EPTWe went to Safeway to pick up our dextromethorphan and some juice. Juice is a very important substance to a psychonauts and pirates alike. Turns out vitamin C prevents scurvy and makes you hallucinate wildly. I stood next to my partner in the cough syrup aisle.
"So, this is 100% legal, right?"
"Hmm? Oh, yeah," he said, doing some math on his phone.
"I weigh about 155 pounds, how much do I need?"
"Let's see... that's 70 kilograms... 350... if you're going for a second plat, you should drink 2/3 of this bottle," he said, handing me a $5 bottle of cough syrup, "I'm going to take these pills because I've developed an aversion to how Robitussin smells."
The plat he referred to was a plateau. DXM has different plateaus of experience based on how much you take, and they all offer different effects. I was going for a second plateau, the one right underneath complete sensory loss and spinal cord dissociation.
An alarm was going off inside Safeway while we did our dosage calculations against the back wall. They shut it off, and a voice came over the loudspeaker, telling us that the cashiers would be closed until they managed to reset the locks. Thank you for shopping at Safeway.
We looked at each other, and I went to investigate. People were still standing in line. I went back to my friend, checking out the mismatched couples in the grocery store at 10pm. Some of them eyed back, pleadingly.
Ten minutes later, the lines started to move again, and my friend and I stood in separate lines, holding cranberry juice, orange juice, a bottle of cough syrup, some pills and some gum. I asked him about how to extract a chemical similar to Adderall from the cotton inside of Vick's inhalers and he gave me the low down on lemon juice. Legal illegal drug alternatives are usually quite complicated.
I smoked a cig outside as I waited for him to finalize his purchase. He had got into the slower line, and it gave me time to make eye contact with a meth-faced lady pushing a shopping cart and some hoodlums sitting on a tabletop. I glanced them over, uncaring, mind on the greater issue of the impending state of alteria. I hadn't ever done DXM before, and after dismissing it as something college kids did to get high because they were broke, my friend had mentioned it to me and shown me some research. It was actually really fun, and quite safe, and there were certain dosages that have been aggregated over a large number of trials of informal experiential research online, something that true psychonauts end up doing at some point in their journey inward and outward. I had suspended the limits of my drug exploration after a bad combination of alcohol and methoxetamine, an analogue of ketamine--a dissociative, also known as special k--had left me on my knees puking next to my car in a parking lot, unable to control my body, head pounding from an alcohol allergy, on a psychedelic trip in my mind. Since then, it had been a stretch for me to try new substances. I thought I was content with my repertoire of drug experiences. I pondered this as my friend came out of the store, and we walked back to an undisclosed location.
"What does 'self-actualization' mean to you?"
"Hmm... that depends how you define it, I guess. To me it's respecting myself and knowing what I want and living healthily..." he began, explaining his views on the capstone achievement in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I was working my way out of the lower side of the pyramid. He was a few levels above me.
"I think mine is more general. To me it's being able to materialize something that I've visualized. Like, if I can create a path to it in my head, I should be able to make it happen."
We walked up the steps to a place. Inside, we set our computers up and got our juices out and I put a notebook and a pen on the bed next to my chair. Everything was set for the trip ahead. My friend put a trash can between us, facing opposite ends of the room, each with our own wall to stare at and a computer chair to recline in.
"I'm going to put this here just in case," he said, "DXM vomit comes from nowhere." I opened the packaging on my bottle of cough syrup. "Oh, I'm going to leave the room," he said, as he had mentioned before that the smell of cough syrup made him vomit uncontrollably. Sauce Bearnaise syndrome.
I poked a hole in the shiny metallic plastic underneath the lid with my keys and smelled the bottle. It was Robitussin, alright. The ingredients listed menthol, and my friend had advised me to take a deep breath, chug the bottle, drink some chaser, then exhale. If I inhaled before drinking the chaser the vapors from the medicine would catch my lungs on the way out and I would probably vomit. I stood over the sink. Here goes.
After emptying a little too much of the bottle into my stomach and drinking some sink water, I spit a little blue-red expectorate into the sink and shook my head. I looked at the bottle. Oops. I think I drank too much, I told him.
It'll be fine, he assured me. You might have a strong trip.
I was reading the DXM FAQ online and it talked about a level 2.5 plateau, between 2 and 3, where all of the dissociative effects that I was treading lightly on occurred. Oh well, what's done is done. I might be going a little too deep.
