DOSE:	4 hits	oral	LSD	(blotter / tab)
	8 glasses	oral	Alcohol - Beer/Wine	(liquid)
	repeated	smoked	Cannabis	(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

175 lb

I am eighteen years old and on my way with P and G to see Widespreaed Panic in Nashville. I have never really listened to them, but I know from friends that the scene is like a Grateful Dead show. We are stocked up on cannibus and beer, but I am concerned because we do not have any acid. At this point in my life, I have tripped around 40 times. Needless to say, I am wide ass open and I want to trip every chance I get!

We get to the parking lot and I jump out of the car and run up to the first hippie I see and ask if he knows where we can find some dose. Well, I have asked the right guy! He must assume I'm not a cop from my long hair, Liberty overalls with no shirt, bloodshot eyes, and shit-eatin' grin! He looks over his shoulder a couple of times and pulls a large piece of paper out of some foil. We buy 10 hits. I eat 4, P eats 3, and G eats 1. This leaves 2 hits in my sock.

We get into the show and I am berzerk. The acid hasn't kicked in but I am stoned, drunk, young, and dumb. I am screaming another buddy, C's name at an annoyingly high decibal, trying to find him in the crowd. We find C and he is with our other buddy, D. These guys went to a high school on the other side of town, but we know them through the stoner circuit. I had also come to the same arena a few months earlier with C and D to see a Rusted Root show. Good show! However, right now C and D are acting shady and snotty. They probably have something like coke and do not want to share, so they say they are going to go up front.

The show starts!

Widespead Panic is getting down, but I am in a strange state of mind. The pine trees looming over both sides of the stage have begun to take on the appearance of several Gargamels from the Smurfs, only his chin juts out just as far as his nose! I feel very self-centered and begin to take imaginary things very personally. I don't realize it and I would not admit it if I did, but this may come from the fact that I feel threatened and out of my element for not really knowing WP's music. I feel the need to represent myself, so I start 'dancing' with myself. Man, am I going nuts! We are near the back-left of the open area, and the crowd collectively decides to give me some space, forming a circle. I am psycho: spinning, flailing of arms, kicking of legs, and basically making a total jackass of myself with a circling crowd of hot chicks and frat boys making wisecracks at me. At one point at the end of a song, I jump as high in the air as I can and land flat on my back!

This all seems totally necessary. It is as if I feel the need to confront every one of my mental quirks, but the trouble is that I keep getting quirkier by the minute. My friend G attempts to act as a voice of reason and tells me to sit down and chill out because I am freaking him and P out. They just want to enjoy the show, you know like normal people. It seems to me that he is trying to act like my Daddy. Does he not realize that I have been divinely summoned to dance like Turbo and Ozone in Breakin' 2: the Electric Boogaloo?

Well I would have been better off to listen to him, because I was about to unwittingly embark on a riskier mission. Now I am roaming through the crowd and I feel like I am the only person with emotions or something. Everything everyone is talking about seems so vain, and yet I feel so subordinate to everyone. If there is a fine line between sanity and sociopathy, I am now moon-walking on it. I mesh with crowds of moving people acting as normal as possible until out of the blue, I surprize the masses with oohgah-boogah-chant-babble and bust back into the freaky-time dance! This gets me several threats of ass-whippings which I totally deserve. I believe I am a spy-prankster saving mankind by freaking people out for their own good! At one point I get right up in this cute girl's face (I hope she was not tripping) and make the most twisted goatfuck mug I can muster while delivering a blood-curdling witch-cackle while throwing one leg up edgewise and figeting my fingers together like Montgomery Burns before backpedaling away from her. I am in a place to which cartographers do not make maps.

All of this behavior is way out of character for me. My whole life I have generally been well-liked by all my classmates. Maybe there are some deep-rooted issues of acceptance by my peers coming out of the closet here. I must sound like a basket-case, but an inferiority complex is the least of my problems. I don't know it at the moment, but my ego will soon become a total loss!

