Flickering
Bluelighter
This was my sixth in a frustrating line of failed attempts to have a strong experience with mescaline. Much as I love mescaline, it just doesn't hit me as hard as mushrooms or LSD, and though its insights and emotional effects are impressive, I find the superficial effects such as visuals and time distortion lacking, and the general state of mind too sober, leaving me with the feeling that I'm not 'really' tripping or on a spiritual journey. For this reason, I decided to step it up from the fourteen or so inches I'd tried before, to around twenty. It still wasn't enough, and I'm left to conclude that either I destroyed a lot of the psychedelic components in the preparation, or I have a natural resistance to it. I'll divide this trip into two categories: preparation, for those interested in brewing it themselves or looking to compare notes, and the trip itself, for the ones who prefer to get into the action.
PREP
Two feet of Peruvian Torch cactus. I sliced it into half-inch pieces, sliced off the spines and peeled most of the skin. Wherever the meaty green stuff stuck to the skin, I scraped it into a bowl, and put these excess pieces, which actually amounted to quite a lot, into a plastic bag and froze them for next time. Most of the reason my previous trips had been weaker than I'd hoped was I'd failed to boil them down adequately, so I was left with unmanageable amounts of liquid sludge. This time I decided to dry the cactus, grind it into powder, put it on the back of my tongue and follow it down with juice. It didn't work out that way, and I ended up making tea again, though there's something on that note worth mentioning:
The tea did not taste bad. I repeat: the tea did not taste bad. You may wish to take note of my method for this reason alone, because the bitter taste of so much cactus juice is rivalled only by cough syrup, and the quantity tends to be greater. I'll offer my own hypothesis on why it wasn't as horrible as usual, but I'd appreciate any comments about it too.
I began by dropping the star-shaped pieces onto a silverfoil-wrapped cookie tray and putting them in the oven at 66 Celsius, later increasing to 87, and leaving the door slightly ajar. Because I have to dodge roommates during the day, I did this at midnight, and stopped around 2a.m. when I grew too tired to keep monitoring it. I then left the half-dried stars in a plastic bag in my room overnight. This may have contributed to the mescaline degredation, not a mistake I plan on repeating. I should have frozen them.
Throughout the next day, I dried the pieces in the sun, but after accumulating around ten hours of sunlight, they were still spongey. When I tried running these pieces through a coffee grinder, they splattered into chunks instead of powder. I decided to make it into a tea after all, this time reducing it to an amount I could manage, and put it in a blender with a small amount of water.
I poured the blended contents into a pot and began to simmer it gently, once again at midnight. The simmering process didn't take as long as usual, because the pieces were partly dried already. After about three hours, there was no liquid residue at the bottom of the pot, only spongey clumps of cactus. There were two points at which I accidentally increased the heat to maximum, and may have damaged the mescaline content, though it was only for a couple of seconds. If anyone can comment on that too, I'd appreciate it, though either way I'll be especially careful to avoid it next time.
I scooped the clumps into a singlet, suspended it over the blender and spent the next half hour wringing every last bit of juice out of it. In the end, the twenty-ish inches were reduced to one and a half cups of brown-green tea. I popped a lid on the blender and placed it in the fridge, where it would remain for the next forty-eight hours. Though it was refridgerated, I attribute the wait to the degree of degredation - it should probably be taken within 24 hours of cooking. Any comments on this too?
Finally, the fridge was a lot colder than I realised, and when I pulled it out at 12a.m. two nights later, there were sheets of ice floating in it. This is what I think took the bitter bite out of the flavour. I'm not sure why, but the alkaloids that make it taste so bad musn't have survived the extremeties of freezing. I plan to use the same fridge next time (soon, since this experience was less than I'd hoped for) to see if it was this, or just overlong air exposure on humid summer days. I know the cactus itself was bitter, because I sampled it before cooking it. A mystery... but if I've discovered a technique to kill that awful taste, all to the better!
