Okay guys... here's a preview of what I'm working with so you've got an idea of where I'm going with it.
I would appreciate any feedback that you can provide. Keep in mind that this is a draft of prewriting; this IS NOT what I plan to use as "my book" in the end. It's just prewriting for you all to see a bit about my journey and the ideas that I'm working with. Also, it's not near complete. This is only the very beginning of the 15 or so psychedelic experiences that I had on trail.
WARNING: LONG POST
[Introduction]
I want to begin by thanking everyone on this site for your help in getting me started down a path that eventually led me to where I am today. Were it not for the knowledge that I gained from Shroomery and the Nexus (Yes, I know, very different sites, but they both contributed to my journey in their own ways) I would not have had the skill set, the knowledge, or the testicular-fortitude to actually attempt this life changing journey.
I still have to write in somewhat ambiguous terms for a couple of reasons. Firstly, what I did was illegal. That one’s pretty straight forward. It is for that reason that I must emphasize that everything that I’m about to tell you should be read as fiction. If you want to believe that it is all true, then go ahead and do so, but I make no claim that this is actual truth. It’s really much closer to a dream that I had or a story that I developed in a creative writing workshop. Secondly, I want to be sure that those other people who were involved in this journey are not implicated unwillingly. Although I’m somewhat okay with “putting myself out there” by sharing my story, those who were with me through the story did not sign up to have their story told to audiences of strangers. So for that sake, I will go to great length in creating composite characters or completely making up characters. While my story is fictional, their involvement in my story is *extremely* fictional.
And finally, before I get going, I’d like to say that I’m still working on how I can best tell my story. I am in the process of trying to write a book about all of these things, but it’s a big story and it’s basically a story about my entire life leading up to a 4-month adventure that very heavily relied on the influence of psychedelic substances—namely psilocybin and DMT. So I am starting by sharing my trip-specific experiences with the communities of the Nexus and the Shroomery who started me down this path in the first place. I don’t really know how this will turn out, but I conceive of the following “trip reports” as a prewriting process that I hope to use to gain perspective on how to tell the greater story at large.
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[The Backstory]
I have to give a bit of back story to explain how this all came about and hopefully contextualize the 4-month psychedelic experience that I want to share with you all.
I moved from my home state in 2006 to finish my undergraduate degree. Immediately after finishing my bachelor’s I enrolled in a master’s program and also completed that at the same school. Following completion of grad school I went straight into working what basically amounted to a dream job, but before starting that job I took 2 months and went out on a backpacking trip that was 800 miles long. That’s where I first smoked marijuana. I’d been open to smoking weed before then, although I was adamantly opposed to drugs before I was in college, but I was never exposed to people who had access, so I just never tried it. During the 800 mile backpacking trip however I was with a dude who smoked a lot, so he introduced me to it and I became a heavy user of pot after that. Then through the use of pot I was introduced to mushrooms, then LSD, then DMT. Well shoot… I guess pot really is a gateway drug after all.
I found that the psychedelic experience was absolutely amazing. I had been an atheist for years before my second LSD trip, and during that trip I went from atheist to pantheist in about 4 hours. It completely changed my life. I started using LSD about once a every week or two while I was also starting work in this “dream job” that I mention above. It was weird though because my job required that I be pretty straight-laced. I wore a tie to work, sat behind a desk, and was supposed to be an upstanding citizen. This sucked though because that’s not who I had really become. Although I did my job well and didn’t mix drugs with work, I was in a small enough community where people would see me outside of work and expect me to be a representation of the guy who wore a tie Monday-Friday when in fact I was the guy who was tripping balls and getting in touch with the universe on Saturday and Sunday.
This conflict between my two lives gave me a great deal of anxiety… or maybe “anxiety” isn’t the right word, but it made me feel like I was living a double life and the life that really felt more important to me was one that I had to keep hidden from the people in my community.
Now, long story short here, the dream job started to fall apart during the latter half of my third year working in it. I can’t give too many details about this, but basically I started to see the job for what it really was as opposed to the idealized image of what I had thought that it was for so long. A new supervisor came in and started working above me and that person really began manipulating and harassing me for no reason. I was horrified because although I had thought that I’d really “made it” even before turning 30, all the sudden that dream was being taken away from me. I was a hard worker and I genuinely kicked ass at what I did, but now for no reason this other person wanted me out largely because of the good work that I did. She wanted to do things her own way and a subordinate who had his own vision for the company/business wasn’t in line with her ability to do what she wanted. So she really started screwing with me and there was nothing that I could do about it because she was sort of like my supervisor.
