komrade komura
Active member
Cracticus Tibicen (Magpies)
By komrade komura
Yeah I wrote this shit. Blame no one else.
It started with a mistake. Many things do. Silverstein and I walked back to our dormitory across the grass in the quad. We had gone to Hadley Hall to visit Peter. Once a month he was known as Peter the Great. Yeah, funny name I know. But when you are a young, black man in the American south on a full academic scholarship, majoring in chemistry in the early 1970’s and can once a month produce 500 doses of LSD using university equipment ... I reckon the title ‘the Great’ applies, at least temporarily. On the way back, we each took a hit and placed the small piece of paper under our tongues.
Peter could talk for hours about making LSD, it was his passion. Micro grams were his unit of measure, Augustus Owsley Stanley, III, his hero. While we were visiting him, he had gone on and on about dosage levels and tolerances. His latest batch was special. He believed he had been able to eliminate the nervousness and paranoia of the initial lift off and yet, had significantly increased the psychedelic effect. He had tested it personally and believed it to be, by far, his finest work ever. So instead of a slow ramp up and a trip with a significant peak, he had created a new formula that resulted in an ultra-fast rise to peaking (near instant by his reckoning) followed by hours in the peak zone before a relaxing and rapid come down. It sounded wonderful to us.
He reminded us not to mention to Chip that a new batch was available and definitely don’t give him any. We remember babysitting Chip the night he thought he would experiment with acid. Academically brilliant, but not quite right in some respects. He convinced himself that he could tune his body into the wavelength of creation. By careful tuning, he believed that he could pass through solid objects. After smacking into the door four or five times and falling down just as many, I made up some bullshit about subatomic misalignment that prevented his success. He stopped trying. A bloody nose while everyone is tripping is really weird and a little frightening, but the ice cubes were the most beautiful temporary objects in the universe that night.
About six months earlier, Peter was responsible for reports to campus security of large pets roaming around the campus disoriented and acting strangely. This was the result of a very heated argument among us about who should volunteer to take the first test trip. Nobody was willing. It resulted in widespread testing on any animal with measurable body weight.
There was an incident at the Vet school. During the night about a dozen dogs, 20 or so cats, 5 chimps and over 100 guinea pigs, all tripping like madmen, had gone completely berserk, escaping their cages and causing significant property damage. They smashed up equipment and wasted public monies like Nixon at war. Anything glass was broken. Anything liquid was spilled. The campus police theorised that the chimps had opened all but the locked cages, liberating their fellow captives for a night of hard-core indoor rioting. Staff came in the next morning to find mass destruction and all the animals sleeping in unexpected locations, dogs and cats and guinea pigs and chimps all peacefully crashed together. That same morning a bleary-eyed Peter declared the clinical trials a success and he officially opened for business. Sales were brisk. Based on the relative mild dosage of the last batch, we decided that we would each do a full two-way hit, twice the normal dosage.
We settled back in at the dorm room and went through our Pre-flight check list:
Carefully selected tripping music (more about that later)
Two deep sinking heavy padded armchairs with extra wide arms
1 Gallon Water
6 Candy Bars
Two rolls of toilet paper
½ oz of Jamaican weed
1 oz of Colombian weed
Grab and Run stash bag in the middle of the room
Jackets (for sensory variations)
Running Shoes (installed just in case)
Decommissioned hand grenade ... nothing says ‘leave me the fuck alone’ like a hand grenade sans pin. People go away immediately.
Outside we could hear birds sing to each other a lovely song, call and response between them in near harmony, their tones rising and then dropping within a single call. I whistled a response to them, a mimic to get their attention. It was a Saturday evening.
Silverstein’s girlfriend, Ester, had gone to Atlanta to visit her parents. She was a really nice stoner chick, but she was not very tolerant of psychedelics and tripping. She had proven problematic and given us grief on a previous trip ... so Ester far removed was good. Nobody likes any grief while tripping, especially romantic grief. I tried sex on acid a few times but it was only successful if I turned off the music.
The girl I had been dating was still very angry with me and not speaking to me. The last time the four of us got together for a heavy smoke out, we had been discussing religious traditions. These were mostly Jewish traditions and other more obscure eastern religious ones ... you know, the really weird ones. Grabbing a chicken by the shoulder blades and spinning it around your head three times to transfer your sins to the chicken, which is then slaughtered and given to the poor. Not being around one’s wife when she is on her period and definitely no sex with them. A Niddah, she is called during that time. This of course is a completely dumb rule which is illogical, except for reasons of laundry.
Not sure why, just can’t remember but I was trying to convinced Emera that in my family it was an observed religious law that we are not allowed to wipe our arse on Saturdays. Our god had forbidden it in his holy text, the Baghavadtorah. Since we were prohibited by our obscure eastern religion from performing this act of personal hygiene, the only obvious solution was for family members to wipe each other’s arse. Our god had not actually written anything about that. It is one of those completely insane ideas that can only be believed when one is very, very stupidly stoned. I looked at Silverstein with left eyebrow raised, our card playing cheat signal that means ‘back my play on this.’ He immediately chimed in and claimed it was true. He had even seen it with his very own eyes on Saturdays at my home, my father going off to the bathroom with the newspaper under his arm and my mother by the hand.
Yes, you guessed it, I told her this on a Saturday and I really needed to -- real bad. After much pleading and moving around as if I were about to explode and complaints of cramps, and even farting to relieve the pressure, she finally agreed to perform this religious workaround for me. We started to leave for the bathroom but upon hearing Silverstein’s howls of laughter, she realised that I was only figuratively full of shit and threw her shoe at me before storming off in an uneven gait. She had not spoken to me for a week afterwards and then only to suggest that we needed to spend more time apart. All runways cleared for take off … check.
I had been reading eastern religious philosophy books for a class. It seemed that with aid of the right chemicals we could have an out of body experience during mediation. That could be interesting. Our souls floating upwards out of our bodies as we look back down upon ourselves. Definitely cool. But according to Silverstein this is a seasonal activity only.
We lived in one of the old red brick dorms without air conditioning. As one of the worst consolation prizes in human history, some cheap bastard had decided that putting ceiling fans in the rooms was all they would provide. This meant that there were months when the ceiling fan was on high constantly, just sending the same stifling hot and humid air round and round in a vortex. It offered relief so limited that it couldn’t be measure without a microscope. Being comfortable while tripping is very important. It became seasonal when Silverstein pointed out that perhaps attempting an out of body experience with the ceiling fan on high might be a huge fucking mistake … karmic gore should the two entities meet.
