School had been out for a week now, summer was in full swing. I had
purchased my ticket to see Starf*cker, (indie pop/electronic group)
and my friends would get their's at the door. The mention of LSD had
only been made to me that very day. Our fat friend, to whom we
convinced the show was sold out so he wouldn't go, (it was a terrible
move, but for the best, he would have hated it anyway) said that our
friend N was interested in getting some. Apparently the acid
connection that was iffy weeks before, had now turned legitimate. I
was excited from that moment on. After breaking the false news, we
left to my friend E's house. Trying to eliminate some confusion here,
it was now myself, E, N, and another friend, A, at E's house. A had
been conversing with the acid connect, and we came to the conclusion
that we would buy twelve hits. Fast forwarding through the waiting
period, we get the acid, and A trades a chocolate bar containing an
eighth of mushrooms for two more hits. In total, we have fourteen, and
we were off to meet A's girlfriend and her friends at the show.
It was hipster mania in there. I remember saying to my friends "there
is an immeasurable amount of non-prescription glasses in here." The
first act, one man, drunk as the dickens, playing under the moniker
'Feelings.' It was horrid. The "music" was uninspired and dull, and
otherwise very rudimentary, like some if little kid found a mixing
board in the basement and started fiddling around with it. And his
vocals were even worse, cracky moans and mumbling, I was not enjoying
myself. The second act, Wampire, was somewhat better. A full band,
actual songs, but still blew. It was worth the wait, because
Starf*cker was fantastic. Great sound, good visuals, crowd surfing
horses and astronauts, and balloons falling from above. They put on a
great show.

We returned to E's house at around midnight, and after some gathering
of things and ourselves, we took the acid. I think everyone else took
two to start with, someone might have even only taken one, but went
right ahead and did all three of mine to the dome. It was bitter and
numbing. Hopefully, we were in for a wild ride. We stayed inside while
the tabs dissolved. I was drinking a cherry coke, I couldn't feel a
thing on the spot of my tongue where the acid lie, so the fluid was
weird. We also wanted to decide on a movie to watch beforehand, and
get it all queued up, because I'm sure we would be too confused to
later. We shuffled through the movie selection, and The Animal with
Rob Schneider was jokingly brought up. A hadn't seen it, and we've all
seen all these other movies dozens of times, so as dumb as it is,
that's what we decided on. It had been about twenty minutes or so
since we did the acid, and already I feel that shiver, that slight
tingle, that lightness. At this point, we went outside to smoke a bowl
on the porch.

Sitting outside, I could tell I just did acid. The plants were so
bright and prominent. I was shivering erratically, but I don't think
anyone noticed. After a bit, we moved into the garage, and continued
the bowl. All the seats were taken, I leaned up against the truck. We
started talking about how we felt, everyone had started their come up,
we all had that same tingle. They began talking about visuals, and I
guess no one had any yet. I took the most, though, and was
experiencing some very minor hallucinations. I was spacing in and out
of the conversation, looking at different surfaces. The markings on a
wood cabinet separated themselves from each other. The floor began to
spiral, but stopped quickly. Parts of it seemed closer to me than
others, like it was warped. A had noticed my confusion. The longer I
looked at his face, the tighter his skin grew. He had a very skeletal
look about him. I was always the quiet one, and I was even more quiet
now. We sat around in the garage for a while, shooting the sh*t and
whatnot. According to them, my pupils were extremely large, while
everyone else's weren't. I guess I was high.

We finished the bowl, and went back inside. We stopped in the kitchen
to wash the X's off of our hands from the show, plus my hands were
genuinely dirty. We noticed a carpenter ant crawling along the edge of
the counter. It first struck me as bizarre, all these legs and
segments, but I shook that feeling away. As we made our way to the
living room, N had stopped, and started making slow body motions, he
was doing tai-chi, I guess. He was embracing the acid, which we all
felt strongly now. We made ourselves comfortable and turned on the
movie, and I'll tell ya, it was weird. Never had a movie seemed so
strange, and all the dumb jokes combined with the LSD made it
uncomfortably hilarious. The characters looked as if they were made of
clay. The first person cut scenes of him prowling around at night were
almost jarring, we were all astounded after each one. At one point
towards the end of the movie, there was a shadow of window blinds cast
on the TV screen. Each segment of the screen grew away from each other
and melded back. E's dachshund crawled into someone's lap, and we
shared a gaze that seemed to last forever. The dog's face implanted
itself in the center of my vision, while everything surrounding
spiraled into a fractal mess. I almost believe we shared thoughts at
that moment, he was a being on a higher level than me, guiding me
through this haze. In reality, that moment only lasted like two
seconds, but it was significant. The movie was over. E and N wanted to
go smoke another bowl, but A and myself stayed inside. We turned off
the lamp and sat in silence. I reached the peak of an intense acid
trip.

