"acid" evokes decades of hippie-derived psychedelia and associated baggage. the beatles! rugs that smell bad! paisley everywhere. bad posters. guys with long hair and platitudes! admittedly, a bunch of very nice music that i enjoy quite a lot. kaleidoscopes and sunshine haha. observed visual patterns repeated piecemeal in art, with no deeper understanding of their neurological origins in the serotonergic signalling of the V1-V6 layers of the primary visual cortex. ditch weed. 1967 in the Haight. giggling and rolling down a hill. dancing at the commune, don't ask who does the dishes! hey man, keep that fag shit to yourself! woodstock! woodstock '99! fucking in beat up Chevy vans. wastes of V8s that have never been used to haul anything except the mattress and shag carpet. nazi cars. new beetles. r. crumbian self-loathing. merchandise with nazi cars! merchandise purchased in the Haight in 2024! complete lack of political awareness, from then 'til now! nostalgia ground up and fed to the profit motive! they were THERE and they see NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS! it makes me SICK!
yank the base compound from its cultural context and it is something completely different.
you ever hear of lysergic acid diethylamide? they call it "magnifier."
a few years ago i was at a friend's house and they were like "hey wanna do lsd" and i said fuck it why not
...
most of my life people had asked me if i was on drugs, because the way i would talk, or my thinking process, and it was always fun to say "nope this is just how my brain works"
my writing and metaphors have always been surreal and psychedelic, if anything they have gotten much more tame
in high school our chemistry teacher had us all do a presentation on some drug of our choice, i picked psilocybin, and i learned a lot about it and try as i might i did not find really much bad about it, low toxicity, bad trips tended to be more rare and less intense compared to other hallucinogens
i did not try anything before i was already an adult, i did not even drink until after it was legal for me to do so
but by the time i was offered lsd i had done shrooms a few times before, so i was not new to hallucinogens, and i respected them and to me they were not just party drugs
for me, most of the anxiety about a trip is the lead up, the planning, thinking what could go wrong, so being offered it on the spot, with no lead up or pressure was the perfect way for me to experience it
...
it helped me see so much of myself, it broke down my coping mechanics, it showed me the things i had pushed under the rug, it made me accept
the anxiety attacks i had been having for years stopped after that experience - for years
after like 5 years i do now sometimes feel anxiety attacks, but that is mostly due to fresh trauma from events since, and they still are not as constant as they were before
i was indoors, with friends, we listened to music and watched 3d fractal videos, i stayed up for 18 hours and started writing notes after everyone went to sleep, i am still working on some of the concepts i came up with that night
mushrooms are wonderful for me, they always seem very much like they have a journey for you to go on, and you do not get to choose your journey consciously, and if you fight that journey you will not have as good of an experience as you should
one time i thought that i was going to DO something with my trip, i no longer recall what, and when it was not working out i got really frustrated, plus the place we were at had Bad Vibes, i ended up wondering out into the cold night with a friend following me while i ranted incoherently in the empty city streets
at some point it dawned on me that my friend was also high and i was trying to brute force myself into working on something when i was clearly not in the right headspace
i remember standing on an overpass with my friend and i let go, we found a bus and went to a place we knew well, we danced with friends and closed the night out, then went back to our other friends at the original location, according to the clock we had been gone for less than an hour, barely enough time to get to the other place and back, especially by bus, but people saw us there
it ended up being a good night, and i started to learn a valuable lesson about not trying to bully myself into things
acid is less gentle, if you push it pushes back, but it also makes it clear where your center is - when you find it you learn how far you can lean into it, and from there it can be like a lucid dream, you can directly influence your perceptions
one of the first things i did was extend my proprioception out into the building around me, as if i pushed myself into the floors and saw my fingers rippled the boards there
i wrote symbols on a page and used them to peer into another world and i damn near passed through that portal, but it pushed back, so i decided to let it rest for the time being
the room full of psychonauts around me were like "you tried to do WHAT"
it was a good time
psychedelics will not themselves make you a better person, but they might give you an opportunity that you would not have had otherwise
psychedelics on the whole make your experiences feel profound, and that can be enough to reset you, enough to help you reconnect with a part of you that you did not know was missing
but i believe it is a mistake to assume that this feeling of profundity is where it ends, that because it feels a certain way makes it truly that thing
i am a dreamer, i have always been a dreamer, so i compare things to dreams a lot
the truth of a dream may connect to a truth in waking life, it may represent it directly, it may be a simulacra, it may represent a truth abstractly or metaphorically, or it may have just been a convenient symbol with no inherent meaning - treated it as such will lead you down confusing and winding paths
always when you latch onto something, a feeling, a truth, a part of you that you missed, you can anchor it, you can bring it back with you - to waking life - to the world on the mundane side of the looking glass
it is important to never believe that what you experienced over there - in the dream - in the surreal landscape of an altered state - is somehow limited to that space
the irrealis is a world that abhors familiarity - every experience will be new, by necessity, because the journey is one of self and there you will find only what you took with you, but you are everchanging
once you have visited a place in a dream, you may never get to visit that particular location again, and trying to do so will only take away from that experience
but you get to keep a piece of it always
anyway, yeah, what @atomicthumbs said, hard agree
