yellowmountain
Greenlighter
- Joined
- Aug 28, 2015
- Messages
- 1
Drop: 8/23/15 2:15pm
I woke up to an alarm I set for 10 am. The plan was to pick up Sophia and head to Dustin’s where we would each drop a tab of LSD. Joe had given Dustin the tabs the night before when we decided to do this thing. It was Sophia’s last weekend in Pittsburgh and Dustin was moving soon as well. Neither of them had taken LSD before, so this was to be a sort of exploratory goodbye with two friends I’d grown very close to.
I spent an hour trying to remove my headache and nausea. I called up Dustin, who was also hungover. He was having doubts about whether he would take the drug on a hangover, but once we had all eaten a meal and met up, he was ready for the trip.
Before we started feeling the acid, Dustin’s roommates Patricia and Chris arrived. Patricia told us her dad said there were two kinds of trippers: people who experience the drug and people who learn how to control it. She suggested that any time we see visuals, we should try to augment them, to sort of embellish the experience consciously.
We hung out in Dustin’s living room for a while and talked to Patricia more. When the acid made its appearance, I was feeling kind of goofy and a little more energetic. Soon, we left to meet JF at his house a few blocks away.
Once we were there, Dustin put Smile Sessions on JF’s living room speakers. during part of the album I developed an acute sense that the house was swaying from side to side. Shadows were oscillating to a slow continuous up and down orchestral scale. I wasn’t focused much on myself at this point. I was almost fully invested in seeing what was happening around me.
I watched my hand draw an amalgamation of eyelashes, ears, and insect antennae in the notebook I brought. Sophia sat beside me for part of the time while I drew and complimented my creation. I was kind of disgusted by the picture to be honest.
While I was drawing, a fractal lattice appeared on the blank parts of the notebook page. The pattern had shown up on previous trips, made of constantly changing numbers of many different sizes all summing up to form a kaleidoscopic pattern very similar to but more complex than the pattern on the back of a Bicycle playing card. This time, though, there were no numbers. The pattern was geometric and fluid, changing more and more dynamically the closer attention I paid it.
JF put on an album by the Books. Their music is made of vast amounts of different samples arranged in crazy ways. It’s like a very broad taste of all the sounds a human might hear in a lifetime--all beautifully and relentlessly crammed into one album. I lost myself for a while, observing the rambling and vague thoughts in my head.
Later on we moved to the patio. JF and I cut pages out of books to create decoupages. JF finished two of his works in progress, one of which was of a boy standing on part of a stethoscope among a sea of cows with a dresser/bed hybrid furniture piece extending from the boy’s mouth. It was a very simple and elegant design. His other piece was of a spider monkey being experimented on by about seven gloved hands holding different types of instruments among a starry background.
My decoupage was of a man laying on a wood grill surrounded by red and blue coral reef. Another man watches the grill through a telescope with four or five large cave-drawn pictures of men whispering in his ear. A cat with a cone around its neck and crazy spiral goggles watches from the top left corner.
Dustin was feeling some nausea from the hangover-LSD combination. He laid on the ground watching the clouds. He said later that at one point, he was thinking about the annoyance of necessity. “Why do I have to eat? Why can’t I just be a consciousness?”
At one point, Sophia went into the house while the rest of us remained on the porch. She was in there a while, so I went up to get water and check on her. As I opened the fridge and began to stare aimlessly into it for a few seconds, Sophia came out of the bathroom looking distressed.
“I’m kind of in a weird place.”
She said she was feeling wrong in some way and wasn’t sure if she should be feeling the way she was feeling. She talked about how she was a small part of the universe and was unsure if she was just an observer or if she was part of everything. She seemed perplexed that she was a thing inside of a thing. I was unable to procure an answer for any of this from my mind, so I offered her some water.
The textured paint on the walls was making it difficult for me to construct meaningful thoughts, let alone words. The bumps of plaster within the paint swayed and flowed to form another lattice pattern. Sophia was becoming part of the pattern. I was trying pretty hard to stay calm. I tried to share some of my thoughts with her to take both our minds to a more comfortable state.
The day after, Sophia told me that just before this, she was having trouble getting out of the bathroom. The lock can be difficult to unlatch--especially when your mind is being altered by a drug, I imagine. It must have been a scary experience.
