Italics indicate later annotations.

Just Dropped

11:31 AM

Haha oh no, some guys just arrived with a new fridge and my landlord came up to help. Tabs still under my tongue.

11:38 AM

Lucky they didn’t arrive a few minutes earlier or I might not have tripped at all.

Good attitude past self.

11:48 AM

I am about to head to the National Gallery of Art, but am waiting to help switch stuff between fridges when the new one is set up.

11:50 AM

Is morality more about your inner mammal vs inner reptile

or inner mammal vs inner man / inner ape / hominid

12:52 PM

Nice transition from not tripping much at all to totally tripping balls. I was just starting to hallucinate when my landlord walked out of my living room.

I don’t know if it’s psychosomatic or what, writing is hard.

1:18 PM

Going around in an artist’s wing is like going around inside their head. People looking back out of portraits at the artist.

1:24 PM

The nervous sweaty guy being paid to stand around with a gun in this museum room is not doing it for me.

1:27 PM

Art is so weird, as someone coming to it through pop culture.

The idea that most of your audience is after your own death.

All this 1600’s Dutch stuff, they were just painting what they saw, but for me the main value is as a period piece.

What I mean by ‘coming to it through pop culture’ is that the experience I have in analyzing and enjoying creative products is mostly with stuff being produce right now. It’s interesting to see all this stuff so out of it’s time and context. Like if snooty people a few hundred years from now were watching modern television, and having people explain to them what the deal is with the product placement, and all the little assumptions we make that they’re not aware of.

1:32 PM

People keep filling the rooms I’m in.

1:36 PM

This building is so trippy. Regardless of the art, just having huge expanses of wood is great.

The whole building is unbelievably cool.

I sort of have a stomach ache. Hopefully it will pass soon.

For some reason writing it down did. Yay!

1:39 PM

I think what I meant was that it helped the stomach ache.

Oh it’s great to shift rooms. I just went from a bunch of bummed dead Dutchmen to a bunch of dope ships and clouds. Also, note deteriorating writing.

1:41 PM

My handwriting broke free of the lines of the page sometime during the above journal entries.

What would a psychedelic city be like? Like what if there were just a few square miles where everyone inside was tripping

1:46 PM

Was tripping pretty hard and looking at Dutch cityscapes.

took a picture. Says a lot about gender relations. I thought about how the gender relations of the early 1600’s Amsterdam needed to be brought down and then realized that they were probably fine

I mean what are you gonna do, they’ve been dead for centuries.

1:51 PM

I think I need a snack but I’m a little nervous to go to the cafe.

1:52 PM

I see some young Asian men wandering around taking photos of art. What are they getting out of this?

I just listened to some dude describe a piece in great detail and it was great. Great enough that I’m currently writing about it instead of searching for food. This museum is so cool but I need to eat Crap

2:06 PM

I’ve run into something meant to guilt trip Chinese tourists

2:10 PM

There was this music emanating out, and all these pictures of Chinese human rights abuses, right out in front of the museum. I assume the point is to get it in front of the huge number of Chinese tourists who come through these museums. Fair enough I guess

I am these old people’s impression of a young person. I guess I feel like I’m not representatives.

Oh the joy of eating an apple!

2:30 PM

Ugh my lower teeth fit together in such a way that little bits of food get stuck, very frustrating!

2:32 PM

I was in this little cafe in the grounds of the national portrait gallery, where there’s also a cool little ice rink. I gobbled down a couple energy bars and an apple to fuel up.

I might be getting a little sensory overload. Calming down.

2:34 PM

Awesome the picture of a candybar on my candybar came offf and floated around.

2:35 PM

For some reason I thought that was before my last time check. I was not.

2:36 PM

Heh heh, got a little confused there buddy?I think this had to do with writing down the time stamps. I had just written “2:35 PM” and thought I remembered writing a later time already.

I’m in a garden room with old people. It’s quite nice.

Yes I actually made it back to the art gallery!

I was just out on the street getting granola bars and helped interpret for a schizophrenic who thought the food truck could get him pizza.

I felt like I was much more on his level.

2:49 PM

Haha okay I have no idea to what extent whoever this dude was, was schizophrenic. I just know I was at a little food stand, buying some granola bars, and this dude came up and kept trying to order pizza, and the dude in the truck was not a native English speaker, and was trying to accept the guy’s patronage. I explained to the dude that he could get other kinds of food at this truck, but he would have to seek pizza elsewhere. Not in those words. He seemed to get it though.

