yardbirdrc
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jan 8, 2011
- Messages
- 160
(25C-NBOMe / ~450ug) - First Experience - "Crazy For Trying"
Date: October 18, 2013
Time: 10:30pm-3:00am
Drug: 25C-NBOMe Hcl (not complexed)
Dose: 400 - 500ug buccal
Please note, this was my first experience with this drug although I'm an experienced user of psychedelics in general. Wasn't sure how that should translate to the thread title.
The evening began as many evenings tend to - in the living room of the small house shared by several close friends in Polish Hill. In our younger wilder days we were a larger, sparser tribe spanning many domiciles. For the past several months, however, this house had largely become headquarters, and everybody who regarded it as such had grown pretty close.
Alfred had been texting me for an hour urging me to come over, which usually means he's bored. After finishing up some stuff around the house and dividing / cramming a quarter ounce of MDMA into 2 vials, I threw these in a bag with some LSD and the 25C-NBOMe and made my way to base camp. I arrived to find the usual suspects congregated on the porch smoking cigarettes, and I immediately began talking shit to Alfred about his incessant texting. The vibe was dead. Meg had been drinking all day, Jamie had recently joined her, and in general people seemed pretty tired as Alfred flipped through minimalistic background music like only Alfred can. It seemed pretty likely we were staying in for the night.
I sat down in the living room and pulled the baggie out of my sweatshirt pocket.
"You've gotta see this fucking Molly, man." I threw one of the vials to Alfred. "It's so white that if I didn't know the source to be reputable I'd probably think it was some of that fake Chinese shit."
The vial was crammed full of dutch moonrocks that had been largely crushed for various reasons into small shards and powder. There was a striation near the bottom of the dram where my old, slightly browner moonrocks met the shiny new pure white stuff. Some kind soul out there must've done an acetone wash, which means some kind soul out there loves MDMA more than they love money. This type of shit warms my heart right in the cockles.
Obviously a night of drug use was ahead of us. Before I even arrived I think that this was understood. There were new products to test, there was new territory to chart, and it was time to do our civic duty and ply our tired bodies with designer chemicals for science. Kyle hadn't gotten off of work yet, usually he ends up being free around 10:30 which meant we were going to have a late start. He had his heart set on trying the newly arrived 25C-NBOMe blotters which were in copious (cooopoius) supply and laid at 1mg a piece. I decided to join him in this, as I was also curious what could be gained from this new addition to the pharmacopeia.
Let me take a quick divergence here to talk about just how fucking cheap this stuff is. The answer: cheaper than it should be. Literally not even worth asking people to pay for because they'd have to break a dollar - that cheap. The fact was unescapable for me throughout the entire evening - I was tripping on a chemical that I despised in principle. If I decided to be a scumbag and sell these blotters to people as LSD at the usual rates I could easily make a month's salary off the quantity I had acquired for less than a day's pay. That's disgusting. First we have to put up with 13% of MDMA actually being MDMA, and now not even Lucy is safe - good, pure Lucy, sweet as cherry pie! And people just shit on that for some dead-faced paper, like that first time LSD really opened them up just meant nothing to them. How can you take something that precious and just distort it like that? It's like spitting in your mother's face, you simple simon fucks. Fuck you people, I know some of you are reading this and fuck you sincerely.
Alfred opted to test out the new supply of LSD. The general buzz was that these tabs were clean but weak - tested on ecstasydata as 75 micrograms. I had overpaid for them, and I knew this, but I needed LSD on hand for some upcoming things and this was easy to acquire through the same channels as the MDMA. We spent some time plotting all of this out before Kyle finally arrived and it was time to dose. Earlier in the week I had dissuaded people from starting with a whole 25C tab. 1mg can be a very strong dose for some people, and in general from what I've read the drug seems drastically incosistent in just about every way possible. Kyle is a full monty kind of guy and a champion of the psychedelic arts in general, so he calmly ignored my advice as he slipped one of the deceptively small Popeye faced blotters into his lower lip. I cut one in half and gave the slightly larger half to Jamie, placing the other under my top lip. Alfred tongued his blotter, which represented some fraction of a taoist dolphin's anatomy.
