yardbirdrc
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jan 8, 2011
- Messages
- 160
Date: May 19, 2012
Time: 11:00AM - 8PM
Drug: Peruvian Torch (T. Peruvianus)
Dose: 15g
Summertime! What better season is there? Right at the end of Spring where things are still in flux, but it is reasonably certain there will be no cold days left to get through. As opportune a time as any to indulge in some phenethylaamine based decompression.
I had recently become a college graduate and almost immediately I found myself in a satisfying full time position with a very relaxed and hospitable group of software developers. In short, life was good and relatively stress-free. I had been dating Robin for about 4 months, and she was expressing interest in pursuing her first psychedelic experience. She, too, was employed at an ecology lab on the bank of a large lake in the middle of a nature reserve. We had a venue.
And so we piled into the car one Friday afternoon and beat our path out of the city. We brought with us 130 grams of ground Peruvian Torch (eesh, gonna need a re-up soon), a bunch of LSD and a few pinches of the elf spice. After a pleasant night of drinking, smoking and getting to know the other students and researchers at the lab, we eagerly went to sleep in preparation for a long day of mental excursion.
Saturday arrived with beautiful sunny weather. As we cooked breakfast we began stuffing cactus into capsules. For Robin and myself I planned a relatively low dose of 15 grams. This had been my dose the first time I had taken the Torch, and I had found the experience satisfying but far from overwhelming. Kyle, Jamie and Zach all opted for 20 grams, with Kelly taking 17. Through extraction I had found this particular sack-o-cactus to be in the 1-1.5% range. 30 minutes or so after we had finished eating, we began the 1-hour dosing cycle. Zach and Kelly had gone to another location at the lab complex to finish up some work, but they also through coincidence began their dosing sharply at 11 just as the rest of us had.
I began to notice nausea rather early. Generally I don't find cactus particularly nauseating, although I've found this to vary from person to person. In fact, in all of my cactus experience I've found it to be highly variable from person to person in many respects. 15 grams for myself is a noticeably psychedelic dose whereas in at least 2 of my previous cacti-cohorts this was found to be a nearly inactive dose. Some people come up early and build slowly into a plateau, others come up much later but have a quicker escalation. Things like this are to be expected when you're dealing with anywhere from a half an ounce onward of not necessarily easily digested plant material.
By the time we finished the dosing cycle I was feeling first alerts. I held on to my last 2 pills as a booster, but once we got outside I felt comfortable enough with the intensity to just say "down the hatch". We made our way to a local tourist attraction where carp were corralled through their own stupidity into small water drainage area. Nearly 2 tons of bread a year were thrown into this drainage area in order to prompt the thick mob of ugly fish into a feeding frenzy, which was enough to have an impact on the local ecosystem. Why we chose this as a destination I am not sure, but when we arrived I was already tripping at a reasonable level, and I found the whole affair depressing. "It's like America", I remarked half sarcastically. Everybody else was mostly just feeling nauseous. Robin was contemplating throwing up, which I felt sorry about. At the carp orgy we got a text that Zach and Kelly had finished work and finished dosing, so they headed our way, forcing us to stay there even longer while they walked the mile long path from the lab. When they arrived, Jamie, Zach and Robin stayed behind in the woods to calm their stomachs while Kelly, Kyle and myself went to the carp orgy gift shop to buy ginger ale. Kelly had a very hard time figuring out how to complete this task, which aroused suspicions that she may in fact be tripping balls. Kyle was also starting to feel some effects at this point. As we walked back to the lab we sipped ginger ale and lit up a joint to quell nausea and increase effects, which I abstained from as I was already starting to trip solidly and we were still pretty early in the chronology. A few hundred yards later I decided to make myself vomit, as I was quite nauseous and I was hoping to halt the escalation of the effects as I was only planning on a moderate trip for the day.
Vomiting was not fun. Go figure. Almost immediately after I finished the tone of the trip became more frenzied, and I noticed a steep increase in effects. Great. Well, let's see where this goes. As we returned to the lab I was already beginning to doubt my ability to be around people. As we prepared canoes for a lake journey, I was getting intense rushes and a strong vision blur with plenty of color exaggeration and patterned overlay.
"Who else is off their tits right now?" I asked, hoping to find mental strength in numbers.
