Cars Are So Loud and Unfortunate

LSD

Citation: Psycho-not. "Cars Are So Loud and Unfortunate: An Experience with LSD (exp66912)". Erowid.org . Apr 22, 2012. erowid.org/exp/66912

DOSE:

1 oral LSD (edible / food) smoked Cannabis (plant material)

BODY WEIGHT: 135 lb

Here follows the events of my first acid trip in all its glory. For the purposes of this recollection I shall be C, and my tripping partner will be L. At the time we were both 18, the summer of 2007. Other characters such as J, P, and many others will be named as they appear. As a preface I will say that I had been trying to obtain a hallucinogen to experiment with for over 6 months. Prior to this my only experience with drugs had come from smoking copious amounts of marijuana for about a year and half, and a week prior to this experience I had take a half eighth of Psylocibin Mushrooms (with L) which resulted in my first mild psychedelic experience. Suffice to say LSD was a much larger experience on the whole.I acquired the acid at a party of all places. I had been talking to my friend L about our recent shroom trip and a very strung out kid walked up to us and said, hey man you wanna buy some acid? Classic, I thought as he told me. Absolutely brilliant. I paid $20 for two hits on shock tarts. I was a little unsure about that but I could see the drops on them so I thought well fuck why the hell not.Exactly a week later, on a Saturday, my friend and I parked at a local elementary school. Yea thats right a fucking elementary school. It was actually a pretty sweet spot because the woods behind the school were frequented by bikers and hikers out getting their kicks on the paths that lacerated the woods. We figured we pop the acid and spend 6 hours or so wandering in these woods looking for glorious things. It was actually a fairly good plan. We just didnt realize how much walking this would actually entail.We parked the car and grabbed all manner of shit that we might need, stuffing our pockets with the stuff. Pipes, papers, weed, iPods, and any other shit that could help chill us out. We snapped into a smart march and made our way into the woods. My friend was getting antsy so I pulled out the acid. I looked at both shock tarts carefully. Red and green. I had really wished they were red and blue, Im a big fan of the matrix. In any case I took the red one and put it on my tongue and he did likewise. There was no taste beyond the sugary sensation of the shock tarts. So here I was finally trying the fabled stuff that had inspired so many songs and powered a counter-culture movement. After about 3 minutes the stuff had dissolved in my mouth and I thought theres nothing I could do to stop it at this point, Im in for 12 hours.I really think thats one of the great things about slow acting psychedelics. That waiting period before they kick in gives me time to accept the fact that I'm in for a ride before the mental distortion kicks in. I sort of resigned myself to my upcoming fate, even if it is only temporary.Anyways so at this point were walking through the woods and its about 11:00am. I remember these times very clearly because they seemed like the most important things in the world at the time. We began walking and L told me what to expect because he had done it once before and I settled in to wait. We walked past all manner of shit along the bike trails: old bikes, a rusted car, a washing machine all kinds of shit that just shouldnt have been there. Slightly disappointing but hey you cant let stuff get you down.The first moment when I began to feel the effects was when we sat down to rest on some bike jumps. They were real big things that the bikers around my town keep up very meticulously. I was on a bank of sorts and my friend on a taller more normal looking jump when I realized that I was expected a stoned feeling, when I should be expecting something more similar to my mushroom trip the week prior. I looked hard up at the leaves and as I leaned my head back I did feel a bit of a rush up my spine but maybe I imagined it. Either way this got me pumped and I jumped up and clapped my hands. Bro lets get going! I said. L consented and we began walking more vigorously through the woods. I figured I wasnt tripping and I needed a little bit of help so I pulled out my iPod, but it on mono and put one headphone in so that I could still listen to L talk.The choice of what song to listen to was agonizing, not because I was tripping yet, but because I take my drugs seriously (perhaps a folly of mine). I finally settled on a one two punch of Somebody to Love and White Rabbit both by Jefferson Airplane. This was a GOOD decision. Somebody to love made me feel pumped, and White Rabbit absolutely weirded me out. In a good way. You know how it is.So L gets this powerful thirst and were at our first point of crisis since dropping. L says he is feeling the acid a little but we need to find water really badly. We didnt bring any with us which was a big mistake as it was probably 95+ degrees out. After much deliberation we decided that we would simply walk back to the elementary school and use an outdoor water fountain. I think I really like that about acid. When I'm in trip mode I really sort of use Occams razor as a decision making process: the simplest solution is probably the best. So we walked the half mile back to the elementary school.It was between those jumps and the school when I began to feel the effects of my LSD. We came up the crest of the hill, and a set of power-lines that snaked along the side of the bike path (which at this point was wide enough to accommodate a truck) seemed to stretch on forever. It was as if the horizon was farther away than should ever be allowed by a rational sane world. The puddles along the side of the path were quite brown. Very, very brown actually.At one point we saw a small toad on the side of the path and L and I stopped and debated for a short time on whether or not the toad was actually there. The conversation started as a joke about how some people expect the impossible while tripping but turned into a conversation and investigation into existentialism and what I like to think of as theory of communication. After such an intense discussion my mind was pretty much in overdrive thinking an analyzing. I find that a trip is best with alternating moments of analytical thought and pure feeling and being in the moment and not thinking anything. Of course at the moment I had no idea that this was a good thing and I was just happy to be having such deep emotionally stirring thoughts.The next thing I saw was absolute beauty. I live in North Carolina, which is known for its red clay dirt. As I walked onto the campus of this small elementary school the ground was covered in red clay, small grey and black pebbles, and blue gravel. No painting ever had more beautiful colors than that red, grey, black and blue. LSD is amazing like that. Thats what I tell people when they ask me about it. Whats it like man? Everything is beautiful I tell them.Anyways we went and got our water from a water fountain, which had a drowned cockroach in the bottom. Pretty gross but we were