Where to begin, ffs. I would just like to say for starters I am writing this without having slept since tripping and the time has ticked over to 1am, so I am sort of on "the day after" but not...anyway my point of announcing this is I cant help going off on tangents of thought and I don't know what parts to leave out or to leave in. <-- Even just trying to explain that required a complicated sentence. Also forgive me if I sound narky or arrogant in whatever I say in further on in this report, I did not plan it that way. I've done mushrooms 3 or 4 times, HBWR seeds once and obviously, acid once before so I am not a very experienced tripper but sometimes I come across like I think I am. Also I am not normally so negatively judgemental and assuming of people, especially the race I mention specifically in this report. I can't really apologize for it or think of a reason to excuse it other than "I wasn't myself".
Expectation (i.e. planned agenda, I believe in going into a trip without expectations but it is difficult in practice): Me and my pal L05ti8 had planned to make use of his mother's apartment while she worked throughout the day. She leaves early, comes back dinner time-ish. We told her we wanted to go swimming and then we'd also be chilling in her apartment as well. We conveniently left out the detail that we'd be tripping while doing that for obvious reasons. We knew we had to get out by like 5pm to make sure we didn't run into her as we knew we'd still be high then. Anyhow..
Experience: We got dropped off at his ma's place at approx 11am which was right on schedule. After what felt like a long walk up several flights of steps we finally got into the apartment. Almost immediately I wanted to "open" my microdots. I'll explain. I don't know if this is standard practice for packaging, but I bought 3 dots through a friend who got them from a work friend and I imagine the chain is near endless, anyway, they were stuck between two pieces of masking tape. Although we'd already gauged the size of them through the tape we were still amazed that these two little black dots were supposed to be our fuel for a day of tripping. Needless to say, it didn't take us long before we decided to find out for ourselves. So we dosed and my friend said he'd been up all night drinking and he thought a mission to the shopping mall right next to these apartments to get some beers was in order. I agreed cause it gave us a task to keep us busy with while we awaited the onset.
The trip to the mall was essentially uneventful. We couldn't help but wait and wait and constantly check if we were tripping but despite the clicheé rookie behavior at least its not the kind of rookie mistake that will taint a trip. We picked up a bottle each of a Japanese beer, the name of which escapes me now but the selling point of this beer for us was that it's self proclaimed "Japan's No. 1 Beer". My friend also bought a pack of cigarettes and I bought 3 Beef Teriyaki (sp?) sushi rolls which I thought might come in handy later if I got hungry. After the mall we walked back.
Upon returning to the base of the apartments my friend explained that there was a nice little courtyard we could go sit in and wait for the trip to come on. We sat there and he smoked a cigarette and we just engaged in general chat, realised the beers weren't screw tops and after about 20 minutes got bored and decided to go back upstairs.
Upstairs we drank our beers on the patio which has a pretty decent view of a huge lake as well as some of the buildings of the general area(residential and commercial and a year 11-12-13 college). After that it was now about an hour since we had dosed and we didn't say it outright but we were both a little disappointed that we weren't sure if anything was happening yet or not. Pretty much when we sat down inside and tried to figure out what we should do to kill more time we started to notice body feelings which soon emerged into light visuals. Now that the trip seemed like it may be starting up I put on one of the cd's I had brought for the trip - B(if)tek, which are a local two-girl group from Canberra, Australia and the music is sort of like down-beat dance music but with various enjoyable quirks such as a variety of uses of sampling sound. I was sure this music would be perfect and gentle for the come up and we both enjoyed listening to the first half or so of the cd but we stopped it at 12:30pm to watch the Jerry Springer show. This was pretty much where it kicked in harder.
I was a little apprehensive about watching springer while tripping as the typical subject matter on that show can be a bit disturbing at times. Today was a weird episode, Extreme Ex-Lovers. This included a woman who wanted to dump her boyfriend and get him out of her house so she went in and systematically fucked up the place. She threw paint over his favorite chair (favorite chair? wtf? rednecks...), smashed the tv screen with a baseball bat, egged him and eventually she got a wrecking ball and knocked her entire trailer home down. I bet that felt satisfying for her. The next woman was so sick of her boyfriend, she wanted to make sure he got the message that it was over, so she said she was going out to find the grossest guy she could find and sleep with him.......yes..that will show him...that doesn't fuck you up in the process does it...he just has to hear about it. Anyhow the camera crew followed her into a bar, she eventually found this overweight barfly who was about 45-50 (she was about 25-30) and had huge muttonchops and apparently they went off and had sex (the cameras stopped rolling so I was personally skeptical, but I'll take their word for it). Then there was this girl, I couldn't work out wether she was breaking up with her boyfriend or he was breaking up with her but it ended up with her stripping down to her bra and whatnot and getting into a bath with dirt and then having buckets of worms poured on her. The boyfriend was pleased by this and eventually joined her in the tub but clothed....right...
