The pictures did not adequately capture the amazing magic of this thing. Then I remembered all about YouTube… and videos and stuff.
I was also just talking about SP, and I have the lamp sitting next to the SP flag. Which makes it even cooler because the flag features the same color palette as the lamp.
Therefore, it made perfect sense to me that I should also include the weirdest SP song in their entire catalog. This is a folky little weird-ass number called “Meladori Magpie”.
I recommend making it full screen to see the full magic. We have come a long way since people put oil drops on slides in the 1960’s and people manually moved the slides.
This post is a sequel to my (arguably better) recent post “My Psychedelic Experiences“. This is a republish, although this time I decided to start with the journal entries and end with the “poetry”.
When reading my “poetry” – bear in mind that I was between the ages of 21-24, and was high for 18 hours a day on strong Alaskan Thunderfuck weed.
Some of my attempts at poetry approached something almost good, while others are comical. Ex. “circles dancing on the road to fear” – like – wtf? Haha. It is pretty clear that I was a big fan of Jim Morrison and The Doors. Like many young rock n’ roll women.
I often wish I had written more journal entries from this time period. Unfortunately, I was often just way too stoned for something as organized as journaling. Seeing Ani DiFranco in concert pushed me over the edge…. to the point where I was so damn inspired that I just couldn’t help but journal about the event soon after. And then, of course, something that destroyed my world happened later on – and I had no choice but to write about it.
*
March 2004
Ani DiFranco performed Saturday night, downtown at the Atwood Concert Hall. Kat and I passed around the side of the building to the front entrance. As we turned the corner, it was Wyatt I first recognized – leaning against one of the pillars, guitar flashing as he strummed.
He was surrounded by a group of kids I soon recognized as my friends. I laughed, seeing them before they saw me. I approached, watching them immersed in their dream together and existing in the space of each other.
Jake was singing and playing. Wyatt accompanied him on rhythm with a sly smile. Nick stood, Eddie sat on a skateboard. Crystal sat cross legged on the cement.
Their faces broke into smiles as they heard my laughter and saw me.
I was laughing because on Friday night I had suggested that we go down to the street and play for change. Jake had said yes, we should play for the crowd outside Ani’s show. And here they were.
Wyatt wore his green robe with some kind of Egyptian looking design on the cuffs and edges. He looked like Dylan in Greenwich Village, which he would have thought a flattering observation if I had actually said anything.
Jake said his fingers were cold, but he kept playing anyway. A bum came over, stumbled over drunken words, and then pulled out a harmonica and played a solo for us. We stood watching awkwardly, glancing around at one another with smirks. After the bum finished playing, he wandered off and said we could find him a couple of streets over.
We went inside and they announced the show was beginning. When Ani began playing, the moment came alive beneath the stage lights. She poured manic acoustic soul-energy onto our heads as she sweated out images through poetry and rhythm.
After the show, we all went to Jake’s apartment for some drinking. Wyatt used his beer bottle as a guitar slide. After a while Jake suggested we walk over to Wyatt’s house to listen to a new recording of Crystal reading poetry over circuit-bending sound effects.
I noticed everything on the walk. A parade of sensation danced before me; the tall streetlights bathed the street orange. As usual, I made some remark about the beauty of the moment. As usual, Jake and Wyatt both called me a hippie.
*
Wyatt’s room is an incredible escape. For the past few years, Wyatt’s place has been the place to go for green, good company, and the constant flow of never-before-heard music.
In this room, we listened to Crystal read poetry, and also Wyatt and Jake’s band recordings, The Crooked Toys. Sitting on the bed, the bookshelf was five feet in front of me. It was full of vinyl records and subculture novels written by guys like Burroughs and Kerouac. The top used to be filled with empty Southern Comfort bottles. Each one stood like a memory in a cloud. An evening in which fun was poured out of the bottle like a hazy genie.
On this particular night, in post-concert excitement, the conversation played out as though we were in a documentary. Jake brought up an observation or a memory. He talked about summer 2001; the summer when I first met them. Back then they were loud, music-playing mohawked punkers living next to me – a never ending stream of rowdy energy. They were up all hours of the night partying. First they annoyed me, but soon I became intrigued by them.
Jake reminisced about the wildness of that summer. He would pause in a story-telling kind of way, and Wyatt would deliver a thought or memory in his quiet voice; measured, on the verge of something new. I never remember every single detail because we’re always stoned in Wyatt’s room. I stared down at our shoes as I listened. The carpet appeared to be 10 feet below.
November 2005
I’ve wanted to dive into my memories for some time now and write about them. I wanted to tell the story of the crowd and write about the last few years. I never got around to it.
But I never wanted to write about this. I never could have anticipated this. Wyatt killed himself on the 5th of November. Nick called me Sunday and broke the news. To use Jake’s word, it was “surreal”.
Shock penetrated every fiber of my being, as it did for everyone. Nick’s voice broke into sobs as he told me. I had to call him back because my throat ached so much that I couldn’t talk. He called back later and I told him I was coming over.
Nate and Ida came over to Adam’s house to join us that night. Nobody directly talked about Wyatt, although it hung over the room unmistakably, a dark cloud. It was awkward at times; the undercurrent of shock and sadness was so thick. But on the surface, it wasn’t doom and gloom the entire time. There was subtle laughter over a pool game and Nick’s cats.
