Marajuana -- Last Experience -- Drowning & Dying w/ Mary Jane.
Drowning & Dying With Mary Jane.
(on 3/15/02)
Sandra patted me on the back and congratulated me -- I'd finally inhaled correctly. I'm always trying to do it too quickly, but I inhaled slowly and then a bit deeper when I took my finger of the air hole. Then I exhaled and let it flow out in an even stream. Success at last.
Between the two of us we probably had a bowl. I was sitting on the sofa in her living room, she was sitting on a chair. It was dark outside, the lights were off, and we were watching Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back.
It didn't take long until things started getting strange, but I tried to relax. Why should this take effort, though? No one else `tried' to relax while high; no one I knew, anyway. No one else I knew ever freaked out on this shit like I did.
It wasn't always like this, either. The first time I tried it was 1998, with some attractive hoodlum girls from my old neighborhood. They took me to this little park nearby the housing development were they lived. There, by some trees behind the swing sets and monkey bars, I watched one of the girls roll the joint. I watched the two of them begin their little ritual, rolling it, lighting it, passing it around our three-person circle. I instantly thought of the native Americans passing around the peace pipe.
It was more difficult to smoke than a cigarette. There was no filter and you couldn't hold it the same. You had to take your drag just right. The inhaling, that was different, too -- breath deep, the girl said, and hold it in as long as you can. Then let it out nice and easy.
After the second joint, I wasn't sure if I was stoned. I wasn't hungry, as I had heard you often were, but incredibly thirsty. I'd about downed by Pepsi. I told them I wasn't sure if it had worked. One of them smiled and told me to stand up straight, close my eyes, and lean my head to the right. I did so, and then they both burst out into a sea of laughter. Apparently I'd leaned.
I was the first in my group to smoke. I wouldn't be the last, nor would I end up smoking the most -- not by far. Everything was fine between Mary and I until one evening at a party. I'd made what would become, apparently, the deadliest of combinations: Mary, alcohol, and coffee. I started freaking out, sought out Sandra downstairs, and had her document my description of the experience in a little pad of paper she had nearby. I told her to record the time and everything. I told her to tell me I'd be okay. I was feeling distance from my body, I was seeing flames out the corner of my eyes, in my peripheral vision. I was convinced I'd never do it again.
I did it several more times, and it never got better.
Once, while smoking up with some work mates, I kept hearing the sound of running water. Of a sink overflowing. I had to stop myself from getting up from checking the sink nearby, telling myself I was just imagining it.
I had been scratching my ear, and felt wet on my fingers. When I looked down at my fingers, I saw blood. I began to freak out, and in a moment I thought I’d known what had happened: the pot had made me so numb that I couldn't even tell how hard I'd been scratching my ear. How deep had I dug below the skin? Then, as I watched the blood move to a central point and disappear, I realized that I was hallucinating. The drive home that evening was in a horrible storm. It was an experience straight out of my personal hell.
I'd tried a `steamroller' with Sandra once. It seems everyone’s got a different name for it. It's like a pipe, only it's got an open end that you cup your whole hand around. You inhale all the smoke into the pipe and then take your hand off while still sucking. A blast of smoke shoots straight into your lungs.
We had all been sitting on the ground in her living room. I gagged like hell. I pulled my knees up to my chin in the corner by the wall. Then, out of nowhere, Sandra and the guy she was with burst out laughing. I'm really confused at this point, steadily getting more paranoid, trying to ask them what they were laughing at. They tried to explain it to me, but no sooner had they tried when they erupted into another burst of laughter. Apparently I was farting at a high volume. I could not hear my own horrendous gas emission, nor could I feel it. That disturbed me. I flopped over on the floor and went to sleep.