When this started happening it caused me to deal with a lot of sever depression. Now I should back up here a bit and explain that I have dealt with depression pretty much my whole life, but I started seeking help for it in college when some really terrible things happened to me (lost my girlfriend of 4 years, lost pretty much all of my friends that same year, and my roommate killed himself in our dorm—all of this happened during my freshman year). It was at this time that I started taking antidepressants (I’ve been on all of them and took them for almost a decade before stopping them after grad school). After grad school however my life started getting a lot better. I had a better understanding of myself and what I wanted from life, I had a solid relationship with a woman who I loved, and I had a killer career set up for me right out of college. So I stopped taking antidepressants and right after that is when I started exploring consciousness with psychedelics. After I started taking psychedelics I had about 2 years where I was in absolute heaven. Life was amazing—the girl, the job, the worldview, everything was just perfect.
But then things started going bad with work for the reasons that I mention above, and I stopped taking the psychedelics because I was worried that the work related depression would bleed over into my trips and I didn’t want to enter the “spirit world” when my life was already in a bad state.
Then sh*t really hit the fan and the supervisor basically took over my work and I learned that my career was done. I wasn’t being fired or anything like that, but she basically rewrote my job and turned my dream-job into a slave-labor position working for her. It was awful. I was so depressed and upset and really pissed off at the world. So I went to visit a therapist.
I should explain here that I have seen a therapist for years and it’s been really helpful, especially after I stopped taking antidepressants. The therapist was very supportive of my choice to use psychedelics and even encouraged me to do so in a safe way. We had a great relationship. But this one day in 2013, things went bad. I was extremely depressed and disappointed in the world and I hadn’t had a psychedelic trip in months. I went into her office in a terrible state and shortly into our meeting I started crying. I just let go and purged my feelings to her… and I said the wrong words.
Basically I said “Sometimes I don’t feel like living.”
She asked me, “Do you feel that way right now?”
And I told her that yeah, I did feel that way right then. I didn’t think that I was going to kill myself or anything like that, but I was severely depressed, I was emotional, and I had said the magic words. From that point forward things got really ugly. (This next part is a book in itself, so I’ll try to keep it short for the time being. Forgive my brevity, but I want to get to the “adventure” part as quickly as I can).
She told me that I had to check myself into an institution or that she was going to force me to be institutionalized. So I went in, hoping that I would get to talk to some really good therapists and that I’d be able to work through my depression. That is not what happened though. What happened is that I was literally locked into a cage, my clothes were taken away along with my dignity and I wasn’t allowed to see a doctor for more than a day. I was completely humiliated and not helped in any way. My time in that institution only lasted for about 36 hours, but during that time I “hit rock bottom.” It was the worst experience of my life BY FAR. It was so, so, so terrible.
And so I told myself that whatever it was in my life that had brought me to that place, I had to see that I never ended up there again. So I had to completely let those things out of my life.
I spent a lot of time thinking while I was in there and I realized that it was my job, my relationship with my fiancé (we had been great for one another at first, but we were honestly growing apart with each passing month), and it was my life of consumerism. Or, to put it more simply, it was my everything that was causing me to feel this way.
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[Birth of The Idea]
I didn’t know immediately what to do to change those things, but one day about a month later, I was out at a lake and I ate some acid with a very close friend of mine. We hadn’t tripped together in awhile, but he was actually the guy who introduced me to psychedelics in the years prior. That night I ate two hits of the LSD and he ate nine… that dude was sort of a professional tripper, if you will. We had an absolutely transformational evening out by the lake and next to the fire. We cried together, we laughter together, we danced around the fire together, and we watched the sun go down and the moon come up. We talked about life and how the world is so rough but also looked for the good parts of reality and what makes life worth living even through the pain. He’d been in the service and he’d seen some really terrible things during his two tours, and he knew of my issues with work.