Ida made strong white Russians for everyone. Too strong. The night ended in a sick haze of throwing up outside where the frozen air felt relieving on my skin. I stood with my arm against the wall, glancing up at the moon, thinking about how Wyatt had stood where I was standing. I crashed on Adam’s couch and woke up in the cold sunlight.
Driving the streets of Anchorage, all I could think this whole week is he’s not here. It goes around in my head like a mantra.
Everything is colorless, white noise vibrations like the feeling of being at work on a Monday morning when you are sleep deprived. Almost every night I’ve woken at 5:00 in the morning, thinking of him, having memories of all the interactions we’ve ever had. Remembering things, he said to me, said to others.
Work was awful. I made the mistake of showing up Monday. I had known Wyatt before I knew any of these people. There was a time a couple years ago when all I had in my day-to-day life was them… the kids, the artists, the lovers of visual art, of poetry, of reading, and above all music.
Wyatt was a uniquely important part of this scene, a huge part of that flow and now I see more than ever how he brought his influence to everyone.
Last night Wanda mentioned a few bands she would never have appreciated, if it wasn’t for him. Bob Dylan, Modest Mouse, Radiohead, to name a few.
Kat has a hand-drum sitting in her room. She sought it after Wyatt brought back a similar drum from India. A couple weeks ago I was thinking of getting a harmonica. Wyatt and his harmonica. Last spring, I wrote that I wished I could invade his book stash.
“Incredible” – that was Wyatt’s word, a word he used to describe things he loved. Wyatt was beautiful. Apparently, he was extremely unhappy sometimes. Despairing as all of us were and are sometimes.
He was always mellow, and now I realize his mellow nature was a deeper sadness. It goes without saying that all of us wish he would have seen things through that night so he could have had the opportunity to feel inspired again in this up and down roller coaster maze that is existence.
*
Undated
Euphoria madness, gates to openness
Rising falling reeling in time
Sneaky shadows cross the sunrise
Sadness darkens the path to your mind
Circles dancing on the road to fear
Leaving judgement to the blind
Triangular moods fade in the distant sky
And then appear next to you
Sometime in 2003
Everything is interesting on this drug. Memories are interesting. Music is beautiful, but then it always is. There are few things like the feeling of chills that you normally get when you love a specific song, combined with LSD. My Bloody Valentine, Jefferson Airplane, Radiohead. Where did this come from, and why does it make so much sense!? Matter and chemical. We are nothing.
heh heh heh heh. The one time I wrote while on LSD. Yes. So very insightful. heh. We are nothing, people.
Undated
Throw back the door
We lie in wait here
Marveling at the bottom of infinite possibility
Glancing upward toward a feast of language unwritten
Locked in the cell of our cells
And the guardsman say to Stay Put
The one standing at the entrance
Throws imagination at them
Like stones piercing through the night sky to the target
Of those who would block the glorious exit
Deliver the allies into enchanted places
Seen and unseen
New strange sweet open
Exerted expounded existing
heh heh heh. Nevermind my terrible fucking handwriting. It’s generally a bit better when I’m not high as fuck.
Spring 2000
If I could have illustrated it, I would have drawn the music in physical form, drifting from his instrument into my body. And the lighting would be an extension of the sound and emotion. Several times I felt my eyes becoming moist. If the true audience are those listening, I was the only audience. Only a few other people sat in the old coffee house, they were scattered and involved in their conversations.
(I am so glad I wrote about this – it was a solo guitarist doing a lot of Cat Stevens covers in a little coffeehouse in Wasilla, Alaska. Due to my choice to write, I can remember this incredible musician like it was yesterday. I was about 20 years of age at this time. I sat facing this acoustic guitarist and behind him were the most intricate and beautiful stained glass hangings against the huge windows, the best stained glass art that you can possibly imagine. This is a lesson about how you MUST write about experiences in order to remember them.)
Undated
Outside the window, staring at the ground, I hear it. A shimmering echo of ascending and descending busyness. It travels in a solitary way outside the limits of human understanding. Before hearing this well-crafted magnificence, I wanted to wander to the edge of my world and jump off into the black. Then suddenly I heard it. Combined with caffeine, it enchanted the colors right back and it deepened the hues, and it opened up the drive to create.
Undated
Momentum
The moment lies trapped
Inside the cruel
Unrelenting fist of time
You must peel the moment from time’s grip
Cast all doubt aside
For time is a universal illusion
Only distance is real
And distance doesn’t end
Undated
We put candles out to mask the other side
They wouldn’t know couldn’t know
Don’t step through the shields
And so, the scent flows
Vanilla, rose and the candles burn
Thru the haze that crows the space and reluctantly
Reaches toward the window
Eager to stay
And dance around the flames
Absorbing a new consciousness into fractured minds
Suffocated by too many dealings
In a world of thousands of universes
From their lost sea of ideal visions
But the sea roars on
And cannot be held back by futile barriers
Or hopes of retreat
It waits to break and roll back
Leaving beneath it a smooth new surface
Upon which minds bask, dance and receive
Masked activities are windows to the sea
And the candles burn on
Undated
Unharnessed illusion of a heightened perception circus
The ringmaster grins
He watches the walls and stairs breathing alive
As though
His eyeballs have been turned around in his head
So that they look upon his brain
And the strobe light flickering
Trance of neurons going haywire
Fields of red and blue explode randomly
Is the door raining drops of paint?
