Let’s Give ‘Er!

Okay okay. It’s about 2PM on a Saturday and I’ve already done my laundry and had my brunch, read all the recent articles there were to read, etc. So now that I have that stuff out of the way I can spend some time here.

Now, you’ll have to forgive me here because this happened a few months ago and my memory isn’t the greatest and I’m currently listening to the face-melting guitars of Dragonforce so I’m distracted.

It was still summertime which meant it was warm. It was late in the afternoon if I remember correctly. I’m just gonna use peoples’ names here for ease of explanation. So I went to Jeff’s place — which might I add is quite a bus ride from my own place — and we chilled for a while and waited for people to show up. Once most people had arrived, we began our treck for supplies. What that meant was we had to head down to Safeway and get some chocolate bars! Hell yeah.

So anyway, our group wandered through the aisles of Safeway until we managed to find some decent chocolate bars, which was a surprisingly difficult task. I mean, we needed something that was just pure chocolate y’know? And everything has fruit and nuts and shit in it. Ugh. Anyway we finally got it and waited in the parking lot where we met another friend of ours. By now I think we have… lemme think. Three people? That seems wrong. I’ve totally fucked up the timeline but whatever. Anyway so we’re waiting in the parking lot and Aaron and I had brought a couple of not-insignificant bags of weed, which we began smoking. Not surprisingly, this is where my memory gets hazy…

So anyway, this is the part where the screen goes black and there’s some white text that says “Later…”

So we’re now back at Jeff’s house and suddenly we have a massive bag of mushrooms. There’s also a girl with us now. So me, my three friends, and this girl that we’re all acquainted with but that’s about it. Well anyway, there are I think 40 grams of mushrooms which we all begin to chow on while eating chocolate bars like no tomorrow to mask the taste. Honestly, when they’re plain, it’s like eating tree branches. Ugh. I mean, the resemblance to eating tree branches is uncanny.

Not that I know what it’s like to eat a tree branch.

So anyway, after that we head out to the park nearby. It has these four great big stone benches and a bit of a covered area. So anyway, we’re just chatting and blah blah blah, know what I mean? Well anyway, what really started it was somebody spilled their water on the floor. I don’t know what it was about that water, but something about the way it flowed… just really triggered everything. So we’re all transfixed by this water making inane comments like “look at it flow” when I look off to my friend who’s sitting on the fringe of the group a bit. He’s star… hahaha oh man, I’m cracking up thinking about this. He’s staring at the ground and mumbling to himself. So I’m like, “Hey, what’s up?” and the poor kid, he just could not formulate a sentence. It was like…

“The… the ants are… getting… more numbers… and making… the water… they’re making… no it’s making… shapes…”

Right now I’m laughing about it but at the time he was the only one really tripping out and my friend and I who had consumed the most were like “Ohhhh shit. That’s gonna be us in a few minutes.” So we’re all bracing for it… but at first, it wasn’t that bad at all!

I’m not really going to be able to describe everything in detail from start to finish here but I’ll give highlights and try to segue things as best as I can.

So anyway we’re still at the benches and suddenly someone yells, “Check that tree out!” So we’re all staring at this tree and honestly, what I saw was a memory I will never, never forget. It’s still so clear in my mind…

It was quite late by this point. Everything around us was dark, and the colors were muted. Except this one tree was actually making it’s own light. And it was bright, too. Not everybody is going to get this, but in Lord of the Rings, when Gandalf the White first reveals himself to Gimli, Aragorn and Legolas, and it’s like he’s creating this own intense, radiant light? The tree was doing that. But see, it wasn’t a tree anymore. It was like a series of blood-vessels were coming up from the ground. They were a bright, arterial red and I could see the blood flowing through them. Instead of leaves, the tree had all these bulbs, not unlike the alveoli found in our lungs.

In bunches, where the leaves would be. And each one of those little bulbs gave off its own bright light… I guess they were like lightbulbs. Now if that isn’t crazy enough… the tree swayed back and forth of its own accord. It was just so amazing.

Yadda yadda suddenly we’re walking somewhere. Oh yeah! It was our original intention to head to the beach. Well, I’m pretty sure we wandered around in circles about three times before we finally dropped two people off to go to home. The girl hardly ate any at all because she was scared of tripping (isn’t that the point?) so she bussed home, and the other guy — the guy that was tripping out from the ants — we dropped him off at his place.

So I guess it was just me and the two guys left, and all of us were out of it. Yet we were somehow able to actually hold a conversation between three people. Anyway, we basically got into this discussion about how, in life, you’re sort of trapped on this track. Like, you have no control over it because of how society is set up. You can’t escape from societal norms because you have to support yourself. You have to eat. You have to have shelter. And to have food and shelter, you need money. And to get money you need a job. So you’re pretty much trapped on these tracks. They were kinda freaking out about it but I was just like… “Even if you are trapped, even if you have no choice but to do something… you still have a choice of what it is to do. You just have to do what makes you happy. That’s what life is about, doing what makes you happy.”

