T2:00
I am sitting in my friend’s car. The peak is battering me with glorious crystalline light. I feel the full force of a trillion photons streaming into my face, of my nerves sensing the light, the warmth that they impart, and passing that message through the rest of my body. I am a great glowing colossus of flesh with constant internal motion, highways and subways and hyperspeed rails tracing efficient paths through me to ensure function, all glowing, all sizzling with energy. I feel like my organ systems have been separated into discrete sensations and I am loving every second of it. The sunlight splatters on the windshield and diffracts into a spectrum of brilliant colors that splash and splinter onto everything around me before slinking away into whatever shadows they can find. I am under a stained glass cascade that dyes the world around me into something more vibrant and beautiful than I could ever imagine. The trees are a lovely magenta hue, the crevasses of their bark guarded by bulwarks of brusque deep turquoise. Aside from all the color shifts the visuals are still fairly subdued, not much geometry to speak of just vibrant color shifts.My friend comes to retrieve me. This dog is like a loaf of bread, she is very polite and I get a sense that this walk is her giving me a tour of her route. I am grateful for her guidance. The trees shift and swirl around me, with the same subtlety one would observe a line of ants traversing their surface. Every passerby is alien, vaguely threatening but not worth my anxiety.
T2:30
We are done with dogs for the day. We drive around for a bit before arriving at a dam on the river, an overgrown concrete monolith that languishes in the sun and the trash in the water that gushes through it. Being the passenger in a vehicle is exhilarating, I myself feel like a dog, wanting to take in every sight and sense and sound that pass us by. I want to stick my head out the window and take in all of this information that is passing me by so quickly- I don’t fret at not being able to take it all in though, I just revel the power of this furious high speed cascade of sensory information. I find solace in thinking about how much of this world there was, so many little details and cracks and crevasses, plants growing on sidewalks and paint splatters and stains on buildings and leaves on trees and all the little things in the windows of people’s houses, and how it’s okay that I don’t know about them right now, they would always be there for me to explore.
The world streams around me gently as we disembark from the car and make our way down to the dam. Conversation flows and chatter bounces around like little birds. Visuals are subdued and mostly come in as color shifts and barely discernible drifts in texture. The power of the sun stains the sky with a geodesic stratosphere. I am cooking in the vibrating, bubbling tension of the world. We trudge through mud and clamber around collapsing structures encrusted with a dense ecosystem of graffiti, pulsing vibrant epiphytes on the crumbling stone
T3:00
We climb down to the base of the dam where there is a little beach being blasted by the glory of the sun. The light is so bright and intense that I feel like I should be able to hear it, the sound of vibrating glass lasers through the sky. We engage with our environment physically (of note- my friend has been sober this entire time), skipping stones, throwing rocks into the water, swinging sticks around. We smash things and break things and collide things with one another. Its visceral and juvenile and feels so good to exert myself with no purpose. Nothing is a waste so long as my body is in motion. I smoke some cannabis from my one hitter as I romp around, laughing and joking with my dear friend. The visuals have settled into the background as a subtle bas-relief, manifesting as iridescent sheens and flashes on all the dazzling plays of light around me. Everything looks stark, monolithic aesthetic contrast, the sharp blasted gray of the dam plastered onto the dense azure jelly of the sky, with quivering bubbling breathing writhing tree branches cooking their way into its margins, the color of acorns and cold chocolate. Every element of the visual field just wants to strut and yell.
T3:30
Another good and old friend has joined us, descending from the top of dam. He asks if I’m making a fire. I wasn’t planning on it but I do pride myself on my ability to make and tend to a fire. I am so hyped up now, I have a mission, I quickly and manically hew out a pit for a fire, gather tinder, kindling, and wood, and get a nice campfire going in a few minutes (even though it wasn’t even cold outside). I make a fan from a plastic bag stretched across a Y-shaped branch that lets me fan the flames to build them nice and hot. It feels nice to do something with competence, it feels so nice to accomplish a goal. I fee like I am baking in my sense of accomplishment, along with baking in the fire and sun. I feel good about myself, I feel good about being a being running around in the sun right now making the most of a beautiful day. Like the luckiest critter on earth, like a bear in a lake of honey. My friend offers me his cannabis oil vaporizer which I repeatedly hit. Each hit feels like blowing onto a fire, the visuals flare for a bit and gently trace their way out of my vision. The smoke from the fire is noticeably iridescent, an aethereal fairy mist over the trash and rubble strewn around the bank.
We decide to head back home to meet with another good friend. I wrestle with my first friend, it was extremely fun to physically exert myself on a warm day. It felt like being a teenager and skipping school, nostalgic euphoria washed over me.
We drive back through an extremely tight and hilly and fast part of the city, it is an intense experience (especially because I had gotten in a car accident myself a few days before), rife with visible tension between the forces at work. Everything zips by as the sun crawls lower into the sky. I get a call from a mental health treatment program asking if I would like to participate in a study. I am able to hold a coherent and effective and articulate conversation with a complete stranger through a phone. In general I have felt very lucid throughout this entire experience.
T5:30
After some shuffling around we end up back at my house. First there is just me and another friend, we hang out and play with my cats for a while. Interacting with dear pets while tripping is a lovely experience, and it feels like they are even more affectionate. Time passes, there are four of us now, some of my oldest and closest friends, we are playing videogames and hanging out smoking a lot of weed. I am certainly coming down, the visuals are all but a memory at this point. Upon smoking copious weed however, the trip climbs back out of its hole. Odd physical dissociative sensations give a warm solidity to my skull and scramble some proprioception. Visuals timidly flash as a newfound glittering energy rises through me. This wears off after about an hour. Sometimes with psychedelics, the comedown has me feeling more articulate and capable and confident than I am when sober. Other times (perhaps with excess cannabis consumption), I feel blank, dumb, locked into whatever sensory blips I can still discern. I definitely feel this way now, mostly at a loss for words, only able to focus on the very neutral feeling of something baking in my skull, radiating gentle fading colors. Time passes into stoniness.
T8:00
One friend leaves, the rest of us go to the grocery store to get snacks. I felt like I was mostly down but being thrown into a whole new environment seems to kick things up again, though just a little bit. The grocery store is colorful and overwhelming and disorienting and it feels like the store is flowing and moving around me. The walk home is jovial and I find myself more and more sociable. We get back to my house and watch Nacho Libre, which is a very odd movie. After watching the first episode of the Dark Crystal, my friends leave, I am alone.
