DOSE:

smoked

Salvia divinorum

(extract)

BODY WEIGHT:

160 lb

My Salvia Renaissance
Addendum to plastic molten cosmic bliss (2010)

I didn't smoke very much salvia for a while—just an occasional low dose just so as not to lose all familiarity with the terrain, so to speak... Since nobody wanted to trip with me at this point, I decided to go it alone, when in October 2017, I dosed heavy (15x) whilst listening to Paul Simon's songs America and Homeward Bound.

First the salvia just made the music intensely loud and beautiful, the harmonies with Garfunkel sounding obviously made in Olympus or some immensely magical place... When they sang the name Cathy (my sister's name) the fact that this was God's voice singing secret messages to me seemed certain...Intense mind-bending paranoia—when Simon sang 'careful, I told her, his bow-tie is really a camera' (very strange acidy lyric there) I felt absolute certainty that my ex-guitar player J. Is some sort of undercover agent, spying on us (though the likelihood of him ever having worn a bow-tie is 0%)... It all became twisted up with the idea of returning to California (a notion I was still entertaining at that point—the place seems since to have evolved into some kind of radical censorship-infested refugee camp)... That state being the place I was born in. As Homeward Bound started, these were my considerations, but Salvia turned my brain around inside my head and told me, 'no, it isn't California you're returning to, but the REAL place you were created in'. Suddenly heaven was very near—Earth is after all just a place in heaven, right? (that horrid song from the 80's having got it all backwards, of course)... Suddenly the certainty of death becomes as absolute as if one's jet-pilot had just announced total engine failure whilst cruising at 700 miles per hour, 33,000 feet up, in a voice of calm resignation. This telescoping of the future is very freaky, but quickly expands back into 'normal' perspective where this singularity, this certainty of one's own ultimate demise, resumes its normal place in the mysterious quotient of the unknown.

I'd had no idea my mother's name was in the song, so I really set myself up, it seems (wink)... I had to listen again to make sure the lyrics were really so strange as they seemed—Sure enough, though distorted and blaringly internalized and directed at me, the lyrics had come through meaning intact—though how Salvia got me to ignore that bow-tie bit could only be explained by panic—the lines are about a guy and his girlfriend playfully imaging whilst traveling on a train that they're involved in some dangerous spy game. Simon must've been tripping his ass off on some good acid when he wrote that stuff, I thought—or, just typical 1960's bullshit... Who knows...

In 2018 I met identical twin musicians. They don't like Salvia, only did it a few times, though we trip together on mushrooms on occasion. But they don't mind letting me experiment with the salvinorin in their garage—They've got their instruments—guitars and harmonicas—there and I've left my old Ludwig snare drum over here for me to play and I bring over tambourine, shaker, things like that—they live a few miles away, so schlepping my entire drum-set over to the garage is hardly an option, so we do our serious recording at my place... But their mother, who is almost my own age (the twins are 19, literally half my age), is a special-education teacher at the very elementary school I attended. She won't touch the salvia, but used to do acid and mushrooms, now uses much tobacco and rum. She used to be into wicca and tarot, etc, and is now a bit into Christ. But she's cool. She'll let us smoke herb, and I'll trip on salvia divinorum, usually deciding to toke up when a good song I like happens to be playing on the wi-fi (the newfangled radio one can selectively listen to, but for which one must pay the price of being constantly bombarded with electromagnetic radiation). Only once (so far, thank God) have I had a sort of panic attack while delving into the 20X dimension of demented mentholation.

I don't know why I did it, after a horrid experience of texting an uncle in California to tell him off, after he slandered me to my grandmother, turning her against me—a nasty, materialistic cop-lover whom I just couldn't pretend to have any respect for any more. Some internal dam of caution broke (maybe I was still coming down the Mushroom Mountain, as it were) and, knowing I'd be hearing about it, there was NO WAY this jerky old jock could possibly keep his mouth shut and take some criticism like a man—I fucking KNEW this prick would tell the ladies, getting them all in a tizzy, but I just could't stand it any more... I believe the first text I sent, out of the deep periwinkle blue of Cancer's grey heart, was 'The fuck you been tellin' people about me?' The last one was simply 'jealous monkey', with the gamut of indignation expressed in between, none of which is relevant here—I'm explaining all this as it is relevant to why I lost my shit, this time around. The garage was as lively and inviting a place as it's ever seemed—nobody was giving me any odd vibe or weirdness (like their autistic uncle, who sometimes seems subconsciously fixated on his fantasies of me being some sort of undercover agent, sent to spy on them, which is a very weird vibe to get from someone, while tripping especially). But the stuff that was buzzing in the back of my head was buggin me out more than anyone else's odd attitude or offensive indifference or even antagonism ever could... It felt like a gigantic ectoplamic crocodile jaw was closing over me, folding me into an alternate dreamlike reality where everybody here, based on their Zodiac signs, and some weird coincidences of names, were the next incarnations of my own family I could barely open my eyes, just glared at the shivering shadowy black-on-yellow silhouettes on my eyelids projecting like cartoons through my vitreous humor.