We were both able to chill out some soon after. Back on the patio, I let the pattern take over for a long time. I kept working on my decoupage and the pattern was everywhere. Each pixel on the pages of the books seemed painstakingly and consciously arranged specifically for me, to show me this pattern and confuse the hell out of me. Why was this fractal everywhere I looked? Another, more natural-looking pattern showed up on the picture of a snow-capped mountain scene. The pattern showed me how the snow fell, where clumps of it had tumbled and volumes had been compacted. I understood exactly how the snow-cap had formed. It seemed that the lattice was an inherent quality of the universe which guides the motion of all matter. I was making this discovery while looking at a photo, so it took me a second to realize that it should apply to the real world as well.
I began to look upwards. At first, the sky just looked like the sky. While I looked more, I could see all the tiny movements the clouds make when they form and dissolve in the air. All the clouds grew tendrils which puffed out smaller clouds, which also grew tendrils which puffed out smaller clouds still. The earth was enveloped by the pattern. The pattern was everything.
The sun refracted in my glasses, painting a spectrum of all colors across the fractal’s loops and angles. The entire lattice swam around the atmosphere in smoothly varying orbits. I thought of it as a forcefield protecting the planet, connecting to everything on Earth’s surface. It was quite a uniquely beautiful sight. It felt artificial. Though they existed in my brain, I did not believe these grandiose ideas that the fractal had any real correlation with the natural course of the world.
Maybe the lattice was a complex result of the chemical reactions going on in my body due to the acid. Maybe the lattice was a representation or a reminder of some of the old ideas that I upheld when I was younger--the thoughts of which I have ideologically disposed, but which remain buried deep in memory. The hope that the world could be fully understood and predicted as long as you have enough information to go on. The desire for the existence of a conprehensive law or entity which all events inherently obey. The determination for the world to “make sense.” The wish for God to be real. The need to feel safe and comfortable. And yet as I read this report again, I realize the lattice only persisted as long as I thought about it. When I stopped expecting it, it went away. As I paid attention to it, it grew and consumed more of the universe.
Dustin, Sophia, and I left to sit on Dustin’s porch where we talked a little bit about what we were seeing and feeling. I was still unable to make much literary sense of my thoughts. Much of the time we were silent. At one point, Dustin went back inside for a bit and came back saying that he threw up. He was having a pretty rough time, so he didn’t join Sophia and I for a walk.
We started walking with no aim other than to avoid the Little Italy festival that was taking place a block away. We had no desire to partake in the festival’s main attraction--food--and we felt that the crowd of people could be difficult to handle. We had a vague goal of finding the cemetery, which we were able to achieve despite second-guessing ourselves all along the way.
A group of three cemetery adventurers who were close to Sophia and I in age had arrived a bit before us and chose a different branch in the road than we did. They looked similar to us. They were walking in the cemetery to pass the time, not to find solace in some dead loved-one’s chiseled name.
The fields of expensive rocks and buried boxes our culture produces seemed like a waste of space and time. These people are dead, they don’t need a home or any sort of locational representation. The natural course is to be dissolved back into the world as nutrients for new life. Why not embrace the universe’s immutable determination to erase you? Life is tenuous and fleeting, try to enjoy it as such. Sophia and I talked some about these and similar ideas. I was unable to slow my thoughts down enough to be able to speak intelligently. It was difficult to remember words for things. My mind was distracting itself from expressing itself. It had been around six or seven hours since I had eaten anything other than a few dried pineapple slices, so I was probably running low on energy. Maybe if I had eaten a light meal at that point, I would have had a resurgence in cognitive clarity. Something to consider on future trips.
On the way back to Dustin’s, I saw the pattern expressed through skid marks and other imperfections on the street and sidewalk--no longer the all-encompassing lattice which the internals of the universe distinctly follow. It was simply a pattern on the surface of objects. The drug was surely fading. We sat with Dustin on his porch and Sam and Joe joined us later on. Joe spoke some of his shaman wisdom about LSD and recommended the practice of processing tripping experiences through writing. We chilled a while and chatted lazily until Sam and Joe drove Sophia and me home after we all took a small dose of etizolam, soon to meet the darkness of unconsciousness.
