I have mixed feelings on LSD (for my own personal use). I've done it twice, and while other people seem to feel it has very therapeutic and recreational qualities, it always seems to fuck with me. I can't really explain how, but things get too crazy. I get easily overwhelmed and my senses get scrambled. Like I stop being able to trust what I see/hear/feel/perceive. As someone with an anxiety problem, that sort of loss of control over doesn't jive well with me.

However, tonight I was reminiscing some, and my nostalgia took me back to the very first time I ever tripped hard on hallucinogens. Mind if I take you there? I'm about to start.

As a dumbass teenager who had just tried drugs that weren't weed or alcohol for the first time, I was enthralled and wanted to get my hands on many different things. That whole summer a lot of my time was spent on finding and procuring drugs- but my little town was usually dust-dry, especially when it came to finding someone risk-prone enough to sell to us dumbass teenagers. After being on the hunt for shrooms for awhile, some friends and I found someone who was willing to sell us acid. I was a bit reluctant because I hadn't gotten much of a drug education and thought I might develop schizophrenia from it, but my curiosity got the best of me and I bought some.

We spent all day waiting for the guy to call us back and by the time we got our stuff in hand, it was 11PM. After a quick google search we decided to divy up the goods. 4 of us, 2 ladies and 2 men (I'm female). Our more trip-sperienced friend took 3 blotters, me and the other guy took 2.5, and the other girl 2. We let them melt a little on our tongue before taking a deep breath and waiting for the magic to happen.

An hour passes. Still no signs of it kicking in. We're sitting outside on my friend's porch, with my one buddy playing his acoustic guitar. Midnight sharp comes, then goes. We are all waiting expectantly for it to happen, losing a little hope as every second passes. One of us asks if the others are 'feeling it', and the answer is decidedly no. Our friend who is hosting us mentions maybe give it another half hour and then maybe she should go to bed.

Five more minutes pass and I begin to feel a bit... strange. Not high exactly- maybe dizzy? I kind of space out a bit, looking at this shinto mask decoration that is on the wall of my friend's deck. As I watch, it's face... moves. Or changes, whatever. It's normally scowling expression turns mirthful and mocking. I gasp aloud and turn to my friends. The girl and our trippy friend have implacable expressions on their face. My buddy with the guitar, on the other hand, has a shit-eating grin on his face, and as I watch his fingers strum his instrument (whoa that sounds dirty) he says in a low voice, "Man, I'm playing really fast right now..."

That's it. It clicks. We all start giggling uncontrollably. No explanations necessary. Giggling turns into an all out brouhaha, until our hosting friend's mom screams to shut the fuck up and stop playing that godforsaken guitar already! So we do our best to strangle our laughter, and we decide to grab our gatorade bottles and go. It takes longer than normal to figure out our shoes, but we want to be anywhere but that house right now.

It was an absolutely gorgeous July night. Warm and sweet-smelling, with bright shining stars and plump white puffs of cloud. Things aren't too trippy just yet, but our laughter cannot be contained. Each joke we tell scares up a gale of laughter. There's a large set of concrete steps- 111 exactly, I counted them once- that we have to descend to get to the downtown/beach area from my friend's area in the bluffs. As we gaze down from the top of the steps to where they end, we all breathe a 'whoa'. It looks like an MC Escher drawing, the way it bends and curves down the slope of the bluff. We all look at each other and slowwllly descend down the stairs, hanging onto the railing for dear life. I feel a bit wobbly, and every shadowy on the way down plays tricks on my mind. Nevertheless, we arrive safely at the bottom, where the moon and street light is casting shadows through a thatch of trees every which way.

I ask my lady friend if I can hold her hand and she gleefully obliges. We're en route to the beach which, incidentally, is en route to my place. I ask if they would mind if we dropped by there so I can grab a pair of shorts. The jeans I wore that night were stiflingly uncomfortable and heavy and hot. They agree, with my musician friend asking if he can use my bathroom. We swing by, leaving trippy and lady in the alleyway behind- I trust our ability to contain ourselves not. I quietly, quietly unlock the front door and we traipse up the squeaky steps. The squeaks are loud- deafeningly so it seems, throwing echoes off the walls of the stairwell. My friend asks "why are your steps so loud?" and I'm agape. "They've never been this loud before," I whisper back.

I point him in the direction of the bathroom with a military-like gesture. It feels like I'm in a WWII movie, that our mission to be silent is absolutely crucial. We part ways for a moment and I open the door to my room and start digging through my laundry for some shorts. The light in my room is so, so fucking bright, that I can barely see. My laundry and folded clothes are just a spectrum of color- I had a hard time telling what I was looking at. Every article was an absurdity; how do they all look so different and so much alike simultaneously? It takes me a good long while to find something suitable. As I'm changing clothes, something I've done thousands of times at least, I'm baffled by the process, like I was doing it for the first time ever.