I feel positive energy rippling off a certain area of the audience. I am getting excited because I am beginning to achieve rainbow-body! Everywhere I turn I am greeted with a spectrum of color and cheer! I believe that I am a way aways from my friends and now I am entertaining a new group of spectators with the suicide-shuffle. And they like me! They really like me! People are throwing their arms around my shoulders and offering me tokes of cannibus and such, but I can tell that I need to tone it down and fake like I am alright so as blend with the mellow crowd as I drift towards the outside of the circle. So I am cool with this: I can act up in the middle of the circle, but I try to chill towards the crowd. This may be the last rational thought of the night for me. And it was a fleeting moment, at best.

Unbeknownst to me, G and P are keeping a watchful eye on me from a safe enough distance so that nobody would notice that they are my friends. What I do next is so sadistic that my memory bank does not allow record of it to this day. Luckily, I had two credible witness whom I trust to lay me out on the exact details later. G and P watch in horror as I relieve myself on some poor concert-goer's back! They quickly intervene to explain my condition to the man who was on the receiving end of my golden shower. My amnesia dissipates about the time I am in mid-stream, at which point I discover that I have no more fans. Imagine the embarrassment. In one awkward instant, I went from the coolest dude in the world (in my own mind) to a scared toddler making a wee-wee, and oh yeah.......showing off my softie to a group of total strangers!

This leads me into a train of thought that reality is not real, and by God, I think I can prove it. My bone-headed plan is so brilliantly retarded: I ought to attack security! If I had an ounce of logic during this lapse of sanity I would have picked a yellowcoat closer to my own size. But no! I just run as fast as I can toward a man who is the embodiment of a military Hum-V and give him the old George McFly (you know 'keep your damn hands off her'), only this guy doesn't fold up afterwards like Biff! He picks me up like a ragdoll over his shoulder and I am pounding on his back! I am ashamed to say that I must look quite a lot like Olive Oil over Bluto's shoulder at this point! Some other members of security notice the hub-bub and feel it would be a good idea to not only restrain my arms but also bend them up towards the back of my head in a manner just shy of dislocating both my shoulders. This moment now marks the end of my good time. What, has it not sounded like fun thus far?

The pain in my shoulders is too much to bear so I now truly feel like the victim. I have difficulties grasping the concept of the prepetual drama at the speed in which it is now unfolding before my primitive eyes and mind. The trip is at full peakage and is begining to take religious overtones. I am reminded of Christ on the cross. I feel that I have been chosen to bear the yoke of humanity. The confusion on the faces onlookers makes me wonder I have maybe just been in some type of life-threatening accident. They take me into a security building and into a room of puke-yellow cinder block walls and plop me into a folding metal chair.

Everything is so surreal. I can still hear the groovy music outside the doorway. I feel like this can not be happening to me. I believe I may be able to stop the current situation by returning back a few moments in time. My heart is in the right place, but my brain is sunny-side-up! Did I really attack security or is this some type of mental conspiracy against me. I am baffled by the setting into which my airplane has just crashed. I was free and now I am not. It is too perplexing. Do these people not know that I am a good person? I wonder if I am on Candid Camera. I feel that I am not being let on. There is a constant blur of non-hipsters (cops, security, paramedics) coming in and out of the door.

Well, this all happened while G and P were still trying to patch things up with my involuntary water-sport partner, so they saw it all go down. They actually followed the pissed-off troupe of security guards who carted me up to the security office and once there, they broke the news to the cops who were arriving that they were my friends! They now have the pleasure of spending the rest of their trip with cops who just found acid in my sock! The cops decide from the size of my friends' pupils that they are tripping and proceed to ask them a series of routine questions.

'Is my face melting? Do you see that? Nevermind, nevermind it was just a spaceship, WAIT!!!.....do you see that? Holy shit, son, it's a god-damn lightning bug! Do you think this is funny? Your friend in there may be schizophrenic from now on because of the dope y'all gave him. You ever seen a cop do the Chubby Checker? Lopez, put down that bear-claw and do the twist for these kids!' That type of stuff.