Then my consciousness dissolved completely and an enormous maroon octopus tentacle snatched me up naked like a baby in its father's safe and powerful grip... And now I was being blind plunged into the sweetest warmest cleanest bathwater and scrubbed clean of all soul filth with some enormous toothbrush. I was crying out in protest, clinging to my black hidden areas of sooty vile filth, fearing this new unknown sate of 'SOUL CLEAN' The parental force laughed and scrubbed away, till I was as pink and shiny as bubblegum. This was a weird enough state to come out of as if from dream, enough strangeness to contemplate for a year or two actually, but I unwisely decided to blast an another huge hit of the 20x, with an almost defiant sense of risk-taking—Like some Evel Knievel nut-job saying 'fuck it' and revving straight off the precipice into the Grand Canyon...

Now, some of these people who hung around in the garage had taken to calling me 'Waldo' due to an alleged resemblance some stroke-victim had perceived in me to the 'Where's Wally/Waldo' guy, with his thick spectacles and beanie hat—But aside from that minor irritant, my external 'setting' as it were was great. But my internal 'mindset' was awful , as much in denial about it as I was—'Fuck 'em' was my conscious attitude about my family in California—But inside my mind, things were melting and dripping and burning in horrible ways which the salvia almost seemed to interpret as meaning I was now homeless, disowned, a broken and defeated man, with nowhere to go. My situation she used to once again snap me out of self-pity and sadness, but in the most shocking way imaginable—by wiping out my entire self-identity. I had no idea who I was after a certain point, only this awfully familiar metal drum to relate to as anything in any way familiar.

I stared at the drum in absolute horror, feeling reborn, placed into a new alternate life, and everyone could see the obvious look of sheer terror on my face, as I stared at this stupid old snare drum there on the floor, resting on its clunky side like some ancient wheel, and everyone starts saying 'Waldo, are you alright?' with utmost concern, and though I had no Idea what my name was at that moment, I certainly knew it wan't Waldo, God damn it, and so this seemed horrifically to confirm the message I was getting, that now I was this person named Waldo who lived in this strange house (then only a few months familiar to me), and I could not look up from the drum, as the feeling of adrenalized space-time warped panic and adrenaline crystalized and made tactile all sight seemed to impossibly increase to where I knew-felt God to be present, to be wrenching me from the shivering depths of the medulla oblongata and the shuddering jello of the hippocampus, into full space-god Kwizsatz Haderach Water of Life SIGHT, I could feel us all as crystaline structures, hurling through the cosmos at light speed) and all I could do was clench at this fucking drum, and repeatedly slam it down onto the concrete floor, like dome primeval tool, saying again and get, 'It isn't possible, IT ISN'T POSSIBLE!' in a shaking voice of panic (I have no idea how loud I got momentarily, I hope their stupid asshole dad didn't hear me blithering).

A peripheral simultaneous concern was that by showing fear I was revealing my inner feminine nature, (since 'men' are never afraid, ha ha), and so the impulse to slam the drum down, in utter defiance of God himself, would mask this, and hopefully nobody would perceive it... Now I could remember my real name, and I said, in a voice like someone who isn't sure which universe he's in, 'You all know my name's Paul, right?' and when they said yes, I was so so so relieved, it's impossible to express—like being told one has been pardoned from a sentenced lobotomy... I was gasping ans shivering with panic, unable to look anyone in the face, just covering my eyes with my hands, saying THANK GOD over and over inside, thank God it was only a trip, a trick—Because salvia can show one ultimate truths and play wicked tricks all at the same time—Like McKenna's flying saucer the Mushrooms showed him: simultaneous confirmation of UFOs as truth and a hoax, by revealing its underside to exactly resemble a Hoover vacuum cleaner: the lie WAS the truth: time was telescoped, and all masks were revealed, in a very true perception wherein I WAS 'WALDO', I was being permitted to 'LIVE' (exist) here, because I was invited there... To put it mildly, my mind was blown... Because a hallucination, as only those who've experienced them really understand, is not an illusion: it is like a hologram, of time perceived as image, seeing with the third eye, (time being merely the fourth of perhaps infinite dimensions): a full-sensory 4-D moving mind-work of full-color Daliesque infinitude... And in particular, the last trip of the stash is always the weirdest one of all—really stickling the onus on you: will you EVER want to really do THAT again????????????

