“Chasing the dragon” is a slang term for a particular method of smoking heroin.
It usually involves placing powdered heroin on foil and heating it from below with a cigarette lighter. The heroin turns to a sticky liquid and wriggles around like a Chinese dragon, hence the name. Fumes are given off and are inhaled, sometimes thorough a rolled-up newspaper, magazine or tube.
I will say that the high I get from listening to “Time Out of Mind” compared to the one I get from listening to “Spill the Wine”* is probably similar to the difference of the highs from inhaling heroin and inhaling the fumes from a warm bowl of good soup. Not that I’ve ever come near heroin, or opium for that matter. “Time Out of Mind” is just so good that it demands superlatives.
*Great Caesar’s Ghost! Looking back at my earlier post I see that I typoed the song as “Spine That Wine.” My mind is always racing ahead of my fingers and moshing words together. I’m going to guess to listening to “Spine That Wine” would be like going through heroin withdrawal, to extend the metaphor until it squeaks.
Well, I get high both from “Time Out Of Mind” AND “Spill The Wine”, even without the help of any substance (though pot makes them better and I’m not inclined to try anything stronger). Two great songs.
ETA: another cryptic (at least for some) Steely Dan drug reference from “Hey Nineteen”:
The Cuervo Gold, the fine Colombian Make tonight a wonderful thing
Well, as a naive German boy I didn’t know that Cuervo Gold was a brand of Tequila, and that the Colombian stood for cocaine, so I learned that much later.
Never heard of that. It was always just ‘Columbian’, and it meant killer primo. Even better than Acapulco Gold, which was supposedly the finest Mexican.
“Science Made Stupid”, the humorous parody by Tom Weller, had a list of future inventions. It ranked “calendar reform” as less likely than immortality or time travel.
The northern chain of California’s Channel Islands (Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel), and Anacapa) are geologically an extension of the Hollywood Hills and Santa Monica Mountains. I never realized it before but it’s obvious when you look at a topographical map. What’s more, they’re at the same latitude, more or less, of the house where I grew up (red location mark).
I’m probably not the only one who thought these islands must be farther north, probably for the reason that, in order to get to Oxnard harbor or Camarillo airport, where you would take a boat or plane to reach the islands, you have to get on I-101 North and drive for about an hour. But on that stretch of road, when you follow the signs to go north, you’re actually going west.
You are looking too locally. The whole west flank of the continent is part of the same geological story, with Yellowstone right at the heart of it. In fact it’s very possible that Yellowstone produced those islands.
Another interesting bit of US geology is that New York City is on the site of part an ancient mountain range which rivalled the Himalayas in height. Many millions of years have worn them away but the root of the mountains is where the land is most suitable for building tall buildings.
The closest competitor for short border crossings would be just north of Weirton WV (the town’s city limits extend the full distance between the borders) with less than 4 miles from the WV-Ohio border to the WV-Pennsylvania border.
Coincidentally - Weirton is the largest town in WV’s Hancock county.
