9/12/18

i took what i thought would be a large dose of psilocybin mushrooms today.

i woke up at 10:30 a.m. and hadn't decided if i wanted to eat them. i had planned to eat them today, but last night i felt somewhat unhealthy. i had developed what i think is probably a "heat rash" mostly on my stomach, which i couldn't decide if i felt concerned about or not. i meditated for ten minutes and saw the glittery cloud thing. i read the section of michael pollan's 'how to change your mind' re his psilocybin trip. i'd decided to save it to read until this morning, and to let that inform my decision, but actually i'd, like, pretty much decided right after meditating that i would eat the mushrooms. it was like 9:1 odds that i'd eat the mushrooms, i figured, and pollan's experience wasn't that interesting.

i blended what i estimated was an eighth of an ounce of mushrooms with the juice of two lemons and a generous amount of honey from a squeeze bottle. the label on the bottle says: "PENNSYLVANIA / Raw / Mountain / Wildflower / Pure Honey" and other things. i just opened it to squeeze some honey into my mouth, and there were a dozen or so ants running around inside the cap thing. i washed it out and tried to examine if there were ants in the actual honey itself. i guess i have an ant problem, in addition to the cockroach problem. i've been more focused on the cockroach problem. anyway, after i cleaned the ants off the honey cap, i squeezed some honey into my mouth. that felt nice. i looked up at the ceiling and saw an enormous cockroach had found its way into my light fixture. not the kind of cockroach i seem to have problems with, since subletting my apartment to those people, the other kind. the "waterbug" kind of cockroach. i like those ones. i can't tell if it's alive or dead.

i ate a pot edible about eighty minutes ago. um... had some trepidation about typing "eighty"... i wanted to type "80" instead? is that what i'm thinking? i'm not spending my time wisely, thinking, in that case, i think.

the stuff michael pollan covered about psychedelics allowing for more entropy in the brain is cool. from what he wrote about, though, i feel like i probably have more entropy in my brain than the average person, anyway. that said, he qualified depression as not being entropic, but the opposite: very orderly. i thought that was interesting. i'm depressed only some of the time. i've been feeling fine for the past few days... i think. i think that's fair to put out there. "past few days" seems a fair assessment for public consumption. you, reader, being my public. haven't gotten to anything about the trip yet. thanks.

okay. so i drank the mushrooms. wait... here, i'll put in a picture of the only page of notes i took in my notebook, expecting to maybe want to take more notes, or draw or something. but no, mostly i just wasn't moving much and having thoughts. i was listening to the radio. i found the notebook among things i've owned for more years than i can account for, and it felt like good portent. wait! here is the picture:


so i expected to be tripping very hard, but i ended up not tripping as hard as i have in other experiences, which was fine. it was still satisfyingly mystical. there're ants crawling on me right now. i can never decide if it's okay to kill them or not.

i had to pee several times. i drank the rest of the "juice" after about an hour, and then also ate another half a stem and cap. after meat puppets stopped, i listened to part of that experimental jazz cd i like so much, 'drum dance to the motherland' by the khan jamal creative ensemble, but i stopped it because i could hear music playing faintly from the radio in the kitchen. i wanted to keep the radio on in the kitchen, even though i was doing other things in the other room, at some point. and i heard the radio music, and it was so melancholy. it was the most melancholy blues or r&b song. how can you tell if it's blues or r&b? i feel like it's r&b if it's sung by a woman and blues if it's sung by a man, even though i know that's not right. for whatever reason, a man can sing both r&b and blues, but a woman can only sing r&b? no, that's not true... what about billie holiday? that was the blues! i feel better, having cleared that up, but i still don't know if the melancholy song was blues or r&b. i realized i was feeling melancholy along with the song, because of the song, but i felt nice too, because i felt connected to something. i felt "at peace" with that. around this time i had my eyes closed and was having visuals and barely forgot who i was, but then i didn't.

something that happened that i expected would happen, but that i wouldn't know how to tell people why i expected it, exactly, without just being like, "this is part of a ritual of paranoid psychedelic and spiritual submission; i gave myself over to modes of knowledge like this at some point; it doesn't matter," was that my therapist called to set our appointment for our first session since i completed the intake stuff again. the last time i took a proper dose of lsd, the same thing happened, except it was after i'd completed the intake stuff for the first time. that was on april 26, i think. sixteen days after i'd done the intake. this time they called me back eight days after i'd done the intake.