Then there was the last time Mary and I had met; a distinctly memorable occasion. It was when four of us had gone over to a girl's house named Angie. It was Angie, Sandra, her brother Nick, and myself. I had a particular fondness for Angie. Perhaps obsession is more accurate. She had a wonderful, dark, complex mind; a light-heartening sense of humor; a sexy voice, beautiful eyes, a nice body, sensuous features. I even liked her hair. She always wore this blue hoodie that had flames on it. I'd had a fixation on her since I met her. She was going out with this really cool kid I knew, but they always had their differences and always breaking up, getting back together again. At one of the parties in the house I was living at the time, we had this really long conversation -- about reincarnation, spirituality, morality, everything. I so wanted her. In every possible way.
Then I'd gotten the chance.
It just so happened that her and her boyfriend had broken up on my twenty-first birthday. That day I came up to the house -- I had moved back with my parents by that time -- and had a brief conversation with him before he left. He had been living there for a few months but was moving that day. I had come just in time to see him go. Then, an hour of two later, Angie shows up, sexy as ever in every aspect. I’m drinking in the living room, sitting by her, a thousand dirty things running through my mind. Her legs around me, her tied to the bed, making that sexy smile on her face widen...
I'd gotten up to get another drink, and when I turned around she was leaning on the wall right by the stairs. I just looked at her, all drunk and giddy. She looked at me with that inviting glare. I don't remember how it happened, but we kissed. A good goddamn kiss. Then I looked to the left, in a living room full of people looking at me. They were all cheering. We were both red in the face, but I was glowing red -- and just glowing.
I got so close that night. I was so fucking nervous. As we were fooling around in the early morning, as I slowly made my way, slowly built up courage to maybe take the final step and get as close to this pure manifestation of beauty before me as I possible could through the physical medium of our bodies, the phone rang. I ignored it. I heard someone leave a message. It sounded urgent. I heard the phone ring again. Sandra came down, picked up the phone. My pants were off, but she was in the other room. Sandra was crying.
It was November 13 by that time, early morning.
Sandra came in, I was under a blanket with Angie, and Sandra told me her grandmother was in the hospital, ready to die. She needed me to drive her, she was drunk and upset. What a mixture of emotions. I apologized to Angie, zipped my pants, and drove Sandra to the hospital just in time to -- quite literally -- watch her grandmother take her last breath.
I had hoped my birthday would end with a sexual ritual signifying my deep appreciation for a beautiful girl. The second girl I'd ever have sex with, a girl I had obsessed over, and on the morning after my birthday. Instead I watched for the first time somebody die right in front of me. I held hands with a family that gathered in a circle around this dead woman I had known as they said prayers to a god I don't believe in.
You can't imagine the roller coaster.
So when Sandra, Nick, Angie and I had gotten together at Angie's house that day and I'd decided to take part in their little smoking ritual, I was a bit nervous. Angie was a pothead. So, too, was Sandra at that time.
I saw this as a ritual to connect with them. For a moment, as I got high, I felt a connection -- like we were all part of some higher being we were all expressions of.
Then that fell away.
I felt distant from them, from my body, from me. It was as if there was something horribly dark and sinister in my mind trying to take advantage of this drug-induced trip off orbit. I was horrified. I wasn't sure if someone had said something or I'd just imagined it. If I'd said something aloud or had merely thought it. If something had happened or I'd merely made a scenario of what might happen in my mind. Everything was mixed up. The boundaries that usually existed between things thinned and disappeared. There were no lines or limitations. It was anarchy in the most complete and horrifying sense.
We were playing a video game. I never play video games. I hate games. It was called Worms. I was a character named Fantasy, my color was blue. It was absolutely horrifying.
I thought that day was just another example of my bad reaction to the drug. Sandra says it was just because I was so fixated around Angie and so nervous around her and about our little bit of history, about what I saw as unfinished business. It wasn't the drug, it wasn't my chemistry, it was my perceptions -- my forever-negative perceptions that Mary amplified, that was all. If I'd only relax... but I could never relax.
That day, alone with her in her apartment, as we watched Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back, Sandra again told me, "Relax."
