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Invisibledwpineal
Psychedelic Artist
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Registered: 07/20/06
Posts: 4,667
Stories from the Psychedelic Underground * 16
    #17180329 - 11/07/12 04:55 PM (11 years, 4 months ago)

This thread is a work in progress. I am trying to add a new story each week. The stories are what I would call "First Drafts" (well, because that is truly what they are), because they contain typos, odd sentence structures, and need a lot more work. But eventually the vision is to edit and edit again until I end up with a book (or two or three).

I'm posting the messy first drafts here to create the framework for the final book(s). Once I've gone through all the stories I have then I'll sit back and polish everything for a print edition.

I'm very interested to know where I am messing up, so please feel free to either comment in the thread with any grammar/spelling errors (or PM me), or anything that I need to elaborate more on. Let me know if there are any parts from the stories that feel like something is being left out, or something you'd like to know more about.

The Trip to the Peninsula
The Search for More
Meeting the Connection
The Edge (Part 1)
Our Paths Cross Again
The Rainbow Family of Living Light
Spreading the Good News
Not My Best Idea
Moving on Up
The Edge (Part 2)
Learning The Hard Way
Microdots
A Quick Trip North
Mom Eats Acid by Accident
Pre-Birthday Weekend/10-Strip at School
Cut Off
Meeting The New Connection
Endo Mekka
People Losing It
My Last Night
Burger King and The Eternal Life Disco
Mail-Order Mushrooms
Island Adventure
Toning Down
IT-290
Lessons in Caution
Finding the People
College Daze - Part 1
College Daze - Part 2
The Belly of the Beast
Keep on Truckin'
Untitled
New Years
The New House
The Marley Festival

Edited by dwpineal (05/08/13 06:20 PM)

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Invisibledwpineal
Psychedelic Artist
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Registered: 07/20/06
Posts: 4,667
Re: Stories from the Psychedelic Underground [Re: dwpineal] * 3
    #17180332 - 11/07/12 04:56 PM (11 years, 4 months ago)

Trip to the Peninsula

There are some moments in time when you get the feeling that your whole life has led up to this exact moment. All your experiences and all you’ve learned, all of who you are and have come to be have led you to this crossroads in space and time. A moment where you are about to step into the unknown, a moment where you are looking at a chance, an opportunity, and you know your life will be forever changed should you stay the path. You look deep into yourself, and you can feel the pull of The Great Other. I had this feeling overwhelm me as I stared down into my palm and looked at the tiny square centimeter of paper sitting within the center of an unfolded piece of aluminum foil. How could this small, insignificant piece of paper hold the very essence of Mystery itself? I sat and pondered this and exactly how I had gotten to this place at this point in time.

About two weeks ago, I was at a local underground coffee house, The Mud House. The Mud House was a coffee shop situated smack dab in the middle of one of Fort Lauderdale’s less desirable areas, just outside of downtown. It was a late-night hangout of would-be poets, artistic types and musicians. So many people would be there on Friday and Saturday nights, that there was no way everyone would fit into the trapezoidal area filled with books, checker boards, tables, and coffee. It was a vibrant and energetic scene spilling outside the confines of the tiny coffee shop into the grassy courtyard out front and the parking lots out back. The Mud House was filled with local art, and poets would share their mental reflections from the mic stand at the far end of the room.

Even though The Mud House itself was small, it was housed within a large V-shaped three story building right next to the train tracks, in a forgotten corner outside of downtown Fort Lauderdale. The unique shape of the building worked perfectly for the blossoming of a small scene. The center of the V held a nice sized courtyard with grass and stone tables. Local bands would play mini-concerts in the courtyard, so the clientele from the Mud House overflowed into its outside openness when the close quarters of the coffee shop became too overbearing. The fact that The Mud house was the only business open late at night, allowed the scene to grow and flourish around the V shaped building without bothering the neighbors. The parking lot behind the V was known to the patrons as the place to relax with some friends, some old, some new, and pass around a few joints. I was still so new to smoking herb, that its effects were fully psychedelic when I smoked, especially in the amounts freely available there. It was a wonderful time for me to be in such a highly creative atmosphere. Art, music, books, poetry, interesting fashions and eccentric people coupled with the effects of pot on a relatively inexperienced smoker really captured my spirit and imagination. Empty spaces in the parking lots would fill up with circles of smokers, passing around joints and creating visible moving clouds under the streetlights.

It was in the parking lot, sitting on the asphalt in a circle with some of these friends, when I looked to the guy next to me, an acquaintance I’d talked with many times before, and asked if he could get me any smoke. After finishing up the joint we were smoking, he led me into the bathroom inside the Mud House. The Mud House was small, the bathroom was smaller. We squeezed into the single bathroom stall, locked the door and I handed him a $10 bill. He reached into his pocket and took out a colorful wrapped cellophane, and handed it to me. I just put it into my pocket without even looking at it, thanked him and squeezed out of the bathroom to tell my friends the good news. I walked over to the courtyard and motioned for my two friends to follow me. Together we walked to Mark’s Jeep in the back parking lot to check out the score.

“So what does it look like?” Alex asked.

“I didn’t check it out, he handed me this. I think it’s two joints” I said, showing him the small wrapped package I’d been handed. It felt like two joints through the wrapper.

“You know people sell rolled joints like this so they can sell you oregano instead of weed.” Alex was an eternal pessimist, but many times he was right, I had a sinking feeling in my stomach as I unwrapped the colorful cellophane. We almost bumped heads looking into the little opened wrapper in my hand.

“See, I knew he was cool!” I said triumphantly when I saw the package contained two nice buds instead of what I thought were rolled joints. The package felt like it had two long “somethings”, and I had just assumed by the feel, that they were joints. But instead, it was two perfect looking buds, not rolled into joints at all, funny how your senses can trick you like that. I was extremely happy that I hadn’t just bought ten dollars’ worth of oregano.  Looking closer, I saw the corner of a tiny plastic baggie sticking out from in between the buds. I pulled it out and it had a very small rectangular piece of paper with a design of some kind.  And it seemed to be perforated right down the middle of the rectangle, making two perfect squares.

“Is that acid? Did you buy acid too?” Alex asked looking at the baggie in my hand. I had never even seen acid before, but I had read quite a bit about it. I had a moment of “Oh my G-d” as I realized what had almost literally fallen into my hands. Looking at my friend in this dimly lit downtown parking lot, late at night, in this most unexpected of places, I felt the beginning of a great adventure. Regardless, I wasn’t sure if my friend Rory, that sold me the herb even knew he had given me the little baggie inside the cellophane. I had asked for herb, and had only given him ten dollars. Surely there was ten dollars’ worth of herb in there also. I wasn’t even sure if this was acid, but it was little paper in a baggie, so I went to find Rory to find out what was going on. I knew he wasn’t a dealer; he was just a nice guy helping me out. I felt like it was my responsibility to let him know. It felt like a mistake. 

I wandered from the parking lot back through the loosely crowded courtyard looking for Rory. After a few minutes of weaving through the people outside, I headed inside the Mud House, pulling open the door and stepping into the cozy warmness of the coffee shop. The smell of coffee and brownies filled the room with a richness that reminded me of the enticing visible smell of Froot Loops tempting Toucan Sam. A girl with short dredds was reading poetry in the front corner of the room. Looking to the coffee bar, I saw Rory reclining and listening intently to her words. He saw me and gave a smile and a nod as I walked over and stood next to him by the bar. I gave him five and quietly started, “Hey man, I think you accidentally, uh, well, I found a baggie inside the wrapper with the buds, it looks like acid. I don’t think you knew it was in there, so I wanted to bring it back to you.”

“Wow, I had no idea that was in there!” Rory said. “I had brought those for a friend of mine, they’re something special. But, I talked to him a few hours ago and he’s not gonna make it over here tonight.”

“So is it acid?”

“You’ve never done it before?”

“No,” I said with a nervous laugh, “I’ve never even seen it before.” This comment brought on a half hour conversation in hushed tones, spoken under the poetry coming from the microphone. Two coffees later he looked into my eyes, trying to read something, and said, “LSD is something special, you know it’s not even about the money, it’s so much more than I can even explain. You keep them, there’s 2 hits there. Find a good friend, a safe, comfortable place, and enjoy.” I had so many questions for him, but he kept implying that until I had the experience, that trying to explain it to me was impossible.

Over the next two weeks I spent a lot of time in the library and talking to friends, quietly researching LSD. I wanted to know more about it before I was going to take any of it. I heard plenty of horror stories from people who had never taken it. I heard that if you took more than 7 hits of LSD during your lifetime that you could be declared Legally Insane. I heard about a friend of a friend’s mother who had taken so much acid in the 60’s that he got flashbacks and went crazy. Another friend’s uncle told him about a kid that had some LSD in his pockets and got caught in the rain. The rain soaked the LSD right into his skin and the kid was taken to the hospital where he still lives today, because he believes he’s a glass of orange juice.

I could only find the very fewest of people who had taken it, acid was not a widespread phenomenon in our area, or at least it was somewhat rare. So this led me to books. I read what was available in our high school library, which was not much. Alex and I took the bus to the Broward County Main Library, a massive eight floor building housing what seemed to be millions of books. We spent hours digging through the shelves and reading quietly in the study cubicles. As closing time approached, we checked out two books. We ended up leaving with a copy of Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception. I read both of them over the next weekend. By Monday morning, my mind was abuzz. I was excited. I wanted to get on the bus.

The following Friday after school we found ourselves climbing into an old beat up blue work van that belonged to our Friend Jake’s dad, headed to what turned out to be the best possible place for our first LSD experience. He was taking us deep in the Florida Everglades during the nicest weather of the year. Alex, Jake and I made ourselves comfortable in the back of the van, as best as we could around all the tools, while Jake’s dad pulled out of the parking lot. The back of the van didn’t have windows, other than on the rear doors, but we entertained ourselves as Jake’s dad kept driving and driving. About an hour later he pulled the van to a stop, and with a smile said, “Alright guys, we’re here. Get your gear together, and don’t forget anything.” Alex opened the side doors of the van and the three of us climbed out into the bright Florida sunshine and a crystal clear sky that seemed to go on forever. “Now go get your site paid for.” He said from the driver’s seat.

We walked over to a building that looked quintessential Everglades, a down home swamp building that looked like it had been there for quite a while. Next to the main building was a huge thatched hut, made by the local Native American tribes, called a chickee hut. They were thatched using the leaves of the Saw Palmetto that are omnipresent in the Everglades.  We opened the door, and the three of us walked through the small survival shop full of camping necessities and fishing gear up to a an older man in well-worn overalls. He looked as if he was there as long as the building itself. “What can I do for ya boys?” He told us that all the campsites were on their own peninsulas, each one a jutting land mass surrounded on three sides by water. He also told us the each peninsula was $11.00 a night. We put our money together and handed it over. He put the money into his register and handed me the receipt. As he did this, he looked up from under his baseball cap and asked, “Now y’all ain’t here to party are ya? ‘Cuz we don’t tolerate that”

“Oh, no.” I said, feeling a bit self-conscious.

“No, we’re gonna do some fishin’.” Jake said with a perfect calmness.

The old man pointed us to our peninsula, and sent us on our way. Back outside I felt the massive openness of the Everglades surround me in a soothing embrace. We walked back over to Jake’s dad, still sitting in the van looking out into the beautiful Florida skies. “Okay, you all good?” he asked.  Jake gave him the thumbs’ up as we walked over to get our camping gear. “Well alright then,” he said with a smile, “I’ll be back to pick you up Sunday afternoon then. Have fun!”

We walked over to our campsite on the peninsula and dropped all our gear. We walked around to check it out. We were on a grassy area, just rising out of the surrounding water about a foot above sea level. Tall reed grasses were growing right along the shoreline of the peninsula in little patches here and there. The water was clear for about 15 or twenty feet from the peninsula and then abruptly intertwined with an amorphous green wall of 7 foot reeds. We could see one of the other peninsulas not too far away. We got to work setting up our campsite. This was my first time camping that I could remember, but luckily Jake and Alex knew what they were doing.

Alex brought along some herb, and he and I lit up a joint once the campsite was all set up. Jake wasn’t interested in psychoactives, so it worked out well since I only had 2 hits of LSD. He didn’t mind, and I don’t know what we would’ve done without him, honestly. I’m sure he was a boy scout, because he was a really great guy to bring camping. We didn’t plan to take the LSD that night anyway, since we were going to be here all weekend, we thought Saturday would be perfect. That night the conversation wound through a thousand subjects as we sat by the stone ringed fire pit. That night after we put out our campfire, I went to sleep listening to Nature’s loud cricket and critter symphony.

The next morning we woke up with the sun beating through the tent and baking us in our sleeping bags. Luckily this was November in Florida and not the middle of the summer. Walking out of the tent, the cool air of the Florida autumn felt really nice. Even by noon the temperatures were nice and comfortable, a nice breeze was blowing over the water, and the skies were a calming mixture of light blues. It felt like the perfect time. Opening the cooler we brought with all of our food, I rummaged around for a moment until I found the folded up piece of tin foil that held our LSD. The tinfoil was cool to the touch in the palm of my hand. I felt extremely nervous, this felt like a huge decision, but I knew the decision had already been made. I unfolded the tinfoil and inside was the little plastic baggie I had found with the herb just two weeks ago. I had no idea that the experience to come over the next twelve hours would come to shape the rest of my life.

I tore the rectangle of paper in half along the perforations, and handed one of the tiny paper squares to Alex and put the other on my tongue. I had heard from one of the many people I’d talked to over the past two weeks that once you put the paper in your mouth, it took 7 seconds to totally dissolve in your mouth. Alex took his and said with a laugh “Well, I guess there’s no turning back now.” I chewed on the paper and kept it in my mouth for quite a while, several minutes at least. I wasn’t sure about the 7 second thing, and wanted to be sure I got it all. “Do we swallow them or spit them out now?”

“I already swallowed mine!” Alex said, so I did the same. I’d read that it would take about 30 minutes to hit us, so for the first time, I noted the time we ate the tabs, so I’d know when I should begin to feel it. Over the next twenty years, I would do this countless times, noting the time as I would take the sacrament, but this was the first.  I’ve found over the years that knowing the exact time you took a psychedelic was important, as your sense of time would be totally different, with minutes seeming to span into eternities. One of the common recurring fears during an LSD trip is that you’ll get stuck in the trip and be tripping forever. This usually happen around the peak of a trip, so knowing when you took the substance and approximately when it should wear off can be extremely calming.

Just as the LSD was coming on, I was sitting on a tree stump by the shoreline where the land met the water. As I was looking into the water, a leaf fell from a tree overhead, landing lightly in the water and then another fell and landed about a foot away from the first leaf. As the leaves hit the water, rippling concentric circles waved across the water’s surface moving toward (and away) from each other. Watching the ripples flowing outwards from their respective centers, the 2 circles met and intertwined creating a fluid pattern of circles within circles.
 
At almost the same moment as the circles met, I glanced down by my legs to the stump I was sitting on and my eyes caught the concentric circles of the tree rings ingrained within the stump. It was as if I was getting a teaching from nature that the world and my experiences of it were cyclical as well, and sometimes the circles of my life intersected with other circles, making my own circles within circles. Information seemed to flood into my consciousness. I felt the truth that life is cyclical, sometimes you’re in an upswing, sometimes you’re in a downward swing, but that when you are in one of these times in your life, the other is not far. So if things are going good in your life, you can recognize how lucky you are to be in an upswing, but at the same time, know that it won’t last forever. Alternatively, when things are looking hopeless and down, that a swing into the positive side of life is also right around the corner and things will get better.

I realized that the circles of the seasons of the year, forever moving around and around are just like the seasons of my life, moving through good times and bad. Circles within circles within circles cascaded through my mind one after the other without taking a break. I saw the circular patterns of electrons moving around the atoms in my body, and simultaneously saw the identical circular movements of the moon around the Earth, and the planets around the sun, and the galaxies of universes swirling around in the vastness of space. Of course this brought me to the possibilities that the galaxies were actually tiny cells in an organism so vast I couldn't even imagine it. If we were on the inside of an almost boundless, yet sentient and alive being, then what does the outside of that being look like? And how many of them are there? Again my consciousness collapsed upon iteslf to the microcosmic world. What if there were entire societies and worlds and galaxies with sentient beings within the tiny cells of my own body? 

