Some time during junior year of high school, I started researching LSD. I think I actually realized I was passionate about psychoactive compounds the first time I smoked weed, just before starting senior year; it simply fascinated me that a chemical could do something like that to my perception. MDMA ratcheted that up a notch, and then one day psilocybin mushrooms absolutely blew my mind apart. There's simply nothing more interesting in the world than the psychedelic experience--not the drug experience, mind you, but the direct experience of spiritual essence that the drugs lead you to if you take them in the right setting. It's the end and the beginning. I feel like all my passions sprout from whatever energy source it was that I first directly witnessed during that first mushroom trip. Right now it's taking the form of music. I first realized that was what I liked to do the most some time during freshman year of college when I got involved heavily with LSD and realized music was a language I could speak.
Listen to anything and take it apart again. Spectrum analysis, in my head. I can break down chords, and timbres, and words too into all the basic frequencies and harmonics, with all their different loudnesses, and listen to them, each pure tone, but all at once.
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49