While the lyrics are admittedly kind of ambiguous, it's actually supposed to be something of an anti-heroin song:
" “Wave Motion Gun” is a cool song. That’s off Shapeshifter. That’s a song that a lot of people seem to really dig. It’s one of those impression songs. In the end, it’s telling the story about me trying to convince my friend not to do heroin anymore. And that became a theme of my life because I went to college in Olympia, Washington, in the early ‘90s. It was sort of a port area in the Pacific Northwest where all the heroin trade was coming through. And everybody was on it at the time in the early '90s. And all my friends were sort of disappearing, and I didn’t know where they were going. I found out they were all doing heroin. And they were doing it together, which is really a weird thing. But I never did it. It was not something I was ever interested in. In fact, drugs are something that never really interested me, except for some experimentation. But I just started watching friends die and disappear and drop out of school and stuff, and turning up in houses in San Francisco and shit like that. And my one closest friend I tried to convince to stop doing it, and that’s kind of what that song’s about."
While the lyrics are admittedly kind of ambiguous, it's actually supposed to be something of an anti-heroin song:
" “Wave Motion Gun” is a cool song. That’s off Shapeshifter. That’s a song that a lot of people seem to really dig. It’s one of those impression songs. In the end, it’s telling the story about me trying to convince my friend not to do heroin anymore. And that became a theme of my life because I went to college in Olympia, Washington, in the early ‘90s. It was sort of a port area in the Pacific Northwest where all the heroin trade was coming through. And everybody was on it at the time in the early '90s. And all my friends were sort of disappearing, and I didn’t know where they were going. I found out they were all doing heroin. And they were doing it together, which is really a weird thing. But I never did it. It was not something I was ever interested in. In fact, drugs are something that never really interested me, except for some experimentation. But I just started watching friends die and disappear and drop out of school and stuff, and turning up in houses in San Francisco and shit like that. And my one closest friend I tried to convince to stop doing it, and that’s kind of what that song’s about."
John Wozniak via SongFacts