For awhile, as it usually goes, I did. I was even humored a bit by the movie. I laughed at things that really, to the sober mind, wouldn't be funny at all. I wasn't entirely sure all the time if my laughing was appropriate or my laugh was simply goofy-sounding. I had the traditional fears, too: I was far more fucked up than she, and I was so certain this fact was apparent to her. I told her about it. She told me she had been the same way when she'd first began smoking regularly with Angie and her boyfriend, but that it would pass. You eventually came to realize everyone thought they were more fucked up. It was all in your head, as Bob always said, it was all in your head.
The phone rang and she went to get it. As she was talking to the person on the other end, I heard her mention that she'd gotten me stoned, but that I didn't seem to be freaking out like last time. The truth was that I was freaking out. I tried to tell her this after she got off the phone, but I wasn't sure if I was making any sense.
She started laughing at me. Then with me. As I laughed uncontrollably, I began to roll myself into a ball. My head was over one end of the couch with my eyes closed, and she held my head down and suddenly started saying, "I'm falling, I'm falling, I'm falling... "
I actually saw and felt myself falling into this twisting, black and blue vortex. "That is so fucked up," I told her, amazed at my heightened suggestibility. "That is so cool." She laughed harder.
Then she mentioned that Simon was coming over and bringing people with him. I didn’t like the sound of that. More people meant more sources for more of my paranoia.
In no time, the movie was over and Simon showed up. I recognized him right away, but the second kid I thought was a stranger. I watched him, and he said, "hey, Tim."
"Hey," I said.
"Remember me?"
It was really dark in that room. Damn, I thought, who is that? For a moment, I thought he was Tool Zeke. I hadn't seen Zeke in a long time.
"It's Ken," he said. It clicked in and his face sort of "morphed" into familiarity. It was Ken the Scorpio guy from that I'd first met at the Scorpio rave the first November 10th. The first rave, before I'd tried MDMA. The one Sandra and Angie had finally got me to go to after a year of convincing and a few months of having given up -- before I approached them about wanting to go.
"Oh, yeah.", I said. I covered my face with my hands. I hate this, I thought. I hate not having control over my own mental functions.
It felt like this: first came the numbness. Then it's like the peak of a head rush, but it won't go away. Like, my head's full, can I leave the table now? But they keep force feeding me -- all my senses are cramming high-intensity data down my perceptual throat. The brain has many channels that are always going on at once. While sober, you can turn up the volume on one channel and turn down all the others, or drown out one channel by turning up another. While stoned, all channels hit me at once, at high volume. I don't just get lost in the noise, I become the static. I become white noise. There's no possibility of denial or self-ignorance, and I freak in my loss of control and inability to ignore.
Sandra's roommate and our long time friend, Lilly, came home. She dropped her things, said hi to everyone collectively, made some food and sat by me, half on me. Sandra informed her that she'd gotten me stoned out of my gourd. I did all I could do, I turned to Lilly and forced a nervous grin.
After she was done eating and had got up to leave for bed, I grabbed my yellow notebook and started to jot down all the weird things in my body and mind were experiencing. If nothing else, it helped me catalog the experience so I wouldn't forget as much -- and it served as a kind of "grounding."
I felt as if I was underwater again, I felt as if nothing I said made any sense at all. I felt guilt, fear, and a wad of other overwhelming things. Emotions of high intensity were stemming from everywhere, triggered by everything. I was wound in a web of agonizing, associated emotions, and the spider of the universe was closing in on me.
I felt as though I was disconnected from my body, but not as it is in my "sober" out--of-body experiences. I felt "pushed back" as if I were sensing everything from a distance -- as if there was a gap between me and my bodily senses. I was still "attached", just not "close up." It was like being in a theater and watching a movie -- if you focused enough you could almost believe you were there, but the sound and image was at a distance -- only here, it was that way with all my bodily senses, the most bizarre experience of which happened to be touch.