Well, instead of going to the beach we ended up going to Jeff’s place. I have no clue why we went there but we did. So I’m standing outside Jeff’s place with Aaron when I realize that I’m overheating like crazy. Like I had the most intense fever. Well anyway, I took my coat and sweater off to try and cool down and finally pleaded with someone to get me some water. The water really helped, whereas taking the clothes off didn’t. I’m pretty sure the temperature was entirely mental and I wasn’t actually hot, though. I thought I was sweating like crazy, but who’s to say? I had also somehow convinced myself that I was really sick and threw up, and my friend was sure I had as well, but I didn’t. I checked back at the place where I supposedly did and there was nothing there. Weird…

Anyway, I can’t remember why but I started to go to my friend’s house. By now I was seriously so out of it I wasn’t really coherent at all, and… well that’s not true. It was weird. My mind was this insane babble that I couldn’t shut off, and it went about a thousand miles a minute with pictures and theories. Despite my spiel earlier about just doing what made you happy, I knew that living a life where everything was pre-ordained for you and you were trapped by a fate created for you by something we couldn’t understand (and it had to be created by something, because how else does something come to being without being created, and if it has to be created, something must spur that creation), that life was not worth living. I didn’t want to exist in this world anymore. So I went into my friend’s house knowing that, were I to fall asleep, I would forfeit my life. That I knew too much, that to sleep would be to die. I accepted that, though. My desire to have freedom of choice outweighed my desire to live. I was still peaking at this point.

I went into his living room and lay down on the floor. Jeff came in and asked me if I wanted a pillow or a blanket. “No, that’s okay,” I said with clarity that surprised even myself. “I’m alright, I’m alright.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, it’s fine, go to bed.”

I guess I just didn’t want to be disturbed. The more people were around me, the more time I had to spend in this wretched existence. I just wanted it to be over.

But oh, it was far from over.

Once I lay down, I tried to fall asleep. Or maybe I just closed my eyes a few times, because really, my mind was completely incapable of coherent chronological interpretation. While I lay there, I had this sensation that parts of my body didn’t exist. I’m not sure how to explain it, but if I didn’t actively look at my legs, feet, arms, hands, and torso, I felt like they weren’t there. I lost my sense of proprioception I guess. So I had to continually look at myself to reassure myself that my limbs were still there, and that I was in fact a person that existed. It was at this point that I had become intensely aware of the fact that I did not in fact exist, and that I was only a memory that I was currently accessing. I remember feeling extremely nauseous, but then thinking to myself, “I’m only a memory… I know I would have gotten up to go to the washroom if I were sick… and I’m definitely not getting up right now, so clearly I never threw up in the future,” and then the feeling of nausea would pass. This happened about five times, but each time I just reassured myself that I didn’t remember myself from the future throwing up, so obviously I didn’t (wouldn’t?), and the feeling would go away.

I was still tripping harder and harder, though. I hadn’t yet begun the comedown. Eventually, maintaining any sense of self-awareness became impossible and I stopped realizing that I existed at all. Suddenly I wasn’t in Jeff’s house anymore. I was in space. Or rather, I was space. My body was the Universe, and I could look at and within myself and see all the stars. I could also travel through myself at impossible speeds with perfect accuracy. It wasn’t that I was a vehicle travelling through space as I was simply observing space, and I could look at one end of the Universe, and then just glance over to the other end. So it wasn’t like travelling. It was amazing, being able to flit through the Universe on a whim, though, and the sense of having everything happen within yourself, and being immune to anything and everything… it was the exact opposite of how I felt earlier. Instead of being forced into this track of societal norms, I was freer than physically possible. My freedom had transcended any boundaries of physicality.

It was somewhere around here I succumbed to exhaustion and fell asleep.

Some time after that — it’s impossible to know how long I was out — I reawakened. Apparently it was long enough for that glass of water to go through me, so I went to the washroom. I remember being in there and saying out loud, “Am I just a memory?”

I looked around and at the ground. I saw a dead animal lying on the ground, it looked like roadkill. Again, I vocalized my thoughts.

“That’s not actually a dead animal… it’s just a facecloth.” Somehow, despite looking at it and seeing, with extreme clarity, some roadkill, I knew that it was just a facecloth. Even though it looked nothing like a facecloth. Anyway, I stood around for a while trying to think. As I left the washroom I wondered to myself whether I was travelling backwards or forward in time. Did I just return from the washroom, or was I getting up to go to the washroom… but in reverse? It was impossible for me to tell whether I was going forwards or backwards. I did, however, laugh to myself as I lay back down on the floor thinking to myself how I had control over my mind again. How it was no longer a mess of uncontrolled thoughts, but one tangent at a time that I had complete control over… even if I had no idea what the hell was happening around me, haha.

Anyway, mega anticlimactic ending… I fell asleep again, woke up, and dragged my sorry ass to Starbucks and then some other cafe, where my friend and I reminisced about the crazy shit. There’s my story!