excess & philosophy

A few friends and I went to Ozzfest this year... this is my story of the first two nights...

On Sunday, Musashi, Maribbles, Muadibh and I got to the camp ground before the rest of the group. When we got there, Musashi told us he had a hit of e that he had salvaged from the movers (he's moving), and he gave it to Muadibh and I to split (but only after I promised to replace it and pay for all his drugs for the camping trip we were planning for later in the summer, a total of about $68), and then Muadibh and I went off to look for some acid.

A few minutes after we started our search, a girl came up to us and asked us if we had any e... we laughed and told her we just took some, but we'd help her look for more... while we were walking around, a guy that we passed said "e" when he walked by, and we kept walking until we realized what he said... then we went back and asked if he had any, which he did, so Muadibh bought one and we split it. We looked for acid for a while longer, but couldn’t find any, so we went back to the concession stand to wait for the rest of our group to get there. When we got there, Ukio and Zhao (Muadibh’s girlfriend) were there, so we went to the campsite and set everything up and then went for a little walk, during which the e hit us both. It was my first time on e, and Muadibh’s second... I was walking around with Ukio, just fondling her shoulders because she was so soft... I was expecting some sort of major mind shift, like there is with acid, but there really wasn't any... I just felt really really really happy, and liked to touch things. There was this one place in a field where there was a steep drop off, and I ran and jumped off of it, and it was soooo amazing how cool it felt...Zhao was bitching and moaning like she generally does, and she was really bringing Muadibh down, so I went and talked to her to try to get her to calm down and just let him have a good time, and after a little bitching about how she wanted some too, she said she would.

Later that night, Musashi, Maribbles, Ukio, and Zhao went out looking for weed (Muadibh and I tagged along, but I don't smoke anymore, and he can't, because he's in outpatient rehab even though he passed his drug test), and got a really good deal, so we all went back to the camp site, and they smoked up. Zhao was being a bitch, because she was stressed out and she wanted to get stoned so she could calm down (which didn't happen), then Ukio’s mom gave them a bottle of rum. They watered it down with sprite to make it taste better and they all got kind of drunk. Then Ukio’s sister took it and she and her friends got drunk

Musashi and I went and walked around for a while, and when we got back, Ukio and Zhao said they found a guy with shrooms, but I didn't have any money. A guy who was in the little huddle around the dealer, and who introduced himself as Dallas, said he'd go halves with me for an eighth, but I told him I didn't have any money, and we had to wait for Muadibh.

When Muadibh got back, we told him about the guy with the shrooms, and the three of us (Muadibh, Dallas and I) went out looking for him... along the way, Dallas hit on every girl he possibly could.

We finally found the shroom guy, and Muadibh shelled out $20 for an eighth, and before we could do anything, Dallas reached in and grabbed a shroom and ate it, leaving us with three. Muadibh ate a stem and a cap, and I only got a stem. This was the first time for both of us with shrooms, but Dallas said that a stem would be plenty for me, so we trusted him.

We wandered around for a while, waiting for the shrooms to kick in, and we ran into Zhao and Ukio. Muadibh introduced Zhao to Dallas, as his girlfriend (the only reason that he didn't hit on her), and Dallas started hitting on Ukio, who by this time was completely plastered... she could hardly stand up straight. The 5 of us wandered around for a while longer, when Dallas and Ukio started making out (Dallas was 21 (or so he said, he looked older), and Ukio is 15)... I was a little disturbed at this, but Zhao kept saying... or slurring, I should say, since she was blind drunk too… that Ukio could take care of herself, and since I’m a pacifist, I didn't go and kick Dallas’s ass.

We all went back to our campsite and Ukio took Dallas into MY tent (since Ukio and I were sharing a tent), and thank doG, her mom put a stop to it...