Meanwhile, I get the idea that the one female security guard in the room has big plans to tell the boisterous crowd to leave the two of us alone so she can sex-me-up-style. I am blowing kisses and giving her the 'I know what's on your mind, you want a piece of Charlie Manson here' look. Either the realization that I am I bufoon or the seemingly constant cycle of strip searches, pinlights in the eyes, and pat-downs caused me to decide to buck the system. I make a dash for the door! Someone guides me back into the chair. I stand up and two people now physically force me into the chair. I shift in the seat and three people hold me still in the chair. This claustrophobic string of events leads me to believe that I am a prisoner of war in a dungeon-cell miles underground and I have been subjected timid forms of emotional abuse for as long as I can remember for the purpose of mind control. I have to break out!

I slide off of my seat like a snake and slither onto the floor, where I am now on my back. While they are attempting to pick me up I discover that my legs are longer than their arms, so I am kicking like hell and pushing off of them with my legs and I am backing myself toward the wall so they can not get behind me because I want to keep kicking them! This was working well for me but I didn't know that they were about to show me a quick trick for being so slick. Apparently, I gave these poor folks a workout, because my friends told me later that three sizable cops came out of the room upset and out of breath, but that may have only been because they pepper-sprayed me and themselves in the process. And let me tell you, you have not lived until you have been pepper-sprayed on acid!

I am now convinced that I have died. This idea probably came from the fact that being pepper-sprayed feels like suffocation by Tabasco. They also took the liberty of putting me in a handsome hog-tie of handcuffs! The chains give me the impession that I am in a pugatory-type of existance, not of this world but nonetheless like the world and its binding propeties. I can move my legs but not my arms and vice versa. Oh good Lord! It is really like they told me in church? After I died I am still stuck with myself, only now I have to suffer the consequences of having died while not being 'right' with God! It should be noted that I am now agnostic. That is, I feel that there may well be a God (or Goddess for that matter!), but it is not my place as a human to know, and if God does exist, He understands my logical assumption that He does not exist and would not punish me for such, I hope! I guess I have been conditioned by my upbringing in such a way that I will never really be comfortable admitting this. Now let's go back to 1997: I feel that I am in an Abraham's Bosom of sorts. Only I must wait for the second coming of Christ before I may plead for my oppurtunity to enter the kingdom of heaven. But how long will this take?!

I am also toying with the idea that I was escorted out of the show for a higher purpose. Several things lead my mind in this direction. I think that maybe I am correct to assume that reality as I have always known it is not real. My memory may have only been implemented to keep my soul at bay until I realized the cosmic truth. At which point, when I realized reality did not exist and hit the security guard, it was a call to the archangel Michael (the heavenly form of Jesus) to sound the trump and officially announce that it was Judgement Day, and yet had it not always been Judgement Day? I felt that the security guards knew this, and that they may have actually been angels that were with me in the security office to iron out all the kinks, and maybe bring me to the point that I could be forgiven for dying under the wrong circumstances.

They ask me my name. I tell it to them assuming that it is so they could check for it in the Book of Life. They ask me if I know what concert I am at. I tell them 'Widespread Panic.' They all smile at each other. It all seems to make perfect sense.

Of coarse, if reality had existed as I once knew it, I would have gone to see a show and chosen to get out of my mind on acid when the world would have come to an end. But have we not always been trying to answer this riddle? In a continuing string of life form possibilities, would I ever be able to make the right decisions? We have all been through this so many times! Unbound by the dimension of earthly time, I am in the picture-show of what my life could have been, but every time I have made the ignorant decision to revolt and have essentially blown it for my spirit. Why have I been such a stubborn old soul? I don't have the strength to fight anymore. Is there not some type of special arrangement that may ensure that I do not end up for an eternity in Hell? Is that not why most of my captors are showing concern for my well-being, or are they only leading me deeper into their diabolical plan to feed their goblin-energy with the eternal consumption of my soul?

There are a couple of things, however, that are just too deep to try to fathom. Why is one fat redneck cop eating Ritz-Bitz peanut butter sandwiches with no drink in the god-awful southern summer heat? And why is he periodically throwing one at me as I lie in an oblivion of despair? I come to discover that he is only throwing the single crackers with no peanut butter on them. You know, the ones at the bottom of the bag that fell apart.

