Aidan of TCC
Bluelighter
This report is from slightly over 2 years ago. I must have been having fun writing this one or something. Reading over it now, the writing style borders on embarrassingly flowery.
It was nearing four in the pm as I left the post office and my body was seething with amphetamine-like energy that pierced through the haze of the previous night's Xanax binge. Driving with an out-of-character aggression, I paused the ear splitting electronic rock that was fueling my mood and flipped open my phone and located the appropriate entry: 'Liz Jew'.
Five rings later, a familiar voice stated quite definitively, “Voicemail.”
“Ready or not, here I come,” said I, with comparable certainty. Ten minutes later I was at her doorstep, rapping my knuckles against the door with an urgent force. I put my ear to the door: a faint rustling, she was inside. I knocked again to let her know I wasn't going anywhere. The door opened to unveil my bleary-eyed Jewish friend, motioning me in. She was wearing a comfortable pair of pajamas and had quite clearly just rolled out of bed, despite it being four o-clock on a Tuesday afternoon.
Before she could say a word, I pulled out a small prescription bottle and handed it for her to read. “XANAX 2MG PILLS 60” read the label, prescribed in my name. Her response was just what I was looking for, “I wasn't going to trip today, I had decided. I thought about letting you leave without answering, but you've just changed my mind. I'm only going to take one hit though. Let me get dressed.”
Getting dressed for a trip is not like getting dressed for any other day, if you're a clothes person. And we both are. Twenty minutes later she had settled on a light brown hat, the sort that looks well-loved with a soft floppy brim. A long black and tan scarf had made the cut, as well as a gray fleece and a pair of loud red and white striped pants that half covered her sneakers. It would be a cold night, and we were both prepared. I had chosen my familiar brown leather car coat with a brown plaid wool scarf for warmth over a favorite blue and white sweater. My pants were of the tan khaki cargo variety that I still hold in favor in spite of a missing button and several threadbare parts. We both agreed that it's best to wear one's favorite clothes on such occasions. It was brisk outside, and overcast, but my enthusiasm was rubbing off and our excitement would not be tempered
Upon reaching my house we came upon a problem. Not an earth-shattering problem like cancer or a poorly-timed grand mal seizure. No, thankfully this was more of an inconvenience than a problem. The vial of acid posed was at hand, but I was fresh out of sweet tarts. Fortunately, green apple laffy-taffy came to our rescue, an indentation pressed in with the butt of a pen. Three drops for me. “Three?” Liz asked incredulously.
“Three.” I replied, smiling. She frowned thoughtfully.
“Give me two then—but a small two.”
A knock came at my door seconds after we began chewing the apple flavored taffy. It was the friendly knock, though, the one that let me know a friend or friendly acquaintance was calling, and such suspicions were confirmed by the peephole. Time passed, company left. A knock came again, the procedure was repeated. Thirty minutes had passed in a few quick moments and the world was beginning to appear different. It wasn't the disconcerting acid come up I was accustomed to. Liz, on the other hand, was enduring the typically jolting journey into the psychedelic world. The reason occurred to me, I was still under the effects of an anxiolytic and quickly offered her half a milligram of Xanax to smooth out the bumpy ride.
I had a new toy to play with for this journey, and I brought it out at this point. The night before I bought myself the Nikon D70 DSLR camera I had been pining over for months. Having never used an SLR camera before, my proficiency was poor at best. Several pictures were attempted, but the evening light was failing and little came of it. That didn't stop me from lugging the entire apparatus with me to our destination for the evening, a medium sized park a ten minute walk away.
Having by now both come up, I locked the door and our walk began. Surprisingly, the sky was clear save for a line of clouds on the horizon, the overcast of an hour before fleeting swiftly. A clear November night meant a cold November night, but luckily Liz had wrapped a fuzzy blue blanket around her in preparation for the swiftly-approaching dark. Things were reasonably normal as we strolled through my quiet neighborhood and through a small wooded path and out to the intersection of a major road. “Let me push the button so the little white man will tell us that we may cross,” I thought out loud.
“Yes, he makes me feel safe, the white man,” she replied, in reference to the brilliant white stick figure that signifies safe passage may be made.
Soon we came to the familiar Wilson Park. Eight of us had been there on Halloween with the same intoxicant. “Lets walk around the playground this time, I don't want to scare off the kids playing on the playground like we did last time.” Liz agreed and we circled the open field adjacent to the playground and tennis courts. The sun was setting and the clouds had taken on a surreal purple hue whose surrealism could be blamed only in part on the acid.