TRIP
My plan was to wake up at 4a.m., down the cactus tea and drive to a nearby park, where I'd spend the day walking through gardens and basking in the beauty of nature, if all went as planned. I was already feeling anxious about doing this on my own, and then I slept through my alarm. Figuring the trip would end long after the park had closed and long into dark, I opted to put it off until tomorrow.
Tomorrow came, and I couldn't sleep. It was midnight and I felt ready as ever to trip there and then - so I did, but I did it at home, because the park didn't open until dawn. I poured the tea into three shot glasses, steeled myself, picked up the first cup and sculled it as fast as I could.
And it tasted... not that bad, actually.
Uh oh. Surely that's not a good sign. Surely all the stress I put the cactus through has wiped it clean of mescaline.
But I knew I'd never forgive myself if I didn't try, so I sculled the next two glasses as well, spacing ten minutes between each to minimize potential nausea. I looked at the clock, and decided if I wasn't feeling anything by 1:30a.m., the trip would never come.
2a.m. came, and all I felt was nausea.
I'd had a big dinner, not anticipating that I'd be taking the juice so soon after, and my stomach was swimming. There was slight body load, irritation at certain tactile impressions like my beard. There was only the slightest light-headedness. I estimated I'd taken perhaps 100mg of mescaline, the absolute minimum dose at which you might feel effects. I was bitterly disappointed, so when the nausea passed (without throwing up), I sat down with a box of cookies I'd been given for Christmas, and like a true moron, proceeded to munch them down.
Now, you can get away with a little chocolate and sweets on LSD or mushrooms, preferably toward the end of the trip. But mescaline will not forgive you for it. Soon enough my gut clenched up in pain, and so it remained the whole night.
It's funny too how my estimates for how much I'd taken gradually climbed. Light-headedness turned to mood alteration; perhaps I'd salvaged 150mg, enough to keep me awake but not enough to trip. Actually, I felt distinctly dissociated; perhaps there was 200mg in it, still such a small amount that I felt I might as well ignore it and read for the rest of the night. Ah, but the words were illuminated, and all bu the sentence I was reading looked like incoherent characters, and the dark moody music I had playing sounded particularly awesome. 250mg, then? In the end, I estimate the dose at between 300-350mg, a sorry yield for almost two feet of cactus, but definitely noticeable.
Unfortunately, I didn't properly acknowldge it until it peaked around 6a.m. I spent the entire time in the interim reading A Storm of Swords, the third book in George R R Martin's series A Song of Ice and Fire. You might know it by its TV series counterpart Game of Thrones. I had to wonder why the book seemed so much more awesome.
By the end of the night it was my favourite book of all time. But in my inebriated state I was very open to suggestion, and Westeros is a cruel world. Not to mention the music. I played such songs as this one, and this! Very fitting for the tone, but it took me to dark places in my mind.
This was not such a bad thing. I've always wanted to explore the 'dark' trip, a journey in which you deliberately expose yourself to the eerie and unsettling, a grove at dusk, an unsettling tune, and see where your mind takes you in the shadow realm of the psyche. Throughout the trip, the idea formed that one day, I should got into a room with one or two friends, take a very large dose of mescaline with them, and sit down in the darkness listening to this kind of music for two or three hours. This is something I'd still like to try, but only with someone I can trust to hold themselves together.
If you're familiar with the book I read, you'll know most of the characters in it are very hard and brutal types, and as the night continued I began to take these traits on in my thoughts. Mescaline always makes me confident to the point of arrogance (I hate to see how I'd fare on cocaine), but this time it was fueled with such fire that I almost didn't like who I became. But what I liked even less was the sober version of me. I suddenly realised that my father, and all sorts of other figures I'd shunned, had been right all along: I was weak. I'd spent my whole life holding back, for fear of pain and for a slothful inclination towards comfort. It had stopped me from ever achieving anything, and yet I knew I was capable of everything. This frustration is a big part of why I've been depressed for so long. And it could not be allowed to continue. I needed no more excuses; what I needed was a vow, and a strong commitment to use all my reserves of strength.
