There is such a thing as too much.

Finally, I stood up and taking off my earrings, stumbled into bed. Curling into a ball, I burrowed into the striped, colorful mess of blankets. The room throbbed. Some giant hand was massaging it like a failing heart. My own heart raced and thumped with it, beating wildly, erratically. I breathed slowly, carefully trying to calm the frantic heartbeats. But I was distracted by my arms. They were freezing. As the cold intensified into shocking pain, I realized that blankets wouldn't help. The cold was not coming from the air. It was inside, diffusing from my blood into my hands, my fingertips; a burning, cutting pain that felt like being rubbed down with menthol and then walking naked into the rain. I huddled into the pillows, completely fascinated by the threads of agony spreading through my ribs, into my neck and all the way to my toes.
Sometime later, I remembered my panicked heart, and raced to reassure it. But I arrived to find it thumping calmly, perfectly cool and collected.

Happy Eating

Coffee
Yogurt and Rye Ganjacakes with Blueberry Sauce
Tea
Collard Greens
Ham
"Dressin' "
Tea
Curry Spiced French Lentil Soup
Rolls
Mashed Potatoes
String Beans
Hot Buttered Rum
Pumpkin Pie with Vanilla Ice Cream
Two Buck Chuck

...all in all a very successful Thanksgiving.

Space Cakes and Time Travel

About two hours after ingesting the butter (by way of toast), I found myself downstairs in my room. I wasn't sure exactly when I had left the living room, but it didn't really matter. What mattered then was that I was sitting, cross legged, in the center of my room. The lights were off and something really trippy was playing in the background. The more I fell back into myself the more details became clear to me. I realized that I had been sitting there for about twenty minutes, which seemed like a very long time. I sat for a few minutes more, absorbing the sounds, the feeling of my muscles as a began to move them around. Then I got up, put on a coat and went out to the back porch. I sat down in the rocking chair and light a cigarette, my fingers all trembly from the cold. I rocked and smoked for about five minutes until I had to put out the cigarette. I couldn't stand to hold it any longer. As I continued to rock I realized that not only was the chair creaking, I was anticipating the creaks. Very softly I explained to myself that I needed to stop waiting, and just let those creaks happen. "Stop anticipating," I said. "Just be here, now." And I rocked. And each moment in the rocking chair turned into the first time I had experienced motion. Each moment was brand new. It was the first time I had heard wood creak, the first time I had rocked back and teetered on the edge between falling and rocking forward. I sat in that chair for eternity and experienced everything for the first time, over and over, at every moment.

That paragraph is from the first time I infused THC into butter and ate it. It wasn't unpleasant, as some people say it can be. It was very, very intense. Time and reality started doing back flips and contortionist stuff that belong only in Cirque du Soleil. It was interesting, but I wasn't sure that I'd ever try it again. Well, Saturday night my neighbor came over bearing a large plastic shopping bag. It was full of trimmings: stems, leaves, everything but bud. He gave it to us, saying that he had no use for it. We didn't really think that we'd get anything good out of the bag. Smoked it wouldn't have done anything at all. But butter....So yesterday I went to the store and bought a half pound of butter. Since we figured we were working with half-assed stuff we changed the proportions. Normally, it seems, you use an ounce of cannabis per pound of butter. So we used an ounce per half pound. After three hours of simmering water, butter and weed, the entire house smelled like pot. But we had a lovely bowl of bright green liquid. So I cooled it, skimmed the butter off the top and proceeded to make some really yummy cookies. And once again, time stopped.

Mmm, Cookies!
Basically, take your standard chocolate chip cookie recipe. Mix up your green butter, sugar and eggs. Add flour, vanilla, baking soda, whatever it calls for. But use really good chocolate chips, and add dried fruit (I used raisins and cranberries) and a lot of nuts (pecans, almonds and walnuts went into mine). Your batter will be a very light shade of green. And it might taste a bit like grass. But once baked all the other goodies in your cookies will overpower that taste. Enjoy.
But please, be careful. Eat two or three and wait a bit. You will want to munch on something, but make sure it isn't laced with THC as well. Eating too much will totally mess you up. Make sure that you really need another cookie before you eat one. I had a lot, probably around seven. I think five would have been sufficient for a good trip. So, yeah...just keep that in mind.

The Other Hallucinogen

I just found this in one of my old notebooks. I think I wrote it in March ('08). Anyhow, its what I wrote during my last acid trip.