Once I've put myself in passable order, I close the door to my bedroom and rap quietly on the bathroom door. My buddy says, "just a minute," and I reply with "I'll be outside on the porch." I head outside to get some fresh air- the house is stifling. Only to bump into who else but my mother. She's sitting on the deck with a cigarette in hand. I've never, ever been so panicked in my life. She's scowling, and bitches at me for bringing a friend home at this time of night, how dare I? I just explained that I had to change my clothes and my friend had to use the bathroom and I couldn't exactly say he couldn't. She scoffed and continued to berate me on not completing my chores. I swallow hard. Eyes as big as saucers I'm sure. Nothing is making sense- am I even actually talking to my mother right now? Is this real life? She stubs out her smoke and retreats downstairs to her room with the closing statement "You better be up and ready to do your chores by 8 AM, and I mean it." I affirm that I will be knowing that I'm balls-out lying to her. No way I'm going to sleep any time soon.

Still, the worst of the crisis is averted and I kind of awkwardly hang back waiting for my friend to finish his... whatever. It seems like hours pass and I wonder if I should go tell my friends in the alley that it might be awhile. But my friend appears- huzzah! with some complaints about bowel issues. I nod and say 'dude I just talked to my mom'. He replies with 'man I could not do that right now'.

We get the hell out of there and meet our friends, who are kind of huddling in shadows against the fence. The reunion kind of takes away the worst of the anxiety. I guess social validation that dude, things are getting weird.

We roll down downtown. It's a weekday and things are dark with very little foot traffic out and about. My friend pulls out his guitar and starts playing and I get this vague feeling like we're in a montage. I mention it to everyone and they say yeah, it really does. We get weirded out and my friend stops playing and then starts up again intermittently. We point out little things in the shadows and shop windows that catch our interest. More laughter. More absurdity.

Finally we land at the beach park and get knee-deep into the water, then promptly get weirded out again. "It's like H2Not," quips the trippy one, and we all agree, and get out and lay on the grass. We just chat about yeah, we're definitely high now. Mild shadowy and halo-like hallucinations. We happen to glance to the left and see a group of people advancing on us. As soon as we see them, a gust of wind comes up, and the vibe goes cold, and one of my friends mentions that maybe we should clear out because we didn't want to deal with any goofs that night. But before we can make up our minds, they are upon us. Who else could it be but a group of friends and acquaintances!

Still, we can't deal with it. Their questions and jokes are uncomfortable. One of them asks me how I'm feeling and all I can do is shake my head. All at once one of my group tells them we gotta split cause this is getting really weird. We hastily take off with our salutations, leaving them behind, baffled.

We walk down the promenade, talking the whole time about what we're seeing. The visuals are getting intense- light and shadow stretching on for incomprehensible eons when seen out of focus. The art gallery and Japanese gardens are about half a kilometer ahead and we all make a beeline for it. The Japanese garden in the summer, in full bloom with the zen garden and lighted koi pond is always a comfortable refuge. We pass under the torii arch and across the familiar wooden footbridge. As we come up on the art gallery building, we are dumbstruck.

The had just put up a new exhibition- 7x7 murals circling the length of the gallery. The first one we encountered was beautiful- an explosively colorful painting of a First Nations woman, her hair cascading downwards to form a river and a copse of trees, depicting a salmon run and all the creatures that feast on the fish. It's a fairly impressive work, if a little played out, but we focus on her. She's powerful and dazzling, her eyes reflecting points of light that makes her more than just imagined, it makes her real. We all agree at once about the painting.

"She is so beautiful."

"Wow, she looks so strong. She must be Mother Earth."

"Definitely. Do you see how her hair makes the river and the land? She's amazing."

All basically wringing our hands and shaking our heads over this painting. As we watch, just like the mask on my friend's deck, her expression changes from stern, to loving, to sad. One of our group asks if we're seeing what he's seeing, her facial expressions change, and we all agree that definitely. The painting seems to take up my entire field of vision, I can't see anything but her. The river flows like a real river (and I can hear the stream that the footbridge is over in the background, adding to the illusion), with salmon interweaving through each other on the race to their spawning ground. On an intellectual level, there was the dim sense of reality that told me that this was just a painting, but I almost completely surrendered to the wonder I felt. We stood there for a long time, just gazing at her, feeling her presence and power. But I suppose eventually the spell she had cast on us broke somewhat, and we moved to check out the rest of the exhibit.

None of them captured us like the lady in the painting. Some of the other pieces were mundane and a few were interesting visually, but none stirred us or kept our attention nearly as long as the first one. The last painting in the exhibit was a black and red splatter, with a pair of fiery eyes set into the dead center. My girl friend immediately turned away from it, and after a few seconds of looking I felt very uncomfortable myself. I told the boys we'd meet them on the dock in the koi pond and walked away.