Of course not
The ringmaster reasons
But then
If he can see it rain
And watch it do nothing
In what he thought was reality
What is it really doing between the two opposites?
Perhaps there’s even more happening
Undated
Sweet haunting love
Chasing invisible muse, never catching
Elusive and beautiful
Eternal and mysterious
Everywhere
Undated
Where do the voices come from?
A thought asked
But was met with only silence
And the dark that soon gives way to dawn
Until we meet the light
The candle of her voice
Will refresh our souls and bodies
Winter 2001
It’s been too long since this invisible ghost has unleashed the tidal wave of uninhibited thoughts freely. Still, something is lost between innermost articulation and the stage that is paper. Wandering, wandering, wandering. Wandering through the black. There is no tomorrow and hardly any yesterday in times like this. Only the forward momentum of now. A stared into space filled with shapes, but a transcendent stare that moves steadily beyond it all. Craving a deep breath of release.
Stepping forward on a slippery stone and claiming a new voice unheard to vacant ears. Spinning, spinning, spinning. Fireworks streak down and fade in her mind. Unknown places that she might never go, but in solitude and half in the ground beneath the stars and trees, she builds a bridge of images. They call subtly from the distance when she’s buried in the squares and circles, far away, wound up all the way and clicking fast like a wind-up toy operated at the hands of another.
Traffic jerking, splashing puddles, city buildings grey and humming. The bridge calls out from the distance, layered with a translucent silvery charm, stretched comfortably across her mind like skin across a hand-made drum. Where does it go?
To oaks and willows swaying gently. To a sidewalk at dusk a child sees the blinking lights of what he calls a spaceship. He needs nothing more than his imagination and physical surroundings to lift him into the realm lying between.
The bridge travels on to a concert where the vulnerable empowered sway together. A few thousand or more separate universes unified, even with their divisions of countless complications, united into a common sound that somehow uncorks every individual. The bridge fades away, silhouette falling away with the disappearance of light. Back to the squares and circles.
Undated
At home again, looking up at the power lines. The sounds carry up to the cables and sing to ring forever from there.
Undated
Water and bread never got them thru
They carried a flag
For otherworldly consciousness
While the hermits of materialism stashed their goods and held fast
For something they didn’t know
“It’s all about reactions,” she said, “and how groups of earthly beings
In reality react to the nothingness they want to be somethingness”
Undated
Welcome to the haze
Come inside the maze
Brush strokes and patterns
Of words and intervals
Numbers
It’s all language
But
There’s no way out because
It shifts in cycles
So that
You hit a wall
When you believe you’ve hit the exit
Or the entrance to a new place in space
Where you want to be
So you linger on the path
Content to make the travel
Because you think you see
The closure just up ahead
Around the corner and beside the
Neon glowing scene
Of your dream
And then it shifts and you scream
Was a lie and you cry
But here comes the next optimistic bend
And you’re at it all again
Undated
Lie cry die
Keep it all inside
Fight lost try
Losing losing losing
Time
Work struggle lie
To gather a dime
Hide hide
Break slowly
You’re on the wrong side of life
Winter 2004
(Grace Slick Girl-Boner prose)
Blue green eyes, the color of ice and azure
pierce into you
She grips the microphone in her hand
She wears a dark towel with a belt wrapped around her waist
She sings so loudly, so passionately that the veins in her neck rise
As the muscles strain
Her hair is dark and long
Her voice is deep and low
Contralto
Winter 2004
A long time ago, jake sat in his living room leaning over the cd book, flipping through it and trying to decide what to listen to. Someone suggested The Velvet Underground. He said he didn’t like the because they didn’t give him “that rush”. I remember being intrigued and amused. Because I knew exactly what he was talking about. We all did.
Winter 2004
In a long slow dream, you thought you had immeasurable time and distance. It was illusion. It was the bending mirrors of a wishing pond. It was your swan gently gliding on golden conscious. It was images sketched in silvery hope and intertwined with a tunnel made of iron sound and whispered resolve. Cynicism descended like a poisoned waterfall drowning the universe. The curtains fell slowly and the darkness is still blinding. Now is the time again to reignite the fires, burn passion with the light long into the eve. Energy creates energy. Acceptance of their reality is the conspiracy of lost flight. Leave the hollow gutless growths in their lifeless forests. Rise instead to the shimmering echoes of the moment where genius awaits.
