Acid Trip
Last weekend Z and T and their friend A J and I made a bonfire and candy flipped. This candy flipping is a new thing for me, they do it here in San Diego. You take an acid plus a molly. Or an ecstasy. I’ll never know the difference.
I guess I was expecting more of an intense molly trip but it was simply a bit of molly feeling at the beginning and then a little bit of LSD visuals and then I fucking figured something out about myself and I cried for 5 hours.
I would say it is one of the most beautiful and life understanding trips I’ve ever had (only three on LSD so far, another 4 mushroom trips). It’s absolutely a step up from taking acid with Jimmy at Mono, or that one jungle bar I threw up at.
A part of me feels so high building these connections between what life has shown me and grown inside of me and what the acid shows me and subsequently what my therapy shows me. I try not to think of it as elitism but I’m screaming in my head right now like, “Don’t you see!!!!!!” it feels like I’m the only person that is paying attention to this. So the other part of me kind of wants to tell the hungry for connections to take a chill pill, because no one really cares. Either they don’t care at all, or they already know all of this and so they just look at me like, duh.
Am I this stupid? Am I this young of a soul?
Let’s start there. The idea that I’m a new soul came to me many years by someone calling me such. I subsequently used it to describe myself, and on last weekend’s trip as I was explaining this to A J, he said it’s because I’m inquisitive. Imagine I’m a new soul, and life is an experience that the consciousness chooses to partake in, you can even go as far as to believe Elon Musk’s sayings that we’re living in a simulation. It seems very plausible to me that, yes, machines achieved consciousness, and they’ve (or the Gods, or Buddha, or whatever) created this organic, biological simulation, humans, we reproduce constantly, we’re better than rabbits but we are essentially living in this experiment. And consciousness is, in fact, this “no-thing and everything” as described by my therapy book AND by psychonaut illustrations.
Our physical language does not have a word for what consciousness is because it transcends time and space and it does not have a beginning and an end, thus it is not a “thing” but a no - thing or also every thing, which is what something is if it is not a thing. The opposite of a thing. Is a nothing, or an everything. But in fact it could be something, simply we don’t have a word for it because we don’t have the physical capacity to understand an object, or a thing, that transcends time and space. Because in death we lose the ability to communicate between one being and the being who has left their physical body (but we’re not really sure). This is very typical of the limits of language. You see it across cultures, Ikagai, Chill, Apapachar (Japanese, English, Spanish) not only in their vocabulary but how language shapes the way we see the world because it is shaped by the world around us. For example, a Chicagoan would never say “I went to the snow” it’s like WTF are you talking about? But in SoCal we GO to the snow. Or how the Eskimo have hundreds of different words for snow, to you or to me, the 97 other words for snow you don’t know would be meaningless to you since you have never seen or experienced them.
So this consciousness, imagine the machines decided to build this simulation in order to experience what life was like. It might beg the question that, well couldn’t we be the OG life that created the machines? I would say no because of the pyramids but maybe? This idea of “experiencing life” runs parallel to the teachings of the Mormon Church, and I assume, most of the rest of Christianity, that we were “given” these physical bodies such that we may have “eternal life” but “consciousness” or our souls, existed before this world and these physical bodies. And there is an existence to come beyond the physical world that we know. ****** My whole argument fails if this assumption is not true **********
Oh fuck, in writing this I realize that maybe I’m just connecting the 18 years of Mormon brainwash to my therapy and to my acid trip? fuck.
My Mormonism and my yoga intersect on a daily basis, every time I go to yoga it’s like I just went to mass. Today I even cried in yoga like sometimes i do at church. In yoga, we always end my hyper-commercialized Core Power Yoga class with a Namaste, holding your hands, palms facing each other, from your third eye center, the space between your eyebrows. The soul's recognition of another soul. “The light in me honors the light in you”
It is here where we swing back to the acid trip.
I went over to Z’s house around 5PM on a Friday night. I knew we weren’t gonna party or go out ‘cause we’re all broke. We drove over to the grocery store, grabbed some beers, and as we’re driving home T brings up the idea of having a bonfire tonight. No one checked the weather and we were like fuck yeah let’s invite A J. Someone, not me, made the decision that we would pick up treats for the bonfire.