As this was going on people started honing in on the MDMA. After some discussion it was decided that Sarah, Dan, Patrick and Meg would be guinea pigs for the new batch. I generally don't accept payment for drugs these days, but for this stuff I started a collection plate. Crystals were crushed up in Alfred's Adderral crucible and 50mg lines were arranged for each of the four of them to start.
"You're doing it wrong man, these are way too fat. They're like little slugs." Alfred took out his driver's license and dribbled the puck until there were four elegantly elongated lines laid out on the Timothy Leary book that was serving as Houston. Soup's on.
By now Kyle and Jamie were rendered mute by the saliva buildup they had been instructed to retain for purposes of buccal absorption. I had been talking through the MDMA process with people so my mouth remained a bit drier, and I worried that my unconscious swallowing of saliva was wasting precious micgrograms.
It was about 20 minutes before Kyle felt it. 30 for Jamie, and by 40 minutes in yours truly was coming around the corner. The rising action was very unusual because none of us really had any experiential knowledge about the chronology of this drug. We knew the numbers according to Erowid, but nobody knew the slope of the incline so to speak. We smoked cigarettes on the porch and Kyle was already getting tracers off passing cars. I was feeling a very gentle increase in physical effects but I was kind of worried the trip wouldn't go as far as I was hoping given these early signs from Kyle. Even Jamie was getting auras by now. We returned to the living room and I noticed and was reassured by the fact that things were still certainly developing. Even now I'm not sure if it was just cold in the apartment or if I was getting some mild muscle tremors, but Kyle and I shared several blankets and pulled our hoods up.
From the couch I began to notice the first visual effects. The room was lit by chritmas lights, and they began to undulate slightly. Some of the molly crowd were mildly dancing and being conversational but I felt detached from this. Color amplification, check. I heard Kyle exhale a few times next to me as he slowly moved his hands through his field of vision. I asked if he was alright. I didn't really worry that he wasn't, but I could tell he was going into some interesting space. We both remarked that we felt couch-locked, which was unexpected. Eventually the molly-folk were discussing re-up options, so I unblanketed myself and cast molly upon the crowd with 30mg strength. It was super effective.
This was Dan's first time on the compound, incidentally. I could tell he was a little anxious about it, because he said he was a little anxious about it. I did my best to dissuade his fears, fears that not long ago I shared. I have had my run-ins with anxiety as well, and I assured him that MDMA is the farthest thing from anxiety. This is still something that can't be truly understood until it's already coursing through your veins. People have this impression that MDMA is a speedy drug, one that makes you want to dance all night. In my experience, and in the experiences I've gleaned from other fellows, it seems that the purer the drug is the less peripheral stimulation is present. All of my MDMA experiences have been with tested and verified high purity, unadulterated MDMA. No pressed pills included in that figure. I must say that stimulation has been a pretty minor and at times forgettable aspect of the experience. Instead a sense of peace prevails above all else. After the second line, I could see Dan starting to understand that and I hoped strongly that the experience would benefit him.
Things were more interesting by that point for me. Everybody noted perceived body temperature modulations. I was laying on the couch rocking that wire head massager hard. Visuals were developing a bit but not overwhelming. I mostly noted a softness of lines and a cartoony glow about things a la 2C-B, but pattern overlay was unexpectedly absent and fractals weren't really on my radar. Mentally very centered, a little stoney if anything - like a small bong rip or something similarly manageable. Physically it was pleasurable, and tactile sensations were pretty nicely augmented a la most phenethylamines. On the whole it was like a weird inbred child of the 2C family and LSD. In a general sense this was about what I expected, but obviously not exactly how I had imagined.
I went to the kitchen in search of Sarah who had mentioned that there was an unclaimed coat floating around the apartment somewhere. She produced the coat from a dining room chair and I donned it to allay the mild muscle tremor that seemed everpresent. Water was heating up for tea. I opted for an orange peel variety that involved jasmine and some green tea, skillfully prescribed by Patrick: master of teas. This was some fancy brand where the teabags were a silky plastic material instead of thin paper which was all the hard working salt of the earth teas could afford.
"The fuck is this shit? Look at this, it's like space age materials." The way the light was playing off the teabag brought up memories of freeze dried ice cream, for which I have a serious disdain that involves a great deal of backstory which I won't get into.
"You gotta get the ones with the pyramids! They're the best."
"With the what?!"