I still remember it so clearly, sitting there beside the campfire that we had built. It was in this moment that I had an idea that would come to completely change my life. I told him about the Pacific Crest Trail. It’s a trail that stretches all the way from the US border with Mexico to the US border with Canada. It’s 2,650 miles long and it had sort of haunted me ever since I had completed that 800 mile trail a few years before. It seemed to me like the ultimate adventure, and ever since I’d hiked the long trail before then, I’d wondered if I had what it would take to hike all the way from Mexico to Canada.
“The problem that we have,” I said, “is that we come out here on the weekend and we have these transcendent experiences, but then on Monday we have to go back to work. We reset ourselves back to culture and civilization instead of ‘coming down’ in nature. But what if we changed that? What if you were to go out into nature, trip you head off, then be out in the woods for two weeks. Then do it again. And again. And again.” I paused and we looked from the fire, then to the moon, and then back to one another. “Imagine if you were to do that along the PCT (Pacific Crest Trail). You walk for 100 miles, then trip, and then just ‘reset’ in nature over the next 100 miles. Every week or two you trip balls and just spend time in nature afterwards. There’d be no society or culture to be your influence; it’d just be nature.”
Well, like so many of the ideas that you get under the influence of LSD, it seemed good at the time, but after we came down the next morning it all just seemed like an acid-fueled fantasy. Sure the idea was romantic, but ultimately it could never really happen. It was just a fantasy.
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[Deciding to Follow Through—The Final Push]
Now fast forward two months and that same friend and I are out in the desert for the weekend for another “psychedelic camping trip.” This time it was mushrooms and it was the first time that I ever ate 5 grams at once. It was one of the top five most intense psychedelic experiences (not counting DMT trips) of my life. In that trip I literally lived every human life that has ever been lived. I saw what it was like to be Hitler AND what it was like to be the people he killed. I saw through the eyes of school shooters AND their victims. I saw the world from the perspective of world-famous authors and philosophers and murderers and philanthropists. I *literally* saw every perspective that ever has existed in human history. I know that this is hard to believe, and it’s even hard for me to believe as I write this, over a year later, but I know that it’s true because I was there. It was an intense evening.
But what really changed me in that experience was that I saw my own life. I saw that even though I had had the experience in the ward some four months before, I still hadn’t removed the destructive forces from my life and I was still on the path that had led me there in the first place. What was so eye opening in this trip however was that I got to see what was actually going to happen to me if I didn’t make a change—I was going to kill myself. I wasn’t going to do it that night, but I saw in absolute clarity that if I didn’t actually do something dramatic to change my life and stop what it was that was causing me to feel depressed and angry towards the world that I would die by my own hand in the next year. I literally witnessed my own suicide that night. I not only witnessed my own suicide, but I witnessed the aftershock of my death. I was able to see what it would do to the people in my life. I saw how it would affect my mother, my brother, my father, and all of my friends. It was like that cliché story by Charles Dickins called “A Christmas Carol” where the character of Ebenezer Scrooge travels through his future and his past and sees the lives of those who he’s impacted. That new perspective changes Scrooge and he realizes the implications of his actions. That’s what happened to me that night too. It was like I was literally flying over my family in the wake of my suicide.
It was such a traumatic experience! I cried so heavily that night, and I was so lucky to have my friend there to support me through the trip. It was definitely the first time that I had a “life changing” experience of such magnitude under the influence of a psychedelic. I’d had my life changed by psychedelics, yes, but never so profoundly.
The next morning we woke up, still in the desert, but no longer tripping like we had been under the stars and the moon the night before. I made a decision right then and there that I wasn’t going to be a passive victim to my circumstances. I was going to do something dramatic. I was going to follow through with that acid-fueled fantasy that I’d dreamed up beside a lake in the months before. I was literally going to quit my job and hike the Pacific Crest Trail and I was going to do it with the help of the entheogenic plant medicines that had given me that insight in the first place.
I couldn’t just do it overnight though. I knew that it would take a lot of preparation, so I made the choice to keep up with that same job that I had started to hate so much for one more full year and get another job on the side. This would allow me to build up enough savings to take 5 months and undertake a hike of 2,650 miles. I also started making preparations to move out of the town house that I was renting with my fiancé and ultimately I prepared to end that relationship altogether.