desperate. We walked down to one of the playgrounds and marveled at the colors of the play structures there for a while until we were interrupted by a group of small children (very strange as it was a weekend and they had nobody supervising them). I think some stuff happened to fill the next half hour but its unclear to me now. Eventually we had decided that we needed to walk to Weaver Street (a local organic foods market full of stoned hippies). The only problem was its distance, something like 3 miles away (I was so amazed by the distance we walked that day I calculated it using Google earth, the school was 2.86 miles by the path we took). Once again we marveled at the ridiculousness of modern society. Why shouldnt we walk a few miles to obtain foodstuffs, it was done by our ancestors for millions of years. So we walked. And we discussed how certain themes in music and literature reflected this traveling mindset that we were experiencing. The only example I can think of at the moment is Ramble On by Led Zeppelin.So there we trekked, over hills and along roads, along railroads, under bridges and over creeks. We finally arrived at a park where we walked through a family reunion with a good deal of African Americans people and fried chicken. It was pretty funny at the time. Anyways when we got to this park I experienced one of my most amazing hallucinations of the trip. There was a large American sycamore across from the bench we were sitting upon and I pulled on Ls arm holy shit dude look at that! The bark of this tree was literally slithering up and down and melting into the ground. The movement was just like watching lava flow, but over the surface of the tree. I looked at the ground and the grass sparkled and flowed as though underwater. I looked up and my whole field of vision swam like an octopus garden in the shade. Dont know if thats what Lennon was going for, but its sure as hell how I felt (I make that analogy in retrospect).The next part of the adventure involved walking into the bathroom at this park, which was not only dirty but had no light. As I walked in and the door close behind me rushing sounds emanated around my head and my vision became very enclosed and narrow. I placed my hands under the running water in the sink and splashed some over my face. I cannot describe what I felt because I forgot it just a moment later, but let it suffice to say it was intense.I emerged back into the light and things really began to break down in terms of what I remember. Time got very jumpy as we walked across another parking lot and began walking into town. For some reason I did not get paranoid as we walked along a fairly main artery into town. L began to speak of the absurdity of large SUVs and how they should be made illegal and whatnot (granted we saw more hybrids than we saw SUVs in our town, but L is very passionate about such things). At one point in this conversation he uttered the words that stuck with me forever cars are so loud and unfortunate. It was at that moment that my entire worldview changed and Im pretty sure Ive never been the same. I cant explain how, it was a very subtle change. But violent movies arent quite as appealing anymore, angry music seems immature, anger in general is bizarre, and television commercials and the way people act on them seem downright strange. I feel as though it retuned my bullshit detector to high.We finally made it to Weaver Street, and after a quick stint walking inside, which resembled very much walking around in an aquarium, we exited with some sushi and mixed wheat grass drinks or something nasty like that. We ate and drank quickly but remarked later that we hadnt really been hungry. While we ate I began hearing a bizarre whooov noise in my left ear which I convinced myself was a hallucination because I didnt want to turn my head and look sketchy. Well this of course was ridiculous and I looked and saw that it was a young mother on the lawn where we were sitting, blowing over the surface of an empty bottle to make that very distinct noise to entertain her child. I had a moment of connection with her where we locked eyes, and I was sure she knew I was tripping, and that she had tripped before. She gave me a smile and as I turned back to L I said dude lets get out of here. The ground wiggled to reinforce my decision.Earlier in the day walking around my elementary school while undergoing such profound leaps of perception had been very eye opening, and had brought about something of what Tim Leary and his Ilk would call ego death. In light of this L wanted to visit his elementary school so, being the liberating walking-light-beings that we were at the time, we decided to go. We had a small mishap crossing the street on the way there, but drivers here are nice and break for absent minded professors from the local university, so had no problems stopping for some local acid freaks either. We arrived at the school and spent a good deal of time staring at the tables and grass. I talked to a friend on the phone briefly and he agreed to pick us up later that evening when we were done tripping. We lay in the grass for a while and watched the clouds float in one direction, and then stop and race back the way they had come. Bark still crawled on the tree if one looked at it hard enough and other weird shit continued to happen. This detour added a good half mile to our return journey to bringing the total distance we had walked up to 5 miles.The next half hour or so was spent in intense deep conversation about life and the universe and the next thing we knew we were back at the elementary school which we had started at. The route we took was very indirect and involved a lot of walking around in the woods making our total distances for the day an eventual 8 miles. We walked around the school again marveling at how gravel showing through imperfections in the concrete would swim like the stars in a galaxy (seriously that is the only way to describe it). Anyways this continued for another half hour or so until I rolled a joint that was pretty much the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Again. We both talked to our parents on the phone (a difficult task) and waited for our ride to come pick us up. A guy name J who I had talked to on the phone earlier and a girl P (who has recently had her own amazing acid experiences, but at this time had not even considered it) picked us up and brought us back to Js house.We were terrified of having to face his parents, but when they said hi to us it really wasnt that bad. Once in his room everything sort of ended. I kept trying to make stuff move with my mind but it was mostly over. The only moment when I felt it again was when about 10 people walked into that same room later after L went to pick them up (he was good to drive at this point). I could feel their combined energy wash over me. The rest of the night consisted of smoking massive amounts of dank marijuana and listening to chill music. I talked to some other people who had tripped at other times and we shared experiences. In the immortal words of General Tarken: This will be a day long remembered.