A calming breeze came in from over the water and I had a moment of peace, feeling that everything was moving exactly as it should, and that everything was connected to everything else.

I then thought about the cycles of humanity, living individual lives, but all touched by similar experiences, desires, thoughts, fears, and triumphs from the beginning of human kind all the way through to today. I saw circles of good and bad energies intertwining like the ripples in the water, and how they also are intimately connected to each other. The teachings kept coming without any breaks and I was lost in a thought loop of never-ending circles within circles within circles. The life cycles of plants and animals were moving seamlessly from generation to generation intertwining in their needs for one another. Bees needed pollen to make honey, but at the same time their very collection of pollen helped to pollinate flowers to bring forth fruits. Both the honey and the fruits were useful to humans and other animals, and all were intertwined needing the others for the continuation of the survival of individuals and species.

The teaching I was receiving was much faster, richer, and more in-depth than I could possibly convey in words, and it hit me so quickly that the ripples from the leaves hitting the water were still moving slowly outward. It was a densely packed moment in time, so rich with information. I stood up and felt like I was making ripples in reality. Like my own energy was rippling out into eternity from this spot in the everglades and moving through space and time. I felt connected to everything, all of the people, places, and things from the past, and all the people, places, and things yet to be. I had the feeling that all of time, and all of human history had led me to this place and this time. It was all leading up to this one perfect moment, with me here standing in the cool breeze of nature as the sun kissed my skin gently and lovingly. My life was forever changed and I wanted to share this experience with everyone. There was so much value in the psychedelic experience – how could it be criminalized? It seemed like such a holy state, why would this experience not be allowed in our society?

“I’m not feeling anything yet! Are you feeling anything?” Alex called over to me from across the campsite.

All I could reply at the time was, “Yes!”  A very short while later he was feeling it to. I felt so good, like my whole body was weightless , yet filled with an energy that seemed to be moving up from my feet and flowing all through my system. It was like I was plugged into the earth from my feet. For the next few hours I experienced an endless parade of thoughts blooming and unfolding within my minds’ eye.  I didn’t talk much during that time because I felt like my ability to make coherent sentences had left me. The words I spoke felt as if they could not hold my meaning, or describe clearly what I was witnessing and experiencing, so I gave up speaking for what seemed to be hours.

The strength of the effects seemed to be coming in waves. It was moving from a calming, tranquil state at times and building to the intensity of a rollercoaster at other points. I kept looking at my watch, and the minutes seemed almost stuck in time. It seemed to be broken because minutes were taking hours to go by; it just didn’t make any sense. As I felt the wave slowing down in intensity, I got up to walk around the grassy peninsula. I felt like I could walk forever and my legs would never get fatigued. My feet took me from the picnic table I was sitting at over to Alex and Jake by the shoreline near the stump I had sat on before. They were doing something, but I couldn’t tell what it was. As I walked over, Jake looked up and held out a long metal pole towards me. “Here take this.” He said, handing me what I could now see was a fishing pole.

Now I had never been fishing before and tried to explain that to him. “aw it’s nothing, here, just hold it back over your head, like this.” He said, positioning the pole just right. He moved my arms and elbows into position, reminding me of my little league baseball coach as a child showing me how to hold the bat. He stood off to my side and said, “Okay now just flick your wrists forward like this.” He made a motion with his wrists that seemed to leave a trail of ghost hands following his real hands. I lifted my arms and looked over to him for reassurance. He nodded and I flicked my wrists like I saw him do just seconds ago. As soon as I cast the rod, I saw Jake grab the side of his neck and fall to the floor with his hand over his neck. What I saw next would ensure that I would never even try to go fishing again. As I got closer to see what happened to him, the fishing pole still in my hand, he moved his hand away from his neck. I saw the hook had punctured the skin on his neck and was lodged there. The hook looked like a traditional grappling hook, with three separate hooks. One of the three looked to be threaded around his jugular vein, with the tip of the hook protruding dangerously from his neck. He sat back up and pulled the hook from his own skin, probably feeling a little like a fish at that moment. We quickly decided that I should probably not do any more fishing for the day. I felt so terrible; I’d lodged a metal hook through my friend’s neck! With the hook out, and a few minutes to take stock of the situation, it soon became apparent that he wasn’t bleeding, and was actually okay. We went to sit down to take a break by the tent. I felt like I needed to catch some sense of internal balance, my emotions were all over the place, and shifting from one feeling to another seamlessly and unceasingly. Sitting on the cool ground by the tent I started to relax. I felt the earth and the grass on my body and felt as if I was connected to everything around me. The waves had been coming on strong, and now thankfully seemed to be starting to subside.

A few hours later the sun started to set behind the next peninsula over from ours. We saw that people had rented that peninsula and were busy gathering wood to build a big bonfire in the middle of their peninsula. “We should probably be gathering firewood over here too, it’ll be dark soon.” Jake said. We were able to gather a nice pile and placed most of it in our fire pit in a nice shapely cone, the rest we put to the side for later. Once our fire pit was set up, we walked back over to our picnic table to make some dinner. I thought about eating, and I realized I wasn’t hungry at all. In fact I didn’t even want to think about eating. Just as I was thinking this, Alex spoke my thoughts for me, “Guys, I don’t think I can eat right now.”

“Yeah, me neither”

So Jake ended up making dinner for himself. He started up the barbeque and Alex and I sat at the picnic table together to watch the sky as the sun set. Even in Fort Lauderdale, the sunsets can be amazingly colorful and awe inspiring, but out here in the vast openness of the Everglades, the sunset seemed to be the most beautiful sunset I could remember ever seeing. I could see the rich colors of the sky blending perfectly in a harmony of balance. The clouds seemed to reach out into the eternity of the skies, creating patterns that were slowly morphing. The clouds appeared to be comprised entirely of connected moving parts; every little wisp of cloud was alive and moving. As the sun moved closer to the horizon, it seemed be descending faster. I watched the sun touch the edge of the next peninsula over, just next to their fire pit full of wood. Once it hit the horizon, I could see the glowing orange circle disappearing at a smooth even pace. I could feel that the setting sun was an event that repeated forever endlessly. That the sun had been setting like this here since the beginning of time. I could feel that many others had the exact same feeling as I had right now, watching the sun go down from this place. The sun was vibrantly colored with orange flowing into red and moving across the sky into pinks and purples until finally a darker blue was touching the horizon opposite the sun. The colors shifted and changed as the sun made its way to the other side of the earth until we were sitting under a dark blanket of sky. All of this happened before Jake had even finished cooking his burger. Across the water, we could see that the neighbors had lit their fire, and thought it would be wise for us to do the same.

Jake decided that he should be the only one to light the fire, since everyone else on our peninsula was on acid. I had no problem with that after the fishing incident. Once he got the fire lit, we all sat around and talked, luckily my ability to hold a conversation had returned. I felt like over the next hour or two that I had really learned so much more about my friends than had I known before we sat down. The conversation connected us in a new and deeper way. While the conversation wandered tangentially from one topic to the next, in many ways we each touched on things about our lives, our fears, our hopes, and dreams. I was able to empathize completely, to feel the inner truths of their words and feelings. I felt like I knew how it was to be Alex, or to be Jake in the total completeness of their own experiences of themselves. It was a totally new and intense experience for me to think about someone in such intricate detail.

As we were talking we noticed that people on the next peninsula were now gathered in a circle around their fire, holding hands. They seemed to be swaying and dancing around the fire together in some kind of ritual. I got a witchy vibe from the whole thing, but we kept watching, fascinated. As we looked across the water, the silhouettes of the people moved around the fire and we speculated wildly about what exactly was going on. We never figured out exactly what it was, though we kept talking about possible answers to the question for the duration of their ritual. Once their circle was broken and the people moved away from the fire, our attention focused back on our own fire. The fire seemed alive with energy, intensity and heat. The flames were moving in an incredibly intricate dance that never repeated itself, yet never stopped flowing. If you missed a second of the dance, you missed a vision that may never again be seen by another living person. We spent many hours watching the fire until long after midnight when it was finally just a bed of embers glowing in the night.

The darkness of the Everglades night seemed to go on endlessly, but it was full of more stars than any of had ever seen in a night’s sky. It was sparkling with the beauty of calmness and peace. I looked into space and felt like I was the tiniest speck in this vast universe. I wondered what else could be out there, was there life somewhere out there, or are we really alone in all that space? I thought about the whole day up to this point, and how much thinking and learning I had done. I felt like I had learned an amazing amount about myself, my friends, and the world around us. I felt like many of the things I had learned and had been taught before today were being challenged. Thoughts bounced around in my mind in meandering loops going from one subject to the next, only to begin again on a subject I’d left hours ago and loop back around again to others. We decided to call it a night and all got into our tent, brushed off our clothes, and climbed into our sleeping bags.

From inside my sleeping bag in the tent, I could hear the noises of the swamp all around us. Noises I’d never heard in the city seemed to repeat and then get lost in the night, only to be replaced or accompanied by newer and stranger noises.  I soon realized that I was not very tired, and my mind was continuing to venture from topic to topic as I lay there. I closed my eyes and saw beautiful and perfectly formed geometric shapes spinning slowly and covered in small blue flames. The shapes changed as they spun around, changing from a cone to a sphere to a pyramid while continuing to spin at the same speed. I watched the display through most of the night while new thoughts kept pouring into my head, keeping me awake. I must have fallen asleep at some point, because I was awoken by the morning sun baking me in my sleeping bag. Alex and Jake woke up at about the same time, and we made our way quickly out of the oven-like tent.

With only a few hours of sleep the night before, I felt unbelievably rested. I felt awake, alert and clear-headed. The morning was cool and refreshing, welcoming the new day with the songs of birds. The three of us spent the rest of the day reflecting on the past 24 hours. Even Jake, who hadn’t taken any LSD, had an enriching and thought-provoking evening. We were going home with a deeper understanding of one another. I had seen myself from many different perspectives the past night. I saw a lot about myself that I loved, and I also saw a lot about myself that I was not proud of. I saw places in my life that needed serious improvement, and I wanted to work harder to be a better person.  Taking that next day to reflect on everything that had happened during the trip really helped me.  We kept talking as we broke down and cleaned up around our campsite. Eventually the morning gave way to the afternoon, and Jake’s dad came rolling up in his old blue work van, kicking up clouds of dust as he got closer. “So, did y’all have fun?”

Edited by dwpineal (11/07/12 05:14 PM)

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Invisibledwpineal
Psychedelic Artist
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Registered: 07/20/06
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Re: Stories from the Psychedelic Underground [Re: dwpineal] * 3
    #17180338 - 11/07/12 04:56 PM (11 years, 4 months ago)

The Search for More

After the experience in the Everglades, I found myself with many questions. I wanted to explore this mental landscape in more depth. I saw that there was a great value in the LSD mindspace and that it was important to have more of these types of experiences. The trip I had taken was the most interesting and most significant thing I could remember from my entire life. I continued to read psychedelic literature, and I tried to find more acid. Unfortunately for me, that turned out to be very difficult. No one that I knew actually sold acid, but some of them said they knew people who did. After several failed attempts, I had heard two kids in the hall at school talking about something called “The Trippy Trippy Circus.” I knew them both, but not very well. I asked what they were taking about.

The two of them painted a picture of a rented college auditorium all decorated in blacklight paints, strobing lights and lasers, colorful costumes, glow sticks and music that played all night and well past when the sun came up. They told me that the events were not openly advertised, but more passed along by word of mouth, by a group called the Rave Doctors. That was the first time I had heard the word” rave,” at least in the context of electronic music events. I had no idea that raves would become one of the main focal points of psychedelic culture during my generation, but I could tell that these two might be able to get me some more acid. After learning a little about raves from them, I asked if either of them could help me get acid. Chris said, “I did get some this weekend, and I can sell you some of what I bought.”

That Friday my parents were away from home, and I had the place to myself. I invited Alex and a few other friends, Mark and Abe over so we could go on another LSD trip. Mark and Abe were slightly older and had done acid before. Shortly after dark, Chris arrived and sat down on my mom’s white couch. There were four of us, and everyone had put in $5 so we could each buy a hit. I gave Chris the $20, and asked, “So how are they?” and he replied with something that has stayed with me ever since.

“I’d never sell you anything I wouldn’t eat myself. You’re going to have a great time.” He said with a smile and a sense of confidence. Later, when I would begin selling acid, I always remembered Chris’ words. I didn’t want to sell anything to anyone unless I knew for myself that what I was selling was top quality. Selling psychedelics is different from selling almost any other drug. It is done less frequently for money, than an honest desire to share the experience with like-minded people. I came to see those that sold LSD as a hidden priestly class, spreading the psychedelic message through the best way possible, through the experience itself. And Chris was right; we did have a great night. His LSD was even stronger than the stuff I had gotten from Rory. I remember thinking that I could not imagine how anyone could take more than one hit at a time, it was so potent. Again I found myself in disbelief that a piece of paper so small could have such astounding effects on my consciousness.

As I felt the LSD taking effect, all four of us were laying around in my bedroom in the darkness. We had a blacklight on, illuminating the glow-in-the-dark stars I’d stuck on the walls and ceiling. I had a feeling that I was no longer just in my body; I felt like “I” filled up the entire room. I closed my eyes and said, “I feel like I’m one with the universe.”

Alex, the eternal pessimist replied immediately, “No you don’t! You’re just saying that because you heard someone else say that!” I broke out into hilarious laughter and so did everyone else.  We laughed until some of us had tears streaming down our faces. It was like the laughter was contagious, and once you started laughing, it was almost impossible to stop.

We continued to search for more LSD each week, but it remained extremely elusive. If we could’ve gotten it, we would’ve eaten it every weekend. LSD was engaging on so many levels for us, giving us insights and understanding, as well as making us question the world we lived in in new and unexpected ways. However we could only find it once in a while, and always from a random source who knew someone who knew someone. We never got it from the person who was actually selling the acid; it was always a favor from a friend. This went on for many months, and we had formed a close friendship, with four of us coming together to do these psychedelic explorations whenever possible. About 5 or 6 months after my first LSD trip, I happened to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, and I met a girl that would send my life in a new direction.

Edited by dwpineal (11/07/12 05:15 PM)

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Re: Stories from the Psychedelic Underground [Re: dwpineal] * 2
    #17180342 - 11/07/12 04:57 PM (11 years, 4 months ago)

Meeting The Connection

Abe and I were walking down the sidewalk of the local strip mall on a warm and sticky afternoon. He was trying to explain to me what ecstasy pills felt like, except he was having a hard time explaining the experience. I didn’t really understand, but I was interested. Abe was an animated talker and was a great artist, so he was very engaging, especially once you got involved in a conversation. We were walking from his parents’ house which was on one side of the strip mall, to my dad’s house way down on the other side. Abe stopped talking and walking simultaneously as he looked into the windows of Natural Foods, a restaurant closer to my dad’s side of the strip mall. Seated in one of the booths closest to the window were two teenage girls, both with dark hair. “Hey, that’s my friend Melanie, I bet she can get us some X.” he said, and I could feel his excitement.

We walked into the welcome cool of the air conditioning and up to their table. Abe introduced me to one of the girls, “What’s up Melanie? This is my friend Jeremy.” Both girls looked up; they were smiling, and invited us to sit with them. Abe leaned close to Melanie, and said quietly, “Man it was crazy, we were just walking around, and I’m trying to tell him what it feels like to take X, I look in here and see you! Do you have any? Do you know where we can get some?” 

Melanie glanced up, and caught my eyes, holding them for a moment, checking me out. She had deep brown eyes, and black hair with tints of purple and red rolling down over her shoulders in soft curls. She wasn’t attractive in the usual sense, but seemed to have a unique style and confidence about her. She moved her gaze from me and turned back to Abe, “Well, not really, if you want X you got to go to The Edge at three in the morning.” I’d heard about The Edge, but had no clue what it was or even where it was. Later I would find out that The Edge was an old firehouse in Fort Lauderdale’s downtown area that was turned into a nightclub. Painted all black inside and out, as if shrouded in Mystery itself, The Edge became the home for the South Florida rave scene. “But,” she continued, “I do have some acid.”