Spring 06, Fridge Magnet Poetry
Spring full wander
Evening black wild
Autumn Mushroom
Early morning breath
Yellow dandelion dream
Stream, harvest grass
In my blue winter thought
Summer dawn road
Must be here
Garden life thru roof
While I leave
Almost journey
Between sound
Rain Child Field
Watch this cold shore
We live
Laugh Shiver Cry
Drop Fall Stand Cry
Thereafter listen
Why
*thanks for reading
Have you ever been experienced? Well, I have. Mmm, LSD. Elementary as these little drawings may be, don’t dare think for a moment that I could draw even that much without a push from LSD. This was written on the back of the psychedelic spider-angel-bong thing. Too lazy to type it up at this point. “Take me back to the caverns, crystal light and reflection. What is real is only what you feel” Another LSD inspired drawing. Wyatt circa 2004.Nick circa 2004. My closest friend of them all during this time. Wyatt and Eddie. Circa 2002 or 2003.Jake and Wyatt, circa 2002. The kids were always happy as fuck in each other’s company. Beyond measure. And I was lucky enough to be a part of that for a few years. As time goes by, I realize it wasn’t just the weed. It was love. A few ofThe kids, circa 2002-03. Nick is that errant little bastard throwing up a middle finger. He couldn’t ever pose for a picture without flipping the camera off.
I’ve been wanting to write about my past psychedelic experiences for a long time. Last night I discovered a great resource for researching psychedelics & experiences that I will plug at the bottom of this post, along with a few other links.
Before we get into my experiences, I gotta plug a few hilarious quotes I found.
My original intention was to do two separate posts.
One of them was going to be chock-full of funny quotes like those below, plus some quotes that were simply interesting or beautiful. The other post was going to be my personal experiences.
Well, as I continued to read about people’s experiences, I found that most of them just were not as funny as the ones below.
And I don’t have patience to make a big research project out of this whole thing.
But let’s get into the good stuff.
Quotes
“Moments later I progressed ever deeper into the ego death and lost my sense of self momentarily. I then started to feel that I was the universe searching for itself within itself but had entirely forgotten that it was itself. At this point a brief moment of realization hit me, I realized that I had found myself and that it had been right in front of me all along.”
“I was asking questions aloud to my friends/guardian spirits, like “When did you get here?” (by which I meant, ‘When did you beings come into existence?’), and my friend replied, “We’ve been here the whole time, dude” (this proved to me that they were divine).”
And later, in the same entry:
“One friend stayed behind to keep me company through all this while the other two went exploring, and I asked stuff from time to time (still thinking he was divine); “Where did you come from?” I asked, and he replied by touching my heart and whispering, “We came from inside.” Looking back on it he was simply trolling me, but my mind was blown, again.”
Haha, lmao! =) That entry above is my absolute favorite.
(The quote below is for Rob in particular)
“I decided it was finally time for me to try to play Mario cart, and as I tried to navigate through the menu with my friend I realized that I could actually still play really well. I chose a map called “rainbow road” for obvious reasons, and the neon rainbow of colors engulfed the entire room as we played. I had never felt this before, but a great peace of everything being connected to me overcame me and I started bawling my eyes out! I kept telling my friends that I was experiencing “pure love” and that the universe loved me!”
(He then goes on to explain that his friends were shitty trip sitters, and it seems like they were just ignoring him while he was having this majestic insight about the universe – how sad).
My experiences
Before we get into my experiences, I should tack a disclaimer on here.
I have never had a bad trip on any psychedelic drug. However. This was during a very social time of my life. I was young and I was surrounded by friends I trusted who I spent time hanging out with nearly every day.
The “set and setting” was continually good because this friend group had such a profoundly positive effect on my life. Thus, even when I tripped alone I never had a bad trip.
I had not yet developed anxiety or a stressful career. I had zero self-awareness. In other words, I was not yet an adult. I was an adult in age (early 20’s) but not mentally. If I took any of these substances now (besides MDMA), there’s a good chance I’d have a nightmare trip unless something in my life changed to where I could establish general emotional safety, plus a very good set and setting.
LSD
I remember the beginning of my first LSD trip like it was yesterday. It makes me smile.
Being incredibly dumb as a young person, I took that first dose alone. My girlfriend must have been at work. I have no memory of her being there. I was alone in my first apartment.
I took a low dose and waited for the effects to kick in.
It must have been one sugar cube, because I can’t remember any geometric wave patterns from this first trip. But then, I only remember the first part of the trip. I do remember a pufferfish on the ceiling. But we’ll get to that later.
The first thing I remember is a gentle and heady shift in my consciousness. I remember having a little feeling of excitement. “Wow, it’s happening!”
Some time passed, and I looked down at the carpet. The carpet was one of those low carpets like you’d find in a doctor’s waiting room office. It was normally dark blue with green specks in it.
As the effects of the acid kicked in, the floor started turning green. A neon-colored green. I was ecstatic.
I grabbed the cordless phone and dialed my friend Nick. He answered.
“Nick!” I shouted, “Nick, the floor is turning GREEN!”
Nick chuckled.
“It sounds like you took that acid.”
“Yes!!!”
I don’t remember what he said after that. I’m sure that I continued talking about how amazing everything was and he continued chuckling for some time.
I was a big marijuana stoner during this time, and I had recently discovered The 13th Floor Elevators. I grabbed a 13th Floor Elevators album, placed it in the CD deck of my stereo and cranked the music up.
The song “(I’ve Got) Levitation” came on and I was overtaken with musical ecstasy.
The lyrics talked about the ocean rolling below you. I jumped up on my couch and looked down at the floor. I wasn’t hallucinating at this point, but I had a general feeling like the room was more expansive and I imagined my floor as the ocean. A blue-green ocean of neon.
I jumped from the couch cushions up to the very top of the couch, and then back down to the couch cushions again. I just remember being ecstatic over the music.