The following year was challenging. I worked like an animal to build up my savings. I did end my relationship with the woman who I did still love, but towards whom I no longer felt the same as I used to. As much as I wished that she and I could be together forever, it just wasn’t going to be possible, and if I wanted to keep that promise to myself, I needed to let it end, so I bit the bullet and did.
I also learned to extract DMT and made my collection of the molecule in preparation for my journey. I grew enough mushrooms to provide me access throughout the trail and enough to give to all of my friends as well—spread the love kind of thing. Then I also used some of my savings and collected a half a pound of the best marijuana that I could possibly find (which was absolute fire!).
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[And the Story Begins]
And so in the spring of this year (2015), after ending my job, finishing my relationship, and selling almost everything I owned, I had a friend drive me to the start of the Pacific Crest Trail at the US border with Mexico in Campo California.
In my backpack was 1/2 pound of top-shelf marijuana, 2 ounces of mushrooms that I’d measured into .5g capsule (I was very careful with this, and each gel cap was *exactly* .5g since I didn’t have a scale to measure the dose on trail), 2 grams of crystal white DMT (way more than I’d end up needing for my journey), and 2 grams of 1:1 changa that I’d made personally.
In the following four months I walked all the way to Canada over the course of 124 days and I tripped quite regularly. I write to you today to share those experiences.
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[Going it Alone]
I spent a lot of time mentally and spiritually preparing to spend 4-5 months out in the woods and tripping on psychedelics regularly. That means that I tripped a lot in the months leading up to my separation from civilization in April. Those of you who have followed me on the Nexus or Shroomery may have read my trip reports from that time. I would meticulously document the dose of mushrooms or DMT and how that dose affected me. I’d also try to repeat each dose experiment. So for example, I’d eat 2.5 grams in silent darkness on an empty stomach, then a week later I’d try to replicate those circumstances as closely as possible and try to compare the two experiences as a means by which to know exactly what I could get out of each dose. This was so that when I got on trail I could titrate each individual trip to the conditions that were at hand.
During much of this time I was with my little brother. My little brother and I grew very close during the four or five months leading up to departing for the PCT and we shared a lot of psychedelic experiences during this time. Unfortunately, (and I will remain brief here like I have earlier in this document) we had a severe falling out just before leaving for the trail (about 3 weeks before the trail). In short, he got involved with a girl and he completely turned into a new person. He went out and bought a gun and threatened me with it. I was completely shocked and hurt in a way that few people have ever hurt me before. To make a long story short however, it was decided that I did not feel safe hiking with him anymore and I *certainly* didn’t feel safe having psychedelic experiences with him out in the woods when I now knew that he was capable of such a terrible thing. So I decided that if I was still going to undertake this journey that I’d been preparing for over a year, then I had to do it alone.
This was a challenge of its own because all of the preparation that I’d done in terms of tripping, or at least the majority of it in the preceding 4-5 months had been with the support of my little brother. We were going to do this together. That made a huge difference. Now however I’d be out in nature alone (something that I was comfortable with) but for me to try and go into entheo-space alone while out in the woods was a completely different ballgame. It was going to be a lot more challenging. So this turned out to be a very major variable for why I was not able to trip out on the trail nearly as much as I had wanted to. I had a lot of anxiety whenever I did try tripping because I no longer had his support. I also had a lot of animosity for the betrayal that he showed me and that led me to have anxiety.
During the entire journey however I wore a necklace with a little mushroom on it, and that reminded me of the two online communities that I’ve shared my experiences with (the Nexus and Shroomery). I knew that even though I didn’t have my little brother to go through this with me, at least I had those of you online who I’d be reporting back to once it was done.
And so I must confess that there was never a single time on trail where I tripped without considerable apprehension, anxiety, and… well… fear. It was hard to surrender to the great unknown, but I KNEW that I would be coming back to these online forums with stories to tell and if all that I did was hike the Pacific Crest Trail and carry these entheogenic agents with me the entire time that I’d be letting all of you down and that I’d be letting myself down. So what I found myself doing was going as long as I could excusably go and then I’d plan and execute a trip. I wish that I could have had more heavy trips and I wish I could have had more trips all together, but I am grateful for every single one that I did follow through with even if they weren’t as plentiful or as deep as I’d hoped when I sat beside a fire with my friend a year before and planned it out.