I would be celibant for three months, to prove that I could master myself. I would not longer be a servant of lust. I would take up my new business job with pride; though I hate the business world, I would turn up on time every day. If sleep would not come, as it so often does not, then I would go on into the next day until exhaustion knocked me back into a proper sleep cycle. I would take up krav maga and any other martial arts that would prove useful, hard and disciplined. Discipline was what I'd been lacking for so long, and discipline was what I would have. No longer self-indulgent and self-pitying, but honest with myself and willing to do whatever it took to change. Through all this, I would eventually write a book, which is a feat I've been trying at ever since I managed a two-hundred page action story at the age of twelve. I felt as hardened as Sandor Clegane.
I wrote all this down, and left a note for myself to sign it when I was sober, which I did. We'll see how it goes.
Meanwhile, A Storm of Swords became my bible. I could see all the thematic brilliance written therein. The viewpoint was always morally neutral, so the readers are free to their own views on the characters and their decisions. There are dichotomies between that world and ours, and dilemmas. There are intruiges and messages. There is a magic to it all. I was utterly captivated.
The 'hardness' and the dark thoughts followed me through the rest of the trip. I realised that I've lacked both in the hardness of discipline and in the softness of sympathy, all my life, allowing myself to be caught up instead in self-absorption. Both these things needed to change, and psychedelics could be my tools. But I was troubled, because I saw a path opening up whereby I could harden myself to the point of sociopathy, to the point of denying a part of myself some have called beautiful, and others weak. The sort who would not be troubled with the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, because it was necessary. The other side cannot bare to inflict such pain on others. The thought was there that I could destroy that part of me, that I could make that choice. It was very powerful and confronting. Something like the allure of the dark side of the Force... I decided then that the 'dark trip' ought to wait, until I was more grounded in love and compassion.
Psychedelics are strong tools that can be used for good or evil, so be careful where you take them.
Come morning, and the peak of the trip, I took a walk. The colours were amazing, and before I'd ingested the cactus tea, there'd been a storm. Water glistened in the grass and red bark lay strewn across the asphalt. It's hard to pinpoint just what was different, but it was all beautiful. This, I reflected, is how we ought to see the world all the time.
Visual effects were minimal. A branch might shift slightly, water would glimmer. I wondered if I had in fact taken 500mg of mescaline, and this is just what 500mg is like for me. It seems very different from LSD or mushrooms, not nearly as outright tripppy, far more natural and sober. By the same token, it reminded me of coming down from LSD and walking the streets, with slight overt effects but a definite sense of still being under the influence. I wonder if, in my case, it needs a small touch of mushrooms to enchant it further, a gram and a half or so of the dreamy fungus.
When I returned home, avoiding roommates who'd just woken up, the house seemed like a Westeros castle. Strange how I'd never noticed how like a cold stone fortress it was before. It was pretty cool to explore it in this mindset. I watched my face morph slightly in the mirror, the nose elongating, cheekbones puffing out, none of it pretty. At around 10a.m., I had a small breakfast and some ginger tea, which eventually helped with the nasty stomach cramping. I returned to my room, and watched Aladdin in an attempt to recall how it had felt watching it the first time as a child. Last time I took mescaline, a lighter trip yet, I'd tried this with Return of the Jedi to very interesting effects. This actually wasn't as mind-blowing, and I managed to fall asleep for about an hour. The dreams were unpleasant. All I remember of them is that Maynard James Keenan of Tool was snorting heroin and telling an interviewer that his song Forty-Six and Two (which follows H., another song I listened to during the trip), was about heroin, not psychedelics. This really cheapened the whole spiritual quest thing for me. When I woke up, the trip was more or less over, and I had a kind of hangover mostly wrought from lack of sleep. I didn't get to sleep until 10p.m. that day, either, which put me on two days with almost no sleep and a trip in the middle but when I did, I slept for twelve hours straight.
I prefer to space my doses by at least a month, but I think I'll try this again in a couple of days, because I'd been aiming for a much stronger experience. I still have eighteen inches in my cupboard, and the cuttings in the freezer should make another three. This time a full-day bushwalk should make for a nicer setting than my room, and if I can avoid the degredation, it should be strong enough to make for a true spiritual journey.