I sat there on the couch, looking around. Everything breathed, nothing
was still. Things would blow up like a balloon, and then pop. There
was an endless loop of shadows gliding across the floor. I would close
my eyes for a minute, and a neon outline of the furniture would
remain. But the lines would melt into a puddle, and begin to boil. I
opened my eyes with a loud pop, and confetti sprinkled downward from
my sight. It was like on of those fireworks, 'BANG!
shshshshshshshshshshshs". A turned his head to me and said: "Are you
enjoying this as much as I am?". I simply looked at him and nodded. I
had to go to the bathroom, I drank like three cherry cokes. Walking
was definitely peculiar. My body felt so light. The hallway before the
bathroom stretched further and further. I heard the raucous laughter
of E and N through the door to the garage. Bathrooms have always been
hard to navigate for me while on psychedelics. This was no different.
I stood in front of the toilet, and watched it hover around, it would
contort itself so much, that urination had become a difficult task. I
literally couldn't do it, as I didn't want to, you know, get it
everywhere. In hindsight, it would've been easier to just go outside.
On my way out, I stopped and looked in the mirror. My entire iris was
black, and this frightened me a tad, the look on my face. I walked
back to the living room, the hallway that had stretched out before,
now shrunk on my way back. I went to lie down on the couch, and zone
out some more. It was still silent. A had asked me if I was having
crazy auditory hallucinations. I said "like what?". I don't know why.
But I was. Mainly that popping and crackling. If I closed my eyes,
there would be a loud whir. I was looking upward now. A hallucination
of a colorful compass-like object etched circles out of the ceiling.
Each one would then descend to me, and evaporate. Occasionally, one of
the circles would drift away, leaving an empty space where it used to
be. I sat up, watching the ceiling the whole time as it shifted. All
the circles were gone, and for a moment, there was nothing, not even
myself. This split second dragged for a bit, this was the best example
of time dilation from that night. I was thinking, "What's happened?
Everything has ceased." It wasn't even just black, but a truly empty
void, inhabited only by my ego, which had momentarily separated itself
from my body. Surreal thoughts and phrases bolted through the
emptiness. I heard loud thunder, and odd skittering. Random,
miscellaneous words strung together to form sentences, looking back,
they were nonsense, but I understood them at the time. The edge of the
void began wrinkling inward, and another circle appeared in the
center, the ceiling shone through. And just like that, the void had
been wiped away. It was like a play, I had reached the end of an act,
and some strange, omnipresent deity closed the curtain, and opened it
once again. I was back on the couch, and for a second, I wasn't even
hallucinating, everything was normal. For a moment I was thinking how
weird my body felt, and how weird the body is. I am just a conscious,
trapped inside a shell, all these thoughts and ideas compressed
inside. While in that void, my conscious was free, and everything in
my mind escaped, and began roaming free.

A had gotten up, blanket wrapped around him, "I'm going upstairs," he
said. I guess he was ready to crash. He asked to me to hand him the
vial on the table next to me, and I did, I was functioning easily. It
was xanax for when we wanted to go to sleep. I was alone now. I decide
to try to use the bathroom again. This time it wasn't as hard, and I
finally relieved myself. I looked in the mirror again, still black. My
skin had turned a weird orange color. The reflection of the wall
behind me was a blur, and every feature on my body morphed slowly. The
whites of my eyes had disappeared, and it was just two black dots,
darting around my face. I walked back through this accordion of a
hallway, and turned to the living room. It was completely different.
Everything was growing all over everything else. It all amplified
itself greatly, everything was a hundred times brighter, and I could
see every color and every shade imaginable throughout the room. I was
awestruck. The floor spun rapidly as I walked across it. I turned my
attention to E's shoes, a pair of black and white Converse high tops.
They lifted off the ground, just barely, about a centimeter, and began
rotating. One went clockwise, the other counter-clockwise. I was
fascinated, and continued watching. They landed, and then began
vibrating. You know those wind up shoe toys that walk around? Well,
they had wound themselves up. The right shoe would take a step, and
the left would wait until it was down, and take it's own step. They
walked all across the floor, leaving a sparkling black and white
checkerboard trail behind them. Even when I turned my head, they would
make their way into my peripheral and across the floor again. I looked
up, and they continued walking, across the center of my vision, up
walls, on the ceiling. I was dumbfounded. They walked with me into the
kitchen, by that time, the entire living room floor was a glowing
checkerboard. I was in the kitchen, and once they stepped onto the
white kitchen floor, they disappeared. I looked back, and they were
sitting there on the floor, which had returned to normal.