Circling around the playing children, I scanned the area for a bench I was familiar with and pointed it out to Liz. It sat just to the right of a small copse of pine trees that grew on a small knoll that I am particularly fond of. It wasn't a fancy bench by any stretch of the imagination. Flecks of red paint were pealing off of the three boards of varying width that comprised the sea. Two more equally red and equally irregular boards served as the backing. Weather-worn iron held the piece together as it looked out over the open field from its elevated perspective.
There's something about acid and hills that's rather peculiar. That peculiarity being that it makes them invisible. That's not to say you can't see the hill, it's quite definitely still there, but it ceases to be a hill. You know the hill is there, assuming you're familiar with said hill, but it tends to look unusually flat. You can't walk up or down a hill on a strong acid trip. Some directions are easier to walk in and some are harder, but everything is flat. “Fucking topography,” I said jokingly as I stumbled and caught myself. Both of us were familiar with this phenomenon, and this was, without a doubt, a strong acid trip.
Sitting down on the bench, we spread the blanket out so as to cover both of us. Every minute the sun slipped lower the temperature followed suit and the mist of our breath could be seen in the air. It was a pleasant place to be, but as the darkness grew so did our curiosity, and a path into the dark woods beckoned.
As I followed Liz down the wide path, I quickly became aware that my inebriation was much greater than hers. The path was easily twenty feet wide and she was walking casually but with confidence. I, on the other hand, was soon unable to tell that we were walking on a path at all. Wire fences sprang out of nowhere in every direction. The sort of wire fencing that comes in large spools and lines wooden horse fences. Trees, as well, grew out of nowhere on either side of me. In my mind, we were walking on a carefully chosen path no more then two feet wide. However, I knew the path from the past and wanted to find something a little more private. We decided to veer off to the left and by what seemed like chance, we found small jogging path through the woods. It was quite dark by that time, though, and not even Liz was sure whether or not it was a path or just a spot in the woods. We picked out a friendly looking pine with a medium sized trunk and sat down at it, covered in our fuzzy blue blanket.
Within minutes of sitting down, a jogger ran by and nearly stumbled over us, a small dog following at his heels and barking at us as if he knew something was abnormal about the situation. As my small pocket flashlight then revealed, there was something abnormal about the situation. We were sitting exactly in the middle of the jogging path, whose existence we had earlier questioned. From the perspective of a jogger, it was certainly not a convenient place for two people to be sitting under a blanket in the dark. Unabashed by our poor choice of location, we continued to sit under our pine for some time. The jogging day was coming to a close; that was the last person we saw in the park that night.
As the cold became uncomfortable, we stood to walk again. This time it was a much more difficult task for me. As we walked the path, it became increasingly un-pathlike in its nature. The ground had become an iron grate, partially covered by sheet metal, but in other places revealing a bustling city hundreds of feet below. For a time I was able to quell my fear of heights and realize the illusion, but eventually I motioned Liz to stop.
“What's wrong?” she asked.
“I'm walking on a catwalk hundreds of feet above a city and I'm afraid of heights. I need to turn my flashlight on for a second, let me find it. Ah, there, pine needles, not iron. I'm okay now.” This became a recurring event every few minutes for the rest of our time in the woods. Eventually we saw a road through the woods, and our path was headed for it. I knew the road and said as much, leading us towards it at a hurried pace. The path somehow turned into a cement culvert (in reality, not my mind) and I steadied Liz and myself as we hurried down it.
We broke into a clearing that was not at all what I expected. Red clay was everywhere and bright lights were illuminating workers in yellow hard hats and bulldozers. The sound of machinery was heavy in the air and the entire area was swarming with people. It didn't make sense, it was much too late for so much activity on the road I was expecting. “This isn't where I thought it was, lets go back in the woods, quick, before someone sees us.”
Stumbling back up the cement culvert, I turned to look back from a safe distance. My face flushed, unseen in the dark. “I thought that was a construction site in the middle of the woods that we accidentally came across. But it's not, it's Estes road like I originally thought. I'm sorry.” Once again we made our way down the culvert and to the road, which suddenly looked much more familiar. We found the original wide path and returned to the park, stopping a moment at our bench that looked cold and lonely on the top of its knoll.
The walk home was a struggle against topography, but we conquered contour without much further incident and found ourselves back in my living room four hours after dosing.