My heart skipped a beat and I forgot all about The Edge and ecstasy. “You have acid? That you’re selling?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.”

This was the first time I had ever met anyone selling acid. Up to that point I was lucky to have friends that could get some for me from their friends randomly. It was very much a hand-to-hand situation, with one friend helping another. Now I was actually sitting at the table with the connection herself, and I could barely contain my excitement. A few quick words later and I found myself sitting in the passenger seat of Melanie’s grey Isuzu pickup in the parking lot out front of Natural Foods. She reached into her pocketbook and pulled out an Altoids tin. When she opened it I was face to face with more acid than I’d ever seen. Needless to say, it was probably only around a hundred hits, but knowing how deeply a square of that paper only a centimeter on each side affected me, the two square inches of yellow perforated paper looked like endless eternities of experience. I could feel the energy that was folded into that little Altoids tin. The paper had the outline of little red smiling suns emblazoned across the bright yellow background. It was perforated perfectly into tiny squares. She called them yellow sunshine.

I walked away from the pickup with a smile and a cellophane cigarette wrapper with about four or five hits of Melanie’s yellow sunshine. Unfortunately I wasn’t savvy enough to know to ask for her number, but our paths were to cross again.

Abe and I called a few of our friends to share our newly acquired bounty. We walked back to Abe’s house and waited for our friends to show up. We dropped in the early evening and sat outside in Abe’s backyard surrounded by trees and good feelings. About the time the acid started hitting us, the sunset had painted the sky in amazing streaks of purple, red, yellow, and orange. In the distance was a characteristic Florida spring evening sight, a lightning storm. The lightning storm went on all night, creating an amazing light show on the night’s skies. Ere since that night I have always connected deeply to the lightning storms of South Florida. We spent all night laughing, talking, connecting, and being awakened to the “other” that acid initiates one into. We were seeing the world we knew open into another place filled with knowledge that seemed entirely contrary to everything we’d been taught, but tinged with a truth so real, it was hard to deny. The LSD kept us up all night, and a short while before sunrise I walked the few blocks to my house, so I could go out on an early morning scuba diving trip with my dad. The air was charged with a calming sense of peace and wonder. I walked as the sun rose, watching the sky brighten and the world around me come to life with color.

The acid had mostly worn off, and of course I didn’t mention to my dad what my friends and I had been doing the night before. He drove us over to the ocean and we got on a boat with all our gear, and headed out to sea in the cool morning calmness. Plunging into the waters of the Atlantic Ocean in my scuba gear, swimming amidst the vibrantly colored coral reef, I felt I was part of all I saw, not someone separate and observing from the outside. I knew I was intimately connected to everything around me. Scuba diving is a unique sensory experience. It separates you from your vocal and auditory communication modes, so you can’t speak, and you can’t be spoken to by others. Alone with my thoughts, I felt as if I could think clearly and was truly involved in experiencing the world in a different way. I used this time to reflect, to look into myself. Recalling the evening before, I felt the value in my experience and I felt it was an important part of my life. I was so thankful for finding this substance that allowed me to see so much deeper into myself and to empathize with those around me. There under the water, I realized that I wanted to bring this experience to others, like Melanie brought it to me.

Edited by dwpineal (11/07/12 05:15 PM)

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Re: Stories from the Psychedelic Underground [Re: dwpineal] * 2
    #17180346 - 11/07/12 04:57 PM (11 years, 4 months ago)

The Edge

I was smoking herb in a big circle of about twenty people sitting Indian-style in the parking lot behind The Mud House. Everyone was smiling and talking loudly from inside a cloud of ganja smoke enveloping our circle. The pebbles from the parking lot dug lightly into my crossed legs. I unconsciously brushed them off with my left hand, and reached for the pipe with my right. The night’s darkness was broken by the streetlights reflecting off our smoky cloud.
The parking lot behind the big V shaped building that held the Mud house became another integral part of the scene. A few parking spaces in the very back were always left open. People would gather, talk, and smoke for hours. It was very open. People would move in and out of the circles while pipes, joints, and the occasional bong would circulate freely, appearing out of nowhere and everywhere all at once. The conversation would roll from one topic to another with side groups splintering off into animated conversations that would seamlessly rejoin the larger conversation.

This evening the talk had meandered onto the topic of The Edge. Some people were going over there around two in the morning. I asked the friends I had come with if they wanted to go and check it out. Since no one wanted to go, and I didn’t have a car, I asked the people who were going if I could tag along. I figured if I could get there, and it was in downtown, I could hang out until five or six in the morning when the buses started running and take the number 12 bus back home. There was a big central bus terminal downtown, and you could pretty much get anywhere in south Florida from there. When you don’t have a car, you get good at getting around town on public transit, and I was getting pretty good.

Luckily for me, there was an extra seat in their car, and they didn’t mind if I jumped in for the ride to The Edge, it was only about five minutes away. The fact that I had a little herb and some hash didn’t hurt either. We all climbed into the car and set off. About five minutes later we were pulling into one of the three parking lots around the Edge. I got out of the car and thanked them for the lift. I started walking from the car through the parking lot and towards the big black building that was The Edge. The parking lot was full of life and energy. People were walking around smiling, standing by open car doors in small groups, laughing. The smell of herb drifted through the air. A lot of people were dressed in bright vibrant colors, and some were even wearing costumes. Bright candy necklaces, glow sticks, hair dyed every color of the rainbow and then some, this was definitely somewhere it would be cool to trip, I thought, and this is only the parking lot.  The rave scene was still new to America. It wasn’t something people knew about outside of those already in the scene. It wasn’t in the news, and very few people realized that there was even anything going on, let alone that a new culture was forming around these all night electronic dance music parties. I certainly had no idea of what the night had in store for me.

As I was walking through the parking lot, someone asked me, “Hey, you got a pipe?” I did. I wandered over to a small group of people sitting on the ground by their car, behind an open door. “Here, sit down.” One of the girls in the group said, patting the pavement next to her. I took out the pipe I had and took a seat.

“We’re all tripping on these mushrooms that were grown in a laboratory!” She said to me as I sat down. She looked excited and happy and her eyes had a shine from the light post above. “We brought weed but none of us brought a pipe!” another girl said.

“Here you go.” I said, passing her my pipe. As she was packing the bowl, I asked if they had any more of the mushrooms, I had never taken mushrooms before. I was very interested. It sounded so scientific that they were grown in a lab. My mind created these elaborate and detailed images of a mad scientist in a high tech laboratory with mushrooms growing in beakers. They didn’t have any, but turned out to be a great group to hang out with for a while. Apparently, everyone was waiting for 3 AM. That was when The Edge dropped their 18 and older policy and changed the music. It went immediately from a typical night club to an all-ages rave. Before three it was nothing special, after three it became magical. A kind of reverse Cinderella, I thought. In the next hour I learned everyone’s life story in that small circle. It was the most open group of people I had run into in a long while. I had a feeling that sitting in the parking lot here, with these people, I was entering something new. I had no idea what, but I was open to finding out.

Soon I was in line walking up to the front door. I could hear the bass from the sound system in the parking lot, but now I could feel it moving through my body. It was a long line, but it moved along quickly. When I got to the front I paid my six dollars, got my hand stamped, and walked in. Immediately I was immersed in a synesthesia of strobe lights, lasers, fog, black lights, and a pounding bass that shook the whole club. It was like walking into a living organism with a thousand heads and a thousand arms all moving rhythmically to the beat. I walked through the people, and could feel the moisture in the air from the fog machines and sweat. As I walked forward through the strobing rainbows of color, I saw steps leading down into a dance floor. I walked around the sides and could look down about five or six feet into the pit. It was an undulating explosion bright colored clothing, glow sticks, whistles, pacifiers, and smiles all moving together. At the far end of the dance floor there was a wall of 8 foot tall bass bins. People were leaning up against the massive speakers and soaking in the waves of pounding bass through their bodies. I walked closer to the bass and made my way through the dancing mass of bodies to another stairway leading out of the dance floor.

The Edge is a bit labyrinthine, with staircases going up here, and down there. I stepped off the staircase and walked to my left and up another stairway. As I kept moving I passed a second dance floor overlooking the bigger main dance floor I had just left. The doorways behind the main dance area lead into a room glowing vibrantly in black lights and the smell of Vicks Vap-O-Rub seemed to replace the air in the room. It was like walking into a psychedelic menthol cave filled with couches. People were all over in every position. It seemed as if I had walked into an orgy on another planet, or at least an intergalactic massage party. People seemed to be in every nook and cranny of the room, massaging each other, painted in the glowing neon of black lights.

I noticed that some people were wearing surgical masks and other seemed to be blowing through little white sticks into each other’s eyes. It was wild. It was a few degrees hotter in here than the rest of the club, no need to wonder why, though. It is impossible to capture in words what I was feeling. I had never seen a party like this before.

I made my way through the room, trying to look everywhere at once with my senses on total overload. I got to the other side of the room and walked back into the main area through a second door. I turned down a hallway painted in psychedelic patterns aglow under more blacklights, and followed it around a corner to another doorway. People were walking past me in both directions, the door opening and swinging shut. I pushed through and was outside the building and into the fresh night air. The music outside was not the ecstatic booming rhythmic pulses of the dancehall, but more of a calming, almost meditative chant of electronic beeps, hums, and tones. I had found the outside courtyard, the chill-out area. The energy outside was totally different, yet no less psychedelic. It was an area to recharge and escape the run-a-way energy inside, to talk, and meet and look around. A stage was set up on the far side of the courtyard and a DJ was spinning ambient breakbeats, sending out an electronic rain, cooling the body aurally. The smell of herb hung in the air of the courtyard. I sat down near a group of people in a small circle. Someone waved me over and passed me a bowl. Everyone introduced themselves to me with so much joy, like they were so happy we’d all come together at that moment. I sat down and packed my bowl with some hash and passed it around. I felt like I was home, like I belonged here. It just felt so open and welcoming. All night people hugged me instead of shaking my hand, and were smiling at me with their eyes. It was really heartfelt and real, so unlike people in my school, or even The Mud House.

I spent hours looking around, drinking in the scene around me. I never danced that night, because I was too self-conscious. Glancing at my watch, I saw it was almost ten in the morning and the music showed no sign of letting up. How long does this place stay open I wondered? Somehow eight hours had passed since I arrived in the parking lot, but it felt like I had just arrived moments ago. I walked through the strobing darkness of the club making my way back to the entrance. As I left the club through the front doors, music still pumping and pulsing against my back, I was blinded by the morning sun. I had to shield my eyes from the brightness, and give them a few moments to adjust. The club had been so dark that you couldn’t tell at all from the inside that it was daytime. It was like walking from one world into another, and in a way I guess it was.

Outside the front doors, people were sitting all around the building, and all through the parking lots. Feeling no immediate need to go home, I walked around a little. I got into a conversation with some kids about ecstasy. I don’t remember most of the conversation, but I do remember one kid, about sixteen years old, telling me, “I don’t really know how to put it, but for real yo, rolling changed my life. You know before I rolled, I was like…like a thug or something. I was in a gang, just lost, you know? Then I took a roll, and the first time, it was like, opened me up. It’s hard to explain if you’ve never done it.” Just sitting on the sidewalk, by the street, I was learning about a whole new culture within American culture. Two of his friends were doing something I’d never seen before, except in the Vicks room a few hours ago.
“What are you doing?”

“Oh she’s blowing her up. You take the inhaler and put it in your mouth like this,” He said pulling out a little white torpedo shaped plastic tube about 3 inches long. It was a Vicks inhaler. “So your mouth is over these holes,” He pointed to little holes at the base of the inhaler. “Then when you blow, it blows the Vicks out this hole in the top.” Pointing to another hole at the top, and then blew to illustrate. “See you blow it in your eyes, and it blows you up, it feels crazy good!”

“Will it do anything to me if I’m just stoned?”

“Nah, probably not.”

His friends asked, “Do you wanna try it? We can get you some E.”

“Yeah. How much does it cost?”

“Like thirty bucks.”

“Uh, well I have $15, but I gotta use a dollar to get home on the bus.”

“You need a ride home? Where do you live?”

“Off Sheridan Street.”

“In Hollywood? Man, we can bring you home, don’t take the bus!”

“Wow, cool, thanks!”

“So you wanna try x?” one of the girls asked excitedly. It felt like she was excited for me to try this stuff. She was looking deep into my eyes, smiling as she asked. The excitement was contagious. I didn’t really know too much about ecstasy, but after seeing this place and talking all night with people about it, I was captivated. It was uncharacteristic of me to be so willing to jump into trying a new drug. Before I even tried marijuana I talked with people for weeks and read everything I could about it, and the same with LSD. But here and now with these friendly strangers, I felt like I was totally safe.

“So you got fifteen bucks? I can probably get you half a pill. It’ll still be great, especially since you’ve never done it before.”

I walked around with her for a while, but we never found their friend with the X. We sat around for a bit longer right outside the entrance door to The Edge, talking about personal experiences and changing perspectives as the morning sun brightly reminded me of how long I had been awake. Suddenly the girl jumped up mid-sentence and dashed over to a small group of people walking out of the exit door. She talked for a minute to a dark haired girl and then ran back over to where we were sitting.

“Well, I can’t get you E, but I can get some acid!” That was great as far as I was concerned. Acid was still really hard to come by. I gave her the $15 I had and she came back with a small rectangular piece of white paper, and said. “Here that’s three. Are you gonna eat some now?”

“Nah, I gotta get home soon anyway, you want one for getting it for me?”

“No, that’s for you. I can get more, here do you want this cigarette wrapper to keep it in?”

“Yeah, definitely. Thanks! I can’t wait to tell my friends about this place.”

When I got home later, that was the first thing I did. I called my friends and told them all about it. My girlfriend, Ashley said, “Oh, I can see it now, you’re gonna become a raver.” And she was right, even though I didn’t really know it at the time.

Edited by dwpineal (11/07/12 05:16 PM)

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Re: Stories from the Psychedelic Underground [Re: dwpineal]
    #17180349 - 11/07/12 04:58 PM (11 years, 4 months ago)

Our Paths Cross Again

The next weekend everyone wanted to go to The Edge after the Mud House. Alex, Abe and I jumped into Mark’s jeep around 2:30 in the morning, and headed downtown. The four of us hung out all the time, so I was really glad to have everyone along tonight, after going alone last weekend. After pulling into the parking lot, we split the rectangular paper I had gotten the previous weekend into four pieces and fired up a joint. Everyone took a piece of the paper and placed it on their tongue. Once the joint was done, we got into line and made our way quickly into the club. I thought I would be less awestruck this time since I had already been to The Edge once before. I couldn’t have been more wrong! Once the acid hit me, everything transformed and I really saw what the place was all about. Instead of the music being something I was hearing, I felt I become a part of me. Since it was so loud, the high-decibel music was running through my body and the bass frequencies humming through my veins. The music became an extension of my feelings and I became connected to everything everywhere. When I dropped acid other places, it was different. At home it was more introspective, here it was completely experiential. Every sense was stimulated; the blue glow of all the blacklights, covering almost every wall inside the building, the rainbow colored lasers, and the flood lights synchronized with the bass drops of the music set the visual senses to overload. The music and pounding bass vibrated intensely, was so much more than sound, it was moving from my ears through every cell in my body. My nose was blanketed with the smell of menthol from so many people with Vicks-vapo-rub. Breathing the mentholated air seemed to cool me from the inside out, which was nice in the sweaty pulsating dancehall. We all danced, becoming a part of the rhythmic beast that is The Edge. Alex made up a cool marching dance, and marched all around the main dance floor, saluting to people dancing. After getting lost in thousands of years of dancing, covered in sweat, we made our way to the stairways. Walking up from the dance floor, I noticed for the first time huge fans blowing in the hallways. I went and stood right in front of one of the fans, and let its cooling breeze embrace me. To the side of the fans, I saw Alex pointing and followed his finger to see that the bar was full of plastic cups of water. We all quickly walked over and found out that they were only a quarter, so a dollar got each a cup of ice cold water. Drinking that water was one of the single most refreshing drinks of my life. I could feel the cold liquid moving through my body, cooling me as it went down.

