A Southern Sojourn
“Jesus Christ! It’s 3:00am, and we’re carrying a bong up the street!” This is one of those realizations you have while on acid. It takes you by surprise when you’re hit by its absurdity. Seriously, we are carrying a bright green bong in a neighborhood with roaming security, and three of us are walking up a well-lit street. And I’m not sure why it becomes the funniest thing in the world considering we could get busted, arrested and will have to wake up my Dad in the middle of the night. But this situation has become a focal point for hilarity; it’s kind of a mantra we come back to about every 17 seconds.

This has been a really good acid trip.
My last one was devastating.

First Bad Trip. I was in Santa Cruz visiting my sister at Porter College in UCSC. We were about to do load of LSD, and I, only 15 years old and psychedelically arrogant, thought I had the Universe figured out. I had had a Revelatory Trip a few months prior and had read a few books on Eastern religion. Sure enough, by taking another large dose of the chemical which unhinges your normal state of daily conceptions, and by clinging solidly to my new life-conclusions-at-a-drugged-out-15-years-old, I proceeded to have an absolutely Universe-destroying trip.

On my way to hell. The first few hours weren’t bad at all. In fact, they were pleasant… to the point of boring. And when the initial sensations ended, I felt a mild letdown and kind of vague emptiness, which I shrugged off knowing that MY experiences on acid still surpassed the average acid-user’s experience. I had attained insight. I was more aware.

The sun went down, and we went to the cafeteria for dinner. Santa Cruz-ian students clattered trays and shared a communal moment. I disengaged and only noticed fat dreadlocked chicks in loose fitting black shirts and played-out hippy pastiche. As my critical eye cast its judgments, unbeknownst to me, a distant tempest slowly gathered force in the back of my subconscious. Boredom. I’d taken four double-dipped tabs that day and I was bored. It’s tough knowing more than everyone else.

The usual dining hall dinner noise started to shift into growing cacophony. Feelings of coldness and isolation ebbed and flowed in existential monotony. Then a new feeling: The fist pang of true disharmony.

It’s akin to one of those spine reaching shivers you can get when you’re peeing, but combined with a sense of indefinable panic. A growing moroseness that you know has only just begun. It wasn’t huge, but shocking in its acuteness. I tried to dismiss it, thinking, “Well, whatever. We’ll go back to Sarah’s room, and get some sleep.” A few more minutes passed and the world began an anxious waver.

I was ready to leave.
No, I’ll finish dinner.
I got up, sat down.
Indecision.
“I’ll wait this out, it’ll pass.”

The cafeteria lights started to take on a washed-out brown and dark yellow tinge. Everyone looked plastic. Deep internal surges were re-awakening and I could sense black tints in the corners of my brain (my brain lobes, I just realized, might be separating and might be bleeding internally). “Hey, can we go back to your room? I’m kind of tired.”

With each passing moment, despair and terror outlines traced the edges of my vision. The trip which had ended was coming back. Slowly, as if death itself was a string section, I could feel bows drawing slow pulls of discord through my body and mind. And my pride won’t let go: “I think I’m having a bad trip! I can’t believe this.”

Thought I had it under control, thought I knew what was “really going on” with the world (and all the subtle, esoteric parts of the mind introverts like to claim for their own), and here I am, self-assumed “knowledged one” having a bad trip. Hell had opened, and I hadn’t even left the DC yet.

It was a terrible trip. The kind you want people to take you to the hospital for because you’re worried you might be doing irreparable damage to your soul — knowing without doubt that the harrowing feeling would never end. However, if there is a pearl of wisdom in this editorial, it would be this: Even trauma can act as a medicine – one that brings into awareness your own foolishness; that allows you to realize the end game of your own mistaken behavioral patterns and choices.

But, to be sure, some medicines you don’t need more than once. Well, maybe twice.

Will Loving (Guitarist / Vocalist)
The Greening
December 2009

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