If you know of anything I did during the prep that would have weakened it so much, please let me know so I can avoid it this time. If you'd like to try freezing the mescaline tea as well, tell me if it has any effect on the flavour. I would say keep it at 1 - 5 degrees Celsius, not quite actually freezing, you don't want a solid mass. Hope this helps, and thanks in advance anyone who knows something that could help me out.
PREP
Two feet of Peruvian Torch cactus. I sliced it into half-inch pieces, sliced off the spines and peeled most of the skin. Wherever the meaty green stuff stuck to the skin, I scraped it into a bowl, and put these excess pieces, which actually amounted to quite a lot, into a plastic bag and froze them for next time. Most of the reason my previous trips had been weaker than I'd hoped was I'd failed to boil them down adequately, so I was left with unmanageable amounts of liquid sludge. This time I decided to dry the cactus, grind it into powder, put it on the back of my tongue and follow it down with juice. It didn't work out that way, and I ended up making tea again, though there's something on that note worth mentioning:
The tea did not taste bad. I repeat: the tea did not taste bad. You may wish to take note of my method for this reason alone, because the bitter taste of so much cactus juice is rivalled only by cough syrup, and the quantity tends to be greater. I'll offer my own hypothesis on why it wasn't as horrible as usual, but I'd appreciate any comments about it too.
I began by dropping the star-shaped pieces onto a silverfoil-wrapped cookie tray and putting them in the oven at 66 Celsius, later increasing to 87, and leaving the door slightly ajar. Because I have to dodge roommates during the day, I did this at midnight, and stopped around 2a.m. when I grew too tired to keep monitoring it. I then left the half-dried stars in a plastic bag in my room overnight. This may have contributed to the mescaline degredation, not a mistake I plan on repeating. I should have frozen them.
Throughout the next day, I dried the pieces in the sun, but after accumulating around ten hours of sunlight, they were still spongey. When I tried running these pieces through a coffee grinder, they splattered into chunks instead of powder. I decided to make it into a tea after all, this time reducing it to an amount I could manage, and put it in a blender with a small amount of water.
I poured the blended contents into a pot and began to simmer it gently, once again at midnight. The simmering process didn't take as long as usual, because the pieces were partly dried already. After about three hours, there was no liquid residue at the bottom of the pot, only spongey clumps of cactus. There were two points at which I accidentally increased the heat to maximum, and may have damaged the mescaline content, though it was only for a couple of seconds. If anyone can comment on that too, I'd appreciate it, though either way I'll be especially careful to avoid it next time.
I scooped the clumps into a singlet, suspended it over the blender and spent the next half hour wringing every last bit of juice out of it. In the end, the twenty-ish inches were reduced to one and a half cups of brown-green tea. I popped a lid on the blender and placed it in the fridge, where it would remain for the next forty-eight hours. Though it was refridgerated, I attribute the wait to the degree of degredation - it should probably be taken within 24 hours of cooking. Any comments on this too?
Finally, the fridge was a lot colder than I realised, and when I pulled it out at 12a.m. two nights later, there were sheets of ice floating in it. This is what I think took the bitter bite out of the flavour. I'm not sure why, but the alkaloids that make it taste so bad musn't have survived the extremeties of freezing. I plan to use the same fridge next time (soon, since this experience was less than I'd hoped for) to see if it was this, or just overlong air exposure on humid summer days. I know the cactus itself was bitter, because I sampled it before cooking it. A mystery... but if I've discovered a technique to kill that awful taste, all to the better!
TRIP
My plan was to wake up at 4a.m., down the cactus tea and drive to a nearby park, where I'd spend the day walking through gardens and basking in the beauty of nature, if all went as planned. I was already feeling anxious about doing this on my own, and then I slept through my alarm. Figuring the trip would end long after the park had closed and long into dark, I opted to put it off until tomorrow.
Tomorrow came, and I couldn't sleep. It was midnight and I felt ready as ever to trip there and then - so I did, but I did it at home, because the park didn't open until dawn. I poured the tea into three shot glasses, steeled myself, picked up the first cup and sculled it as fast as I could.