i think they're doing the closest thing to "god's work" at the coney island branch of the jewish board of family and children's services. they really seem to get it. there are a lot of, like, veterans and people missing limbs and with intellectual disabilities in the waiting area, and almost all the services are provided free of charge, i think. maybe you have to have insurance. i want to post this link here, which helped me get affordable mental health services at a very dark time in my life: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1T4sGRq4T1BvUOcBHiI0Ikv5Y07N1zShbUFRBfAv_Kno/edit. and i also want to thank mira for sending it to me. thank you mira.

what else... i was just in the bathroom peeing... but i got up for some reason before that. it was something to do with touching my back, i think. and then, oh yeah! oh, i was thinking i should drink the smallest amount of coffee to ward off this oncoming caffeine-addiction-related headache, but that i've been thinking this for three and a half hours, and now it's almost 9:30 p.m., and i wanted to turn in early tonight, because i made plans to play tennis with john in the morning. just the smallest amount, though... such a small amount... all right, i did it. if that keeps me up past midnight, though... you motherfuckers... just know where to put your shame, that's my advice. shove it!

anyway, my therapist called, as i'd expected she would, and i felt so happy to hear her voice. i didn't say much, just the words, "i'm well—how are you" and "tuesday at eleven is perfect" and "terrific" maybe... maybe some other stuff, but claire seemed to know something was amiss. she seemed determined to get off the phone as quickly as possible. probably she had other calls to make. she probably didn't care enough to question the amissness of whatever was going on with old dave (me). more likely, she didn't think anything was amiss. and if she could tell i was tripping from that brief exchange, that makes me even more excited to be her patient. shouts out to claire, man, i want to make it rain with the appreciation i feel toward her.

and others, sure. (slant rhyme)

normal psychedelic trip stuff was happening, so i left my phone and my wallet in my apartment and walked out to the beach.

as i got closer to the end of my block, where the beach starts, i felt myself, like, entering another world. like in a video game, when you go to some parallel dimension. or like, a new chapter in zelda or something (does zelda have things you could call "chapters"? i don't remember hardly anything about any of those games)... it felt a little like that. except it felt significantly more mystical... like the game 'myst'... and there was a great deal of fog. you could not see forty feet past where the water touched the shore. (that's a clause i use in my story "being gross," by the way: "where the water touched the shore.")

and it was very low tide. the jetties were fully exposed in places i'd never seen before. the sea-flora exposed on them was vividly green. the rocks were a nice charcoal. everything was shimmery, but matte. and i saw a couple standing on the beach and looking into the dense air, and i walked west, where i did not encounter any couples. i saw mostly elderly people, and people seeming utterly alone and not taking issue with that. i saw a man walking a pomeranian. he seemed to make "sexy eyes" with me, but he was so normal looking, and middle-aged, and (frankly, i edited this out initially, but it's accurate, objectively, so fuck it, it's informative, and more importantly, it doesn't speak my level of attraction to him) ugly. maybe he's a freak, though. i hope i'll see him again. i walked toward an elderly woman, maybe seventy-ish years old, sitting on the jetty with a towel wrapped around her, brushing her hair. i believed she was nude underneath the towel, but i didn't look too closely. i felt extremely comforted by her presence, but i also didn't want to disturb or disconcert her, so instead of subtly approaching, hoping, uh, what(?), maybe to talk to her(?), which i felt very drawn to doing, i kept my distance.

i looked at sand. the entire beach was packed hard because of all the rain. i put my feet in the water, and the water and the air were the same temperature, around seventy-five degrees. it felt erogenous, but in a "that's none of my business" type of way. i looked at some of the indentations in the sand, left by the ebbing/flowing tide. many looked like root systems, neural networks. they were so intricate and fractal and natural. (i typed "fractic" instead of "fractal" at first, which i think is an excellent amalgum, actually, of "frantic" and "fractal." take note kids: "fractic" is the new gak. you're gonna be ordering it out of the back of nickelodeon magazine after you hear what lil uzi vert can do with it. and on that note: uzi (or his management, or whatever), if you're reading this, email dfishkind@gmail.com for rights to the word "fractic." (i'm copping megan boyle's style right now, aren't i? shouts out to you too, megan.)) this is when i felt some pang of regret for not bringing my phone, because i wanted to take a picture of the sand, and the fog, and the slime and green on the rocks, but then i felt good. because it was for me, then, unmediated, and without the pressure to document it in a way where it wouldn't look like what i thought it did anyway. i didn't want an objective, or worse yet, a corporatized (via apple), account of what was going on... so i was happy i didn't have my phone, by way of justifying that i didn't need to use its camera, even though i wished i could, somewhat, while knowing if i ran back to my apartment to get it, i'd be destroying the actual awe-inspiring stuff i was seeing... something about trying to commodify them... thoughts can run like this forever.