After that we amused ourselves for an indeterminate amount of time watching tapes of a somewhat obscure television show, Duckman, I made a few years ago. I found focusing on a tv show meant I sort of lost the noticeable visuals from my trip, sort of. Occasionally I would notice out of the corner of my eye that the sky out the window next to the tv had become a weird shade of pink but when I specifically looked at it the colour quickly dissolved back to blue and at first I wasn't sure wether I was actually seeing that or if I just imagined it. It happened a few times though so I gathered it was actually happening.
After a lot of Duckman and laughing very loudly at the jokes in it, I eventually had to make a quick journey to the little ducks room. This is where things got complicated. I've been to this apartment a couple of times before and this one always gets me, the bathrooms light is on the outside of the bathroom. So I walk in there and half close the door and its pitch black and I can't find the light switch by feeling for it where it SHOULD be on the wall next to the door. Eventually I remember the bathrooms secret and I manage to illuminate it. Side detail, I have had chicken pox pretty much for two weeks before today. I am no longer infectious but it's left all these marks where all the poxes were and haven't quite healed up yet. They're on my face, the palms of my hands, all over my chest, legs, the soles of my feet, lots of places but not everywhere. Immediately opposite the doorway I entered the bathroom though is a huge mirror and I couldn't resist inspecting my face despite knowing it may distress me to look at myself while tripping especially with these recently acquired fucked up additions to my skin. Luckily I was aware this might happen so I laughed off how disease ridden and sickly I looked. The break from the tv was really contrasted by the strong visuals I was having in this new room. Each tile was doing the exact same visual effect at the same time. The effect can be described as the colour and the texture on the tile "blooming" and what I mean by this is that the two characteristics sort of melt towards the centre, make a different pattern/formation and then separate back to their original look and then a repeat over and over of this. I call it blooming cause it reminds me of time lapse footage of a flower being closed and then opening but then someone hitting the rewind and making it close up again, then hitting play and making it open again, etc etc you get the idea.
I don't remember what it was exactly but my thoughts worked their way onto this terrible thought I got when I freaked out on mushrooms one time. I could go into an even more excessively long rant just on this insane thought process alone but I'll try keep it brief yet still communicate how deeply disturbing it is. Essentially it's like a fear of fear itself and it also feeds on itself and gets worse and worse. Part of it is a fear that I have mental problems in my day to day life and that by tripping I am really playing with mental fire and I am close to breaking my mind and becoming insane. The idea of insanity and the resulting action of me being taken away from my family, my friends, my home, everything I find comforting and taken to a place with just more people as fucked up as me, is a thought chills me to my fucking centre. It doesn't scare me, that doesn't justify the sensation. It terrifys me. TERROR is the key word here, also TRAUMA and traumatic. I've been scared a lot in my life, but I can honestly say this feeling IS definitely at least up among the worst experiences I've ever had in my life. That is taking into account harassment, the shock of a friend dying young, funerals, the t.v. show Unsolved Mysteries which use to scare the shit out of me when I was young...basically any time I've experienced fear that I can think of - this is about 2x worse than whatever the next scariest thing I've ever experienced was.
Anyhow, that feeling only overcame me for like a minute or two before I just realised "hey, you were having a great time before you came in here, why not get out of the fucking bathroom if you want to feel better". Upon returning to my friend and Duckman I did feel a lot better, I felt comforted. But something was wrong, I couldn't just get back in and enjoy my trip, not after that feeling...I HAD to worry. I knew I should have found a distraction and then I would get back on a good track again and that would be it, happy trails for the rest of the afternoon, but the pressure of knowing that just fucked me up worse cause I couldn't shut off my thoughts. "what if I don't find a distraction, what if that terrible feeling comes back, oh shit is it coming back now cause I am worrying, I am not freaking out but...fuck yeah I am freaking out, fuck no, please don't that feeling come back". I walked out onto the patio and just tried to get some fresh air and clear my head a bit. Somehow, I managed to calm down enough to go back inside and still laugh at Duckman. I still wasn't able to settle though, I could laugh, I could appreciate the humour, I didn't really feel uncomfortable specifically but I couldn't shake the fear that my fear was now becoming an issue in the trip. This was not what I wanted. And as you can probably tell, another terrible aspect of this feeling is it just compounds and feeds on itself to make itself worse than the original issue was.
I pretty much kept quiet about this feeling for the most part though cause I didn't want to disrupt my friend's trip and just cause talking about it was only going to bring more attention to it and risk making it bigger. I didn't occasionally mumble something like "oh god.........nah its ok.....its just intense at the moment....nah I am dealing with it......fuck its difficult" without actually engaging in a conversation with my friend, I just told him this and he left me to do what I needed to do to calm down (he was present when I had my first freak out) which was great. It was around about the same time that we realised we had to decide what we were going to do cause we couldn't stay there. Without either of us talking negatively or even suggesting it was more than a slight inconvenience to relocate, this "dilemma" became a problem and we both started to freak out lightly. We were aware that a loose plan was to meet up with his girlfriend in the city (Civic) after she finished work but that we could just do whatever and neither she or us were obligated to follow through on this. But it was even just that we had to decide on something that fucked us up. We could go to the nearby bus interchange and catch a bus into the City and meet up with his girlfriend who would be straight and calm us down and we could hang out there until we could go home - but this meant fucking around with the public and specifically the bus driver with the exchange of moneys and i.d. cards and what not.
