Saturday, November 05, 2005

Note On Hallucinogenics...

Since I probably sounded like I was saying how cool acid and shrooms
were in my previous post, I wanted to elaborate on this a little more...

It was a phase of my existence, the cliche college- age- experimentation
-phase that they've made jokes about on South Park. As in: " Don't do drugs
now, kids! Wait for when you are older, and in college, like everyone else!"

By the time I was 21, all of that stuff was out of my system.
But also, to present it straight-up real, I have seen about 3 or 4 people
have bad trips. Maybe more...

Hallucinogenics are like playing a mental form of Russian Roulette.
I've seen a friend of mine go fetal for about 8 hours, he wouldn't talk to any of us,
at all. Just curled up in a fetal position and stayed that way.
One guy that we brought to TRHPS had a bad trip in the van, and never went in to
see the movie.
We all tried to get him to come in and watch the movie, but he was having a sort
of acid-induced anxiety attack.
Found out years later that he was gay, but at this time no one knew it. He'd been
struggling with his identity, and the acid coupled with the TRHPS atmosphere
freaked him out. At the time we just tried to be comforting.

One time I ran into a friend, he was on acid, I wasn't. He lost something,
I don't remember what. Some keys, something.
He wound up thrashing his hand and a guy named T and I had to physically restrain
him when he put his hand through a wooden fence, cut the hell out of his hand, it was bad.
He was trying to hit his hand over and over, and that's where we came in and tried to restrain him from doing it more. His hand looked like bloody meat, and he was still trying to wreck it further. Over some lost keys.

So that's my point. For whatever fun I've had with that stuff, there's an equal amount
of not-fun examples that I've witnessed.
It's weird when people get violent on it. Another guy, also named T, got totally belligerent,
and wanted to fight a dude that he hated for no reason. So odd. He just mysteriously took
offense to this guy, for no reason.

I had kind of a bad trip once when I saw Poltergeist 2 while frying. After the movie I kept thinking that there were ancient Indian corpses buried in the ground everywhere, and we were all walking around on them. That there were probably thousands of ancient corpses that we
didn't know about, all buried underneath us.
Yep.
And my head seemed to be screwed on pretty tight, when it came to this stuff. If anything,
I've helped so many people through THEIR bad trips.
So if I could have such a trip, then anyone could. If you do it enough, you WILL eventually have a bad one. Especially if you are having problems in your life.
That's what happened to me.

Come to think of it, I quit immediately after that. At that point just about everyone I knew
including myself had suffered a bad trip at some time or another.
Those aren't good odds.
Because everyone has some problems in their lives. And when you fry, they can be brought
to the surface. The guy that went fetal later told us that he was having a bad trip about his
mom. Another guy that I saw weeping for literally hours told me that he was thinking about
his family, and all the family problems. Felt guilty. He was having a guilt trip. I bet that was awful. I could imagine. How many of us feel regretful over something that we've said or done
to our parents? Or that our parents have done to us, for that matter.

I wasn't worried about my family, or anything else, so my bad trip was about hypotheticals,
and it wound up feeling plausible, real. There really were corpses of ancient Indians right under my feet! At least, that's what it felt like at the time.
I shouldn't have gone to see Poltergeist 2 while frying, but my friends wanted to.
Not a good idea to watch scary ghost movies while frying your brains out, lol. What did they expect?
Anyway.

3 Comments:

Blogger robin hood said...

I've always been glad I saw such casualties BEFORE I was offered the drugs. Art College in the 70's was a haven for substance abuse for those that wanted to indulge. I'd grown up in the middle of an English forest, completely unprepared for any aspect of city life, let alone its "drug culture". As I quickly fell in with the art/music crowd the scenes you describe became very familiar. But because I had such admiration for the work I'd seen these people produce when they were "straight", and such disdain for the crap they came out with once "under the influence", I decided (no matter how unpopular at times) to leave it alone. Although I do admit to frying my brains in beer on a rather too regular basis.

2:34 AM  
Blogger Nabonidus said...

You were indeed fortunate that you
had the experiences that you did,
I wasn't so lucky.
It really seemed that my entire environment, neighborhood, was on drugs or alcohol. I grew up almost
thinking that it was compulsory! lol
But
I was fortunate that I didn't get too into the alcohol or heavier drugs, and that I stopped the other stuff when I was still young.
Hehheh, despite my blog photo, I actually don't drink very often. If I DID drink every day, I would be trying to hide it from the world, not broadcast it. : )
Do you realize how fortunate you were to grow up in the middle of an English forest? All I knew was beige stucco cracker boxes and pavement.

9:33 AM  
Blogger Justin Kreutzmann said...

It's all in the mind of the beholder.

11:15 PM  

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