What I like about drugs, particularly hallucinogens, is of course the mishmashing. I like the words bleeding together and the free association of random ideas. The visual stuff is certainly cool, sitting out watching waves or having the woods pop out at you, and being impervious to the warmth of the sun or the potential itch of a dozen plants you can’t identify is certainly a level of connected empowered freedom. Hiking is great when you can’t feel yourself huffing! Why? Who wouldn’t want to traverse this cliff when your feet are pillows!? There’s that, and then there’s finding yourself getting caught in a feedback loop because your brain is telling you something happened that absolutely didn’t. (Curse you noodles not making it to my mouth! I felt so full!)
I don’t find drugs “illuminating” in any more of a sense than I feel particularly brilliant at the right amount of drinks. I can recognize that certain points of my perception are floating well beyond my control and I need to stay hydrated even if swallowing is…sideways. But, while the trees and the lake and the sun shine a little, well a lot, brighter, and the sensory input is wholly unrealistic about the amount of sun damage I’m accumulating, there isn’t anything “more.”
I also think that I’d have it no other way. People describe the idea of “bad trips” as these maddening descents into hell or weird visualizations. Nope. For me it’s the idea that I might not really be getting my fork to my mouth. I can put that food down and try again later. Bad trip moment over. It’s been brought to me often enough times that “maybe drugs don’t affect you the same way” and I’ve never been able to make much sense of it. I still have all of the same receptors and I’m plugged into the same space and time as my cohort. Why shouldn’t my head give me some form of “revelatory” insight or fun and freedom that they relish? Or maybe it’s crave?
I think for me, I’ve accepted, or at least done a lot of work to keep up the illusion, that I’m a magical dream-like figure free to piss off into a field in the middle of nowhere or occupy a “normal” state of existence around insufferable white people already. The woods aren’t my escape. The drugs aren’t my connection with the eternal. I don’t need to be anywhere, particularly when it might endanger the people I’m tripping with. I know who I am and where I exist even if it’s only in these tortured lines. I know I’m my work and sacrifices and self-pitying story for every inconsiderate asshole I’ve ever tried to look after who only managed to find resentment. My “trip” is always happening. I’m always discovering some new “crazy” dimension of my being and shit I’m willing to put up with or have to learn how to fix. And I’ve known that for a really. long. fucking. time.
Drugs just remind me that I’m exuberant and hopeful and intrigued and motivated and full of energy and ideas all by myself already, and it’s as isolating and desperate sober as you look being the only one tripping balls in a setting not designed to house you. You’re my bad trip not because of anything in particular you’ve done to me, but you’re bringing down my high. One can only take so much responsibility for their disposition without considering the environment they’re plugged into, and I feel I’ve been identifying all of the parts of mine that don’t work well enough for quite some time. Drugs don’t make them better. There is no “escape.” Maybe you feel like you’re doing something, but you’re not doing the work.