The other alternative was to walk to my house and enjoy the trip as we walked and eventually sit in my room and just trip out with mp3s or my collection of videos on computer. However, my parents were going to be there and while we would have been able to be say "yeah, hi, we're here for a while, swimming was great, we already ate dinner", which would mean they would leave us alone, it was too early to have eaten dinner and I did not want to lie and then get caught out lying, or even worse, end up having to have dinner with my parents while tripping. It was stupid shit, we probably would have been fine and my parents would have been like "early dinner eh? whatever, good that your fed and home, enjoy" but fear got the better of us.
We could catch the bus to Civic and then get my friend's girlfriend to take us to his other home but would we be able to handle talking to his Dad while tripping? Most likely he wouldn't mind too much we were tripping and if we just said "Hey leave us alone, your causing us to freak out at the moment" then he would leave us alone. But this still seemed chaotic and not where we wanted the trip to be going.
Essentially it's all petty bullshit, all those options would have ended up being nice but we just couldn't decide because of the fear of the terrible possibilities we MAY have been committing ourselves to. Jesus christ. Eventually we decided the equivalent of "Well indecision will definitely fuck us over if your mum comes home so we have to leave. If we go to my (me the author) house and we somehow get found out tripping then its definitely going to be troublesome and we wont be left in peace. Lets just go to Civic and there we can decide wether we want to stay or further try our luck at your (my friend's) house where if we get found out tripping then it shouldn't really be a problem". So we pack all our shit up, my Duckman tapes, the rest of my sushi, my cd's etc etc and left.
It was pretty much peaceful and a release as we walked to the bus interchange as there wasn't too many other people around and we could still talk about the visuals and the feelings we were getting and not have to worry about anyone hearing. Deep down though there was an anxiety about our destination, the bus interchange, building. It was somewhat justified if you can justify irrational fear of the public. From our few hours of serene tripping in the comfort of a private apartment, we walked down a short flight of stairs to be faced with about 200 commuters at approx 4:30pm on a friday afternoon, trying to do the same thing we wanted to do. Another unspoken fear was that a girl we mutually know was bashed in an unprovoked attack by a group indigenous Australians of the same gender as her about 2 years earlier at this interchange. Also there are other mini-stories of people we know getting mugged or threatened in this interchange as well as just an established local understanding that this was somewhat of a rough place. Anyhow, we walked silently to the very back of the interchange where we sat down on a bench with some other randoms and just waited for our bus to come. Fear came up and kicked my wussy ass again and I was overwhelmed by it. The contrast of the serene apartment with this now REALLY loud interchange was terrible. People were talking loudly, this fucked up country music was playing loudly over speakers everywhere and the buses all around us seemed invasive in their level of noise which I couldn't control. We pretty much sat in silence cause we both just wanted to talk about how we were feeling but we didn't want the people around us to know we were tripping, for obvious reasons. I did however make it my business to loudly question "why THE FUCK do they have to play THIS music when they could just not play anything instead?". I think about it now and its sort of funny but sort of stupid but of all the pressure I/we were under at that moment, music I do not normally enjoy being played excessively loud all around us was not helping for a second.
I don't know about my friend but I also noticed that across from the little station thing we were sitting at was a group of like 15-20 indigenous Australian youths. Now I am not racist, I don't want to be, but the fear I was getting probably is. I obviously couldn't help but remember our friend who was assaulted, and some of the members of this group looked like (for lack of better words) "tough nuts" and that they wanted to perceived as such. I though some of them might have been looking at us but then I was getting that feeling about the whole interchange as well so I tried to brush off how irrational it was to think that we were any more significant than the rest of the interchange crowd. The mix of people in the interchange was becoming too intense and I couldn't look anywhere without getting worried that someone would think I was staring at them. The only haven for my vision was a huge building to my left which had rows of windows. Not the sort of windows that individually stand out, but just huge long panels of glass. Basically the building was a normal square shape with stripes of huge glass panels running horizontal from the top of the building to the ground. I started staring at the reflection of the clouds in the panels of glass and tried to take my mind off the near crisis I was about to have. Eventually the stripes of wall between the stripes of glass started to also reflect the clouds and that has to be one of the biggest visuals I have ever had. The clouds in the reflection were moving very fast and were turbulent. This seemed in sync to the situation we were in. Unfortunately I couldn't enjoy or even appreciate the beauty of this visual as the amount of pressure I was feeling just made me wish I wasn't tripping right then and there, and seeing the most vivid and largest visual hallucination at the same time wasn't helping. It's sad but I at least appreciate it now in retrospect and I remember it vividly.