I envisioned that I might be able to undertake a psychedelic experience once every 7-14 days when I planned everything out. In the end I was on trail for 124 days and I undertook 15 psychedelic experiences. So I was able to stick with that goal, but most of the time I was not able to go as deep as I had hoped. I did however have some really profound experiences while I was out there though and I came away with some incredible insights that apply to my life. And that’s what I want to document in the trip reports that will follow.
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[My First Trip: DMT]
I had been on trail for a week when I undertook my first psychedelic experience on trail. From the very first day I knew that it would be more challenging to take psychedelics than I wanted for it to be, but during those first 150 miles the thought of what my backpack contained never left my mind. It sort of became a burden to have been out there for a full 7 days and still I had not entered the spirit world.
An ideal opportunity presented itself at this point on the trail though. Although the PCT starts mostly in the desert, there was a mountain at this point. Also, there was a closure on the trail that required hikers to take one of two options: 1) skip this section by hitchhiking around, which most of the hikers did or 2) hike all the way up this mountain to the closure, then take a detour back down the mountain, road-walk for about 16 miles, then hike back up the other side of the mountain. Obviously option 2 took a lot more work, but I had dedicated myself to walking a 100% continuous path from border to border, so skipping wasn’t an option.
The reason that this became an ideal place for my first psychedelic experience was because firstly it was the first time that the trail really rose up from the desert floor to a point of almost 8,000 feet where it was not only extremely beautiful, but it was also much cooler. The desert heat had become a bother to me in that first week and I could see how it would be possible for me to sit in the southern California sun and shmoalk a bowl of changa. Secondly this was an ideal place to trip because most of the other trail hikers weren’t on this part of the trail; they just hitched around to the end of the trail closure, so I mostly had the trail to myself.
On the way up the mountain I decided that the top of this mountain would be my first psychedelic experience on trail and that it would be DMT.
When I arrived at the top there was actually someone there. It was a girl who was laying in the shade of a tree and writing. I found it odd that someone would have been up there, but at the same time, it was quite a scenic place, so I couldn’t blame her much. She told me that she kind of liked hiking until mid day and then taking a nap or a writing for a couple of hours. She didn’t seem like any threat to me, and I told her that I was just going to wander off a little ways and meditate.
For those of you who don’t already use the “Oh, I’m just going to go meditate” excuse when you’re actually going to go trip, it’s a MUST! People will leave you alone and they won’t question why you’re just sitting by yourself off in the woods. And if they do see you shmoalk, unless you’re using a crack-pipe, they’ll think that it’s just bud.
So that’s what I did. I went off the trail a little ways to a place where I was completely isolated. No one would have wandered over there to disturb me unless they were looking for a secluded place to take a dump, but since I knew that most hikers weren’t on this section of trail, I knew that I’d be safe.
I was nervous though. It would be the first time on trail that I had just let go, but I knew that it was also the reason that I’d come out there in the first place, and so I had to follow through.
I sat down in a patch of bushes looking out to the east and I tried to calm myself. I did sort of meditate there for awhile. I closed my eyes and really focused on my breathing. After a few minutes I took out my “equipment” and looked at it for a moment—crystal or changa—I thought. I decided that I’d try to use the crystal. Unfortunately, since I didn’t have a torch lighter, I wasn’t able to get the pipe to melt the product down well enough and so I resorted to packing a small bowl of changa.
I meditated again for a few minutes with the changa pipe in one hand and my lighter in the other. I was extremely nervous… I get anxious/excited just thinking back on it.
After a few minutes I opened my eyes and tried to do a separation-of-body-from-mind sort of thing that I learned works best when I’m about to take a DMT dose. I just broke it down into actions and tried to forget the potential that was in my hands. Pipe to mouth. Lighter to bowl. Flame to product. And just inhale.
I took one hit first and held it in for about seven seconds before letting it out. I closed my eyes and felt that feeling that I had become so used to. I describe it like having a blanket thrown over me from behind. It’s a blanket of anesthetic and sort of numbs away all my anxiety. Colors brightened a bit and I instantly remembered why I had decided to embark on this mission in the first place. I sat with that feeling for a minute or two, and then I took a second hit—this time it was larger and I held it for longer.
