I began by shooting pool in a room that was mysteriously only black and white. The color scheme was set up this way in this room, at a house i've never been to before. Only this one room was black and white. So as you can imagine, as i stepped out of the room into technicolor while i was first starting to feel the effects, i knew i was in for something big.
I became very uneasy walking around outside with my friends. We took back alleys, and walked in a small circle around the block. I was leading the way somehow, and seemed to know exactly what to say and where to go. I lead everyone back to the house but didn't go inside. The air was too fresh out here. I was finding it hard to articulate, and told this in the best way i could to my friends.
We split up into two groups. One group stayed at the house, and I left with a few more guys to my friend's car to grab some weed... we stood around yelling at each other and laughing like idiots for about 10 minutes, looking for a pipe in the car at the same time. We finally found it and took off walking. We stumbled and giggled consistantly through a corridor of darkness and non-threatening statues of demons. More or less a back alley full of trees. Along the way, as the ground was tilting back and forth; much like a labyrinth, I felt rain come down fairly hard on us. I thought "it must be the mushrooms", when i thought i couldn't feel the raindrops hitting me, only dropping off of me. Then I realized that it wasn't raining at all.
I continuously wiped my arms and face of non-existant liquid, while trying to keep my balance on the labyrinth. All the while making conversation with my team-mates. We had no longer been speaking english, but rather a from of piglatin that was very specific to each of us, but understood as a group. It was then that we realized we were on this journey together, and there was some sort of conclusion we had to seek out.
We travelled in a series of straight lines, knowing that straight lines WILL get you from point A to point B, eventually. Along this choose-your-own-adventure grid, we would come up with the best possible route to take, whether or not it would lead us to our final destination. I stopped and sat down on a curb. The ground was very dry... and full of nooks, crannies, caves, and mountains. The streetlights cascaded across this textured plain like paint on a canvas. I looked up at one of my team-mates as he told me we had to keep moving. Somehow he was under the impression that we were leaving him behind, though he was basically the one leading us.
We moved quickly down a back alley in what seemed like a drunken stupor, through this carefully plotted maze. Was somebody watching us? Were we just a form of entertainment to viewers everywhere? I hoped not, because it was embarassing how much I was melting. We soon came to a main street, bright and full of traffic. We crossed it with fleeting ease. One the other side, we faced a valley. A large gorge that divided the town in two. We delved into its' treacherous decline, stumbling, falling, and tripping on the landscape. Mosquitos darted at us, like wasps-turned-fighter-jets; bloodthirsty kamikaze pilots buzzing around us with their bayonets, knowing that they were out of ammo. We plunged across the somewhat beaten path which led us up the other side of the crevice, and into a blinding streetlight of safety.
At this point we had come close to our destination. One of my team-mates houses. We allowed whatever great force it was, guide us to his front door, and into the warmth of an empty, quiet, home. We drank plenty of water and proceeded to check out different rooms in his house. We listened to a bit of Death Cab for Cutie, and layed down in the living room. It was at this point precisely, floating around in the cytoplasm that was oxygen, that the secret of our universe had unfolded before my eyes.
We are elements. Like carbon, or hydrogen. The human being is an element. Or better yet, we are merely ribosomes... the air is cytoplasm... the earth is our nucleus. We are serving it.... and we are together as a cell, dying. We have done what we can, but this was it. How we had come to interact with the many different parts of this cell, had become so obsurd and strangely dangerous that we were surely on a steady decline into overall depletion. Was this the experience of life inside of a brain cell damaged by magic mushrooms? Were we but cell parts; hallucinating much like the human form in which we reside? i became sick. So did one of my team-mates. I dared not tell him what the universe had just told me... so I told him it was the water we had drank. Then it became the water.
We knew it HAD to be the water. We drank it but it left us thirsty, and as if our bodies had been soaked from the inside out in venom. We remembered hearing on the radio something about bad water, a week before... so it WAS the water for sure. We couldn't go to the hospital because of the condition we were in, so we waited it out... and decided we'd better smoke weed to take it off our mind... I mean, if we were going to die anyway.
I felt like a soldier with internal injuries... relatively painless injuries that would be fatal eventually, and no medical attention around me. I gave up on the fear, and decided to just let it ride into my next and final journey: death. We smoked like kings... thinking again about the cell. "This was it", I thought. This was what entire civilization was leading up to. Every series of events that had ever occured, occured to lead us here. This was the pinnacle of our entire existance... to finally get this last chemical into us, using fire as a catalyst. We were the three kings at that moment, knowing we were about to die, figuring this must be what we were meant to do. This was how the cell would finally burn out. We finished the bowl and went back into my team-mates' room, tired, baked as hell, coming down, and ready to watch The Family Guy.
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Beautifully worded.
-------------------- We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies--all these are private and, ex- cept through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
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