I woke up to an alarm I set for 10 am. The plan was to pick up Sophia and head to Dustin’s where we would each drop a tab of LSD. Joe had given Dustin the tabs the night before when we decided to do this thing. It was Sophia’s last weekend in Pittsburgh and Dustin was moving soon as well. Neither of them had taken LSD before, so this was to be a sort of exploratory goodbye with two friends I’d grown very close to.
I spent an hour trying to remove my headache and nausea. I called up Dustin, who was also hungover. He was having doubts about whether he would take the drug on a hangover, but once we had all eaten a meal and met up, he was ready for the trip.
Before we started feeling the acid, Dustin’s roommates Patricia and Chris arrived. Patricia told us her dad said there were two kinds of trippers: people who experience the drug and people who learn how to control it. She suggested that any time we see visuals, we should try to augment them, to sort of embellish the experience consciously.
We hung out in Dustin’s living room for a while and talked to Patricia more. When the acid made its appearance, I was feeling kind of goofy and a little more energetic. Soon, we left to meet JF at his house a few blocks away.
Once we were there, Dustin put Smile Sessions on JF’s living room speakers. during part of the album I developed an acute sense that the house was swaying from side to side. Shadows were oscillating to a slow continuous up and down orchestral scale. I wasn’t focused much on myself at this point. I was almost fully invested in seeing what was happening around me.
I watched my hand draw an amalgamation of eyelashes, ears, and insect antennae in the notebook I brought. Sophia sat beside me for part of the time while I drew and complimented my creation. I was kind of disgusted by the picture to be honest.
While I was drawing, a fractal lattice appeared on the blank parts of the notebook page. The pattern had shown up on previous trips, made of constantly changing numbers of many different sizes all summing up to form a kaleidoscopic pattern very similar to but more complex than the pattern on the back of a Bicycle playing card. This time, though, there were no numbers. The pattern was geometric and fluid, changing more and more dynamically the closer attention I paid it.
JF put on an album by the Books. Their music is made of vast amounts of different samples arranged in crazy ways. It’s like a very broad taste of all the sounds a human might hear in a lifetime--all beautifully and relentlessly crammed into one album. I lost myself for a while, observing the rambling and vague thoughts in my head.
Later on we moved to the patio. JF and I cut pages out of books to create decoupages. JF finished two of his works in progress, one of which was of a boy standing on part of a stethoscope among a sea of cows with a dresser/bed hybrid furniture piece extending from the boy’s mouth. It was a very simple and elegant design. His other piece was of a spider monkey being experimented on by about seven gloved hands holding different types of instruments among a starry background.
My decoupage was of a man laying on a wood grill surrounded by red and blue coral reef. Another man watches the grill through a telescope with four or five large cave-drawn pictures of men whispering in his ear. A cat with a cone around its neck and crazy spiral goggles watches from the top left corner.
Dustin was feeling some nausea from the hangover-LSD combination. He laid on the ground watching the clouds. He said later that at one point, he was thinking about the annoyance of necessity. “Why do I have to eat? Why can’t I just be a consciousness?”
At one point, Sophia went into the house while the rest of us remained on the porch. She was in there a while, so I went up to get water and check on her. As I opened the fridge and began to stare aimlessly into it for a few seconds, Sophia came out of the bathroom looking distressed.
“I’m kind of in a weird place.”
She said she was feeling wrong in some way and wasn’t sure if she should be feeling the way she was feeling. She talked about how she was a small part of the universe and was unsure if she was just an observer or if she was part of everything. She seemed perplexed that she was a thing inside of a thing. I was unable to procure an answer for any of this from my mind, so I offered her some water.
The textured paint on the walls was making it difficult for me to construct meaningful thoughts, let alone words. The bumps of plaster within the paint swayed and flowed to form another lattice pattern. Sophia was becoming part of the pattern. I was trying pretty hard to stay calm. I tried to share some of my thoughts with her to take both our minds to a more comfortable state.
The day after, Sophia told me that just before this, she was having trouble getting out of the bathroom. The lock can be difficult to unlatch--especially when your mind is being altered by a drug, I imagine. It must have been a scary experience.