At one point, I looked up at the ceiling. I couldn’t believe my eyes!
I saw a flashing pufferfish on my ceiling. There wasn’t any color or anything, it was just the outline of the pufferfish. It was in the ceiling texture – those paint bumps you see in apartments.
But it was clearly a pufferfish. Spikes and everything. And it was flashing and moving around.
I sat for a while looking up and admiring the pufferfish.
This is an amazing thing about LSD. Where did this come from? I didn’t have any particular interest in pufferfish. But one just appeared randomly. Created by my fucking brain. Just… out of nowhere.
*
Apparently, Nick decided that I shouldn’t be alone. Because at some point there was a knock on the door. I wasn’t scared because I somehow knew that it was my friends.
I opened the door, and they all piled in. About 7 or 8 of them.
I didn’t have much furniture so most of them sat cross legged on the floor.
They suddenly looked like cabbage patch kids to me. You know, the doll from the 80’s. They didn’t literally look like the dolls, but I had a general feeling that they were cabbage patch kids because of the particular way they sat cross legged on the floor. Their crossed legs were like cabbages and they were cabbage patch kids.
Most of them were a few years younger than me. I was totally the immature 21-year-old befriending and buying beer for the 17- and 18-year-olds. And yet… I was the most childlike among the whole crowd. It was a thing they liked about me and they were special.
There’s a whole Jack Kerouac-style backstory about how I met these kids that I should tell some other time. We all remained friends for several years until a primary member of the group committed suicide and shattered each of our lives.
But, at this very moment on LSD they looked like cabbage patch kids to me, and I remember telling them so. They were always amused by “crazy Melissa” and my weird-ass antics while drunk or stoned. And they all came over to my apartment because they couldn’t miss the chance to see me on LSD. Heh.
One of the girls sat next to me on the couch and I handed her my journal with sketches and writings. She sat there reading it and looked amazed by what she was reading. I continued tripping but I don’t remember anything else.
This is something I drew with colored pencils during my acid days. I think I was just stoned, but obviously influenced by LSD. I cannot normally draw or even conceive of something like this. I have no idea what the fuck this is. Welcome to your brain on LSD.Even when you are not actively tripping on LSD – it changes your whole perspective and increases creativity for about a week. Do you see theupsidedown bong?
Other trips
I did quite a bit of LSD tripping after that. There was a great deal of listening to music and staring at the geometric swirls in the fireplace.
During the most intense experience, I remember I ate a little too much acid. Probably like 3 or 4 sugar cubes. Too much for me. I tried listening to some wild song by Jimi Hendrix.
The whole room smiled at me in mockery. The edges of everything in the room, and indeed the room itself – it was all bent sharply upward in a mocking smile. The stereo smiled at me. It wasn’t a bad trip; it was just a little too intense. I shut the radio off and waited it out. This intense moment passed pretty quickly.
One time me and the boys went to Kincaid Park and it was the most amazing trip of my life. People should trip outdoors under the moonlight. We climbed this huge hill and looked out over Anchorage’s Cook Inlet. I can’t remember much of that one, beyond the sheer beauty of Kincaid Park under the moon in early spring. Which, honestly – I’m sure is amazing while perfectly sober.
Generally speaking – low to moderate doses of LSD bring a vast amount of geometric form pattern hallucinations.
You don’t actually have the kind of hallucinations where you see things that are not really there – you just hallucinate moving geometric patterns – at times often quite intricate – in the forms of reality. Walls, carpets, desktops. And maybe – as in my case – the occasional form of some kind of animal in the wall or ceiling.
Most of the experience is spiritual in nature. It changes how you feel. There’s a spiritual transcendence.
I cannot speak for high doses. I was never brave enough to take a high dose, except the aforementioned “mocking smile” experience. That was a bit uncomfortable for a while. My male friends would take much higher doses than I did.
One time Nick told me that he had a trip after 9 sugar cubes where he thought he swallowed his tongue. I laughed my ass off and told him that’s why I stuck to lower doses.
One time I drove to Kincaid Park and ate a couple of sugar cubes in the bathroom. Alone. I hung out for a while and went and sat in the grass. Then I went to the bathroom to pee.
At some point, the walls began turning orange and the geometric hallucinations began. The walls started breathing. I had a moment of clarity where I decided it was probably not smart to hang out in the woods alone on LSD.
I drove home. High on acid. So – it was not safe enough to be alone in the woods, but driving was apparently fine. I wrote in more detail about this experience in my post about Soundgarden.
Because I listened to Soundgarden on the drive home, see. On full blast. It was the greatest driving experience of my life.
But… it was incredibly, incredibly dumb. I cannot believe I was ever that stupid. I don’t understand how I made it out of my early 20’s alive.
I paid close attention to red and green lights. I drove as carefully as I could and stayed between the highway lines while everything swirled around me. This was my Hunter S. Thompson moment.
I could have called my girlfriend to come get me. I realized this half-way through the drive. But it was too late.
But when I got home, my girlfriend was zoned out on LSD herself. She was laying on the couch watching Pink Panther cartoons.
Heh. So much for that idea.
Mushrooms
Then came magic mushrooms. Ooooh, I was arrogant about mushrooms at first. I thought I could handle a whole bag of mushrooms because I had done so much LSD.