Silverstein put on the first album of the trip, Joni Mitchell’s BLUE album. I was the designated roller and had twisted up two Jamaican and two Colombian joints. I lit one and we passed it back and forth. This evening would start with the voice of an angel; the devils would come soon enough. After listening to one side of vinyl, Joni was followed up by one of the most wonderful albums for light tripping ever made, Les McCann’s Invitation to Openness. Yes it is jazz, but it is definitely some wonderful trippy shit. When Yusef Lateef’s middle-eastern oboe kicks in … just fucking great, trippy melody and with a serious groove. About two thirds of the way through the album, our phone rang. We looked at each other for a moment. We never answered the phone while tripping, but as we had not started to feel the effect yet, I shrugged and got up to answer it. It was Peter.
‘Hey Aussie, yeah man it’s Peter.’
‘What going on man?’
‘Hey man, there has been a bit of a fuck up. I grabbed your hits from the wrong bag, man. I apologise for that. I gave you from the four-way bag. Wanted you to know that you need to only do ¼ of a tab each. Don’t worry, you don’t owe me anymore money as it was my mistake. Since I have adjusted the strength of the formula from the last batch a ¼ will get you tripping really, really well. Sorry for the mistake man, just wanted you to know before blast off’.’
‘Oh Fuck’!
‘Did you already split the tab?’
‘No’
‘Then what the fuck is the problem?’
‘We each took one tab.’
‘Fuck! Wow man, you are about to trip like you can’t even imagine.
Jesus, human-fucking-guinea pigs. I am so very sorry about this man. Listen, you have my phone number. If it gets too weird, give me a call, I will come over and help you any way I can. I won’t come banging on your door though, not unless you call me. OK? But remember I tweaked the formula, there won’t be any paranoia, but you will get to the peak very quickly and stay there for a long time. It will be very intense, but relaxed. One last thing Aussie. Get a notebook and write down what is happening if you can. I need it for my research.’
IF I CAN? That did not sound good. Did he think that I could lose language or motor skills required for penmanship? ‘OK Peter, thanks for the warning. Listen man, we need to go smoke a few joints now and prepare ourselves.’ I hung up the phone and was visibly shaken. No way out. No escape. Oh well, THEN Fuck it ... let the adventure begin.
I explained our problem to Silverstein. He was very upset and more than slightly freaked out. He started talking a million miles per hour, walking around the room frantically and cursing – every other word was either ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’. Despite being three years older than me and bridled with more street smarts, Silverstein could occasionally be more emotional than rational. But he was from New York and it seemed a likely behaviour for people from there to someone not familiar with the region, except through cinema and Kennedy airport. He wanted to go beat the crap out of Peter. I explained that violence would not improve our circumstance. In fact, it may perhaps have led to a night tripping in a jail cell or even worse, getting raped in a jail cell while tripping … and all of this without any good music.
I calmed him down. A long motivational speech about adventure and exploring was delivered with every historical reference from Buddha to Marco Polo to Timothy Leary thrown in to help. I reminded him of the tweaks to the formula that Peter had mentioned, a really intense but stress free formula, repeat stress free. Yes, he said stress free. You heard him say stress free. Wouldn’t that be nice, no paranoia at all. Outside the birds sang a lovely song again with the precision of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, voices in symmetrical harmony. We smoked another joint followed by another. I rolled four more. Better do it while I still could.
About 15 minutes later we were still waiting for the effects to kick in when the phone rang again. We saw the ring before we heard it; a wave of multi-coloured lights flashed outwards from the phone and filled the room for a full second before the sound reached our ears. The colours exploded against the walls but left no stains or trace. Oh fuck me, now that was unexpected. Silverstein quickly retreated to his armchair. From his firm grip on the arms of his chair I could tell that he was also surprised by the colour burst. The ringing sound was of two pieces of metal being struck together at high speed, the sounds of brutal industrial sin. He begged me to answer it, to stop it. Very reluctantly I agreed to do so but only if he would be absolutely quiet while I was on the phone. He agreed.
I answered the phone, although I think it more melted into my hand than me picking it up. At first I could only hear a series of unintelligible chirping sounds in staccato, machine gun like manner. After a few seconds, they became the voice of my mother. Each sentence she spoke at first sounded like a series of strange chirps. Then like wearing headphones at the UN, the translation came a few seconds later. Difficult, but I thought I could manage. I can’t recall the entire conversation, but realised that it started to go much better when I stopped answering her pre-language chirps with a series of my own chirps.
She asked me through her interpreter if I was ill, her little coded way of asking me if I was high. I explained that I was indeed suffering from severe stomach cramps due to some food at the cafeteria. It may have been the risotto with <chirp> mushrooms. This was also our convenient way to exit the conversation. I told her I loved her, she responded with the same and cautioned me to be careful what I ate.
As I returned the phone to the cradle hanging on the wall, I looked down at my hand. The black from the phone had bled onto my right hand and forearm. Interesting, perhaps Peter was right about the rapid, stress free ascent. As I turned around to get back to my armchair, Silverstein was emitting a rainbow of light from around his body. Wow ... very cool ... guess that is what the Buddha was talking about.
‘How you doing Aussie?’
‘Fine mate. If this is the initial rush, I think we are in for a wonderfully strange time for the next few hours.’
‘Yeah you know it. Open our heads let the pictures come. Hey Aussie...promise me one thing. OK?’
‘Sure’.
‘No spaghetti tonight, OK?’
‘No worries mate ... no spaghetti tonight.’
The spaghetti episode had happened a few months earlier when Silverstein and I had taken LSD and stopped off at a local diner for dinner. We figured that we had plenty of time to eat and get back to our dormitory before the effects kicked in. Due to a packed diner and incredibly slow service, the results were not as planned. By the time the spaghetti was delivered, we were giggly and everything was breathing and had come wonderfully to life, the universal groove was now visible. When the plate was set in front of me, it was alive with long white worms that had been injured and were bleeding thick red blood. Like most animals under siege they were angry, ferocious and hissing. After my initial panic I calmed down enough for reasoning.
As an animal lover, I was unsure as to what to do about the circumstances. After a few seconds of thought, I decided that the only humane thing to do was to finish killing the poor bastards so that they would be out of their misery. But the more I stabbed them and cut them into pieces, the more the smaller remnants cried in pain. Vigorously and violently I stabbed the plate over and over, trying to release them from their pain. Instead they merely multiplied. After several moments of observing me and noticing that everyone was staring at us, Silverstein understood the urgency of my cause. With his other foot barely in reality he recognised its threat to our own security. He put $10 down on the table, got up, pulled me up hard by the shoulder of my denim jacket and whispered to me. ‘Leave them Aussie, we are too strong for them now. Let them re-grow to their full size and strength again. Then we can do battle with them on honourable terms when the time is right for us.’ We quickly exited the diner. I agreed that there would be no spaghetti tonight.
