marijuana at the ripe age of 1415, the summer going into 9th grade while spending a weekend
in Nantucket at my friends house. His older brother
introduced my friends and I to cannabis. I can remember the
instant the smoke permeated my lungs, sending the THC and
127 cannabinoids spiraling into my capillaries and into my
bloodstream, neurons firing instantly I felt marijuanas
euphoric high. Time slowly seemed to dissipate as I sifted
the sand with my hands it felt as though everything
suddenly became magical, I felt the world in every grain of
sand- once again I was able to re-enter a surrealistic
reality of a dream that I always longed for and at once
being high and all my mind seemed to be elsewhere in that
surrealistic reality I longed for. But it was not a dream,
more of a living nightmare as I experimented with alcohol
and other illicit substances with sophomoric recidivism up
unto even very recently. Where again I found myself again
dealing with consequences of substance abuse, which for me
has always lead to a wheeling and dealing. Always trying to
fill my emptiness and longing to be elsewhere by escaping
through alcohol or any substance that would numb me from

the pain and sorrow these inner feelings brought forth.

Ignoring my true calling.
The night before leaving for boarding school at
proctor academy for my freshmen year of high school at
proctor I drank a lot of southern comfort from my parents
liquor cabinet only to awaken to find myself and my bed
doused in vomit. Hung-over for the first time I left home
and started orientation with a pounding headache.

I think

it was the third weekend that I received my first violation

at proctor for drinking after becoming utterly intoxicated,
and once again covered in puke.
I probably knew drinking was not for me, yet I still
enjoyed the euphoria and warmness that it temporarily
brought me. I was sober the rest of my freshmen year on
account of receiving a major violation, which required piss
tests. But let me get back to my sophomore year, a couple
of close calls like the junkyard owner shooting at us with
his shotgun over at wildcat- this old grateful dead van we
decked out- and almost getting busted by the volunteer fire
department when some of my associates from Greenland were
making a weed and pot drop off to me, and then finally
being confronted one Thursday night by two teachers for
being intoxicated, as I was supposed to be at a Biology
movie during study-hall when I was actually smoking a joint

in the woodshop while selling a bag to one of my friends. I

was immediately confronted for not showing up to the
biology movie, and I knew they were going to search my room
because the teachers had been cracking down on all the
widespread substance abuse amongst the student body. My
eyes were of course as bloodshot as the devil himself.
Unbeknownst to them I had a bunch of devils lettuce up
in my room, a quarter pound to be exact. I lied to them and
told them I was drunk as a skunk, that I had drinking
issues, although I tried to only drink on the weekends,
they fell for it, told me they were glad that I turned
myself in because if I had not they indeed would have
searched my room. Its funny now because I find myself
haunted by alcohol, many nights and days spent blacking out
to the point where I have pushed any sense of reason over
the edge into insanity, devoid even of some nave
consciousness I become primal in my nature, and animalistic
in my behavior.
Only hazing recollections of intoxicated nights and
days do I recall, but one of my ex girl friend described my
behavior as such. Anyways they told me to go get my
alcohol, I got some gin a friend had given me, I had not
even touched the stuff but my friend had finished most of
it off. I didnt get the quarter pound of Canadian Kind

Buds hidden in the closet, didnt feel like dealing with

the police or any legal trouble. They would have shit
themselves if they saw that quap. I was abusing a lot at
that time, smoking before football and lacrosse games. I
took mushrooms before one lacrosse game as I recall. All
trees were blooming in the spring and the mountains seemed
to move, as I giggled at the start of the game.
It didnt seem to affect me much, or at least I
believed so at the, as I was lead running back for JV
football scoring numerous touch downs and also received
MVP for JV lacrosse. Actually my roommate sophomore year I
will call him pat for the sake of this memory, died this
past year from a heroin overdose, he was the kid who never
smoked with any of us even in the dorm, we actually lived
in a room that a boy had committed suicide by taking too
much Tylenol or something a couple of years before we lived
there. Anyways he was always doing his homework and was
very kindhearted and yet shy and reserved. I was always
trying to be cool, and how he did not know I sold weed and
alcohol baffles me still.

