tetra-hydro-para-schizomagination

An exercise in memory and analysis. Was drinking with M. We were having a good time and everything was groovy. I was sticking with plain, easy alcohol, no other drugs. But I asked him, out of curiosity, if he had any acid left. He checked his pockets and found nothing. Then he asked me if I wanted to smoke some crack. So I said, you have crack? Really? He said yeah, and put something into a pipe.

I had a brief glance. It was a little white something, looked like it could have been a crack rock, so I accepted that it was crack – hit the pipe and took as big a hit as I could. Didn’t really feel anything, but the initial taste reminded me of pot. Whatever that little white something he’d put into the pipe was, it had disappeared under the flame. He put some more in, this time registering to my eyes as a little white bubble. I hit it hard and asked him again, this is really crack? He said yeah. I was starting to feel tripped out. I got what was probably a placebo effect for a few seconds, felt a little stimulation and thought, oh, this is a crack high, I guess I’m high on crack! I wasn’t really feeling euphoric or anything though, so I questioned M again, and he told me that it was tree sap.

Then he went on some spiel about how it was the same as crack. So I thought, that white bubble thing, maybe that was sap, could have been sap. Then M told me there was DMT in the sap, and shamans use it. So I’m thinking, he’s really fucking with my head here. I definitely felt stoned, but on what? It definitely wasn’t crack, there was no euphoria or upper feeling. It felt like pot, but very strong pot. Was very tripped out, so it was plausible to me there could have been DMT, or 5meo in the mix. There weren’t any visuals, but I was stoned and suggestible all of a sudden, so part of my brain was open to the idea that I’d smoked crack or tree sap or tryptamines, and was thus coming up with wild theories about how it could be one or the other or all of the above. And another part of my brain was questioning whether I’d been deceived, and for what purpose, and was M trying to teach me some redundant lesson about the power of the mind, and placebo? And an ultra skeptical part was wondering if that white thing was something he’d put into the pipe to make it look like crack, and there just happened to be hash resin in there that got me stoned. Or if it was actual tree sap mixed with the resin. Or maybe he’d taken a chunk of hash and coated it with K. Or if, since I’d been expecting crack, my mind had just created the “white thing” for me. And he was going on these weird raps, trigging weird stoned thoughts. My head was chaos, trying to sort this out.

So then he started showing me this trippy visual software he’d created, spiraling patterns mapped over spheres, cool stuff. I was getting lost in the visuals, sitting in front of his monitor, but then he kept telling me to press certain keys, to do this and that, insistently. So I obliged, but his commands sounded increasingly tense and frustrated. I got the feeling he was upset that I couldn’t do what he wanted me to do with his software. He was saying that this and that controls the mouse sensitivity and you have to do it like this, etc, etc. I understood the specifics of what keys did what, and tried to tell him that, but I couldn’t understand why he was frustrated, and what he wanted me to do. It got really frentic and irritating, and I began to feel oppressed and overwhelmed. When he took over the mouse, he made the visualizer change much faster, and what I was seeing was tripping me out more and more, and making strange patterns in my brain that I didn’t know what to do with. His fragmentary raps had me thinking that he was trying to show me some new way of seeing, like his software had opened a window into another dimension, or something, and this was an initiation that I was failing, because I was a frustratingly clueless apprentice. Something in my reaction led him to say “I didn’t mean to offend you”. I felt like I was the one who had offended him. But I was also confused and irritated. I just wanted to play around with his cool visualizer, but he had some huge bug up his ass, and I couldn’t figure what it was all about, and what it had to do with me. So I said he could take the controls. He did K and I went home. The last thing he said was a comment on the quality of a house that I interpreted as meaning: “haha, you loser”.

Was hellishly paranoid the rest of the night. Went back to my old room, still stoned out of my mind, intense closed eye visuals. Listened to the fugue from Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata, indescribably beautiful and brilliant, blew my mind. But all the sound and visual sensory splender was gloss over the sick grinding paranoia. Probably had a lot to do with feeling like a failure, and being unable to cope. That was the psychological baseline the drug was working with. I decided what I’d smoked was definitely hash. Or pot resin. Nothing else. And M had been fucking with my head. Or was crazy, and actually thought it was crack or tree sap or something. I get paranoid and suggestible when I smoke THC, especially if it’s unexpectedly.

Schizophrenia, THC, paranoia, imagination, they’re all tightly tied together. A lot of my trip that night was paranoia, but I’m not convinced that all of it was. The real killer is that for every false positive, the rare time something happens that is the result of real, actual malice on someone’s part – confirmation of that could legitimize all the false positives, and keep the cycle of negativity going. Well, that’s my theory, anyway. I’d planned to stop by the house after work last night and simply ask M what was going on last night, and what he was frustrated about, and why he’d put something in the pipe and called it crack when it was pot… But I knocked on the door and he yelled “we’re closed”, so I thought, fuck him, and went home.