As the tea was poured, Sarah regailed us with detailed knowledge and anecdotes related to tea and her English heritage. She also encouraged us to sample some cinnamon biscuits she had baked. All of this was just lovely. I was feeling more and more talkative, and simultaneously I was enraptured by listening to others talk. We passed around our various teas, and we passed around our various cigarettes. Kyle, having just snorted some MDMA to go with his 25c (that crazy bastard), was looking for something menthol. Meanwhile I was camping out with my usual Marlboro Reds, and Meg was passing around Seneca Lights which we affectionately referred to as "clouds", because that's what we imagined they tasted like.
"Ohhhh man. This cigarette is really doing something to me." Meg's facial expression was as if she had just climbed into a jacuzzi. The MDMA was doing its work.
People filtered in and out and eventually the kitchen was left with just myself, Meg and Kyle. I began to talk here about what a great joy it is to share with people. This slowly became a rant about how so many people are just mired in bullshit and aren't truthful to themselves and to others. I expressed how either drug use, or life experience, or both had led me to become a very open and genuine person. We all were, everybody in that house. That's what made everything work so well. Kyle was laying on the Kitchen floor, echoing my sentiments of love and pride for the people we surrounded ourselves with.
Soon I joined Kyle and the floor and we talked about random things for a while. Jamie arrived at some point and expressed a desire to do somthing productive like go for a walk. I lit another cigarette to this remark so that it would have time to ruminate. Building a fort was also a suggested activity. In the end Jamie and I just spent 15 minutes bullshitting about the various catholic priests who had given sermons at the church we both attended as kids. Jamie is from the town I grew up in, though we didn't really become friends until we were in college together.
I don't remember a lot of the laying-on-the-kitchen-floor period. I know that this is when I finally felt fully comfortable in the trip. At one point I was spinning around on my back pretending to be a clock. We also reconvened with Alfred, who had turned his LSD trip into a candyflip by now. For one reason or another everybody seemed to have the giggles.
We returned to the living room and fell into deep conversation. Sarah had returned from a prolonged and presumably sexual absence. Her boyfriend Lou (prounounced "Llloooooooouuuuuu") had fallen asleep upstairs - a harbinger of sleep to come for the molly camp. We were probably about 4 hours in by this point. Many of the previous hours that were not explicitly described were spent in brownian motion - walking, talking, sitting, etc. By now the effects were generally tapering. I remarked that the drug was generally enjoyable, but that I wasn't in love with it. The general lack of (but not complete absence of) insight was of course disappointing, but something I was used to from the halogenated 2C's. I think I prefer the plain 2C's to this new spin on them, but at this point I'm not sure that I can say why exactly that is. One interesting effect is that this drug made me feel particularly talkative. There were times I had to stop to breathe because I had been talking so much. While not a direct sort of insight, I definitely found this valuable and interesting. A lot of the positive things I took away from the experience came from interacting with other people rather than internally. Certainly I will make further ventures with 25C given the remaining quantity.
Sarah and I started talking pretty in depth about hip hop and culture in general.
"You know how for a while 80's stuff was coming back? Like all the hipsters latched onto the 80's?"
"90's, 90's is big." Meg chimed.
"Yeah and now its the 90's. I can't wait for the early 2000's to come back. When people are wearing velour sweatsuits and oversized basketball jerseys, or like that dress J-Lo wore where it was V-Cut but the V came all the way down." I lit up at this statement from Sarah. I'd been playing a lot of Dipset lately, and I had recently made a playlist for an upcoming party that was a lot of early 2000's southern hip hop. People tend to look down on that time period as a time of stagnation for the genre, and in some ways it is but having listened to hip hop for many years it's kind of the last frontier for me and there's a lot that can be discussed in terms of cultural influence.
We talked about the influx of weird flavor of the month rappers at the time like Nelly and Ja Rule, and eventually we got to the subject of Lil Wayne.
"Lil Wayne was really big too, he was actually really great in like 2002." Once again I was extremely pleased to see that Sarah and I were on the same page. I get really disappointed by the fact that people often completely disregard Lil Wayne because of his recent career which has been pretty vapid.
"Wayne was huge man! Huge! People don't understand the kind of monster he was until like '07 - '08! I mean now when I say how good Lil Wayne is people think "Unh I let her lick the lollipop" and they think I'm some kind of idiot."