I was expecting it to be a big ass bonfire, a bunch of drugs, people, music, alcohol. instead, only 2 people stopped by and quickly left, other than that it was just us four and the birds hanging around. It was the most, most San Diego night ever. The type of night only locals have, and the type of night that makes me feel like I belong here, both on this world and in San Diego. After picking up candy in Point Loma, we were deciding where to do our bonfire, Ocean Beach was a possibility, plenty of action around, people, Friday night, hippie town. But T said he knew a spot on Shelter Island. We drove around for a minute, asking people, trying to consult Google, but we almost gave up because we couldn’t find the pits. Finally, we found four pits, which I believe were actually the only four pits on Shelter Island. There’s a boat ramp 200 yards away. We set up our pit, started building the fire, and ate our treats. It hit Z first and then T. They were off down the beach, dancing to the music we were playing off our Bluetooth, looking at the lights of downtown. Z took me for a walk down the beach wanting a blow job but I just wasn’t there yet. It hardly felt like the molly was hitting me at all. I was sitting there on a stone staring up at the sandhill beside me as the LSD visuals started waving around at me. I started asking questions, “If we were less smart would the trip affect you different?” Answer: The conversation would be steered in another direction but it would arrive at the same conclusion. I have this beautiful memory of watching Zeo dance and stare at the fire and talk to his friends. I think that’s when I really fell in love with him.
Earlier or now, I don’t remember when or how I decided to pose the acid a question. Setting an intention was easy and natural. How can I find peace? I had done a yoga class that morning where my teacher mentioned Santosha, and described it as “contentment in suffering, finding peace in the midst of pain.” And I think that I was thinking of this regarding my anxiety, a feeling of not being able to breathe, chest tightness like my heart was about to explode out of my body, which had been flaring up the last two weeks due to my lack of sleep and just January, and life stress.
I was sitting there at the bonfire thinking about how peaceful this moment was. The bay next to us, waves lapping up on shore, the birds squawking occasionally nearby, the boats rocking away 30 feet from shore. The cops hung out with us a few hours. They stayed in the parking lot, maybe 20 yards away. I only ever caught glimpses of their flashers, whenever we pulled out a beer or the bong, thinking they had left. We had talked about the rumor that circulated about not using pallets. The rumor is that when you use pallets for the bonfire, the nails explode. But in the discussion, it turned out that the exploding pallettes rule is only a rumor, to stop the use of nails so that when children or dogs, or homeless people are digging through the sand, they don’t impale themselves. As removing the nails from the ashes is an expensive task, and the city no longer pays for maintaining the pits. (Reminds me, I need to buy a metal magnet so this can be my community service project). It was one of those moments where everything was at peace because we were being respectful, the cops weren’t giving us shit, we were tripping balls but people tripping balls aren't belligerent assholes. Usually, the type of people that trip (hippies) tend to already be a bit more conscientious. The conversation swung back to a souls recognition of another soul. The realization one has when tripping, that everything is, that we’re all connected. And A J is this random person I just met who has a fuck ton of money and works 80 hours a week, and Z is my lover, who has a blue collar job, and T is the one who brought us together, simply because he’s friends with my friend's cousin. It just felt like this is where I was supposed to be and with these people.
I look back on all the things I’ve written on this blog and on my sex blog and it just feels like I’m achieving something. I’m not gaining any financial wealth, but I believe I’ve achieved what I set out to do when I graduated from college, “Poursuit”. Chase. Search.
I think what I’ve learned so far and what’s taken me 29 years on this earth to figure out is just do whatever the fuck I want and enjoy it. Enjoy all of it and enjoy the little bits of it. I remember as I was tripping wanting to feel like that all the time, dislocated from time or space, there’s no tomorrow and there was no yesterday, just today. And it’s always hard to come back from that. The post-trip blues are real, the comedown, is rough, making your way back into the real world, to get swallowed up whole by the distractions and chatter of daily life, of the woes of routine, and the rat race. When all we’ve come here to do is live, and experience, and feel pain and feel love, and feel a loss, but mostly to suffer. Whether its the machines or the Gods that made us and this world, it seems like it was important for them or for us if we chose to come here, to suffer. But why?
As I’m laying in Shavasana in my yoga class this morning, class is ending and I’ve started going back to yoga daily because I’m depressed again. Nothing out of the ordinary, I’ve gotten good at being depressed, I’ve made it this far, I just have to remember not to quit my jobs! The LSD maybe dropped me back down to earth after my latest upswing. I’m crying but I’m also so sweaty that absolutely no one can tell so I’m just trying to keep silent. I’m crying because it feels like everything in my life was meant to be. Like this is the path I chose because I wanted it, I wanted to be free and crazy and sexual and I wanted to travel, and I wanted to see “what it was like to be a regular person (working class)”. It’s like I’m legitimately a new soul, eager to experience everything about life. Whether it’s learning to scuba dive, hitch-hike, never work, work from home, it’s like I needed to try it all. But that was that time. Now it’s time to turn inward. Now it’s time to find a way for me to give of myself to this world. Like, as the drinking got progressively worse, it was meant to lead me back home, to a place where I would convince my dad to pay for a black tag yoga membership. To a place where I finally found a psychiatrist to explain my anguish.
