It's Just a Ride
"And we can change it any time we want.... A choice, right now, between fear and love." —Bill Hicks
BILL HICKS SAVED my life, probably. In my darkest moments I have found salvation in his words. He was a funny motherfucker, but he was also punk rock to the core and spiritually enlightened. He was an artist in the truest sense, and he lived his art every day. Hicks is the kind of artist I hope to be, and though he died when I was ten months old, I miss him dearly.
I WAS SIXTEEN years old, high on European cannabis and the rush of staying up into the night before school, the hot white glow of the computer screen my portal out of that black room and the duties waiting beyond. There is nothing so free as a teenage loner in the dead of night with a laptop and an Internet connection. I have been chasing that feeling ever since.
So much I discovered on the Web then, when it truly was free, from underground music and ideas to philosophy and film noir. I found horrors too, dark sights and sinister ideas that frightened me. Among it all I discovered Bill Hicks, whose precious few video specials I watched clips of on YouTube with near religious fervor.
Sixteen years later I’m realizing how profoundly those nights spent giggling on my bed in the dark shaped how I see the world today. And I can say it now: All that sacrificed sleep and all those schooldays spent too exhausted to learn were absolutely, unequivocally worth it.
I DISCOVERED PUNK and Bill Hicks around the same time. Looking back on it now, the connection is undeniable. One of my favorite Hicks routines features his evisceration of the hollow popular entertainment that reared its head in the Reagan era and set about eradicating culture ever since. That’s no accident of course. Art challenges power structures and unites us around our shared humanity. This threatens the psychopaths and spawn of Satan determined to spread as much misery on this planet as possible.
And so art had to be replaced by entertainment—or “content,” as they freely admit now. Hicks was having none of it.
Fuck that! When did mediocrity and banality become a good image for your children? I want my children to listen to people who fucking rocked! I don’t care if they died in puddles of their own vomit. I want someone who plays from his fucking heart!
In Hicks’ material this topic often intersected with his disgust of
the war against drugs, which actually is a war against civil rights—don’t ever be fooled again. If they cared about us they’d get rid of the number one drug, which is cigarettes. Kills more people than crack, coke, and heroin combined times one hundred—legal.
…[But] marijuana, a drug that kills no one—and let’s put it in a time frame: ever—illegal.
Hicks expressed often how the “drugs” our society deems dangerous have the curious effect of making us choose love over fear—or unity over the profits of the military-industrial complex.
I’m glad mushrooms are against the law because I took them one time and you know what happened to me? I lay in a field of green grass for four hours, going, “My God! I love everything.” Yeah, now if that isn’t a hazard to our country. How are we gonna justify arms dealing when we realize that we’re all one?
When I first tried mushrooms, it opened a window to the universe that has never closed. The delusion we call “reality” faded away along with the delusion we call “me.” I saw the fabric of the world, and my spirit was free.
I use psychedelics and cannabis at times to help keep that window into the cosmos open, but since that first experience with mushrooms all my destructive habits have faded away. I have barely touched alcohol ever since, which, for me, was a fairly gigantic transformation. Whatever pain the alcohol was numbing, whatever deluded bullshit it was feeding were wiped away by the near wordless truths I learned that day, truths whose exposure was facilitated but not caused by psilocybin. (Alcohol, I have discovered, takes us further away from enlightenment by blocking our ability to see. Because of this, though certainly helpful to the introverted among us in social situations—gasp—ultimately, alcohol is poison to an artist.) I haven’t done any hard drugs since that day either, and I haven’t been a force of chaos in my life or anyone else’s. And my creativity has been turbocharged. Finally, I had figured out what I want to do and how and why.
In other words, in psychedelics I found healing and enlightenment (like
, who writes about it beautifully), and it’s wonderful for this version of me now to see that, in this, I have followed in Hicks’ steps. (My other favorite comic, the iconic George Carlin, said the same things about psychedelics too.)The connection Bill draws between the war on drugs and vapid entertainment is perhaps best exemplified in his ’92 special Relentless. You really have to watch Hicks perform this one to get the true effect. The clip is below. It’ll be the least-wasted twelve minutes of your life.
Drugs have done good things for us. That’s my belief: drugs have done good things for us. Hard to believe I’m saying this: drugs have done good things for us. “What do you mean, Bill?” Well, if you don’t believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favor then: go home tonight, take all your albums, your tapes and your CDs, and burn them. ’Cause you know what? The musicians who made that great music that has enhanced your lives throughout the years… real fucking high on drugs, okay?
…Okay, uh, look, just look at it in another way then: these musicians today who don’t do drugs and in fact speak out against them—“We rock against drugs!”—boy, they suck. Ball-less soulless spiritless little corporate fucking puppets, suckers of Satan’s cock each and every one of them. “We rock against drugs, ’cause that’s what George Bush would want!” “We’re rock stars who sell Pepsi-Cola products!” “We’re rock stars who sell Taco Bell products!”
I BROUGHT MY brother to a Bill Hicks tribute night in Dublin, Ireland, a long time ago. February 2017 to be exact, a few months before I moved to Canada. There were musical acts and standup comics, and Bill’s brother Steve did a virtual Q&A with the audience. I think I recall a documentary about Bill was screened. The atmosphere was exuberant, Hicks fans celebrating his life’s work with love and appreciation. All the proceeds went to the Bill Hicks Wildlife Foundation.
