DOSE:

1 hit

oral

LSD

(blotter / tab)

BODY WEIGHT:

155 lb

My friend had acquired six tabs of acid around the middle of October, while we were looking and failing to find magic mushrooms. I’ve been smoking weed on a weekly basis for about a year, my friend having smoked since attending college in 2011, and we, along with my girlfriend, had decided that we wanted to have a psychedelic experience. My friend, ‘Todd’, had already taken a dose about ten days prior, and was excited to do it again. So we texted about doing it over the weekend, but my girlfriend wasn’t feeling it when the time had come, and didn’t want us to do it. We said we wouldn’t, and she took a nap. Todd and I were both disappointed.

I had been researching the drug the week leading up to taking it, and made sure to do some basic things before taking the plunge (stay positive, look for signs that it isn’t really LSD, etc.). Still, I was hesitant to take it, mostly because I knew my girlfriend didn’t want me to right then. Todd and I talked about that, and we reached the conclusion that I shouldn’t let her control me, so I went against her wishes. At 5 o’clock, as she was taking a nap, I popped it in.

The tab was on a strip of blank paper, kind of like cardstock, and tasted like nothing, which was a good sign. We were playing Cuphead while we waited for it to kick in.

As the first hour passed, I felt this growing anticipation in me, kind of like the excitement I would get before a job interview or another important event. My friend was getting a little goofy before I was really feeling it, and he decided to take another tab. Todd and I were feeling like going for a walk, and he wanted to get a fidget spinner for some reason, so we walked down the street to Walgreens. While we went down the sidewalk, I was thinking about how many other people had occupied the same space as we had, and how there must have been thousands of other people who had been in that same space over the years. It was beginning to kick in.

Once we reached the parking lot of the store, I was struck by all the different vibrant lights around. The red Walgreens logo, the yellow street lights, the green traffic lights, they all looked very beautiful. My friend wanted to make a short video of himself doing a Seinfeld impersonation in front of Walgreens, so we shot that for half a minute before going in. We meandered into the store, and couldn’t find any spinners, so we left after goofing around a bit. I was feeling pretty funny by then, and suggested that we head back to my apartment, but Todd wanted to find a spinner, and he convinced me to keep on moving towards downtown in our search.

Next we stopped at 7/11, where we found no spinners but picked up two water bottles. Todd insisted on buying water, saying that it was really important to drink a lot of water while doing what we were doing. I wasn’t sure if he had heard that you were supposed to stay hydrated while tripping or if he was just making it up, but the idea sounded logical. We moved on towards the inner city.

While waiting for a crosswalk, we were laughing really hard and joking around as a cop car stopped at the intersection. My intestines turned to ice, and I thought to myself that this is how a frog in a field must feel when spotted by a cat. Then the crosswalk light came on, and we strolled past the police, focusing only on looking natural. Once we were out of sight of the car, I asked Todd if that frightened him too, and he said that as long as we appeared to be going somewhere, the police wouldn’t have any reason to stop us. That made sense, so we laughed and drank from our water bottles.

By now we were beneath the highway, and I told Todd how weird it was to be in a space that I’ve only ever experienced from within a car. The smell of the area, the copious amount of pigeon droppings, the trash and feathers and bird carcasses were all totally unknown before. There were a lot of crosswalks to deal with here, and we made a rule of obeying every crosswalk sign. Todd never had his driver’s license, so I was curious about how he experienced his world as a pedestrian, where I nearly always travel in a car, event to places within a mile of where I live.

After crossing a bridge, we were beginning to get to the heart of my city. The smells were very strong, and the lights and people milling about made it seems like a fair. Todd wanted to hit up a bar and get wasted, but I was against that. We were beginning to walk near other people, and I really didn’t want to deal with anyone else in my state of mind, thinking that it would be abundantly clear what was going on with me. So we walked down Elm Street, chatting, when we entered a spot near a park where a few homeless people had settled for the night. I wanted to turn back and head home, and we began to, but Todd had convinced me to keep going downtown after a few minutes, so we came to that homeless person camp again.