Then something perhaps even weirder happened. I seemed to witness some connection between Ken and I. The best way I can explain it is that he was thinking at me. At first I thought he was mocking me. He started talking about suicide, how bad his life was, how nothing matters, how he can't feel... I was so sure he was mocking me.
He seemed to almost relate to me in a sense, or have a deep understanding of what I was feeling. I didn't notice him ever really looking directly at me. It seemed, as I said, as if I was watching this from a movie theater. I wasn't part of this at all, I was a spectator, an observer; from the outside looking in. No one gave acknowledgement of my existence. It was as if they didn't even know I was there.
None the less, it seemed as though Ken was some strange manifestation of a guide, a coach or a teacher. It was as if a lesson were being communicated though his words, with some things "highlighted." Other things he didn't say exactly -- though he could have and I only picked up on them unconsciously -- but these things still seemed to stem from whatever "messages" were working through him. All in all, though it seemed as if he was reacting and responding to things in my mind without being conscious of doing so. Or it was as if he was trying to offer me knowledge and guide me on a path he didn't even know I was taking.
I stepped into the movie and turned to Simon. "Hey Simon," I said. "When you ever do drugs, any of them, do you ever get the sensation that you're under water?"
When I spoke, it felt as if I was speaking far too liquid, or far too softly, or not clearly. I worried that I might say something and not remember or realize what I said. I feared overemphasizing or sounding too extreme, or coming across as too enthusiastic, belligerent, or intense.
It took him just a second. "No, not really." It almost sounded brutally sarcastic to me. Was I being weird? Were my reactions off key again?
They began talking about Salvia, and Ken explained how his Salvia experience threw him for a loop. He envisioned his eye rolling out of his head, and he saw sight from the perspective of the eye as it was rolling. The strange thing about all this was that his description of this sounded exactly like Zeke's past life memory of being at the guillotine, having his head chopped off, and seeing it `rolling' from the perspective of the head. I couldn't get passed that bizarre synchronicity -- how much like Zeke's story it was, and how I'd mistaken Ken for Zeke when he'd first come in. I wondered, was my brain making connections that made sense?
In regards to Salvia, Ken said, "I feel like I die, man."
It felt like getting closer to Home to me. Mary was death to me.
Simon broke in: "But that's the thing I like about it. That's the great thing about it. I live for that feeling. When it's over, you suddenly feel alive."
Ken began talking about death, but I caught that he wasn't talking specifically in the literal or biological sense of the word. He talked about how "rites of passage always involves a lot of pain." Something along those lines. He began talking about a song, I think, perhaps singing it -- and that's when he started chanting, "change must come, change must come, change must come..."
He began speaking about how certain things involved an emotional commitment and strong, unwavering dedication -- that you've got to put your all into it and run it to the extreme. Then came the thing I sensed from him -- a simple phrase that I wrote in big, bold letters in my little yellow notebook: Fear Is Murder.
Then Simon went out into his car and grabbed a CD. He said it was tribal music by Ritchie Hotten. He put it in the CD player and told me to listen to it. I did, and it was very entrancing and resonated well with my state of mind. Parts of it sounded as if they were made underwater, but that could not have just been my state of mind and not the music itself. I began getting that lateral, right shifting, chopping turning motion I most associate with being drunk.
When I intentionally focused on the music, I simply got lost it. It was beautiful and mysterious. The shifting in my vision seemed to go in tune with it. It was as if the world was one pulse or rhythm.
It also suddenly felt as if the world was tightly packed together. Vacuum sealed for freshness. As if everything around me was a team or family; as if we were bound and connected to each other as a brother-and-sisterhood on one plane of existence, while on the other, I was alone.
Both, simultaneously and in many strange ways, were very comfortable.
They left, and Sandra and I just sort or sat there in our mutual intoxication, zoning out into space for a few moments. I looked at her, unable to hold back my smile. She eventually got up to go to bed.
"Thanks for smoking up with me," she said.
After a thought, I smiled. "Thank you," I said.