"Bluaahhh!", Kelly waved her arms wildly in the air from her canoe. Kyle was beginning to get visuals and Zach had a grin plastered on his face. At least I'm fulfilling my role as the provider of exotic brain candy. I seem to be fulfilling that role a lot these days.
We pushed off from the dock and I began to row. As I rowed the tension began to build steadily, starting between my eyes and then traveling down my neck until my body felt like a sock fresh from the dryer. I was tingling all over, with strong electric rushes and a rather confused and sickened mental state behind my very blurry and chaotic visual field. There was nothing around but the waves and the sun. I ate a pear as we watched a bald eagle flying overhead. I was reminded, as I lay in the boat allowing Robin to take over paddling duties, of some childhood memory or feeling that I had either long forgotten, or which had been completely synthesized by the drug and presented to me under the masquerade of deja vu. I began to panic. It had been about a year since I had taken a strong pinch of psychedelic, and I was no where near prepared to deal with the intensity of the experience I was having. I felt overstimulated, heat stricken and weak. "Land. Where is the nearest land?" I frantically queried. At this point I pulled the ripcord and chewed 0.5mg Lorazepam. We rowed to a small strip of sandy beach and after shedding my shirt I hurriedly bounded off into the woods with Robin following. I wandered around in circles out of sight of the rest of the group trying to get a grip on the situation. Robin's presence was soothing, and I would go through waves of intense confusion and fear and brief respites of relative calm. I began to feel the Ativan droop over my head and bring the tone of the trip down slightly. My legs began to feel very weak and jello-ey. I informed the group that I was going to go lie down back at the cabins and I'd meet up with them later. Robin, who had finally begun to trip herself, shepherded me back to safety through the woods and along an access road. I popped another half milligram of Lorazepam.
I began to express to her a bunch of personal fears and insecurities that I probably would not have normally admitted. Namely, I'm sometimes afraid for my mental health. Things have seemed somehow different since last summer, a time when I ate a pretty solid amount of psychedelics. It's hard to put my finger on how exactly, but sometimes everything is just a little... much. I could be (and probably am) just psyching myself out. Lots of people think they're going crazy, but the brain is just not a static thing. There are changes, and sometimes they catch us off guard. But, I still worry. There is a substantial amount of schizophrenia, bipolar, depression and general anxiety throughout my family on both sides. Part of me knows that I really shouldn't be playing around like this, but the rest of me is committed to this fascination with psychedelic drugs. It's one of the very few things I'm really passionate about, and it brings me great joy to share these things with the people who appreciate them. To guide them on these journeys... that's all I really want to do. Unfortunately I can't get a job doing that, and I refuse to take any sizeable profit from the drugs themselves. I was once that kid paying 50 bucks for 5 blank pieces of paper. People don't deserve that, people who seek these things sincerely. I want to make that better. It's more rewarding to give things away. I get them for practically nothing these days anyway.
By the time we reached the camp, I was feeling a bit calmer thanks to the benzos. We went into an empty room and I took off my shoes and laid down on the bed. Robin remarked that she was getting visual effects now that we were inside. Things were moving "and they weren't supposed to be", and that made her slightly uncomfortable, so we moved outside under the shade of a tree where I curled into the fetal position and lost myself in closed eye visuals of spinning flower fields and sketched landscapes. Robin began whittling. This didn't last long before our friends returned on the canoes. By that point I was feeling much more comfortable in my body, though still tripping pretty hard.
The next 3 or 4 hours were the most enjoyable of the experience. Once the Ativan kicked in I was still feeling the mescaline but it was far more controllable. We spent a lot of time hanging out in the front lawn, kicking around a volleyball, throwing frisbee and having conversations.
"Look at this volleyball." I said. "Look at it. This volleyball. Do you understand? Just look at it. Do you get it?"
Nobody got it.
There was a small family of baby groundhogs under the cabins that we spent a lot of time observing. We discussed trapping one, but we weren't sure what to do with it. We considered eating it, but we weren't really sure how to do it. I suggested beaning it with a volleyball, but eventually these plans were discarded. We decided to go fishing instead. Everybody but Robin and myself broke off some Hoffman 1943s and transitioned from mescaline to LSD. These were laid by a friend of a friend, though unevenly (thus their ridiculously low cost). Some of the sheets off some of the pages were pretty weak, but fortunately the sheet I got were only slightly less than average. 2 or 3 put you there, 4 or 5 put you over. Kelly, Kyle and Jamie went there, Zach went over.