Muadibh and I went for another walk, during which we got a couple glowsticks, broke them open and sprayed all the glow juice on ourselves... soon after that, he started tripping, but I still wasn't feeling anything. We went back to the campsite for a minute, and Ukio’s mom called Muadibh over and had him sit down, and asked if he had taken the rum away from the little kids (Ukio’s sister and her friends, who, by the time we found them were also pretty wasted), and he said "ya," but Ukio’s mom said "you're not talking." Muadibh said "yes I am," and one of Ukio’s mom's friends said "no, you're not, we can't hear you..." that went on for a while, and then Muadibh came up to me and asked, "Am I talking?" I told him he was, and he told me about the wierdness that just happened. I told him that he was already tripping some serious balls, because I had never gotten that level of confusion on acid, even at 5 hits.

We went out for another walk, and when we got by one of the bathrooms, he asked if I was feeling it yet, and I told him that I wasn't... probably due to cross tolerance from the acid I had taken on Wednesday. By this point, I wasn't expecting to get anything, while Muadibh was seeing the stars dance.

We walked for a while longer, when he told me to look up at the stars, which I did, hoping for even the smallest flicker... and they were vibrating, and I could see connections of constellations, and then they all started to rotate. I told him I was feeling it, and he was very happy. I looked over at one of the fences, and it was rippling.

We went walking for a while, stopping occasionally to lay in the grass and look at the stars, and we got to this big stretch of open field, where we decided to race. I won, and I felt like no matter how fast I was going, no matter how fast I was moving my feet, I could go faster. We reached the end of the field, where we saw two guys walking over a part of the fence that had been knocked down. We talked to them for a while and they said that the field on the other side of the fence was huge... that it probably went on for like 2 miles, and that one of their sisters was still out there with some of her friends, climbing on one of those irrigation things (y'know the big long rolly things that look kind of like caterpillars), so we decided to go out into the field, and leave the partying behind...

We got out there, and as we were walking, Muadibh was telling me about little devils that were in the grass, that would hide when you looked, but when you looked away, they grinned at you... I wasn't tripping that hard, but I told him that I saw them too, because it seemed the appropriate thing to do.

We looked out at the horizon and it seemed to go on forever. The irrigation machine looked like it was miles away, but we kept walking toward it, and when we got there, we ran into the one guy's sister and her friends, and we talked to them for a minute or two... told them we were both tripping really hard on shrooms. We went and we climbed up on the machine and stared down its length, and it too went on forever; it was "triangles forever" according to both of us (we both said it at the same time). We started philosophizing, and I said that this was how it was supposed to be... living in the moment, savoring everything you see, taste, touch, hear, and smell... that back at the camp ground, that was society, that was what was forced upon us, and that was wrong... there isn't supposed to be any sort of planning or working toward the future... school and the grade system is futile, because grades don't matter... because sure, if you get good grades, you can get into a good college and get a high paying job, but that in the end it doesn’t matter... the mindset of society is that whoever dies with the most money wins... but that's wrong... all that really matters is whether or not you're happy... if you would rather do something you enjoy than do your homework, then you should... if you would rather take a less than high paying job because it's something you love to do, then more power to you. We decided that we needed to get together with a bunch of our friends and buy an island... not necessarily a big one... maybe just a hundred or so acres, but an island, and we would secede from whatever country it was a part of, and start our own country, and be totally self sufficient... we wouldn't have money, because we wouldn't need it, we would grow our own food and make everything we needed, because that is how it's supposed to be. We just lay on the ground, stared at the stars and talked about that for what seemed like hours...

After a while, we decided to go back to the camp ground, and when we got there, when we re entered the fences, re entered society, we were disgusted... there was garbage everywhere, there were drunks everywhere, it was revolting what was considered ok by society... and the security guards were pure oppression... we realized that the fences were symbolic of society, they were there to restrict us, to make us follow certain guidelines, to control us, and the security guards were the active principle of that.

We wandered around for a while, when a black light emanating from a little room made of tarps caught out eyes. We went over and sat down inside it, just watching the people there, and I realized that there were three kinds of people in the world. The first and most massive group was that of the people who play by the rules, the ones that let society rule their lives and never have a second thought about it... these are the ignorant masses, the people who are convinced that all drugs are evil.

The second group is the group of people who played the game for the first part of their lives, but in their twenties, they realized the futility of "the system", whether through the use of psychedelics or other means... these are the people who had constructed this little bastion of "how things were meant to be" inside of society... they are removed from society, but not totally, they are still caught inside.