so i knew this was happening alone, and i was okay with that. it felt appropriate, and i felt increasingly willing to indulge that... (that sentence was getting away from me, so i ellipsed its ass.) i sat on the jetty and climbed out further, but i was wearing adidas slides and they were slipping on the wetness of the rocks and the sea-flora and the mollusks and barnacles clinging to everything. i sat for a while staring into the gray. it rained a little bit. i got off the rocks.

i walked farther west, and i watched people going in an out of the water. each person seemed drawn, almost religiously into the bay. the surf in coney island is almost nonexistent, so it's like a big tub. like a bathhouse thing. and i saw an elderly woman coming out of the water. and, past the next jetty, i saw a young man wearing plaid boxers going into the water. he was, like, appearing to "cleanse" himself. i wanted to go in the water too, so i walked past the next jetty and took off all my clothes except my underwear and left them on a rock. i went in the water. i stepped on trash and broken shells and stuff. the water was in the air, the atmosphere and the water, it all seemed like one contiguous entity. and i felt emotional.

i was having all kinds of thoughts, reader. i haven't told you about a lot of it. i was having my private thoughts, and i was in the water emotional. and i got in so it covered all of my body, and then i quickly got out. in retrospect i wish i'd relaxed more and floated around, but i felt a bit nervous about going out too far. i'll admit it. i was worried i might drown myself, folks. accidentally, i mean. or maybe it would've seemed like a good idea. i wasn't feeling desperate or bad, that's not what i mean. i felt very calm while the water was over my head. and i put my clothes back on and walked home. it was on this walk, eastward, that i saw the man with the pomeranian. actually my shirt was off still, and my hair was very wet. that's what influenced me to think he was making "sexy eyes" at me. i supposed, given [whatever], i looked very sexy.

in my apartment, i hadn't received any texts or notifications. i've been leaving my phone on "do not disturb" more often, and letting it dictate my decisions and interests less, maybe minisculely so, but so, even so, you know? and i also discovered i'd only been outside for forty-nine minutes. it had felt longer. there was just a lot weight to how it felt out there. i was seeing birds fly around and stuff. at one point, before i got to the beach, i stopped to observe some flowers, but then i had to stop myself from standing in one place, intently staring at a flower, because there was a cool young guy with a nice car doing things in his car and with a style of "being," like it'd be better if i gave him the privacy to do whatever he needed to do in his car.

i mentioned the birds. can i tell you about these birds? they were seagulls. they looked very great.

i showered for a long time. i picked at some of the grime and mold on the shower walls. i thought about spending some of my trip intently cleaning my shower, and i weighed the pros and cons of that, and there seemed to be a lot of pros, but i talked myself out of it. in any case, after the shower, i didn't feel like i was "tripping" anymore. i lay on my bed and had thoughts and felt that it was special and okay to exist, despite [something more precise re "all the limitations"].

i feel so many limitations. on what i can give, on what i can receive. even when i think in, like, terms of infiniteness, i know i cannot give and receive without limitation. i know that i have to work within my own limitations. it's okay. there's no limit to the amount of "feeling" you can experience, though, i think. i think you can "feel" into eternity, which is nice, even just as a thought. i'm glad about that.

i read some more of the michael pollan book. i want to go cook dinner, but i also wanted to maybe paste something i texted my mother... i wanted to paste that in here earlier, before i started writing this, because i wanted to be able to look at it later, easily accessible, but now i don't know. i need to look at what i was going to say. also i'm going to preheat the oven because it's 10:00 p.m. and i haven't started preparing dinner...

ok here's the thing i was going to paste here: "well, yeah. i'm just so weird and interior lately. the past couple years. and i feel like my ability to aptly, healthily socialize comes and goes. maybe this is part of bipolar, i'm starting regular sessions with my therapist again next week. but i just want you to know, i feel so lucky that you're my mom. there couldn't be a better mom, you're an awesome person. and i wanted to tell you how much i love you, so i texted"

it's good to love your mom, man. i'm worried this looks like i'm bragging, but... nah, this blog is for me. i want to be able to know that on this day, september 12, 2018, i went out of my way to shout out my mom, straight to her, via our phones... i'm bragging. i love my mom. that's that.

is that rain what i'm hearing?

the thesis of this blog post is: the dose of mushrooms wasn't as strong as i expected.

and, uh, i think i have nothing else i want to include. i'm feeling dehydrated. that's a fixable problem that i can go ahead and fix, and thus i will, imminently, after finishing typing this, and then pressing the "publish" button... going to do that, i guess... should i? okay, i'm going to now. okay.


1 comment:

willisplummer said...

heh. i think that if you are ready for a serious dose it always ends up being a little underwhelming based on my experience last weekend trying to get entheogenic on a couple tabs of ellis b