DOSE: T+ 0:00	10.5 g	oral	Morning Glory	(tea)
T+ 1:00	600 mg	oral	Pharms - Gabapentin
T+ 1:00	150 mg	oral	Pharms - Bupropion
T+ 1:00	1 tablet	oral	Aspirin
T+ 6:30	10.5 g	oral	Morning Glory	(ground / crushed)
T+ 7:00	600 mg	oral	Pharms - Gabapentin
T+ 7:00	150 mg	oral	Pharms - Bupropion
T+ 7:00	0.1 mg	oral	Pharms - Clonidine
T+ 13:00	600 mg	oral	Pharms - Gabapentin
T+ 13:00	100 mg	oral	Pharms - Trazodone
T+ 0:00		buccal	Nicotine

BODY WEIGHT:

160 lb

It's that time again. You guessed it! Time for a vacation. A scientific expedition. Or really something in between.

The month of May. Warm weather returns and flowers bloom. Except today it is unreasonably wet and cold, with minimal signs of life. However, seeds are ready to liven things up. Morning glory seeds.

I've secured 21 grams of the heavenly blue variety. After separating them into two 10.5 gram piles, my buddy JA grinds them up and mixes them all right back together. This bothers me as a meticulous and anal individual, when it comes to drugs at least. Something about just doing 'a bunch of that shit' strikes me as irresponsible. Many will call consuming hallucinogens irresponsible in and of itself; I beg to differ. Sure, it's a lot of fun to trip. Things certainly can get out of hand. But it requires some basic parameters, which include having a general idea of dosage when possible, as the metrics of dosing illicit products are often skewed at best to begin with. Let's at least maintain a vestige of scientific methods when extracting or synthesizing mind-bending chemicals, ok?

Nonetheless bright and early, I do what I have to do to get these things ready to take. The preparation I've had success with takes roughly four hours to process. I won't get into incriminating details: none that are any more incriminating than what I'm already writing. Just know that if you can make a cup of coffee, you can make this preparation I speak of (or allude to). What a glorious morning for morning glories! Cold, wet, and cloudy-the same environmental conditions as last time I did this.

Seeing as JA had to work today and I am eager to a fault to trip my face off, I consume roughly 10.5 grams of morning glory seeds via the secret aforementioned recipe. This, after impatiently waiting four hours for it to process...disgusting as its appearance and contents may seem, this method has not produced the notorious 'morning [glory] sickness' that many users report, a side-effect which deters them from further experimentation with this lovely little substance.

11AM: down the hatch it goes. Now I play the waiting game, twiddling my thumbs...aeh, the waiting game sucks. I decide to play chess with another guy living at the house. The halfway house, which I kind of like living at; nevertheless I'm halfway thru my pre-determined, court-ordered stay and cannot wait to get home. I left jail for a long-term rehab on December 22nd, essentially the first day of Winter. The days only get longer after that. Then I left that wretched rehab on March 21st, basically the first day of Spring, to come to this halfway house. And I leave here-you guessed it-the first day of Summer. What better synchronicity could exist, the days get longer and my life gets freer.

I'm bombing at chess. Put it this way: the kid who just learned to play two days ago beats me. I'm his first victory. Ever. Glad I can be a part of his journey into the world of chess. As we begin another game, the heads of the pieces begin to twirl a bit, rotating slightly. Here it comes! Lunch is ready, but I do not eat-don't want to interfere with the digestion. Instead I pack a sloppy glob of tuna into saran wrap to eat later at the library.

Ah, the library. The sanctuary for intellectuals and bums alike. Considering myself of both demographics, it suits me perfectly. To here I gravitate lately at the onset of psychedelic drugs. However I don't want to leave the house until after I've taken my noontime meds. So I sip on some tea which I made with distilled water, distilled because tap water contains chlorine and other things that can kill LSA. That's not my cup of tea.