We were both able to chill out some soon after. Back on the patio, I let the pattern take over for a long time. I kept working on my decoupage and the pattern was everywhere. Each pixel on the pages of the books seemed painstakingly and consciously arranged specifically for me, to show me this pattern and confuse the hell out of me. Why was this fractal everywhere I looked? Another, more natural-looking pattern showed up on the picture of a snow-capped mountain scene. The pattern showed me how the snow fell, where clumps of it had tumbled and volumes had been compacted. I understood exactly how the snow-cap had formed. It seemed that the lattice was an inherent quality of the universe which guides the motion of all matter. I was making this discovery while looking at a photo, so it took me a second to realize that it should apply to the real world as well.
I began to look upwards. At first, the sky just looked like the sky. While I looked more, I could see all the tiny movements the clouds make when they form and dissolve in the air. All the clouds grew tendrils which puffed out smaller clouds, which also grew tendrils which puffed out smaller clouds still. The earth was enveloped by the pattern. The pattern was everything.
The sun refracted in my glasses, painting a spectrum of all colors across the fractal’s loops and angles. The entire lattice swam around the atmosphere in smoothly varying orbits. I thought of it as a forcefield protecting the planet, connecting to everything on Earth’s surface. It was quite a uniquely beautiful sight. It felt artificial. Though they existed in my brain, I did not believe these grandiose ideas that the fractal had any real correlation with the natural course of the world.
Maybe the lattice was a complex result of the chemical reactions going on in my body due to the acid. Maybe the lattice was a representation or a reminder of some of the old ideas that I upheld when I was younger--the thoughts of which I have ideologically disposed, but which remain buried deep in memory. The hope that the world could be fully understood and predicted as long as you have enough information to go on. The desire for the existence of a conprehensive law or entity which all events inherently obey. The determination for the world to “make sense.” The wish for God to be real. The need to feel safe and comfortable. And yet as I read this report again, I realize the lattice only persisted as long as I thought about it. When I stopped expecting it, it went away. As I paid attention to it, it grew and consumed more of the universe.
Dustin, Sophia, and I left to sit on Dustin’s porch where we talked a little bit about what we were seeing and feeling. I was still unable to make much literary sense of my thoughts. Much of the time we were silent. At one point, Dustin went back inside for a bit and came back saying that he threw up. He was having a pretty rough time, so he didn’t join Sophia and I for a walk.
We started walking with no aim other than to avoid the Little Italy festival that was taking place a block away. We had no desire to partake in the festival’s main attraction--food--and we felt that the crowd of people could be difficult to handle. We had a vague goal of finding the cemetery, which we were able to achieve despite second-guessing ourselves all along the way.
A group of three cemetery adventurers who were close to Sophia and I in age had arrived a bit before us and chose a different branch in the road than we did. They looked similar to us. They were walking in the cemetery to pass the time, not to find solace in some dead loved-one’s chiseled name.
The fields of expensive rocks and buried boxes our culture produces seemed like a waste of space and time. These people are dead, they don’t need a home or any sort of locational representation. The natural course is to be dissolved back into the world as nutrients for new life. Why not embrace the universe’s immutable determination to erase you? Life is tenuous and fleeting, try to enjoy it as such. Sophia and I talked some about these and similar ideas. I was unable to slow my thoughts down enough to be able to speak intelligently. It was difficult to remember words for things. My mind was distracting itself from expressing itself. It had been around six or seven hours since I had eaten anything other than a few dried pineapple slices, so I was probably running low on energy. Maybe if I had eaten a light meal at that point, I would have had a resurgence in cognitive clarity. Something to consider on future trips.
On the way back to Dustin’s, I saw the pattern expressed through skid marks and other imperfections on the street and sidewalk--no longer the all-encompassing lattice which the internals of the universe distinctly follow. It was simply a pattern on the surface of objects. The drug was surely fading. We sat with Dustin on his porch and Sam and Joe joined us later on. Joe spoke some of his shaman wisdom about LSD and recommended the practice of processing tripping experiences through writing. We chilled a while and chatted lazily until Sam and Joe drove Sophia and me home after we all took a small dose of etizolam, soon to meet the darkness of unconsciousness.
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