My worst fear then happened: someone approached us. A short, dirty, middle-aged man began to speak at us, asking if we were from around here. I was trying to be oblivious, and felt safe being with another person, but Todd engaged with him and said that yes, we were from around here. The man began saying that he was a former marine, pulled down his shirt neck to show us a tattoo, and said that he was locked out of his car and needed money to hire a locksmith. Todd, upon hearing that, immediately said that we could only help with directions, and we both swiftly walked away from the man.

I realised how much better off one is to travel in a group rather than alone, because even being in a group of two makes you so much harder a target than being solo. Todd and I talked about this for a bit, and he said that he wasn’t ever really worried about that guy.

We were both pretty hungry, but I didn’t want to deal with a sit down restaurant, so Todd and myself decided that we would go to this weird fried chicken restaurant that we made fun of all the time for looking very dingy but had never eaten at, thinking it would be a fitting barrier to break. As I stared at the menu above the cashier, I realised that the images of the food were beginning to blur, and I told Todd that we shouldn’t eat here, that we should order a pizza instead. He agreed, and we kept walking.

Around this time I got a text from my girlfriend, asking where we were. I saw it was 7, only an hour since we left my place, which was surprising: I thought our walked had been going on for several hours, not just one. I managed to type out “Out for a walk, be back later!” and send it to her. Guilt consumed me: I had taken a serious drug against her wishes while she was asleep, and was a good deal away from home while as high as I had ever been. Thankfully, I was able to convince myself that if I dwelled on that much longer I would spiral down a very bad path of thought, and I immediately began making jokes with Todd. I was also able to get Todd to start walking home.

Here is where I began to realize how much more intense the trip was becoming. Todd mentioned how he wished he was hungrier so we could go out to eat, which we both laughed at for being such an American thought. I began to think of the basic things living things needs, like food and water and shelter, and how Todd and myself have those things secured, but most animals don’t. We’ve begun to feel like we needed those things again even though we have them, like life is always trying to accomplish those things, and once it has attained them it resets to another state of need, wanting better versions of them. Musing about what we would seek next after we achieved them, I thought about how you can take that concept backwards with the individual, about how an egg is safe (has shelter), has all the food it needs in its yolk, and doesn’t want anything more, but once it has grown and has all those things it hatches into a baby, which then needs those things it once had. Egg growing into baby, into adult, into energy, into universe, and then back into the egg, cyclical.

We found ourselves in front of mural of bright, bold colors, patterned in cubes and and bars and shadows from the street lights. Yellow, blue, and red were its primary colors. Tessellations undulated before my eyes, and I asked Todd what he saw in the mural. “Yep, I do believe the painting is pulsating,” he said. Two words were written in the top left corner of the mural: “The Loop.” My mind erupted: That’s it: The Loop, egg into animal into star into egg. And The Loop, the loop we’re walking from my apartment to Elm Street and back again. And The Loop, the squirming wall painting. And the loop, this thought process. And the loop… It was hard to convey this to Todd, who thought I was talking about predeterminism, but did manage to get it through eventually.

Elm Street became a cabinet of curiosities. People’s faces became incredibly interesting and beautiful, and I wondered about who everyone was. Electric signs shone like combusting magnesium. The spatial volume of the environment was very clear. We mused about the reason some space was left open, while other, seemingly inutile spaces were developed. There were reasons, but know one knew them anymore, so were there reasons still?

Thoughts of my girlfriend waiting at home for us began to bother me again, so I figured to get her a donut as an apology. We sauntered into Dunkin Donuts on our trek back.

It’s October, so the coffee store is decked out in the most tacky modern Halloween decorations ever made. Paper skeletons, spiders, and pumpkins dangled from the ceiling, and fake cobwebs covered each wall. The first thing I noticed here was that an Elvis impersonator was standing at the counter. Todd and I made eye contact. I wanted to laugh and fall down and cry at the absurdity of the situation (my city is pretty small, and seeing something so weird was really out of the ordinary), but managed to hold it together. “You go first,” I said to Todd. As he ordered his food, I looked over at the pickup counter, and this very large banner of a realistic skeleton sitting in the lotus position over a dungeon background. It was too much, and I was beginning to think I was seriously hallucinating, between Elvis and that. The cashier was having trouble finishing Todd’s order because the machine ran out of paper, so that was also confusing, and it felt like a long time before they were able to take my order.