The color yellow. I don't really have a follow up to that sentence. Just yellow. Its such a forgiving color. When the sun shines and hits the yellow just right...its like hearing bells, or feeling a smile: a warm glow spreading everywhere. Yellow is such a happy color. It's like a reward. A reward for living. Every time I noticed something pretty today the sun came out and made the yellow a bit brighter for me. Although it did get carried away with itself sometimes. But, oh well! It's the sun, right? I guess it's allowed.
I felt so bad about walking on the poor earth earlier. I could feel it springing back and breathing under my feet. I walked on so much ground today. Is it all resigned to it's job, or does it aspire to be more than the dirt under our feet? It does feel good to dig your toes into the grass. Especially when the grass is that pretty yellow-green color that the sun gives it sometimes.
Today was only for the cuckoo birds. I had to scare the others away. I wasn't very good at it. I mostly just yelled at them in my head.
I hope that everything is okay...

I don't remember why I stopped writing at that point, and I have no clue what that last sentence means. I wasn't seeing things at the time that I wrote this, but I was nowhere near sober. I had spent the day walking around Miami talking to the sun. Yep, talking to it. It was my personal friend that day. I remember that I was scolding (probably out loud) it for getting carried away with itself. But I kept talkin to it because it was doing beautiful things to all the yellow objects around me.
I've noticed that when I do LSD I develop a fixation with the color yellow. Every time I trip I become completely obsessed with it. Example (mom, you may remember this!): my mother's kitchen used to be a beautiful sunflower yellow. Sometime in the last few years she painted it a brickish shade of red. I was tripping at her house one day (I believe I was still living there) and happened to walk into the kitchen. Looking around I realized that although I knew the walls were red, I could see the yellow paint underneath. I sat on the floor and stared at the yellow/red walls until my mother came in and rightly asked me what the hell I was doing. "Well mom," I answered, "it's always Christmas in your kitchen." It made sense to me, since my altered mind thinks of the color yellow as a gift or "reward for living" as I put it in the above passage. She just shook her head and walked off. Point is, even the memory of yellow is enough to enthrall me when I'm tripping.
As for the cuckoo birds...I don't know. The next page in my notebook says "What does a cuckoo bird look like?" The page facing that claims that "It has big eyes! And it loves to put its toes in the grass." The sketch that goes along with it is of a man with a bird's head, sporting a blue mohawk. Make of that what you will.

Forget scrambled eggs! THIS is your brain on drugs.

Anyone who has seen the movie Children of Men will recognize this scene: We're walking down a shadowy path. Many people move around us as we walk towards the bright spotlights up ahead. I can see people and trees trapped behind the chainlink fence to my right. Under the lights a few people are rudly directing the members of the crowd one way or the other. I suddenly realize that if we get sent to the right we will be entering what is essentially a death camp. We got to the crossing, and were sorted to the right. "I'm going to die," I thought. I knew it was true. There was no way to make it out of here alive. My mind caved in. "I'm going to die." The path we were on got darker and darker. The farther we went the more terrified I became. When it became so dark that I could no longer see the rest of my body the fear seemed to swallow me. In the moment before I broke down completely something occured to me. I could, I realized, accept that I was going to die. I could accept that there was no way out, and I could resolve to do it gracefully. Kicking and screaming never helped anyone, I reasoned. This thought made so much sense that I calmed down. Why spend the last minutes of my life terrified beyond reason? If I could not enjoy them then I could at least live them fearlessly. And if there was actually some sort of afterlife I would be able to be proud of the way I died.

That ten minutes on the path was the most pivotal part of my shroom trip. I realized the next day how much I had managed to learn. I realized that if I had not accepted that I was going to die my trip would have turned very bad. I truely thought that I was going to die. It never crossed my mind that I would not. That I was able to find the strength to accept this fact was amazing to me. I now know that I have the potential to react this way when I finally am dying.
It was also very interesting to me that I could control the outcome of my trip as much as I did. Some part of me knew that I needed to calm myself before things got ugly. The trip itself had started really well, with no indications that I would later be facing death.

Yesterday afternoon my roomate Jen, her dog Frida and I ventured into San Fransisco for the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park. At the park we met up with a friend of Jen's (who's name I cannot remember), and many friends of this friend. After introducing ourselves we kicked off our shoes and sat down on the large threadbare blanket that had been spread on the ground. Almost immediately people began to produce bowls and pipes, and we broke up into many "getting to know each other" conversations.

The words "shroom chocolates" were all I managed to pick out of the conversation going on next to me. I had been talking to a few of the blanket people about my art, but suddenly the concept of shroom laced chocolate had my full attention. Jen's friend had pulled out a round, foil wrapped object that was presumably the chocolate in question. Seeing that I was interested she told me that one of the guys on the other end of the blanket was selling them. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.

