I’m the first to arrive. I wait in the old familiar house with him and roll joints while I wait for people to show up. When 3 out of the 4 others are there, I pop my capsule. My friend does likewise, and the host takes his tab of acid.

We’re playing in the pool. I begin to feel the onset of the drug, a lightness in my head and a slight nausea. Colors begin to look brighter. I am intermittently playing in the pool and going around the garden collecting insects for my collection. The sun is beating down and bathing everything in resplendent light. We light up some joints.

The last person arrives. They biked all the way here quite a bit of a distance, and they are playing music through a portable speaker on their bike which carries a nice atmosphere with them. I give them their 2C-B and they join us in the pool.

I begin to peak now. It is like a great gloved hand that was gently massaging me has now embraced me, swallowed me in its prismatic iridescent fingers. I feel like I have been hit with a great wave that carries me into a great vibrating sea. The pool is a spectacular place, with the ripples of the water dancing and swirling and twitching to colorful pieces like stained glass fern fronds. We smoke some more and put on some wonderful music. The feeling of water running over my body is spectacular. I am the first person to begin peaking, the others are still on their comeup, so we are not sharing the same level of wonderment yet. I am very lucid and can easily and clearly make conversation, but I am also awash in a powerful synthetic euphoria with visuals that ripple through the world around me.

The others begin to join me on the peak. Everyone is so giggly and jovial, we are telling stories and joking under the brilliant glow of the sun and the sky. The clouds look like the surface off flowing water and the surface of the water is reflecting the resplendent light like the fire of a million glistening diamonds. I find my body under immaculate control that I could not have imagined before. In catching insects, I find my fine motor skills are very much superior, being able to easily pluck insects off of flowers with my forceps before they are able to fly away. This is despite my visual field being interrupted by the strong visuals that cause plants and variegated textures to mirror themselves and flash with green and magenta auras. In swimming, I feel graceful like a fish or dolphin. This one may have just been perception, I probably looked clumsy as hell but I sure felt graceful and elegant. I am so perfectly lucid too. This drug feels not like an experiment or alteration, but an enhancement, it’s travelling down a well-travelled path, it’s a well-practiced routine that I am bathing in the benefits of. It’s pure unbridled joy and revelry and beauty, all chemically enhanced to my very liking and specification. I flip around underwater and close my eyes, feeling weightless in suspended in a wonderful fractal bliss. There are very few closed eye visuals- they mostly present with my eyes open. Wearing goggles, or opening my eyes underwater, I am greeted with the familiar visual patterning of 2C-B, lines, striations, stripes, floral and foliate designs in calming pulsing colors.

I was trying to catch a bumblebee with my bare hands and stung myself on its stinger. Bumblebees will rarely consciously sting, rather I mishandled it and pricked my finger on its stinger, probably against its intent. Normally this would be a cause for alarm, but in my state I don’t mind at all, even when my hand swells up substantially. I continue swimming like nothing happened, although there is some itchiness and achiness to it the rest of the night. We are all joking and laughing and giggling so much at this point that it hurts. Who knows if any of this was truly funny or if we simply found giggliness and humor in our altered states? But it was extremely fun regardless and everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves and having a great trip. The nice suburban neighbors periodically stop in and out of their house doing errands and yardwork etc. We make a concerted effort to assure the odor of burning kush doesn’t creep too close to them. It’s weird to think about them going about their daily lives while next door we’re plunging into the depths of our perception. I don’t mean that in some pretentious superiority complex “suburban sheeple not doing psychedelics” way, it was honestly truly strange to think about, an alien thought to mill about in my mind like a wad of clay.

We get out of the pool and hang out on the patio, drying off. In a new dry environment I feel like the trip is sinking in even harder than before. I close my eyes and fall into a trance, there aren’t marked closed eye visuals but the headspace is like sinking into a deep well. I am entirely entranced and consumed by thought that splashes me like treading water at the surface of a choppy sea. The grass of the backyard spreads out before me like an undulating ocean. We turn our attention to the spectacular golden hour hearkened by the sun as it creeps down the sky. The trees are bathed in golden light like gilded snowcaps, a large cluster of spiderwebs in the treetops catching the light at just the right angle and glistening like a tangle of golden chains. The branches and leaves of the trees are mirroring and fractalizing themselves like snowflakes or blossoming fern fronds. I draw and find myself drawing the usual psychedelic fare, this time the theme is sea creatures. I don’t seem to have the sense of aesthetics and composition granted by LSD. The drawing ends up sloppy and ill composed and I never finish it.

Our next object of attention is the clouds- they are truly strange looking today. Rows and rows of cirrostratus clouds like ocean waves crawl across the sky, they are beautifully structured in a seemingly very organized manner, resembling great spinal columns or herringbones. In the state that I’m in, they look extremely 3-dimensional, and not nearly as ethereal as a cloud should. It is like twisted ivory and driftwood sits looming above us, the deep blue dusk sky as a backdrop, its vastness and distance so impossible to comprehend that my mind simply perceives it as a near and flat screen. I play the album ‘Since I Left You’ by the Avalanches, which creates such a wonderful beautiful atmosphere (for me at least. Maybe it was selfish for me to put on an entire album that only I knew about…) The heavily layered songs get picked apart in my sinking and pulsing thoughts like a grand jovial jigsaw puzzle. We smoke some weed and order a pizza. The process of ordering it is an absurdly complex ordeal in our state but we manage eventually. I find my appetite is not as compromised as it usually is on psychedelics. After this we return to the water.

We sit in silence and gaze at the color of the sky as the sun creeps below the horizon. Just silence was we gaze at the swirling and breathing and blossoming clouds. The sky is unfolding itself before us and its wispy edges slither off into the abyss of the night sky. After a while we get cold, it seems like we all want to get out but are all waiting for one person to suggest it. Eventually one of us does and we all get out and dry off and get changed.

The next activity to occupy us is a game of exquisite corpse (party game where each person draws a section of a creature without looking at the others). I notice my drawing is much less psychedelic than it was before- fewer repeating patterns of fractal abstractions. When the game is over I have to catch a train home.

Walking to the train station is a blast. Warm comfortable suburbia is a living breathing entity around me, exhaling streams of iridescent color that disperses through my field of vision. I am listening to music and grateful for the fact that no one is around me as I can sing to myself completely tone deaf and off-key with reckless abandon. I arrive at the train station and satisfy myself with staring intently at textured surfaces. The visuals are dying down but still remain enough for me to revel in their presence. Forms like eyes wreathed in feathers bubble up out of the concrete and on the stucco walls. The train ride home is pleasant and it is nice to return to another place of familiarity.

Get home. Smoke weed. Play videogames for a while. All the usual comforts, what a pleasant way to come down!

Back to baseline. Go to bed.