"Yeah, yeah..."
"But man... Dedication, Dedication 2, that Blow tape with Juelz Santana, fuckin' Drought 3... all classics man, fucking 5 star classics. And people just sleep on that shit and look at me sideways when I put it on. For a minute there he was like the next Jay-Z."
Pretty much nobody else was talking during this conversation, which went on for probably 15 minutes. Meg eventually asked for some context so Sarah and I laid out the migration of hip hop from New York through the West Coast and eventually the rise of the South, all in terms of how the music reflected certain reactions to hardship. Namely that New York in the 90's took on a subdued and depressed air (think Pete Rock and DJ Premier), the West coast reacted with anger and militant frustration (think NWA), and the South played the role of the sad clown - a quirky and highly materialistic culture that belied deeper insecurities (think Pimp C).
Meg and Patrick retired to bed around 2:30, and the rest of us remained talking for another 15 or 20 minutes. Eventually Kyle and I went to drive home, feeling more or less baseline by this point. As I went to pull out he motioned to roll down my window.
"Put on 88.3!"
I re-pocketed my phone and hit the FM button. There was some music most likely from the late 20's or early 30's that was in the vein of Annette Hanshaw. I cracked a huge grin that I was not able to wipe off my face for the drive home. "Crazy" by Patsy Cline came on as I pulled to a stop light. I had a moment where I spontaneously started chuckling. I felt as if I might shed a tear for how happy and fulfilled I felt at that moment. Adjusting to life without a partner had been difficult over the past several months, but lately largely thanks to some incredible friends and some delving into psychedelics I was feeling happier than ever to be on my own. I've been discovering parts of myself that I had never had the time to discover before, and I was putting things on track to make my life what I really wanted it to be - for myself, not for anyone else. I felt like myself more than ever. Paradoxically I felt this way because my "self" was more fluid and less defined than ever, and that's exactly how I liked it. I was reminded of that passage - "The highest good is like water. Water gives life to the multitude of things without striving." The light turned green.
"Crazy... I'm crazy for feeling so lonely... Worry! Why do I let myself worry? Crazy for thinkin' that my love could hold you. I'm crazy for trying, and crazy for crying, and crazy for loving... you."
Date: October 18, 2013
Time: 10:30pm-3:00am
Drug: 25C-NBOMe Hcl (not complexed)
Dose: 400 - 500ug buccal
Please note, this was my first experience with this drug although I'm an experienced user of psychedelics in general. Wasn't sure how that should translate to the thread title.
The evening began as many evenings tend to - in the living room of the small house shared by several close friends in Polish Hill. In our younger wilder days we were a larger, sparser tribe spanning many domiciles. For the past several months, however, this house had largely become headquarters, and everybody who regarded it as such had grown pretty close.
Alfred had been texting me for an hour urging me to come over, which usually means he's bored. After finishing up some stuff around the house and dividing / cramming a quarter ounce of MDMA into 2 vials, I threw these in a bag with some LSD and the 25C-NBOMe and made my way to base camp. I arrived to find the usual suspects congregated on the porch smoking cigarettes, and I immediately began talking shit to Alfred about his incessant texting. The vibe was dead. Meg had been drinking all day, Jamie had recently joined her, and in general people seemed pretty tired as Alfred flipped through minimalistic background music like only Alfred can. It seemed pretty likely we were staying in for the night.
I sat down in the living room and pulled the baggie out of my sweatshirt pocket.
"You've gotta see this fucking Molly, man." I threw one of the vials to Alfred. "It's so white that if I didn't know the source to be reputable I'd probably think it was some of that fake Chinese shit."
The vial was crammed full of dutch moonrocks that had been largely crushed for various reasons into small shards and powder. There was a striation near the bottom of the dram where my old, slightly browner moonrocks met the shiny new pure white stuff. Some kind soul out there must've done an acetone wash, which means some kind soul out there loves MDMA more than they love money. This type of shit warms my heart right in the cockles.
Obviously a night of drug use was ahead of us. Before I even arrived I think that this was understood. There were new products to test, there was new territory to chart, and it was time to do our civic duty and ply our tired bodies with designer chemicals for science. Kyle hadn't gotten off of work yet, usually he ends up being free around 10:30 which meant we were going to have a late start. He had his heart set on trying the newly arrived 25C-NBOMe blotters which were in copious (cooopoius) supply and laid at 1mg a piece. I decided to join him in this, as I was also curious what could be gained from this new addition to the pharmacopeia.
