Oh MAN did I have an epic weekend at my favorite music festival! The music was wonderful, and the company... I kept waking up early so I hung out with my friend's kids (age 8 and 9) more than anyone else, they're amazing and are already friends of mine, it was so much fun. Also this adorable little girl named Ari hung out a lot and she and the younger of the boys had a little 8 year old romance going on, it was so heartwarming and cute, and funny.
She was so damn cool, she really liked me a lot and when she left she almost cried and gave me a hug and told me she wished I was her dad. I don't think she has one...
I also did a ton of psychedelics. And I actually had about 45 minutes of a bad trip, it's literally the only time that's ever happened. I don't just mean anxiety, but like, really, really bad. So, I took AMT around noon on the second of 4 days, a nice solid dose of 80mg of a succinate which is around 50mg of freebase. It did its thing and before long I was glowing with a massive grin on my face. Then some guy was looking for mushrooms and I had some, and we traded, 4 hits of acid for the mushrooms. I took one of them straight away, and after a couple of hours I realized they were quite strong hits. I was having a great time though, talking to everyone, making people laugh, going to see music at various times. Then around maybe 4, I was like, fuck it, I'll take 2 more of these hits. I've never tripped really, really hard on LSD, and this seems like the idea time to do it.
Well, it was great. I started getting very strong visuals, with bright lines connecting everything and large-scale perspective shifting. I was saying to people "I'm SO HAPPY right now", "I think I'm feeling the maximum amount of happiness it's possible for a person to feel right now", and so on. Then in the early evening, I went to see Rising Appalachia. I thought they were quite good but I also thought the lead girl was the most unearthly beautiful human being I'd ever seen. Like, it was blowing my mind how hot she was, I was completely mesmerized. And then something happened, I'm not exactly sure what, but she got really awkward introducing the next song they were playing, which was new. And at the end she's like, "no pressure you guys but you better like it!" and the audience and her band started murmuring with disquiet. Then the band started playing and I guess they did something wrong or played longer than she wanted them to and she started to get all huffy on stage and the band was really uncomfortable, and some people started leaving. And the lead girl looked SO upset and pissed. It triggered this deep disquiet inside me, after a few minutes I realized I was surrounded by no one I knew and I needed to leave.
So I left and decided to walk to find some friends who I figured would be at the next place. As I walked I was grappling with a very intense anxiousness inside. It seemed like I just seen the most beautiful human of all time, and all day I had been feeling absolute bliss and then seeing her acting like she did shattered my illusion. I could barely tell what I was stepping on, grass or sticks, or mulch, the visual confusion was quite intense. I found a couple of my friends in front of the main stage. Steve Earl was about to go on, apparently he's the most money they have ever spent on one act there. I stood there watching them sound check, trying to rationalize away the panic I was feeling. It started to work, but then Steve Earl and his band started getting massively angry and aggressive with the sound guys because they weren't happy with the sound, they were all red-faced and getting up in the sound guys' faces and screaming obscenities at them. So it started turning some people off and they started walking away. Then he turned to the crowd and started cussing THE CROWD out, saying "Motherfuckers, fuck YOU, IT'S NOT MY FAULT, I'LL KICK YOUR MOTHERFUCKING ASS!!!!" At that point it was too much negativity for me. I'd say 2/3 of the crowd left too, cuz fuck that asshole (turns out his vocal mic wasn't working because... drum roll... he forgot to turn it on 8)). A guy I know from the festival, an old head, could tell I was wigging out and gave me a hug and told me I was with friends, which was nice.
I tried to keep my composure but I had to leave. I walked back to our camp and tried to describe what was happening to my good friend who also took AMT and LSD with me. He later said I just seemed really high but to me it was like I was being a miserable failure or something. It's hard to describe how overwhelmingly terrible the anxiety feeling was. I've felt it briefly before on edible weed when I smoked a big fat bong on top of it, but that was more transient and would come and go... this was more intense and was just how I felt constantly. It had a feeling of permanence to it that horrified me.
Suddenly I remembered I had etizolam, and in a full-on panic I went to dose some, I was trying to take 2mg to interrupt the anxiety. But, in my panic, I grabbed the OTHER bottle of drugs in liquid suspension I had... which was DOC. Which I dosed 1mg of and realized as I swallowed it since it tasted like bitter alcohol water instead of sweet propylene glycol. OH MY GOD OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK THIS IS BAD THIS IS BAD THIS IS BAD! I was repeating these things to myself over and over again out loud. I thought about inducing vomiting but honestly DOC in alcohol was probably already absorbing, and I thought that gagging myself in this state might have been worse than just accepting the DOC. So I checked VERY carefully and made sure I grabbed the correct bottle, and took 2mg of etizolam this time. My friend came over to see if I was okay because he heard me muttering to myself in fear and I told him what happened. He sat there and talked to me for a bit and I started to feel a little better so I followed him over to his tent (just next door), but then the kids were there and everyone was being really normal and honestly I really didn't want to expose the kids to my state, so I went back to my tent awkwardly and stiffly.
And that's when the anxiety hit full force. I laid in my tent and just tried to breathe through it. There was no longer even a reason for it that my brain was giving me, it was just this feeling of endlessly falling with deep, deep existential terror. It was a lot like my trip on 2C-E when I went to the void, almost like an incredibly lonely feeling of dimensionlessness and timelessness except that I was still fully aware of who and where I was. I knew (or at least hoped very strongly) that the etizolam would start working soon and help. But it seemed to take so fucking long to do so. Every time I closed my eyes the darkness exploded into an infinity of fractals that moved so quickly they seemed threatening. I settled on staring (unblinking with eyes open as wide as possible) at the corner of my tent while I breathed as deeply and regularly as possible. It would fade a bit and I'd sit up and be like "oh my GOD what the FUCK??" and then it would start again. It was the worst feeling, I felt like I would be that way forever even though since I've tripped many, many, many times, I knew it wasn't going to last forever. But my brain was coming up with ways to kill myself, that's how bad it was. I was just recognizing that they were errant thoughts and letting them pass by, I wasn't going to hurt myself, but that's where I was at.
Fortunately after maybe 20 minutes of that hell, the etizolam started working, and at last I felt like I could come out of my tent. I told my friend it was getting better and we started laughing about stuff and before long I felt amazing again, full of bliss and hilarity. I even took another milligram of DOC after a while because the DOC was actually a great addition. 8) And for the whole rest of the festival I didn't take any more psychedelics, but I was on that same trip the entire time and also the day after (yesterday).
Moral of the story: a full dose of AMT and 3 strong hits of acid is really fucking strong, and when you mix it with an intense situation, even if you've tripped hundreds of times for half your life and never had that sort of thing happen, it can still happen. I'm fortunate I have so much experience because it could have ended very badly. Instead it ended amazingly.
It was so strange how it turned on me SO hard, but only for like 45 minutes. I basically felt the two extremes of fear/anxiety as well as bliss/euphoria, possibly the strongest I have felt both, ever.
Other moral of the story: don't be a dick when you're a musician (or in general), and never, EVER scream obscenities at your audience and say you're gonna kick their ass if they leave. For the rest of the festival, he was kind oif the laughingstock of the place, all the bands would make little references, people would scream out "fuck Steve Earl!!" randomly into the night. :D
Anyway the weekend was fucking amazing, I'm starting to know dozens and dozens of people through this festival and I make new friends every time. And there's always wonderful music. I love life. What a perfect vacation that was.