The file ends here with "to be continued" but I don't believe I ever continued it.
It was nearing four in the pm as I left the post office and my body was seething with amphetamine-like energy that pierced through the haze of the previous night's Xanax binge. Driving with an out-of-character aggression, I paused the ear splitting electronic rock that was fueling my mood and flipped open my phone and located the appropriate entry: 'Liz Jew'.
Five rings later, a familiar voice stated quite definitively, “Voicemail.”
“Ready or not, here I come,” said I, with comparable certainty. Ten minutes later I was at her doorstep, rapping my knuckles against the door with an urgent force. I put my ear to the door: a faint rustling, she was inside. I knocked again to let her know I wasn't going anywhere. The door opened to unveil my bleary-eyed Jewish friend, motioning me in. She was wearing a comfortable pair of pajamas and had quite clearly just rolled out of bed, despite it being four o-clock on a Tuesday afternoon.
Before she could say a word, I pulled out a small prescription bottle and handed it for her to read. “XANAX 2MG PILLS 60” read the label, prescribed in my name. Her response was just what I was looking for, “I wasn't going to trip today, I had decided. I thought about letting you leave without answering, but you've just changed my mind. I'm only going to take one hit though. Let me get dressed.”
Getting dressed for a trip is not like getting dressed for any other day, if you're a clothes person. And we both are. Twenty minutes later she had settled on a light brown hat, the sort that looks well-loved with a soft floppy brim. A long black and tan scarf had made the cut, as well as a gray fleece and a pair of loud red and white striped pants that half covered her sneakers. It would be a cold night, and we were both prepared. I had chosen my familiar brown leather car coat with a brown plaid wool scarf for warmth over a favorite blue and white sweater. My pants were of the tan khaki cargo variety that I still hold in favor in spite of a missing button and several threadbare parts. We both agreed that it's best to wear one's favorite clothes on such occasions. It was brisk outside, and overcast, but my enthusiasm was rubbing off and our excitement would not be tempered
Upon reaching my house we came upon a problem. Not an earth-shattering problem like cancer or a poorly-timed grand mal seizure. No, thankfully this was more of an inconvenience than a problem. The vial of acid posed was at hand, but I was fresh out of sweet tarts. Fortunately, green apple laffy-taffy came to our rescue, an indentation pressed in with the butt of a pen. Three drops for me. “Three?” Liz asked incredulously.
“Three.” I replied, smiling. She frowned thoughtfully.
“Give me two then—but a small two.”
A knock came at my door seconds after we began chewing the apple flavored taffy. It was the friendly knock, though, the one that let me know a friend or friendly acquaintance was calling, and such suspicions were confirmed by the peephole. Time passed, company left. A knock came again, the procedure was repeated. Thirty minutes had passed in a few quick moments and the world was beginning to appear different. It wasn't the disconcerting acid come up I was accustomed to. Liz, on the other hand, was enduring the typically jolting journey into the psychedelic world. The reason occurred to me, I was still under the effects of an anxiolytic and quickly offered her half a milligram of Xanax to smooth out the bumpy ride.
I had a new toy to play with for this journey, and I brought it out at this point. The night before I bought myself the Nikon D70 DSLR camera I had been pining over for months. Having never used an SLR camera before, my proficiency was poor at best. Several pictures were attempted, but the evening light was failing and little came of it. That didn't stop me from lugging the entire apparatus with me to our destination for the evening, a medium sized park a ten minute walk away.
Having by now both come up, I locked the door and our walk began. Surprisingly, the sky was clear save for a line of clouds on the horizon, the overcast of an hour before fleeting swiftly. A clear November night meant a cold November night, but luckily Liz had wrapped a fuzzy blue blanket around her in preparation for the swiftly-approaching dark. Things were reasonably normal as we strolled through my quiet neighborhood and through a small wooded path and out to the intersection of a major road. “Let me push the button so the little white man will tell us that we may cross,” I thought out loud.
“Yes, he makes me feel safe, the white man,” she replied, in reference to the brilliant white stick figure that signifies safe passage may be made.
Soon we came to the familiar Wilson Park. Eight of us had been there on Halloween with the same intoxicant. “Lets walk around the playground this time, I don't want to scare off the kids playing on the playground like we did last time.” Liz agreed and we circled the open field adjacent to the playground and tennis courts. The sun was setting and the clouds had taken on a surreal purple hue whose surrealism could be blamed only in part on the acid.
