DOSE: T+ 0:00	1 hit	oral	LSD	(blotter / tab)
T+ 9:36	1 tablet	oral	Pharms - Diazepam

11:13: I'm in my room, which is bathed in morning sun. About 90 seconds ago I placed beneath my tongue a hit of acid, the first I've ever taken. My understanding is that it contains a dose of 125 micrograms, although I know I can't be sure.

As far as my 'set' is concerned, I guess I feel alright. My last meal was 14 or 15 hours ago. I'm listening to Trane's Sun Ship.

11:23: I think that one of the trickiest aspects of this trip will be keeping the tab in place. I should be better at this, shouldn't I, given my familiarity with the sublingual route of administration.

11:28: Already I feel different somehow. This music -- "Attaining" -- is hospitable.

11:38: I'm experiencing butterflies so strong that I had to sit down. It's like their giant wings are abrading my insides as they flutter.

12:04: I feel anxious, and unsteady on my feet, but at the same time I'm beginning to feel orgasmic. I realise that is far too crude a word -- too trite, too clumsy.

12:25: I feel amazing -- like a coiled spring. The tensity, and the sheer pleasure of that tensity. This music -- Bicep -- is almost too much to bear. I think it would be folly to try to step out of this experience in order to describe it. Just feel, mate, feel. There's no need to record everything.

12:28: I am positively vibrating. It's like I want to burst out of myself.

12:59: I'm feeling no less euphoric. The visuals are really beginning now. My carpet squirms with fractals. The tab -- a little mushy now -- is still beneath my tongue.

13:02: This screen is bulging and pulsing and warping, and fractals try to impose themselves upon it. Nothing is static; everything seems viscous. Is some of my physical energy starting to dissipate now? Will it give way to (greater) mentation?

13:27: I realise now that I am in the hands of a very powerful instrument. These visuals are unlike anything I've ever experienced before, but it's the mental aspect of the trip that threatens to overwhelm me. Looked at one way I'm just in a particularly elevated form of my usual hyper-anxious state.

13:43: I could allow myself to be shredded by this substance, but the effects it's producing in me -- aren't they sort of, well, normal? They're nothing I can't deal with; they're not telling me anything about myself that I don't already know. Perhaps they should be? I'm struck by the banality of these words -- their limpness compared to what I'm going through right now -- the ultra-heightened state of my sensorium.

13:53: Pondering the impossibility or otherwise of truly relating to other human beings. Understanding it's a hunger that cannot be sated.

13:55: One of the powers of this drug is that it's forcing me to identify and confront what is most ugly in me.

13:59: I think a lot of my ugliness stems from my desire to be a 'man'.

14:04: If only I could jettison that desire and all that clings to it.

There is also the matter of my physical ugliness, but isn't it pointlessly masochistic to flog that dead horse? I look at myself in the mirror, albeit from a distance. I see self-evolving variations on a fundamental ugliness. Some more attractive than others, but isn't that the point?

14:15: Why do I want to be a 'man'? Insecurity. Uncertainty. My stature. My background, and the effect this had -- continues to have? -- on my socialisation.

14:20: It'd be criminal to trip without listening to Shpongle. For a decade their music (among other things) has sustained the flame of my desire to trip. I'm therefore going to try as best I can to muffle my thoughts for a while and luxuriate in "Monster Hit".

14:23: There's no such thing as a prelapsarian time as far as the self is concerned. I can pretend that x was the case before I did y or went and said z, but the reality is that my entire history has been stained with embarrassment and the embarrassment of embarrassments. What is it that Alain Leroy mumbles when he staggers sweating from the restroom? 'The humiliation of it all.'

All this, then, points -- and can only point -- to one end. 'Suicide has the power to transfigure life, with all its quotidian mess, its conflicts, its ambivalences, its disappointments, its unfinished business, its 'waste and fever and heat' -- into a stone-cold myth'. The sentence -- Fisher's -- rings coldly, sardonically even.

For in the final analysis, a myth is what it is. The paraphernalia of suicide can be glamorous, but it barely conceals the sordidness of the act itself, the desperation.

14:34: I'm not overly concerned or distressed by my thought-processes. I guess it's good -- or not so good -- to know that they continue to revolve around the same sick ideas.

14:43: My black skinny jeans lie in a heap on the floor. I can't help but see them as a pile of rags containing the gaunt dead body of a thing I couldn't really call a baby.

15:04: Can I believe that nearly four hours have passed since I put that square of blotter-paper underneath my tongue? It's still there, by the way.

15:08: Promise. Collapsing. Inexorably. And then, always, the logic of suicide, like a stain I can't scrub away.

15:15: I carry around with me the 'energy', or whatever it is, of Death. I am a 'gnawing little negation' -- and destined always to be so.

15:19: I'm poring over a Basquiat, namely Riding with Death (1988). It astonishes me -- the sheer fucking fatalism of it. Here we have a work which sees its creator prophesy, with stark and sombre certitude, the event of his imminent death (and imminent it was).

15:20: It's funny to think now about how good I felt during the early stages of this trip. I felt blissful. I want to recapture some of that euphoria now, more than four hours after dosing.

15:32: I turn off the music, lay down on my bed and close my eyes.

15:54: I thought I would get some food, so I went into the kitchen. A was in there packing away her things. I told her I was tripping. With the wisdom of one who has been in my current position many times before, she recommended that I go out for a walk and into nature, which I will do once I've finished eating these bran flakes.

15:57: I'm reading all about coelacanths. What bizarre fucking creatures.

17:11: The only thing that drugs reveal to me is the stubbornness of what I knew already.

17:14: The curse of not quite belonging in the world. That feeling never goes away -- it's like I'm a left foot in a right shoe.

17:21: There is a tranquility now though, as I sit pharoah-like on my graffiti-blazoned throne. Watching the waters of the canal, flecked as they are by points of sunlight. Attuned to the existence of the littlest insect but not desirous of human company. I should have come out sooner than I did.

20:37: The three preceding entries were composed as memos on my phone, for I had by that time ventured up Three Mill Lane and then along the "River" Lea. I walked for a while before sitting down to think -- think hard -- and take in some lingering visuals.

20:49: I've showered, changed and changed my bed-sheets. I've taken most of a Valium and had plenty of water. But I'm still not back to baseline. A said to me a few hours ago that tripping on acid is a 'commitment'. She is so right.

Life could have been so easy. I could have just done what my parents wanted for me. 'No flowers grow upon busy machinery', but at least that machinery would have worked.

20:55: I need some time to digest this trip -- to understand its meaning. But at the same time I reckon I'll be able to get up tomorrow and dismiss it and go about my business. I know exactly why -- vide some of my earlier entries.

Ten hours after lift-off, I'll finish this trip report by quoting Fisher again: '[d]epression is not sadness, not even a state of mind, it is a (neuro)philosophical (dis)position.'

Exp Year: 2018	ExpID: 115915
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 25
Published: Nov 21, 2021	Views: 1,352
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