In some strange way, for the first time in a long time I actually meant it.
Drowning & Dying With Mary Jane.
(on 3/15/02)
Sandra patted me on the back and congratulated me -- I'd finally inhaled correctly. I'm always trying to do it too quickly, but I inhaled slowly and then a bit deeper when I took my finger of the air hole. Then I exhaled and let it flow out in an even stream. Success at last.
Between the two of us we probably had a bowl. I was sitting on the sofa in her living room, she was sitting on a chair. It was dark outside, the lights were off, and we were watching Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back.
It didn't take long until things started getting strange, but I tried to relax. Why should this take effort, though? No one else `tried' to relax while high; no one I knew, anyway. No one else I knew ever freaked out on this shit like I did.
It wasn't always like this, either. The first time I tried it was 1998, with some attractive hoodlum girls from my old neighborhood. They took me to this little park nearby the housing development were they lived. There, by some trees behind the swing sets and monkey bars, I watched one of the girls roll the joint. I watched the two of them begin their little ritual, rolling it, lighting it, passing it around our three-person circle. I instantly thought of the native Americans passing around the peace pipe.
It was more difficult to smoke than a cigarette. There was no filter and you couldn't hold it the same. You had to take your drag just right. The inhaling, that was different, too -- breath deep, the girl said, and hold it in as long as you can. Then let it out nice and easy.
After the second joint, I wasn't sure if I was stoned. I wasn't hungry, as I had heard you often were, but incredibly thirsty. I'd about downed by Pepsi. I told them I wasn't sure if it had worked. One of them smiled and told me to stand up straight, close my eyes, and lean my head to the right. I did so, and then they both burst out into a sea of laughter. Apparently I'd leaned.
I was the first in my group to smoke. I wouldn't be the last, nor would I end up smoking the most -- not by far. Everything was fine between Mary and I until one evening at a party. I'd made what would become, apparently, the deadliest of combinations: Mary, alcohol, and coffee. I started freaking out, sought out Sandra downstairs, and had her document my description of the experience in a little pad of paper she had nearby. I told her to record the time and everything. I told her to tell me I'd be okay. I was feeling distance from my body, I was seeing flames out the corner of my eyes, in my peripheral vision. I was convinced I'd never do it again.
I did it several more times, and it never got better.
Once, while smoking up with some work mates, I kept hearing the sound of running water. Of a sink overflowing. I had to stop myself from getting up from checking the sink nearby, telling myself I was just imagining it.
I had been scratching my ear, and felt wet on my fingers. When I looked down at my fingers, I saw blood. I began to freak out, and in a moment I thought I’d known what had happened: the pot had made me so numb that I couldn't even tell how hard I'd been scratching my ear. How deep had I dug below the skin? Then, as I watched the blood move to a central point and disappear, I realized that I was hallucinating. The drive home that evening was in a horrible storm. It was an experience straight out of my personal hell.
I'd tried a `steamroller' with Sandra once. It seems everyone’s got a different name for it. It's like a pipe, only it's got an open end that you cup your whole hand around. You inhale all the smoke into the pipe and then take your hand off while still sucking. A blast of smoke shoots straight into your lungs.
We had all been sitting on the ground in her living room. I gagged like hell. I pulled my knees up to my chin in the corner by the wall. Then, out of nowhere, Sandra and the guy she was with burst out laughing. I'm really confused at this point, steadily getting more paranoid, trying to ask them what they were laughing at. They tried to explain it to me, but no sooner had they tried when they erupted into another burst of laughter. Apparently I was farting at a high volume. I could not hear my own horrendous gas emission, nor could I feel it. That disturbed me. I flopped over on the floor and went to sleep.
