my first trip :3
After catching our breath and chugging endless amounts of water, we prepared ourselves for our extended period of natural recreation. My brave friends decided to just chew through the bitter taste of the mushrooms, while I opted for a peanut butter and mushroom sandwich (some would call me a pussy in this case. Don't be hatin', that shit smelt nasty). We washed down the psychoactive fungi with orange juice and lay in the grass, counting down the minutes until lift-off.
We shared a small joint during our wait. We're all chronic
marijuana-smokers, but the chronic helped to ease us into the shitstorm
that we were about to enter. I began feeling a bit buzzed, but nothing
spectacularly different from my usual post-toke state, about twenty
five minutes after consuming the shrooms. From that point on, however,
I gradually became more and more stoned. After ten minutes I was the
most stoned I had ever been off of any form of weed. Five minutes after
this…BOOM!
The landscape looked normal…peaceful, even. And at
the same time, I knew something wasn't right. Little areas of the grass
where we lay were ridden with large flat stones, surrounded by earth.
The first part of the scenery that began to breathe were the brown
blotches of dirt around the stone contraptions. We ran over to an
especially large stone and collapsed, laughing, staring, and reaching
out a hand to touch the warm living ground.
This was followed by the colors; I was seeing the greens of the trees and the grass in a
way I'd never seen them before. The small hills around us stretched out
and the field we were in seemed suddenly to be about eight times its
original size. The trees blew in an implausible manner, swaying slowly
yet heavily from side to side. The branches reached out and touched
each other briefly, yet constantly. All around us things were merging
into a perpetual entity.
Amazed and a little bit scared, we tore our eyes away from the view around us to that above. The sky was
doing the most incredible thing I'd ever seen; the clouds seemed to be
racing each other, fighting to be noticed as they each individually
transformed into things. Not only were the clouds dancing and tangling
amongst themselves, they also were at a constant transition through
blues and pinks.
This introduction shocked me. Although I couldn't
dwell on the way I felt for long because every thought that filled my
head was instantaneous, and constantly led to another thought. I felt
like I was in a beautiful scenic movie, where every frame made me want
to burst out into both a fit of laughter and rage. I spent a lot of my
time reckoning that all geniuses were able to grasp what I felt and
thought while I was on shrooms.
I'm not a very cultured person, and yet any form of good film or good literature suddenly hit
me like a wave. Palahniuk! Einstein! Tarantino! Atwood! They all got
it. They knew what they were fucking doing every damned step of the
way, and they were geniuses because they managed to do these things sober.
A friend-no, a brother, at that point-excitedly yanked
his headphones off of his head and shoved them onto my own. I was
drowned by the sounds of birds, chirping faster and faster in a
pattern. Pink Floyd crawled into my ears gradually, but once the
instruments started, they exploded into my body and my being. Circus
Minor was the soundtrack for this incredible setting. The hills around
us were breathing in a wave-like manner along to the music.
Everything around me was so overwhelmingly beautiful, and before I knew
what was happening, my face was wet with tears. My friend sat up and
looked at me. I pulled off the headphones and we both burst out
laughing at how ridiculous everything was. The first hour we spent just
laying there, silently tripping on our own until one of us would point
out how intense we were being, causing us to all collapse in laughter once again.
The same black bird I was watching so intently fly through the sky appeared in several places at once. Time and space made
no sense at that point. Lying there doing nothing was tiring in itself
because in our minds we were all role-playing. One friend considered
being a lawyer. I saw myself as a writer, a film-maker, and an artist.
I envisioned myself conveying how the mountain on which we lay was a
person herself through the means of art(artart).
All of us were beginning to get antsy because we were all thinking a lot but we
also wanted to run around and explore the forest.
I kicked off my shoes and spontaneously ran into the forest, but my friends weren't
far behind. I stopped and ran back to them only to grab the ipod and
headphones from my friend. This time when I put on the headphones, my
ears were being caressed with Radiohead.
We reached a spot where some skinny trees leaned onto each other to form an arch. We were
all drawn to the never-ending path which went through the more
troublesome obstacles ahead. I began skipping down the path, and in the
middle of a half-spin half-run I realized that as I span the trees
joined "hands" around me and danced along with me. I continued to spin,
caught up in the red of my cloak as it flew into the air and spun with
me, then stopped in front of a tree.
My friends had finally caught up to me and joined me in staring at the thin tree which stood
out amongst its ginormous ancestors. Her bark seemed to have many faces
in it, moving and breathing along with the rest of the forest. Every
one of the trees around us had his or her own character. You could
spend what seemed like forever trying to learn each of their names,
only to find yourself captivated by a piece of grass a moment later.
There were bugs in the forest and they seemed to be playing the same
trick on me as the black bird did. One bug flying around my head felt
like 5 bugs zooming in and out of focus in front of my eyes.