We grabbed some fishing poles and the canoes and struck back out onto the water. The colors coming off the water during the sunset were unreal, which made me slightly disappointed that I had not dropped acid with everybody else. We sat on the lake until it became pitch black. There were bats flying around us snatching up dinner from the clouds of midges all around us. We smoked a joint and gazed up at a sky full of stars relatively unobstructed by light pollution. We had caught 3 fish, one of which was a rather large and delicious looking catfish. When we returned to shore, Zach (who was on 5 hits of LSD), began meticulously dissecting the catfish, who was still very much alive even as his meat was filleted from his bones and his organs were ripped from his ribcage. The "he" turned out to be a "she" as we collected a fair amount of roe from an egg sack. The fish parts were pan fried, with the catfish being dredged in cajun seasoned cornmeal.
The rest of the night was pretty uneventful. We poured scotch and ate catfish.
Zach and I sat on the deck smoking cigarettes.
"What did you think of mescaline?"
"I liked it. It's a very happy trip. It's not really like mushrooms at all, or even LSD. It's a little bit like 2C-B."
"Well, it's the only phenethylamine among the classic natural psychedelics." Suddenly I remembered something. "Although, amphetamine and even methamphetamine are found in some species of Acacia... not that they're psychedelics. Of course, some people argue that was just a case of a dirty vial used for the GC/MS." I went on, "You know, DMT was synthesized in Canada before it was discovered as the active constituent in ayahuasca. All these people argue that 'natural is better' when it comes to psychedelics. Even Terrence McKenna. Does that mean that for the 15 or so years that DMT was unknown in nature, it was somehow a lesser drug?"
I was at a small party a few months ago. A girl I met was talking about how much she liked shrooms, but how she would never take LSD. I asked her why, and she told me it was because LSD is synthetic. "It'll fuck you up", she eloquently quipped. "I have friends that have never been the same since they took LSD. I only stick to the natural stuff, it's safer."
I looked her square in the eyes. "Go chew on some poison ivy and let me know how that works out for you."
I continued the discourse with Zach. "Shulgin... he started with mescaline. Today we experienced the progenitor of 200 some drugs he arrived at by tweaking this molecule, bit by bit. First the TMAs, then the DOx's and on to the 2C's..."
"I wonder what kind of effect that had on him. All those drugs."
"Well, he's pretty scatterbrained, but he's also in his 80's. He had a stroke last year, but he's getting better. Everything effects everybody differently. I heard him talk once about an experience his group of friends had with this new cactus he was working with, Pachycereus Pringlei." Zach is an ecologist, I felt comfortable using binomial nomenclature around him. "He said that of the people that took it, half had overwhelmingly uncomfortable strongly psychedelic experiences, whereas the others had a very mild barely threshold experience. All from the same batch of tea. I mean, hell. Today is even an example of that. You ate quite a bit more cactus than me, and here you are adding LSD to it while I'm just trying to forget what happened to me today."
"Thank you for bringing this stuff up this weekend, man. I always wanted to explore stuff like this, but nobody really shared my interest. You, Kyle... I'm glad I found this group of friends. I love you guys."
I loved him too, and Kyle and Kelly and Jamie as well. Alfie too, though he wasn't there. The only one I was having a hard time saying that to was Robin, despite trying to find the right moment all weekend. But hey, that's another story. As a group of friends, we really did cultivate a great little groove for ourselves. There was a lot of positive emotion flowing around - the genuine kind, where we'd go out of our way to help each other and make each other happy. That's worth its weight in gold.
The ladyfriend and I fell asleep around 2am, the rest of the crew lay awake for a while longer on the tail end of the LSD.
I'm a relatively experienced psychonaut, and although I've had some momentary rough patches in the past, I've never had a "bad trip" to the point that I needed to abort it entirely. I guess there's a first time for everything. All I know is that I'm extremely lucky to have gotten that Ativan prescription. Despite the stumble, it was still a pretty great weekend.
I have 2 or 3 solid doses worth of extracted mescaline hcl. I am curious as to whether or not this would have a less physically stimulating/disorienting effect. This will most likely be investigated before the summer is over.
