Memoir of Madness: ACID TRIP and never returned (Deviant Behavior) Hardcover – Large Print, March 12, 2026

In the summer of 1993, on the exact date of the Grateful Dead's infamous concert at Buckeye Lake Music Center—June 11—a fifteen-year-old boy from Bay Village, Ohio, stepped into a parking-lot festival of tie-dye, patchouli, and collective forgetting. What began as a quest for escape from divorce, small-town silence, and the unresolved shadow of a local child's abduction and murder became something far more dangerous: a nitrous balloon inhaled at the edge of absurdity, plunging him into a psychedelic abyss that stripped away identity, time, and mercy.This unflinching memoir captures the raw collision of adolescent bravado and existential terror. From the benign chaos of a first acid trip in a suburban bedroom—where gerbils turned prophetic and a naked-swimming activist mom quietly cleared the blast zone—to the sun-baked madness of Buckeye Lake, where wizard hats sagged, ferrets escaped, and a man calmly deposited his "warmth" on the grass like an offering, the narrative builds to a hallucinatory tribunal of judgment and interruption.What follows is not redemption, but recalibration: a body that never fully trusts itself again, hypervigilant guts narrating threat where none should exist, and a quiet friendship tested by rehab and silence. Blending vivid sensory detail, dark humor, and philosophical reflection, Buckeye Lake explores how trauma lingers in the flesh long after the mind pretends to move on—how horror and stupidity can coexist, how the universe sometimes shrugs, and how survival sharpens into a lifelong, sideways vigilance.Now in a revised second edition, with tightened prose, corrected details, and deepened aftermath reflections, this edition honors the enduring power of a single, irreversible inhalation—and the fragile thread that pulls one back from the deep.It begs the question, If you have EGO death, do you ever return? For readers of Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, and Cheryl Strayed: a Midwestern coming-of-age that doesn't flinch from the psychedelic dark, yet finds in absurdity a strange, reluctant mercy. Read more