Meanwhile, my friends have been so polite outside with the cops that they have actually convinced these cops to let me go home on one condition: a paramedic would do a final analysis (basically wave a pin light in front of my face and nothing else) to make sure I was good to go. It couldn't be better news! Things are really looking up for me, right? Only one problem: my mind is up somewhere in the stratosphere!

So the paramedic comes in and has the cops get me uncuffed and such. He then waves a light in my face again and says, 'OK, you're free to go!' He must be playing some sort of prank on me, I think. I am so fed up with the repetitive process. I have tapped back into the rage that has fed my rebellion through my numerous life possibilities through which I have been so disgraced! I decide to press on and fight the not-so-good fight! So what do I do? I open-hand bitch-slap the poor paramedic across his 5 o' clock shadow! Well that is all she wrote for me. They appropriately cart me off to jail in the back of a cop car that is tuned in to none other than the Classic Rock Station from Beyond, as far as I can tell. While the cop up front listens to the old, twangy Pure Prairie League tune that is playing the way it was meant to be heard:

'Amy, what you gonna do? I think I could stay with you, for a while, maybe longer if I do.'

To me it sounded more like a code from above:

'JC, how you gonna tell? I think I could stay in Hell, for a while, maybe longer if I do.'

The song gives me the heebie-jeebies to this day.

So I get to jail and I am convinced that it is a personal hell of my design. I am forced to take a few shots. No, not whiskey shots, tuberculosis shots and what not! Did I mention that I am petrified of needles? I choose not to test the limits of reality while they stick me with needles. Now, there is some evil shit going on this jail. I keep a humble demeanor, because I think that a group of saved people are behind some glass (clear glass, that is, I can plainly see the people), formed up like a jury to decide if I might be saved. And it is not looking good for me, because every member of the jury of my imaginary peers appear to be straight-laced Republicans! In retrospect, it seems that these may have been total hallucinations. This is happening while I am getting my mugshot, so surely there are not any old ladies and folks on the other side of a window. I cannot explain it.

After all this I am on a cold metal bench being processed and I start to cry.......and sing! I must have tugged on the lady's heartstrings who was processing me in to the computer system, because she showed true empathy on her face when she should have been laughing her fool-ass off! This further leads me to believe that she understands my plight, and I am correct to assume that I am in the Big Waiting Room Upstairs. She can not ignore the despair in my voice. I am truly singing the blues! I grace her with my psychotic vocal stylings of the gospel tune 'Jesus is on the Mainline,' and again, I am in jail, crying, and singing at full volume!

'Jesus is on the mainline, tell him what you want, oh!
'Jesus is on the mainline, tell him what you want, oh!

Jesus is on the mainline, tell him what you want!
Just call him up, and tell him what you want!

Oh if you need a lawyer, tell him what you want.............'

I feel that I have the answer! I will praise the Lord even though I know that I am facing the possibility of an eternity in Hell. How could God put me in Hell if I praise him? This may be what they mean by 'weeping and gnashing of teeth' (Luke 13:28).

To make matters freakier the tile floor is checkered black and white. These tiles faintly form the M.C. Escher-esque image of angels and demons in an etheral waltz. It also seems that these angels and demons make up the cage that binds me, so they actually ARE the floor, walls, and ceiling. It is just easier to see that by looking at the black and white floor where, like an eternal chess match, they plainly dance to their tiresome hearts' desire. A perfect stale-mate!

When they throw me into the drunk-tank with the other inmates, I feel that I am in the general population of lost souls. An old man with a white beard is brought in after me and another guy exclaims, 'Hey Santa Claus! What kind of case do they got on you?'

A few of the other guys half-laugh and there is a general somberness to the comment. I feel that it is in bad taste to joke at someone's expense when we are all really supposed to be pleading to the Lord to save us from damnation. I try my hand at some good old-fashioned small talk with a fellow next to me who closely resembles Cactus Jack.

'What are you in for?' I ask.

'Me and Mama got into it. That bitch cut me and they locked ME up.'

This poor spirit is confused and not willing to admit his own part in the matter that led to his demise, I think. I guess he will have to just wait and let St. Peter explain it to him, because I don't have the energy. I am totally delusional, lost in my own tangled web of nonsense.

