Midnight Pub
Extemporeality 1
~thebogboys
#EXTEMPOREALITY 1
##or, "The Eternal Now"
###or, "How I learned to stop my amygdala and enjoy the ride"
My best friend invited me to come out to his uncle's lake house, about an hour east of my place, on a Thursday night, and since I wasn't expecting to work the next day, I spent the night. He and I had some plans, so I immediately prepared myself for a kind of crazy evening. I talk about him a lot in my stories, so I should give him a name. His club nickname is Constable, so I'll refer to him as that.
When I got there, he was just getting back to shore on his kayak, he was happy to see me. We had both been spending time out on that lake, exploring the western shore that had a very healthy and vibrant bog growing on it. Some of the most remarkable specimens I've ever seen of carnivorous plants, orchids, Ferns and all sorts of other plants were there, and we were attempting to document everything we could find. One of our plans that evening was to go back out there and see if we could step out onto the bog itself. This didn't end up happening until a later trip, but we made it a worthwhile stay anyway.
After I was settled in, Constable pulled a tiny baggie out which contained what looked to be little pieces of plastic. I had never seen LSD in person before this, so it was pretty fascinating to be able to finally look upon it and wonder what it would do to me. I took it around 5:30 PM. We went out kayaking for a couple of hours, came back to the house, and at least 90 minutes passed before I remarked on the fact that the tab didn't seem to be having any kind of effect on me. "Sometimes people are insensitive to acid, or it takes a really long time to take effect," he told me. He was aware of my mind, the way I think and process the world. I've told him before that I feel like I'm "naturally high" a lot of the time, not in a physiological way but in the sense that I am always "overfocused" on the physical world: I can't help but be mesmerized by trees dancing in the wind, or the way a person walks, or the chromatics of an oil slick. Visual spectacles are not merely seen by me, but their existence makes an impression on my psyche. It's like I am presented with a duality where something can seem far beyond me and also within arm's reach at the same time.
I guess I figured that the LSD would transform and expand this mental state. A few months prior, Constable and I camped out for a few days at a national forest in Michigan, and it was there that I tried my first psychedelic: "penis envy" magic mushrooms. My first sense was of iritability, but that eventually faded and I got very nauseous, almost to the point of vomiting. It was not fun learning that intermittent nausea is a common side effect of consuming mushrooms. The high feeling that came from the shrooms was not something that I could feel "coming on", but a pinpoint moment of realization, like I had just jumped into a pool. I sat on the edge of a hill overlooking a wetland, and when I gazed across the water to the opposing treeline, it was like the trees were 200 feet closer than they should have looked. Greens were more intense, movement was more pronounced. It was the most beautiful and serene thing I had ever seen.
LSD did not do this for me, nor did it seemingly have ANY kind of psychotropic effect, disappointingly. Perhaps I just needed a larger dose, which he was not able to supply at the time. I decided, after getting a fantastic dinner at a local sports bar that looked strikingly like a seedy strip bar from the outside, to take a THC edible for the first time in around three years. I've smoked weed enough times to know that I am a lightweight, and often I won't smoke more than even a third of a joint before I am thoroughly high, afterwhich I will generally not imbibe for months. If I INGEST THC, however, my psychology gets absolutely ruined. I've never heard of anyone having a reaction to an edible as I have.
Part 2
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evan@thebogboys.space
inquiry
We're just back from a long-ish weekend visit to south west Michigan: a mix of good and challenging times.
I had acid once, mushrooms once. I don't remember any of the former. Can't even remember when in my life it happened. But the mushrooms experience created lasting memories. I can still picture sitting on part of a downed tree at the base of a dusty, eroded hill that went up into an apple orchard, in a part of "upstate New York" just west of the Hudson River.
I remember weeping over finally understanding how much my dad influenced me, and how so much of it was on ongoing sense of having never lived up to his hopes/expectations, and how that fed a sort of doubting of my "gut feelings" when attempting to make decisions, which of course puts one on shakier ground relative to those who can quickly plot, plan, and execute.
Anyway, I think probably milked more from that than was actually there courtesy of the psilocybin, because 30+ years later, I'm vastly more of the opinion that I'd have been nothing without lots of things my dad instilled in me.
I was one of the lucky ones who didn't become nauseous from them - but I do remember how horrific the mushroom tasted, because I tend to be too curious to, say, take someone else's word for that thereby attempt to swallow something in a rush to get it paste taste buds.
thebogboys
It's pretty amazing how people are affected differently by the same compounds. I had had a lot of interest in 'psychonauting' even as a teen, and the experience was much different than I expected it to be. It was a pretty cathartic experience, really building my appreciation for humanity and the life I have. It would be good to know what an experience as that would be like if I took a lot more.