The little pier on the pond is a very pretty place. There are lights underneath the surface of the water year round. The water looked like an ocean underneath- fathoms and fathoms of water concealing mysteries. Every so often a koi would pass over a light, blocking it, which gave more dimension to the lights not being blocked.

I think we were all about at the peak. When my other two friends joined us I lay on my back to look at the stars. They spun around themselves in circles, creating kaleidoscopic patterns. I started laughing again, gaping at the spectacle, totally in my own little world. I take out my lighter and play with it a bit, and inch backwards so my head is hanging over the surface of the water. I look deep within it's depths, longing to see it all, everything. I light my lighter and try to plunge it into the water to give it more light, but it of course extinguishes immediately. That's when I kind of snapped out of the worst (best?) of the dysphoria. My friends are all chatting in a triangle; my one friend has his guitar out, resting lovingly in his hands, but isn't playing.

We stay on the dock a little longer, but we all have to pee again and agree to head back the other way to the resort/casino because they have a washroom open for the casino 24 hours a day. On our way back we start becoming a bit more sober, though still thoroughly weirded out. We shyly enter the casino, trying to make ourselves as scarce as possible, but when we see a vacuum like this our trippy friend cracks up and can't contain himself. All of us but him have to use the facilities, and he is by far the most high of all of us. So after negotiating babysitting while he sits on a bench with a dazed, happy expression on his face staring at the ceiling, our other guy friend agrees to sit with him til us ladies are done.

The washroom using goes by without much incident, but when I wash my hands I catch a glimpse of myself. My face looks drawn and pale, my chest and arms bruised, and my eyes look as wide and dark as an alien's. I look away quickly, shocked by what I saw. I'm the first to finish up and I go and sit with my very high friend who is just happily giggling like a toddler at the ceiling. He mutters something about the rainbows playing and I look up to find that huh, yeah, it does kind of look like a shifting rainbow on the white ceiling. We both gaze up in such wide-eyed wonder than we are totally startled when our other lady friend comes out of the washroom.

When we've all evacuated our innards and are all together again, my one friend with the guitar mentions that he worked in the dish pit at the restaurant in the resort last summer and he knew a way onto the roof. We assess the risk vs reward analysis, but we agree to go up with him. We took the elevator the the top floor and ascended a rickety staircase to the roof. Once up there, we are glad we made the decision we did. The sky is a vast blanket of light and color, with black spaces in between. We contemplate the vastness of it together, and what it all means, what the purpose of such a design is. Below us the lake shimmers. After a heavy dose of atmosphere, the realization that we might get caught by the resort workers who come up here to smoke dawns on us, and we make moves to exit the roof with longing glances upwards.

We make it down to the beach again and talk til we notice the sun coming up and lightening the sky. My friend mentions she has work at 11 and we gape at her. No way is sleeping possible. But to be gentlemen, we all decide to pack it up and take her home.

The acid is wearing off bit by bit then but I can no way be considered sober. The trek up to her place on the bluff is a little excruciating as it was getting hot, hot, hot, and fast. I was sweating so bad. The stairs this time seem menacing, impossible. When we make it to her house I am in serious need of a drink of water.

It's still way too early to be a nuisance, so we decide to go to the elementary school a few blocks away. So we grab some water, and her pipe to scrape out. (No weed on an acid trip, what were we thinking?) I'd never been to that particular school, but it turns out the main soccer field is right on the edge of a cliff/bluff edge overlooking the lake. It really is a gorgeous view, and that day the sunrise was as beautiful as you could wish one to be. We sat in the grass talking and scraping and listening to my friend play guitar and enjoying the mood. On a property directly below our vantage point, a momma and 2 baby deer bounced and bounded around, and a flock of Canadian geese at one point flew not 2 feet above our heads, honking loudly to each other, and settled on the other side of the field. A mushroom cloud of ash from a faraway wildfire got bigger and bigger. It was truly beautiful.

When 7 AM rolled around we went back to my hosting friend's house so she could try to chill before work. My trippy friend made popcorn and we watched The Thief and The Cobbler (amazing show on drugs or not btw) and talked about what we had seen and been through. Around when the movie ended my friend called into work because we were still tripping pretty hard. Our trippy friend crashed but the other three of us went to lay in my friend's bed. I tried to catch some zz's but every time I closed my eyes I saw huge waves swelling and crashing on the sandy shore so vividly that it shook me to consciousness. Finally one friend grabbed my hand and held it. I relaxed a little easier and eventually, after what felt like hours, drifted off.

Sadly this story doesn't have any great climax. It was pleasant, surreal, and a little scary/uncomfortable at times. I've never had a group of friends so perfect as those people together for a trip night, and I look back on it fondly. Definitely the most beautiful experience on hallucinogens I've ever had, if not the most insightful. I hope you enjoyed. :)