I don't know if you'll believe this. I don't know if I would believe it either, if it were somebody else telling it. All I can do is give my word of honor that it's true.
First I have to explain the situation: As you get older, eventually you start to actually LOOK older. I think this is the part a lot of people have trouble with. I am certainly no exception.
Okay, there's this stuff called TCA (trichloroacetic acid) which has among its uses a cosmetic use. You dilute it to 50% or 25%, and apply it to your skin to cause a controlled chemical burn, which after a few days of looking like hell, will peel, leaving new, less-wrinkled skin. (Oh, sorry, never say "wrinkle" -- it's 'fine lines and the appearance of aging'

Anyway.
A few days ago I did this. But, you know, because I smoke, I have these lines around my mouth that I REALLY hate and ... well, I overdid it. Didn't dilute enough, put on too much. Oh God, I've been thinking, I have permanently disfigured myself. I applied MHRB in a paste immediately (helped a lot btw), and I've been putting on shea butter every waking hour since then. Part of my face got much better. But as of about 90 minutes ago, there were still pretty severe chemical burns around my mouth -- ugly brown scabs, cracked and painful, and everyplace that had peeled was still an angry red.
Around that time, I loaded my pipe with spice and smoked. It's funny how I mostly don't get closed-eye visuals, and instead seem to trip with my eyes open.
I don't remember exactly how it started, but after a time I found myself feeling as if seated in some kind of examination chair, and I saw a blue beam run over and up my body, like a scanning beam, a couple of times. Then followed sequences during which it was like, hold still, don't breathe -- okay, take a breath, now hold very still ... hold it ... hold it ... okay, breathe -- palms up -- close your eyes -- okay ...
I felt my arms lift up, a scanning beam again, hold still, then arms folded on top of my head, look straight ahead, don't breathe, okay, okay ... now, breathe. It went on like that for awhile. The last time, I had to hold my breath until I almost burst. Each time, there was a little visual superimposed over my vision, like the HUD in a computer game, with a time bar like when a program is loading or a file transferred.
There was a very definite time when it was finished. After that, I was in a funny little parallellogram version of reality where everything was sort of compressed and skewed. When I get strange altered vision like that, I'm always curious whether I myself will look weird too, so lately I've been getting up and looking in the mirror to see. I noticed as I was standing up that my upper lip was really wet.
When I looked in the mirror -- yep, I was sorta parallelogrammed too. Hee hee!
But then I noticed something else. All the angry red patches are now a faint pink. Most of the scabbing is gone, and the one scab that is left is no longer cracked, but smooth and painless. I am completely gobsmacked! (no pun intended) But I swear that this is true.
"What's wrong with that generation? ... Is this what comes of putting on Pink Floyd laser lightshows down at the Planetarium?" --Spider Robinson