Then there was the last time Mary and I had met; a distinctly memorable occasion. It was when four of us had gone over to a girl's house named Angie. It was Angie, Sandra, her brother Nick, and myself. I had a particular fondness for Angie. Perhaps obsession is more accurate. She had a wonderful, dark, complex mind; a light-heartening sense of humor; a sexy voice, beautiful eyes, a nice body, sensuous features. I even liked her hair. She always wore this blue hoodie that had flames on it. I'd had a fixation on her since I met her. She was going out with this really cool kid I knew, but they always had their differences and always breaking up, getting back together again. At one of the parties in the house I was living at the time, we had this really long conversation -- about reincarnation, spirituality, morality, everything. I so wanted her. In every possible way.
Then I'd gotten the chance.
It just so happened that her and her boyfriend had broken up on my twenty-first birthday. That day I came up to the house -- I had moved back with my parents by that time -- and had a brief conversation with him before he left. He had been living there for a few months but was moving that day. I had come just in time to see him go. Then, an hour of two later, Angie shows up, sexy as ever in every aspect. I’m drinking in the living room, sitting by her, a thousand dirty things running through my mind. Her legs around me, her tied to the bed, making that sexy smile on her face widen...
I'd gotten up to get another drink, and when I turned around she was leaning on the wall right by the stairs. I just looked at her, all drunk and giddy. She looked at me with that inviting glare. I don't remember how it happened, but we kissed. A good goddamn kiss. Then I looked to the left, in a living room full of people looking at me. They were all cheering. We were both red in the face, but I was glowing red -- and just glowing.
I got so close that night. I was so fucking nervous. As we were fooling around in the early morning, as I slowly made my way, slowly built up courage to maybe take the final step and get as close to this pure manifestation of beauty before me as I possible could through the physical medium of our bodies, the phone rang. I ignored it. I heard someone leave a message. It sounded urgent. I heard the phone ring again. Sandra came down, picked up the phone. My pants were off, but she was in the other room. Sandra was crying.
It was November 13 by that time, early morning.
Sandra came in, I was under a blanket with Angie, and Sandra told me her grandmother was in the hospital, ready to die. She needed me to drive her, she was drunk and upset. What a mixture of emotions. I apologized to Angie, zipped my pants, and drove Sandra to the hospital just in time to -- quite literally -- watch her grandmother take her last breath.
I had hoped my birthday would end with a sexual ritual signifying my deep appreciation for a beautiful girl. The second girl I'd ever have sex with, a girl I had obsessed over, and on the morning after my birthday. Instead I watched for the first time somebody die right in front of me. I held hands with a family that gathered in a circle around this dead woman I had known as they said prayers to a god I don't believe in.
You can't imagine the roller coaster.
So when Sandra, Nick, Angie and I had gotten together at Angie's house that day and I'd decided to take part in their little smoking ritual, I was a bit nervous. Angie was a pothead. So, too, was Sandra at that time.
I saw this as a ritual to connect with them. For a moment, as I got high, I felt a connection -- like we were all part of some higher being we were all expressions of.
Then that fell away.
I felt distant from them, from my body, from me. It was as if there was something horribly dark and sinister in my mind trying to take advantage of this drug-induced trip off orbit. I was horrified. I wasn't sure if someone had said something or I'd just imagined it. If I'd said something aloud or had merely thought it. If something had happened or I'd merely made a scenario of what might happen in my mind. Everything was mixed up. The boundaries that usually existed between things thinned and disappeared. There were no lines or limitations. It was anarchy in the most complete and horrifying sense.
We were playing a video game. I never play video games. I hate games. It was called Worms. I was a character named Fantasy, my color was blue. It was absolutely horrifying.
I thought that day was just another example of my bad reaction to the drug. Sandra says it was just because I was so fixated around Angie and so nervous around her and about our little bit of history, about what I saw as unfinished business. It wasn't the drug, it wasn't my chemistry, it was my perceptions -- my forever-negative perceptions that Mary amplified, that was all. If I'd only relax... but I could never relax.
That day, alone with her in her apartment, as we watched Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back, Sandra again told me, "Relax."