I stopped at the stereo on my way back to the armchair. As I walked across the dark blue linoleum flooring, I enjoyed its pattern of occasional and random white spots injected into the sea of deepest blue. As I settled my bony arse into the soft sinking chair, the intro to the music began. “Hot ‘Lanta,” this was the opening song of side three of the Allman Brothers Live at Filmore East album. The building sense of urgency in the song seemed to match our stage of the trip, wicked anticipation of further craziness – two guitars playing a careful harmonic melody, interrupted, like us, by moments of total abandonment. As we began to listen to “In Memory of Elisabeth Reed,” I found my notebook and a pencil. I noted that the multi-coloured lights emanating from Silverstein has grown stronger and I could even see light coming from my own body. Red and yellow colours flowed from the end of my fingertips as I wrote in my journal. These colours bled into the paper changing it, like litmus paper.
06:48 – colours flowing everywhere. Everything is breathing and alive. Silverstein is doing fine. Sub-atomics rule our universe.
As I put down the pencil, it refused to detach from my fingers. No matter how hard I tried, it was glued to my fingers. I attempted to throw it, but the only thing that left my fingers was a stream of coloured light that moved across the room and exploded into a rainbow against the far wall.
06:57 – Silverstein complains of being hot and removes his jacket.
07:00 – Silverstein complains of his shirt being too tight and of it being a fascist construct designed to imprison humans, the uniform of wage slavery. I consider providing a counter argument of protection from cold, protection from nipple thieves and leeches and other logical reasons. But thoughts are easy – words much harder now. Chirping is easy though, but unintelligible to all of god’s creatures…and mothers.
We smoke another joint. The walls are breathing strong now and everything has become as if totally made of fluid – flowing and moving. The ceiling keeps dipping down towards us with each breath it takes. I reach up to tickle it as it dips down towards me. Our dormitory room is alive and functioning as an organism. We had previously added moulding to the top of the walls where they meet the ceiling. The moulding was painted a light blue colour. Now its purpose was realised, as around the intersection of the two planes was a flowing river of soft blue water. What I had not anticipated were the plants that were now growing along the banks of the river. Soft ferns and long reeds.
The music changes as we begin to become more detached from reality. Blow Against the Empire by Jefferson Starship. I recognised the song “Baby Tree” and then the wonderful “Let’s Go Together.” Grace Slick in a harmony from heaven.
07:36 – Hallucinations become more intense now. Cartooning objects at first, now changing into strange creatures full of life. Silverstein is having a conversation with a bong creature. It is a soft, shiny, green creature with a nice, friendly smile and calm, purple eyes. The bong is explaining to him how it is a pleasure to serve us the holy smoke of god. What a delightful character. So thoughtful. Silverstein asks if the bong would smoke people if it could. Interesting line of questioning I think.
07:48 – Silverstein is covered in sweat, on his knees, a huge fucking knife on the floor beside him, his bamboo bong in many, many pieces on the floor, stringy slivers and large chunks scattered on the floor around him. Its water spilled out like blood. It was a hard fought battle but he had killed it. According to Silverstein it was not the answer given by the bong that caused him to act, but the fact that the bong lied and its immediate change of colour exposed its lie, the semaphore of its deceit. No denying it, the bong had lied and I had witnessed the lie in Technicolor.
07:49 – Silverstein collapses onto his bed exhausted and with tears in his eyes. ‘I had to do it;’ he sobs ... ’you saw it. It lied. It would have smoked us.’
‘Yeah man, I saw it ... it was either <chirp> or us. Completely <chirp> justified, self-defence.
I hear the sounds of that psychedelic inspired album, Their Satanic Majesty’s Request by the Rolling Stones. The sounds of “In Another Land” fills our ears. I force myself up from the chair and over to the scene of the crime. I pick up the huge knife. With every last bit of reality I could muster I realize that the best thing to do with this big, dangerous thing was to get rid of it immediately. It was potentially bad news for both of us and we needed bad-trip preventative action, immediately! I look towards the open window. Exit point? Check. Logical? Good enough considering the circumstances – check. I pick up the knife with my non-pencil attached claw and throw it as hard as I can from across the room towards the open window. I received partial credit. The knife took out two of the top panes of glass and cracked an adjoining pane on its way out of the building. Not perfect, but fuck it, close enough. The deadly weapon now lay somewhere else in the vast universe (the grass outside) and we are safe.
Silverstein jumped up from the bed, startled at the sound. ‘What was that?’
‘Turbulence. Please return to your seat and fasten your seat belt. Have a <chirpy> day’.
Remarkably he got up from his bed and returned to his armchair. This feat was remarkable, not for his skill or effort, but for the simple fact that there was simply no floor beneath his feet, only a drop into deepest space somewhere off in the dark night and stars of the universe.
Upon closer examination I realise that the floor was not open for us to fall through but was, in fact, some clear glass or plastic membrane that keeps out deep space. We are looking through an observation portal at our feet as we travelled across the universe. We are amazed. ‘Glad you know how to fly this fucking thing,’ came from my co-pilot.
I chirped agreement.
08:13 – We stare down through the portal watching the planets and galaxies roll by us. Silverstein is sweating hard again, each bead on his forehead emitting a rainbow of colour.
08:18 – I get up to make some adjustments to the flight controls on the far wall. I work furiously testing and pushing the right combinations of glittering lights reflections turned to switches and buttons to adjust our course and speed. I look down through the portal with every adjustment to gauge the effect. As I turn back towards my flight control chair, Silverstein stands up and drops his trousers and underwear. He kicks them away from him and sits back down into his flight chair, au natural. Luckily the deep chair only reveals his head and shoulders and his legs sticking out.
‘Ah, much better now. It permits the energy to pass into me and out from me. I can feel it so much more now. You should consider it.’ With a series of chirps I declined his offer. He understands and nods. I sit back down into my flight control chair.
I look over at my co-pilot. ‘How are you <chirp> Silverstein?’’
‘Much better now. I can’t believe the amount of energy my body is absorbing. It is like I am morphing into another form of being, based on energy rather than matter’. His features were indeed morphing now into new shapes constantly as if his face could not decide a final shape and reformed every moment. Ripples followed by geometric misalignments … and melting … always the melting, but now with a wonderful Escher perspective.
08:42 -- Through the portal we can see a large, blue-white light approaching. I look over at my co-pilot. He is gripping the arms of his flight control seat firmly and there is fear in his now large multi-faceted insect eyes.
‘Is this death approaching’ he asks.
‘No, I don’t think so...<chirp>. I think it is just a very large <chirp> we are approaching. I have accelerated our <chirp> in the past 30 minutes so no <chirp> where we are by now.’
As we approach the light, our speed began to slow. There was the feint sound of electrical circuitry as if knobs and switches in a sound laboratory were being quietly adjusted. An ozone smell drifts to our noses. Far away in the background, as if playing a mile away, I can hear the sounds of the Yes album, Close to the Edge, “And You and I,” a track that always brings a smile to my beak.