We played a game of League to calm our nerves and wait for the comeup. As we were finishing the game, I felt my thinking cloud. Psychedelic trips were always like this. As a psychonaut, you tend to get used to them. It's very disorienting if you've never felt it before, and it's the reason why people have bad trips. Once you level on a psychedelic trip it's never so bad. You're just coasting along the mental highway at an extremely high speed. It's the acceleration that kills people. Figuratively, of course. You can't easily overdose on psychedelics. The internet also assured me that there was nothing dangerous about drinking an entire bottle of Robitussin, so I had no qualms about overshooting, except maybe that it might be too intense.
"We're like the yin and yang of psychedelics," I told my partner, pointing to the room set up. His blond hair contrasted with my black hair and the way we were seated in the room was like the tao. Things like that become significant when you're tripping. My partner and I were highly experienced individuals. We had been where a vast majority of the world would never go, to the dimensions of nirvana and enlightenment that the Buddhists train their whole lives to be able to attain. We discussed our pasts together and repented to each other for a previous transgression, and gave thanks to the level of achievement we had each come to in our paths. "There's a lot out there for both of us," I noted, mind still trying to catch up to the breakneck speed of thought.
I disconnected from my computer and leaned back in my chair, reclining as it squeaked in leathery objection. Loud techno music pounded over the surround sound as I slurred my thoughts and pondered the meaning of the word "syzzurp". I was on the comeup, hard, as hard as I've ever been, and the level of confusion taking over my body was on par with that of ketamine or extremely high-dose psilocin, the chemical in mushrooms. Disoriented, I looked around, and my friend turned off the lights. The techno music hammered at my cerebellum.
"Man... it's so intense," I said to my confidant, who was showing less signs of affliction from the syzzurp because he was experienced in this particular dissociative, and had taken his in gelcap form to trick his body into allowing him to swallow it. First, his stomach had to dissolve 20 gelcaps, and then he'd start absorbing the DXM, and then his body would realize what was going on and he'd probably throw up. "I think I'm fighting it too much," I said.
Fighting it is something that people who are first introduced to psychedelics do instinctually. The comeup is so fast and rapid compared to any other experience they've had in their whole lives that their body freaks out and tries to clutch to reality. It's like being launched out of a cannon with a parasail strapped to your back. The magnitude of a psychedelic experience, to someone who has never been experienced, is unfathomable. I am completely incapable of describing it in words.
I went to the bathroom to go throw up. Throwing up is giving in to the fact that the drug is more powerful than your body, and you're letting it take control. Throwing up is a symbolic purge of the impurities of the body, the weakness of the flesh. Throwing up means you've touched the peak of the comeup, and you're set to coast for miles. I was ready.
"GAAARRRRBRRAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGHhhhhhhhhhaahahh," I spewed, into the comforting white porcelain, "GAAARBRRAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHHHH." Surprisingly, nothing came out.
"Holy shit," I exclaimed to my partner after rinsing my mouth out in the sink and slumping to the floor in his bathroom. His dog came over and licked my face. The clouding disorientation faded to a clear, painless psychedelia.
"Feeling better?" he asked.
"Oh yeah," I nodded, cracking a sinister grin. It was on.
I climbed back into my chair and reclined back, throwing my hood over my eyes and descending into meditation. I could create here. I could see the physical manifestations of sound, the beat as an electric phoenix spiraling like a pendulum over a sea of pulsing waves. I let the bird morph into a tower in the middle of a room which was tiled with scenes from my life. The tower kept rising, and inside it held scenes from a future that I constructed. I came to some understandings about my life path and connected some of the dots looking backwards, and wondered what would come of the path forward, feeling it unfold within the tower of space-time, actually physically touching the people and places in my head. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, I pondered, and broke out of my visualization long enough to write a facebook message and send a text. Real life seemed so trivial. Here I was king. The sound manifested itself again visually behind my closed eyes, and I went deep, shutting down the connection between my spinal cord and brain. Here lies dissociation. I let it take control of my thoughts as I focused on the isolated sense of kinesthesia between my tongue and clenched teeth.
I must have sat like that, reclined in my chair, in a dark room with pounding techno music, hood draped over my eyes in deep meditation, for hours. The insight you gain from something like that is unfathomable. It's definitely not something I would recommend for someone with a weak body, mind, or spirit.
(To be continued...)
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