Once the insects began to get on our nerves and we felt restless once
again, we ran back to our clearing of grass. Exiting the forest was
like leaving one dimension and entering another. There had been so much
action happening in the forest that it seemed impossible that there was
still an existence around us. Though it was just a forest and a field
on a sunny day, there was so much more going on around us. The hills
were alive, and on the hills was grass that carries living insects and
it grew from warm brown dirt that had a whole bunch more stuff going on.
We had lost our voices somewhere amidst all of the beauty and the
action we were witnessing. But once we sat down again, a grin on each
of our faces, we felt we needed to share our thoughts.
All topics of conversation are a blur now, not that they would make any
sense in a sober context anyway, but all that mattered was the feeling
we put into our words. Feeling for me was a weight pressing down on my
chest, and this weight was created by pure happiness, anger, sadness,
and then happiness again.
Our thoughts were like wild-life; hyenas and zebras running free in chase. But it was as if the predator
and the prey had gotten confused about which role they were playing. As
a result, both animals would be hunting and running in a circle after
one another. Every time one would get close to tearing at the other
creature's throat they would halt and forget what they were doing.
And this thought process really wasn't very productive; every time we
would get close to explaining our thoughts we would veer into another
thought, another role. And once this pile of thoughts reached its peak,
we would all collapse in soothing laughter, pulling us out of our
vortex of thought. The evening turned into night as our trip dwindled into something more mild yet still completely out of whack. We
continued to talk about everything and nothing, taking long drags from
our cigarettes without even thinking about it.
As the darkness began to take over the lively sky, we decided to go on one last walk
through the worldly forest. We made a couple of friends on the way, one
of them was only beginning his own trip, we learned.
The wall that usually stands between a group of strangers was completely
annihilated. We were bound by what some would call existentialism and
others would call insanity. We climbed trees together, risking hurting
ourselves on the slippery way up a giant fallen tree. We experienced
fear together as we hallucinated evil shadows in the moonlit forest. We
laughed together at how incredibly frivolous the idea of fear was.
Alas, as we began to come back to reality a little bit more with every
passing and dimming moment, we realized we had to leave our little
world and return to our homes.
On our solemn journey down the
mountain, we stopped at the lookout, a point on the mountain where you
can see all of the city of Montreal. As breathtaking as the site was,
it did not encourage us into thinking that we were walking back to a
better place one bit.
We were looking down on the incredulous
city that man had built, plastered with billions of little lights. Each
light caused us to think of the hundreds of thousands of people going
about their lives. Someone was out there finishing up some work in his
office, someone out there was fucking someone else or themselves,
someone out there was happy, and someone was sad.
I did not want to leave the mountain. I wanted to stay on the mountain; grow out
my hair and never shave again, live off of anything the mountain would
provide me with, set my clothes aflame and dance around the fire pit,
be psychotic forever if it meant being happy with nothing.
We shared a small joint during our wait. We're all chronic
marijuana-smokers, but the chronic helped to ease us into the shitstorm
that we were about to enter. I began feeling a bit buzzed, but nothing
spectacularly different from my usual post-toke state, about twenty
five minutes after consuming the shrooms. From that point on, however,
I gradually became more and more stoned. After ten minutes I was the
most stoned I had ever been off of any form of weed. Five minutes after
this…BOOM!
The landscape looked normal…peaceful, even. And at
the same time, I knew something wasn't right. Little areas of the grass
where we lay were ridden with large flat stones, surrounded by earth.
The first part of the scenery that began to breathe were the brown
blotches of dirt around the stone contraptions. We ran over to an
especially large stone and collapsed, laughing, staring, and reaching
out a hand to touch the warm living ground.
This was followed by the colors; I was seeing the greens of the trees and the grass in a
way I'd never seen them before. The small hills around us stretched out
and the field we were in seemed suddenly to be about eight times its
original size. The trees blew in an implausible manner, swaying slowly
yet heavily from side to side. The branches reached out and touched
each other briefly, yet constantly. All around us things were merging
into a perpetual entity.
Amazed and a little bit scared, we tore our eyes away from the view around us to that above. The sky was
doing the most incredible thing I'd ever seen; the clouds seemed to be
racing each other, fighting to be noticed as they each individually
transformed into things. Not only were the clouds dancing and tangling
amongst themselves, they also were at a constant transition through
blues and pinks.
This introduction shocked me. Although I couldn't
dwell on the way I felt for long because every thought that filled my
head was instantaneous, and constantly led to another thought. I felt
like I was in a beautiful scenic movie, where every frame made me want
to burst out into both a fit of laughter and rage. I spent a lot of my
time reckoning that all geniuses were able to grasp what I felt and
thought while I was on shrooms.
I'm not a very cultured person, and yet any form of good film or good literature suddenly hit
me like a wave. Palahniuk! Einstein! Tarantino! Atwood! They all got
it. They knew what they were fucking doing every damned step of the
way, and they were geniuses because they managed to do these things sober.