On the far wall, a stream of light came from what was once a lava lamp that had morphed into a dancing sponge-like being. It danced across the top shelf in the bookcase, sliding across it like Fred Astaire in his socks on a highly polished wooden floor. It giggles and laughs as it dances to the music. A delightful creature, very entertaining, very huggable … and a damned good dancer. Interestingly, the light it emitted illuminated only specific particles in the air with its brilliant blue colour, bypassing most of them, but for the rare particle, illumination. Something simply not possible.
09:01 – The particles illuminated now start to move closer together as if gravity was pulling them together. Silverstein looks over at me. He had taken on chimp features for a couple of seconds before morphing into a magpie.
‘What is happening here’ he asked. ‘Not sure, but <chirp> think because of the symmetry of the <chirp> it is a consciousness at <chirp>.’ Not sure if I said that or chirped it but he nods. The particles continue to coagulate slowly into a smaller and smaller space until they formed a spherical shape about the size of a basketball. Particles arranging themselves into a shape, not solid but with large gaps between them, as if to make sure that the determination to form is obvious.
Silverstein gets up from his flight chair and walks over to the sphere that is levitating in the middle of the room. Fortunately he is covered in feathers and I am spared the sight of his chubby arse. Slow squiggly lines of orange light come from the sphere. As they reach us, we hear a soft, calm voice in our heads.
‘Welcome. We wish you all the happiness in the universe.’ For a brief moment, me and my magpie co-pilot look at each other, confused but mostly amazed.
‘Did you hear that?’ I ask.
‘Fuck yeah. This is really weird man’.
The voice continued, ‘It is normal for you to be disoriented for a few moments upon arrival here. Just know that your physical bodies are safe and your minds are not only safe but also being healed of the many traumas inflicted upon it. The blinders of consciousness are being removed and what you will be seeing are possibilities.’
Instinctively, as if a little chick, Silverstein reached out and touched the hovering sphere with his claw. Upon contact, he exploded into a flat plane of lights that radiate out from the sphere at incredible speed and disappear.
‘Bring him back’ I yell. In my head I hear the voice reply, ‘I am sorry you do not understand. He is not hurt. Here he is again.’
A swirl of light particles came together and then swirled tighter and tighter. In a couple of seconds they morph from light into matter and Silverstein was returned to his flight chair, back in human form.
‘Whoa!!! Aussie, you still here? I have been gone for years, lifetimes man.’
‘We returned you to your temporal coordinates at the request of your friend.’
‘Just a few seconds by my reckoning,’ I advise.
Silverstein looks up from his flight chair towards the orb. ‘What was that?’ he asked. His eyes are wild but without fear.
‘On this level of existence you were just living out the permutations of your possibilities,’ it replied.
‘But some of those lives seemed wonderful…beyond belief. How do I make those happen,’ he wanted to know.
‘Most of us are a prisoner of our own choices, but we can also be liberated by them. What you called ‘wonderful’ was when you make liberating choices,’ was the voice response.
I took my turn spending decades living out my possibilities. In what seemed like thousands of decades, but were mere moments were I lived tens of thousands of lives simultaneously. Most were full of too much grief, heartache and misery. But some of them were quite exquisite in beauty and happiness. These were the lives of different and extraordinary paths. There only seemed one constant through almost all of the wonderful lives, the same pair of eyes. Those eyes only showed love and affection towards me. I would recognize them in any face in the universe. Their signature was carved into my mind forever. Upon return, I chirped bitterly that I wanted to stay in my possibilities. I put my pencil down on the floor beside me.
‘Regrettably your state of mind is chemically induced and therefore comes with temporal limits of its existence. For this reason, you cannot remain here forever. But this experience is meant to give insight into your possibilities, which are near infinite,’ was the explanation from the voice.
Silverstein was back in his flight chair, regenerated back into magpie form, Cracticus tibicen and thankfully with feathers again. ‘Can we come back here again?’ I needed to know.
The voice replied, ‘Life forms reach here by different methods. Regrettably for your species, there are limitations and only a handful of your kind can reach here naturally and the few who stay here are not functional back in your reality. The number of those who reach here chemically is also very limited. While you can indeed return here, it would be pointless as the mere return would affect the possibilities, just as this experience will profoundly affect your possibilities by altering your way of thinking of them. You are forever changed as you now know your possibilities.’
‘Are you god’ asked Silverstein.
‘That is a term that causes much destruction and has been banned in many universes, but to answer your question, no. Many worship what they do not understand.’ The voice perfunctorily replied.
I reached over for my pad to capture some notes. My claw was holding the pencil in a strange manner and writing was difficult. We continued taking turns living our possibilities, always leaving one behind to help the other come back if needed, a gesture deemed admirable by our host, but completely unnecessary. In normal time we are gone for minutes each turn. In our new environment we are gone thousands of lifetimes.
10:37 – Fuck me, I can’t believe that we have lived through this much time. I have just lived tens of thousands of lives, loved and caused hurt thousands of times. Thousands of days, weeks and years lived in just over an hour.
My magpie co-pilot stood in front of the orb began to question it again. I tried to figure out what was happening and how it was possible. I hear the sounds of Pink Floyd’s Meddle Album – “Echoes Side” playing somewhere very far away; calling me like a mother calls a child for supper.
10:48 – My co-pilot continues to ask questions. However, to most the answers are the same, either ‘it is your choice’ or more simply ‘no’. I hear him mention many established religious beliefs in his questions. Those questions always receive a polite ‘NO’ in response, with an occasional ‘it is misunderstood’ added.
11:56 – Silverstein collapses back into his flight chair. His beak is melting slowly. I am watching as first his beak then his feathers begin to melt. Underneath them is his human form. After a few minutes he is fully returned to human form. The spherical orb still is hovering in the centre of the room. It appears to be fading now.
12:03 – The orb sends out one last burst of colour with a message: ‘It’s all about your choices.’ The sound of this echoed for minutes as the sphere fades away.
12:14 – The breathing movement in the world is slowing. It is pleasant now and controllable with the conscious mind. We are still emitting light. We discover that we can bend the light and change the colours. So we amuse ourselves for minutes creating our own psychedelic light show, sending out blasts of colours from our fingers, then splitting them and changing them both in colour and direction.
12:25 – I have lost my chirping tongue. It is not my instinctive language any more. Regrettable.
12:32 – We smoke another joint. Ah, the nice feeling of a cannabis high after this long strange night. We sit quietly and process the events of the evening while Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, “The Pastorale” plays.
12:49 – The world is rapidly returning to normal. Silverstein is now cold and has gotten fully dressed again. I sigh in relief.
01:12 -- Lights out after one last joint. It has been an interesting evening.
Thank you Peter.