And it tasted... not that bad, actually.
Uh oh. Surely that's not a good sign. Surely all the stress I put the cactus through has wiped it clean of mescaline.
But I knew I'd never forgive myself if I didn't try, so I sculled the next two glasses as well, spacing ten minutes between each to minimize potential nausea. I looked at the clock, and decided if I wasn't feeling anything by 1:30a.m., the trip would never come.
2a.m. came, and all I felt was nausea.
I'd had a big dinner, not anticipating that I'd be taking the juice so soon after, and my stomach was swimming. There was slight body load, irritation at certain tactile impressions like my beard. There was only the slightest light-headedness. I estimated I'd taken perhaps 100mg of mescaline, the absolute minimum dose at which you might feel effects. I was bitterly disappointed, so when the nausea passed (without throwing up), I sat down with a box of cookies I'd been given for Christmas, and like a true moron, proceeded to munch them down.
Now, you can get away with a little chocolate and sweets on LSD or mushrooms, preferably toward the end of the trip. But mescaline will not forgive you for it. Soon enough my gut clenched up in pain, and so it remained the whole night.
It's funny too how my estimates for how much I'd taken gradually climbed. Light-headedness turned to mood alteration; perhaps I'd salvaged 150mg, enough to keep me awake but not enough to trip. Actually, I felt distinctly dissociated; perhaps there was 200mg in it, still such a small amount that I felt I might as well ignore it and read for the rest of the night. Ah, but the words were illuminated, and all bu the sentence I was reading looked like incoherent characters, and the dark moody music I had playing sounded particularly awesome. 250mg, then? In the end, I estimate the dose at between 300-350mg, a sorry yield for almost two feet of cactus, but definitely noticeable.
Unfortunately, I didn't properly acknowldge it until it peaked around 6a.m. I spent the entire time in the interim reading A Storm of Swords, the third book in George R R Martin's series A Song of Ice and Fire. You might know it by its TV series counterpart Game of Thrones. I had to wonder why the book seemed so much more awesome.
By the end of the night it was my favourite book of all time. But in my inebriated state I was very open to suggestion, and Westeros is a cruel world. Not to mention the music. I played such songs as this one, and this! Very fitting for the tone, but it took me to dark places in my mind.
This was not such a bad thing. I've always wanted to explore the 'dark' trip, a journey in which you deliberately expose yourself to the eerie and unsettling, a grove at dusk, an unsettling tune, and see where your mind takes you in the shadow realm of the psyche. Throughout the trip, the idea formed that one day, I should got into a room with one or two friends, take a very large dose of mescaline with them, and sit down in the darkness listening to this kind of music for two or three hours. This is something I'd still like to try, but only with someone I can trust to hold themselves together.
If you're familiar with the book I read, you'll know most of the characters in it are very hard and brutal types, and as the night continued I began to take these traits on in my thoughts. Mescaline always makes me confident to the point of arrogance (I hate to see how I'd fare on cocaine), but this time it was fueled with such fire that I almost didn't like who I became. But what I liked even less was the sober version of me. I suddenly realised that my father, and all sorts of other figures I'd shunned, had been right all along: I was weak. I'd spent my whole life holding back, for fear of pain and for a slothful inclination towards comfort. It had stopped me from ever achieving anything, and yet I knew I was capable of everything. This frustration is a big part of why I've been depressed for so long. And it could not be allowed to continue. I needed no more excuses; what I needed was a vow, and a strong commitment to use all my reserves of strength.
I would be celibant for three months, to prove that I could master myself. I would not longer be a servant of lust. I would take up my new business job with pride; though I hate the business world, I would turn up on time every day. If sleep would not come, as it so often does not, then I would go on into the next day until exhaustion knocked me back into a proper sleep cycle. I would take up krav maga and any other martial arts that would prove useful, hard and disciplined. Discipline was what I'd been lacking for so long, and discipline was what I would have. No longer self-indulgent and self-pitying, but honest with myself and willing to do whatever it took to change. Through all this, I would eventually write a book, which is a feat I've been trying at ever since I managed a two-hundred page action story at the age of twelve. I felt as hardened as Sandor Clegane.