Be careful out there, folks. I've never met most of you, but I love you all the same.
Time: 11:00AM - 8PM
Drug: Peruvian Torch (T. Peruvianus)
Dose: 15g
Summertime! What better season is there? Right at the end of Spring where things are still in flux, but it is reasonably certain there will be no cold days left to get through. As opportune a time as any to indulge in some phenethylaamine based decompression.
I had recently become a college graduate and almost immediately I found myself in a satisfying full time position with a very relaxed and hospitable group of software developers. In short, life was good and relatively stress-free. I had been dating Robin for about 4 months, and she was expressing interest in pursuing her first psychedelic experience. She, too, was employed at an ecology lab on the bank of a large lake in the middle of a nature reserve. We had a venue.
And so we piled into the car one Friday afternoon and beat our path out of the city. We brought with us 130 grams of ground Peruvian Torch (eesh, gonna need a re-up soon), a bunch of LSD and a few pinches of the elf spice. After a pleasant night of drinking, smoking and getting to know the other students and researchers at the lab, we eagerly went to sleep in preparation for a long day of mental excursion.
Saturday arrived with beautiful sunny weather. As we cooked breakfast we began stuffing cactus into capsules. For Robin and myself I planned a relatively low dose of 15 grams. This had been my dose the first time I had taken the Torch, and I had found the experience satisfying but far from overwhelming. Kyle, Jamie and Zach all opted for 20 grams, with Kelly taking 17. Through extraction I had found this particular sack-o-cactus to be in the 1-1.5% range. 30 minutes or so after we had finished eating, we began the 1-hour dosing cycle. Zach and Kelly had gone to another location at the lab complex to finish up some work, but they also through coincidence began their dosing sharply at 11 just as the rest of us had.
I began to notice nausea rather early. Generally I don't find cactus particularly nauseating, although I've found this to vary from person to person. In fact, in all of my cactus experience I've found it to be highly variable from person to person in many respects. 15 grams for myself is a noticeably psychedelic dose whereas in at least 2 of my previous cacti-cohorts this was found to be a nearly inactive dose. Some people come up early and build slowly into a plateau, others come up much later but have a quicker escalation. Things like this are to be expected when you're dealing with anywhere from a half an ounce onward of not necessarily easily digested plant material.
By the time we finished the dosing cycle I was feeling first alerts. I held on to my last 2 pills as a booster, but once we got outside I felt comfortable enough with the intensity to just say "down the hatch". We made our way to a local tourist attraction where carp were corralled through their own stupidity into small water drainage area. Nearly 2 tons of bread a year were thrown into this drainage area in order to prompt the thick mob of ugly fish into a feeding frenzy, which was enough to have an impact on the local ecosystem. Why we chose this as a destination I am not sure, but when we arrived I was already tripping at a reasonable level, and I found the whole affair depressing. "It's like America", I remarked half sarcastically. Everybody else was mostly just feeling nauseous. Robin was contemplating throwing up, which I felt sorry about. At the carp orgy we got a text that Zach and Kelly had finished work and finished dosing, so they headed our way, forcing us to stay there even longer while they walked the mile long path from the lab. When they arrived, Jamie, Zach and Robin stayed behind in the woods to calm their stomachs while Kelly, Kyle and myself went to the carp orgy gift shop to buy ginger ale. Kelly had a very hard time figuring out how to complete this task, which aroused suspicions that she may in fact be tripping balls. Kyle was also starting to feel some effects at this point. As we walked back to the lab we sipped ginger ale and lit up a joint to quell nausea and increase effects, which I abstained from as I was already starting to trip solidly and we were still pretty early in the chronology. A few hundred yards later I decided to make myself vomit, as I was quite nauseous and I was hoping to halt the escalation of the effects as I was only planning on a moderate trip for the day.
Vomiting was not fun. Go figure. Almost immediately after I finished the tone of the trip became more frenzied, and I noticed a steep increase in effects. Great. Well, let's see where this goes. As we returned to the lab I was already beginning to doubt my ability to be around people. As we prepared canoes for a lake journey, I was getting intense rushes and a strong vision blur with plenty of color exaggeration and patterned overlay.
"Who else is off their tits right now?" I asked, hoping to find mental strength in numbers.