For awhile, as it usually goes, I did. I was even humored a bit by the movie. I laughed at things that really, to the sober mind, wouldn't be funny at all. I wasn't entirely sure all the time if my laughing was appropriate or my laugh was simply goofy-sounding. I had the traditional fears, too: I was far more fucked up than she, and I was so certain this fact was apparent to her. I told her about it. She told me she had been the same way when she'd first began smoking regularly with Angie and her boyfriend, but that it would pass. You eventually came to realize everyone thought they were more fucked up. It was all in your head, as Bob always said, it was all in your head.
The phone rang and she went to get it. As she was talking to the person on the other end, I heard her mention that she'd gotten me stoned, but that I didn't seem to be freaking out like last time. The truth was that I was freaking out. I tried to tell her this after she got off the phone, but I wasn't sure if I was making any sense.
She started laughing at me. Then with me. As I laughed uncontrollably, I began to roll myself into a ball. My head was over one end of the couch with my eyes closed, and she held my head down and suddenly started saying, "I'm falling, I'm falling, I'm falling... "
I actually saw and felt myself falling into this twisting, black and blue vortex. "That is so fucked up," I told her, amazed at my heightened suggestibility. "That is so cool." She laughed harder.
Then she mentioned that Simon was coming over and bringing people with him. I didn’t like the sound of that. More people meant more sources for more of my paranoia.
In no time, the movie was over and Simon showed up. I recognized him right away, but the second kid I thought was a stranger. I watched him, and he said, "hey, Tim."
"Hey," I said.
"Remember me?"
It was really dark in that room. Damn, I thought, who is that? For a moment, I thought he was Tool Zeke. I hadn't seen Zeke in a long time.
"It's Ken," he said. It clicked in and his face sort of "morphed" into familiarity. It was Ken the Scorpio guy from that I'd first met at the Scorpio rave the first November 10th. The first rave, before I'd tried MDMA. The one Sandra and Angie had finally got me to go to after a year of convincing and a few months of having given up -- before I approached them about wanting to go.
"Oh, yeah.", I said. I covered my face with my hands. I hate this, I thought. I hate not having control over my own mental functions.
It felt like this: first came the numbness. Then it's like the peak of a head rush, but it won't go away. Like, my head's full, can I leave the table now? But they keep force feeding me -- all my senses are cramming high-intensity data down my perceptual throat. The brain has many channels that are always going on at once. While sober, you can turn up the volume on one channel and turn down all the others, or drown out one channel by turning up another. While stoned, all channels hit me at once, at high volume. I don't just get lost in the noise, I become the static. I become white noise. There's no possibility of denial or self-ignorance, and I freak in my loss of control and inability to ignore.
Sandra's roommate and our long time friend, Lilly, came home. She dropped her things, said hi to everyone collectively, made some food and sat by me, half on me. Sandra informed her that she'd gotten me stoned out of my gourd. I did all I could do, I turned to Lilly and forced a nervous grin.
After she was done eating and had got up to leave for bed, I grabbed my yellow notebook and started to jot down all the weird things in my body and mind were experiencing. If nothing else, it helped me catalog the experience so I wouldn't forget as much -- and it served as a kind of "grounding."
I felt as if I was underwater again, I felt as if nothing I said made any sense at all. I felt guilt, fear, and a wad of other overwhelming things. Emotions of high intensity were stemming from everywhere, triggered by everything. I was wound in a web of agonizing, associated emotions, and the spider of the universe was closing in on me.
I felt as though I was disconnected from my body, but not as it is in my "sober" out--of-body experiences. I felt "pushed back" as if I were sensing everything from a distance -- as if there was a gap between me and my bodily senses. I was still "attached", just not "close up." It was like being in a theater and watching a movie -- if you focused enough you could almost believe you were there, but the sound and image was at a distance -- only here, it was that way with all my bodily senses, the most bizarre experience of which happened to be touch.