I had been rehearsing it in my head: two chocolate glazed donuts and a medium iced coffee made regular. At the counter, I couldn’t make eye contact with the cashier, noted she was wearing a pentagram necklace, but ordered two ‘wicked chocolate donuts’ (I couldn’t remember the regular name of what I ordered, and they changed the name of that for Halloween) and my coffee, paid with cash, and left. Elvis was talking to some old men near the door.

My sense of proprioception began to change. My mouth felt like it was beneath the exact center of my head rather than near the front, and I brushed the straw against my teeth and lips. I began to feel filthy, as I had not showered that morning and possibly not the day before, and my face felt very damp. Finally, we reached home.

Todd immediately went upstairs to use the bathroom, and I went to find my girlfriend. She was sitting on the couch wrapped up in her blanket. I gave her her present, which made her happy. She made a face at the donut she took out and showed it to me. There were little chunks of it missing. The glazing on the treat combined with the dark brown pastry to remind me of an elephant’s grey anus. She handed it to me, which made me uncomfortable, but I ate it anyways. I didn’t tell her immediately what was going on, and she didn’t seem to notice anything weird. I went out to the kitchen to heat up some leftovers and broccoli for me and Todd.

I put on some ‘of Montreal’ music and sat at the table with Todd as we ate. The broccoli was incredible; I’ve always known that broccoli is a fractal plant, but it was so incredibly apparent right there in front of me, and I remember the different sized fractals becoming distinct in a flowing pattern. I showed Todd some of the zine I was working on, and the music we were listening too was different than normal; the tempo of the song would seem to change at random, making it seems as if time was slowing down and speeding up. “My day has been really strange,” my girlfriend sighed as she did some dishes, which made Todd and myself burst into laughter. I’m pretty sure that tipped her off, because soon after that she asked me what was going on. “I’ve been bad,” I giggled, and she looked at me. I told her we were on acid. She stared at me, then went to take a shower after asking a few questions. I was pissing a lot, and remembered looking into a mirror and thinking how dirty I looked there, all my dead skin and scraggy 10 day beard and sweat. I could see my pupils were enormous, the right one slightly bigger than the left. My nose was running.

As my girlfriend showered, we talked about how people who only have a vague knowledge of broad, related topics can sometimes categorizing the whole group as one specific part of it.

I decided to do a thought experiment with my friend. I had a silly drink coaster of a dia de los muertos skull, which my girlfriend had drawn a Frank Zappa-esque moustache and eyebrows, and I wanted to know how it appeared to him. “Here’s what we’ll do,” I said, “I’m going to point to some things and you’re going to tell me what they are.” Todd agreed. I pointed to a cup. “Cup,” he said. Then, to a book. “Book,” he replied. I went through a few more objects, then finally came to the coaster. Without missing a beat, Todd said, “The devil.” This was both hysterically funny and horrifying to me. I couldn’t look at the coaster, and set it face-down on the table. I kept asking him why, why he saw the devil in that coaster, but he just laughed and laughed and brushed it off.

Todd then went upstairs to smoke some weed and I was drawing, when my girlfriend came out of the shower. She said that she wanted to get some stuff for us, and brought me a bunch of colored pencils and paper. That made me really happy, so I went to go get Todd. He was laying on the carpet, one of my cats next to him, and I asked him how he was doing. He wanted to move the hangout up here, but I told him my girlfriend was getting us stuff down there.

Downstairs we kept drawing, me with the colored pencils and Todd with pen. Todd said he was drawing some “fucked up shit,” a lot of lines turning into crude representations of sexual organs and lumpy mounds. I was making a pattern of an eye with arrows and squiggles radiating from it, with symbols for thoughts, statements, energy, and other individuals woven into it, with repeating colors and shapes. I told my girlfriend about The Loop.

I said that I was very sweaty, and they both asked if I was hot. “No,” I replied, “I’m just sweaty. And I’m not cold, I’m very comfortable.”