For a long time now I've been meaning to try mushrooms. My experiences with LSD have been wonderful, but there is something to be said for the fact that shrooms are natural, while acid is synthetic. I wanted to see if that made a difference. So I bought some chocolate. I ate half of it to start with, feeling very glad that I had declined to smoke any pot when a bowl was passed in my direction. I didn't want to mix the two drugs just yet. I don't really remember what happened for a while right after I ate the chocolate. I just know that when I finally looked up I realized that I had been drawing on my hands for some time. I got up to watch the band that was playing and the effects seemed to hit me at that moment. The sun was beginning to set and the strips of pink clouds weren't behaving quite right. They seemed to be staying still, but at the same time gave the impression that they were itching to scurry off across the sky. As I was watching them I absentmindedly raised myself up on my tip toes. I gasped and looked around, and then stumbled. For a moment it had felt as if I was flying. But I was still on the ground. I shook my head, trying to reconcile being in the air on on the ground at the same time. The sensation was unsettling, but interesting enough that I did it over and over in order to have that feeling of grounded flight.

At this point I hadn't had any strong visual hallucinations, and I never ended up having any. What happened was more than a visual hallucination. It was a total sensory hallucination. It was as if I had created another reality for myself to exist in, where my senses acted differently. Listening to the music gave me the feeling of being in water, or being filled with it. Sound was translated into a tactile sensation. The sounds of the large crowd and of the music combined made me feel very full, as if every last bit of space in my body had been filled with some sort of jelly-like substance. As the sounds waned, so did the feeling. Some visual stimulus also translated into tactile hallucination. A person in the crowd was playing with a green laser, and every time I saw the light skitter past I felt someone grab my head and shake it, jarring my brain.
I felt at this point that I could safely experiment with a little pot, so I packed a bowl and took a few hits. It was almost dark and the band was playing a beautiful song, so I got up and danced. Jen, the nameless friend and I danced barefoot in the grass until the last song. And then we kept dancing to the music in our heads.

During the walk out of the park I slipped from my audio/tactile reality into the CoM reality. When I finally made it into a new reality I found that there was new music in my head. And I danced to it.

The Setting

It's a little too early for the light to be coming through the window exactly the way I wish it would. The sun is still too high in the sky. Come 3 o'clock it will look perfect. I want the sun to shine through the window this way because of the scarves hanging next to it. The scarves are arranged on three hooks. One hook holds all of the red, brown and orange scarves. The next holds all of those that are predominantly green. From the last hang the scarves that are grey, blue and white. The streaming, late-afternoon type of light makes that corner glow as it plays off all of the colors around it. But that moment is still three hours off. This bright, glowing, high noon type light is perfect to illuminate the window itself. The wall it's in is painted white, as is the deep sill. A drooping rose sits on the sill, in a bottle whose label matches its pink petals exactly. A devil-esque mask rests beside the bottle, tounge lolling, staring up at the Tibetan Prayer flags that hang above it. The bright light makes this little scene look like a photo you would find in one of those magazines that showcase cottage interiors.
The bedside table and bed look like they belong in a college dorm room. The bed is a rumpled mess of blues, greens, pinks and browns, polka dots and stripes, stylized flowers, and emroidered hearts. The table is littered with crumpled wrappers, paper and pens. There are stacks of books and a dirty bowl. A large paper bag on the floor collects trash. Only two elements ruin this setting: a photograph over the bed, and two bowls under the bedside table. The photograph is from my stepfather, and is of mailboxes all in a row. The bowls are Moroccan; painted with intricate designs and filled with many balls of yarn.
I am sitting at another small table at the foot of the bed. It is a low table, so I am sitting on the floor, surrounded by cushions. The two walls that make this corner boast a line of objects: masks, a small mirror, necklaces that are art on or off the body, a handwoven basket, a very old purse. These are all the things I've picked up along the way. I like looking at these three walls. The fourth is not quite as pleasing. It has all my practical items like clothes, toiletries and books arranged along it. There is a folded stack of cloth on the floor that I keep meaning to put away.

The light has shifted slightly, and no longer shines through the yellow flag. The scene at the window is not interesting without that shock of yellow in the corner. I think this is my cue to walk down to the lake. I can draw there until 3 o'clock, when the light in the window will be just where I want it.

Musing at Such Great Heights

I got drunk last night. I went out with some girls that I work with, said that I would not get trashed, and then promptly proceeded to. We shared our horror stories, and laughed over the stupid things we've pulled recently. We skinned our elbows on icky bar tables, and sang bad songs really loudly.

What is it about alcohol that makes us want to pour our hearts and souls out onto some beer soaked table? We talk about things that are normally kept quiet, we allow ourselves to examine thoughts that are normally kept buried. We finally are able to confess things to ourselves that we would never, ever dream of during "normal" hours. And then in the morning we hate ourselves for thinking, feeling, saying the things that we did. Why not just own up to being a human, with all the thoughts, desires, drama and pain that comes with it? Why does it seem to take the influence of some substance or other to make us fully human, even as it is making us slightly less so?

Maybe when I'm thinking straight I'll have all the answers. Stay tuned. I may decide to share them.