Then something perhaps even weirder happened. I seemed to witness some connection between Ken and I. The best way I can explain it is that he was thinking at me. At first I thought he was mocking me. He started talking about suicide, how bad his life was, how nothing matters, how he can't feel... I was so sure he was mocking me.
He seemed to almost relate to me in a sense, or have a deep understanding of what I was feeling. I didn't notice him ever really looking directly at me. It seemed, as I said, as if I was watching this from a movie theater. I wasn't part of this at all, I was a spectator, an observer; from the outside looking in. No one gave acknowledgement of my existence. It was as if they didn't even know I was there.
None the less, it seemed as though Ken was some strange manifestation of a guide, a coach or a teacher. It was as if a lesson were being communicated though his words, with some things "highlighted." Other things he didn't say exactly -- though he could have and I only picked up on them unconsciously -- but these things still seemed to stem from whatever "messages" were working through him. All in all, though it seemed as if he was reacting and responding to things in my mind without being conscious of doing so. Or it was as if he was trying to offer me knowledge and guide me on a path he didn't even know I was taking.
I stepped into the movie and turned to Simon. "Hey Simon," I said. "When you ever do drugs, any of them, do you ever get the sensation that you're under water?"
When I spoke, it felt as if I was speaking far too liquid, or far too softly, or not clearly. I worried that I might say something and not remember or realize what I said. I feared overemphasizing or sounding too extreme, or coming across as too enthusiastic, belligerent, or intense.
It took him just a second. "No, not really." It almost sounded brutally sarcastic to me. Was I being weird? Were my reactions off key again?
They began talking about Salvia, and Ken explained how his Salvia experience threw him for a loop. He envisioned his eye rolling out of his head, and he saw sight from the perspective of the eye as it was rolling. The strange thing about all this was that his description of this sounded exactly like Zeke's past life memory of being at the guillotine, having his head chopped off, and seeing it `rolling' from the perspective of the head. I couldn't get passed that bizarre synchronicity -- how much like Zeke's story it was, and how I'd mistaken Ken for Zeke when he'd first come in. I wondered, was my brain making connections that made sense?
In regards to Salvia, Ken said, "I feel like I die, man."
It felt like getting closer to Home to me. Mary was death to me.
Simon broke in: "But that's the thing I like about it. That's the great thing about it. I live for that feeling. When it's over, you suddenly feel alive."
Ken began talking about death, but I caught that he wasn't talking specifically in the literal or biological sense of the word. He talked about how "rites of passage always involves a lot of pain." Something along those lines. He began talking about a song, I think, perhaps singing it -- and that's when he started chanting, "change must come, change must come, change must come..."
He began speaking about how certain things involved an emotional commitment and strong, unwavering dedication -- that you've got to put your all into it and run it to the extreme. Then came the thing I sensed from him -- a simple phrase that I wrote in big, bold letters in my little yellow notebook: Fear Is Murder.
Then Simon went out into his car and grabbed a CD. He said it was tribal music by Ritchie Hotten. He put it in the CD player and told me to listen to it. I did, and it was very entrancing and resonated well with my state of mind. Parts of it sounded as if they were made underwater, but that could not have just been my state of mind and not the music itself. I began getting that lateral, right shifting, chopping turning motion I most associate with being drunk.
When I intentionally focused on the music, I simply got lost it. It was beautiful and mysterious. The shifting in my vision seemed to go in tune with it. It was as if the world was one pulse or rhythm.
It also suddenly felt as if the world was tightly packed together. Vacuum sealed for freshness. As if everything around me was a team or family; as if we were bound and connected to each other as a brother-and-sisterhood on one plane of existence, while on the other, I was alone.
Both, simultaneously and in many strange ways, were very comfortable.
They left, and Sandra and I just sort or sat there in our mutual intoxication, zoning out into space for a few moments. I looked at her, unable to hold back my smile. She eventually got up to go to bed.
"Thanks for smoking up with me," she said.
After a thought, I smiled. "Thank you," I said.
In some strange way, for the first time in a long time I actually meant it.
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