Let me take a quick divergence here to talk about just how fucking cheap this stuff is. The answer: cheaper than it should be. Literally not even worth asking people to pay for because they'd have to break a dollar - that cheap. The fact was unescapable for me throughout the entire evening - I was tripping on a chemical that I despised in principle. If I decided to be a scumbag and sell these blotters to people as LSD at the usual rates I could easily make a month's salary off the quantity I had acquired for less than a day's pay. That's disgusting. First we have to put up with 13% of MDMA actually being MDMA, and now not even Lucy is safe - good, pure Lucy, sweet as cherry pie! And people just shit on that for some dead-faced paper, like that first time LSD really opened them up just meant nothing to them. How can you take something that precious and just distort it like that? It's like spitting in your mother's face, you simple simon fucks. Fuck you people, I know some of you are reading this and fuck you sincerely.
Alfred opted to test out the new supply of LSD. The general buzz was that these tabs were clean but weak - tested on ecstasydata as 75 micrograms. I had overpaid for them, and I knew this, but I needed LSD on hand for some upcoming things and this was easy to acquire through the same channels as the MDMA. We spent some time plotting all of this out before Kyle finally arrived and it was time to dose. Earlier in the week I had dissuaded people from starting with a whole 25C tab. 1mg can be a very strong dose for some people, and in general from what I've read the drug seems drastically incosistent in just about every way possible. Kyle is a full monty kind of guy and a champion of the psychedelic arts in general, so he calmly ignored my advice as he slipped one of the deceptively small Popeye faced blotters into his lower lip. I cut one in half and gave the slightly larger half to Jamie, placing the other under my top lip. Alfred tongued his blotter, which represented some fraction of a taoist dolphin's anatomy.
As this was going on people started honing in on the MDMA. After some discussion it was decided that Sarah, Dan, Patrick and Meg would be guinea pigs for the new batch. I generally don't accept payment for drugs these days, but for this stuff I started a collection plate. Crystals were crushed up in Alfred's Adderral crucible and 50mg lines were arranged for each of the four of them to start.
"You're doing it wrong man, these are way too fat. They're like little slugs." Alfred took out his driver's license and dribbled the puck until there were four elegantly elongated lines laid out on the Timothy Leary book that was serving as Houston. Soup's on.
By now Kyle and Jamie were rendered mute by the saliva buildup they had been instructed to retain for purposes of buccal absorption. I had been talking through the MDMA process with people so my mouth remained a bit drier, and I worried that my unconscious swallowing of saliva was wasting precious micgrograms.
It was about 20 minutes before Kyle felt it. 30 for Jamie, and by 40 minutes in yours truly was coming around the corner. The rising action was very unusual because none of us really had any experiential knowledge about the chronology of this drug. We knew the numbers according to Erowid, but nobody knew the slope of the incline so to speak. We smoked cigarettes on the porch and Kyle was already getting tracers off passing cars. I was feeling a very gentle increase in physical effects but I was kind of worried the trip wouldn't go as far as I was hoping given these early signs from Kyle. Even Jamie was getting auras by now. We returned to the living room and I noticed and was reassured by the fact that things were still certainly developing. Even now I'm not sure if it was just cold in the apartment or if I was getting some mild muscle tremors, but Kyle and I shared several blankets and pulled our hoods up.
From the couch I began to notice the first visual effects. The room was lit by chritmas lights, and they began to undulate slightly. Some of the molly crowd were mildly dancing and being conversational but I felt detached from this. Color amplification, check. I heard Kyle exhale a few times next to me as he slowly moved his hands through his field of vision. I asked if he was alright. I didn't really worry that he wasn't, but I could tell he was going into some interesting space. We both remarked that we felt couch-locked, which was unexpected. Eventually the molly-folk were discussing re-up options, so I unblanketed myself and cast molly upon the crowd with 30mg strength. It was super effective.