Well, after being served breakfast, lunch, and dinner I decide that I may actually be in jail. I was arrested with $500 in my pocket but I can not be released on my own recognisance. I place a Collect call to my Mom and she and my brother come to my rescue. As for my friends, they decided I could just screw and headed back to Alabama. For some reason, they felt like they had their fair share of fun with law-dog types that night. I have since given them several playful rations of shit for not bailing me out, but only after they bring up the whole ordeal. They just say, 'Fuck you man, they were gonna let your stupid ass go home!' Well that is my story of the first time I went jail on acid. There has since been two more times, though not quite as dramatic.

The second and third times I was subsequently arrested for DUI. Note: driving under the influence is stupid and irresponsible and it puts other people at risk.

The second time I went to jail on acid, I was arrested for DUI. I was at a party on some farmland owned by a buddy of mine's Dad, and from what I understand some dumb idiot threw a rock at a car that was driving up the highway. The cops broke it up and made everyone leave. Well, almost everyone. I was driving the caboose of the party train, and boy did my buddy and I look suspicious! They asked us how many pini colonis (that's redneck for pina colada) we had that evening. I told them I was at zilch. They shined the flashlight in my buddy C's face and said, 'what about you, son?'

'I only had, hiccup, screws me, ociffer......I only had a couple......ya heard me.'

When they put the cuffs on me, I had a quarter bag of schwag in my pocket and about a half sheet of blotter in an envelope in my wallet. When I got into the back I got my hands into my front pocket of my jeans (it's not easy but it can be done) and then shoved the baggie as far up my crack as possible without, well, you know. I was admitted into County, forced to give up my clothes and my wallet, and man was I sweating! The lady behind the glass actually asked me as she was thumbing through my wallet, 'You don't have anything tucked away in here for a rainy day, do you?'

'No ma'am, ma'am. And may I add, ma'am, that you look real nice this evening, ma'am?'

I made it out the next day with everything, including a charge (which I totally deserved).

The third time I went to jail on acid, I was with a group of buddies riding around town with a keg in the trunk two weeks after the previous DUI. I do not know what I was thinking. I am a different person now. I think I was so bummed about my legal predicament that I didn't really care what happened to me, and I blamed all my problems on cops. This is not a good frame of mind. Things can always get worse, especially when I deserve it! Anyway, my buddies and me go through the Taco Bell drive-thru and I didn't think they gave me all my food and I got belligerent with the poor girl at the window. She informed me that the cops were on their way to which I replied, ‘Good! I want to file a report about my missing taco!'

So the cops get there and put me in the back of one of the squad cars and I remember that I have a 15 pack of gelcaps in my wallet. About the time I get them into my mouth (it's not easy but it can be done) one of my buddies who is now waiting on his cab looks in the window at me to give me a peace sign and a shrug so I stick my tongue out. I see him mouth the words,'Oh, shit!'

I can hardly remember the time I spent this night in jail. Thankfully it was very clean acid, so I had the feeling of a tremendous wave of water rushing over me for about 12 hours. Piece of cake compared to the 4 hits at the Widespread Panic show. I also lost my ability to speak. That was kind of frustrating. A seemingly cool dude was trying to shoot the shit with me in the bullpen but whenever he asked me a question all I could do is nod and shrug. He asked me what high school I had gone to and I knew the answer but I just could not speak. It was like when you try to run in a dream and just can't. He must of thought I was a total dumbass! He was right if he did!

Please, reader, avoid the mistakes I have made. I don't know if anyone is even stupid enough to do any of these things, but I am very grateful that I never hurt or killed anyone. I always felt like I was cool to drive when I did, but I was not too cool to go to jail. Because of these and other mistakes I have spent a year of my life behind bars. Be careful out there and I wish you all
Peace
Love
Unity
Respect
and.....oh shit:
Responsibility

Exp Year: 1997	ExpID: 72372
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 18
Published: Jan 7, 2010	Views: 16,095
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Alcohol (61), LSD (2), Police / Customs (60) : Festival / Lg. Crowd (24), Train Wrecks & Trip Disasters (7)