I went into the garage to join E and N, but N was just on his way back
inside. E and I then shared a bowl. Every time I reached for it, my
arms would move in slow motion, and even slower when I went to light
it. After it was done, we went back inside, I was in front. Walking
back to the living room I saw N sitting on the couch, staring at me. I
couldn't see his face, but my mind improvised, painting one on, with a
wide smile. I said, "What's up?" He just laughed and hopped up and
toward me. When E came in, he asked where A had gone. I said he went
upstairs. After a moment of frustration on his part, we all decided to
migrate. I grabbed a glass from the cupboard to get some water from
the fridge. I pushed the button in on the dispenser, and a red liquid
filled my glass. An intense red. Bubbles rose from the water like it
was carbonated. We went upstairs. The stairway seemed so high from the
bottom. When we opened the door to E's room, it was pitch black. I
shuffled in slowly as my vision was overtaken by kaleidoscope. E
turned on the light, and the shards all fell away. A was lying in the
bed. Someone had asked if he was having a bad trip, he said no and he
was just tired. I think his trip was over by the time we got there, if
not soon after. We all got situated, E in his chair, N sat at the end
of the bed, and I sat up against the wall on the right side of the
bed. The Simpsons had been turned on. While the opening sequence ran,
I looked at my hands, I would wave them back and forth. The tracers
were so prominent, that an image would still be in the place where I
began to move it. I believe N had taken a fourth hit of acid by now,
and he looked considerably high and confused. He was waving his hands
around too.

I was still peaking, I could tell. The show had no meaning to me. I
understood the words being said, and recognized them as language, but
they didn't process in my mind. They were speaking English, but that
lost all it's meaning to me. I wasn't even thinking in English,
thoughts formed as vivid images in my mind's eye. Everything happening
on the show was so miscellaneous, it was just a huge jumble of
oddness, yet we were all cracking up. E would laugh hysterically and
turn to us and say "I didn't understand any of that." If I focused on
a single character, everything around their face would mold together,
and they would be a head, floating in a sea of psychedelia. I would
also notice characters aging, right before my eyes. Hair would grow
long and gray, wrinkles would form around their face, until they died.
I would see the skin rot off, until they were nothing but a skeleton.
I was seeing characters getting hurt on TV, and it started occurring
to me that I didn't understand basic concepts of life anymore, such as
pain. I didn't understand feelings and physical sensations, emotions,
language, etc. I would even pinch myself, I couldn't feel anything.
Everything I knew about life had gone. I almost felt like I wasn't
supposed to be alive. I felt that if I died that instant, nothing
would change. The world would continue, and I would stay in this
state. Like there was no border between life and death. I wasn't
worried at all, just a little shocked that I had reached ego-death.
This lasted for a while. I was already dead. If my heart stopped, I
would remain in that bed, in the same state of confusion and state of
mind, and nothing would change at all. Once I had reached that stage,
that feeling would remain for the rest of the night. That feeling of
acceptance.

I was coming down now. I had no idea what time it was, but we ended up
watching four-ish episodes of the Simpsons. N was still very high.
Earlier he had smacked the bed, A jerked up and asked "what was that?'
N said he didn't know, or something, I'm not entirely sure how he
replied. A said he was almost finally asleep before that, and he
hadn't gotten any sleep the rest of the night. Language made more
sense now, I could piece words together and understand what they
meant. An odd hallucination, I remember, occurred while the show was
on. I was looking straight ahead, towards the TV, and had my legs
outstretched in front of me. The only way I could describe it was as a
cliff side drive-in. With the bed as the cliff, and the TV Suspended
out over the edge of the cliff. There was more to it than that, but
you know, sometimes you just can't explain it. It's all personal, only
you understand what you're trying to say. Sometimes it's like "Whoa,
that plant is growing up the wall," and everyone will say yeah man.
Sometimes you try to put it into words but you can't, and what does
come out is jumbled and confusing.

I don't remember much of what else happened while the sun was down,
but it soon rose, much to all of our surprise. We tried to smoke
another bowl in the room, but that confusion kept setting in. Someone
would hold it forever, stuff like that. If I recall correctly, we
didn't finish it for at least two hours. That morning was riddled with
bewilderment. A and E had been trying to go to sleep earlier, so they
did a lot of xanax, but it only got them high. We were trudging around
the room, throwing ourselves all over the furniture. N was still
pretty on acid, but I think he started coming down. I was almost all
the way down, there were still mild tracers and confusion, of course.
We would start looking for things, but forget what and continue
looking. "I have no idea what I'm looking for." We discussed taking a
morning walk, and smoking the bowl outside, (which was still going
around, apparently) but we never made it. It was around eight o'clock,
and we were still shuffling around, falling everywhere on purpose.
Nobody had any idea about anything. We were fried. A bottle of
Gatorade suddenly came into existence, I don't know where it came
from, and someone took a drink and remarked that it was the greatest
thing he had ever drank. We all took long, very long, satisfying
gulps, and whole-heartedly agreed. I myself was parched, and this
Gatorade quenched like no other.

We wandered around some more, then E's dad went off to work. We took
that as the queue to go downstairs and outside. Most of the confusion
was gone. We sat outside, which was incredibly bright and vibrant.
Everything was calm. We smoked about 600 bowls and reminisced about
the night. It was rejuvenating, to say the least. I felt like I had
just been born.