Eventually, thank you there is a god, the bus came and while I was nervous about getting the cards and the money right I figured I should be able to get on the bus somehow and get the fuck out of this hell that is the Belconnen Bus Interchange (if you ever visit Canberra and for some reason you have to go there - avoid it like the fucking plague, tripping or otherwise). While I did feel good about getting away from the whole interchange which intimidated and worried me, I still couldn't settle and the bus we were on was packed. I felt trapped, completely taking for granted the privilege of being carted around without having to walk my lazy ass, and that it was like a test. The mix of people and the noise was still getting to me and the pressure that now, unlike the interchange, I couldn't just flip out and run as fast as I could away if needed to got to me. I swear I could have just stood up and yelled and demanded "FUCK, JUST SHUT UP PLEASE, I NEED SO MUCH FOR YOU ALL TO JUST NOT TALK SO LOUDLY RIGHT NOW PLEASE"...but luckily I maintained. I had a sneaking suspicion that while that would have been instantly gratifying, there would be grave consequences to face that would exceed the tension I was currently facing.
One more note about the bus ride. The bus goes past my old high school/college. There was this girl in the year below mine who I could seriously not determine her gender initially. I had to ask various people to confirm and in turn we had to almost vote cause we just couldn't tell. The feeling I had was that the variation in people at the interchange was so tense that almost everyone seemed alien in appearance...and now as if to totally trump that performance, this girl who I've found trippy enough when I am not high has to get on the bus. I could have screamed again. Thank god I didn't. Eventually as we came closer to the city I realised a lot of this pressure was going to be relieved and I started to feel a bit better but still, the whole interchange and bus experience had been near traumatic for me and I wasn't ready to calm down to normal quite yet.
Walking through the city we just kept seeing people we knew, but not friends of ours. I don't think I've ever seen so many people I know at once in the city in the same day before. This happened as we were just walking through a café area in the city. We didn't have a specific destination other than somewhere calm and less chaotic. My friend was hating being in the public as well and we hadn't even shared our thoughts on the issue up until this moment. I find it strange though that we both ended up in essentially the same mental state at points in our trip when we hadn't actually been specifically talking about how we felt, but we were both in the same place mentally. Anyway, this wasn't just our thinking we were recognizing faces, we got a good vantage point and sat down and looked at these people and saw it was definitely them and not our imagination. Most of them we weren't on the conditions that we would have to stop and talk to them, we just knew them from schools or parties. Personally I just didn't want to see any of these specific people while I was facing a difficult trip, I wouldn't have been bothered by them if I had walked through that area straight.
While we sitting in our somewhat calm location and waiting for my friend's girlfriend to drive past and pick us up, a specific friend of mine popped up out of nowhere and was suddenly right in front of us. This guy is pretty cool, a bit of a trendy freak and then also wanting to be anti-mainstream at the same time, and I enjoy his company when I am straight. When I am straight. Cause this guy doesn't do drugs, he drinks and gets drunk but thats it. But he is one of those "Drugs aren't for me, and I appreciate the music that they've inspired, cause a lot of my favorite artists were influenced by drugs, but the people taking drugs and not making the music I enjoy are pretty much wasting their time and I look down on them" sort of people. .... I don't know if you know anyone like that. I do and it's that guy. Anyhow, he is cool but he is right up there on the list of people I DO NOT want to see when I am not only tripping, but having a difficult time. He also started telling some weird story and somehow just popped in "timothy leary" and something like "some spaced out shit mannn" which was his way of telling us he knew we were high on something. Again it could be seen like this was just my own paranoia talking to me but I know him well, I saw his lips shape the words, and this was definitely his intention. Unfortunately for him I was able to maintain a very standard and lighthearted conversation and joke a little and eventually he left to the café across from where we were sitting. Not far enough away, but good enough for now. Soon after my friend's girlfriend rocked up and we got our fabled ride home. It felt SOOOO good to be in our own little private world again where we could say and do what we want without fear of persecution or random acts of violence.
We went back to my friend's house and enjoyed the tail end of the trip. Once again we could just kick back and enjoy the visuals that were all around us if we just sat back and relaxed our vision slightly. His girlfriend ate some of my sushi then left to go to dinner and we sat there playing the old playstation game Driver and getting a kick out of how "old school" the game was. Eventually the visuals stopped and we were both tired and I felt stable enough to get a ride to my home with his mum who was going back to her original apartment where we'd been tripping all day anyway. I thought that was a weird little coincidence in a loose way.
I know I know, this sounds like a BAD trip. And it was. But that whole bad period, that was about only an hour. As you can probably see from my copious writings on that section of the trip though, it felt like a day just in itself. We still got several hours of great visuals, lots of laughs, great body vibes etc etc but my memory of the trip is still focused around the negative side cause it just got so deep under my skin. Overall I feel ok about it, I had enough of a good time for my money and for a freak out, that could have been a lot worse and a lot more public.