This was Dan's first time on the compound, incidentally. I could tell he was a little anxious about it, because he said he was a little anxious about it. I did my best to dissuade his fears, fears that not long ago I shared. I have had my run-ins with anxiety as well, and I assured him that MDMA is the farthest thing from anxiety. This is still something that can't be truly understood until it's already coursing through your veins. People have this impression that MDMA is a speedy drug, one that makes you want to dance all night. In my experience, and in the experiences I've gleaned from other fellows, it seems that the purer the drug is the less peripheral stimulation is present. All of my MDMA experiences have been with tested and verified high purity, unadulterated MDMA. No pressed pills included in that figure. I must say that stimulation has been a pretty minor and at times forgettable aspect of the experience. Instead a sense of peace prevails above all else. After the second line, I could see Dan starting to understand that and I hoped strongly that the experience would benefit him.
Things were more interesting by that point for me. Everybody noted perceived body temperature modulations. I was laying on the couch rocking that wire head massager hard. Visuals were developing a bit but not overwhelming. I mostly noted a softness of lines and a cartoony glow about things a la 2C-B, but pattern overlay was unexpectedly absent and fractals weren't really on my radar. Mentally very centered, a little stoney if anything - like a small bong rip or something similarly manageable. Physically it was pleasurable, and tactile sensations were pretty nicely augmented a la most phenethylamines. On the whole it was like a weird inbred child of the 2C family and LSD. In a general sense this was about what I expected, but obviously not exactly how I had imagined.
I went to the kitchen in search of Sarah who had mentioned that there was an unclaimed coat floating around the apartment somewhere. She produced the coat from a dining room chair and I donned it to allay the mild muscle tremor that seemed everpresent. Water was heating up for tea. I opted for an orange peel variety that involved jasmine and some green tea, skillfully prescribed by Patrick: master of teas. This was some fancy brand where the teabags were a silky plastic material instead of thin paper which was all the hard working salt of the earth teas could afford.
"The fuck is this shit? Look at this, it's like space age materials." The way the light was playing off the teabag brought up memories of freeze dried ice cream, for which I have a serious disdain that involves a great deal of backstory which I won't get into.
"You gotta get the ones with the pyramids! They're the best."
"With the what?!"
As the tea was poured, Sarah regailed us with detailed knowledge and anecdotes related to tea and her English heritage. She also encouraged us to sample some cinnamon biscuits she had baked. All of this was just lovely. I was feeling more and more talkative, and simultaneously I was enraptured by listening to others talk. We passed around our various teas, and we passed around our various cigarettes. Kyle, having just snorted some MDMA to go with his 25c (that crazy bastard), was looking for something menthol. Meanwhile I was camping out with my usual Marlboro Reds, and Meg was passing around Seneca Lights which we affectionately referred to as "clouds", because that's what we imagined they tasted like.
"Ohhhh man. This cigarette is really doing something to me." Meg's facial expression was as if she had just climbed into a jacuzzi. The MDMA was doing its work.
People filtered in and out and eventually the kitchen was left with just myself, Meg and Kyle. I began to talk here about what a great joy it is to share with people. This slowly became a rant about how so many people are just mired in bullshit and aren't truthful to themselves and to others. I expressed how either drug use, or life experience, or both had led me to become a very open and genuine person. We all were, everybody in that house. That's what made everything work so well. Kyle was laying on the Kitchen floor, echoing my sentiments of love and pride for the people we surrounded ourselves with.
Soon I joined Kyle and the floor and we talked about random things for a while. Jamie arrived at some point and expressed a desire to do somthing productive like go for a walk. I lit another cigarette to this remark so that it would have time to ruminate. Building a fort was also a suggested activity. In the end Jamie and I just spent 15 minutes bullshitting about the various catholic priests who had given sermons at the church we both attended as kids. Jamie is from the town I grew up in, though we didn't really become friends until we were in college together.
I don't remember a lot of the laying-on-the-kitchen-floor period. I know that this is when I finally felt fully comfortable in the trip. At one point I was spinning around on my back pretending to be a clock. We also reconvened with Alfred, who had turned his LSD trip into a candyflip by now. For one reason or another everybody seemed to have the giggles.
