This is basically a word-perfect description of my absolute, tailor-made, personal hell. Even in college, which was probably the peak period of my interest in psychedelics (yes, I’m a walking cliché), I never understood my friends who would eat like, 20 hits at a time. What’s fun about that? Maybe I’m uptight or, just as likely, I just don’t have the mental fortitude for that kind of thing, but it genuinely scares me shitless to think about being that off my head. When I was 18, I had a slightly older acquaintance who had clearly done waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much acid and I remember thinking, even then, “This person is living in a mental world I never want to inhabit.” I mean, this was not someone who had become charmingly idiosyncratic because of one too many hits. No — talking to her was like interacting with a starry-eyed, fascinated-by-the-boringest-shit-on-the-planet mental hospital escapee: You wondered what she was thinking, but not enough to want to experience it for more than like, a nanosecond. Which reminds me, a friend of mine swears that Maury or Montel or Rolonda or Ricki or one of those late ’90s talk show hosts had an episode on once with people who were permanently tripping and, at one point, the host said, “So, when you look at me, you know I’m not a hallucination, right?” And one of the forever tripping guys calmly said, “Um…when I look at you, I see a bunch of purple and red dots just kind of floating in the shape of a person.” I’ll never forget that story, even though the fact that no one else (including me) seems to have ever seen or heard of that episode does make me wonder about its veracity. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, there is No. Way. In. Hell. I’d eat super strong acid every day for six months. The only way that dare could possibly end is with me in the nuthouse, counting out my million like some crazy miser from an old movie. And I say Fuck That.
- Kali