The come up continues very slowly. At noon I take my meds, 600 mg of gabapentin and 150 mg of Wellbutrin. I like to note my Rx regimen in case a certain effect is actually caused by one of them, or their interactions, or whatever. For the vestige of science. I also take an aspirin which I believe to be a vasodilator to counteract any potential vasoconstriction. [post-note: aspirin is not a vasodilator, says Answers.com and other first-page Google results. It thins blood and keeps platelets together though]

After downing these delectable pills, I pack a bunch of things in a drawstring bag: 10 pieces of nicotine gum, 5 pieces of watermelon gum, chapstick, notebook, my pink pen, headphones, bottle of non-distilled water which I'll refrain from drinking for a few hours, tuna, and a handful of cash. Not a cool handful of cash. A bunch of ones, maybe a five, and some change. And not all quarters, either. We're talking dimes, nickels even. On the bench out front of the halfway house I sit as I wait for an Uber to pick me up and take me to the library. Despite loving to walk, the fractured bone beneath my kind-of hilariously oversized orthopedic boot would make the 45 minute stroll unpleasant. As I wait, I jot down thoughts which I plan to use word-for-word, verbatim, to write this here article. But it comes out so cryptic the best I can do is expand on these ideas later. Don't get mad at me. Even Hunter S. Thompson edited 'Fear and Loathing' five times, unable to consciously stomach pure Gonzo journalism.

Waiting for my ride, I can't help but gaze in amazement at my water bottle. I mean, it's just a water bottle, but it's so...water-bottley. Basking in the Aquafina's water bottliness, I plop in a piece of nicotine gum. It tastes like straight poison. Cigarettes taste great tripping and the smoke looks awesome, forming images not unlike staring at clouds as a child. But I don't smoke anymore. But boy, does a cig sound nice right about now, as I accidentally swallow the toxic tasting spit courtesy of a Nicorette knock-off. Nausea. That's a thing right now. Is it the gum, is it the seeds; is it psychosomatic?
I look up.

I'm on this bench. People walking by. Suddenly, suppressing a smile is not an option. Sometimes when tripping in public, I must-out of necessity, or so It seems-hold down my happiness. But here, now, no. Just no. Why bother? What's in me is practically undetectable. No one can trace me, and I don't even care. Why not just be me? 'I' changes constantly. Yet I should never have to hold back or hide 'I.' The joy of liberation, akin to the first day out of jail ten-fold, flusters throughout my body and soul. I'm gonna be 'I!'

Euphoric laughs and giggles proliferate. The bar across the street-yes, the bar directly across the street from a halfway house for recovering alcoholics (deplorable; smart marketing though)-it has this door. The door burns red. Seriously. Looking directly into it inspires a special sense of awe, forceful awe-I grit my teeth and cannot part from its hypnotic hue.
Until I do.

'Say What You Say' by Eminem comes on in my earbuds, which...how long have I had these in? Normally I don't like rap music on psychedelics. Most days I'm down with it, I fux with rap, hence the song coming up on my playlist in the first place. But the message behind rap and its presentation and word choice just doesn't sync up with the vibes of tripping. This song though, it's hilarious. He's so mad, passionate. Him and Dre-I love it. Across the street, that tree looks plastic.
LOL, it begins.

The Uber driver shows up and I hop in. He's 'not from here.' Probably like Jamaican. Nice guy. Drives like a maniac. Has no clue how to stop at a red light. Maybe he does and just doesn't care. Still, he gets me there safely and with a smile. 'You give me five stars?' he asks as I get out. I nod. That's how you get a five-star review in this world. It has next to nothing to do with your performance most of the time.

At the library, I choose to sit in the comfortable chairs by the magazines. Going to the computers would be the more economical choice because there I wouldn't have to drain my phone's battery to jam. But comfiness...can't pass that up.

As I sit and throw in headphones and chomp away at gross gum, it worries me that I may disturb the other readers and bums. Unlike some dicks, I turn my headphones up to full volume and pull them out of my ears to gauge how loud it sounds. Not audible at all. Great. Again I pop them in and recline on the plastic chair, plastic, trying its best to be something else and kind of succeeding. For a while I close my eyes and drift away. Not any discernible CEVs (closed-eye visuals) at this point. Sounds great though, the music-much crisper. When I open my eyes, many magazines with colorful covers display themselves before me. With a white shelf behind them, they shift slightly, rigidly, and when I look somewhere else they leave behind their image for a second or two.