Almost without trying we found ourselves making friends and meeting people. It seemed like you could make a friendship here in minutes that would last a lifetime. People were so open and friendly. Girls, guys, it wasn’t about flirting it was about being together, experiencing this as a family, and creating a community. The feeling was amazing and uplifting. I saw why people wanted to come here. We all saw.

Dancing really made the experience for me. It was something liberating and new. I had never really danced much before, especially like this. Yet now, fluid movements just seemed to come pouring out from a well deep within me. The music moved me physically and I couldn’t help but dance. Hundreds of people, maybe thousands, connected by the same rhythm, moving together, dancing, smiling, sweating, it felt communal. We were all one tribe, dancing to the drums.

As the night became morning people filtered out of the club, thinning the group to a few hundred people. The acid was still hitting us, and we wanted to stay as long as we could, or at least until they kicked us out. At one point the DJ played “We are Family, (All my brothers, sisters, and me!)” And everyone on the dance floor got in a big circle and put their arms around one another and sang along. I just started smiling so strongly I felt my face was going to hurt later. This was an indescribable feeling, together with these strangers, but feeling so connected to each other. It was a bonding of the community; it was inviting us into the family. That was the last song of the night, as it ended the lights came up, the music went off, and people started making their way to the exit. Some people stayed on the dance floor and started chanting to the DJ on the second floor overlooking the scene “One More Song! One More Song!” With a loud click, the lights went dark and the music started pumping again. We all ran back towards the dance floor and kept dancing, so did most everyone else. That one more song became another, and another, with the DJ playing almost another hour.

Finally around one in the afternoon, the lights came on and the music stopped, for real this time. The crowd, now about only about a hundred people returned from the darkness of the club to the real world, completely blinded by the brightness of the afternoon sun. I realized that this was something that was going to happen every weekend. People hung around the parking lot for a while, friends finding each other again after a long night of partying, relaxing in the calm after the sensory assault of The Edge. Walking out into the sunshine, I saw a group hanging out by the sidewalk in front of the entrance. I thought I saw girl that looked a lot like Nikki in the middle of the group, talking and laughing.

“Is your name Melanie?” She looked up, and obviously didn’t recognize me, but cautiously said, “Uh, yeah.”

“Oh! Hey! I met you a while back at Natural Foods with Abe…” She immediately softened her posture and smiled.

“Oh, okay I remember you now. What’s up?”

“Do you think I can get your number? I’d like to, uh, maybe do that again sometime.”

“Sure, It’s 656-1582” I grabbed a sharpie pen from my pocket and not having any paper, wrote it quickly on the knee of my jeans. “Just call me whenever.” That number never did come off those jeans, no matter how many times they were washed. It was there for years until I had finally worn them to shreds. I used that number many, many times.

Edited by dwpineal (11/07/12 05:16 PM)

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Re: Stories from the Psychedelic Underground [Re: dwpineal] * 1
    #17180356 - 11/07/12 04:58 PM (11 years, 4 months ago)

Rainbow Family Gathering –Florida Regional (1993)

“We’re going to go to a Rainbow gathering this weekend, do you want to come?”

“What’s a Rainbow Gathering?”

“It’s like a bunch of hippies camping in the woods, trust me it’s going to be fun.” My friend Darbi said as we were driving smoking a joint. Her brother Gabe, one of my close friends, and also the guy who introduced me to smoking herb was also in the car and nodded in agreement. They were both a few years older than me, and I respected them a lot. I tried to get a handle on what exactly went on at a Rainbow Gathering, but the information I got was just a drop in the bucket compared to what I would learn over the years. I asked, “Should we try to get some acid to bring up there?” They were going up that weekend, which made it very unlikely that we’d be able to get any in time.

“No, there will be acid everywhere up there” Darbi said. That was enough for me, I was in.

That Friday we drove for hours and hours to get to the Ocala National Forest, finally arriving while it was still daylight out. Once we were in the forest we drove for what seemed like another half hour or more on dirt roads until we finally pulled into a huge area filled with cars and buses. A guy waved us into a specific area and helped us to get to where we were supposed to park and said loudly “Welcome Home!” I learned that we were not going to camp by our car, that at the gatherings people parked their cars in one place, and went off into nature to camp. The main camping areas were quite a hike away, and this was done on purpose to separate the outside world from the gathering. The gatherings were a place where no one used money, only barter to get things you might need, and they had kitchens set up and built in the forest that fed everyone there for free. No electricity or generators were used within the gathering; I had never experienced anything like this before. We gathered all our camping gear and started walking down the main trail to find a place to camp. The main trail was lined with colorful signs and streamers and decorations. People were dressed in a different style than I had ever seen, kind of a nature-hippie-forest-fairy-tie-dye style, and everyone we passed was saying “Welcome Home!” to us as we walked in to the deeper forest with our gear. It felt very nice and truly welcoming.

After walking for what felt like a very long time, we arrived into an area where people were camping along the main trail. We found a spot there and began to set up camp. Several people walking along the trail stopped to help us set everything up and one even stopped just to smoke us out with some nice buds he’d brought. Smoking that joint in the forest really set the mood for me and everything seemed to move into a space of feeling perfectly at home here. Once we were done setting up camp, the sun had already started to set and nightfall was upon us. We all walked along the main trail and found interesting things all over the place. There were camps set up and people around camp fires all over the forest it seemed. Some of them had really impressive structures constructed completely out of wood that was obviously found in the forest and built right there on the spot. We followed the signs to the Main Meadow and soon the forest opened up into a huge clearing. All along the edges of the clearing were campsites set up on the tree-line. As I walked into the Main Meadow, I saw a sign that was hard to make out in the dark, but said something about a Hopi Indian prophecy about the People of the Rainbow and a white buffalo. In the center of the clearing was a huge bonfire with people circled around it in the darkness. People closest to the center were dancing around the fire, with their outlines silhouetted by the light of the fire towering above their heads. Around the dancers were a circle of drummers and some other random musicians playing instruments like a dulcimer, a flute, and a few others. I could feel the tribal nature of the gathering really hit me here. Even though Gabe and Darbi had called it a Rainbow Gathering, I had learned the people here called themselves Rainbow Family, and it truly felt like I was coming home to a long lost family I never knew existed. Nothing from my past had prepared me for anything like this. I had never even heard of anything like this, like it was a secret society of sorts. It wasn’t a concert, it wasn’t anything organized around anything centralized, it was just a gathering that was created in part by everyone here and it all came together into one cohesive whole. It worked by everyone pitching in where they were needed, or where they saw a need. It was a self-created city operating on love and self-reliance.

I wandered around the forest meeting people from all over the country that had come here just to be a part of the gathering. I asked a lot of people if they had any LSD, but had absolutely no luck finding any. I met a few people who had eaten some acid, but no one who had any they would part with. It seemed like the perfect place to take some LSD, but I certainly was not finding that there was “acid all over the place out here.” I made my way back to our campsite, thank goodness it was along the main trail as that made it easier to find, though it did take me quite a while of wandering to get there. I smoked a joint with Darbi and Gabe and we talked about what an amazing place this was, before I went to sleep in the tent for the evening. I woke up bright and early and took a walk in the forest by myself. It was very nice out first thing in the morning. The forest was quiet, but I could see the colorful and interesting camps, signs and forest decorations much better than I had in the night. After walking through the forest for quite a while, following different paths in the woods, I came upon a kitchen with a big sign that said Tea Time. Someone invited me in and I settled in with a big group of people that were sitting around a small fire. A tea kettle hung above the fire while everyone relaxed around with cups in their hands. I was there for about an hour when someone said they needed to do a supply run for more tea, and did anyone want to help. I offered to go along to help and so did another of the guys sitting around the fire. We walked all the way back to the parking areas and made our way to an old Mailman’s truck. I thought that was pretty cool to drive around in a truck that used to be a mail truck. The drive out was so peaceful, the area was still very forested and calm in the morning. We made conversation as we drove out into the countryside, and I soon discovered that the supplies we were going for were psychedelic mushrooms. I didn’t realize they were making mushroom tea! I had never gone mushroom picking before, so I could barely contain my excitement.

We pulled into the driveway of a large farm and were greeted warmly by the family there. We were invited in to smoke a joint before going mushroom hunting and walked inside the home. I was way out of my element here and my judgmental nature kicked in big time inside their home. It was a large family with people of at least 3 generations living there. There were kids running around inside the house while the parents smoked joints with us. The mother was a rather large lady and she had a tattoo running down her entire leg that started in a big pot leaf and ended up in a row of dancing bears by her ankle with so many images in between that I could hardly register them all. I would later tell my friends in disbelief about these backwards hillbilly folks and the way they lived. Years later I would realize how ridiculous I was being, but at that moment, it seemed like the craziest family on the planet. One of the guys there told us that the joints we were smoking were from herb they had grown right there on the farm. They told us that we were welcome to look for mushrooms, but that we might not have much luck as this time of year it was cold out most of the time. But since it had been warm for the past few weeks it was as good a time as any. They led us out into the fields and went back in to their home and left us to search. The three of us stayed together and it was a good thing since I had no idea how to tell the difference between magic mushrooms and poison mushrooms. We looked through the fields and there were several kinds of mushrooms growing from the cow patties, but I quickly learned which ones we were looking for. I was holding the garbage bag while the other two filled it with handfuls of gold capped mushrooms, cutting off the bottom of each stem with a little knife before placing in the bag. The guy from Tea Time explained this was to avoid bringing clumps of cow poo along with us, so none accidentally ended up in the tea and also because doing that helped to spread spores around so more mushrooms would grow later. The act of cutting the stem was enough to get the spores moving apparently. Some of the mushrooms had dark red caps, some were orange/gold, but they told me they were all actually the same species, just that the red ones were “younger” in terms of growth stages. The caps got lighter as the mushrooms got bigger. In what seemed like almost no time at all, my garbage bag was getting heavier and heavier. Soon the sun was up and it was starting to get warmer. We had made our way deep into their fields and their home was just a little speck in the distance. The cows didn’t seem to notice us or be concerned that we were walking through the fields.  With our bag full we began the short trek back to the house, said our grateful good-byes and loaded back into the mail truck for the ride back to the gathering. “We did some good work today! Hopefully we’ll open some minds, maybe change some lives tonight.” The Tea Time guy said as we pulled out of the driveway. I realized he was right, we had untold energy and priceless experience in this bag. It was an interesting feeling to know that I had a hand in someone else’s experience, and that I might never know or meet those people or know in what ways the trips would affect them or the course of their lives. I said a quiet prayer that everyone that took these had a great trip and learned a lot about themselves.

When we were back at the gathering I left them to go by my campsite to get Gabe and Darbi so everyone could enjoy the mushrooms. No one was there at the campsite, so I left a note to find me at Tea Time. Getting back to Tea Time all by myself was a bit harder than I imagined. The first time I got there, I had just been aimlessly wandering the forest and on the way out I was involved in conversation with my two new friends and they flawlessly guided us out. After asking several people and getting weird forest directions, (follow the trail until it forks, turn right on the path with the stacked rocks, go down a ways, you should see some signs) I finally made it back to the Tea Time camp. They had been there a while, but hadn’t even begun making the tea yet. They had a few people taking the mushrooms out of the bag and laying them out, I think they were doing a last minute cleaning for cow poop. Instead of the tea kettle I saw before, there was now a really big stock pot on the fire full of water with a turkey thermometer sticking out of the top. “What’s that for?” I asked. “You don’t want to get the water too hot or the mushrooms won’t work. We like to keep it around 125 degrees.” We all sat around the fire pit talking while the water heated up, someone would stir up the water once in a while even though nothing was in it yet. Soon the water was steaming and they started putting handfuls of the mushrooms into the pot. We had so many mushrooms they wouldn’t all fit into the pot, so they just filled it as much as they could and kept stirring the pot. Someone was squeezing fresh lemons into the pot, Tea Time had a whole crew of people working to help make this tea it was really neat to watch. The water in the pot was now a dark purple from all the mushrooms. They kept stirring it and after it sat for a while the first pot was strained and poured into another equally big pot. That second pot was filled full with more mushrooms and the whole process was repeated several times until all the mushrooms had been infused into the two full stock pots.

“Well we have to test it and see if it’s any good!” someone said and everyone seemed to be in agreement with smiles all around. Apparently to reduce waste at rainbow gatherings everyone has their own cups, plates, and utensils. It seemed like I was the only one there not carrying a cup with me. Luckily they had some extra cups there and I was able to use one. One of the girls was ladling out cups of the tea to everyone, and I was able to try my first ever mushroom tea, from mushrooms I helped to gather. Everyone at the camp was drinking mushrooms that I had helped to bring back here and help create this experience for everyone. In reality I didn’t do much more than hold a garbage bag and have some great conversations, but I felt like I was connected to everyone here in some new and deeper way. The mushrooms came on strong, really strong. My stomach felt uneasy and I stood up to walk into the forest in case I had to throw up, I didn’t want anyone to see me. I felt wobbly on my feet and the earth started to undulate and wave like the surface of the ocean. I tried to walk as steadily as I could, with great care to place my foot down on solid ground time and time again until I was away from the kitchen and into the relative quiet of the woods away from the trails. I steadied myself against a tree and tried to catch my breath. I still had a nauseous feeling in my stomach, and I sat down in the forest at the base of the tree in a soft patch of moss. As I kept breathing I noticed that my breath was having an effect both on my stomach pains and on the imagery that was flowing everywhere around me. The deeper the breath, the more relaxed my stomach got, and the more I seemed to have some kind of control over the waves of visuals. As I worked with my breath, I noticed for the first time how truly important breathing is to the art of living. With a few minutes of this, I realized that my stomach wasn’t really bothering me anymore, but the visuals and trip were really overwhelming. I leaned back onto the trunk of the tree and put my hand on the mossy earth, listening to the sounds of the forest and the gathering around me.

I felt my awareness move down from my hand into the earth below, and begin to move through the soil and roots of the tree. Now the connection I had felt earlier to the people at the Tea Time kitchen expanded exponentially, connecting me to the rest of the forest, and then the living organism of the earth. The feeling of oneness presented itself with the sureness of undeniable truth. “We are all one” was not just a saying anymore, it was something I now knew from the inside. A rush of how the connectivity flowed throughout the planet washed over me, like a year of school classes condensed into a single moment. The cycles of birth, life, and death played out for every species, one feeding off the other at different points. This moved into the cycles of inanimate objects, like structures, homes and buildings from construction, to use, to abandonment and deterioration by the elements. The mushrooms were teaching me, right here in the school of the national forest, the ways of the world as it has always been, and will continue to be if we kept living in the same ways. I saw the cycles and patterns in my own life, and how my actions moved my life in one way or the other, leading up to the moment I sat here under this tree. How thoughtless I had been and so uncaring at some many times, so many wrong decisions I had made and how those decisions might have played out differently had I thought things through better. I saw my potential to be a better person, someone I could respect and love when I looked back in my old age, and decided to let the lesson I was learning now become a part of me. I knew I could be better than I have been, I needed to act from a place of love and understanding, see how others would be affected by the actions I took and the course of my life.

