So I went with MAL on Saturday, and boy was it ever a garbage experience for both me and my friend.
The dosage and batch was the same as usual, but for some reason the experience was just meh for both of us. No love, no empathy, no eroticism, very few visuals, and minimal body sensations. It took 3-4 hours to hit peak and it was barely a ++, most of which was just cerebral trippiness and mild anxiety. My friend described it as being nothing like MAL or really any phenethylamine, but more like a "typical undercooked tryptamine experience." I couldn't have put it better. For four hours or so, I rather enjoyed what felt like swimming through my own internal somatic filth, but it wasn't healthy or productive. It was very much like the sensation of rolling around in self pity, an unhealthy but perversely enjoyable indulgence. I eventually got sick of it and decided to take 1mg of etizolam to attempt to abort the trip even though it wasn't at all challenging. It didn't work, but it made me more comfortable. I didn't tell my friend that I'd taken a benzo, and an hour later they decided to do the same, only the second or third time they'd ever done so. They weren't having a hard time either, they were just over it, too.
I've experience this twice before with mescaline, where it felt more like a murky, swampy tryptamine than typically crystal clear, clean, and bright mescaline space, so I know it's part of the possible true character of 3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamines. I don't know why that side sometimes manifests, though. If this had been LSD and if I were less familiar with psychedelics, I would be swearing up one side and down the other about how this was a batch of bad acid. Instead, I think it was one of two things. It might have been that both my friend and I had taken a hefty dose of tadalafil for the first time 18hrs earlier, which could have led to the mild headache, congestion, and other cold symptoms that made us both feel mediocre. More likely, though, is that we both got our second COVID-19 vaccine shot five days before. This experience felt a lot like two prior experiences that I'd had, one where I took a psychedelic while fighting off a cold and another when I did so while not entirely recovered from a bout of the flu. In both cases, I felt like I was swimming through the filth of my own body's disease. This experience could possibly have been in part due to our immune systems still being tired and run down from responding to the vaccine.
I've only tripped maybe 6-8 times so far this year, maybe less. The first time was on MAL on New Year's, and it wasn't great that time either. I would almost suspect that age, tolerance, and overfamiliarity with psychedelics could be responsible for the mediocrity of many of the experiences that I've had this year if it weren't for the fact that my last two experiences (vaporized 5-MeO-MiPT two weeks ago and insufflated 2C-B four weeks ago) were both magical and beautiful.