OMG the main non-old people are young asians. They seem very scheduled. Are they on a school trip? Here with parents? Hard to say.

2:51 PM

Looking around it seems like I’m in a TV drama. A bunch of well dressed people in a lavish setting, going about their business.

Not sure what that says about TV. Maybe just that actors are well groomed and movie sets are pretty?

2:53 PM

If I’m ever the messiah remind me not to just look like a bored little alien, even if it turns out that’s what being a messiah is all about.

2:59 PM

Jesus, Christ why you gotta look so weird?

I guess I need to ask what I’m tripping for. Just to have a fun day? To produce journal material?

I’m recapitulating a conflict like between 2 people, one annoyed at the other for taking too many photos instead of living in the moment.

3:02 PM

A lot of that conflict ahead.

I can’t tell if writing is part of tripping, or part of talking about it after.

Because right now I’m writing, but later people will read this and respond.

Story idea: you are one mindstate, trying to get a message out in a diary before the jaws of sobriety rush in!

3:04 PM

I feel indescribably better with a full stomach. Christ.

3:05 PM

Fuck I think I’m starting to see the family resemblance amongst Medici’s. Feel very pretentious.

Don’t know when I became such a self-hating culture snob. I guess I’m more of an art rube! It’s lucky for me I’m a nice clean shaven young white dude that doesn’t attract much notice here.

3:08 PM

I was thinking like if I was black and scary, they might look more askance at me. But idk, I guess everyone is welcome in the museum. I’d be interested to see how they react to lower class people going around stinking up the place, but I guess the answer is that anyone sufficiently together to have an interest in art can probably put themselves together decently for a trip to the art museum, or else they’ve got other shit on their mind.

Oh nice, I just went from an awful echoey marble Italian room to a nice wooden Dutch room.

The sounds are a lot more muffled.

I didn’t write about it much while I was there, but the sound off the place was also very interesting. Some rooms were super-echoey, some super-soft and quiet. Going from big marble rooms to big wooden rooms to big carpeted rooms you really notice the difference.

Haha some kid is trying to pick out a painting for a project. Imagine if you could see other people who were looking into the same stuff as you, like how I can tell people are with me in the room (now none).

That’s just what a library is like I guess?

No, slightly later acid self. It’s more like if you could see who was looking at the same things on the internet as you? And I guess that you’d be able to see just sense

But imagine if you were in some little Greek city state, where it’s just you and your few hundred / thousand buddies who use the library.

I need a break from writing

3:15 PM

I think the fact that I wrote “I need a break” rather than stopping shows what a state I was in.

Instead I took pictures:

This is a weird painting. My interpretation was that it’s an older dude and his weird looking young wife. Also the white horse seemed like it had very flirtatious eyes.

Really I guess I was just amused by everyone’s expressions.

Durrrr

I get why people get into art. It’s a whole entertainment and cultural experience, like “being into TV” or “being into music” but you get to feel very fancy and hang out in nicely apportioned places with other fancy people, so basically winning the social status signaling game.

It’s so far from my area of expertise,

3:23 PM

Looking at the back of my hand is also great. I sort of see a bunch of weird patterns and then they fade out again. It’s very helpful for finding real patterns like how the veins go.

3:27 PM

That’s how I think psychedelics work in general: they just make you super-sensitive to patterns. So you’re more likely to see patterns that aren’t there, but also more likely to see ones that really are there. You just need to have a process where you see the billion possible patterns when you trip, and then sort through them afterward and find which ones were real / are useful insightful ways of looking at the world.

Find the photo of the dude in red on camera, synch up

That Medici chin and that weird front – cape style haunt me. I keep thinking statue heads are on backwards.

Giuliano de Medici. I guess if you want your name to live forever, being the patron of super-famous artists and having them do portraits and sculptures of you is not a bad way to go about it. Rich people in eras of big creatively flowerings are lucky.

3:53 PM

I will have to revisit the museum. I’m not sure if I’d still be interested when not tripping. It’s cool though, definitely potential for many days of tripping / culture / writing ahead!

Okay to the mall!

3:57 PM

Continued here

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