Circling around the playing children, I scanned the area for a bench I was familiar with and pointed it out to Liz. It sat just to the right of a small copse of pine trees that grew on a small knoll that I am particularly fond of. It wasn't a fancy bench by any stretch of the imagination. Flecks of red paint were pealing off of the three boards of varying width that comprised the sea. Two more equally red and equally irregular boards served as the backing. Weather-worn iron held the piece together as it looked out over the open field from its elevated perspective.
There's something about acid and hills that's rather peculiar. That peculiarity being that it makes them invisible. That's not to say you can't see the hill, it's quite definitely still there, but it ceases to be a hill. You know the hill is there, assuming you're familiar with said hill, but it tends to look unusually flat. You can't walk up or down a hill on a strong acid trip. Some directions are easier to walk in and some are harder, but everything is flat. “Fucking topography,” I said jokingly as I stumbled and caught myself. Both of us were familiar with this phenomenon, and this was, without a doubt, a strong acid trip.
Sitting down on the bench, we spread the blanket out so as to cover both of us. Every minute the sun slipped lower the temperature followed suit and the mist of our breath could be seen in the air. It was a pleasant place to be, but as the darkness grew so did our curiosity, and a path into the dark woods beckoned.
As I followed Liz down the wide path, I quickly became aware that my inebriation was much greater than hers. The path was easily twenty feet wide and she was walking casually but with confidence. I, on the other hand, was soon unable to tell that we were walking on a path at all. Wire fences sprang out of nowhere in every direction. The sort of wire fencing that comes in large spools and lines wooden horse fences. Trees, as well, grew out of nowhere on either side of me. In my mind, we were walking on a carefully chosen path no more then two feet wide. However, I knew the path from the past and wanted to find something a little more private. We decided to veer off to the left and by what seemed like chance, we found small jogging path through the woods. It was quite dark by that time, though, and not even Liz was sure whether or not it was a path or just a spot in the woods. We picked out a friendly looking pine with a medium sized trunk and sat down at it, covered in our fuzzy blue blanket.
Within minutes of sitting down, a jogger ran by and nearly stumbled over us, a small dog following at his heels and barking at us as if he knew something was abnormal about the situation. As my small pocket flashlight then revealed, there was something abnormal about the situation. We were sitting exactly in the middle of the jogging path, whose existence we had earlier questioned. From the perspective of a jogger, it was certainly not a convenient place for two people to be sitting under a blanket in the dark. Unabashed by our poor choice of location, we continued to sit under our pine for some time. The jogging day was coming to a close; that was the last person we saw in the park that night.
As the cold became uncomfortable, we stood to walk again. This time it was a much more difficult task for me. As we walked the path, it became increasingly un-pathlike in its nature. The ground had become an iron grate, partially covered by sheet metal, but in other places revealing a bustling city hundreds of feet below. For a time I was able to quell my fear of heights and realize the illusion, but eventually I motioned Liz to stop.
“What's wrong?” she asked.
“I'm walking on a catwalk hundreds of feet above a city and I'm afraid of heights. I need to turn my flashlight on for a second, let me find it. Ah, there, pine needles, not iron. I'm okay now.” This became a recurring event every few minutes for the rest of our time in the woods. Eventually we saw a road through the woods, and our path was headed for it. I knew the road and said as much, leading us towards it at a hurried pace. The path somehow turned into a cement culvert (in reality, not my mind) and I steadied Liz and myself as we hurried down it.
We broke into a clearing that was not at all what I expected. Red clay was everywhere and bright lights were illuminating workers in yellow hard hats and bulldozers. The sound of machinery was heavy in the air and the entire area was swarming with people. It didn't make sense, it was much too late for so much activity on the road I was expecting. “This isn't where I thought it was, lets go back in the woods, quick, before someone sees us.”
Stumbling back up the cement culvert, I turned to look back from a safe distance. My face flushed, unseen in the dark. “I thought that was a construction site in the middle of the woods that we accidentally came across. But it's not, it's Estes road like I originally thought. I'm sorry.” Once again we made our way down the culvert and to the road, which suddenly looked much more familiar. We found the original wide path and returned to the park, stopping a moment at our bench that looked cold and lonely on the top of its knoll.
The walk home was a struggle against topography, but we conquered contour without much further incident and found ourselves back in my living room four hours after dosing.
The file ends here with "to be continued" but I don't believe I ever continued it.