Pain and suffering makes one see

the emptiness in life, and so Strange is life because this

emptiness I feel is my guide and light for my soul. Being
Alone with the Great Alone scared me to death for so many
years, but nowadays I find peace and tranquility therein.

Im digressing again, after my second offense with

alcohol they made me go to drug and alcohol counseling as
well as a mandatory piss tests every so often. I started
drinking more because of the piss tests. But the addict in
me found other ways to get around such stipulations,
getting somebodies clean piss I would bring a fake
urination device heated by hand warmers to every Tuesday
assembly because thats when your advisor would thereafter
have you go to one.
I was two or three points away from getting kicked out
- three late points- would have accumulated to give me the
boot. So when you get in trouble they made you work at
maintenance facility being their bitch, which included
scrapping gum off tables that sort of thing. I got in so
much trouble my two years at proctor the whole maintenance
crew knew me pretty well. I got to drive a gator around
picking up leaves, but I didnt mind, hauling ass down
campus streets. The kids got a kick out of my charade and
so did I. my cares were few and far between. I eventually
stole the master key to the school and got it copied, which
in brief led to my expulsion.
That summer I was getting stoned everyday with my
friends older brothers, who had first introduced me to pot
in Nantucket. We would go out jet boating in great bay and

little bay. Blazed out of our minds they would get a kick
out of sending us skipping us like stones across the water
on inner tubs at 60 miles an hr. By that point my parents
were noticing my behavioral patterns and apathy, the stoner
mentality and contentment. That August my parents sent me
away to the Adirondacks to an outward-bound program and
upon my return I would go to PHS that fall for my second
sophomore year.
I kicked and screamed when they sent me away, but
after a week I loved it, even though you werent supposed
to, I found ways of making myself quite at home. I made a
walking stick, found a dear skull and attached it to the
top of the walking stick with feathers and the like. The
outdoor leader started calling me the shaman. I wasnt
taking my add medication at the time and well I fell into
this sort of primal and animalistic negation of my inner
self, although it felt right. I ate some random mushroom to
freak the counselors out and so that they would send me to
an infirmary and thus I would be able to run away. They
sent a doctor into the woods, and I ended up constipated
for a week. One night it was raining cats and dogs and the
food bags we had put high in a tree had fallen.
I thought it was funny and started pretending I was in
Vietnam as we tried to look for another tree to secure the

bags of food in. The counselors didnt like that. One

evening as we settled down for camp we played this game of
which animal you resembled. So you would take a card from
the deck, and the animal you got had had a mythic Native
American story about the animal, which you were supposed to
internalize. I got the coyote. My letter came from my
parents, we all had letters from our parents that described
why they sent us to the woods. When my turn came, I burst
into tears because I fucked up so bad at proctor and longed
to be reunited with my dear friends and because I
squandered such a great education there with my petty game
of wheeling and dealing. Yet I know now that my curse from
these tears of from pain and longing to be elsewhere have
surely been my cure, and it their has once again appeared a
light of hope on the dark horizon of my existence.
I was sent to Hyde school, a place for troubled
youths. After a terrible fall semester at PHS as previously
mentioned.

At Hyde I remained sober but was always in

trouble for something or other. The place was this kind of

this hellish nightmare of a school, a place for all sorts
of juvenile delinquents. But I did quite well in school
and excelled in sports. I didn't give a speech when I
graduated as a sort of protest against the idiosyncratic

cult like mentality of the boarding school experience that

Hyde had to offer.
The juvenile delinquents are an exceptional bread of
human beings, with possibly some evolutionary anomaly
hidden within our genetic code, which tells us that we are
not fit to live in society, or under any government. For
what we think of life under these structures of power is so
far from rational and conventional thought may provoke that
we would rather just say FUCK IT, than become what we abhor

