Story 7
First let me say that I have been to almost a hundred dead shows and never
tripped on acid until this past summer, 1997. I did shrooms at a few shows,
but never tripped hard enough to call it a real trip, because I never really
ate a great deal.
Well this past summer, my boyfriend decided to introduce me to real trippin'
and introduce me he did!!!! The first time I ate acid, we were at a bluegrass
festival in upstate New York, and the shit was pretty weak but I had a good
time, groovin' on the "amebas" which was something I talked about for hours.
Matt was finally like, what the fuck is an ameba?!?! I described the visual
to him, and he explained to me that what I was seeing was fractals. We
grooved on the Dead, 6/28/74 to be exact. We grooved on the bass player in
Hypnotic Clambake who was playing at this festival... we swear Chris Q knew we
were trippin' cuz when he noticed us starin' at him, he turned toward us and
played his bass like we had never seen before. Other than that, this trip was
fun but pretty much uneventful, except for the fact that I fell asleep
trippin' and woke up to the annoying sound of someone rummaging through a
cooler next to my tent for what seemed like hours, they were movin' shit in
the cooler around and the melted ice was LOUD as all hell. I woke up
extremely grumpy, and got out of the tent, and luckily Matt was still up, and
I grooved on fractals in the light of the lantern he was sitting under. (Does
anyone else only see WHITE fractals?) I'm jealous I dont usually see colors.
Anyway, this night was the beginning of "Olive Juice"... while we were sitting
there I look over at Matt and he mouths the words "I love you" - well
actually, who knows really what he said. I responded "I love you too" and he
said, "I didnt say I love you, I said OLIVE JUICE!" (Mouth the words olive
juice in the mirror sometime and tell me it doesnt look like yer sayin I love
you). He doesn't even remember this part of the trip, but to this day we say
Olive Juice most times instead of I love you. Anyway... enough about this
trip which I lived through with no permanent brain damage :-) The NEXT trip
however...
I thought, ok, trippin' is no big deal... I can handle it. So a few weeks
later we buy some doses and trip after the Jethro Tull show at Jones Beach.
We drop at about 12 AM and start trippin' around 1 AM or so. There were some
people over my house when we got there... including some guy with a tank of
nitrous, which we sucked on some balloons and made us start to get off a
little quicker. At first the trip was nothing out of the ordinary. Matt and
Marty played guitar in my living room, and everything had a sort of far-off,
dreamy sound to it. Then suddenly the patterns in the wooden floor started
swirling, and I knew immediately by the intensity of the visuals, I was in for
the ride of my life. The totally trippy sound of the guitars became a little
too much for me right then, so I headed into my computer room and went online
for a little normalcy. (Is that a word?) It was ok for about two minutes
until the dirt on my computer monitor began to melt and move, and the screen
and everything on it began melting. It was so intense compared to my first
acid trip that it freaked me out somewhat. I had to get a break from the
computer so I went back into the living room where Matt was getting off just
as hard as I was but he was enjoying it, being a wayyyyy more experienced
tripper than I was. Finally I made it clear to him that I was a little
freaked and needed to be with just him, because he knows how to make me have a
better time than anyone in the world. We headed downstairs into his basement
apartment and he began the trippy mind games with me that I enjoy. Matt got
the black lights out, and hung up the posters from his bedroom and we grooved
on that for a bit. For a few minutes we werent feeling like we were tripping
and we were sitting there on the couch when I looked out his window and the
lightning flashed outside (yes there was really lightning) but it was
GREEN!!!!! I was excited that I was beginning to experience my first trip
with wacky visuals, but I was also a little nervous, not knowing what to
expect. We took a few minutes and had an amazing time and then we put
on the Dead, 6/28/74 again since we dug it so much the last time... totally
expecting we were gonna have a blast this time too. For some reason though,
we noticed every imperfection in the music and in the tape... every wrong
note, everything that was just a fraction of a second off... we noticed it and
it was extremely annoying - so much so that we had to turn it off and put on
another show. That was the first clue that things were about to get wacky for
the BOTH of us. I started sweating and we put on the fan, and then I got
extremely cold and shut it off... only to be sweating again in a few minutes.
This battle with hot and cold lasted quite a while... probably even the whole
trip, but later on that became the least of my problems. Matt and I
alternated between shedding clothing to putting it back on, and from turning
the fan off to turning it back on. The fan became really interesting to watch
although totally freaky. Things started turning purple on me, and while Matt
was sitting on the floor with me, I looked at him at one point and his whole
face changed before my eyes... he looked like a king, but he had a purple-ish
looking face and I think the beads of sweat on him made him look all glittery.
