Hey all. Been a while since I was here, and that's a good way to start off this post: I feel compelled to say that back when I posted pretty frequently on this board, I was more or less convinced that I was a psychedelic expert and that I had nothing left to learn based on a few years of what honestly could be called "abuse" even by fellow users.
That wasn't the lesson psychedelics wanted me to learn. I'll just go ahead and bite the bullet: psychedelics finally taught me the lesson in a way I could understand by proving to me that I know *absolutely nothing*.
About life. About drugs. About myself, other people. Society. The Universe.
I've got a suspicion that this is a common theme in the psychedelic journey, but I could be wrong.
The past couple months haven't been just acid and weed, either. Wouldn't want to forget the molly, or the blow. Or those fifteen vicodin that were missing after I came out of the blackout, or the oxy's.mmmm... J dubs.... Definitely don't forget the mushrooms. Oh, there was that bean I bought at the laser show... who knows what was in that lol.
It may be a little more normal for people my age to be going on such binges these days, but still, certainly not normal for me. Relax, this isn't a story about how drugs ruined my life. I did a whole shitload of drugs and came out on the other end perfectly alright. But the reason I partied so hard was because I could finally see a point in my life ahead of me where partying would not be an option.
The U.S. Army. But that's a whole separate story.
What I want to tell you about is kind of difficult to summarize. I'm a writer; my specialty in story telling. This is your warning.
There's one other thing you should probably know, even though I won't actually write much more than this about it, considering it's not *immediately* applicable to all of this. At the center of all of this was a girl. Just a friend; not a girl I fucked either even when I had plenty of opportunity, so get that out your head now. I didn't want to fuck her because she was the first girl I ever met who A) was more fucked in the head than I was and B) more intelligent than me. I have noticed a corellation in these fields as well, but again, I could be wrong. I'll stop repeating myself there for now.
And that was pretty mindblowing itself. I'll get back to it.
I consider myself intellectual, in that I spend most of my time quiet, in thought, and I devote a great deal of that thought to the consideration of abstract ideas and concepts, whether in politics or religion or life or whatever, that may or may not have any real application in my life. Like most people I was brought up in the world with one set of values and beleifs *given* to me by the people who raised me, and what I thought I'd learned about life was that it was mainly the process of shedding those values and creating your own.
I suppose it only took a couple years away from mommy and daddy to realize how childish that was as soon as I found a *challenge* to my new so-called beleifs. I suppose that's where drugs make their first entrance. My mother told me pot would make me stupid, I tried pot and it clearly has not impeded my intelligence. Big surprise, mother was wrong, but back then it was! Then I tried acid a few times and realised that I would never be happy serving the man, and by serving the man, I mean anything from flipping burgers at McDonalds (which I've done) to being some sort of data analyst in a toothepaste company, regardless of how much I got paid. Suddenly the man was wrong too; not such a big surprise, he was wrong about drugs in the first place. But I just knew I had to do something with my life that would amount to more than a final sum I made working for some ridiculous company I had no interest in.
Of course, while still making a shitload of money. Don't get me wrong, I've got the paper chaser bug like anyone, just because even though for most of my life I've rejected material possession as a hinderance in my life, I do eventually want to have nice things. it just has to be more than that.
My friend is a very different person- possible as close to opposite from me as you can get. Having your own ideas challenged by a close friend is very different than having your old beleifs, your parents beleifs, challenged by a psychedelic or any drug related experience even. But it's also very similar, in a way. The drug makes you dialogue with yourself almost as you would a friend, but a friend, unlike your own subconscious or conscious, has a completely different set of inputs, stimuli, experiences. They've lived a whole other life; they have a *completely* different perspective.
I was attracted to psychedelics by the romance of the idea of a drug that takes you on an adventure in any form. But let's be honest, no one can know what's it like to trip just from reading it. Psychedelics, acid in particular, took me on adventures, but often they were excursions of the mind, which I did not expect. I would be tripping on acid at a beach and realise I was contemplating middle-eastern current events and what was to be done of the whole goddamn mess. I felt foolish at first, sitting there on a beach fucked up as ever but thinking about politics. But I reconsidered all the conclusions I'd arrived at. It was not like being in a drunken state, where ideas sound good for as long as you can remember them but sound terrible when you rethink it even a few moments later. Acid left me especially lucid; my emotions were prone so be more easily swayed in one direction or another, but it did not usually impede my thought process.
I understood that many of things I thought about while on psychedelics was utter nonesense, but that's part of the drug as well. The "Alice in Wonderland" feel, if you will. But I immediatelly recognised such thoughts for what they were and discarded them, since I wasn't always just sitting around staring at the beach while I tripped, especially in a group. But every once in a while, like with the middle-eastern politics, I recognised that the strange connections, patterns and parallels in abstract thinking that acid suggested to me was actually a useful tool because, while many of those connections and parallells were simple fantasy, some of them were legitimate.
