French Roast Trip

Before this trip, I had tripped seriously three times in the past. Twice I had taken 1 hit of acid in clubs and ended up on scarry, paranoid trips--the kind where you pray for them to end NOW. The first time I tripped on shrooms it also turned bad because of a personal relationship thing that was going on. I had almost decided that tripping was just not for me, until my most recent trip, which was incredible.

Sometime before midnight, me and a friend who has never tripped before journeyed into a nearby cow pasture that is situated behind a cemetery. It was a little freaky because he had just watched the Blair Witch Project. We got lost, but I was able to call my other friends on my cell phone to find our way. Anyway, by the time we left the field, Daniel and I had managed to stuff a Taco Bell bag full of Psilocybe cubensis, the cute little guys that grow in the Gulf Coast region.

I am a college student, but I am staying with my mother while I'm out of school for the summer, so we had to wait till she went to bed at 2am. In the mean time we ate a couple (2) of the shrooms, but experienced no effects aside from the fact that I got sick (more likely because of the cheap italian food I had had earlier).

My friends have always made shroom tea, but I didn't want to use the kitchen, so I came up with a new method (at least new to my group :-). I brought my new el-cheapo coffee brewer into my room, loaded it with French roast, added a few smooshed up shrooms, and brewed the mix with enough water for two coffee cups. We added cream and sugar.

After drinking the first cup, Daniel noticed no effect, and he was getting disappointed. Because I had tripped before, however, I recognized the strange pressure on the back of my neck and on my temples as signs of an approaching trip. Meanwhile, I brewed another batch, this time using most of our remaining shrooms--it was probably three times more potent than the first batch.

I knew with the first sip of this stuff that it was strong. I don't know about everybody else, but for me, a sip of strong shroom juice has the immediate effect of causing my head to feel heavy. After only a few sips, I excused myself to use the restroom. While in the restroom, I didn't drink any more coffee, but I noticed that the carpet and the wall paper began swirling around, and I became paranoid about leaving Daniel alone (I unfortunately get very paranoid when I trip). When I got back to the room, he was laying on the bed, and was glad to see him because something had frightened him--presumably the beginning of the trip.

As we finished that cup, Daniel started to complain that he didn't think he was tripping. I noticed that his pupils were completely dialated. I have noticed this effect on myself and other friends when we trip, so I take it as a good sign, but I may be crazy. I asked Daniel what my eyes looked like, then told him to look in the mirror. He did and was surprised at what he saw. I said to him, "We're tripping, we just don't know it yet."

Those must have been the magic words, because almost immediately the trip hit full force. It had been less than 10 minuted since we finished the coffee. Dispite the information on web pages that suggests it takes 30 minutes or more, both times I have done shrooms it has hit me almost immediately. We decided to go outside and walk down the dirt road--in the dark, barefoot.

On the first part of the road, there is a particularly creepy property that is surrounded by a wooden fence, and the road is canopied by huge trees where the leaves are missing and there are only tentacle-like branches. We saw strange faces and moving stuff in the trees. The further we got down the road, the stranger the trip got. Before long, we were at the peak of the trip: The world was inhabited by strange psychadelic creatures, and our conversation (during the brief periods we were able to speak) was quite odd.

At one point, while I was "wigging out" (as Daniel puts it) in the middle of the road (I for get what I was seeing at that point), Daniel silently sat down on the side of the road. It took a minute before I found him. My words, as I recall, were "There you are. Leave those elves alone. Get up." The moonlight reflecting on the flowers of the weeds on the side of the road was causing us to see mythical creatures which all seemed to come from traditional fantasy--at least for me. That was the side of the road. The road in the distance was another story. Looking into the dark abyss down the road, I saw creatures that were not based on existing objects at all. They were made of strange cycling psychadelic lights, kind of like the designs seen on those posters from the 70's, but stranger. One such creature was a huge spider-scorpion thing that chased me back for a while until Daniel grabbed me and forced me to go forward.

The trip down the road was filled with such incidents, and we were having a great time until I got very paranoid and wanted to go back to my house. Daniel didn't want to go, and I had to fight him (orally, not physically) to turn around, but he finally followed my direction. The trip back was the same, we were both still tripping like crazy.

When we got back to the house, I calmed down and apologized for my paranoid behavior. We decided to follow a private road that services several private residences, including the creepy house I mentioned earlier. We passed the creepy house without incident, and observed all the interesting trippy sights down the road. At one point Daniel walked ahead of me then knelt down on the road to play in the dirt. I decided to run down the road for the hell of it, but as I was passing Daniel he tossed a handfull of sand at me. The sand got in my eyes, and I was frustrated. I tried to explain that we could not be totally irresponsible, that we could not forget about the real world, that we could not go wild and then show up in the morning covered in mud and haggard. He totally did not get this concept, and kept saying "It doesn't matter", which bugged me even worse, becuase I was worried he was going to decide to become a wild man and abandon civilization. Of course I was just being paranoid, but I didn't realize it at the time. I insisted that we go back to the house.

By the time we got back to my room, we were both starting to come off of the trip, so we watched the trippy Albedo plug-in for WinAmp. It was an entertaining way to spend a couple hours, along with some conversation during which I learned why Daniel had thrown dirt at me. He had found a nail on the road and had the idea that the road ahead might be covered with them, so he threw the dirt at me to make me stop, because I didn't hear him yelling. So I forgave him which made me feel much better. It is not good to be mad when you're tripping.

At some point, something interesting happened to the radio. It had been on a local top40 station, but somehow the station had changed, although neither of us had touched it intentionally. The really odd part is that we slowly came to realize that we were listening to a radio talk show about psychic experiences. A caller was talking about how she had encountered elves or fairies in her garden. I don't think we could have both hallucinated this, so this must have actually been playing on the radio--what a cool coincidence! It was fun to listen to for a while, until it started to scare us and we had to change the station.

Around 7am, the sun was up and we were nearly completely through tripping. There were still some shrooms left though. Daniel wanted to take them, but I didn't because it had been such a good trip, I was worried if we extended it it might turn bad. Finally I gave in and we brewed more coffee--this one was not as strong as the last one, but was not too far off.

After we cleaned up and left a note for my mother that we had gone for a walk (in case she got up), we drank the coffee and went for another walk, this time with shoes on. This time, I was not subject to any paranoia at all, because we had left everything perfectly normal in my house. This daylight trip was not as vivid as the one the night before. In fact, it was more like being stoned off our butts, except for some mild visual effects. We found everything hillarious, especially talking about the earlier trip.

At one point we encountered a little dog, which I called "yippie" and Daniel called "Rover" or something like that. For some insane reason, I asked Daniel "Where's his face?" Daniel replied "Why don't you ask him?" I actually walked to the dog, knelt down, and asked him, "Where is your face?" After we both recovered from a hysterical lauging fit, we walked on, and the dog followed.

There's not much to report about the morning trip. It was not as vivid as the night before, but it was actually more enjoyable for me because I was not paranoid. We returned to our lives, and plan on tripping again, same time next week.

I think I will be doing a lot fewer other drugs now that I have found this fun, free alternative. I think the secret to a good trip is to be with somebody who can make you enjoy yourself. My coffee machine is one of those generic quick drip things. I've heard that you should cook it for a long time to get all the "stuff" out, and I've also heard that heat kills the "stuff". Well, in spite of all that, a quick drip coffee brewer gave me the best trip I've ever had, so I think I'll stick to it.