As I was drawing on the table, the light in the kitchen flashed, and I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it or if it was real. Then the lights went completely out. We moved to the living room, where we drew some more. My drawing became more and more frantic and disorganised. My precise pattern had dissolved, and more random arrangements emerged. My girlfriend was shimmering in the light, and we listened to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which my girlfriend and I thought was very cliche, but Todd insisted “we should lean into it.” I agreed. I felt very serene and childlike as we sat there, very perceptive to everything around me. I imagined I was a child but with the experiences I’ve gained as an adult.

My girlfriend needed to get some laundry from her mom’s, so we headed over there in her car. It was around midnight by this point. As we drove through through town to get to her mom’s place, I thought of why specific areas become population centers, why people didn’t just live evenly spread out. We grabbed a bite to eat at her mom’s place, and I went to use the bathroom. I had the urge to look at my phone, which I hadn’t since being high, but there was a disgusting, plastic looking photo of Harvey Weinstein’s face that grossed me out and I had to stop. I believed that in this state, I was able to detect all touch ups in photos, and that probably most photos of celebrities we see are very heavily edited. I looked at myself in the mirror again, and felt very dirty. After I went back to the kitchen, my girlfriend showed me a picture her sister had taken of herself, wearing way too much makeup and grimacing instead of smiling. Like the picture of Weinstein, it was disgusting, and her skin rippled in waves. I had to look away.

By the time we got home it was between one and two in the morning, and I could tell that I was starting to come down. We watched a bit of TV before deciding that it was time to go to sleep.

My girlfriend and I talked for an hour in bed, and I felt extremely close to her, like I wanted us to turn into smoke and blow out the window together, commingling forever. She asked if I was still high, to which I said I didn’t think I was, or that at the very least I was definitely coming out of it. She said that she felt like I broke her trust by doing what I did, but that she ended up having a good time being our trip guide, and that everything was okay right now. I apologized.

At 6 in the morning I was still awake, finding it very difficult to fall asleep. I knew that insomnia was a side effect of the drug, and I still felt like I had this static charge throughout my body. As I lay there, I began to have some minor intrusive visions. I saw a group of naked, misshapen people on a grassy plain participating in hellish activities; one of them pulled his lower lip down over his knees and inflating it like a balloon before jumping off a tree, and another was stuffing severed human legs into his long mouth. I forced these images away by visualizing colorful pulses of light pushing them out of my mind, which I had to do several times before they went away for the night.

I awoke at 8:30 that morning, and couldn’t manage to get any more sleep. I wasn’t tired, though; I had this energy in me. So I went downstairs and read for a bit, waiting for Todd to wake up and get ready to go. My girlfriend had to go to work at 3 PM, and I was hoping that Todd would be ready around 10 so I could have some alone time with her, but we ended up leaving at noon.

For that entire day after I felt very different. Once my girlfriend had gone to work, I picked up some groceries for us, and decided I would do some cleaning while she was gone. But once I got home, I felt incredibly lonely; I had been looking forward to having a day to myself to decompress and meditate on what I had gone through , but I found myself overcome with sadness. Tears were running down my cheeks as I thought of how much I missed my girlfriend, so I put on one of her hats to feel closer to her. I completely cleaned out my car (I’m a bit of a car hoarder), and moved on to clean up the kitchen a bit, when a wave of melancholy overtook me and I had to just sit on the couch and relax. I texted Todd, who was also feeling this weird sadness hangover. I wasn’t able to get anything else done that day, and ended up playing some video games until my girlfriend got home.

Overall I feel like the experience was positive. I wish I had not been so hasty to do it, and doing it behind my girlfriend’s back was wrong, but it was fun, incredibly interesting, and I can see how one could use it as a tool for viewing things in a new way. I want to do it again someday, but I’d want to do it with more daylight, and with either more activities ready to do or a safer place to wander around.

Exp Year: 2017	ExpID: 111925
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 25
Published: May 10, 2018	Views: 704
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LSD (2) : Relationships (44), First Times (2), Small Group (2-9) (17)