I am going to come back to this tomorrow and just add some more about the good side of the trip, fix up the spelling and halve some of my extremely long sentences. It's near 4am and I still haven't slept since I took this SINGLE microdot. I certainly wasn't expecting to get that overwhelming and intense an experience over such a single dose of such a tiny thing. You know what? Now I know better.
Updated: Finally got around to running this through a spellcheck and correcting the plethora of mistakes and typos.
Expectation (i.e. planned agenda, I believe in going into a trip without expectations but it is difficult in practice): Me and my pal L05ti8 had planned to make use of his mother's apartment while she worked throughout the day. She leaves early, comes back dinner time-ish. We told her we wanted to go swimming and then we'd also be chilling in her apartment as well. We conveniently left out the detail that we'd be tripping while doing that for obvious reasons. We knew we had to get out by like 5pm to make sure we didn't run into her as we knew we'd still be high then. Anyhow..
Experience: We got dropped off at his ma's place at approx 11am which was right on schedule. After what felt like a long walk up several flights of steps we finally got into the apartment. Almost immediately I wanted to "open" my microdots. I'll explain. I don't know if this is standard practice for packaging, but I bought 3 dots through a friend who got them from a work friend and I imagine the chain is near endless, anyway, they were stuck between two pieces of masking tape. Although we'd already gauged the size of them through the tape we were still amazed that these two little black dots were supposed to be our fuel for a day of tripping. Needless to say, it didn't take us long before we decided to find out for ourselves. So we dosed and my friend said he'd been up all night drinking and he thought a mission to the shopping mall right next to these apartments to get some beers was in order. I agreed cause it gave us a task to keep us busy with while we awaited the onset.
The trip to the mall was essentially uneventful. We couldn't help but wait and wait and constantly check if we were tripping but despite the clicheé rookie behavior at least its not the kind of rookie mistake that will taint a trip. We picked up a bottle each of a Japanese beer, the name of which escapes me now but the selling point of this beer for us was that it's self proclaimed "Japan's No. 1 Beer". My friend also bought a pack of cigarettes and I bought 3 Beef Teriyaki (sp?) sushi rolls which I thought might come in handy later if I got hungry. After the mall we walked back.
Upon returning to the base of the apartments my friend explained that there was a nice little courtyard we could go sit in and wait for the trip to come on. We sat there and he smoked a cigarette and we just engaged in general chat, realised the beers weren't screw tops and after about 20 minutes got bored and decided to go back upstairs.
Upstairs we drank our beers on the patio which has a pretty decent view of a huge lake as well as some of the buildings of the general area(residential and commercial and a year 11-12-13 college). After that it was now about an hour since we had dosed and we didn't say it outright but we were both a little disappointed that we weren't sure if anything was happening yet or not. Pretty much when we sat down inside and tried to figure out what we should do to kill more time we started to notice body feelings which soon emerged into light visuals. Now that the trip seemed like it may be starting up I put on one of the cd's I had brought for the trip - B(if)tek, which are a local two-girl group from Canberra, Australia and the music is sort of like down-beat dance music but with various enjoyable quirks such as a variety of uses of sampling sound. I was sure this music would be perfect and gentle for the come up and we both enjoyed listening to the first half or so of the cd but we stopped it at 12:30pm to watch the Jerry Springer show. This was pretty much where it kicked in harder.
I was a little apprehensive about watching springer while tripping as the typical subject matter on that show can be a bit disturbing at times. Today was a weird episode, Extreme Ex-Lovers. This included a woman who wanted to dump her boyfriend and get him out of her house so she went in and systematically fucked up the place. She threw paint over his favorite chair (favorite chair? wtf? rednecks...), smashed the tv screen with a baseball bat, egged him and eventually she got a wrecking ball and knocked her entire trailer home down. I bet that felt satisfying for her. The next woman was so sick of her boyfriend, she wanted to make sure he got the message that it was over, so she said she was going out to find the grossest guy she could find and sleep with him.......yes..that will show him...that doesn't fuck you up in the process does it...he just has to hear about it. Anyhow the camera crew followed her into a bar, she eventually found this overweight barfly who was about 45-50 (she was about 25-30) and had huge muttonchops and apparently they went off and had sex (the cameras stopped rolling so I was personally skeptical, but I'll take their word for it). Then there was this girl, I couldn't work out wether she was breaking up with her boyfriend or he was breaking up with her but it ended up with her stripping down to her bra and whatnot and getting into a bath with dirt and then having buckets of worms poured on her. The boyfriend was pleased by this and eventually joined her in the tub but clothed....right...
After that we amused ourselves for an indeterminate amount of time watching tapes of a somewhat obscure television show, Duckman, I made a few years ago. I found focusing on a tv show meant I sort of lost the noticeable visuals from my trip, sort of. Occasionally I would notice out of the corner of my eye that the sky out the window next to the tv had become a weird shade of pink but when I specifically looked at it the colour quickly dissolved back to blue and at first I wasn't sure wether I was actually seeing that or if I just imagined it. It happened a few times though so I gathered it was actually happening.