When I let out the hit I opened my eyes and watched the smoke as I pushed it out of my lungs and it dissipated in the air in front of me. The world began to change. The colors brightened, and then I could suddenly recognize the alive-ness of the plant life around me. It was like the trees and bushes were no longer plants but watchful animals. I could FEEL their eyes on me, and they changed in their form. They looked and felt different. They didn’t really speak to me as I have had trees sort of do when I have been in deeper DMT states, but I could absolutely feel their awareness of my presence.
It was such a warm and pleasant experience. There was no element of fear whatsoever after I had taken the hit. It was a welcoming to this place and, like I said before, a reminder of why I came out here on this mission in the first place.
I sat there with the trip for about ten minutes. I considered taking more, but in the end decided that this was all that I needed. I had miles to cover still that day before the sun went down, and really the purpose of this first trip was to test the waters. I didn’t need to breakthrough today. I just needed to remind myself what the DMT realm was and that it would be okay.
I accomplished that goal fully.
After coming down over the course of about ten minutes I packed my pipe and equipment away, threw my backpack back on, and made my way back to the trail. I could still feel the spirit molecule flowing through my system, but by the time that I made it back to the trail where that girl had been relaxing and writing I was fully “back” to this reality. I could feel a heavy afterglow though and an immense feeling of gratitude. It was going to be okay; I was going to be okay; the world was a beautiful place.
I talked with the girl a bit more and then headed back down the mountain on the detour trail. Throughout the remainder of that day I could feel a tangible after-glow that I always seem to get from psychedelics—especially from changa.
I camped that night under the stars and slept like a baby.
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[My Second Trip: Low Dose Mushrooms]
Although I really like to think of myself as a general “psychadelacist” my drug of choice really is mushrooms. I love DMT and LSD is really what got me going down this path, but I feel like mushrooms are “where it’s at” for me at least. The LSD trip I find to be too synthetic and electric. I prefer something natural and organic. Also, I don’t think that it’s as easy to reach true transcendence with LSD. You can trip your head off on enough acid, but it really has more to do with visual hallucination than transcendence of the human condition and understanding of the interworking of the universe. Then with DMT it obviously will blast you straight to “level 5” but as many users point out, it’s hard to process so much in such a short time period. Mushrooms give you just the right amount of time through. I compare high dose DMT and high dose mushrooms like this: I say that in both cases you’re going to go to the moon and back; with DMT you’re going to make the trip in 5-10 minutes, but with mushrooms it’ll take 5 hours. Both are pretty fast to be traveling that far, but at least with mushrooms you have a lot more time compared to the spirit molecule.
It was hard for me to take the time out of my trail days however to sit down and have a mushroom trip. But the fact remained that mushrooms were really my purpose for being out there. I mean I literally had a glass mushroom hanging from my neck; I had to take a mushroom trip early in the hike if I was going to succeed in this mission. I couldn’t let it wait and keep putting it off. It needed to happen.
So I decided around mile 275 that I’d take my first low-dose mushroom trip. It had to be low enough dose that I could keep hike during the experience and it needed to be low enough so that it didn’t invoke any anxiety since I’d be in a place where I’d never been before (I mean physically—I’d never seen that part of the trail that I’d be walking through. I certainly would be familiar with the mental space that the mushroom would bring me to). So I decided to start as low as I possibly could—I would take a single gel cap: 1/5 gram.
I had never eaten such a low dose of mushrooms before, and I really thought that it would be sub-threshold—a “micro-dose” if you will. I was on top of a mountain when I took the dose and I’d been on trail for about 10 days. Although I had been in the desert for much of that time period, this spot was up high on a mountain near Big Bear, California. In fact, I planned to hike far enough that I’d actually end up in Big Bear (my next resupply point) by the end of the day. So that meant that if anything “went wrong” (whatever that may have meant) I wouldn’t be far from a city and I could get to a motel if I really needed to. This wasn’t such a logistical help as it was mentally calming.
So being up on that mountain, it was actually quite chilly that evening. What I could not have anticipated however was what I woke up to: snow....
All of my posts are entirely fictional. I am a writer, and as a means to research the life of a fictional character that I'm writing about, I post on the Nexus to get into character. In real life I have no interest or interaction with mind-altering substances.