Laughter broke out along one of the paths through the forest nearby, interrupting my internal mushroom lessons. I could hear a group of people laughing and giggling as they walked and it was almost as if the universe was purposely juxtaposing the laughter and the serious thoughts I was having, to show me the absurdity of reality. Things can go from serious to silly in a flash and move just as quickly in the other direction.  From calm to stormy and from anger to love, was it all random, or is there some intricate destiny being played out? I could see the laughing people through the trees, leaves and branches, all walking, talking as they made their way down the path. They were wearing weird clothes and costumes, like many other people I’d seen here at the gathering. The forest fashion was like a mix of clothing you might see on homeless people who were actually also magical elf-fairy people. These people were nothing like the kids in my high school, or in my town, and they dressed nothing like those people either. The clothing seemed so foreign when I arrived here, but now it seamlessly fit within the bounds of the gathering. I finally was able to get up from where I was sitting and made my way through the branches back to one of the forest paths and headed down the trail. I wanted to see more of this place now; it was totally transformed under the effects of the mushrooms. The colors of the forest decorations, the sounds of music, talking, and laughter all swirled into each other, creating a sense of newness and wonder. As I passed people walking down the trail, I would catch the briefest snippets of their conversation before losing the sounds into the depths of the forest. My mind would take the few words it heard, and from just that, I could move backwards and forwards in the life of the person who spoke them, seeing their entire history and entire future unfold before me as I walked. This would all happen in a split second and repeat as the next people walked by involved in their separate conversations. I heard people saying that dinner would be served at the main circle soon as they walked the opposite direction from the one I was headed, but after thinking that I still did not have my own plate or utensils, and realizing that even though I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, I was not hungry at all, I just kept exploring the forest.

Eventually I recognized some familiar paths and signs and made my way back to our campsite. I was excited to tell everyone about the tea, and bring them back to Tea Time to get some. But when I got to the camp, all the chairs and tents were empty. I sat in my chair to wait for everyone as the woods started to darken as the sun was setting for the evening. I remembered we had some herb in our tent, so I packed myself a bowl while I was waiting for everyone to return. After taking a long inhale and holding in the smoke, I felt the mushroom trip intensify in a wave of colors and emotions. As I exhaled, I followed the smoke as it rose from my lips, winding its way into the evening skies. There was a sense of peacefulness in the air, and I noticed that fireflies were starting to come out, filling the surroundings with little luminescent green blinking lights. I waited for a long time and no one ever came back to camp, but I was starting to get hungry. We had some snacks and food here, so I made myself a small bite to eat. I smoked a little more of the herb we brought and relaxed at our site with the fireflies, listening to the people walk by on the path. As the night fell, it started to get really cold, and I didn’t have many warm weather clothes packed. I pulled on a long sleeve shirt, and headed out to try to find that main circle with the bonfire. I had to ask around, and shortly found some people I was able to tag along with on their way out to the bonfire. The main circle and fire seemed much more festive tonight, people were everywhere in the open meadow, smoking herb, eating, talking, and of course the drums and dancing around the fire were in full force. I spent the rest of the night here, connecting with strangers in deep conversations under the blanket of the night skies. The sky filled with so many stars, reminded me of my first trip in the everglades, connecting the two trips into one continuous psychedelic timeline. Thinking about time when you’re on a psychedelic trip can be an exercise in understanding the nature of perception and experience. Your sense of time is so drastically different from normal consciousness you’re led from thinking about who first invented time, how it got standardized, the calendars, watches, and of course, “is time even real?”. Many of the realizations and teachings in this mushroom trip were similar to previous experiences with LSD, in the ideas I contemplated, especially in relation to myself and how I could become a better person, but the perspectives and specific trains of thought were completely different each time I used a psychedelic. It was like the lessons were being taught over and over in slightly different ways, until the meaning was ingrained in my mind. Mushrooms had a totally different character to the visuals and overall feeling of the experience. LSD seemed to have an almost mathematical precision to both thoughts and visuals, while mushrooms had more of an organic-amorphous-paisley feeling to the visuals and I felt slightly less balanced on mushrooms.

This was the last time I would experience psychedelic mushrooms for many years. The next time would be almost 4 years later. It was also the only time in my life that I went on a successful psychedelic mushroom hunt. As soon as I got back home, my friends and I went looking in many of the local cow fields for mushrooms, and we found some mushrooms out there, but none looked anything like the ones I picked out at the farm that day. There were rumors that there were local laws forcing farmers in our area to spray their fields with a fungicide so that the psychedelic mushrooms wouldn’t grow. I don’t know if there was any truth to those rumors, but I do know that I never found any magic mushrooms ever again in a cow field.

Edited by dwpineal (11/07/12 05:17 PM)

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Re: Stories from the Psychedelic Underground [Re: dwpineal] * 3
    #17180362 - 11/07/12 04:59 PM (11 years, 4 months ago)

Spreading the Good News

After getting Melanie’s number, I finally had a steady supply of LSD. And since so many people had selflessly helped me to get acid up until now, I started letting some of them know about my good luck. I didn’t charge them anything over what I was buying them for, I just wanted to return the favors I had been given. I bought them for $5 each, and sold them for $5. To me LSD was not about making money, it was far more valuable than money. After a few weeks went by, people started realizing that I could get acid reliably, and news spread quickly. I started taking orders for a few people, having them give me the money, and then I’d bring them back the doses. Melanie dropped the price from $5 to $4, since now I was picking up more than ten at a time. So I just kept giving them to my friends for $5, and by doing this, I was able to get a little free acid for myself, while keeping everyone else’s price the same. I never took my share out in cash, I always took my cut in LSD. I was extremely excited to be able to share this experience with those around me, I felt like I was doing something important.

One day I was talking quickly in the hall between classes with my friend Chris.
“Man, you should really start selling this stuff. You’re doing this all wrong. Get her to front you a hundred hits and we’ll sell it to everyone. No one else can get this here.”
I thought about that the rest of the day as I sat in my classes. When I got off school that day I paged Melanie to see what she thought. “Can you come by and meet me at Sheridan Plaza? I want to run something by you.”

Later that afternoon, sitting in the front seat of her grey Isuzu pickup, I asked, “Do you think you can front me a sheet? I’ve got a lot of friends at school that want, so I think I can sell it in like a week or so.” She looked at me like I was crazy.

“I fronted a half sheet to a guy and then he moved out of town on me and I never heard from him again. That’s $250 of my money, and no, I’m not having that.” She thought for a second and then said, “Well, I can’t front you a sheet, but I will drop your price to $3, and drive you around to move it so I can see what you can do. Set everything up and give me a call.”

Over the next few days I put the word out. I got everyone’s phone number and picked a day the next week to go around to everyone’s home one afternoon. I had Melanie pick me up from school that day the following week and we set off all over town. We went from house to house. I’d jump out of her truck, run to the house, go inside for a few minutes and run back to the truck. Then off we went to the next stop. By the time she dropped me off four hours later we had moved through a hundred and fifty hits, a sheet and a half. I couldn’t believe I sold that much in one day, and neither could she. I asked her how much she wanted to sell me a sheet for, since I now had about $300.

“$200 bucks.”

I went home with $100 and a new job.

Edited by dwpineal (11/07/12 05:17 PM)

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Re: Stories from the Psychedelic Underground [Re: dwpineal] * 3
    #17180365 - 11/07/12 04:59 PM (11 years, 4 months ago)

Not My Best Idea

I called Chris later that night, and told him how everything went. The next day I brought a few ten strips off the sheet and sold them in the morning before school even started. By about third period class, we realized that most of those hits were eaten as quickly as they were sold. People were tripping all over the school, including Chris and me. It seemed like everywhere I looked people had the LSD perma-grin and twinkle in their eyes. The school had gone from a place where you could barely find any LSD with weeks of searching, to a virtual psychedelic playground overnight. At lunchtime we went to Burger King at Sheridan Plaza. The place was filled with tripping teenagers. When we showed up, people were laughing and playing in the plastic ball-filled playground outside, it was madness. As if the atmosphere was not already wacky enough, Chris pulled out a blunt and lights it at our table in the smoking section. It was a ridiculous scene with all these people tripping and passing around a blunt inside a fast food restaurant. Unbelievably, none of the staff walked by while we were smoking; maybe they were just staying in the back to hide from the pandemonium.

About halfway down the blunt, we got to thinking it was probably a good idea to get out of there before someone did notice. We all jumped into separate cars and drove to the beach. I guess we were done with school for the day. I can’t really recreate the madness of that afternoon with words for you, but the situation was way out of control. Another day like that and we were going to be busted for sure. From here on out, I decided, “no playing while we work.” If I wanted to trip in school fine, but not on a day while I was selling doses. Selling LSD and taking LSD at the same time just did not mix well for me. It was too confusing. We also started becoming more selective about who we sold to in school. I just don’t think anyone was really prepared for that flood of acid to arrive. The floodgates opened and the waves came crashing down uncontrollably. I learned some lessons that day that helped keep me safe many times in the future.

Edited by dwpineal (11/07/12 05:18 PM)

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Re: Stories from the Psychedelic Underground [Re: dwpineal] * 2
    #17180367 - 11/07/12 05:00 PM (11 years, 4 months ago)

Moving On Up

About two months later I was sitting in Melanie’s grey Isuzu pickup in Sheridan Plaza buying a sheet, when she said, “I just met this guy Jesus in Miami, and if everything goes right, everyone’s gonna be buying sheets from me. We’ll all be moving up.” I thought Jesus was a funny name for an acid dealer, but kept that to myself. I also thought it was funny how she said I met Jesus, but again, didn’t say anything, she seemed really excited. “I’m gonna start selling sheets for $165.” That I liked.

I guess everything went okay, because soon the price dropped just like she said. At this point I had started making new contacts and had people from some of the other high schools helping me move Melanie’s acid. In addition to selling singles, I also started moving a little bulk, selling quarter sheets or more. When the price drop passed on down the line I started getting people who were interested in buying their own sheets. I asked Melanie how much it would cost to buy a book (a thousand hits).

“A dollar a hit.” She said. So I started selling sheets at about the price I was getting them at before, $180. I would take almost all the money I made and reinvest it into more LSD. It was about now that I realized that the market was insatiable, as much as I could get, people would buy. The LSD came in waves; two months on and two months off. For two months it would be plentiful, I could get as much as I wanted, and then the following two months there would be none. I realized later that this was done on purpose, and for two reasons. First it helped keep everyone safe, by not allowing the supply to be overwhelmingly present within our network. It also created scarcity within the market. It kept prices stable and interest constant, also leading a lot of the purchasers to stock up during times of plenty.

Now during this time I had been going to The Edge every weekend. After being there every week for months, I began to feel like it really was a family. The same core group of people was there every weekend, having ecstatic life-changing experiences together. Seeing the same people every week, and having these powerful moments emerge within the The Edge and within this group, brought many of us to feel the “family vibe” permeating the early rave scene. Six mundane days at home as a teenager with your biological family, climaxed into this one exciting and fulfilling night with this newly blossoming family. The scene itself was growing too. I noticed the lines to get into the club got longer and longer each week, and the inside was more packed too. We felt like this was a revolution of sorts. I remember a lot of people commenting that we were like a new psychedelic generation, like the evolution from hippies into cybernetic electronic psychedelia. This was going to be big, and we could feel it. Every week I was meeting more and more smiling, friendly people. We were all sharing a group ecstatic experience, getting our minds’ blown together. On Sunday’s after The Edge closed, people started having after- hours parties at their houses. So after the party was over, smaller groups were getting together in more relaxed settings, getting to know each other a bit more personally. DJ’s would spin records or we’d listen to mix tapes and just enjoy the trailing off of the night’s excesses together.

Melanie was running a lot of the acid she sold through people at the Edge. People from all over South Florida were coming week after week to party there, so the demand was huge. People would buy some there, bring it home and re-sell it to their friends. I never sold my acid there, though I did give a lot away, due to an agreement with Melanie. One night in the parking lot beside The Edge we were talking and she asked, “Do you want to work The Edge? I wanna move to the background. I can do what I need to do without bringing everything here anymore.” Needless to say I jumped on the opportunity.

Once we started working The Edge, Chris and I quietly made it known around the scene that we had plenty of good acid available. At that point we started meeting other people into buying and selling acid, some with good networks. We learned from everyone, and many of us became good friends. We felt like we were doing important work for the community, spreading higher consciousness. Selling acid at a rave puts you right in the center of a tornado of sensory stimulation. Raves seemed like the descendent of the Acid Tests of the 1960s – they were environments created to stimulate the mind, the emotions and the senses. There one can build a universal connection within the space of the dancefloor where the All-One emerges through focused energy flowing through the crowd. People were having deeply personal experiences - being touched and opened up for the first time in their lives, and we watched it happen consistently week after week. This was part of the reason we made it a point to go every weekend, it was an amazing place where magic seemed to happen unexpectedly at any time, but with reliable frequency. To sell psychedelics to people at a place like this, and see the energy in the room cycle and build in intensity through the night, is like an experience outside of time and space. It’s like you’ve plugged into the consciousness of the group at points all over the event, because you helped to create this with everyone.

The designs on the LSD blotter paper changed every few weeks, but the acid always seemed to be excellent. There were Purple and Rainbow Jesus hits, Felix the Cat, Bevis and Butthead, Tim Learys, Orange Sunshines, Aztec Calendars, Dancing Skeletons, among many others. For a while we would sell singles to friends and friends of friends. After a few months of this, we would hit the parking lots surrounding The Edge and it felt like we knew everyone there. It wasn’t a huge scene, so it was easy to get to know the people who came out every week. We started focusing on supplying people selling, it was safer to work with retailers because we weren’t dealing with so many different people. We learned it was better to make money on volume rather than a high mark-up on small amounts. We always made a point to do good ethical business. The whole system was set up on trust, and our word was like our underground credit score, and we wanted that to be good.  Unfortunately not everyone worked that way. Some things we had to learn the hard way.

Edited by dwpineal (11/07/12 05:19 PM)

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Re: Stories from the Psychedelic Underground [Re: dwpineal] * 2
    #17180371 - 11/07/12 05:00 PM (11 years, 4 months ago)

The Edge

The Edge became the Mecca for the local rave scene on Saturday nights. Allowing itself to become more than a nightclub, The Edge morphed into a magical jeweled garden of delights. It became a thriving, blossoming microcosmic community. A community bound together by optimism and goodwill; a smile on the face of Fort Lauderdale that radiated from deep within the city like the warm glow of a new love. A feeling of discovery pervaded the scene. Like the discoverers of immense treasure beneath the sands of Egypt, we felt like we had come upon a secret wonder that few even knew existed. There was a feeling of wonder and amazement that within the normally impersonal confines of the metropolis, an almost unimaginable merging of cultures was flowering week after week. A general feeling of acceptance knit diverse individuals together into a fine tapestry of rich and varied designs.

The music I heard there was something totally different from anything I’d heard before, and it was something almost unique to South Florida. Electronic music that was played and created in this area was heavily influenced by hip-hop beats and then mixed with the psychedelic acid electronica. At the time, electronic dance music was beginning to create a new and growing global culture in clubs, warehouses and remote fields around the world. The breakbeats of a previous generation became food for hungry sampling machines, which ran through the digestive systems of oscillators, multi-effects panels, and synthesizers, to emerge as the funky new anthem of a generation. Trip-hop, and “funky breaks” became the defining sound of South Florida, while the rest of the world remained oblivious to this side of electronic music. Each geographical area defined itself musically in the early nineties, and then DJs and producers began travelling and influencing and integrating the soundscapes of faraway places. This led to new and ever evolving genres of music that would spring up quickly and move across the globe at the speed of digital communication.

The Edge became the place where the South Florida rave scene found a true home. In the beginning, warehouse parties were the first manifestation, followed by a group known here as the Rave Doctors. The Rave Doctors would rent out a college auditorium or some other random venue and throw some of South Florida’s first raves. But when The Edge started hosting a party known as Late Night by the Lollipop Guild, it seemed to focalize the energy of the community into a point of light that radiated outwards. The energy moved down to Miami to clubs like Diamonte, Risk, Groove Jet, Paragon, and points all over South Beach in Miami, to as far down as MARS Bar in Kendall. The energy radiated up through West Palm Beach and connected south Florida to Central Florida through the scene emerging and taking root in Orlando. In addition to clubs, warehouses from one side of the tri-county to the other erupted weekend after weekend with DJs and producers from all over the world spreading the new psychedelic gospel of dance. The longevity and consistency of Late Nights at The Edge made it one of the longest running weekly raves in the early 1990s, certainly the biggest and best attended.