Newsflash: They’re two different drugs. You don’t eat a whole fucking bag of mushrooms the first time you try them. It doesn’t matter how often you’ve been taking LSD.
I was laying on the couch while tripping. At some point, I completely lost my sense of self. I had no form. I had no body.
I could not perceive where the couch ended, and I began. All of this happened with my eyes closed.
I closed my eyes and the most incredible visuals with great huge beams of blue light in a shape I can only describe as hourglass-like – they moved in constant patterns like a modern screensaver.
I was too fucked up to be scared. I do not remember any fear. Whatsoever. I remember being fascinated. To the extent possible, given that I was no longer a human and I had no human form.
After a while, I came down some and opened my eyes. I took a drink of my water and it tasted like strawberries. I was astonished. I kept drinking more. How can this be? I took more sips, it kept tasting like strawberries.
The best mushroom trip happened with my friend Nick.
We ate the mushrooms (a reasonable dose this time!) and walked the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail. As we entered the trail, some type of machine that cleans paved paths was driving toward us. I was starting to come up. I was absolutely fascinated.
“Nick, look at this crazy shit!”
There were a few of these machines and they were like crazy giant bugs – some kind of ant that sprayed water. He laughed because he saw the same thing. “Yeah, that’s some weird shit, I know…”
We walked the trail all night long. Gorgeous. I had to stop several times to puke. Mushrooms always had this effect on me.
Until my friend Crystal informed me that you can cut the nausea by squeezing the good shit out of the mushrooms with a strainer into a cup of double-bagged chamomile tea and steep it for 15 minutes.
It works. That’s how powerful chamomile tea is. I never puked or had nausea after making “mushroom tea”.
Here comes the best part:
We entered a park area with picnic tables. I saw a statue sitting at a picnic table. I was absolutely fascinated. I began walking quickly toward the statue. I heard Nick yell behind me, “Melissa, what you are you doing!?” He sounded alarmed, but I thought he was just being dramatic.
“I’m going to look at this statue!”
I slowed my pace as I neared the statue. The statue had its chin resting on its hand – like that whole “To be, or not to be” statue of classical whatever.
Suddenly, the statue moved! I gasped and started running away as fast as I could.
At some point, I stopped and looked back, still alarmed. I’m not sure why I did this, but I kicked dirt up into the air with my foot. Like a dog. And then continued running back toward Nick.
Nick was laughing his ass off. He was laughing so hard he was in tears.
“I thought it was a statue!” I explained.
So, let’s consider the perspective of this poor dude. He’s sitting around thinking about something. Suddenly, a young woman runs up to him at full speed, slows down, and peers closely at him with wildly dilated eyes. Ha. It’s too great.
Welcome to Anchorage, Alaska. Stranger things happen in this town.
*
As we walked, seagulls dived at Nick and it scared the shit out of him. We had walked beneath a nest. He was trying to punch them in the air. I laughed at him and he was annoyed at my laughing. And I laughed even more at his annoyance.
I wish I had a better description of walking on the Knowles Trail in summertime on mushrooms. Especially with a trusted friend. Let me just say this: This trail in Anchorage is amazing enough on its own. The lush plants, the summer light.
Nick was planning on leaving for California for winter, and toward the end of the trip we sat in a field with flowers. Suddenly Nick became Mr. Planning. Which I thought was hilarious.
He talked a great deal about things he needed to do for his cats. Nick always had cats around. He was very serious about taking care of his pet cats. Which was sweet because he was a young stoner boy. He named one of his cats “Spliff”.
He talked about his plane leaving at “Nine o’clock in the afternoon”.
We were still fairly high. I lost it. I started laughing my ass off.
“Nine o’clock is nighttime, Nick, not afternoon!” He was like, “Oh yeah, I guess you’re right.”
Heh. Shit like that. You had to be there.
MDMA
Ah, then there was MDMA. Colloquially known as “Ecstasy”. This was a few years after the LSD and mushrooms.
Far and away – the CRAZIEST hallucinations I have ever seen happened on MDMA. This is due to one of two things – either the massive doses I took, or there was something else in those pills. We’ll get into the hallucinations later.
This was during a very irresponsible time of my life. I was out of my mind, and I was reckless.
My good friend had killed himself.
Only a few months after that incident, I walked in on my best friend and my girlfriend having sex.
I remember my MDMA trips, but I do not remember much else from this period. It was the darkest period of my life.
Looking back, I used the MDMA as self-therapy. I had no one. My friend group had splintered apart after our mutual friend’s suicide. The whole group isolated and stopped seeing each other for a while.
I lived with this best friend of mine. The Betrayer. So, I had to continue living with this wench for a while until I decided to move back in with my parents. You can imagine how that went.
Well, unless I was high on MDMA, which I often was. Then I was okay with the two of them. But when I came down? Not so much. I should have moved out sooner, but you see – I couldn’t sit around doing MDMA all night long at my parent’s house.
I did ecstasy alone and it was my therapy. I forgave them both. I saw their perspective. I had intense empathy for myself, for both of them, and for everyone in the whole world. My friend would walk by and I was like, “Okay, I understand, and I forgive you” and she would be confused because hours earlier I was screaming at her and throwing shit.