"Bluaahhh!", Kelly waved her arms wildly in the air from her canoe. Kyle was beginning to get visuals and Zach had a grin plastered on his face. At least I'm fulfilling my role as the provider of exotic brain candy. I seem to be fulfilling that role a lot these days.
We pushed off from the dock and I began to row. As I rowed the tension began to build steadily, starting between my eyes and then traveling down my neck until my body felt like a sock fresh from the dryer. I was tingling all over, with strong electric rushes and a rather confused and sickened mental state behind my very blurry and chaotic visual field. There was nothing around but the waves and the sun. I ate a pear as we watched a bald eagle flying overhead. I was reminded, as I lay in the boat allowing Robin to take over paddling duties, of some childhood memory or feeling that I had either long forgotten, or which had been completely synthesized by the drug and presented to me under the masquerade of deja vu. I began to panic. It had been about a year since I had taken a strong pinch of psychedelic, and I was no where near prepared to deal with the intensity of the experience I was having. I felt overstimulated, heat stricken and weak. "Land. Where is the nearest land?" I frantically queried. At this point I pulled the ripcord and chewed 0.5mg Lorazepam. We rowed to a small strip of sandy beach and after shedding my shirt I hurriedly bounded off into the woods with Robin following. I wandered around in circles out of sight of the rest of the group trying to get a grip on the situation. Robin's presence was soothing, and I would go through waves of intense confusion and fear and brief respites of relative calm. I began to feel the Ativan droop over my head and bring the tone of the trip down slightly. My legs began to feel very weak and jello-ey. I informed the group that I was going to go lie down back at the cabins and I'd meet up with them later. Robin, who had finally begun to trip herself, shepherded me back to safety through the woods and along an access road. I popped another half milligram of Lorazepam.
I began to express to her a bunch of personal fears and insecurities that I probably would not have normally admitted. Namely, I'm sometimes afraid for my mental health. Things have seemed somehow different since last summer, a time when I ate a pretty solid amount of psychedelics. It's hard to put my finger on how exactly, but sometimes everything is just a little... much. I could be (and probably am) just psyching myself out. Lots of people think they're going crazy, but the brain is just not a static thing. There are changes, and sometimes they catch us off guard. But, I still worry. There is a substantial amount of schizophrenia, bipolar, depression and general anxiety throughout my family on both sides. Part of me knows that I really shouldn't be playing around like this, but the rest of me is committed to this fascination with psychedelic drugs. It's one of the very few things I'm really passionate about, and it brings me great joy to share these things with the people who appreciate them. To guide them on these journeys... that's all I really want to do. Unfortunately I can't get a job doing that, and I refuse to take any sizeable profit from the drugs themselves. I was once that kid paying 50 bucks for 5 blank pieces of paper. People don't deserve that, people who seek these things sincerely. I want to make that better. It's more rewarding to give things away. I get them for practically nothing these days anyway.
By the time we reached the camp, I was feeling a bit calmer thanks to the benzos. We went into an empty room and I took off my shoes and laid down on the bed. Robin remarked that she was getting visual effects now that we were inside. Things were moving "and they weren't supposed to be", and that made her slightly uncomfortable, so we moved outside under the shade of a tree where I curled into the fetal position and lost myself in closed eye visuals of spinning flower fields and sketched landscapes. Robin began whittling. This didn't last long before our friends returned on the canoes. By that point I was feeling much more comfortable in my body, though still tripping pretty hard.
The next 3 or 4 hours were the most enjoyable of the experience. Once the Ativan kicked in I was still feeling the mescaline but it was far more controllable. We spent a lot of time hanging out in the front lawn, kicking around a volleyball, throwing frisbee and having conversations.
"Look at this volleyball." I said. "Look at it. This volleyball. Do you understand? Just look at it. Do you get it?"
Nobody got it.
There was a small family of baby groundhogs under the cabins that we spent a lot of time observing. We discussed trapping one, but we weren't sure what to do with it. We considered eating it, but we weren't really sure how to do it. I suggested beaning it with a volleyball, but eventually these plans were discarded. We decided to go fishing instead. Everybody but Robin and myself broke off some Hoffman 1943s and transitioned from mescaline to LSD. These were laid by a friend of a friend, though unevenly (thus their ridiculously low cost). Some of the sheets off some of the pages were pretty weak, but fortunately the sheet I got were only slightly less than average. 2 or 3 put you there, 4 or 5 put you over. Kelly, Kyle and Jamie went there, Zach went over.