As Saturday night became Sunday morning in the neon glow of Fort Lauderdale, Late Night began. People of all ages came from miles around, weekend after weekend to be a part of the electronic sensory artistry that was The Edge. The party spilled out of the boundaries of the physical building in a radiating halo of energy. People were everywhere for blocks around The Edge, hilarious with laughter, beaming with smiles and auras like flamethrowers. Nearby parking lots were full of people in circles around cars seated Indian-style, hanging onto open doors, lounging on hoods, trunks, or anything handy. These were breeding grounds for involved, deep, and personal conversations spanning galaxies of experience and feeling. The crowds thinned a little as you moved even farther from the inner sanctum of the party. A bit north was the entrance to the Discovery Center, a huge downtown science museum with its own IMAX Theater. Outside the entrance of the museum, away from the intensity of The Edge, was a place of peaceful transcendence. It was the home of a four story clock that looked as if it were built by Doc Brown from Back to the Future, a giant Rube Goldberg machine, built to keep time. It was kept running by a cadence of perfection, balls moving from tubes to railways, and up a conveyor belt in an endless loop moving the hands of the clock forward one minute at a time. At four in the morning, the sound of the balls rolling seamlessly and in perfect harmony with the quiet hum of downtown Fort Lauderdale, and the sight of the towering experiment in timekeeping hovering above was enough to move you into a silent meditation of your own. Right across the street there was a huge sundial and celestial marble calendar laid into the grassy lawn of the science center. A huge white gazebo sat with one side on the grassy lawn of the Discovery Center, and the other opening out onto the waters of the New River. You could walk a little pathway along the river dotted with lighted clocks and park benches looking out into the subtle waves of the river, and end up crossing the train tracks into another big parking lot full of cars, colors and laughter.
These are the areas of retreat from the sensory overload of the raging party enclosed within the walls of The Edge. The pounding bass can be felt and heard as far as the white gazebo blocks away, as a subtle vibration, calling to you like the sirens’ song. It gains in power and volume as you walk closer and pulls you in towards The Edge like a tractor beam. In front of the Edge is the line of people waiting to get in, orbited by others buzzing by in every direction, glow sticks and light toys leaving trails of phosphorescence in the night. The line undulates as if a living entity, people moving forward already dancing to the music that is hardly contained by the walls. At this point the energy is boiling over the walkway and spilling out into the front parking lot.

Walking through the threshold of the club is like moving into a bag of rapidly popping popcorn in a microwave somewhere in outer space. You feel the music moving through you, literally vibrating your cells in synch with the powerful rhythm. Fans blowing your hair like a ride in a convertible on some faraway beach, and the flashing colored lights pull you into the collective trance that is being weaved like a giant dream catcher from the DJ booth on the second floor.

With a little help from the mind expanding molecules moving through the central nervous systems and pockets wandering the maze within the club, the Edge becomes the secret psychedelic nuclear reactor of Fort Lauderdale. Partiers moving like subatomic particles in a quantum flux, appearing and disappearing at will, bouncing off every surface. Eyes connect and hands drift gently over skin as people pass, inching the energy up higher and higher. Cascading rhythms paint the inner landscape of your imagination in Day-Glo puddles rippling in synch with the bass. Like a huge macrocosmic organism, the people within become the cells responsible for carrying on the processes of sustaining life. Every inch of it covered in cellular smiles and hugs, moving and coalescing into one another and effortlessly separating again. The motion and the music are the unending constants within the beast. Never faltering until it comes finally to a quiet rest. Yawning in the mid-morning sun, and curling up in a comfortable ball like a kitten after tirelessly playing for hours with a ball of string.

We called it “Church” at the time, because we were there every Sunday. And also because we were having intense personal and group spiritual experiences week after week. While it had no formalized rituals or doctrine of any kind, many people were religious in their dedication to the movement and the music. It was like a revival of the tribal heritage of our ancestors, dancing around the flickering lights of the fire all night to trance inducing drumming. This experience of ecstatic dance, lights, music and community was once again coming together and opening the hearts and minds of a culture. To be dancing together with hundreds or thousands of other people, and to feel totally open and safe allowed many people to experience a state of true bliss and connectedness. The combination of the music, lights, dance, and drugs would meld into a figurative key, unlocking the minds of the dancers, opening them to the infinite possibilities of the universe. It was like each dancer was a comet, illuminating the night in sparkly luminescence while moving through space and time in precise patterns.

It seemed like impossibly large amounts of experience were being fitted into tiny moment of time. People were going through multiple lifetimes of experiences from multiple perspectives of age and even genders in matters of minutes. With this kind of time dilation and intensity of experience it is no wonder why it seemed that so much was going on and so much was changing in relatively short periods of time. There was so much, in fact, that it seems like it should have taken a decade to fit in all that happened in between the summers of 1993 and 1994. During this 12 to 18 month period there was a really feeling of harmony and oneness within the rave community of Southeast Florida. There were a lot of ups and downs, but we went through it all together.

The dance music culture in South Florida developed some amazing dancers. Break dancing evolved into a more fluid and personal dance that came to be called “liquid” because of the flowing movements. One night while on a significantly high dose of LSD, I was watching the dancers in the pit. There was a group of people doing these coordinated and extremely complex movements. The dancers were totally surrounded by electrically colored psychedelic tracers following the movements of their hands, feet and bodies. It was impossible to describe the density of visual information I was getting flowing into my mind, but it appeared that the air around them was rippling with colors that reacted to each movement. Then I watched as one of the smaller guys climbed up onto the shoulders of one of the other dancers. He folded his legs around the neck of the bigger guy while another dancer moved behind them. They all started waving their arms and all of a sudden I realized what I was seeing. I was looking at a living breathing version of the multi-headed, multi-armed Hindu gods. Staring at them straight on, it appeared that there stood a being with 2 heads and six arms all moving together.

Dancing became one of the ways people communicated with one another. Some people would dance by themselves off to the sides of the dance floor, some would dance together with one or more people, while others would “battle” each other. The battles would clear out small circles of the dancefloor, allowing the dancers space to get down. Battles would gather large groups of people at the edges of the cleared circles, watching the dancers trying to one-up each other with ever more impressive moves. Dancing together week after week seemed to build bonds of trust and openness between people. This openness was expressed in many ways, but there was a lot of sharing and a lot of kindness shown between both friends and strangers. People would walk around and hand out bottled water, blow pops, glow sticks and even LSD or ecstasy  for free.

Within that environment selling LSD seemed very safe. We would meet new people each weekend, but most of them came through our developing network of friends. We would spend a the night dancing together and going through experiences so deep and so vast in the course of just one evening, that by the time the morning came, we felt very close. We would leave the Edge and go off to someone’s house, and it was a new house every weekend, and the party would continue there as an “afterhours.” Sunday would melt away as someone would be spinning records while people danced or relaxed, depending on the vibe. The afterhours parties would usually be about 15-20 people who would hang out all day Sunday after the Edge closed (which sometimes would be as late as 1PM), at a private home or local park. Many times larger park parties or advertised After Hours parties would be thrown with hundreds of people dancing to DJs spinning in the Sunday sunshine.

Slowly it became obvious to others that there were these all night parties filled with people who were getting high all night and also had money and drugs. Parasitic people started arriving on the scene in larger and larger numbers. Gang members started frequenting the clubs, hanging out in the parking lots, and taking advantage of the ravers. People got robbed, beat up, and a bad vibe started flowing through the scene. People began to get a lot more skeptical of others, and a lot of the feeling that had originally knit the community together, was fleeting quickly. People were still doing their thing, getting high, or moving psychedelics (including ecstasy), but it got quieter, and everything became more exclusive. Some of these groups actually formed rave gangs of sorts and started throwing their own parties and selling hard drugs. The scene suffered dramatically from that, but continued to survive for years to come, but it never was able to return to the purity of the early days.

Edited by dwpineal (11/07/12 05:19 PM)

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Re: Stories from the Psychedelic Underground [Re: dwpineal]
    #17180374 - 11/07/12 05:01 PM (11 years, 4 months ago)

Learning the Hard Way

One night I was walking outside The Edge to the parking lot, and I ran into Melanie’s boyfriend, Lollipop.

“Hey have you seen Melanie? I wanna get together with her, I gotta re-up.”

“Nah, she ain’t gonna be here tonight, but I can take care of you.”

“Cool, where are you going to be? I have to find my boy.”

“Over by my van, there.” He said, pointing towards the back side of the parking lot.
I went and found Chris; we got our money together and went off to the back side of the parking lot and found Lollipop by his old van. “Can we get a book?”

“Yeah, I got these pink suns, they’re the bomb! Just give me the money and I’ll run to my place and grab it for you.”

“No Problem. A grand?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay here you go,” I said putting a neat fold of bills discretely into his hand. “We’ll just chill here.”

“Alright I’ll be right back, I live just about 10 minutes away.” He got into his van and drove off with a smile and a wave.

Chris and I waited in the parking lot, and waited, and waited. After about forty-five minutes, Chris stood up with his arm outstretched and said theatrically, “Please pink sun guy, Come Back!” we both cracked up laughing, and I will never forget him doing that. I went to page Melanie and see what was up. She called us back at the pay phone and I told her the story. “That Asshole!” she yelled; it turns out that she had broken up with him last week because he’d started smoking crack and she caught him stealing money from her. Of course he never came back with the 1000 hits of pink suns. In fact I never saw him again, ever. That was one of many tough lessons.

Another time, after a great night at the Edge, we got a ride home from some guys we’d just met that same night, Carlos and Two-Finger John (he really did only have two fingers on his right hand). When the car pulled up and stopped at the corner near my house, we thanked them for the ride home and jumped out of the car. As we watched the car drive away down the street, I reached into my pockets and realized my keys were not in my pants pockets. To make matters worse, my key ring had a little zippered pouch that I had been using to put all our money from the night’s work in. I had counted out some money in the car for gas, so I knew I had it with me then. I ran into the middle of the street trying to chase after the car. Maybe they didn’t realize I was running behind the car with my arms flailing wildly trying to get their attention. I went home and called them, asking them to see if they could bring my keys back, but allegedly they couldn’t find them. We never saw that money again, and Chris was really pissed off at me for leaving it in their car. “That was the money we worked all night for!”

Yet another time, a friend of mine that I had sold quite a bit of acid to over the past few months called me and asked if I could get his friend Carmine an ounce of crip. Crip is what high-grade pot is called in South Florida. The low grade stuff comes compressed in bricks from other countries, and was of quality that varied, and was called “regs”, for regular. Regs sold for about $100 an ounce and crip sold for $300 an ounce. I set it up so that Chris met the guy outside a local 7-11. Carmine asked to see the bag so he could check it out, and Chris handed it to him. Carmine then jumped into the back seat of a car and sped off, leaving Chris there with no money. The guy we got the herb from was not very understanding, he told us if we didn’t come up with the $300 he was going to kill us. These were some hard and expensive lessons to learn, but taught us a lot about being selective about who we dealt with.

Things like these helped me to decide how I felt about morality and the way I wanted to treat others. It also taught me how I wanted to be treated myself. We came to the conclusion that we would write off bad debts. Fighting and perpetuating negative energy was not worth it. If someone ripped us off, it was worse for them, not us. Instead of doing good business where we could all make good money, they settled for whatever little amount they got on the spot. They were cut off. We were dealing in South Florida, where people get killed over bad deals, so we just decided to write them off instead of fighting or trying to get them back. The people who did good clean business we kept close, the few bad apples were cut off.

One night at The Edge Chris and I were talking in the corner. He said to me “I can get this awesome haze bud for $300 an ounce from Mike, he says its lime green and it’s got purple all over it.” I knew Mike, and he did always have excellent herb. Chris and I worked as a team, always watching each other’s back. Everything we made we split evenly, no matter who did what in terms of sales over the course of the night. Usually one of us would hold the money and the other the doses. I went into my pocket and grabbed the money I had, and started counting him out the $300 he needed. As I was doing that, one of The Edge’s security guys grabbed us both on the shoulder. I was shocked because they never really bothered you.

“Are you dealing drugs in my club?”

“No!” we both said.

He dragged us outside the entrance over to a few other security guards and started searching our pockets. He pulled out my wallet, pulled out a stack of cash about a quarter inch thick, and said, “How’d you get this?”

“I work.” Since Chris was the one working the crowd that night, I was just the one holding the money and the doses. I had eaten a few hits earlier in the night. This guy had no clue that in the wallet he was holding, I had a little clear baggy with about 300 hits of white unperf hidden in the flat pocket behind my ID, a few family pictures and a condom.  Unperf was great because it was just white paper soaked in liquid LSD. It was called unperf because it was unperforated, unlike most acid, which was perforated into neat quarter inch squares.  If it wasn’t inside the little clear drug baggie, it would be virtually unrecognizable to anyone, but as it was, I was screwed.

With the wallet still in his hand he said; “What’s this?” His other hand was touching my pocket from the outside, his fingers around a rectangular piece of paper hiding in the security of the fabric of my pants. I had no clue what it was, but time seemed to stand still for me as I realized I must’ve had about thirty hits in my pocket I had forgotten about. My mind flashed to me sitting in jail, for a long, long time. How did I mess that up? What were thirty hits doing floating in my pocket with no cellophane or anything holding them? If they had that, they’d keep looking and find the sheets in my wallet, I thought. A hand reached in my pocket and fished out the little paper that had the next few years of my life written invisibly on its surface. Unbelievably it was just an Admit One ticket that the club we’d been at before the Edge used as admission tickets. It was one of the little tickets with numbers on both sides that are used by carnivals and raffles everywhere. I was tripping so hard, I just stared at the ticket as I came to the realization that assured disaster had been averted.

With that, they figured I had nothing else of interest for them to find. The security guard put my money back into my wallet and pressed it into my hand. Again I didn’t really comprehend what was going on. I thought for sure they were going to try to at least steal the money. But no, he was giving it back, untouched. No bills skimmed off the top and falling into his pockets.

The early morning sunshine fell coolly over me as we stood outside the main entrance to the club with four Edge security guards circled around Chris and I. One of the security guards pulled out a pipe from Chris’ pants pocket. It’s a strange pipe that Chris loved, but no one else took much notice of. It was thick clear glass, about four or five inches in length, straight and cylindrical with a wooden mouth piece fitted to one end, and nothing really special about it at all, by the looks of it. I’d never seen one before, and haven’t seen another like it since though, and I have no clue where he originally got it from. It had a tightly wound, diamond shaped spring that acted as a screen and created a place to pack the herb into by tightly fitting into the center of the glass tube. After using it a few times, if the pipe started to get resin coating the inner surface of the glass, all you had to do, was push the spring through the pipe and it cleaned itself onto the coils of the spring. Pretty nifty, I guess.

Being in South Florida, in downtown Fort Lauderdale, at an all night party, with a straight glass pipe, the first thing these security guards think is, crack pipe. “Oh! This is for the bad shit!” The guy says as he takes it out of Chris’ pocket, examining it. “No way, man, that’s for kind bud!” Chris shouts back. Turing the pipe around in his hand the guard sees the top lined in a circle of bright green, painted with flecks of orange and THC crystals glinting in the morning sun. “What else do you got?” His hands moved in and out of Chris’ pockets. He handed the pipe to a security guard lounging on the bar stool that the door man used until the early hours of the morning. That chair is like a point at which two worlds meet, the door man is the gatekeeper. Waiting crowds move from the dark world of the downtown Fort Lauderdale night to another world entirely filled with lasers, black-lights and pounding bass. At this time in the morning, the post is abandoned, even though the party rages on. The club had made its money and if you wanted to arrive at 8AM, The Edge wasn’t going to ask for your six dollars.

After a few more minutes of fruitless searching, security saw us as a waste of time. All four towering guards turned away from us in a gesture of dismissal. I was already walking back into the club, when I hear, “Hey man, can I get my pipe back?” Chris was not about to give up his prized pipe. “No way kid, get out of here.”

“You’re just going to take my pipe like that?”

“Man, forget about the pipe!” I called back

“No way, that ain’t cool.”

“Either I keep the pipe, or the cops keep it, and you.”
And that was the last we saw of Chris’ pipe.