These magazines look cool. I get up and grab a 'Popular Science,' marveling at the machines on every page. One machine stands out. The brief article ends noting that this device at the National Ignition Facility will either generate the energy of a star for endless energy, or blow us to smithereens. That I find hilarious. As a conscientious person, of course the magnitude of suffering involved in that scenario makes me queasy. Yet there's something so human about the whole thing. We collectively embark on such simultaneous creation and destruction, paralleling the cycles of the universe, expanding and contracting, emulating Shiva. Stars born and collapsing into black holes. It just makes me laugh once I remove myself from the scope of carnal consciousness and view it thru this sentient and alien lens.

For the next hour or so, I rotate between quasi-reading magazines and closing my eyes to absorb the music. That song about swinging from a chandelier by Sia comes on. You know the song, and you like the song, whether you'll ever admit it. First of all, the song has 1.5 BILLION views on YouTube. The breadth of that astounds me. It once took months to spread an edict or a poem between towns in a small country like France. Now, a quarter of the world can see a music video instantly. I realize that many of those views are some of the same people watching it over again, I know this because A) logic and B) I'm one of them It's a good song. Good message, perfect for this trip. The peak of the song approaches as I, 2-1/2 hours after ingestion, also approach the peak. When the chorus sounds with all its heart, a blast of emotion washes over me. Joy, pity, sadness, ecstasy. I begin to laugh out loud and cry tears at the same time about how blessed I am. For family, access to food, all kinds of things. This immense fusion of powerful feelings has its limits, rather than an expression of an otherworldly, divine, mystical, or all-encompassing sensation. Very powerful and very relevant nonetheless.

The body load returns. Maybe reading about vasoconstriction prior to the trip has influenced it but certain veins in my legs feel tighter, squeezed, jolting electricity thru its narrowing corridors. Also I feel a bit nauseous. Physical symptoms, sure. No matter that mind can't trump though. Maybe I'm hungry. My appetite sucks when I'm sober and on psychedelics I have a hard time identifying if I'm hungry or thirsty etc. So I sip some water, the non-distilled kind; 3 hours into this I've already absorbed everything I'm going to absorb. I go out front of the library to eat my glob of tuna. Pieces of it fall on the ground but I don't care.

Remaining outside after I finish eating for some reason, I run into a guy who just left my halfway house. He's got his own place now. We talk. The subtext of his words register emotions, detached emotions instead of words. It seems that he lacks direction on his own. Institutionalized no doubt. The conversation kind of kills my buzz. To top it off, we say goodbye at the end, then he goes right in the library. It feels too awkward to follow him in. And anyway it's sunny now so I decide to chill out here. The tree that I've sat under in trips past have a moat of mud, so I descend to the adjacent playground and take up a bench. If kids played on the swing sets and jungle gyms I would feel wrong on so many levels and never think to sit there, but the park has nobody else in it. Eerie, really.

The swings. They're calling me. Holy shit, I need to swing on them! So I do. Higher. Higher, higher. Higher! Each time I shoot forward at the sky the tree branches and the celestial dome rapidly magnify; each swing forward I expect to launch into the sky. The entire time-a good ten or more minutes-I cannot stop laughing. Hysterically. Like a child. Eventually I force myself to stop. I wish I didn't though.

When I return to the bench, I get bored. Cars pass on the street barely leaving behind any trails. The music does not arouse much interest. Thought process seems 'normal,' a word I use loosely but that is appropriate in this case. When I think I'm not tripping I stare at tree bark or something and basic patterns start to emerge. Key word: basic. Despite having consumed by weight more seeds than last time, this does not feel as intense. The variation in potencies is likely due to both coming from different suppliers. Solid level two trip, sure, which is cool and fun. But it's fading barely four hours into it. I suspect that like many substances, dosage greatly determines its duration. This occurs with DXM, where 200-300 mg might last five hours while 400 or 500 mg lasts 10 or more. Alcohol, too; we've all had that night where we drank too much then woke up drunk the next morning. Yet the buzz from a beer or two is gone in an hour and a half. Well this must ring very true for morning glories because while my two recent trips have had slow (2-1/2 to 3 hour) come-ups, last time the peak went on until hour seven, and it only ended nine hours later because of heavy sleep meds. Now though, I've certainly experienced a noticeable dip in effects.

JA texts me around 3:30. 'What's good w/ tn?' he asks. Regrettably I inform him that I did 1/2 the seeds. The other 1/2 of the total stash is physically accessible to him, but to properly prepare for ingestion the way we've been doing it would take four more hours, at least. By then I'd be totally sober. Almost all sources will warn against eating these seeds raw, which most commonly leads to lengthy nausea and vomiting. Whatever though, I'm trying to up my buzz.