We grabbed some fishing poles and the canoes and struck back out onto the water. The colors coming off the water during the sunset were unreal, which made me slightly disappointed that I had not dropped acid with everybody else. We sat on the lake until it became pitch black. There were bats flying around us snatching up dinner from the clouds of midges all around us. We smoked a joint and gazed up at a sky full of stars relatively unobstructed by light pollution. We had caught 3 fish, one of which was a rather large and delicious looking catfish. When we returned to shore, Zach (who was on 5 hits of LSD), began meticulously dissecting the catfish, who was still very much alive even as his meat was filleted from his bones and his organs were ripped from his ribcage. The "he" turned out to be a "she" as we collected a fair amount of roe from an egg sack. The fish parts were pan fried, with the catfish being dredged in cajun seasoned cornmeal.
The rest of the night was pretty uneventful. We poured scotch and ate catfish.
Zach and I sat on the deck smoking cigarettes.
"What did you think of mescaline?"
"I liked it. It's a very happy trip. It's not really like mushrooms at all, or even LSD. It's a little bit like 2C-B."
"Well, it's the only phenethylamine among the classic natural psychedelics." Suddenly I remembered something. "Although, amphetamine and even methamphetamine are found in some species of Acacia... not that they're psychedelics. Of course, some people argue that was just a case of a dirty vial used for the GC/MS." I went on, "You know, DMT was synthesized in Canada before it was discovered as the active constituent in ayahuasca. All these people argue that 'natural is better' when it comes to psychedelics. Even Terrence McKenna. Does that mean that for the 15 or so years that DMT was unknown in nature, it was somehow a lesser drug?"
I was at a small party a few months ago. A girl I met was talking about how much she liked shrooms, but how she would never take LSD. I asked her why, and she told me it was because LSD is synthetic. "It'll fuck you up", she eloquently quipped. "I have friends that have never been the same since they took LSD. I only stick to the natural stuff, it's safer."
I looked her square in the eyes. "Go chew on some poison ivy and let me know how that works out for you."
I continued the discourse with Zach. "Shulgin... he started with mescaline. Today we experienced the progenitor of 200 some drugs he arrived at by tweaking this molecule, bit by bit. First the TMAs, then the DOx's and on to the 2C's..."
"I wonder what kind of effect that had on him. All those drugs."
"Well, he's pretty scatterbrained, but he's also in his 80's. He had a stroke last year, but he's getting better. Everything effects everybody differently. I heard him talk once about an experience his group of friends had with this new cactus he was working with, Pachycereus Pringlei." Zach is an ecologist, I felt comfortable using binomial nomenclature around him. "He said that of the people that took it, half had overwhelmingly uncomfortable strongly psychedelic experiences, whereas the others had a very mild barely threshold experience. All from the same batch of tea. I mean, hell. Today is even an example of that. You ate quite a bit more cactus than me, and here you are adding LSD to it while I'm just trying to forget what happened to me today."
"Thank you for bringing this stuff up this weekend, man. I always wanted to explore stuff like this, but nobody really shared my interest. You, Kyle... I'm glad I found this group of friends. I love you guys."
I loved him too, and Kyle and Kelly and Jamie as well. Alfie too, though he wasn't there. The only one I was having a hard time saying that to was Robin, despite trying to find the right moment all weekend. But hey, that's another story. As a group of friends, we really did cultivate a great little groove for ourselves. There was a lot of positive emotion flowing around - the genuine kind, where we'd go out of our way to help each other and make each other happy. That's worth its weight in gold.
The ladyfriend and I fell asleep around 2am, the rest of the crew lay awake for a while longer on the tail end of the LSD.
I'm a relatively experienced psychonaut, and although I've had some momentary rough patches in the past, I've never had a "bad trip" to the point that I needed to abort it entirely. I guess there's a first time for everything. All I know is that I'm extremely lucky to have gotten that Ativan prescription. Despite the stumble, it was still a pretty great weekend.
I have 2 or 3 solid doses worth of extracted mescaline hcl. I am curious as to whether or not this would have a less physically stimulating/disorienting effect. This will most likely be investigated before the summer is over.
Be careful out there, folks. I've never met most of you, but I love you all the same.
