Apologies for the lack of posts in January, I was sick all month. Feeling better now.
SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA
MANY YEARS AGO
We hiked up the hill at the end of the street, the hill looming over one of the Facebook offices. It was a sharp incline and at the top you could see the entire bay area — the San Francisco skyline, the hills on the east bay, and the many bridges that connected the two regions. We decided to take the mushrooms there. Nolan gave the five of us clear sandwich bags full of stems and capsules. We washed them down with Sunny D that we had bought at the grocery store because someone had read somewhere that it would make the trip stronger. They didn’t taste good or bad but more like nothing at all.
None of us had done mushrooms or psychedelics in general before except for Nolan. He had tried shroomsfor the first time a couple weeks prior and said it was incredible, that it would rock our worlds. I had almost done them earlier that summer up on the lake but Sarah had prevented her friend from bringing the mushrooms, said it would be too much. I was curious and interested but didn’t know what to expect. This would be the first time I ever did drugs.
After standing around for a while we left the hill and walked over to a nearby elementary school. It was the late afternoon and the gates were locked so we hopped the fence. There was a massive open field and we lied down in it waiting for the trip to lift off. I was staring at the clear blue sky when my legs started to tingle and soon enough I could feel something flowing throughout my body, coursing through every vein and nerve and muscle. It made me feel funny. As this was happening I saw the face of a clown in the sky. He had white makeup and a big red nose and his mouth was open wide and I start giggling until he disappears.
At this point the shrooms trip has started for real for all of us. We get all get up and start walking around. The grassy field feels much longer than it did thirty minutes ago. Like an infinite blank canvas that can be filled with whatever is lying deep in the depths of our psyches. On the edges of the field I see a large hedge and when I walk towards it the sky turns red and I see a million hards emerge from the bush flicking towards me to go away from here and go back to my friends. I run back to the group and the sky turns blue again and when I look back at the bush the hands have retreated from where they came.
I take out my phone and start tweeting gibberish. Someone asks if I’m okay and I just reply back to them shroooooms. Tomu sees me on my phone and takes it from me and tweets from my account that I’m tripping balls but that I’ll be fine.
**
Eventually the sun sets. I don’t remember it setting but I remember the night sky. I remember staring up at the sky and seeing all the stars and satellites and planes and planets and starships. I remember feeling like a speck of dust staring up into this infinite horizon that felt so full. I was entranced by it. I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to get closer to it and touch it and experience it and feel it for myself.
“THERE ARE INFINITE POSSIBILITIES!” I yell out to no one in particular.
I stared up at the stars for a long time. When I looked back down at the field it was empty.
**
My name wasn’t Michael anymore. It was John. If you had asked me I wouldn’t have known who Michael was and I would have told you my name was John.
Not that I would have said anything you could understand. I had made up my own language, you see. I had realized that everyone was reading my thoughts and I decided that the only way to stop them from doing that was to make up a new language. It was a series of grunts and consonants that, when I yelled them out, sounded like complete gibberish. Only I knew what everything meant.
There were four shadowy figures watching me from the edges of the field. I couldn’t tell what they looked like in the darkness. I didn’t know who they were. I didn’t know what they wanted. Something nefarious, probably. They were hunting me and monitoring me and I tried to get away from them but no matter what I did I couldn’t escape them.
For what felt like an eternity it was just John wandering and stumbling around in the infinite darkness, muttering to himself in a hybrid of English and his own language. I wasn’t there anymore. I was gone. My ego had not only died but had been fully reborn. A samsara moment on this field in an elementary school.
John felt trapped on the field but knew he couldn’t leave it. Outside of the field was an even bleaker, darker void that would destroy him if he ventured into it. It was the most terrifying thing he could think of. The field didn’t feel safe exactly, what with the shadowy figures watching him and all, but it was better than whatever was out beyond it.
**
Nolan tires to corral John back to the group and, after a couple failed attempts, is successful. He gets John off the grassy field and to a picnic bench where he and the shadowy figures are hanging out at. One of them is eating a bag of popcorn and staring at John with an annoyed look on their face.
John is freaked out by the figures, who he views as demons. He keeps yelling “YOU’RE NOT ALEXANDER!” at them, as if John even knows who that is.