I always thought I was like Holden Caulfield from

catcher in the eye; the whole experience was so damned
surreal. While I thoroughly enjoyed it for many reasons,
any student who has attended Hyde knows that its a fuckin'
trip. One teacher said to me that I would never succeed in
college, and more generally alluding to life. They even
sent me away for a month when I was senior for "flying
under the radar" because I wouldnt follow their rules as
well as "causing chaos"- or something to that effect.
Despite completely denying and rejecting my participation
in Hyde School's orthodoxy and institutional capacity for
taping into young minds in sometimes disastrous ways. When
I was 17 during a meditation retreat that summer at Hyde, I
experience my second and third hierophanies. I reached

Nirvana, but that is another story that would take many

pages to explain.
The suicides from that school have been numerous, my
close friend and roommate Frank McGill killed himself my
fall semester sophomore year at mount Ida College. Like his
favorite author Hunter S. Thompson, he shot himself with a
handgun in a park somewhere on the outskirt of Austin
Texas. Another girl, named Carol Anne Brown hung herself.
The worm a notorious drug dealer at UNH is incarcerated
somewhere after having over 45 felony charges, after being
busted with a brief case stacked with Molly, acid and all
sorts of drugs on a flight back from Colorado.
I went to Franks funeral, and I still think of him
often. Hyde definitely made my life in college more
socially awkward as well as introverted, but also instilled
me a hatred for any institution representing order and
societal progress, I found myself for the first time being
a full blown alcoholic freshmen and sophomore years at
mount Ida. Although still I was able to manage a 3.8 GPA
and start on there D-3 lacrosse team both years. My coach
said one time that us Jokes have no place in academia.
Classes were so easy; I got As on all my papers and exams,
with nights of studying with alcohol my warm and possessive
friend. I was again smoking pot everyday. Nothing seemed to

challenge my inner angst, but it was here that I started

becoming more spiritual, even through the lust driven
nights of our lax houses raging alcohol parties, women
flocked to me. But sex, drugs and rock and roll fueled my
romance of passion and desire, still though I longed to be
elsewhere, to be with my beloved, the absolute being of my
yearning loves desire.
I decided not to play lacrosse and transfer to a
better school. I got into American University in D.C. with
as much ease as I could buy beer with my fake I.D. My first
year there I made deans list and maintained a 4.0 GPA,
despite my somewhat controlled drinking and use of
marijuana. One time I found a wallet on the bar, sitting
there, I took it and proceeded to buy the entire bar
drinks. All my friends where there and I spent easily a
1,000 $ buying drinks. I thought it was funny at the time,
I figured that not only would the cardholder be reimbursed
but I was actually using the banks money to amplify my
Marxist desire for chaos and well participating in the
perpetuation of my growing disgust for capitalistic
American society.

That summer I got heavy into OC 80s

which were rampant in Portsmouth. I tried heroin a couple

of times, but one week after not finding a fix. I felt the

hellish withdrawal symptoms of opiate addiction and checked

into detox at Hampstead hospital.
After I stopped drinking during the school year, but
would indulge in alcohol during the summers, and even then
it started to dissipate, especially with my growing
knowledge of religious texts. They seemed to fill the void
of my yearning, filled me with the remembrance of my
beloved that had once been so part of my childhood. I
really started to clean up my act, and gave up alcohol for
months at a time. Last year around this time I had not had
a drink since august. I was using marijuana less
frequently. But I still had much to learn about my
perfectionism and ADD that seemed to precipitate into
substance abuse as an outlet for my many failures and
growing shame.
For all it was worth, I'm currently in pursuit of a MA
degree at American University for Islamic Peace and
Conflict Resolution. My BA is in Religious studies and I
have a minor in Arab studies and international studies. I
am currently four classes and an internship away from
obtaining my goal for the past 5 years going on 6 years
now, as I was accepted into an accelerated MA-BA program
after my first year. OH I also am the lacrosse teams
captain there. But I find myself in new Hampshire at the