The third, and smallest group was composed of those like us... people who realize the futility and wrongness of society early on, and still have the potential to do something about it, to become removed from it.

This little revelation of mine, triggered one for Muadibh... he said that it was like the movie the matrix (which he's a huge fan of), because they said that they didn't take people out after a certain age, because they couldn't handle it, and he was right... it was very much like what I had just said... we realized that the matrix, in the movie, is a symbol for society, and the people who were fighting to do away with the matrix, to save humanity, were those like us. I doubt that's what the writers thought of when they wrote it, but it fits so well.

After a while, we left the trip room and started wandering around again. We ran into Dallas again who said "dude, y'know that girl I was with... I found out she's only 15... if I had known she was only 15, I wouldn't have done that" which was complete bullshit, because Ukio doesn't look like she's over 15... she almost looks like she’s 12.

After that, the bastard offered us some "red rock" opium, which, thanks to erowid, I knew was really just ground up "dragon's blood" incense, so we turned it down. There were a couple other guys near us that were smoking some weed, and a couple security guards came by and started doing the whole drug bust thing, so we left.

We wandered around for a while longer, but we had seen all that we wanted to see, and I was already pretty much back to baseline, so we went back to the campsite and went to bed...

I laid in my sleeping bag for about an hour, with my eyes closed, and I finally noticed the closed eye visuals, but it wasn't anything special, and I fell asleep. The next morning, Muadibh asked Ukio’s mom about the incident when he "wasn't talking," and she said she was just fucking with him... anyway... the next day, the day of the actual concert, Musashi and I stayed at the campsite because neither of us had tickets... we decided to go wander around and see if anyone left any drugs out around their camp sites, but no one did...

At one point, we both had to go use the bathroom, so we went to "comfort station" #2, and relieved ourselves. When we finished, we stood outside the Porto potties for a few minutes, when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the bushes move. I bent down to look, because on the way to the gorge, we stopped at a rest stop, and I found a lizard on the ground, and I thought there might be another one...

But what I found wasn't a lizard... sitting next to the bushes, in a little hole, were two mushrooms... I picked them up, and they had been dried (so I knew they hadn't grown there), and they looked and felt like the shrooms Muadibh and I had the night before, so we took them back to the camp site, brushed them off, and just to be sure they were actually shrooms and not some poisonous mushrooms, I took a tiny bite off the edge of one of the stems to make sure it tasted right. It did, so I handed Musashi the smaller of the two, and I broke mine in half, since it was pretty big (I was eating the bigger one, to hopefully counteract the tolerance I had built the night before). We ate them, and Musashi commented on how horrible they tasted... at which point, I realized how much I like the taste of shrooms. He asked how long it would take to kick in, and I told him about 20 minutes to a half hour or so, but I suggested we walk for a while, to help get it into our bloodstreams faster.

After a while, neither of us was really feeling anything, or seeing anything for that matter, when out of the corner of my eye, I saw something dripping down the side of a tent... I looked at it, and there was a bag hanging from the tent, but there was nothing dripping... I told forest that it should be kicking in at about that time.

We went over to the edge of the campground by a little stream, and I closed my eyes… I felt like the stream was carrying me away, slowly eroding me.

We followed the stream to a muddy little shallow, where we started playing in the mud, and I was so amazed at the feeling of the mud around my hand, it’s impossible to describe.

We stayed there for a little while, then started walking again, and eventually found our way back to the camp site, after which, I didn't get much in the way of a trip, but Musashi was getting some intense closed eye visuals, involving a horizon and things that would morph into other things, and would always resolve into a cactus. Then he started talking about a blue box on the horizon with writing on it, but he was too far away to read it. I closed my eyes to savor my minor closed eye visuals, and dozed off a little. When I woke up, Musashi had gone into his tent and laid down, so I did the same and took a little nap...

When I woke up, I got out of my tent and went and woke Musashi up, so I wouldn’t be alone. When he woke up, he told me that I should have let him sleep, because he had been reading the box.

Not much happened after that, until that night, when Musashi started getting some effects in the dark, but I didn't get anything...
And that was the extent of our adventures...