Even Psychonauts Get The Blues...

Having been stuck in Frostburg, Maryland for a week by this point, downing three bottles of cough medicine to trip just felt like the right thing to do, even it meant risking death…

The thing about tripping on dextromethorphan is that you lose all sense of self, time, and sometimes bodily functions. Fortunately the third did not happen this time. Dissociative also hold such notorious substances such as PCP, Ketamine, and even Nitrous Oxide(Laughing Gas). They are desperate drugs for desperate people seeking to escape whatever situation they may be in and it’s no wonder they share a name with a psychological disorder known to be tied to victims of abuse. Not to say that my situation was anywhere near as traumatic as some people who experience disassociation but there is, in the uninformed opinion of this author, a commonality between the brain’s process of is and the person who chooses to reach that state by chemical means. As I laid on the small twin sized bed that I was fortunate enough to be able to sleep on during our journey, I thought about the factors that had led me to this moment were on my mind.

After a year of slacking off at a sandwich shop inside a gas station, I had essentially been fired from the crappy minimum wage job after regretfully expressing my desire to work from home in a higher paying position. Unknown to me at the time, the customer service position I had lost my job over would fail spectacularly since I didn’t feel like ripping off old ladies try to sell their jewelry in an attempt to recover from the Great Recession that had just happened. I was in the same boat as them, only instead of selling jewelry, I was selling my vast collection of DVDs that I had accumulated for several years. Also, I was fortunate enough to have parents that would throw me a bone here and there when I truly needed help.

One day, a friend of mine had convinced me to road trip with him, first to Maryland and then to Virginia. He had briefly attended school at Frostburg State University only to ditch it, and a lot of his possessions at his old apartment. After months of not picking up his stuff, he was notified that he had to come get it, or else it would be tossed out. Everything, including a friend’s canoe he had borrowed. Since I had no job or future at this point, I figured why not? A few days turned into a few weeks…
When you’re not going to school or work in this town, you’re pretty much a vagabond. There wasn’t much to do, especially as it was in the last part of winter. So, to pass the time, one of his friend had shoplifted the cough syrup to extract dextromethorphan and trip. Unfortunately the brand he decided to unlawfully take was one that is produced in a way to make it pretty hard to extract. A wasted venture. Until I offered my services in disposal. One bottle became two and then it quickly became three. Since I am naturally a large person, the amount hopefully wouldn’t kill me… I had decided to rest my eyes until the drugs began to take hold.

Upon waking up, in full blown disassociation mode, I walked downstairs to where my friend and our host were watching television. There was some absurd reality game show featuring solely reality stars. This was not necessarily the best material to put into your brain, sober or not...

I opted to look outside instead of the television only to discover the world had been destroyed. The whole apartment had been moved into a deep underground cavern, so deep that it somehow was snowing… It was also in eternal darkness, aside from the amber street lights. I wanted to feature outside but the coldness was able to cut through my numbness. It was like the bunker in “A Boy and His Dog” only less people, and no one had weird white face paint…

The only source of entertainment in this post-apocalyptic future was shitty reality television. “This can’t be what life is all about, can it?” I thought to myself while staring out the window. I turned around to talk to the people that surrounded me, trying to find out more information as to what happened during my Rumpelstiltskin slumber. Oh my God! They’ve all been entrapped in cocoons! I grabbed a dull butter knife and began slicing the cocoon to free them. They gasped their first fresh breaths of air and my friend immediately turned to me to say, “We have to get out of here."

Luckily my vehicle was still there and we hopped in, he drove of course… We drove deep into the night until it was finally daylight. The nightmare trip was coming to a close…

Having an existential crisis at age twenty isn’t very fun, especially when you’ve barely lived. The trip on DXM had shown me what I was previously denying to myself that I was experiencing… The sense of being trapped by poverty and depression. The feeling that everyone around me was complacent and not willing to actively change their lives…

It pushed me into confronting those feelings and heading towards a new day.

We had arrived in Charlottesville, of all places, but years prior to the unfortunate incident that took place in the summer of 2017.

We were there to see the Dead, with Warren Haynes subbing for the late, great Jerry Garcia. It was my first time experiencing it. The lot, the show, every part of it. It was magical. It’s just a shame that the magic couldn’t be captured.

Despite being relatively sober for the first half, I could already feel the positivity rushing through the air. In between the sets, I was gifted a gram of mushrooms that began to peak midway through and then I could physically see the energy. It was a 180 from the trip in Maryland… It was a sense of achievement in finding a community that could all bond together through a unifying source of sound.

I began to peak on the walk back to our friend’s car and despite there being cops everywhere, I was able to huff on a nitrous balloon while walking by a squad car with their lights flashing. There were just too many Deadheads to stop everyone that might’ve been doing something illegal and they were there to manage the traffic flow out of the stadium. It was at this moment that I had discovered the beauty of community that beats isolationism. Then again, I could’ve been just way high off my mind.

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