I took massive doses. 5 pills at once, and then I took more once the high wore off. Nick told me I was out of my mind. He was concerned, but there was nothing he could do about it.
The craziest hallucination was The Parrot. I worked for a guitar store at the time. We were allowed to take home awesome promotional posters sent to the store for gear.
I had this poster of Jimi Hendrix with a huge Marshall stack behind him. It was a Marshall advertisement. I was high and staring at this poster intensely.
Suddenly, something started GROWING on this poster. On Jimi’s shoulder. It was a bright green color, almost a neon green. The green thing started as just a little round ball, but the ball kept growing.
The ball continued to slowly grow into a branch! From the branch, talons formed, and from the talons, legs grew up, and from the legs a torso, wings, and a head!
I sat up and squinted. I couldn’t believe this was happening. I knew that I was experiencing a hallucination, I didn’t believe it was real. But – I had never seen ANYTHING like this on LSD or mushrooms. The detail was amazing.
Best yet, this was all 3D. The branch grew out halfway into my living room and the parrot WALKED out onto the branch and stared at me. It turned its head this way and that, checking me out.
I got up and grabbed the air. People are funny like that when high – you know full and well that it’s a hallucination from your mind, but you’re going to try and grab it anyway. You know. It just seems so real that you have to make sure.
I also remember seeing a lot of spiders coming down from the ceiling on webs during this time. That was unsettling because spiders are a thing that actually exist. I was always swatting at them just to make sure. But these hallucinations were so frequent that soon enough I learned to ignore them and listen to my music.
I was constantly listening to The Meat Puppets. That music is made for MDMA. There’s no way I can explain this. The only way you could understand how The Meat Puppets are the perfect MDMA band is to take the drug and listen to the band.
It was so good that I rarely listened to anything else.
I just listened to this and it took me back. I have not heard this album in a long-ass time. This album was cemented to the point where I can almost feel like I am on MDMA while listening to this.
One morning I had a hallucination that a rat was giving birth in my bathroom heater vent. I thought it might be a hallucination, but it seemed so real that I couldn’t stop watching and trying to figure it out. It was disgusting. These little hairless rodents swirmed around like maggots and the mom rat just kept popping them out. She had like 10 babies and finally it disappeared.
Then I went to work while still high. I told one of my co-workers about how a rat may have given birth in my heater vent. I relayed this information while still obviously very high, I’m sure.
I was fired that day, of course.
Heh. And then four years later I became an HR worker. I never judged people with drug charges on those background checks, let me tell you.
*
And so ends the history of my psychedelic drug use. I had many fun times. I did many stupid things.
I have no interest in MDMA but would happily do LSD and mushrooms again under the right circumstances. But first I would need either a group of close and trusted friends, or a licensed therapist who enjoys supervising these adventures. I can’t see ever doing any of that shit again on a willy-nilly basis like I did back in the day. And I would certainly never trip alone. In general, I’m more of an actual adult now and would be very cautious about the whole affair.
“I think society is moving a little bit, but I think it isn’t moving near that fast. There’s always gonna be a large, huge bulk of straight people that aren’t going for it.”
“Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, they are so subtle. They can milk you with two notes. They could go no further than from an A to a B, and they could make you feel like they told you the whole universe… but I don’t know that yet. All I have now is strength. Maybe if I keep singing I’ll get it.”
“I always felt that way about the blues, even when I didn’t know anything about it. When I listened to it, I always felt there was something there – an honesty that Peggy Lee was lacking. And now the kids are open enough to say, ‘Now, wait a minute, let me listen for myself’, and those kids are getting into Indian music, getting into black music, getting into any kind of music they think is telling the truth to them.”
“This success thing hasn’t yet compromised the position I took a long time ago in Texas; to be true to myself and not play games. To be the person inside me, not bullshit anybody, be righteous, be real. So far, I’m not wearing cardboard eyelashes and girdles and playing in Las Vegas. I’m still being Janis. It just happens to be on a slightly different level.”
“It’s slightly inhibiting, but it doesn’t force a game on me. Because I don’t let it force a game on me.” (The interviewer asks if the camera is inhibiting, and this is her response).
-Janis Joplin
Hunter S. Thompson
“There was madness in any direction, at any hour… you could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, we were winning. That sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.”
“’You found the American Dream, in this town?’ [he asked]. I nodded. ‘We’re sitting on the main nerve right now’, I said. ‘You remember that story the manager told us about the owner of this place? How he always wanted to run away and join the circus?’ Bruce ordered 2 more beers. He looked over the casino for a moment and shrugged. ‘Yeah, I see what you mean,’ He said. ‘Now the bastard has his own circus, and a license to steal, too’. He nodded. ‘You’re right, he’s the model.’”
“The room looked like the site of some disastrous zoological experiment involving whisky and gorillas.”
“The rear windows leapt up with a touch, like frogs in a dynamite pond.”
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (2008) Documentary
Directed by Alex Gibney
Shown: Hunter S. Thompson
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
“She was not only singing; she was weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song, she filled it with gasping, broken sobs, and then took up the lyric again in a quavering soprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks – not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. A humorous suggestion was made that she sings the notes on her face.”
