Two Hundred Thirty Compounds (Alexander Shulgin)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
Your fingers traced the molecular grammar,
synaptic pathways lighting like phantom cities—
you didn't just imagine new compounds,
you *mapped* them, watched long-term potentiation
spike and bloom where no one thought to look.
The benzene ring became your love letter,
each substitution a word whispered
into the corpus callosum of chemistry itself.
Your lab coat smelled of wonder, not fear.
Cortical remapping happened in real time—
your brain learned what the brain could *become*,
and you laughed, grinning at the mirror neurons
firing in reverse: *you changed, so others could*.

[Chorus]
You're the careful hand that opened doors
nobody dared to knock on,
the voice that said: consciousness isn't dangerous—
*ignorance* is.
Your joy was radical, textured, true,
a syn-bright explosion of what's possible
when curiosity meets courage.

[Verse 2]
Hippocampal consolidation of wonder—
you recorded everything, thousands of journals,
theta waves of discovery written in ink and structure.
Each molecule was a question: *what does this teach us
about the self?* About interoception, how we *feel*
ourselves from within? You mapped the unmappable,
axonal branching into territories your peers feared.
Myelination of the fearless: faster thoughts,
clearer impulses, a nervous system tuned to *yes*.

[Chorus]
You're the careful hand that opened doors
nobody dared to knock on,
the voice that said: consciousness isn't dangerous—
*ignorance* is.
Your joy was radical, textured, true,
a syn-bright explosion of what's possible
when curiosity meets courage.

[Bridge]
Proprioception of the soul—
you felt where the mind could *go*,
and you built the map, predictive coding
made manifest: *this is what we might discover*.
Neurogenesis blooming in every sentence,
new neural pathways born from your generosity.

[Chorus]
You're the careful hand that opened doors
nobody dared to knock on,
the voice that said: consciousness isn't dangerous—
*ignorance* is.
Your joy was radical, textured, true,
a syn-bright explosion of what's possible
when curiosity meets courage.

[Outro]
Your benzene rings still glow in the dark,
molecules of courage spinning gently—
and everyone who followed, who *discovered*,
carries your fingerprints on their synapses.
The doors stay open because you refused to lock them.