The best way I've ever described it, I think, is like this. Imagine, if you will, someone on acid in the early ninteen thirties who decided to sit down and take a little peek at current events in Germany. Imagine if he'd already read a lot about the current political state there, and was actually a political scientist. Imagine if he'd read a little book all about killing Jews and Gypsies written by some German asshole?
I'm not saying such a person would have predicted all of the atrocities to come, but I know it is possible that such a situation could have easily resulted in someone making *some* ridiculous claim about the re-emerging militarism of the Germans and how this Hitler guy *might* just be setting himself up to be king of the 3rd Reich, and by 3rd Reich I mean the whole world. Imagine if that had happened. Imagine if everyone in the world had dosed on acid and read a bit about Germany, had acid even existed and been in widespread use then, sometime in that decade. Consider.
I've often seen a group of stoners or people tripping shift seamlessly from subjects in one long, flowing conversation without ever actually acknowledging that the conversation would shift, had shifted, or was probably going to shift again some time soon. Obviously there's always that person who just isn't paying attention, but for the most part you don't have people asking "hey, how did we get to that subject?" too often, especially considering how often the subject changes. Many people describing visuals on psychedelics find other people in their lifetime, sometimes many people, who have experienced similar if not identical visuals. As if there were some underlying form, pattern, art to the world that only psychedelics could unlock.
Perhaps there is some link between the visual and mental aspects; perhaps, had we all similar inputs and stimuli, we would all arrive at the same abstract ideas and conclusions, just like we see comparable visuals. Many people focus almost exclusively on the authority in their own country in regards to their psychedelic experience, understandable considering the whole ridiculous fact that it happens to be *very illegal*, but moving beyond that and applying that random, frenzied thought process that is LSfuckinD, to anything, was a major step in my psychedelic journey.
She was one of the people that helped me realise that. I'm smart enough to think I'm smarter than I am, and on top of that, I've lived most of my life with a simple black and white distinction in my beleifs and actions and values. Both positive and negative; I am a passionate person, but passionate people are not always right about everything they beleive. My struggle against the man boiled down to an education board hearing at my university where I more or less decided that my English degree and the money I was wasting on it was not worth it if the people teaching me were so ridiculously uninformed on drugs, which was apparent since the trial was regarding my use of drugs and I got to see where they stood pretty clearly.
After I told them to fuck off and quit school for a year, I spent a lot of time with her, talking about things like the middle east and drug laws. We had some crazy experiences together; she's seen me at my worst, which would probably be any number of terrible experiences: getting super drunk at a club and endin up beating the shit out of a random stranger outside and almost getting arrested, or when this little git stole my xbox, my one valuable posession and the fun little revenge adventure afterwards, or when all my friends fucked me over simultaneously which was basically the meltdown of my decade at any rate. But she's seen me at my most passionate times as well, sans sex, which I think are as close as you can get to seeing me at my best. Those rare conversations where you end up talking about something so important to you, you could get a little teary if you don't fight it back.
After some of those experiences, really a whole lifetime of ridiculousness, it left me changed. I went to see my brother down south for a couple months, and when I came back I was harder to the world than I had ever been. I'd learned some valuable lessons about trust, but I'd taken it to the extreme, and had become extreme about everything. I held grudges, I wanted revenge when I thought I deserved it, I thought I was always right, like some sort of shooting fucking star the whole world ought to follow or something.
I guess I lied; the girl clearly has more to do with it than I thought haha. My perspective is changing just a little even as I write this.
And all she ever said to me were things like "Let go" when something happened that I couldn't change. "Let it be" when I insisted that I could change it anyways. And for the first time in my life, someone besides my mother called me an angry person to my face, which I suppose was a shock. She did have her bitchy side like any girl, evidenced by the fact that we're not even on talking terms atm till she comes around lol. She has a good with way with sarcasm; when I questioned her regarding her apathetic approach to life, she once apologised for not trying to save the world every day like me. It made me wonder. She made me realise something nobody wants to realise: I take myself way too seriously.
MDMA. Hell of a drug. I underestimated; thought it was a pussy drug, for pussies. I'd tried it multiple times from multiple people; everyone else rolled face off each batch, i got nothing. I gave up really. Then one day, said girl and a few other friends convince me to eat a bunch of molly and go to a little house rave. Or maybe I convinced them; my memory is hazy. In any case, again, it didn't work. Two hours in I stopped worrying about it and tried to go to sleep.
Thirty minutes later I realised I was unable to sleep and was rolling face. Blew up to some good glowstringing and I've been able to do it ever since.