We returned to the living room and fell into deep conversation. Sarah had returned from a prolonged and presumably sexual absence. Her boyfriend Lou (prounounced "Llloooooooouuuuuu") had fallen asleep upstairs - a harbinger of sleep to come for the molly camp. We were probably about 4 hours in by this point. Many of the previous hours that were not explicitly described were spent in brownian motion - walking, talking, sitting, etc. By now the effects were generally tapering. I remarked that the drug was generally enjoyable, but that I wasn't in love with it. The general lack of (but not complete absence of) insight was of course disappointing, but something I was used to from the halogenated 2C's. I think I prefer the plain 2C's to this new spin on them, but at this point I'm not sure that I can say why exactly that is. One interesting effect is that this drug made me feel particularly talkative. There were times I had to stop to breathe because I had been talking so much. While not a direct sort of insight, I definitely found this valuable and interesting. A lot of the positive things I took away from the experience came from interacting with other people rather than internally. Certainly I will make further ventures with 25C given the remaining quantity.
Sarah and I started talking pretty in depth about hip hop and culture in general.
"You know how for a while 80's stuff was coming back? Like all the hipsters latched onto the 80's?"
"90's, 90's is big." Meg chimed.
"Yeah and now its the 90's. I can't wait for the early 2000's to come back. When people are wearing velour sweatsuits and oversized basketball jerseys, or like that dress J-Lo wore where it was V-Cut but the V came all the way down." I lit up at this statement from Sarah. I'd been playing a lot of Dipset lately, and I had recently made a playlist for an upcoming party that was a lot of early 2000's southern hip hop. People tend to look down on that time period as a time of stagnation for the genre, and in some ways it is but having listened to hip hop for many years it's kind of the last frontier for me and there's a lot that can be discussed in terms of cultural influence.
We talked about the influx of weird flavor of the month rappers at the time like Nelly and Ja Rule, and eventually we got to the subject of Lil Wayne.
"Lil Wayne was really big too, he was actually really great in like 2002." Once again I was extremely pleased to see that Sarah and I were on the same page. I get really disappointed by the fact that people often completely disregard Lil Wayne because of his recent career which has been pretty vapid.
"Wayne was huge man! Huge! People don't understand the kind of monster he was until like '07 - '08! I mean now when I say how good Lil Wayne is people think "Unh I let her lick the lollipop" and they think I'm some kind of idiot."
"Yeah, yeah..."
"But man... Dedication, Dedication 2, that Blow tape with Juelz Santana, fuckin' Drought 3... all classics man, fucking 5 star classics. And people just sleep on that shit and look at me sideways when I put it on. For a minute there he was like the next Jay-Z."
Pretty much nobody else was talking during this conversation, which went on for probably 15 minutes. Meg eventually asked for some context so Sarah and I laid out the migration of hip hop from New York through the West Coast and eventually the rise of the South, all in terms of how the music reflected certain reactions to hardship. Namely that New York in the 90's took on a subdued and depressed air (think Pete Rock and DJ Premier), the West coast reacted with anger and militant frustration (think NWA), and the South played the role of the sad clown - a quirky and highly materialistic culture that belied deeper insecurities (think Pimp C).
Meg and Patrick retired to bed around 2:30, and the rest of us remained talking for another 15 or 20 minutes. Eventually Kyle and I went to drive home, feeling more or less baseline by this point. As I went to pull out he motioned to roll down my window.
"Put on 88.3!"
I re-pocketed my phone and hit the FM button. There was some music most likely from the late 20's or early 30's that was in the vein of Annette Hanshaw. I cracked a huge grin that I was not able to wipe off my face for the drive home. "Crazy" by Patsy Cline came on as I pulled to a stop light. I had a moment where I spontaneously started chuckling. I felt as if I might shed a tear for how happy and fulfilled I felt at that moment. Adjusting to life without a partner had been difficult over the past several months, but lately largely thanks to some incredible friends and some delving into psychedelics I was feeling happier than ever to be on my own. I've been discovering parts of myself that I had never had the time to discover before, and I was putting things on track to make my life what I really wanted it to be - for myself, not for anyone else. I felt like myself more than ever. Paradoxically I felt this way because my "self" was more fluid and less defined than ever, and that's exactly how I liked it. I was reminded of that passage - "The highest good is like water. Water gives life to the multitude of things without striving." The light turned green.
"Crazy... I'm crazy for feeling so lonely... Worry! Why do I let myself worry? Crazy for thinkin' that my love could hold you. I'm crazy for trying, and crazy for crying, and crazy for loving... you."
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