·•¤ Sands Beach ¤•·

although last night was a relatively low dose (1.6g), it must have been one of the most intense trips i have had. people say that set & setting are *everything,* you better believe it! the past two weeks i had been on edge about i don't even know what. just something always bugging me, making me uncomfortable, not allowing me to just be. next thing i know, i hear the knock at the door. phil says, "Hey Mike, you wanna bust some mushrooms tonight?" ARE YOU KIDDING ME? my god, this is just too good to be true! so we munch them down straight and are traveling up to the 10th story of my dorm to borrow The Yellow Submarine from some girl when the world takes on a different look. i feel the magic starting to creep over me. we (my roomate and i), then reconveine with phil and his suitemate mark, and we go up to my room on the 7th floor. we have some floyd in the backround, the room has got it's blacklights on, etc, etc.

this is phil and mark's first encounter with the magical fungi, and phil is having some trouble letting go of reality and just gettin' in the flow of the experience, so we all just sit and listen to music for about twenty minutes. we then proceed to the balcony on the 1st floor where there must have been 25 people standing around smoking and talking. it was a mistake to go out there. immediately one guy starts asking phil for money that he owes him and phil can just open his pockets and say he's got nothing aside from the clothes on his back. then instead of simply asking what's up or showing any concern, the other guy just walks away without saying a word. all about the $

so we leave that scene when marc joins us (he had gone to change into some jeans) and then we embark on our adventure.

we start walking down a narrow road with no lights on it. trees all around. it winds down into a swamp, and after a half mile or so we take a seat on a bench next to a lagoon where a drainage pipe was slowly trikling water into the ocean. slowly the sound of the hundreds of frogs all around swell to the point where it sounds like they're about to jump right on top of us, but then the sound just fades away as quickly as it came. we sat on that bench for a good thirty minutes, my roomate and i smoked a small bowl. the sky was colored from the nearby city of santa barbara, but we were in a dark, secluded little inlet from the ocean. we proceed down the road.

water so still and so flat right next to us, rising hills, trees everywhere. we get to the end of the road and walk through a very small community with a few houses and out onto Sands beach, a very secluded sandy beach in the inlet. we are in awe of the beauty and lay down in the cool damp sand, sprawled out staring at the crisp night sky. as i watch it seems as though lighting flows in from all different angles on the universe, stars swirl, and what appears to be a 2-D skyscape, melts outward and i'm flying into the night sky with planets and burning stars all around me, completely 3-dimentional. now i'm sure it was my mind playing tricks on me, but i swear i experienced another dimention. we layed on that sand for thirty or forty minutes listening to the waves break on the shore and the water flowing up into the sand just to sweep back out into the ocean. i had my hands dug deeply into the sand at my sides squeezing the earth and feeling it's energy. it was cold but at one point it just went away, i didn't move, i just saw, with my minds eye, the real world. my vision was not in its normal state, i was looking past the stars, looking at energy... i suppose you could say looking at god right in the eyes (although i do not believe in god in the conventional religious sence).

after a while mark, my roomate, and i decide to proceed farther down the beach. phil insists we leave him to his spot on the beach, so we crack a glowstick and perch it in the sand so that we can find him on our way back. we walk. we walked in between two bodies of water, the ocean, and a small lake left by high tide. the sand was hard packed and wet at this point, like cement. we reach a sandy mountain, climb and stumble to the top to be presented with a full view of the coast, the ocean, and the land behind us. beautiful. i can only scream at the top of my lungs and thrust my hands towards the sky... i fall to my knees and grab handfulls of cold, soft, sand, watching it dance through the air to the ground below. after some time we get phil, and explore more of the beach, we then go back up to a large deserted dirt parking area and stand around discussing, smoking, and soaking up the experience, deciding what to do next.

we end up walking through a tall grass medow, then down a dirt path on the side of the bluffs (nearly falling off trying to get to the beach again ;) and the fog rolls in onto the land draping the coast with a thick wet mist, making the night even more surreal. we then travel along a street full of beach houses right on the edge of the coast, Del Playa, the "main drag" of the college town. then we proceed through campus and marvel at all the things we've never seen before and all the different things in this world we live in. we end up circling around in what was a giant loop (probably 6 or 7 miles) and come apon our housing towers again from the other side of the road.

we straggle in, me holding a gatorade bottle full of sand, rocks, and a flower... phil with the rock that kept him grounded in this world and alive, god's hand... marc with his large rock that we all ended up signing and drawing on at the night's end... and all of us in shambles, sand all over, dirty, unkempt... but who cares?! we walk in and there's about 20 of the people that were out on the balcony earlier that night in the lounge, and they all look and laugh, but some of them know what we went through... some of them have experienced the same journeys and mind-blowing revelations that we were consumed by that night.

we all take a quick shower, dress up, and by this time (about 3 in the morning on a wednesday night) we're sitting in the hall talking to some people and neil strolls up. so the six of us go into my room and we smoke to some nice relaxing marley, dylan, and tom petty. the last toke is taken at 4:20am and we call it a night. and what a night it was... never to be forgotten! i sleep when the sun rises, and this experience is just what i needed...