After a lot of Duckman and laughing very loudly at the jokes in it, I eventually had to make a quick journey to the little ducks room. This is where things got complicated. I've been to this apartment a couple of times before and this one always gets me, the bathrooms light is on the outside of the bathroom. So I walk in there and half close the door and its pitch black and I can't find the light switch by feeling for it where it SHOULD be on the wall next to the door. Eventually I remember the bathrooms secret and I manage to illuminate it. Side detail, I have had chicken pox pretty much for two weeks before today. I am no longer infectious but it's left all these marks where all the poxes were and haven't quite healed up yet. They're on my face, the palms of my hands, all over my chest, legs, the soles of my feet, lots of places but not everywhere. Immediately opposite the doorway I entered the bathroom though is a huge mirror and I couldn't resist inspecting my face despite knowing it may distress me to look at myself while tripping especially with these recently acquired fucked up additions to my skin. Luckily I was aware this might happen so I laughed off how disease ridden and sickly I looked. The break from the tv was really contrasted by the strong visuals I was having in this new room. Each tile was doing the exact same visual effect at the same time. The effect can be described as the colour and the texture on the tile "blooming" and what I mean by this is that the two characteristics sort of melt towards the centre, make a different pattern/formation and then separate back to their original look and then a repeat over and over of this. I call it blooming cause it reminds me of time lapse footage of a flower being closed and then opening but then someone hitting the rewind and making it close up again, then hitting play and making it open again, etc etc you get the idea.
I don't remember what it was exactly but my thoughts worked their way onto this terrible thought I got when I freaked out on mushrooms one time. I could go into an even more excessively long rant just on this insane thought process alone but I'll try keep it brief yet still communicate how deeply disturbing it is. Essentially it's like a fear of fear itself and it also feeds on itself and gets worse and worse. Part of it is a fear that I have mental problems in my day to day life and that by tripping I am really playing with mental fire and I am close to breaking my mind and becoming insane. The idea of insanity and the resulting action of me being taken away from my family, my friends, my home, everything I find comforting and taken to a place with just more people as fucked up as me, is a thought chills me to my fucking centre. It doesn't scare me, that doesn't justify the sensation. It terrifys me. TERROR is the key word here, also TRAUMA and traumatic. I've been scared a lot in my life, but I can honestly say this feeling IS definitely at least up among the worst experiences I've ever had in my life. That is taking into account harassment, the shock of a friend dying young, funerals, the t.v. show Unsolved Mysteries which use to scare the shit out of me when I was young...basically any time I've experienced fear that I can think of - this is about 2x worse than whatever the next scariest thing I've ever experienced was.
Anyhow, that feeling only overcame me for like a minute or two before I just realised "hey, you were having a great time before you came in here, why not get out of the fucking bathroom if you want to feel better". Upon returning to my friend and Duckman I did feel a lot better, I felt comforted. But something was wrong, I couldn't just get back in and enjoy my trip, not after that feeling...I HAD to worry. I knew I should have found a distraction and then I would get back on a good track again and that would be it, happy trails for the rest of the afternoon, but the pressure of knowing that just fucked me up worse cause I couldn't shut off my thoughts. "what if I don't find a distraction, what if that terrible feeling comes back, oh shit is it coming back now cause I am worrying, I am not freaking out but...fuck yeah I am freaking out, fuck no, please don't that feeling come back". I walked out onto the patio and just tried to get some fresh air and clear my head a bit. Somehow, I managed to calm down enough to go back inside and still laugh at Duckman. I still wasn't able to settle though, I could laugh, I could appreciate the humour, I didn't really feel uncomfortable specifically but I couldn't shake the fear that my fear was now becoming an issue in the trip. This was not what I wanted. And as you can probably tell, another terrible aspect of this feeling is it just compounds and feeds on itself to make itself worse than the original issue was.
I pretty much kept quiet about this feeling for the most part though cause I didn't want to disrupt my friend's trip and just cause talking about it was only going to bring more attention to it and risk making it bigger. I didn't occasionally mumble something like "oh god.........nah its ok.....its just intense at the moment....nah I am dealing with it......fuck its difficult" without actually engaging in a conversation with my friend, I just told him this and he left me to do what I needed to do to calm down (he was present when I had my first freak out) which was great. It was around about the same time that we realised we had to decide what we were going to do cause we couldn't stay there. Without either of us talking negatively or even suggesting it was more than a slight inconvenience to relocate, this "dilemma" became a problem and we both started to freak out lightly. We were aware that a loose plan was to meet up with his girlfriend in the city (Civic) after she finished work but that we could just do whatever and neither she or us were obligated to follow through on this. But it was even just that we had to decide on something that fucked us up. We could go to the nearby bus interchange and catch a bus into the City and meet up with his girlfriend who would be straight and calm us down and we could hang out there until we could go home - but this meant fucking around with the public and specifically the bus driver with the exchange of moneys and i.d. cards and what not.