Salvia always leaves me with an insane riddle when it's my last hit. The twins's mother went into full teacher mode, taking away my pipe, which I was clutching like some talisman against evil spirits... 'You can have it back at the end of class' I swear I heard her almost say, pocketing the teal glasspiece... 'You're gonna break it, she said,' and I should have listened... This is a Libra who tripped about Dumbo on LSD, so she has her shit together, spiritually in tune, it seems. I eventually calmed down (externally at least), and convinced her to let me have the pipe back, by promising not to smoke any more salvia. 'I don't even have any more,' I told her, in complete honesty, though of course I didn't expect her to believe me at all). I tried setting down on the table in front of me, obsessing over the teal color, MY color, Virgo's color... Ten seconds later one of my stupid fumbling spastic drunken forelimbs knocks the thing off the table, shattering it on the concrete floor that strange way everything seems to fall on salvia...So ridiculously magnetically heavy, yet the slightest bump knocks everything over with the most irritating heavy CLUNK, almost invariably disappearing (as this pipe had done on a previous trip, almost convincing me I'd entered an alternate universe, like more of a 'Mandela effect' kind of vibe, I've gotten, where the corner I'm gazing into will often seems to take off like the prow of Magellan's ship, being bent and twisted into some other nearly identical reality... But again it was a sort of hyper-telescoping of thought, which one can feel recede back to normal' like a tide: 'I LIVE HERE NOW... I'm Living Here Now... I'm staying here now... I stay here sometimes... I hang out here...'

So being allowed to 'hang out', it seems means in my heart that I do, in fact, LIVE there, for periods of time, of varying lengths... ( and if I can keep myself from flipping out too bad on this stuff, I should be permitted to continue to do so). It was weird to see even the autistic uncle get concerned, seeming worried I'd blown my mind. The mother said she'd given him acid when they were teenagers, and though he was a bit older than her, she now wondered if that had been such a good idea, with him living with her like a big fourth child... Her third child, a daughter, is Gemini: traditionally the Twins, though Gemini's Zoidion is really the Birds): this completes the Air triumvirate with the twins: Libra, Gemini, and Aquarius... Virgo's reverse-color: Black, and White...

I've since come to think of a 'Waldo' as this sort of character we all create, to interface with the world—this 'cool, calm, collected, funny, interesting/interested, tough yet kind external being we project to hide the gibbering, oversensitive, fearful, paranoid, hysterically laughing, raging, egomaniac we all really are inside...

She also said she took LSD while pregnant with the twins, and wondered if that was what had caused the egg to split... In my salvia state, that seemed a certainty... Weird, visceral unconscious thoughts of Paul Atreides's weird sister, Alia, receiving the Water of Life in utero... And as I thought about this I could feel Salvia riding along like a wet plasmic electric neon pink cactus panther Goddess, stuck to my body like a body-shaped, enormous tongue-tentacle, stuck like octopus suction, glowingly attached to my body and soul, and I could see the twin fetuses, also tripping and twitching, inception of new neural patterns). I realized with intense paranoia that the bat squeak the stroke victim had remarked on earlier had actually been some alien w-fi type devices wiring being swooped into the trees like some Batman device, and that this was what was enabling the salvinorin to electro-magnetically channel these Aztec gods...

The stroke-victim is a Capricorn: this connection with mollusks, the first animals, springing directly from the amorphous fungus, the first creatures from whom we all descend, seemed wickedly significant—these are all notes taken from the partial amnesiac state—like dreams, it is impossible to recall everything one sees, and feels, and even more impossible to describe the things one does bring back—like artifacts salvaged from some titanic wreck of a mental crash-and burn disaster, one can only study the mental photographs made of these objects in wonder, and interpret what one thinks one sees. Each trip is a colossal personal riddle, twisted like a twelve-dimensional living sculpture out of the 'place between moments', for one to behold in timeless space (for awhile)...

[Reported Dose: "15x, 10x, 20x extracts"]

Exp Year: 2018	ExpID: 112294
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 37
Published: Sep 13, 2018	Views: 1,135
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Salvia divinorum (44) : Small Group (2-9) (17), General (1)