As I'm waiting for a response, I second-guess whether or not I should dose up with this guy again (Side note: a cool name for tripping on morning glories would be 'waking up,' because they're called morning glory and also you wake up your mind on them). Fate answers my question when around 4 he texts me: 'I got kicked out.'

This isn't going anywhere. As the hour passes on, my timeframe narrows. I can only stay out of the house for six hours at a time, and I left around 12:15. Plus, with JA no longer in the equation, my sick mind decides to ingest the rest of the seeds in his absence. But shit, I don't have time to do a whole nother preparation. After a short Google search, I read that a few people had success sprinkling the grounds on ice cream. Yeah, that should work.

5:30PM. Just ate another 10.5 grams. This is a 'heavy' dose, but given the slight disappointment of earlier, I don't proceed with all too much caution. Since stores are running out of seeds on their shelves and JA took the coffee grinder with him, I might not have another opportunity to wake up (yeah, I'm starting that saying) for a while. Rather than having another mild trip in a few days, I have chosen to go for the gold. Seeds, bring it on.

Again I bumble around the house awaiting the onset, as I've essentially returned to baseline by now. At 6:00 I take my meds, this time not only 600 Neurontin and 150 Wellbutrin, but also 0.1 mg clonidine, and an aspirin for good measure.

Back in my room, I climb under the covers so as to create a veil of darkness and pop in the earbuds. Music has acquired crispiness. What once displayed itself as blobs of color now manifest themselves as two-dimensional patterns. This births a smile, accompanied by euphoria and laughter.
Yes, there it is!

Mmm, now it's on. What time is it? Who cares. Eventually I'll have to get to my home group at 8:00, but for another hour and a half, I'll bask in these visions and tranquil, revelatory thoughts.

Poking.
Someone pokes me through the blanket. I out my earbuds in case it's staff, since technically we can't use our phones inside the house.
Phew.
Just BJ.

'Come on dude, we gotta go to our homegroup.'
'It's like 6:15 dude,' I say.
'We have our business meeting tonight.'
Oh come on.
Once a month, every NA group has a 'business meeting' with all of its members. So now I have to get up and go do this. I like my home group, I do, but this. Tonight. Booh.

For as quickly as it took BJ to get me up with such urgency, it takes the guy eons to decide on what to wear. Quite frankly I don't care, but if he finds it important I'll humor my friend, even though his fashion insecurities eat up precious CEVs-dancing-to-jamband-music time.

Although the colors of his clothing ooze their potency with increasing definition. Burning reds and galactic blues. Plus as he frantically switches shirts, all the motion makes for pretty tracers. Plus it comes as a relief realizing that what I wear does not define me whereas it does to others; eye-opening insight on that burden of self-image, relatively foreign to me.

On the way there we talk. Barely anyone showed up: just me, BJ, an older guy and an older girl. We stall the business meeting for as long as possible and bullshit all through the 7 o'clock hour. No matter to me. Everything's hilarious. The tracers draw out longer and longer, the patterning keeps adding more intricate components...at times I can only define it loosely. 'Lizard skin' I'll call it at this exact moment. It just keeps evolving though. On every surface, every chair, every face, it has its own evolving pattern.

Finally, we have the business meeting at 7:45. It lasts like two minutes. Then I have to greet, meaning as an NA greeter I must hug and welcome every person who comes thru that door.

Once I take my seat at 8:00 and the meeting commences, I realize just how hard I'm frying. The patterns transcend basic description. Nothing immense or totally beyond comprehension. Hard to call though. They have a jungle/Mayan/snake/tropical/beach/seashell/9th-thru-11th grade/basement/stringy/sun-god/stretchy/flexible/ancient, but not before the dawn of man/rebirthing/regenerating/cyclical/shimmering type of flavor to it. The man speaking, an old Black guy with more years clean than I have alive, shares an incredible message about staying away form narcotics. I shuffle between immersing in the visuals and then really listening and absorbing his message. When I trip, I love to hear about and have spiritual insights. Some trips though are just plain fun. Most exist in between on a spectrum between total shaman and gigglefest. This experience veers toward the latter. But that is ok. Fun and laughing has a therapeutic value. Still, I catch myself before I use that as an unconscious attempt to use this insight to justify using other drugs, ie. my arch nemesis heroin.