moment in recovery after having not been able to control my

substance abuse which I always seemed to manage somehow
throughout my life probably through the loving kindness of
my parents and the grace of God who looks after fools. When
I found out last December that I had a little girl that had
been given up for adoption, as well as my dad having cancer
I started too loose control.
Drinking and depression reared their ugly heads. I
would wake up every morning, crying and praying to god, in
a sort of delirious state of suffering I had never felt
before. I then started dealing pot this past spring because
I was afraid my father would die and I would need to
provide for my family, thought nothing of it at first. It
reconnected me to the social life I also desired, after
isolating myself for 3 years form the AU party scene.
Selling massive weed came easily to me, and I was able to
mastermind a group of friends to do my biddings. It was
trilling for a time, as the massive amounts of weed gave me
wealth, power and privilege like a true Machiavellian; who
at the same time was an anarcho syncalist who desired to
overthrow the despotism and corruption of the American
capitalistic system. I still had time for my studies, but
then we our posy, the Albe and Marle gang, as we liked to
joke around about, but then we got big. We easily were the

biggest dealers in N.W. DC, selling to the surrounding

schools like G.W. and Georgetown and diversifying our
clientele basis from Saudi Princes to adorable little
virgin central American girls. I was that cool guy bringing
8 balls to parties and getting everyone blasted out of
their minds on some of the best Peruvian flakes to be found
in the D.C. metro-area. Then my main associate and I
started selling all sorts of other drugs halfway through
2014 summer to afford a lavish life pussyfooting around DC
attempting to cure what we called Gods curse. We even made
a death pact. I attempted to drown my heartaches in a
downward spiral of wheeling and dealing, with fine wines
and white lines. I loved selling weed and I was damn good
at it, know one would have suspected me, dressed in suit
and tie on Friday nights, and always dressed to kill. I
tried so hard to leave the party life of liquor and women.
But they always seemed came back with utter vengeance after
abstinence from both for the past three years. My desire
for my beloved vanished once harder drugs entered the
scene; I started ignoring my demons and literally the
started haunting me this past spring, dark shadows lurking
in my peripheral vision. I feel in love with a blonde this
summer who broke my heart after she went into an IOP
program and stopped talking to me. I felt alone once again,

and this feeling was numbed by cocaine use, drinking on my

Xanax everyday, and eating wax infused edibles, and smoking
wax. I even started doing opiates again, and almost checked
myself into rehab but I detoxed with alcohol. I was lost in
a drug-induced coma of that wheeling and dealing. I came up
here for a week in august to try and stop drinking, but as
soon as I returned the stress of drug dealing became an
ethical and moral issue I could not ignore. I decided that
my ex got it right; I should check myself into IOP program.
Im currently on medical leave, only because I kept
asking for help - desperately so. The Friday night I had my
intake at the seacoast mental health center IOP up-here my
house in the luxurious neighborhood of the United States
capital was raided by a swat team, more precisely the DC
vice unit. They found nothing, we knew the neighbors had
been on too our antics. Plus all the drugs we were doing
made us wicked paranoid. They found no money and no drugs.
I was also in New Hampshire. My minions squabbled over the
remnants of my clientele where my leadership had left a
vacuum as I know they still are wheeling and dealing. I
honestly do not know how Im not dead right now, only by
the grace of God have a lived 26 years for I have had many
close encounters with death, car and bus accidents, I think
I almost overdosed a couple times, and vomiting in my

sleep, more that I cannot recall. I almost long for death

sometimes to be re-united with my beloved, but it is by his
will to call the angel of death and I will be ready for my
hands and feat to testify against me for my copious
Once again, I find myself sober. I know now that I
mustnt sacrifice my life to my animal-soul. I must find
that universal balance, with grace, dignity, servitude, and
faith. I must gamble everything for love, to help
perpetuate humankinds progress, within this manner.