I lay on the floor watching the fan, as things got weirder and weirder all
around me and I got more and more nervous. My foot began shaking back and
forth faster and faster, in an attempt I guess, to calm myself. I didnt even
realize it until Matt yelled at me out of no where to STOP! I then realized
he was starting to become freaked out by our trip, which freaked me out even
harder, because he was supposed to be the experienced one!!!! We decided to
head upstairs to talk to someone even more experienced than Matt. Well Thomas
was passed out, so we talked to Marty, who we didnt particular care for, but
we figured anything will help us at this point. Matt asked him a question, to
which he replied something about shaving off his eyebrow. We were like
THANKS, you really helped our bad trip. We were like, lets get the fuck out
of here... so we went back into the basement. That didnt help much, so we
went back upstairs. And over and over again. I really have no idea how long
we went upstairs, downstairs, etc... but it started becoming light outside and
things weren't getting any better. We went outside on my back deck, hoping
the change of scenery would help. It didn't. We looked at each other with a
pained expression, wondering if we were ever going to get our minds back. We
went downstairs and went into his bedroom where the walls are white and he had
taken all the posters and put them in the other room earlier, so we were
hoping the lack of stimuli would help. It didnt. We held each other and just
kept saying I love you OVER and OVER... trying to will each other into not
losing our minds. I began to come down a little bit, and I realized Matt was
still having a very hard time, so because I love him so much, I decided in my
mind to "take his bad trip for him." Well no one told me that an
inexperienced tripper should never do such a thing, because within minutes I
was tripping hard again, teetering on the brink of insanity. (Later we
described it as being reduced to a single cell organism). So we both lay
there holding each other, waiting for it to just go away. It wasnt working,
so we ventured upstairs and outside once again, where the cats were waiting
for their food, being that it was around 7 AM and past their normal feeding
time. We took one look at my cat Ripple, looked at each other and go, "He has
no idea." Every minute seemed like an hour or more. Matt kept asking me what
time it was, because we kept telling each other that in a while we'd be ok.
Well each time he asked it was only about a minute or two after the last time.
Finally he had this brainstorm of doing things as we normally do them in the
morning to try and bring ourselves back to reality. Lets make coffee, he
decided. However, Matt had no clue how to go about it, and he had taken more
hits than me, so I decided I was going to be the one that was going to help
HIM and take control of the situation. I got the coffee down out of the
cabinet, I put the water in the machine, I tried counting the correct number
of scoops, but everything became such a PROJECT. I counted the scoops out
loud, laughing my ass off because I felt so retarded... I was trying to
lighten the situation and I looked over at Matt, hoping my having a little bit
of fun was helping, when I realized it clearly wasnt. I didnt want either of
us to have any more chemicals in our body and thought coffee would send us
into the spins again, so I did everything but actually turn the coffee maker
ON. I kept telling Matt it was almost ready, until over an hour later he
forgot about it. We started calming down after about two hours of being
upstairs in the daylight, but we had to be in separate rooms, because
everytime we saw each other it brought back the intensity of the trip. So he
stayed in the living room while I went online and found some experienced
trippers to talk to and explained I was losing my mind... they helped talk me
down, but every time I left that room and saw Matt I began spinning again.
Finally we knew the worst of it was over, so we went downstairs to try and
sleep, which was basically impossible. We watched TV and the TV was just too
much for us... we finally just layed there and did nothing as it slowly wore
off.
It wasnt until 18 hours later that we were fully down, but for days things
were weird and fuzzy to us, and every time we smoked pot for about a month
things melted on us constantly and we got trails and fractals all the time.
One time I even saw Matt's aura when we were sitting on the back deck one
night smoking pot. I was grooving on this purple outline around him but had
no idea what it was... I just thought it was the street lights through the
woods that were reflecting weird. When I told him about it a few days later,
he told me it was his aura, because other people had told him he had a purple
aura. WOW!!!! I was never able to see auras before (nor have I been able to
since then).
Anyway... to this day when I smoke really good bud I trip... things melt...
and I ALWAYS see fractals... especially in the sunlight. I finally got
rainbow fractals (the ROYGBIV rainbow) which is really sweet. But most of the
time they are still white. I am nervous about dropping a full hit now,
because I think I only took one hit that night and it lasted 18 hours, even
though we think I might have eaten two, because there was one missing, but it
could have been anyone, even Matt, that took that extra hit that night...
because who knows anything for certain about that night. Now I stick to a
half a hit, and even then I get nervous I am losing my mind, but I dig it now.
Even looking back on parts of that gnarly trip, I totally dug it... and I dig
the memory of it. At the time I dug next to nothing, but there are some
things I wouldnt mind experiencing again. At least now I know you can be that
close the edge of insanity and still come back, so I'm not as afraid of losing
my marbles anymore :-)
Probably the grooviest experience I had while tripping though would hafta be
after that when I took a half hit and Matt took only one, which was just
perfect for the both of us... he kept telling me I was orange and we layed on
his bed laughing hysterically the whole time. But the coolest thing was when
he played his guitar and I laid on the sofa with my eyes closed and the notes
were dropping like raindrops all around the room. I could actually follow the
notes with my ears from the guitar to where ever the notes "landed" in the
room. It is the neatest thing I have ever experienced!!!!!