Do you ever wonder where the world went? It wasn’t that long ago, yet it’s gone. I’m not even sure what it is that I miss. Whatever it is, it’s about as real as Bill Hicks ever was to me. The man looms so large, yet I’ve never seen him outside the confines of a screen. Hicks was long dead by the time he entered my life. Cancer killed him in ’94. Thirty-two years old. He was a ghost of the past to me even then, but now that world is dead with him. Trying to remember it feels like chasing a dream.
Then I return to one of Bill’s specials (many of which are on Tubi), or the clips still floating on YouTube, and in flashes, I remember. And I wonder. So often these days I wonder what Bill would have made of this new world. He must be screaming in his grave.
What would he say about the “greatest crime of this century,” for example? My heart is broken over Palestine. The grief it brings is relentless; I hear screams on the wind. I wrote about Israel’s and the West’s genocide last week and I have nothing to add, but I wonder what Hicks might have said.
Perhaps something similar to this re the Gulf War.
This needs to be said: There never was a war. “How can you say that, Bill?” Well, a war is when two armies are fighting. So you can see right there, there never was a war.
And probably this too about the same conflict.
I was in the unenviable position of being for the war, but against the troops.
And he would for sure unleash his fury on the monsters responsible, such as he did back then with Bush Sr.
People ask me where I stood politically, you know. It’s not that I disagree with Bush’s economic policy or his foreign policy, but that I believe he was a child of Satan here to destroy the planet Earth. Yeah, I’m a little to the left there.
See, Bill Hicks was angry—no—he was fucking furious. So am I. Constantly. At my worst I feel it corroding my insides like battery acid. At my best, or most enlightened, it’s a dull background throb.
Hicks dealt with his rage by traveling the US and elsewhere (particularly the UK, where he achieved the kind of star status he would not live to see in America) to make people laugh while giving them something to chew on—not just for that night but the rest of their lives. Hicks challenged power structures and punched up, and he spent damn near every day of his later life on the road preaching truth to the people while showing them a good time. That’s a fucking beautiful thing.
Hicks refused to let the horrors of this world beat him down. He refused to succumb to nihilism and depression. He knew that to fight the power structures that dominate us, even when the odds are insurmountable—especially then—is to free one’s soul from them. He knew that while our bodies may be trapped in the physical world and the conditions herein, the human spirit is cosmic and forever, and cannot be contained nor killed. Of all the lessons Hicks taught me, it’s this I cherish most.
This message is best showcased perhaps in the closing monologue of Bill’s final video special, Revelations, recorded in London in November 1992 at the height of Bill’s powers, and fifteen months before his death.
The world is like a ride at an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it, you think it’s real, ’cause that’s how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round; it has thrills and chills and it’s very brightly colored and it’s very loud and it’s fun… for a while.
Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question. “Is this real or is this just a ride?” And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and they say, “Hey, don’t worry, don’t be afraid—ever— because this is just a ride.”
And we... kill those people. “Shut him up! We have a lot invested in this ride. Shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and my family. This just has to be real!”
It’s just a ride, and we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that—you ever notice that?—and let the demons run amok. But it doesn’t matter because… it’s just a ride, and we can change it any time we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your door, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one.
Here’s what we can do to change the world right now to a better ride: take all that money that we spend on weapons and defense each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.
SIXTEEN YEARS AFTER stumbling onto Bill Hicks clips on YouTube in the dead of night, I have realized that I carry a little piece of Bill’s spirit. This brings me some peace.
In his final weeks, Bill wrote a letter to the world and said goodbye.
February 7, 1994 –
I was born William Melvin Hicks on December 16, 1961, in Valdosta, Georgia. Ugh. Melvin Hicks from Georgia. Yee Har! I already had gotten off to life on the wrong foot. I was always “awake,” I guess you’d say. Some part of me clamoring for new insights and new ways to make the world a better place.
All of this came out years down the line, in my multitude of creative interests that are the tools I now bring to the Party. Writing, acting, music, comedy. A deep love of literature and books. Thank God for all the artists who’ve helped me. I’d read these words and off I went—dreaming my own imaginative dreams. Exercising them at will, eventually to form bands, comedy, more bands, movies, anything creative. This is the coin of the realm I use in my words – Vision.
On June 16, 1993 I was diagnosed with having “liver cancer that had spread from the pancreas.” One of life’s weirdest and worst jokes imaginable. I’d been making such progress recently in my attitude, my career and realizing my dreams that it just stood me on my head for a while. “Why me!?” I would cry out, and “Why now!?”
Well, I know now there may never be any answers to those particular questions, but maybe in telling a little about myself, we can find some other answers to other questions. That might help our way down our own particular paths, towards realizing my dream of New Hope and New Happiness.
Amen
I left in love, in laughter, and in truth and wherever truth, love and laughter abide, I am there in spirit.
It’s a just a ride, Reader, and we can change it any time. Don’t ever forget it.
Love love love this! 🩷
What an absolutely beautiful piece