Like psychedelics, I found out the hard way that MDMA is very much dependent on your mental state when you take it. Unlike psychedelics, however, which simply make you have a bad trip, I honestly think I was simply incapable of rolling simply because of my mindset. But I'll tell you, I ate *enough* molly, that's for sure. Once I was rollin, I was rollin that night. And I haven't ever called molly a pussy drug since.
Why did I roll *that* night? Partially because I was with friends I trusted. But I think mainly it was when I tried to sleep, stopped worrying about th efact that I wasted money on bunk shit, tried to stop worrying about *anything* in fact which is hard enough as is... and just listened to the steady beat... the rhythm of the techno in the background just draws you into some sort of trance once you get everything out of the way.
Then the feel good starts.
I never went to drugs because I wanted to *feel good* really. It was more for adventure if anything. But that night something I changed in my mindset. I guess you could say I've always felt down, twenty four seven, just because I was always concerning myself with something. That night I learned it one of the only wasn't a crime to be content, happy, to not worry about what's happened or is going to happen, because I'm not sure I'd ever felt like that *ever* before.
I have to urge anyone using drugs to NOT make the mistake of thinking that the purely psychedelic experience is the only one you can learn from. It is TRULY a mistake. Any altering of your conscious puts you in a unique perspective, to learn what you can or will from it. Not every drug teaches every person the same lesson, and not every person is meant to try every drug. Some drugs are only traps to some people. For some people, all drugs are traps, especially if approached with the wrong intentions. But whatever the case, you can learn from any experience.
The hardest time I ever rolled was not on pure MDMA. It was on the bean I mentioned at the laser show. I was surrounded by Mexicans; I had a particular prejudice for Mexicans. When I was groing up in shitty appartments they'd keep me awake for hours partying loud as hell. But that night at the laser show apparently everyone decided they'd had enough Mexican music and wanted some Pink Floyd, and lots of them were rolling just as hard as I was. So loud they couldn't help themselves but shout when the laser show got intense. And I couldn't help myself either a few times.
I remembered an argument with my friend regarding another particular friend of ours. I had been very close to this guy, but since then had realised he was a dirtbag and kind of had me fooled the whole time. The truth was, I had admired him to a degree. He was intelligent and had some potential. But in the end I couldn't stand being friends with someone who lied constantly, or was in general as much of a dick as this guy was. She was essentially defending him, saying he couldn't help it if he was fucked in the head because he had a terrible upbringing. I didn't want to hear any of that. He's a rich Jew (I happen to me one of those self hating Scottish Jews that you've never heard of before), and as a poor Jew, rich Jews are some of the people I hate most, especially the spoiled little brats that don't work or do anything for their money and still bitch about life.
But the truth was, he did had supposedly a pretty bad childhood. I've had a bad adulthood, though. Get over it, I always said.
In this case, I remain even still unmoved on the subject, since the guy really was such a giant douche. But it put a seed in my mind; the hint of the beginning of one of those abstract ideas I spend most of my day contemplating. It wasn't until months later that the thought finally bloomed into something I could put a name on, and it was while I was rolling face at that laser show shouting along with all those Mexicans. It started when I thought to myself "Hey, these guys are all fucked on the same thing I'm fucked up on" (minus the mushrooms for most of them I would guess lol). It's pretty easy to spot someone rolling; whatever method people use to get to that mental state where they just don't give a fuck about anything negative, it's easy to spot them once they're there.
And I thought to myself how, really, the Mexicans and I weren't too different anymore. I'm kind of poor. So are they. I liked to get fucked up and have fun; so do they. I'd rather buy a roll and some mushrooms, or rent a canoe, or hike a national forest than buy something like a tv or a nice sound system. I'd seen the inside of those Mexican apartments; they didn't have much either. And here I was, probably slightly ruining some sober S.O.B.s experience shouting giddily with all the other fucked up people in the room, and suddenly, something clicked in my head. I was probably way more similar to these people than the rich assholes I know as a university aged student in a university town.
Empathy. That's what's it's called. I hadn't experienced it for a very long time.
It was a life changing night, for sure, because that wasn't all of it. It only took a few minutes of that Pink Floyd laser show in a fuckin planetarium to confirm it was way more intense than just putting on Pink Floyd on your speakers and raving with glowsticks. It was funny to me that the planetarium where I got to roll face harder than I ever had before was in the end built either by government funding, or from donations from the wealthy. Either way, it represents something I could never achieve on my own: no matter how bad I wanted to have the craziest Pink Floyd laser light show, I would not be finacially capable of producing it.
I was rolling face harder than I ever had before, and the Man had provided the venue.
It's hard to keep things black and white in your head when it's never that simple.
That's all I have time to say right now. I don't want to say too much and get ahead of myself. Maybe more next time I have a breather.
-WT
-------------------- Captain Cannabis, Guardian of Ganja, Sultan of Shrooms, Giver of Green, Tabbed Tripper, and all around Good Guy.
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