Trip Report
The Aussie and Silverstein
University of Georgia
March 1973
(lost in the post)
By komrade komura
Yeah I wrote this shit. Blame no one else.
It started with a mistake. Many things do. Silverstein and I walked back to our dormitory across the grass in the quad. We had gone to Hadley Hall to visit Peter. Once a month he was known as Peter the Great. Yeah, funny name I know. But when you are a young, black man in the American south on a full academic scholarship, majoring in chemistry in the early 1970’s and can once a month produce 500 doses of LSD using university equipment ... I reckon the title ‘the Great’ applies, at least temporarily. On the way back, we each took a hit and placed the small piece of paper under our tongues.
Peter could talk for hours about making LSD, it was his passion. Micro grams were his unit of measure, Augustus Owsley Stanley, III, his hero. While we were visiting him, he had gone on and on about dosage levels and tolerances. His latest batch was special. He believed he had been able to eliminate the nervousness and paranoia of the initial lift off and yet, had significantly increased the psychedelic effect. He had tested it personally and believed it to be, by far, his finest work ever. So instead of a slow ramp up and a trip with a significant peak, he had created a new formula that resulted in an ultra-fast rise to peaking (near instant by his reckoning) followed by hours in the peak zone before a relaxing and rapid come down. It sounded wonderful to us.
He reminded us not to mention to Chip that a new batch was available and definitely don’t give him any. We remember babysitting Chip the night he thought he would experiment with acid. Academically brilliant, but not quite right in some respects. He convinced himself that he could tune his body into the wavelength of creation. By careful tuning, he believed that he could pass through solid objects. After smacking into the door four or five times and falling down just as many, I made up some bullshit about subatomic misalignment that prevented his success. He stopped trying. A bloody nose while everyone is tripping is really weird and a little frightening, but the ice cubes were the most beautiful temporary objects in the universe that night.
About six months earlier, Peter was responsible for reports to campus security of large pets roaming around the campus disoriented and acting strangely. This was the result of a very heated argument among us about who should volunteer to take the first test trip. Nobody was willing. It resulted in widespread testing on any animal with measurable body weight.
There was an incident at the Vet school. During the night about a dozen dogs, 20 or so cats, 5 chimps and over 100 guinea pigs, all tripping like madmen, had gone completely berserk, escaping their cages and causing significant property damage. They smashed up equipment and wasted public monies like Nixon at war. Anything glass was broken. Anything liquid was spilled. The campus police theorised that the chimps had opened all but the locked cages, liberating their fellow captives for a night of hard-core indoor rioting. Staff came in the next morning to find mass destruction and all the animals sleeping in unexpected locations, dogs and cats and guinea pigs and chimps all peacefully crashed together. That same morning a bleary-eyed Peter declared the clinical trials a success and he officially opened for business. Sales were brisk. Based on the relative mild dosage of the last batch, we decided that we would each do a full two-way hit, twice the normal dosage.
We settled back in at the dorm room and went through our Pre-flight check list:
Carefully selected tripping music (more about that later)
Two deep sinking heavy padded armchairs with extra wide arms
1 Gallon Water
6 Candy Bars
Two rolls of toilet paper
½ oz of Jamaican weed
1 oz of Colombian weed
Grab and Run stash bag in the middle of the room
Jackets (for sensory variations)
Running Shoes (installed just in case)
Decommissioned hand grenade ... nothing says ‘leave me the fuck alone’ like a hand grenade sans pin. People go away immediately.
Outside we could hear birds sing to each other a lovely song, call and response between them in near harmony, their tones rising and then dropping within a single call. I whistled a response to them, a mimic to get their attention. It was a Saturday evening.
Silverstein’s girlfriend, Ester, had gone to Atlanta to visit her parents. She was a really nice stoner chick, but she was not very tolerant of psychedelics and tripping. She had proven problematic and given us grief on a previous trip ... so Ester far removed was good. Nobody likes any grief while tripping, especially romantic grief. I tried sex on acid a few times but it was only successful if I turned off the music.
The girl I had been dating was still very angry with me and not speaking to me. The last time the four of us got together for a heavy smoke out, we had been discussing religious traditions. These were mostly Jewish traditions and other more obscure eastern religious ones ... you know, the really weird ones. Grabbing a chicken by the shoulder blades and spinning it around your head three times to transfer your sins to the chicken, which is then slaughtered and given to the poor. Not being around one’s wife when she is on her period and definitely no sex with them. A Niddah, she is called during that time. This of course is a completely dumb rule which is illogical, except for reasons of laundry.
Not sure why, just can’t remember but I was trying to convinced Emera that in my family it was an observed religious law that we are not allowed to wipe our arse on Saturdays. Our god had forbidden it in his holy text, the Baghavadtorah. Since we were prohibited by our obscure eastern religion from performing this act of personal hygiene, the only obvious solution was for family members to wipe each other’s arse. Our god had not actually written anything about that. It is one of those completely insane ideas that can only be believed when one is very, very stupidly stoned. I looked at Silverstein with left eyebrow raised, our card playing cheat signal that means ‘back my play on this.’ He immediately chimed in and claimed it was true. He had even seen it with his very own eyes on Saturdays at my home, my father going off to the bathroom with the newspaper under his arm and my mother by the hand.
Yes, you guessed it, I told her this on a Saturday and I really needed to -- real bad. After much pleading and moving around as if I were about to explode and complaints of cramps, and even farting to relieve the pressure, she finally agreed to perform this religious workaround for me. We started to leave for the bathroom but upon hearing Silverstein’s howls of laughter, she realised that I was only figuratively full of shit and threw her shoe at me before storming off in an uneven gait. She had not spoken to me for a week afterwards and then only to suggest that we needed to spend more time apart. All runways cleared for take off … check.
I had been reading eastern religious philosophy books for a class. It seemed that with aid of the right chemicals we could have an out of body experience during mediation. That could be interesting. Our souls floating upwards out of our bodies as we look back down upon ourselves. Definitely cool. But according to Silverstein this is a seasonal activity only.
We lived in one of the old red brick dorms without air conditioning. As one of the worst consolation prizes in human history, some cheap bastard had decided that putting ceiling fans in the rooms was all they would provide. This meant that there were months when the ceiling fan was on high constantly, just sending the same stifling hot and humid air round and round in a vortex. It offered relief so limited that it couldn’t be measure without a microscope. Being comfortable while tripping is very important. It became seasonal when Silverstein pointed out that perhaps attempting an out of body experience with the ceiling fan on high might be a huge fucking mistake … karmic gore should the two entities meet.
