DOSE:	1 g	oral	Mushrooms
	0.5 hits		Unknown	(blotter / tab)

BODY WEIGHT:

160 lb

Comprende c'est pardonner [To understand the city is to forgive its excesses]

Our trip took place somewhere between Devil’s Pocket and Queen Village, downtown Philadelphia. We were joined by train, just hobbling off the 15th, looking to make it to the ice rink before it closed, or before some kind of saturnine mood would have swept us aside, overturning our plans, making a neap tide of the situation that was unfurling below, in the belly of the architect, one might say. Always the question: “how many times will I make a major psychedelic excursion like this, and still manage to fall flat on my ass?”

…

Having dimethyl, cubensis and some mystery blotters to choose from, like trading cards presented in a single sprawl, we decided to micro-dose the mushrooms first, then proceed to cutting, in half, the single tab we thought to share . As our geospatial purview of the city bellowed through, I could have been a wind chime in that moment, an instrument played by the fog overlooking the winter-barren miasma up ahead. As we incrementalized the dr00gs, making way for dosing, it had felt we were hot in the cross-hairs of some aching, morbid suspicion, paranoia – wrapped in a blanket of stars, as we fell subject to the frenzied examinations of all the city slickers and onlookers present. I remember distinctly feeling it was like we were in one of Giacometti and Beckett’s infamous walks, leaving our bench, lost to the city (which was just one large subway station, really). She was bobbing along with her beret, a shiny talisman, through crumpled and curved pavement & I was something troubled and unsettled, hustling with the imperial haste of a cavalry (leading the way to the nearest bathroom because my bladder was crooning). We quickly fell from sync with the motorik pulse that was the twisting mechanical clock of the world’s center. Turned out the onset was instantaneous, our sly banter all at once pressing to a halt.

For me, it had all been like several weapons, trebuchets and fireworks alike, each poised at the brink of the imaginative foreground, ready to go off. Memory and media, such disparate sources, all seeming so non-disparate in their symphonic arrangement, like gravity had strung and coalesced together this spring-active pop-up book of 5-HT receptors, a righteous contraption loaded with the gallery of all history’s great frescos. The neon ember of fanatical racial strife, old time religion, the undertones of vanishing biographies, all galore. I could watch as steps and stairs vanished under the spectral guise of vantablack fluorescence and cobblestone disarray – “hyper-Gothic imminence”. The prime directive was to go deeper into that impenetrable darkness, to cut the black leather of sky with the dagger that tore through to the aperion. Small cryptids, alike, reigning from above, chalking and unfurling mischievous little rituals, conniving and jet-setting pranks that would impact humans below. Somewhere in those endless grid lines was death, hungry as a cannibal, who knew that to merely suck the juice would leave the marrow. Could it have all been capitalist upset? No one answered. The concrete jungle’s allure had been all but too transfixing, even as it were left behind. The wraith’s betrayal, that which cancels all light, its performance of timeless incantation conversion ritual was left before our eyes. But how could one ever tell of this?

The time traveling Wiccan merchant – hairy and drooling eyes such as these felt so near. The heart of society beating like an undulating coo-coo clock, Motown funk ‘45s, freestyle street prayers, a waterfall of debris unfolded. Millions of impoverished souls, all working and dying, each day like the laundry. Gutter monsters that would quite literally drag you through the cracks. The haptic tomes of cabbage heads which appeared as gore, circulated in these wheel barrels. They had this way of cross-fading into fiction, what the maker wanted to show. Math and geometry somehow made the scroll legible, yet nothing had ever felt so oppressive as just simply passing through, two hep-cats who knew how to reverberate off each other’s acquiescence and directionless-ness. The pertinent realities of man’s fear, as it had crept through those Episcopalian chapels, preached as though it were the living word. The night had been creeping all with momento mori, the sigil worn like a heavy medallion cross. Or the atrocity exhibition. Soon, we would be stepping out under the vein of the concrete underpass. Beige and auburn landscapes of winter glaciality, like dust, blowing into softened ash.

---

The camera sputtering from my inner-person went kaput. My life, in its stately colors, shone over the ice rink (as we’d just made it there), appearing like a star spangled banner made of Colgate toothpaste (but I think it would have looked like that sober anyway). It was as though I were caught in the environs of a snow globe, destined to always be on the twinkling refrain of the real action. There was certainly a spiritual/symbolic sense to this testimony. The surfaces by the harbor and its moats looked like they could have shattered under their own, radiating tension. It were just like crème brûlée, the smacking of lips, wroughtness and treason all conveyed through the flytrap of imaginary focus as my attention was hopelessly adrift. The dobos torte of life, and all life for that matter, seemed so stacked with delicious irony, unpreventable folly, and malingering sentences that could not be swayed by any God or lack thereof. Yep, it was that time of the trip: caught with feet in the fire all over again. Just a moment later, my mood suddenly changed. How undeniable it all seemed, we the people, the children of 4chan.org, the bell curve, the sacrosanct media groups responsible for the dotcom bubble, our persecution and alienation from prior generations of history. How it all propounded on top of the museum’s rooftop we had climbed, its crenels and merlons serving as our soapbox. It was like being in the Student Protest of ‘68, the summer hot as cadmium, all our gripes and struggles could be openly flaunted, the street as indifferent as cows in a field. Catchphrases and sloganeering had both their own electrifying effects, word combinations seemed anthemic and cheesy as hell, as they zipped off the tongue.

All of a sudden this black Maserati clunky emerged, as though it were a security camera that had popped into the dream, rolling in from all dimensions simultaneously. What a creep I thought (was I in some Ken Kessey territory for thinking this?). The automobile felt tuned into our joking paranoia, it was a moving shadow so black that babies could die.

As we stepped down, and strolled in wistful lethargy, back to the rink, I couldn’t help but think back to some prior shows I had watched. The France of Cléo from 5 to 7 seemed as hauntological as the Weimer Republic of ETA Hoffman or Beethoven, Van. History seemed so jejune in its naivety, thinking from the dire din that had set in as the annunciation of the now. I knew all of this had to be entirely subjective, like a house of self-projected mirrors. Yet, something even darker, more sinister and lachrymose, ever-present-tense, was still waiting. All that really waited were a bunch of grotesque looking fireworks and some other carnival rides and duds of the Ferris’ attractions. But I could conclude one thing, it’s that: if a night like this could somehow qualify as a normal person’s idea of an eventful evening, those who live among us must truly be insane. The comic reversal of perspective, just like being locked in Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, was lusciously palpable. I felt larger than life.

The only real remaining thoughts I recollect before we got in our car ride home was that, just as the fanatical hues had dotted her face beneath the Ferris wheel, catching each other spoofed by the day-glo looking florescence, at least one of us had been growing before the other’s eyes. My life seemed like a thesis statement and this provided the thought for the possibility that all lives might make for college thesis. Recollection, confession, forgetting and exhaustion, all these forces culminating in the slow swell of unpacking this fun and lyrical turmoil. The Ukrainian-strung harps of the Black Sea’s riddles must have been the tonic for tired sailors, lost at sea, at occasions just for these. All this experience threatened to slip by the Lethe had we not left 20 minutes later, the night for all mortals was still young. The words of William Gibson resounded from here to the nether: in this world, anything can happen.

Exp Year: 2021	ExpID: 115569
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 24
Published: Sep 19, 2021	Views: 31
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Unknown (120), Mushrooms (39) : What Was in That? (26), Poetry (43), Combinations (3), Public Space (Museum, Park, etc) (53)