The other alternative was to walk to my house and enjoy the trip as we walked and eventually sit in my room and just trip out with mp3s or my collection of videos on computer. However, my parents were going to be there and while we would have been able to be say "yeah, hi, we're here for a while, swimming was great, we already ate dinner", which would mean they would leave us alone, it was too early to have eaten dinner and I did not want to lie and then get caught out lying, or even worse, end up having to have dinner with my parents while tripping. It was stupid shit, we probably would have been fine and my parents would have been like "early dinner eh? whatever, good that your fed and home, enjoy" but fear got the better of us.
We could catch the bus to Civic and then get my friend's girlfriend to take us to his other home but would we be able to handle talking to his Dad while tripping? Most likely he wouldn't mind too much we were tripping and if we just said "Hey leave us alone, your causing us to freak out at the moment" then he would leave us alone. But this still seemed chaotic and not where we wanted the trip to be going.
Essentially it's all petty bullshit, all those options would have ended up being nice but we just couldn't decide because of the fear of the terrible possibilities we MAY have been committing ourselves to. Jesus christ. Eventually we decided the equivalent of "Well indecision will definitely fuck us over if your mum comes home so we have to leave. If we go to my (me the author) house and we somehow get found out tripping then its definitely going to be troublesome and we wont be left in peace. Lets just go to Civic and there we can decide wether we want to stay or further try our luck at your (my friend's) house where if we get found out tripping then it shouldn't really be a problem". So we pack all our shit up, my Duckman tapes, the rest of my sushi, my cd's etc etc and left.
It was pretty much peaceful and a release as we walked to the bus interchange as there wasn't too many other people around and we could still talk about the visuals and the feelings we were getting and not have to worry about anyone hearing. Deep down though there was an anxiety about our destination, the bus interchange, building. It was somewhat justified if you can justify irrational fear of the public. From our few hours of serene tripping in the comfort of a private apartment, we walked down a short flight of stairs to be faced with about 200 commuters at approx 4:30pm on a friday afternoon, trying to do the same thing we wanted to do. Another unspoken fear was that a girl we mutually know was bashed in an unprovoked attack by a group indigenous Australians of the same gender as her about 2 years earlier at this interchange. Also there are other mini-stories of people we know getting mugged or threatened in this interchange as well as just an established local understanding that this was somewhat of a rough place. Anyhow, we walked silently to the very back of the interchange where we sat down on a bench with some other randoms and just waited for our bus to come. Fear came up and kicked my wussy ass again and I was overwhelmed by it. The contrast of the serene apartment with this now REALLY loud interchange was terrible. People were talking loudly, this fucked up country music was playing loudly over speakers everywhere and the buses all around us seemed invasive in their level of noise which I couldn't control. We pretty much sat in silence cause we both just wanted to talk about how we were feeling but we didn't want the people around us to know we were tripping, for obvious reasons. I did however make it my business to loudly question "why THE FUCK do they have to play THIS music when they could just not play anything instead?". I think about it now and its sort of funny but sort of stupid but of all the pressure I/we were under at that moment, music I do not normally enjoy being played excessively loud all around us was not helping for a second.
I don't know about my friend but I also noticed that across from the little station thing we were sitting at was a group of like 15-20 indigenous Australian youths. Now I am not racist, I don't want to be, but the fear I was getting probably is. I obviously couldn't help but remember our friend who was assaulted, and some of the members of this group looked like (for lack of better words) "tough nuts" and that they wanted to perceived as such. I though some of them might have been looking at us but then I was getting that feeling about the whole interchange as well so I tried to brush off how irrational it was to think that we were any more significant than the rest of the interchange crowd. The mix of people in the interchange was becoming too intense and I couldn't look anywhere without getting worried that someone would think I was staring at them. The only haven for my vision was a huge building to my left which had rows of windows. Not the sort of windows that individually stand out, but just huge long panels of glass. Basically the building was a normal square shape with stripes of huge glass panels running horizontal from the top of the building to the ground. I started staring at the reflection of the clouds in the panels of glass and tried to take my mind off the near crisis I was about to have. Eventually the stripes of wall between the stripes of glass started to also reflect the clouds and that has to be one of the biggest visuals I have ever had. The clouds in the reflection were moving very fast and were turbulent. This seemed in sync to the situation we were in. Unfortunately I couldn't enjoy or even appreciate the beauty of this visual as the amount of pressure I was feeling just made me wish I wasn't tripping right then and there, and seeing the most vivid and largest visual hallucination at the same time wasn't helping. It's sad but I at least appreciate it now in retrospect and I remember it vividly.