Silverstein put on the first album of the trip, Joni Mitchell’s BLUE album. I was the designated roller and had twisted up two Jamaican and two Colombian joints. I lit one and we passed it back and forth. This evening would start with the voice of an angel; the devils would come soon enough. After listening to one side of vinyl, Joni was followed up by one of the most wonderful albums for light tripping ever made, Les McCann’s Invitation to Openness. Yes it is jazz, but it is definitely some wonderful trippy shit. When Yusef Lateef’s middle-eastern oboe kicks in … just fucking great, trippy melody and with a serious groove. About two thirds of the way through the album, our phone rang. We looked at each other for a moment. We never answered the phone while tripping, but as we had not started to feel the effect yet, I shrugged and got up to answer it. It was Peter.
‘Hey Aussie, yeah man it’s Peter.’
‘What going on man?’
‘Hey man, there has been a bit of a fuck up. I grabbed your hits from the wrong bag, man. I apologise for that. I gave you from the four-way bag. Wanted you to know that you need to only do ¼ of a tab each. Don’t worry, you don’t owe me anymore money as it was my mistake. Since I have adjusted the strength of the formula from the last batch a ¼ will get you tripping really, really well. Sorry for the mistake man, just wanted you to know before blast off’.’
‘Oh Fuck’!
‘Did you already split the tab?’
‘No’
‘Then what the fuck is the problem?’
‘We each took one tab.’
‘Fuck! Wow man, you are about to trip like you can’t even imagine.
Jesus, human-fucking-guinea pigs. I am so very sorry about this man. Listen, you have my phone number. If it gets too weird, give me a call, I will come over and help you any way I can. I won’t come banging on your door though, not unless you call me. OK? But remember I tweaked the formula, there won’t be any paranoia, but you will get to the peak very quickly and stay there for a long time. It will be very intense, but relaxed. One last thing Aussie. Get a notebook and write down what is happening if you can. I need it for my research.’
IF I CAN? That did not sound good. Did he think that I could lose language or motor skills required for penmanship? ‘OK Peter, thanks for the warning. Listen man, we need to go smoke a few joints now and prepare ourselves.’ I hung up the phone and was visibly shaken. No way out. No escape. Oh well, THEN Fuck it ... let the adventure begin.
I explained our problem to Silverstein. He was very upset and more than slightly freaked out. He started talking a million miles per hour, walking around the room frantically and cursing – every other word was either ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’. Despite being three years older than me and bridled with more street smarts, Silverstein could occasionally be more emotional than rational. But he was from New York and it seemed a likely behaviour for people from there to someone not familiar with the region, except through cinema and Kennedy airport. He wanted to go beat the crap out of Peter. I explained that violence would not improve our circumstance. In fact, it may perhaps have led to a night tripping in a jail cell or even worse, getting raped in a jail cell while tripping … and all of this without any good music.
I calmed him down. A long motivational speech about adventure and exploring was delivered with every historical reference from Buddha to Marco Polo to Timothy Leary thrown in to help. I reminded him of the tweaks to the formula that Peter had mentioned, a really intense but stress free formula, repeat stress free. Yes, he said stress free. You heard him say stress free. Wouldn’t that be nice, no paranoia at all. Outside the birds sang a lovely song again with the precision of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, voices in symmetrical harmony. We smoked another joint followed by another. I rolled four more. Better do it while I still could.
About 15 minutes later we were still waiting for the effects to kick in when the phone rang again. We saw the ring before we heard it; a wave of multi-coloured lights flashed outwards from the phone and filled the room for a full second before the sound reached our ears. The colours exploded against the walls but left no stains or trace. Oh fuck me, now that was unexpected. Silverstein quickly retreated to his armchair. From his firm grip on the arms of his chair I could tell that he was also surprised by the colour burst. The ringing sound was of two pieces of metal being struck together at high speed, the sounds of brutal industrial sin. He begged me to answer it, to stop it. Very reluctantly I agreed to do so but only if he would be absolutely quiet while I was on the phone. He agreed.
I answered the phone, although I think it more melted into my hand than me picking it up. At first I could only hear a series of unintelligible chirping sounds in staccato, machine gun like manner. After a few seconds, they became the voice of my mother. Each sentence she spoke at first sounded like a series of strange chirps. Then like wearing headphones at the UN, the translation came a few seconds later. Difficult, but I thought I could manage. I can’t recall the entire conversation, but realised that it started to go much better when I stopped answering her pre-language chirps with a series of my own chirps.
She asked me through her interpreter if I was ill, her little coded way of asking me if I was high. I explained that I was indeed suffering from severe stomach cramps due to some food at the cafeteria. It may have been the risotto with <chirp> mushrooms. This was also our convenient way to exit the conversation. I told her I loved her, she responded with the same and cautioned me to be careful what I ate.
As I returned the phone to the cradle hanging on the wall, I looked down at my hand. The black from the phone had bled onto my right hand and forearm. Interesting, perhaps Peter was right about the rapid, stress free ascent. As I turned around to get back to my armchair, Silverstein was emitting a rainbow of light from around his body. Wow ... very cool ... guess that is what the Buddha was talking about.
‘How you doing Aussie?’
‘Fine mate. If this is the initial rush, I think we are in for a wonderfully strange time for the next few hours.’
‘Yeah you know it. Open our heads let the pictures come. Hey Aussie...promise me one thing. OK?’
‘Sure’.
‘No spaghetti tonight, OK?’
‘No worries mate ... no spaghetti tonight.’
The spaghetti episode had happened a few months earlier when Silverstein and I had taken LSD and stopped off at a local diner for dinner. We figured that we had plenty of time to eat and get back to our dormitory before the effects kicked in. Due to a packed diner and incredibly slow service, the results were not as planned. By the time the spaghetti was delivered, we were giggly and everything was breathing and had come wonderfully to life, the universal groove was now visible. When the plate was set in front of me, it was alive with long white worms that had been injured and were bleeding thick red blood. Like most animals under siege they were angry, ferocious and hissing. After my initial panic I calmed down enough for reasoning.
As an animal lover, I was unsure as to what to do about the circumstances. After a few seconds of thought, I decided that the only humane thing to do was to finish killing the poor bastards so that they would be out of their misery. But the more I stabbed them and cut them into pieces, the more the smaller remnants cried in pain. Vigorously and violently I stabbed the plate over and over, trying to release them from their pain. Instead they merely multiplied. After several moments of observing me and noticing that everyone was staring at us, Silverstein understood the urgency of my cause. With his other foot barely in reality he recognised its threat to our own security. He put $10 down on the table, got up, pulled me up hard by the shoulder of my denim jacket and whispered to me. ‘Leave them Aussie, we are too strong for them now. Let them re-grow to their full size and strength again. Then we can do battle with them on honourable terms when the time is right for us.’ We quickly exited the diner. I agreed that there would be no spaghetti tonight.