Scenes like that happened every once in a while at The Edge for us. One night I was on the second floor, looking down on the dance floor below. The second floor was more like a rectangular balcony, the DJ presiding over the club on one side, and the other three sides were narrow walkways with a view of everything and everyone below. I was leaning on one of the railings, looking down at the crowded dance floor below bathed in lasers and strobing lights. I felt like a scientist watching subatomic particles bouncing around in a giant reactor, moving in and out of reality through parallel universes in an explosion of colors. I was smoking a bowl, but saw the telltale beam of light bouncing through the walkway that meant only one thing; security. I put the pipe over the edge of the balcony, so that I could drop it if the light happened to fall on me. I guess the people below would be none too happy to be hit by a falling glass pipe from above, but since the light kept moving right on past me, they never knew the danger they were in. When the light was about five feet away, I figured I was safe, so I put the pipe to my mouth, sparked up the lighter and pulled happily on the pipe. This was not a good idea. The light swung around as if pulled by a wire tied around its beam, and shone brightly in my eyes. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Didn’t you see me right here?” I heard from behind the beam. I don’t remember my answer, but I can’t imagine it was too bright. “Gimme the pipe.” I handed it over into the opened palm that appeared under the light. “You got anything else you shouldn’t have in here?”

“No.” I lied. My pockets were stuffed like a psychedelic candy store, acid, rolls*, and of course, more herb.

“Man, don’t fuck around in here like that.” With that, he and my pipe were gone. Two pipes down, and many more to go.

(to state the obvious)*rolls are ecstasy pills

Edited by dwpineal (11/07/12 05:19 PM)

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Re: Stories from the Psychedelic Underground [Re: dwpineal]
    #17180375 - 11/07/12 05:02 PM (11 years, 4 months ago)

Microdots

Towards the end of the summer in 1994 Melanie got something new in our circles. Up until then, all the LSD I had seen was on blotter paper with different designs. She started bringing me “pillows” of different colored microdots. She called them pillows because each small plastic baggie of 100 microdots looked like a little pillow. A microdot is a form of LSD that looks very much like a tiny pellet about half the size of a grain of rice. Over a period of about 6 months we saw yellow, red, blue, green and purple microdots. The different colors may or may not have been different potencies, but some people liked the green ones better than the blue ones, and other people like the purple ones better than the reds, and so on. Microdots were a lot of fun because they were something different. At first they seemed a little harder to hide than paper LSD, because they were bulky, and they could crush inside the plastic bags if you weren’t careful. We would always keep the dust at the bottom of the bags for head stash and called it pixie dust. Soon we figured out that we could open up a ball point pen, take out the ink well, and fill the inside full of microdots. We would walk around with pens filled with 100 microdots and sell them that way. Microdots are notoriously hard to keep track of when you’re counting them. They’re tiny and their shape allows them to roll around on whatever surface you happen to be using to count them. My suggestion is to never count microdots on a table in a room with carpet, I can’t tell you how many microdots have been sacrificed to shaggy carpets, but I’m sure the numbers are high. Counting thousands of microdots is an exercise in patience and care. Each microdot was about the size of a pin head and about the same thickness. One time we had counted and put 5,000 microdots into a regular sandwich bag and they barely filled up the bottom inch of the bag.

A lot of people thought the microdots were mescaline and people were calling them mescaline microdots, but that wasn’t true, they were LSD. The amount of mescaline that would be necessary to bring on the psychedelic experience, in the range of 200-400 milligrams, would never have fit into those tiny dots. The microdots only weighed a total of about 20-30 milligrams each. I would try to explain this to people, but ended up hearing some very weird explanations. The weirdest one was some guy that was telling me that the microdots were a very concentrated form of mescaline. I spent a while trying to reason with him that mescaline had a specific molecular weight and no matter how concentrated it got, even 100% pure, it could never be concentrated enough to lose 10 times its volume, but he wouldn’t budge. I learned that people believe what they want to believe in many circumstances, regardless of what reality might be saying to the contrary.

One of the things that I have always loved is to go to the movies. Going to the movies on LSD became one of the things my group of friends really loved; it would totally immerse us in the fantasy of the story. We would collect all the pixie dust into bags, and bring the bags to the movie theaters. Since the microdot dust was all different colors, the bags looked like little bags of sand art, or the smallest bags of Trix cereal one could imagine. We would take the pixie dust and pour it all into a bottle of orange juice, put the cap on and shake it up and pass it around. It was impossible to guess how many doses were in the bags of pixie dust, but we got pretty good at figuring out about how much pixie dust could be mixed for different size groups of people, but it was never an exact science. Before we had the ratios figured out there were a few really intense trips. One time we went with a group of about 10 people to see Pulp Fiction at the local theater. We met up at a nearby park so we could all go together. We mixed up the orange juice and sat around smoking a few joints before walking over to the theater. By the time we got to the theater we were already lifting off on the heavy doses. Purchasing the tickets seemed to take so long, dragging on into forever. Every moment passed so slowly because we could focus in on every motion, every movement, every breeze, and then look up and realize that the person at the front of the line hadn’t even finished paying for their tickets. Years later when we all had our tickets and were making our way to the theater, the trip was in full swing. We all found seats in the same row and tried to sit without giggling through the previews. The movie finally began and the combination of the music, the cinematography, and completely non-linear ordering of the scenes had everyone struggling to hold onto the threads of the story. I was totally drawn into the story when Samuel Jackson was quoting from the bible and shot that kid for stealing from his boss. The scene was just dripping in intensity, and I was totally gripped by the story, even though I was having trouble following it as it switched from scene to scene. None of the scenes seemed to be related to the scene before it, and the story was confusing everyone in the group. Ripples of whispers flowed through our row and soon my best friend next to me was tapping my shoulder, saying “man we’ve got to get out of here, everyone is losing it!” I didn’t want to leave, but it was almost immediately apparent that most of our group was totally unable to follow the movie and the consensus was that we needed to leave, right now. I can’t imagine having been a patron in that theater with all of us, I’m sure if we hadn’t left, we would’ve been kicked out soon enough.

Another time, we went to see Stargate and again the dosage was probably just a little too high. But this time it was only about 4 of us, and things never got out of control. The movie however really got my mind moving in high gear. I was totally blown away, and walked out of the theater convinced that it was the best movie ever made. I remember remarking to my friends as we walked out of the theater how something like that could be going on right that very moment, and the general public would never know that the government had a super-secure secret facility tucked away somewhere and experimenting with alien technologies with the danger that the whole world might end if everything didn’t work out just right.

Then almost as suddenly as they appeared, the multi-colored microdots disappeared, never to be seen again. A few years later the market again was totally flooded with orange barrel microdots. They were all orange and all extremely well pressed. The orange barrels seemed to be much stronger and didn’t crush anywhere near as easily. You pretty much had to try to crush them, which was a lot better for everyone, since every dot would be intact and at the intended dosage, instead of losing little bits here and there.

Edited by dwpineal (11/07/12 05:20 PM)

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Re: Stories from the Psychedelic Underground [Re: dwpineal]
    #17180379 - 11/07/12 05:02 PM (11 years, 4 months ago)

A Quick Trip North

When we got into the parking lot of Hyperspace II at a fairground outside of Orlando, about four hours north of Fort Lauderdale, we saw rows and rows of cars covering acres of grassy land and stretching into the distance. Chris and I piled out of the old red Toyota Celica with three friends that had cramped into the close quarters for the ride up. When we opened the doors, the smoke from the joint we just finished made it out first, followed by the five of us. Looking out on the sea of cars we were amazed at how big the scene was. This was the first rave we had been to of this magnitude. Previously we’d been to clubs, warehouses, and local events, but this would be our first rave in a festival setting. We followed the river of partiers flowing through the rows of cars heading towards the music, like pilgrims on the way to the holy city, the dance Mecca. The river carried us through the expanses of the parking lot and through the entrance gates into a nighttime carnival of sound and light. As we walked closer I heard “Raise Your Hands” by the Boston Bruins and my excitement continued to build. I was feeling great and so excited, all my cells were giddy with good feelings.

Sound systems were set up under the stars, filling the night like a teapot filling a cup full of rainbow colored liquid. Thousands of people were everywhere smiling, hugging, and dancing, embraced by the cool air of the evening breeze. Covered in the cleansing sheen of sweat, dancers crisscrossed the open field everywhere running and laughing, tripping over each other and falling on the grass in piles of brightly colored fabric and glowing jewelry.
Three more sound systems were housed within the cavernous building in the center of the fairground. Each sound system was in a separate room within the building and each had DJ’s and producers from all over the world, each creating their own vibe

The lasers here were even better than the best we had at The Edge, forming images and words on the ground and in the skies on the clouds above, or the walls within the inside rooms. Going to an event like this really opened my eyes to how many people, and how many varied types of people came to these events. Everyone was different ages, shapes, sizes, wore different clothes (some VERY different) and yet, everyone was not only getting along, but seemed to be having the times of their lives. I felt so at home and so at peace in the middle of all the lights, sounds, and euphoria, like my whole reason for being was taking form here and making itself known.

Together we wandered around looking at everyone, and weaving through the crowds from one stage to the next. I had taken a few hits of acid shortly after getting into the festival and as they started to kick in I looked back to see if Chris was feeling his, and realized my friends were nowhere to be seen. I started re-tracing my steps as best as I could, trying to find them. As the acid really started to come on strong I became more and more immersed in the music and the crowd, and soon, I forgot all about looking for my friends. I was hundreds of miles from home, with no idea where my friends were, no car, but all of that melted away. I knew I would find them somewhere, sometime before the morning sun rose over the party. The DJ was dropping some really great grooves and I started dancing, feeling my body become fluid, moving on its own to the rhythm. Dancing on LSD does something unique to your mind and body. There is no way to describe what happens, but everything synchs up, your movements, your muscles, your reactions, the drums, the beats, the air around you, everything seems to just flow. The motion pumps the experience through your body and intensifies the trip until it feels like your whole body is one gigantic smile that can barely contain itself within the confines of your physical form.

As I was feeling myself become one with the universal-human-tribal-dance-soul, losing all sense of my physical body, I felt my feet leave the ground, and arms around my body. The next thing I knew, I was on the ground, which felt cool and grassy, with someone’s arms around me calling my name in a long drawn-out excited voice. I looked and it was my friend Karla from the Edge. She was with a group of our friends and literally tackled me when she saw me. It was nice to see familiar friends in this far-away land, and I was laughing and dusting myself off while giving and receiving hugs all around. We had to almost yell into each other’s ears to hear ourselves speaking, so we walked back from the wall of bass bins and speakers, to where it was just a little quieter. From back at the edges of the crowds we see the whole scene, and it was a lot to take in. The night was nice and cool, which felt amazingly refreshing after dancing for so long. I was covered in sweat, but the breeze was drying me off.

Someone had a backpack with a blanket and put it on the ground and we all melted into a big multi-armed, multi-legged, multi-headed, multi-conscious entity. They were all excited about some pure ecstasy capsules they’d bought a while ago, apparently it was really good stuff. Once I had drunk some water, cooled down some, and been able to get a sense of balance, I wanted to get one of these capsules as well. Just watching everyone in such an excited and blissful state was enough to make my soul smile. I was able to convince Karla to take me to find the guy they bought the capsules from, and we got up from the blanket, said we’d be right back, and walked back into the crowds, lights, and music. She was sure she would be able to recognize the guy again when she saw him, so we walked all through and around the crowds outside, into and through all 3 rooms of the building, but no luck. We’d been walking for what seemed like a really long time, but it was great fun to see all the wild outfits and costumes, and hear all the different and amazing music. It felt like we were on an epic quest through a magical kingdom, in search of treasures beyond description. After making a circuit of the entire fairgrounds and all the rooms in the building, we walked back outside, still looking.

“There he is!” she said, and grabbed my arm and dragged me over back towards the edge of the crowded outside dancefloor. I’ll never forget the guy she brought me up to, she was right, he was easy to recognize. He was a really big black guy all dressed in white flowing robes, exuding a feeling of kindness and peace. She gave him a hug and introduced me. He looked down at me with the nicest smile, and held out his hand. “I’m Nimrod.” I looked down at his outstretched hand, and on each of his fingers, he had what looked like a large silver, highly decorated claws. I took his hand, and was almost surprised that it felt soft, and that I didn’t get scratched by his claws. He made quite the first impression. The price seemed really high to me, but I ended up buying two of his capsules, and he sent us off with waves of knowing kindness. Karla and I went off in search of some water so I could take one of the capsules.

Up to this time, I had only had ecstasy pills, and there were always rumors flying around about what might be in any batch of pills that hit the scene. People would say some had heroin, some had cocaine, some had this and that and whatever (but most almost 100% of that was just speculation and ignorance). Nimrod had assured me these capsules contained about 125mg of pure ecstasy powder. I had never even seen ecstasy in anything other than pressed pills, but I was confident his stuff must be good, based on just watching and talking with my group of friends that had appeared out of the aether of the event. It almost seemed like everything had aligned to put me alone there on the dancefloor when they found me and helped me get to this moment where I was swallowing the pill with some amazingly refreshing cold water.

I was right around the peak of the acid trip when the ecstasy crept into the experience. It softened the psychedelic experience in the most profound way. The peak of the trip opened up into an overwhelming feeling of bliss and oneness. We were walking around trying to find our friends (either Chris and the group I came with, or the group Karla came with), but all of a sudden I had to stop and sit down. My stomach felt a little uneasy and I felt like I was moving up on a speeding elevator, rocketing towards the stars. I drank some more of my water and it helped to calm my stomach down, but I still had a feeling of moving up and up, getting higher and higher. The energy rush felt so crazy. It was like I was totally weightless and then like my entire body seemed to move particle by particle to become a cloud, hovering over and moving through every part of the rave. I closed my eyes, but the colors from the lights and lasers of the event seemed to continue right into the core of my mind. I felt like this was the ultimate human experience and if I could bring just a bit of this to everyone on the planet, that things would change for the better. Wars, famine, poverty, fear, it would all just disappear and a new age of cooperation would bring humanity to evolve into what we were always meant to become.

My whole body was singing at the very peak of a bliss that I could never have imagined could be possible. I moved back in time and experienced life through multiple viewpoints all at once. I was the experiencer, the viewer, the person outside the experience looking in, and I could relate intimately to each emotion felt, each action taken, and each word spoken in an infinity of situations all occurring in unison. I felt like all of time was happening right now, and I was every person that ever lived all at once. I opened my eyes, and was amazed to see I was sitting on the ground, next to Karla, in the middle of a rave. It was quite a shock and took me a second to get my bearings enough to put my hand on her shoulder, give her a smile, and say, “you were right, this IS good stuff!” She smiled back and it seemed like her eyes were smiling at me.

We spent the rest of the night walking around, dancing in all of the different areas of the event, and never found either group of our friends. The sun came up and it felt like I was just glowing from the inside. Karla and I were sitting on a power transformer talking when Chris and one of our friends came walking over.

“Here you are! We’ve been looking for you all night man!”

“We were looking for you guys all night too!” I said.

Karla jumped down and gave them both hugs, and Chris said, “Man, we bought a bunch of these pure ecstasy capsules out here”

“Sweet man! Karla hooked me up with a guy here that had them, they’re amazing!”

Chris looked at me like I was crazy and said, “No, man, these are all bunk! We’re supposed to meet the guy back at our car in a few minutes to make things right.” And then I felt a bad energy coming from them from whatever they’d been up to that night. Every night at a party was really a working night for Chris and I and I knew we’d brought a bunch of money up with us. Apparently they’d bought 50 or 100 capsules of what they thought was pure MDMA (ecstasy), but that turned out to be completely inactive. I was having trouble getting my mind around the negativity. I just was feeling so good, that I wasn’t registering that we’d lost a significant amount of cash. They wanted us to come with them back to the car to get the money back, and eventually we did end up coming along. Of course the situation never got straightened out, and eventually I was able to come to terms with the loss of money, but it never really ruined my mood. I knew we’d be okay, it wasn’t that much money and things always seemed to work out for us one way or the other.