“The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot. The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher… the groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wandering confident girls who weave here and there and become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group, and then excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices under the constantly changing light. Suddenly, one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage, and moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform.”
“The wind has blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life.”
“Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees – he could climb to it if he climbed alone, and once there he could gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. He waited, listening a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star.”
Grace Slick
“A startling presence, both visually and vocally. An Oscar Wilde in drag who combined insight and sarcasm that was sometimes light, sometimes dark. A provocateur.” – Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane
Somebody to Love? 1998 Grace Slick Biography
“There’ll always be people who are afraid of living and afraid of dying. And there will always be more of them than there are risk-takers, the people who bring innovation into every area, with our without drugs.”
“Since all changes, no matter how small, are absorbed into and add impetus to the ongoing paradigm shift, nothing ever really slips away. The old themes and styles persisted as stitches in the unfurling tapestry, but they were hard to see. What caught the eye was all the newness.”
“As we lay on our backs in the tall grass on the mountain, each person made a brief awestruck remark about the diversity and synchronicity of the clouds, the air, the trees, and the animals. It was on that mountaintop where I first understood that you and I are only separated by one channel of a limited thought process. If I looked long enough, colors on the same object would slowly change in accordance with my ability to take in the transformation. My usual focused perspective was expanded. Instead of viewing certain things or people as passing scenery, as something inconsequential, the peyote made everything, and everyone seem equally important. Suddenly I could see no isolation, no overabundance. It was just energy exhibiting itself in infinite dimensions.”
“Four gigantic Altec speakers were set up so we could literally feel the playback, the technology could squeeze or explode a sound… there were countless knobs and dials and wires to mold a song into an aural vision, and I was fascinated by all of it.”
“When a band is in sync and everybody is playing well and feeling good, there’s nothing like it. You, both the audience and performers, become the power of the music. It’s a biological as well as spiritual phenomenon and it still happens to me when I’m riding around in a car or sitting at home listening to 130 decibels of speaker-cracking music. An almost tangible shift in feeling happens as I go from thick to weightless.”
“Imagine it’s a Saturday night, and there’s a line of what looks like a bunch of young multi-colored circus freaks waiting to go into the Fillmore Auditorium. The crowd is animated, everybody is talking to each other even though they may have just met for the first time. The only visible sign of color on the outside of the building is a poster drawn in Day-Glo swirls. It reads ‘Jefferson Airplane, The Charlatans, Moby Grape and The Great Society.’ When the door to the building opens, the last of the grey vanishes. At the top of the steps that lead to Fillmore’s main hall there is a wall of bright, intensely colored posters. They’re so numerous that the wall itself is invisible. As you walk onto the dance floor, you have the feeling you’ve just entered seven different centuries all thrown together in one room. The interior of the building is turn-of-the century rococo, and a man in red briefs and silver body paint is handing out east Indian incense. A girl in full renaissance drag is spinning around by herself listening to some baroque music in her head while several people in jeans and American Indian headbands are sitting in a circle on the floor smoking weed. Close by, a good-looking man in a three-musketeer costume is placing ashtrays on the cheap fifties Formica tables that circle the edge of the room. In the corner, people are stripping off their clothes while the acid is taking effect. This is The American Dream (for a few hours) with no color barriers, dress code, moral imperatives, and only one keeper – the show’s intense but smiling dark haired promoter – Bill Graham.”
Jack Kerouac
“But there was a wisdom in it all, as you’ll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street, each with the lamplight of the living room shining golden, and inside the little blue square television, each family riveting it’s attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards, dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels… I seem him in future years stalking along with full rucksack in suburban streets, passing the blue tv windows of homes, alone, his thoughts the only thoughts not electrified to the master switch… the millions of the One Eye.” -The Dharma Bums
“It was a mad crowd. They were all urging that tenor man to hold it and keep it with cries and wild eyes, and he was raising himself from a crouch and going down again with his horn, looping it up in a clear cry above the furor. Everybody was rocking and roaring… boom, kick, that drummer was kicking his drums down the cellar and rolling the beat upstairs with his murderous sticks, rattley-boom! The pianist was only pounding the keys with spread eagled fingers, chords at intervals when the great tenor man was drawing breath for another blast… The tenor man jumped down from the platform and stood in the crowd, blowing around, his hat was over his eyes… he just hauled back and stamped his foot and blew down a hoarse, laughing blast, and drew breath, and raised the horn and blew high, wide and screaming in the air.” -On the Road
“See, the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, dharma bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming all that crap they didn’t need anyway. All of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work. I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks going up to the mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad.” -The Dharma Bums
Wayne Coyne
Some interview. Original Source not recorded in the notebook these are typed from.
“’The good times, it’s hard to make them last.’ – I think what people are hearing somewhere along the way is that the good times don’t just come at you. You almost have to create them. You have to make sure that you’re searching out some sort of meaning and some sort of happiness throughout.”
“It just makes you stop in your tracks and go, ‘What’s it all worth?’ We’re all just hurtling through space. At any moment the whole thing could just run into some asteroid out there and we’re all gonna blow up and how insignificant and meaningless and what a speck of existence our life is, and I think I sing about that a lot. When I sing utterly with fear about how insignificant I am, that’s the only time we sound significant. Isn’t that funny?”
ZeroSpace 