There have probably been bipolar people for all of humanities history. Maybe we were the ones to discover pot! (70% of bipolars use marijuana, most first use it at a very young age) Maybe our anguished existence was necessary to propel humanity forward by all the amazing connections we make?! I'm being sarcastic but also seriously believe all of this. Just in trying to understand why I’m like this. (Also to go off on a tangent, I think bipolar people and stoners evolved together. Ever since I was a child, I’ve attracted stoners to me like Anne Child attracts the crazies. Every guy I date is progressively more stoner, and it’s my favorite medication, my doctor says if it works, I should keep using it. It’s these sort of little things that make me feel like This is the Right Place.
Today i made myself go to my volunteer group. I have a new favorite kid, this guy can only talk about trash, and he gets points for talking about anything but trash. Last week my favorite kid only asks about what the weather is going to be. She’s always worried it might be too hot or too cold to ride. I completely understand them. I know the anguish! And it makes me recognize again, that we’re all here to suffer or to face different challenges. Mormons always taught me that we’re never given a challenge we cannot overcome.
“Santosha or contentment means keeping a positive attitude in difficult times. We can choose to wallow in darkness and difficulty, or we can rise above our challenges and see them as opportunities for transformation and the discovery of immense and lasting joy. The more we choose contentment, the more we are able to grow. Here is inspiration to help us walk more cheerfully through life’s valleys as well as its peaks.”
As we begin to pack up our bonfire, I start to realize that I’m bipolar and it’s sprinkling. Since August, I would see things about me that “could be” bipolar, but at that moment I was like holy shit I’m having a manic episode. I saw it for the first time, maybe because the LSD made me come out of myself for a minute. I wasn’t being manic in that moment, I hadn’t made the decision to come out here, I hadn't gone out looking for drugs, but I hadn’t slept in weeks, I had asked my doctor for medication to sleep and realized that was out of my character, but it was when I was tripping that I saw myself. I saw my patterns. It’s been a blur since then, reading through my therapy book, coming across this mindfulness exercise where they literally have you look at your consciousness. ****** By showing you who you are, patients often have a feeling of “dying” because in a sense you are. Our language and our existence are based on the Ego. The self. The individual, establishing who you are, your boundaries, is necessary to feel satisfied. And when the ego dies, when you realize you are boundless because consciousness transcends time and space, we are all one, you and me are the same, you can accept death or suffering (how LSD and shrooms are used to treat end of life patients in accepting their end) but in the moment of this death, when I realized I wasn’t who I thought I was, it was pretty sad and I cried for a long time. I cried because I thought I’ll never travel again. I thought I’ll never do anything without questioning whether it's me or my crazy talking. I cried because of how mean I was to my sister. I cried thinking about how sad I’ve been for so many years. Like I cried for myself, I felt bad for myself. And I cried for all the people that I’ve met on the road, all the hippies, and all the bonfires, and all the stories about tripping. I guess I just connected all of it like maybe they're bipolar like me. That’s why they’re out there. I cried for us. And how fun it’s been but also how it’s been a mask we’ve put on, trying to make sense of the anguish.
I’ll always remember my Farmer Mykal telling me I wasn’t “that lost” like the other people in Garberville. And I said to him then, like I feel now, But I am lost. And I think that’s the part that makes me cry.
The day after the acid trip I was reading my therapy book and they talk about this ego death, which I'm reading and I'm like, yeah I know I just did acid, and then they talk about the guy who cries because he feels like he’s dying once he disassociates with his ego, they call it defusing from self-conceptualizations.
“If I am not my thoughts, then who am I”, It was as if he were dying. And in a sense, he was.
I think this is what the 5-hour acid trip cry was for me. I needed to let go of the old me. I’m so proud of everything I’ve done, and achieved and learned. I know I want to teach and work outside, helping people, teaching people to help themselves. I’ve traveled, I’ve fucked, I’ve been poor, I’ve been rich (for a month in Mexico once). I think I’ve gathered plenty of material and I should write a book. But now that the universe has brought me here, back to San Diego, I think it’s time for me to learn to live in the moment. The thing old souls know how to do far better than me. Just live, chill, let it in, relax.
*****