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30 Minutes
The room isn’t right. It’s not like Alice in Wonderland or anything. Just a barely perceptible difference of geometry letting me know something very strange is coming. I turn to my long-haired companion.
“The walls are… off.”
He looks at me, sweating and a little green. “I gotta puke.”
60 Minutes
Puking sounds emanate repeatedly from my toilet. I’m handling his vomiting and my solitude better than I would have thought. Vomiting happens. We’ve both ingested poison. I hear him cough and sputter in the next room. I smile, relishing the warm glow coming from inside my body and dance to The Beatles. I hate the fucking Beatles.
I shout out, “I love everything!”
75 Minutes
He’s still puking and my bladder is at critical mass.
“I need to piss. Can I have the toilet?”
He thoughtfully considers my proposition. “Nah, man. I need it.” He hugs the porcelain, resting his head against the bowl. The sleeve of his flannel shirt hangs down.
“Do you care if I piss in the shower next to you?”
Without a thought he bleats, “No. Go for it.”
My piss streams next to his head while he retches bright blue foamy chunks into the toilet.
95 Minutes
He’s returned from the toilet and we’re both lying on my bed. I notice a discoloration in the paint that I have never seen before; pale yellow on off-white. I stare at it, trying to find meaning, sinking deeper into a glassy-eyed stare as I consider the larger universe I’ve entered.
My companion stares, glassy eyed into the infinite space of a drug haze. “I am tripping so hard right now.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say, clutching a letter I wrote to myself explaining what the fuck is going on. “Are we going to be OK?”
He doesn’t hesitate to reassure me. “Yeah. We’re gonna be OK.”
“I thought so, but I figured I’d ask.”
“That’s what I’m here for.”
“Can I touch you?” The letter falls from my hand with the sweat of a clenched fist dampening the words.
“Sure, man.”
I put my arm around him and hold on for dear life.
130 Minutes
Two babies cling to one another, shaking ever so slightly in the middle of a blinding brilliant ball of white light.
200 Minutes
My roommate bounds merrily through the door and begins putting groceries away. I feel energized and run out to him.
“Joseph, I’m tripping my face off so you have to be nice to me.”
He’s slightly amused, but unfazed. “What did you take?”
“Mescaline. About 500 milligrams. It looks like a big grey aspirin. Did you know it’s made of salt?”
He keeps putting groceries away while I bounce around the room, looking at everything around me, walking for the sake of walking.
315 Minutes
The graveyard is silent and peaceful. This is the last place I thought I would want to come in this state, but I feel more at ease here than I have anywhere else. The trees swirl softly in the breeze. The stones provide a deliciously grey foreground in front of the blue-and-purple sky. I stand near under a tree, walking forward two feet, then back.
“This is really peaceful.”
“Yeah, man,” My companion agrees, his hair softly flipping in the breeze “I don’t know why people are afraid of graveyards.”
We stand there, staring off into the distance, the definition of comfortable silence. Everything is fine.
“It would really suck if there were fire ants here.”
Nothing is fine.
420 Minutes
“It’s kind of wearing off. Let’s smoke weed.”
We smoke in benumbed silence.
“How do you feel?”
“It’s sort of coming on again,” I smile warmly, glowing from the inside out. “I wish I could tell my dad about this.”
“I know, dude. It’s like you had your bar mitzvah or something.”
1200 Minutes
I get up, smoke a bowl and try and make some breakfast. I feel the mescaline kick back in and wonder: Will I ever be normal again?
I sure hope not.
I didn’t care for The Beatles until that one DMT experience…
If you ever find yourself on mescaline in the desert, you’d write about that, wouldn’t you?
I laughed my way through this one.
been there.
funny stuff.
“…my bladder is at critical mass.” – That is the best line.
“…I’m tripping my face off so you have to be nice to me.” – Sounds familiar.
A nice, funny read (mostly because I too have been there minus the graveyeard part).
Haha… I have no idea how I ended up here. My blackberry must’ve hit an old link and this story came up. I couldn’t stop reading it… Nice trip.
Good lord this was funny. I want to share this with everyone. You make me miss tripping. I could easily forget all the shit about paranoia and the dark ugly places you can get stuck in and the two days that you have to give on the other side of the trip just to recover.
Holy shit, though. This is hilarious.
My favorite part is the letter you wrote. I always wondered if that would work. Did it help at all?
Every time I got a little twitchy I referred to the letter. Worked like a charm. I also recommend Dramamine for the nausea.
The cemetery is an excellent place to be when tripping. I don’t know why the prospect of ghosts is only spooky when one is sober, but that appears to be the case. At least in my experience.
I used to go there a lot. For one thing, it’s quiet. Unsolicited, unwanted external stimulation, which can prove overwhelming, is at a minimum.
Though there was the one time I saw my own name (or two of my three own names) on a tombstone when I was totally off my face.
That did not go so well.
But after running screaming bloody murder halfway across the graveyard, I did eventually stop, my friends did eventually calm me down, and it was eventually revealed that this poor dead woman had a totally different last name.
Everything was hunky-dory after that.
Ha ha ha ha ha.
I’m sure it wasn’t funny at the time, but it’s funny as hell now.
It took my friends, who were in a similar state, quite some time to figure out what was going on.
I think two of them screamed just because I screamed, and the other two just started chasing after me, even though they didn’t know why we were running.
That’s just about the only thing I remember from that sprint. My friend Dean, who had MPD and probably should never have been tripping in the first place, running behind me screaming “SHIT! SHIT! WHY ARE WE RUNNING????? SHIT!”
I remember one of the first times I tripped I found myself at Wal-Mart in Roswell, New Mexico. We were buying glow sticks. Just as I really started tripping, my friend shoved a pack of glowsticks down my pants and said, “Be cool” in my ear and started moving me toward the exit. Now I was committing two crimes – I was high, in public, and I was stealing. I was trying to be cool but I was feeling VERY not cool. We got to the exit and, right then, a car alarm went off in the parking lot. I lost it. I started screaming, “Aaaaaaaaaaaggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh!!” and ran toward the car. It was horrible. My friend teases me about that to this day.
Nice one. Makes me nostalgic. 😉