I stopped at the stereo on my way back to the armchair. As I walked across the dark blue linoleum flooring, I enjoyed its pattern of occasional and random white spots injected into the sea of deepest blue. As I settled my bony arse into the soft sinking chair, the intro to the music began. “Hot ‘Lanta,” this was the opening song of side three of the Allman Brothers Live at Filmore East album. The building sense of urgency in the song seemed to match our stage of the trip, wicked anticipation of further craziness – two guitars playing a careful harmonic melody, interrupted, like us, by moments of total abandonment. As we began to listen to “In Memory of Elisabeth Reed,” I found my notebook and a pencil. I noted that the multi-coloured lights emanating from Silverstein has grown stronger and I could even see light coming from my own body. Red and yellow colours flowed from the end of my fingertips as I wrote in my journal. These colours bled into the paper changing it, like litmus paper.
06:48 – colours flowing everywhere. Everything is breathing and alive. Silverstein is doing fine. Sub-atomics rule our universe.
As I put down the pencil, it refused to detach from my fingers. No matter how hard I tried, it was glued to my fingers. I attempted to throw it, but the only thing that left my fingers was a stream of coloured light that moved across the room and exploded into a rainbow against the far wall.
06:57 – Silverstein complains of being hot and removes his jacket.
07:00 – Silverstein complains of his shirt being too tight and of it being a fascist construct designed to imprison humans, the uniform of wage slavery. I consider providing a counter argument of protection from cold, protection from nipple thieves and leeches and other logical reasons. But thoughts are easy – words much harder now. Chirping is easy though, but unintelligible to all of god’s creatures…and mothers.
We smoke another joint. The walls are breathing strong now and everything has become as if totally made of fluid – flowing and moving. The ceiling keeps dipping down towards us with each breath it takes. I reach up to tickle it as it dips down towards me. Our dormitory room is alive and functioning as an organism. We had previously added moulding to the top of the walls where they meet the ceiling. The moulding was painted a light blue colour. Now its purpose was realised, as around the intersection of the two planes was a flowing river of soft blue water. What I had not anticipated were the plants that were now growing along the banks of the river. Soft ferns and long reeds.
The music changes as we begin to become more detached from reality. Blow Against the Empire by Jefferson Starship. I recognised the song “Baby Tree” and then the wonderful “Let’s Go Together.” Grace Slick in a harmony from heaven.
07:36 – Hallucinations become more intense now. Cartooning objects at first, now changing into strange creatures full of life. Silverstein is having a conversation with a bong creature. It is a soft, shiny, green creature with a nice, friendly smile and calm, purple eyes. The bong is explaining to him how it is a pleasure to serve us the holy smoke of god. What a delightful character. So thoughtful. Silverstein asks if the bong would smoke people if it could. Interesting line of questioning I think.
07:48 – Silverstein is covered in sweat, on his knees, a huge fucking knife on the floor beside him, his bamboo bong in many, many pieces on the floor, stringy slivers and large chunks scattered on the floor around him. Its water spilled out like blood. It was a hard fought battle but he had killed it. According to Silverstein it was not the answer given by the bong that caused him to act, but the fact that the bong lied and its immediate change of colour exposed its lie, the semaphore of its deceit. No denying it, the bong had lied and I had witnessed the lie in Technicolor.
07:49 – Silverstein collapses onto his bed exhausted and with tears in his eyes. ‘I had to do it;’ he sobs ... ’you saw it. It lied. It would have smoked us.’
‘Yeah man, I saw it ... it was either <chirp> or us. Completely <chirp> justified, self-defence.
I hear the sounds of that psychedelic inspired album, Their Satanic Majesty’s Request by the Rolling Stones. The sounds of “In Another Land” fills our ears. I force myself up from the chair and over to the scene of the crime. I pick up the huge knife. With every last bit of reality I could muster I realize that the best thing to do with this big, dangerous thing was to get rid of it immediately. It was potentially bad news for both of us and we needed bad-trip preventative action, immediately! I look towards the open window. Exit point? Check. Logical? Good enough considering the circumstances – check. I pick up the knife with my non-pencil attached claw and throw it as hard as I can from across the room towards the open window. I received partial credit. The knife took out two of the top panes of glass and cracked an adjoining pane on its way out of the building. Not perfect, but fuck it, close enough. The deadly weapon now lay somewhere else in the vast universe (the grass outside) and we are safe.
Silverstein jumped up from the bed, startled at the sound. ‘What was that?’
‘Turbulence. Please return to your seat and fasten your seat belt. Have a <chirpy> day’.
Remarkably he got up from his bed and returned to his armchair. This feat was remarkable, not for his skill or effort, but for the simple fact that there was simply no floor beneath his feet, only a drop into deepest space somewhere off in the dark night and stars of the universe.
Upon closer examination I realise that the floor was not open for us to fall through but was, in fact, some clear glass or plastic membrane that keeps out deep space. We are looking through an observation portal at our feet as we travelled across the universe. We are amazed. ‘Glad you know how to fly this fucking thing,’ came from my co-pilot.
I chirped agreement.
08:13 – We stare down through the portal watching the planets and galaxies roll by us. Silverstein is sweating hard again, each bead on his forehead emitting a rainbow of colour.
08:18 – I get up to make some adjustments to the flight controls on the far wall. I work furiously testing and pushing the right combinations of glittering lights reflections turned to switches and buttons to adjust our course and speed. I look down through the portal with every adjustment to gauge the effect. As I turn back towards my flight control chair, Silverstein stands up and drops his trousers and underwear. He kicks them away from him and sits back down into his flight chair, au natural. Luckily the deep chair only reveals his head and shoulders and his legs sticking out.
‘Ah, much better now. It permits the energy to pass into me and out from me. I can feel it so much more now. You should consider it.’ With a series of chirps I declined his offer. He understands and nods. I sit back down into my flight control chair.
I look over at my co-pilot. ‘How are you <chirp> Silverstein?’’
‘Much better now. I can’t believe the amount of energy my body is absorbing. It is like I am morphing into another form of being, based on energy rather than matter’. His features were indeed morphing now into new shapes constantly as if his face could not decide a final shape and reformed every moment. Ripples followed by geometric misalignments … and melting … always the melting, but now with a wonderful Escher perspective.
08:42 -- Through the portal we can see a large, blue-white light approaching. I look over at my co-pilot. He is gripping the arms of his flight control seat firmly and there is fear in his now large multi-faceted insect eyes.
‘Is this death approaching’ he asks.
‘No, I don’t think so...<chirp>. I think it is just a very large <chirp> we are approaching. I have accelerated our <chirp> in the past 30 minutes so no <chirp> where we are by now.’
As we approach the light, our speed began to slow. There was the feint sound of electrical circuitry as if knobs and switches in a sound laboratory were being quietly adjusted. An ozone smell drifts to our noses. Far away in the background, as if playing a mile away, I can hear the sounds of the Yes album, Close to the Edge, “And You and I,” a track that always brings a smile to my beak.