A friend-no, a brother, at that point-excitedly yanked
his headphones off of his head and shoved them onto my own. I was
drowned by the sounds of birds, chirping faster and faster in a
pattern. Pink Floyd crawled into my ears gradually, but once the
instruments started, they exploded into my body and my being. Circus
Minor was the soundtrack for this incredible setting. The hills around
us were breathing in a wave-like manner along to the music.
Everything around me was so overwhelmingly beautiful, and before I knew
what was happening, my face was wet with tears. My friend sat up and
looked at me. I pulled off the headphones and we both burst out
laughing at how ridiculous everything was. The first hour we spent just
laying there, silently tripping on our own until one of us would point
out how intense we were being, causing us to all collapse in laughter once again.
The same black bird I was watching so intently fly through the sky appeared in several places at once. Time and space made
no sense at that point. Lying there doing nothing was tiring in itself
because in our minds we were all role-playing. One friend considered
being a lawyer. I saw myself as a writer, a film-maker, and an artist.
I envisioned myself conveying how the mountain on which we lay was a
person herself through the means of art(artart).
All of us were beginning to get antsy because we were all thinking a lot but we
also wanted to run around and explore the forest.
I kicked off my shoes and spontaneously ran into the forest, but my friends weren't
far behind. I stopped and ran back to them only to grab the ipod and
headphones from my friend. This time when I put on the headphones, my
ears were being caressed with Radiohead.
We reached a spot where some skinny trees leaned onto each other to form an arch. We were
all drawn to the never-ending path which went through the more
troublesome obstacles ahead. I began skipping down the path, and in the
middle of a half-spin half-run I realized that as I span the trees
joined "hands" around me and danced along with me. I continued to spin,
caught up in the red of my cloak as it flew into the air and spun with
me, then stopped in front of a tree.
My friends had finally caught up to me and joined me in staring at the thin tree which stood
out amongst its ginormous ancestors. Her bark seemed to have many faces
in it, moving and breathing along with the rest of the forest. Every
one of the trees around us had his or her own character. You could
spend what seemed like forever trying to learn each of their names,
only to find yourself captivated by a piece of grass a moment later.
There were bugs in the forest and they seemed to be playing the same
trick on me as the black bird did. One bug flying around my head felt
like 5 bugs zooming in and out of focus in front of my eyes.
Once the insects began to get on our nerves and we felt restless once
again, we ran back to our clearing of grass. Exiting the forest was
like leaving one dimension and entering another. There had been so much
action happening in the forest that it seemed impossible that there was
still an existence around us. Though it was just a forest and a field
on a sunny day, there was so much more going on around us. The hills
were alive, and on the hills was grass that carries living insects and
it grew from warm brown dirt that had a whole bunch more stuff going on.
We had lost our voices somewhere amidst all of the beauty and the
action we were witnessing. But once we sat down again, a grin on each
of our faces, we felt we needed to share our thoughts.
All topics of conversation are a blur now, not that they would make any
sense in a sober context anyway, but all that mattered was the feeling
we put into our words. Feeling for me was a weight pressing down on my
chest, and this weight was created by pure happiness, anger, sadness,
and then happiness again.
Our thoughts were like wild-life; hyenas and zebras running free in chase. But it was as if the predator
and the prey had gotten confused about which role they were playing. As
a result, both animals would be hunting and running in a circle after
one another. Every time one would get close to tearing at the other
creature's throat they would halt and forget what they were doing.
And this thought process really wasn't very productive; every time we
would get close to explaining our thoughts we would veer into another
thought, another role. And once this pile of thoughts reached its peak,
we would all collapse in soothing laughter, pulling us out of our
vortex of thought. The evening turned into night as our trip dwindled into something more mild yet still completely out of whack. We
continued to talk about everything and nothing, taking long drags from
our cigarettes without even thinking about it.
As the darkness began to take over the lively sky, we decided to go on one last walk
through the worldly forest. We made a couple of friends on the way, one
of them was only beginning his own trip, we learned.
The wall that usually stands between a group of strangers was completely
annihilated. We were bound by what some would call existentialism and
others would call insanity. We climbed trees together, risking hurting
ourselves on the slippery way up a giant fallen tree. We experienced
fear together as we hallucinated evil shadows in the moonlit forest. We
laughed together at how incredibly frivolous the idea of fear was.
Alas, as we began to come back to reality a little bit more with every
passing and dimming moment, we realized we had to leave our little
world and return to our homes.
On our solemn journey down the
mountain, we stopped at the lookout, a point on the mountain where you
can see all of the city of Montreal. As breathtaking as the site was,
it did not encourage us into thinking that we were walking back to a
better place one bit.
We were looking down on the incredulous
city that man had built, plastered with billions of little lights. Each
light caused us to think of the hundreds of thousands of people going
about their lives. Someone was out there finishing up some work in his
office, someone out there was fucking someone else or themselves,
someone out there was happy, and someone was sad.
I did not want to leave the mountain. I wanted to stay on the mountain; grow out
my hair and never shave again, live off of anything the mountain would
provide me with, set my clothes aflame and dance around the fire pit,
be psychotic forever if it meant being happy with nothing.