Eventually, thank you there is a god, the bus came and while I was nervous about getting the cards and the money right I figured I should be able to get on the bus somehow and get the fuck out of this hell that is the Belconnen Bus Interchange (if you ever visit Canberra and for some reason you have to go there - avoid it like the fucking plague, tripping or otherwise). While I did feel good about getting away from the whole interchange which intimidated and worried me, I still couldn't settle and the bus we were on was packed. I felt trapped, completely taking for granted the privilege of being carted around without having to walk my lazy ass, and that it was like a test. The mix of people and the noise was still getting to me and the pressure that now, unlike the interchange, I couldn't just flip out and run as fast as I could away if needed to got to me. I swear I could have just stood up and yelled and demanded "FUCK, JUST SHUT UP PLEASE, I NEED SO MUCH FOR YOU ALL TO JUST NOT TALK SO LOUDLY RIGHT NOW PLEASE"...but luckily I maintained. I had a sneaking suspicion that while that would have been instantly gratifying, there would be grave consequences to face that would exceed the tension I was currently facing.
One more note about the bus ride. The bus goes past my old high school/college. There was this girl in the year below mine who I could seriously not determine her gender initially. I had to ask various people to confirm and in turn we had to almost vote cause we just couldn't tell. The feeling I had was that the variation in people at the interchange was so tense that almost everyone seemed alien in appearance...and now as if to totally trump that performance, this girl who I've found trippy enough when I am not high has to get on the bus. I could have screamed again. Thank god I didn't. Eventually as we came closer to the city I realised a lot of this pressure was going to be relieved and I started to feel a bit better but still, the whole interchange and bus experience had been near traumatic for me and I wasn't ready to calm down to normal quite yet.
Walking through the city we just kept seeing people we knew, but not friends of ours. I don't think I've ever seen so many people I know at once in the city in the same day before. This happened as we were just walking through a café area in the city. We didn't have a specific destination other than somewhere calm and less chaotic. My friend was hating being in the public as well and we hadn't even shared our thoughts on the issue up until this moment. I find it strange though that we both ended up in essentially the same mental state at points in our trip when we hadn't actually been specifically talking about how we felt, but we were both in the same place mentally. Anyway, this wasn't just our thinking we were recognizing faces, we got a good vantage point and sat down and looked at these people and saw it was definitely them and not our imagination. Most of them we weren't on the conditions that we would have to stop and talk to them, we just knew them from schools or parties. Personally I just didn't want to see any of these specific people while I was facing a difficult trip, I wouldn't have been bothered by them if I had walked through that area straight.
While we sitting in our somewhat calm location and waiting for my friend's girlfriend to drive past and pick us up, a specific friend of mine popped up out of nowhere and was suddenly right in front of us. This guy is pretty cool, a bit of a trendy freak and then also wanting to be anti-mainstream at the same time, and I enjoy his company when I am straight. When I am straight. Cause this guy doesn't do drugs, he drinks and gets drunk but thats it. But he is one of those "Drugs aren't for me, and I appreciate the music that they've inspired, cause a lot of my favorite artists were influenced by drugs, but the people taking drugs and not making the music I enjoy are pretty much wasting their time and I look down on them" sort of people. .... I don't know if you know anyone like that. I do and it's that guy. Anyhow, he is cool but he is right up there on the list of people I DO NOT want to see when I am not only tripping, but having a difficult time. He also started telling some weird story and somehow just popped in "timothy leary" and something like "some spaced out shit mannn" which was his way of telling us he knew we were high on something. Again it could be seen like this was just my own paranoia talking to me but I know him well, I saw his lips shape the words, and this was definitely his intention. Unfortunately for him I was able to maintain a very standard and lighthearted conversation and joke a little and eventually he left to the café across from where we were sitting. Not far enough away, but good enough for now. Soon after my friend's girlfriend rocked up and we got our fabled ride home. It felt SOOOO good to be in our own little private world again where we could say and do what we want without fear of persecution or random acts of violence.
We went back to my friend's house and enjoyed the tail end of the trip. Once again we could just kick back and enjoy the visuals that were all around us if we just sat back and relaxed our vision slightly. His girlfriend ate some of my sushi then left to go to dinner and we sat there playing the old playstation game Driver and getting a kick out of how "old school" the game was. Eventually the visuals stopped and we were both tired and I felt stable enough to get a ride to my home with his mum who was going back to her original apartment where we'd been tripping all day anyway. I thought that was a weird little coincidence in a loose way.
I know I know, this sounds like a BAD trip. And it was. But that whole bad period, that was about only an hour. As you can probably see from my copious writings on that section of the trip though, it felt like a day just in itself. We still got several hours of great visuals, lots of laughs, great body vibes etc etc but my memory of the trip is still focused around the negative side cause it just got so deep under my skin. Overall I feel ok about it, I had enough of a good time for my money and for a freak out, that could have been a lot worse and a lot more public.
I am going to come back to this tomorrow and just add some more about the good side of the trip, fix up the spelling and halve some of my extremely long sentences. It's near 4am and I still haven't slept since I took this SINGLE microdot. I certainly wasn't expecting to get that overwhelming and intense an experience over such a single dose of such a tiny thing. You know what? Now I know better.
Updated: Finally got around to running this through a spellcheck and correcting the plethora of mistakes and typos.
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