Following the meeting the older lady in our home group drives BJ and I home. Thank God, I do not feel like walking. Not with a fractured foot. This lady is allover the place, she says she runs apartment complexes, is on house arrest for the IRS, she's 50 years old with pink streaks in her hair; she's in NA for pot and alcohol-alcohol is serious shit, but being in a 12step group for smoking weed is often looked down on, the prevailing sentiment summarized by that scene from Half Baked where Dave Chappelle goes to an NA meeting for smoking bud and the one guy yells 'you ever suck dick for some marijuana?'

Back inside the house, I am to quickly complete my chore: the cleaning of Bathroom #2. This in and of itself is a sort of sobriety test. When I go in with Windex and bleach, it looks like a simple gig. As I spray the Windex, the way it smears all over the mirror glass generates rainbows. Endless colors and combinations thereof. My eyes refocus to the face staring back at me behind the glass. The creature that is me morphs into a pig-like creature. Having learned this trick a long while back I do not blink, allowing brightly colored atoms to envelop my face and stretch and distort it how it will. I never got how this aspect of psychedelia has disturbed so many over the years. Probably the watching of one's own face melt or turn into a demon. Ok, I get it. Perhaps not everyone remembers that 'I am not that 'me.'' All in all, it takes...I don't know how long. Who cares about time.

Completing my chore allows me to go into the room and pick up where I left off in my bed: under the covers, listening to music, exploring CEVs of an increasing magnitude. Although I hit the peak an hour ago, the effects have plateaued off and continue as such, confirming my theory earlier about dose-dependent duration.

As much as I want to immerse myself in these synesthetic visions, I still dwell at a level where I can interact with my peers. And I want to. Alienation and connection coexist within me always and today is no different. By no means could you call me anti-social, but at the same time I don't engage in interpersonal interaction as much as many others do. Tonight, I go out in the common area. My memory fuzzens, but who cares. I laugh with my fellow housemates.

More flowy patterns. Still peaking when the clock hits midnight. Buzz-kill hour. Everyone in the house must turn their phones in at this time and shut the lights off in the room. In order to get the most out of my seedy experience, I had asked staff if I could take my sleep meds later than usual. So after turning my phone in at the crack of midnight I down 600 mg Neurontin with 100 mg trazodone.

Regarding the trazodone: I postulate that it has the ability to terminate a trip. In the past year, the four times I've tripped on LS-something then taken trazodone, the trip comes to a screeching halt and I fall asleep very rapidly regardless of how long ago I dosed. Granted, 6-1/2 hours into a trip, tonight, is the soonest after ingestion that I've taken it. Afterwards, I do not experience flashbacks or persisting visuals. No intellectual, verbal, or any other kind of impairment present. The following day I did feel burnt out but since then I actually feel slightly sharper.

Over the next few days, the only results of this trip have been a cushy afterglow; increased appreciation for what and who I have; more gratitude; a stronger desire to 'keep it pushing,' for example I called a place that said they'd hire me to finally get on the schedule and I have written more things like this fine piece you're reading now; decent amount of diarrhea; light and unaccounted for numbness in my lips; bright colors; also a few mild, classical 'hypomanic' symptoms such as more energy, more goal-directed activities, ambitiousness, increased irritability at things such as a webpage that doesn't load as fast as I'd like, better mood, and feelings of grandiosity, real or imagined. Not to mention that smile so distinct of this type of feeling, a face that surely creeps out onlookers: my brows slant angrily while my eyes dilate and widen and focus in on one object, as I grin, teeth together but not clenched (or sometimes clenched). When I smile as such I am truly sporting the face of madness. Is that crazy? Maybe.

I don't have any quirky or clever way to close this one. Sometimes things don't need to have immense profundity to them, it's just a nice ride. Like that trip, or hopefully this story.

Yet that, in and of itself, is enough to make it all worthwhile. No reason to label it, as if the experience of life fits into some pre-determined categories; it works the other way. My journey may be nameless, but is by no means aimless.

Exp Year: 2017	ExpID: 111045
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 23
Published: Dec 21, 2020	Views: 789
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
Morning Glory (38) : Various (28), Combinations (3)