one and a half tabs placed on my tongue.

First notes possibly, a feeling of weight yet lightness simultaneously, while a tingling stimulation climbs my nerves.

Begin to feel more physical effects- clenching jaw and a slight twisting discomfort in my muscles. I feel a tiny bit nauseous, but it is definitely manageable. My legs are twitching.

I begin to shake more and more, the typical psychedelic jitters and tremors. I feel like I am coming up into the trip exponentially, with the intensity soaring by the second. Visuals begin to present as a slight wobbling of my visual field.

I feel like everything is beginning to dissolve a little, my world turning to iridescent vapor around its edges. I feel uprooted, my form at the mercy of technicolor waves and ripples. The text on my screen begins to breathe and wobble and twist like I am reading it through the surface of undulating waves. The white space on my screen is a colorful visual snow, an impenetrable collage of formless noise with no distinct patterns. Little streams of dark forms trail off into my periphery.

Visuals are picking up- everything is watery and swirling, still no discernible patterns or rhyme or reason just constant motion. The distortion radiates from focal points and replicates itself outwards. Interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be much intense cognitive distortion as the visuals build, it’s lucid eye candy with a standard stimulating body load for now.

I smoke a bowl of weed to take the edge off of the body load.

Textures begin to look deeper, in higher relief and contrast than normal. The visuals continue to build by the second, at first they were simply accessories to the experience but now they have become unavoidable, tearing through my normal visual field with swirls, radiating outwards in all variety of rainbow colors. There is a distinct sense of continuing acceleration as my mind begins to trail off deeper into the hyper-analytical hyper-sensitive state of psychedelia. My thoughts begin to flow freely into one another with the energy of an iridescent avalanche, its fringes trailing off into gaseous fractals. I gaze at my ceiling, where great harmonic forms bind and twist into each other, flowing with stripes and ripples and constantly reforming at a consistent calculated pace.

I find myself intimately retracing pleasant memories. I fall deep into introspective holes, adorned with pillars of flowing color around their fringes like a grand temple to my memories. It is all so bright, it is all so pleasant.

It is the second day of protests in Minneapolis following the murder of George Floyd. I want to follow the events of what is turning into a major uprising after the first round of riots last night. I want to witness history in real time. I tune into a livestream where protesters have surrounded the 3rd Police Precinct during the daytime. Police and the crowd steadily grow more and more aggressive. Things are building and raging and burning, both there, halfway across the country, and in my glimmering burning tangle of thoughts and memories. I can do nothing but watch, glued to the screen with grim fixation.

I try to close my eyes and lay down and relax for a bit and really sink into the experience. The visuals with my eyes closed are fields of interlocking fractals, bound by rigid geometric frames. The fractals drift and flow like a river, constantly splashing into their partitions. They are mostly grayscale with a few bright primary colored beacons placed at regular intervals, casting colorful light upon them.

With my eyes open, I could only describe the visuals as potent and energetic, bright and prominent. I’ve noticed lately that I rarely get intense visuals from psychedelics anymore, but within this experience they are vivid and apparent. Waves of nausea bubble up occasionally but it is for the most part manageable, moreso than other lysergamides in my experience.

I am tracking events now via a police scanner, an aerial live stream, and a livestream on the ground. The people have now raided a nearby Target and are expropriating goods en masse. The police on the scanner sound increasingly distressed as they are assailed by the furious crowd, raining projectiles on them. The people have now gained the initiative in this battle, the police are now defending what they can on their back foot. It is exhilarating to witness history in real time from a bunch of different perspectives. I revel in my ability to do this. My headspace is lucid and coherent, I can process thoughts clearly and rapidly without getting bogged down in loops or holes. I feel like I am cooking in the energy of it all, in the energy of an uprising building into the summer, of the crackling electricity through my nerves, arcing as incandescent visuals that sizzle every surface my eyes lay upon.

The character of the visuals has shifted now, something I’ve noticed by gazing endlessly into the plaster on my ceiling- where before it was swirls, distortions, flowing stripes of concentric colorful textures, it has now taken on a different more vivid character.

The forms are intricate and lively, like peering into the undergrowth of a forest- a million overlapping and blossoming foliate and floral patterns with fractal sutures at their edges, overlapping over each other like shingles, the living breathing scales and feathers of an impossibly ornate dragon pulsing with polychrome. Its wings and body ripple above me, blended seamlessly into the textures of my ceiling, perpetually self-transforming into yet more intricate and ornate designs. I could gaze into all the infinite details and iterations forever, it’s so lovely and lively like a grand ecosystem moving and breathing and crawling with sputters of life.

I feel so warm and sweaty, it’s like I’m in a crystalline jungle or a coral reef where fractalized self-perpetuating organisms nudge their way into my existence, tickling me with their glimmering extremities, all of it fringed by lace, with deep colorful reliefs at their core providing a bold contrast. Such aesthetic, beautiful, and well-composed designs.

I am ravenously taking in information, reading firsthand account after firsthand account about what’s happening on the ground in Minneapolis, watching it happen live, all the various methods of input are glistening ornate ribbons streaming into my head to be processed by this this gaudy ostentatious gilded psychedelic machine that chews them up and turns them into iridescent jets of rippling crackling energy that surges through my neurons. I am taking in so much and processing so much I feel like a computer processing more than it should, glowing with the prismatic heat it generates.