After a while of John’s freakout, he doesn’t calm down so much as run out of energy. The demons decide that they should leave the picnic bench and go somewhere else, and they grab John along with them.
As John is walking with them he steps on a tree branch. This triggers something in him. He starts feeling like his body is melting and the blood in his body is collapsing from his head down to his legs.
In this moment John suddenly dies.
“UHHHHhhhhhhhh,” I moan.
“UhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHHHHH”
“GuuuUUUUUHHHHHHHHHHH”
John is dead and Michael is alive again. I am reborn.
**
My brain feels like it’s been scattered to a million pieces. I try to piece together what happened but it’s very hard to do so. I feel horrible. I want to curl into a ball.
After walking for what felt like an eternity we walk over to an open playground in the neighborhood. Dan blasts Dr. Dre and Sublime off his phone speakers but I don’t want to hear any music right now.
I go to the highest point on the playground structure and stare back at the sky for a while, alone. I look for the stars and planes and ships I saw earlier but the sky is empty with an infinite darkness.
Eventually we make it back to Tomu’s house. I fall asleep as they play God of War III. I wake up early and walk back home. My parents ask me how I’m doing and when I tell them I’m fine I am lying to them. I get ready for Monica’s wedding and I remember my body being at the ceremony and the afterparty but my mind lost within itself.
**
Nolan tells me a couple weeks later that I had a psychotic break based on some websites he read. I read them for myself and symptoms sound pretty accurate to what I remember experiencing. There’s bad trips and then there’s trips from hell and it appears I had the latter.
I had voices in my head for years after the trip. The main one was a low, deep growling voice that kept telling me I was weak and pathetic and a loser and that I should kill myself. It would plant stories in my head and tell me how I was undeserving of love and affection. I didn’t tell anyone about the voices — not my friends, not my family, and definitely not the asshole therapist who my parents foisted on me after they caught me smoking pot in the garage on the night The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim came out.
I would smoke plenty of pot and snort crushed amphetamine salts throughout high school but psychedelics were the one drug I would never touch, even as the rest of my friends did more shroom trips and graduated to LSD. I knew I couldn’t experience what I experienced out on that field ever again, that it would probably destroy me for good. That John would re-emerge and never leave.
I wouldn’t touch psychedelics again for 8 years, when I dropped acid on a rooftop in Santa Monica, where I won $30 in poker as the floor beneath the table was melting. On that trip I remember looking out to the Los Angeles skyline and seeing all the streetlights and cars and people and feeling a warm glow from everything. That I wanted to be a part of it and feel it and experience it all for myself. The infinite sky I had seen so many years ago on that field had been brought down to earth. It didn’t feel so far away now. I could touch it for myself if I wanted to. And I did.
**
BROOKLYN
MANY YEARS LATER
I’m at St. Vitus chilling with Nolan and Spencer while we’re waiting for Danny’s band to go on stage. Nolan and I start talking about the people we know who’ve fried their brain from too much acid and declare that we’re both past our psychedelic eras. We’ve done enough and see too much.
I mention the first shrooms trip from all those years back on the field. I say that it was really bad but that I can’t remember all of the finer details anymore.
“Oh man, I remember that clearly.” Nolan says. “It was nuts.”
He tells me about moments that I don’t remember, like how I tried to call my parents at one point until he snatched my phone out of my hand. He goes over details of that night to Spencer, including how I made my own language and personality.
“You guys are insane,” Spencer says while giggling. “I can’t believe you guys did that.”
We all laugh and start talking about something else. Danny’s band starts to do a mic check and we leave the bar area and walk closer to the stage. He puts on a good set.
**
I can’t remember when the voices left my head. It was some point in college, maybe. They’ve been gone for a very long time. I never took any medication for them or really wanted to see a therapist about it, even when the counselor wrote up that I had “severe mental issues” in the IEP assessment I had a couple months after the trip.
As anyone who’s met me since I moved to New York knows I’ve done a bunch of acid and shrooms and 2cb since I’ve moved here, sometimes all at once. I haven’t done either of them in a couple of months, thankfully. I feel like I’ve gotten all I can get out of them.
Sometimes I wonder if my younger years would have been different if I had never gone out to the field that night and see the infinite horizon and turned into John. But after a while I stopped mourning over lost futures and unrealized past lives. There’s no real point. It’s nights like those that turned me into the person I am now, for better or worse.