I wrote all this down, and left a note for myself to sign it when I was sober, which I did. We'll see how it goes.
Meanwhile, A Storm of Swords became my bible. I could see all the thematic brilliance written therein. The viewpoint was always morally neutral, so the readers are free to their own views on the characters and their decisions. There are dichotomies between that world and ours, and dilemmas. There are intruiges and messages. There is a magic to it all. I was utterly captivated.
The 'hardness' and the dark thoughts followed me through the rest of the trip. I realised that I've lacked both in the hardness of discipline and in the softness of sympathy, all my life, allowing myself to be caught up instead in self-absorption. Both these things needed to change, and psychedelics could be my tools. But I was troubled, because I saw a path opening up whereby I could harden myself to the point of sociopathy, to the point of denying a part of myself some have called beautiful, and others weak. The sort who would not be troubled with the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, because it was necessary. The other side cannot bare to inflict such pain on others. The thought was there that I could destroy that part of me, that I could make that choice. It was very powerful and confronting. Something like the allure of the dark side of the Force... I decided then that the 'dark trip' ought to wait, until I was more grounded in love and compassion.
Psychedelics are strong tools that can be used for good or evil, so be careful where you take them.
Come morning, and the peak of the trip, I took a walk. The colours were amazing, and before I'd ingested the cactus tea, there'd been a storm. Water glistened in the grass and red bark lay strewn across the asphalt. It's hard to pinpoint just what was different, but it was all beautiful. This, I reflected, is how we ought to see the world all the time.
Visual effects were minimal. A branch might shift slightly, water would glimmer. I wondered if I had in fact taken 500mg of mescaline, and this is just what 500mg is like for me. It seems very different from LSD or mushrooms, not nearly as outright tripppy, far more natural and sober. By the same token, it reminded me of coming down from LSD and walking the streets, with slight overt effects but a definite sense of still being under the influence. I wonder if, in my case, it needs a small touch of mushrooms to enchant it further, a gram and a half or so of the dreamy fungus.
When I returned home, avoiding roommates who'd just woken up, the house seemed like a Westeros castle. Strange how I'd never noticed how like a cold stone fortress it was before. It was pretty cool to explore it in this mindset. I watched my face morph slightly in the mirror, the nose elongating, cheekbones puffing out, none of it pretty. At around 10a.m., I had a small breakfast and some ginger tea, which eventually helped with the nasty stomach cramping. I returned to my room, and watched Aladdin in an attempt to recall how it had felt watching it the first time as a child. Last time I took mescaline, a lighter trip yet, I'd tried this with Return of the Jedi to very interesting effects. This actually wasn't as mind-blowing, and I managed to fall asleep for about an hour. The dreams were unpleasant. All I remember of them is that Maynard James Keenan of Tool was snorting heroin and telling an interviewer that his song Forty-Six and Two (which follows H., another song I listened to during the trip), was about heroin, not psychedelics. This really cheapened the whole spiritual quest thing for me. When I woke up, the trip was more or less over, and I had a kind of hangover mostly wrought from lack of sleep. I didn't get to sleep until 10p.m. that day, either, which put me on two days with almost no sleep and a trip in the middle but when I did, I slept for twelve hours straight.
I prefer to space my doses by at least a month, but I think I'll try this again in a couple of days, because I'd been aiming for a much stronger experience. I still have eighteen inches in my cupboard, and the cuttings in the freezer should make another three. This time a full-day bushwalk should make for a nicer setting than my room, and if I can avoid the degredation, it should be strong enough to make for a true spiritual journey.
If you know of anything I did during the prep that would have weakened it so much, please let me know so I can avoid it this time. If you'd like to try freezing the mescaline tea as well, tell me if it has any effect on the flavour. I would say keep it at 1 - 5 degrees Celsius, not quite actually freezing, you don't want a solid mass. Hope this helps, and thanks in advance anyone who knows something that could help me out.
