Inspiration

The first time I tripped on drugs, I did so on the spur of the moment and had a fucked up time. Around 9:00 PM, the second to last day before my girlfriend was heading back to college in Hawaii, we decided to buy some mushrooms with two of our closest friends because none of us had ever tripped. We threw a bunch of beds, blankets, and pillows onto the living room floor of Senan’s house, sat in a circle, and roughly divvied up our drugs. We ate the mushrooms with chocolate; they tasted funky on their own.

A couple of minutes later, we all started feeling loose, drunk, giddy. It was fun. I felt happy and free, and inebriated. I was the first to start trippin. I looked at Senan’s wall-hangings, and noticed that the umbrellas in one picture were dancing up and down with the music in the background. I laughed. My friends thought I was kidding. But when the Christmas tree started dancing as well, fatly swaying in its own jolly way, the others figured out what I was talking about. We were all embarking on a trip none of us could have imagined before eating those little pieces of fungi.

My night turned sour about 4 hours into my trip. I slapped my friend Ashley in the face, and when I realized what I had done, I was horrified. You see, I began having problems distinguishing what was real from what wasn’t real, and slapping Ashley in the face seemed perfectly logical at the time. She didn’t get hurt, she was just startled. Everything was fine, except that I began wanting to stop tripping. It had been a blast. I’d experienced marvelous things, and I’d gotten into a laughing fit I will never forget. I made noises I’d never heard before, seen rooms and atmospheres for what they really were, I’d rejoiced and laughed about everything for everything. Now I wanted to stop. The thing I didn’t realize is that mushroom trips last a long time. And time didn’t make sense. What was that thing? That thing people lived by? The thing they called time? The thing they called tomorrow? Wasn’t now the only thing that existed? Time can’t exist now. It exists in the thing called tomorrow, in the thing called the clock, not in reality.

I decided to walk home. It was a mile or so walk, but I was sick of the atmosphere I was in. My friends all started mocking me, because my friends became figments of my imagination, beautiful characters I’d created in this adventure I called life. They were all so perfect for the play, the play we lived in every day, life. But now they were pissing me off. I didn’t want them to be those characters I’d created any more, I just wanted to be alone in my place of comfort. I left Senan’s house at 6:00 AM, trippin balls. I was wearing socks, jeans, and a long-sleeved tee. There was snow and slush on the ground, and I was a mess. I made it about a block and half. A cat had appeared out of nowhere, literally; it just came into existence and walked by. The road felt like a treadmill; I kept walking but wasn’t getting anywhere. Fuck it. I decided the nearest house would do. I didn’t need my own home anyway, it was just as fake as the rest of these places. None of them were real. I went into a house, socks wet and muddy, pupils big as all hell. Some guy came out of the kitchen looking startled. I apologized and went back to Senan’s.

The first time I tripped scared the fuck out of me. I thought I had been living a wonderful life on Earth, eaten drugs (something people warn you not to do), and then I thought I went straight to my own personal Hell for fucking with my body like I did. It took me a long time to accept what happened. For the next couple of months, I had problems figuring out my place on this planet. Before eating shrooms, I’d always had he attitude “experience as much of this world as you can before you die,” but now I wasn’t sure I wanted to try everything. I was frankly scared shitless.

It’s funny the way things work. About 1 year and 2 months after that bad trip, I ate mushrooms for the 4th time in my life. This time, I was at Caprock Canyon in Texas, a deserty canyon of the southwest. I was with my two best friends from college and it was one of the most amazing things I’ve experienced. We talked about life; it goes by. It’s fast, and fun. I think that’s one of the coolest things I’ve realized: life is fast and fun. I saw my friends as characters again, only this time, I saw myself as a character too. I saw my friends, my girlfriend, my mom, all as characters acting out their part in this reality called life. I conquered my own character too. I realized that there was a certain level of control that came with being a character, and I could be and do whatever the fuck I wanted.

Before trippin in Texas, I’d been in a funk. I’d been bumbling through life doing my own thing, keeping everything low key. People had noticed, and I wasn’t sure why I was being like that. But funks are silly parts of this adventure. Why worry? What is there really to worry about? We’ll deal with death when it gets here, but why the fuck should we not do as much as we can while we’re here. Life’s fast, it’s fun too. I don’t like being in funks most of the time. Why put myself in them? It’s just dumb. It’s just fuckin with yourself until you pull yourself through. It took me a while to get out of the funk of having a bad trip the first time. Ironically, I’m not sure I ever fully got out of it until a couple of days ago, in Caprock Canyon on shrooms; the same things that put me into it. But who the fuck cares anyway?