"My only speed experience was in 1960. I was an undergraduate. I did not even know what speed was. A friend's wife was a psychiatric nurse, who was supplying my friends with pills to keep them awake longer. I needed to study for a German test. I took a pill. I did not like it, but I was buzzed up. I asked me German teacher to go out with me. She did not accept my invitation, but, at the end of the semester, I was shocked to have been given an A."
Well, if we're trading. In 1973 I was an English major at UCLA and writing a paper for my English class. I was paying rent by working in an Ob-Gyn research lab. Part of my duties were to go to the slaughterhouse downtown and collect cow uteruses, bring em back to the lab, and isolate the protein from the muscle tissue. This was existentially very instructive. At UCLA everybody was white. At the slaughter house, the meat inspectors were white, the cutters were Latino, and the cleanup crew was black.
The cutters and cleanup crew downed uppers pretty regularly, took a liking to me, and shared their goods, which I needed one day when I had waited too long to write my Macbeth paper. So I stayed up all night and wrote the paper in a daze of hyperattention, knowing I was writing a fairly mediocre paper, but oddly certain that I was having an experience Macbeth would recognize.
Joanna