Drukqs
I'm the luckiest motherfucker on the planet, basically.
This past weekend, my friend Mauricio came up from Miami, along with his new boyfriend and nearly half an ounce of mushrooms. I'd been looking forward to his visit for awhile, and the fact that we'd be doing some shroomin' was a totally a plus to the whole weekend. Since I've started taking Prozac, mushrooms are the only psychedelics that get me off the ground and into that crazy heavy beautiful headspace.
With alot of my friends, it's usually the case that I'm the more experienced one with regard to drugs, though not always. I've got some friends who are trying to give Sasha Shulgin and Jerry Garcia a run for their money, and others who can count the number of times they've been high on one hand.
But anyway, I found myself in the position of being the most experienced one in the group this weekend. I was comfortable with, and slightly amused by this. We were at a house I'd never been to, sitting on the back porch when I started weighing out the mushrooms. Two of the folks trippin' were mushroom first timers, two were not, and I was me. Everyone ended up deciding to take a gram and a half, but I'd come into the day with the intention of taking three grams.
Now, I want to clarify that this wasn't a rash or even experimental decision on my part. I've taken more than that in the past and had smooth (albeit intense) rides. I was mentally prepared for and looking forward to something along those lines. Unfortunately, I ended up getting something else entirely.
Within 15 minutes of having washed down our mushrooms with some yellow Gatorade, we found ourselves already going. And damn, was I going hard. Shit. I lay down in a hammock in what should've been an ideally beautiful backyard with ideally beautiful weather. Unfortunately, I was overcome with alot of restless energy from one minute to the next, and started stomping around, trying to tear out the lawn, jumping up and tearing flowers and vines out of trees. I wouldn't stop. There were fractals spinning off of everything in every direction, and my actions would send waves, warping space around itself through a carefully determined time-sequence. The other members of my tripping party got absorbed in their own activities elsewhere. We had two sober individuals with us, but I'm not sure what became of them. For reasons I don't remember, I took off on my own and started walking down the road.
Then there's a lapse in my memory. I don't actually recall leaving the house, and I don't recall doing much walking. But, next thing I remember, I am in the parking lot of a Walgreen's, quite a distance from the house, and the sun has already set. I think I might've gone inside and knocked down a display. I'm not sure. At this point, I'm so far gone that I don't even remember my own name, where I am, where I came from, or even what I am. So, as a non-human life form with no name or past, I walk into the middle of one of the main streets in this town and attempt to direct traffic. Despite the fact that I can only just barely see straight, I try to tell the cars where to go, but naturally, I just look like some guy in the street waving his arms around and pointing. I got honked at, yelled at, and nearly hit a few times.
The staff at Walgreen's called the police because of my strange behavior. When they arrived, I was lying in the grass with a mouthful of dead leaves and dirt. They start interrogating me, and I'm incapable of answering any of their questions coherently. They handcuff me and start yelling, but I don't understand what's happening. I got stuck in a time loop. The same events kept repeating themselves over and over and I could not escape it. It was like living on a five second loop of film. I was thoroughly confused, but completely helpless to do anything about it.
In my mind, at that point, I had died. This was death. I was going to spend eternity on the floor of this dark place, under orange lights with cold metal loops binding my hands, spitting out the same fragment of leaf and being yelled at for the same reason, endlessly. Strangely, I accepted this. I was dead. I understood that much. I didn't remember any part of my life before death, so that was fine.
The police called an ambulance. I was relieved as they strapped me to a stretcher since I felt it meant I'd get a change of scenery. The lights were bright in the ambulance as the two EMTs put electrodes on my torso and needles in my arm. I remember telling one of them that the needles felt good, and he chuckled. I didn't recognize them as human, and I believed that I was being taken to the afterlife in their brightly lit ship.
Arriving at the hospital, I was transferred from the stretcher to a hospital bed, and was symbolically fully dead at that point. Doctors, nurses, and hospital staff walked around me, all alien and angelic, asking me questions that I still didn't comprehend and preparing me for existence in this new place
After laying there for a bit, a social worker came in and started talking to me. I had come-to enough that I could answer her questions normally, but I still wasn't sure why she was asking them or why I was there, just that something had gone very wrong and they were trying to help me out. I started to think that I had unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide, or that I had finally just snapped for real this time.
Things started to slowly come back to me. My name. The fact that I'm a student in college. Friends. My parents. My Girlfriend. Myself. This was without question the strangest experience I have ever had. Having forgotten everything about myself, it all slowly came back to me. Vaguely at first, as if they were all things I had dreamt up or been told about once upon a time. And the fact that it was all actually real? It was just overwhelming. To realize that my name is Esteban O'Sullivan and I have parents who love me in Miami, and friends on the outside of this hospital, and responsibilities, and a little apartment full of junk I've accumulated throughout the process of being alive... I started crying uncontrollably. Cold, shirtless, electrodes stuck on me, laying on my back in a tiny room with curtains for walls. Here I was. I was alive. I had a past and a future. This was alot to deal with at once.
When I finally came to, I started asking everyone I could about the circumstances under which I'd been brought there. My wrists were covered in bruises because of the odd position I put myself into with the handcuffs while sitting on the floor, and I knew that had to be indicative of something bad.
The staff only knew what they'd been told, and it wasn't much. They were considering holding me involuntarily for examination, but ended up deciding against it when I started to come around. I asked them to call the police station to find out about any criminal charges being put against me, and, miraculously, there were none. I hadn't really done anything too illegal aside interfering with traffic. They left it in the hands of the hospital, thinking I'd be committed, and the hospital decided after a short series of examinations that I had a rough night but was good to go. I gathered my belongings (sans phone and wallet, which I'd lost at some point) and checked myself out. I and walked two blocks to my apartment.
I got back around 12:30 pm to find my roommate sitting on the couch with a friend. They told me I looked shaken up. I was, man. I was.
Fast forward two days later. I'm in my room one afternoon, and I hear a knock at the door. I get up to answer it, and looking out the peephole, I see two police officers. My heart imploded. I felt the color drain from my face as I stepped out and greeted them.
"Are you Esteban O'Sullivan?" one of them asked.
"Yes, that's me." I replied.
"Here you go, someone dropped this off at the station yesterday." He said, handing me my wallet.
I thanked him profusely and looked through it. Cash gone, but that was to be expected. More interestingly, my license had been folded the hell up, and there was only half of my old American Express giftcard in there, covered in teethmarks. That and a piece of paper with my own phone number written on it, clearly in someone else's handwriting. You can't make this shit up.
"How'd you lose that thing son? Riding around on your bike or what?" He asked, noticing my bicycle in the doorway.
"Oh, it's a really long story..." I said, leaving it at that, thanking them some more before they left.
Aren't I the luckiest motherfucker on the planet?
I don't know what I did to deserve to get away from that insane situation unscathed. That, compounded with the fact that, in my mind, I experienced the process of death, had encompassed nonexistence, and returned to life -- it's all just given me an incredible feeling of amazement toward everything. I don't feel any more of a sense of purpose, or anything like that, though. I still won't delude myself into thinking life has some sort of meaning, and I remain a nihilist at heart. However, for one reason or another, I feel a desire to seize the day that I've been missing for a long time. Life doesn't feel like a burden, as it has at times in the past. It just is what it is, and I might as well be what I am while that's happening.
If you read through all this storytelling, thanks. I appreciate it alot.