With the sun completely up, the music finally coming to an end, and the sea of cars beginning to thin, we found Karla’s group of friends. We smoked a few joints and shared all our stories from the night before splitting up, getting in our cars and heading out. We weren’t heading back to South Florida yet though, there was another party tonight at The Edge in Orlando. Orlando also had a club named The Edge and it was owned by the same people as the one in Fort Lauderdale. It even looked very similar. Black on the outside, it had a main dancefloor, a second floor inside, and an outside patio to chill out in. There was a live performance by two live acts, one of them was Two Bad Mice who I liked a lot.

When we got to the club that night, it was like a meeting of two long lost families, South and North. Many of the regulars from the Edge in Fort Lauderdale had made the trek up for Hyperspace II and ended up staying for the party tonight at the Orlando Edge, so we already knew tons of people here. That worked out good since we had lost so much money at Hyperspace on the fake pills, now we could work here and make some of that loss up. A good friend of mine had come up to Orlando a few nights before Hyperspace to lay some LSD crystal onto paper for distribution at Hyperspace II. Apparently when he was doing it he added just a little too much liquid into the solution, so the pages didn’t dry as quickly as normal. So he laid the wet pages on sheets of wax paper to finish drying. He’d sold most of the LSD at the event, but had a few thousand hits left. He fronted me and Chris 2,500 hits to work after I told him about what happened last night. Since we knew so many people there already, and some of them were our distributors from down south that wanted to work the party tonight, we were able to move all the hits almost as soon as we had them in hand. We were finished working those in less than an hour and now we’d made back some of our money, and gave the rest to my friend.

He was really happy as apparently that was the last of what he had brought up, and now he could drive home clean. He gave me all the sheets of wax paper that the pages of LSD were soaking on and told me to give them out and have a good time. I looked at the paper and had no idea how much was a dose, so he tore off a piece about an inch and a half square, which seemed really big, but he said he thought that would be about one dose. Chris and I walked around and handed out the big squares of wax paper and soon, between the paper LSD and the wax paper, that whole place seemed like it was lit up. I had eaten a small bit of the laid LSD, but didn’t eat any of the wax paper. I ran into Karla and her friends and gave them each a square of the wax paper before wandering off into the crowds. The rest of the night passed in a blur, it seemed like everywhere I looked, there was activity, people were moving really fast, laughing, smiling, but it felt like people were moving with a purpose, like things were getting done. Eventually the night wound down, the lights came up in the club, and we piled back into the red Toyota Celica and headed home.

I ran into Karla next week in the parking lot at The Edge in Fort Lauderdale. When she saw me, she motioned me over and said, “Damn man! You didn’t tell me that piece of wax paper was going to be like eating 25 hits! I ate that and when I was driving home I felt like I was going to fly off the planet!”

Edited by dwpineal (11/07/12 05:21 PM)

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Re: Stories from the Psychedelic Underground [Re: dwpineal]
    #17180385 - 11/07/12 05:03 PM (11 years, 4 months ago)

Mom Eats Acid by Accident

Some days things seem to align in ways that seem impossible, and this was one of those days. My mother was one of the most straight-laced people you could imagine. She’s never smoked herb, never had anything more intoxicating than a glass or two of wine. She was a very strict, no-nonsense kind of mother. Most of my friends would tell me they were scared to come over to my house because of her.

One day I went to school as usual, but my little brother had stayed home sick. Now I never – ever went to lunch with my mom, before or after this. I have no idea why this one day I had made plans to go to her work for lunch. I didn’t even have a car, so I had to have a friend of mine drive me over to her work during the lunch break at school. He dropped me off in the parking lot of her office building, and was just going to wait for me to finish lunch and then we’d go back to school together, probably smoke a joint on the way back. He didn’t want to go up and eat with my mom, I think he was scared of her. My mom was the president of a small company, so I took the elevator up to her office floor, and walked over to her office. When I walked in, she said, “Can you close the door?”

I closed the door behind me and looked over to her. I saw a look on her face that I had not seen before. She hesitated a little and said, “I found something in your room…”

My heart sank, I knew I had a sheet of LSD in my dresser drawer, she must have found it and now I’d be in serious trouble!

“And I licked it.”

WHAT? My mind raced, “What did you do? How much did you lick? Why did you do that?”

She drew out a series of rectangles on her desk blotter, “About this much” and it looks like she basically licked the whole sheet, but she had drawn a lot of rectangles, so it was hard to tell. But the sheet in my dresser was not perforated, so it was just one piece of paper with about 100 hits of LSD on it, so I knew she must have licked that page. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m feeling a little dizzy, light headed, what was it?”

I’ve felt bad for this my whole life, but I told her it was rat poison because I didn’t want her to flip out from reading propaganda about bad LSD trips. I have no idea why I told her it was rat poison, but I wasn’t sure what to tell her it was. Years later I told her it was LSD, and she was upset, apparently she’d spent some time looking up rat poison and how it affected her. I told her to just wait there, and that I would drive her home. I didn’t have much experience driving, but I knew I could probably do much better than she could at this moment, and I knew she needed to not be at her office. I ran down to my friend and told him a very brief snippet of what had happened, and that he should go back to school, and I’d fill him in later.

I drove her home and spent the day with her. She lay in her bed and we talked about what she was seeing and feeling for most of the afternoon.  By the early evening, the effects were mostly over and we had a nice cup of tea together outside in our back yard. She went to bed early and woke the next morning feeling much better.

In the meantime, I went to my brother and asked him what in the world happened. He said he was in bed and she woke him up holding the sheet asking, “What’s this? I found it in your brother’s room. Is it drugs? I’m licking it to find out!”

“And you let her lick the sheet???”

“I didn’t have time to stop her, she just licked it as soon as she said that. There was nothing I could do.”

“And you let her just go to work?”

He just shrugged and looked embarrassed.

I guess she had seen too many cop shows, where the cop finds a baggie of white powder on someone and licks it, “Yep, that’s drugs!” or something like that. I can’t imagine why she thought she could tell if it was drugs or not, but since the paper was tasteless, she just figured there was nothing on it. And my brother just told her he didn’t know what it was.
It was a really scary day. I’m not sure exactly how much she got into her, or how much she licked, but she handled it amazingly well for an unsuspecting first-timer. And after that day, everyone noticed a major change in her attitude. People stopped being scared to come over. She was still strict, but much less-so and seemed to be softer and gentler all around. It was a really amazing turnaround. We were never sure 100% if it was the LSD, but we also couldn’t think of anything else that could have brought on the change. I promised myself I would never ever keep drugs of any kind in her house, and I never did. Of course I found other safer places for them, but I really learned a lesson that day about being careless with something so potent.

Edited by dwpineal (11/07/12 05:21 PM)

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OfflineKief Ledger
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Re: Stories from the Psychedelic Underground [Re: dwpineal] * 1
    #17181447 - 11/07/12 08:07 PM (11 years, 4 months ago)

Only read the 1st one so far, but a great read!  Always loved your stories from the good Ol days.  Keep em coming.  :popcorn:  thanks so much

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Re: Stories from the Psychedelic Underground [Re: dwpineal] * 1
    #17183191 - 11/08/12 03:21 AM (11 years, 4 months ago)

Read the whole series. Great stories, keep them coming.:thumbup:

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Re: Stories from the Psychedelic Underground [Re: mushcap]
    #17184276 - 11/08/12 11:13 AM (11 years, 4 months ago)

Sweet, thanks guys! Should have another one or two to post up later...

:awethumb:

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OfflineNo Cars Go
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Re: Stories from the Psychedelic Underground [Re: dwpineal]
    #17184514 - 11/08/12 12:08 PM (11 years, 4 months ago)

These are incredible! Thanks for posting these :wink:


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Re: Stories from the Psychedelic Underground [Re: No Cars Go] * 4
    #17185541 - 11/08/12 03:52 PM (11 years, 4 months ago)

Pre-Birthday Weekend/ Birthday 10-strip

One night we were at a club in South Beach called Risk. The doorman was a friend of mine that I met giving him a ride one night from a South Beach club called Diamonte to the Edge. His head was bald and this night he had a circular microchip that looked like it was implanted in his skull. So it looked like he was some kind of cyborg doorman to the club. He let Chris and I in and with a smile, even though we weren’t 18 yet. Shortly after getting in, Chris sees a friend of his and we walk over to this guy who was dancing spastically, waving his hands and jumping around the dancefloor. I looked at Chris and asked “Is that your friend dancing like that?” “Man he’s a good dancer; he must just be really high.” He replied. Dancing good was a kind of underground street cred in the early rave scene. You figured the good dancers were devoted to the scene, and almost assuredly were not going to be undercover cops. And this guy was not just a bad dancer, he was almost comical he was so bad.

But apparently Tony was a new hook up that Chris had met that was going to be giving us books for $750, ($0.75 per dose). So after the spastic dance was over Chris walked over and introduced me to Tony. He smiled and we walked to the bar to grab some water. It was a fun night, I had never been to this club before. Chris at one point was all excited because he got to sell some ecstasy to the DJ who was a popular DJ at the time. I won’t give his name as he is still spinning and still popular.  After partying for a few hours in the plush South Beach club, people started talking about going to The Edge because a really popular New York electronic music group, called Dee-Lite was going to be doing a record release party there. Pretty much everyone in the scene at the time knew about Dee-Lite and since they weren’t local we weren’t sure when they’d come back.

When we got to The Edge around 3:30AM, there was a huge line to get in. The record release party for their album Dew Drops in the Garden drew a really large crowd. The energy in the air inside The Edge was amazing. Some nights were good, some were so-so, but you could tell that the crowd was extra-pumped for this show. We danced and danced, but Dee-Lite never came on. People started to grumble and the vibe turned down. By 9AM they still had not gone on stage and I was getting tired. I decided to call it a day and went home to sleep all Sunday until school Monday morning. I heard rumors that they went on stage at 1PM and it was a great show, but I was never sure if that was true or not.

Monday was my birthday, so I was excited to continue all the fun from the weekend. I woke up that morning and put on a shiny silver suit that I had sewn together. It probably looked funny just because of my horrible sewing skills, but it was extremely bright, rave-y, and not something most people would ever wear to high-school. The word shiny terribly understates the look of the shiny suit. It was like wearing a suit made of silver glitter. Before my breakfast I tore off a ten-strip of LSD and popped it in my mouth. It was the first time I had ever eaten this much, but it was my birthday and I was ready for a special day. I left my house and headed out to school. I didn’t have a car so I walked to school every morning, and it was probably just over a mile to my school. After leaving my house I sparked up a joint I had and walked down the road. After the first toke or two from the joint, I began to feel the LSD coming on.

I looked at the sky and I could see little bubbles bouncing in the air in front of the beautiful fluffy morning clouds. My shiny suit was glinting madly in the morning sun. The walk took about half an hour and as I walked onto the campus, I could feel people’s eyes moving to me, maybe wearing this suit and taking a ten strip at school was a little crazy of an idea. There were probably only about 5 kids in our school that could be considered in-the-know about raves, the scene was just starting in South Florida, so this was even weirder than most of the school was ready for. Walking through the halls I got so many weird looks, smiles, grins, and rolled eyes I couldn’t help but giggle to myself.  I saw one of my best friends, Scotty, and he stopped me, asking, “Man, I thought you told me you went to Risk Saturday night, what happened?” “I did go to Risk, why?”

“It was on TV yesterday, the whole club burned down Saturday night.”

“What? Really? Well it must have happened after we left, because it was fine when I was there…”

“And what the fuck are you wearing?” I just laughed and said it was my birthday suit.

Over the past summer, we’d done extensive LSD training in my group of friends. We wanted to see what it was like to be tripping all the time, so we took as much acid on as many days as it would work (we had to wait 2-3 days at least to account for tolerance). We taught ourselves to eat, sleep, do our normal daily activities, and also how to “keep cool” so that no one would even realize we were tripping if we didn’t tell them. So other than my wild get-up, I was confident no one would know I was tripping. I was always a nerdy type, and I loved school. Many of my friends would eat acid and skip classes all day, but I was the opposite. I would take acid and go to classes and learn. I felt like my mind could focus on the subjects being taught in a much more holistic way, viewing all the issues, problems, solutions, and concepts from many more angles than in my sober consciousness. My grades reflected this as well, as I was always able to keep my GPA over 3.5. Also my mother was very strict, so I didn’t want to be caught skipping school.

I went to my first two classes and everything was going great. In the time between 2nd and 3rd period I ran into Chris and told him I’d eaten the ten strip. “Man, why didn’t you tell me? I wanted to eat a ten strip!” He said with a sad look. Hey do you want to go smoke a bowl over by the auto-shop? I have some office passes. Chris had a friend in the school print shop and had a book of hall passes from the administrative offices, which were the best passes you could have to get out of classes without getting into trouble. Since he had the passes, I decide it would be okay to walk over there for a bit and return to class once we were done.

The auto shop was on the other side of the campus, away from the main buildings. We walked over there and our friend Anthony was standing by one of the auto shop cars. “What’s up guys? Jump on in.” He said, opening the car door. I didn’t like the idea of getting into a car, it felt like it would be a little claustrophobic with the LSD coming to a peak about now. It also seemed like it was too easy to get caught in there. What if someone came up while we were in there smoking? Anthony assured us that it was cool, no one would come over here. So we got into the car and Chris packed a bowl of some nice herb and hash that he had. We sat in the car and smoked a few bowls, the whole time, the LSD was getting stronger and stronger. When we finished we jumped out of the car, with a cloud of smoke following us out. As I got out and turned around, I saw about 30 feet away, walking through the fence to the auto shop was Mr. Manzo, an ex-Marine that was now the school Head of Security.

So here I am in my shiny silver suit, on ten hits of acid, stepping out of a car full of clouds of marijuana smoke, looking over at the head of school security.  I remember the visuals at this point so clearly, like I am seeing them all over right now. Everywhere, colors were flowing, almost dripping down reality slowly, energy everywhere, moving, everything was moving – except Mr. Manzo. Amidst all the moving colored fractal patterns, Mr. Manzo was perfectly clear; there were no visuals where he stood, like he had a force field protecting him from the swirling imagery. As he saw us and started walking towards us, Chris dropped the bowl we’d been smoking and stealthily kicked it under the car we’d been in. I’m not too sure on what happened next, but soon Mr. Manzo was walking us to the Principal’s office.  He didn’t know we’d been smoking, but it was perfectly clear that we were not in class where we were supposed to be.

We waited in the office, with the world on full melt down, for our turn to speak with the Principal. Chris and Anthony talked our way out of the situation, while I mostly agreed with what they were saying and tried to look nonchalant in my ultra-shiny silver suit. Whatever excuse they gave must have worked, because we weren’t in any real trouble, and were sent back to class. Since Chris had the office passes, he gave me one so that I wouldn’t get in trouble for showing up to class almost 40+ minutes late. I brought in the pass to my teacher, and took my seat for the last few minutes of class.

The rest of the day passed, I made it through geometry and then creative writing, both awesome classes to be tripping in. I just kept quiet, sat in my seat, and focused on the multiple dimensions opening up all around me. For the last period of the day instead of class, everyone in the school went to a performance in the school auditorium by the US  ARMY band. Somehow I ended up in the very front row, and when they played Aretha Franklin’s  Respect, I got up quickly and walked through the back stage door. I’m not sure how I was able to do this so smoothly, as it is hard to be unnoticed when you’re dressed like I was. I walked right backstage, and ran out on stage, but behind the band as they were playing, so they didn’t see me at all. I started break dancing in the back and it seemed like the entire auditorium full of students got up from their seats, stood up and started clapping and cheering. The band still didn’t know I was there dancing behind them, so they thought the standing, clapping, and cheering was for their performance, so they kicked it up a notch and started playing even better and more soulfully. This got me excited and I kept dancing through to the end of the song. I don’t think the band ever even realized I was on stage with them. I walked off stage and out the backstage door and headed for my seat. Before I could sit down, one of the school administrators grabbed me by the arm and dragged me out of the auditorium and back to the office. She was not happy at all with my little stunt. At this point in the day it was almost 7 hours into the trip, so I was down enough to talk to the Principal again when I had to. I didn’t make any excuses, I just said I was feeling the music and wanted to dance. Somehow miraculously, again, I didn’t get in any trouble, and I’d been in the office twice today, it was definitely a good birthday.

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