The rebellion spreads, people are pouring out of the neighborhood to join the jubilant destructive throngs in the streets. The livestreamer I am watching now is interviewing people, who seem to be collectively in awe of the power they have claimed. Highlight videos of the day’s events have begun to pop up on social media, becoming memes and viral points of humor. Despite the tragedy at the heart of this uprising the people seem joyous in their rage. The first building of the night has gone up in flames, soon to be followed by many more. The fires on the computer screen flare with rainbow colors. All I can do is watch and smile dumbfounded, the burning overclocking machine of before has slowed down a bit and I feel like I am taking in and processing information at a more normal rate.

The visuals continue to be vivid- now they weave and intertwine with each other and blossom into ornate florets reminiscent of meso-American stone reliefs, adorning every mottled and rough surface. They are apparent and prominent, though they don’t aggressively seize my attention, rather if I give them a second to blossom they will happily do so. I’m getting tired of being cooped up in my room and I should take a break from watching riot live streams. I go out for a walk.

Outside is nice, it is balmy and humid. The streets are still quiet due to the coronavirus lockdown. Nevertheless, being in a different environment lets me notice auditory effects a bit more, just the standard echoing and reverberating that accompanies any psychedelic. It sounds like every sound I hear is running off into the distance, leaving doppler tracers in their wake. Visuals chase me and trace around me as I walk, and per usual catch up with me when I stop moving, pulsing and breathing as they seep in. I encounter few other people, but I avoid them, I feel awkward and ungainly. Despite changing my surroundings my thoughts are obsessively fixated on the tension that seems to have finally broken in this country, on how unrest has begun to spring up in other cities on just the second night, on the ripples that will be felt across the nation, of how this city I’m in now and the empty streets I was walking now could very well soon be the scene of a similar uprising (and indeed, just a few days later, it was). Despite my fixations I still feel fairly lucid and coherent. There is still a stimulating buzz in my body, giving an extra little spring behind every step.

I feel like I’ve opened the drain while taking a bath, the experience sinks down around me, it’s all sinking and sinking and leaving me cold and exposed in the tub. The visuals are noticeably not apparent anymore. My mental state has become a fiery lucid mania. My limbs are tense but in a way that they feel more functional and controlled than normal.

I’m starting to get a headache. My shoulders and neck feel so tense, they always do but it feels moreso than normal now. I decide to play some Super Smash Bros. Melee while I turn the livestream back on. I grind out some tech, practicing wavedashing and such, it’s pretty much exploitation of glitches in the game that require extremely precise button inputs. I’m just okay at it for now, but in this state, with my heightened tension and muscle control, I feel like I can do it a little better than normal. The person streaming is walking around the ruins of the target now, interviewing people who offer opinions on what’s going on, why they’re there, why they see this destruction as justified. The people are remarkably unified and coherent in their messaging. They flash weapons at the camera. The sound of celebratory gunfire and fireworks and music dominates the background.

I smoke some more weed. The visuals are still apparent on some mottled surfaces if I stop and focus. They are also notably quite apparent on my hands, with what looks like intricate rainbow tattoos of woven braided forms streaked across them, these visuals now are static but clearly defined. I catch tinges of colors in my skin that certainly aren’t actually there. The nausea has for the most part subsided and the added cannabis makes me hungrier. I heat up some food.

I tune back into the stream to see an absolutely awe inspiring scene- an under construction condominium has gone up in flames, it is fully consumed by fire, a 6 story building engulfed in soaring pillars of flame, the fire is immense and furious, it is the largest building fire I have ever witnessed. The people on the street must retreat from it because the heat output is so great, the sound of it crackling and roaring overwhelms everything as it belches illuminated smoke into the sky. It must be visible for miles around, it is a towering flaming beacon calling to everyone across the country to rise up against police repression. And indeed, in the following week, uprisings, riots, protests, and mass unrest flared up in almost every single city in America, in every single state. My jaw is agape at the size and power of this fire, of how it illuminates everything, of the sheer destructive force as the building begins to collapse, of how the unrest of just a few has produced an object of such incredible force and such undeniable power. I almost want to cry tears of joy at witnessing such raw power. I am definitely sensitized right now.

I hop on a discord channel and have a voice chat with some internet friends. My voice sounds less awkward now, less like an echo into the void, and though my thoughts feel very coherent I am having trouble stringing them into outwardly projected words. This may just be because I have had very little human interaction for some time now. I feel self-assured and confident.

I am still very awake. Visuals have entirely died down, as has much of the stimulation. Events on the ground have died down as well as the night wears on and people disperse on their own. The police on the ground have barricaded themselves inside their precinct, which would fall to the people the following night.

I have been discussing events with others on a different politically oriented discord channel while smoking weed, purely through text this time. Despite the fact that these people are mostly strangers I feel confident and authoritative in how I talk. I am more eloquent and articulate than normal, typical of a psychedelic comedown, even though it is so long after the peak.

I finally call it a night and go to sleep. It takes me a bit to get there, but it comes eventually. I am giddy but anxious.