On the far wall, a stream of light came from what was once a lava lamp that had morphed into a dancing sponge-like being. It danced across the top shelf in the bookcase, sliding across it like Fred Astaire in his socks on a highly polished wooden floor. It giggles and laughs as it dances to the music. A delightful creature, very entertaining, very huggable … and a damned good dancer. Interestingly, the light it emitted illuminated only specific particles in the air with its brilliant blue colour, bypassing most of them, but for the rare particle, illumination. Something simply not possible.
09:01 – The particles illuminated now start to move closer together as if gravity was pulling them together. Silverstein looks over at me. He had taken on chimp features for a couple of seconds before morphing into a magpie.
‘What is happening here’ he asked. ‘Not sure, but <chirp> think because of the symmetry of the <chirp> it is a consciousness at <chirp>.’ Not sure if I said that or chirped it but he nods. The particles continue to coagulate slowly into a smaller and smaller space until they formed a spherical shape about the size of a basketball. Particles arranging themselves into a shape, not solid but with large gaps between them, as if to make sure that the determination to form is obvious.
Silverstein gets up from his flight chair and walks over to the sphere that is levitating in the middle of the room. Fortunately he is covered in feathers and I am spared the sight of his chubby arse. Slow squiggly lines of orange light come from the sphere. As they reach us, we hear a soft, calm voice in our heads.
‘Welcome. We wish you all the happiness in the universe.’ For a brief moment, me and my magpie co-pilot look at each other, confused but mostly amazed.
‘Did you hear that?’ I ask.
‘Fuck yeah. This is really weird man’.
The voice continued, ‘It is normal for you to be disoriented for a few moments upon arrival here. Just know that your physical bodies are safe and your minds are not only safe but also being healed of the many traumas inflicted upon it. The blinders of consciousness are being removed and what you will be seeing are possibilities.’
Instinctively, as if a little chick, Silverstein reached out and touched the hovering sphere with his claw. Upon contact, he exploded into a flat plane of lights that radiate out from the sphere at incredible speed and disappear.
‘Bring him back’ I yell. In my head I hear the voice reply, ‘I am sorry you do not understand. He is not hurt. Here he is again.’
A swirl of light particles came together and then swirled tighter and tighter. In a couple of seconds they morph from light into matter and Silverstein was returned to his flight chair, back in human form.
‘Whoa!!! Aussie, you still here? I have been gone for years, lifetimes man.’
‘We returned you to your temporal coordinates at the request of your friend.’
‘Just a few seconds by my reckoning,’ I advise.
Silverstein looks up from his flight chair towards the orb. ‘What was that?’ he asked. His eyes are wild but without fear.
‘On this level of existence you were just living out the permutations of your possibilities,’ it replied.
‘But some of those lives seemed wonderful…beyond belief. How do I make those happen,’ he wanted to know.
‘Most of us are a prisoner of our own choices, but we can also be liberated by them. What you called ‘wonderful’ was when you make liberating choices,’ was the voice response.
I took my turn spending decades living out my possibilities. In what seemed like thousands of decades, but were mere moments were I lived tens of thousands of lives simultaneously. Most were full of too much grief, heartache and misery. But some of them were quite exquisite in beauty and happiness. These were the lives of different and extraordinary paths. There only seemed one constant through almost all of the wonderful lives, the same pair of eyes. Those eyes only showed love and affection towards me. I would recognize them in any face in the universe. Their signature was carved into my mind forever. Upon return, I chirped bitterly that I wanted to stay in my possibilities. I put my pencil down on the floor beside me.
‘Regrettably your state of mind is chemically induced and therefore comes with temporal limits of its existence. For this reason, you cannot remain here forever. But this experience is meant to give insight into your possibilities, which are near infinite,’ was the explanation from the voice.
Silverstein was back in his flight chair, regenerated back into magpie form, Cracticus tibicen and thankfully with feathers again. ‘Can we come back here again?’ I needed to know.
The voice replied, ‘Life forms reach here by different methods. Regrettably for your species, there are limitations and only a handful of your kind can reach here naturally and the few who stay here are not functional back in your reality. The number of those who reach here chemically is also very limited. While you can indeed return here, it would be pointless as the mere return would affect the possibilities, just as this experience will profoundly affect your possibilities by altering your way of thinking of them. You are forever changed as you now know your possibilities.’
‘Are you god’ asked Silverstein.
‘That is a term that causes much destruction and has been banned in many universes, but to answer your question, no. Many worship what they do not understand.’ The voice perfunctorily replied.
I reached over for my pad to capture some notes. My claw was holding the pencil in a strange manner and writing was difficult. We continued taking turns living our possibilities, always leaving one behind to help the other come back if needed, a gesture deemed admirable by our host, but completely unnecessary. In normal time we are gone for minutes each turn. In our new environment we are gone thousands of lifetimes.
10:37 – Fuck me, I can’t believe that we have lived through this much time. I have just lived tens of thousands of lives, loved and caused hurt thousands of times. Thousands of days, weeks and years lived in just over an hour.
My magpie co-pilot stood in front of the orb began to question it again. I tried to figure out what was happening and how it was possible. I hear the sounds of Pink Floyd’s Meddle Album – “Echoes Side” playing somewhere very far away; calling me like a mother calls a child for supper.
10:48 – My co-pilot continues to ask questions. However, to most the answers are the same, either ‘it is your choice’ or more simply ‘no’. I hear him mention many established religious beliefs in his questions. Those questions always receive a polite ‘NO’ in response, with an occasional ‘it is misunderstood’ added.
11:56 – Silverstein collapses back into his flight chair. His beak is melting slowly. I am watching as first his beak then his feathers begin to melt. Underneath them is his human form. After a few minutes he is fully returned to human form. The spherical orb still is hovering in the centre of the room. It appears to be fading now.
12:03 – The orb sends out one last burst of colour with a message: ‘It’s all about your choices.’ The sound of this echoed for minutes as the sphere fades away.
12:14 – The breathing movement in the world is slowing. It is pleasant now and controllable with the conscious mind. We are still emitting light. We discover that we can bend the light and change the colours. So we amuse ourselves for minutes creating our own psychedelic light show, sending out blasts of colours from our fingers, then splitting them and changing them both in colour and direction.
12:25 – I have lost my chirping tongue. It is not my instinctive language any more. Regrettable.
12:32 – We smoke another joint. Ah, the nice feeling of a cannabis high after this long strange night. We sit quietly and process the events of the evening while Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, “The Pastorale” plays.
12:49 – The world is rapidly returning to normal. Silverstein is now cold and has gotten fully dressed again. I sigh in relief.
01:12 -- Lights out after one last joint. It has been an interesting evening.
Thank you Peter.
Trip Report
The Aussie and Silverstein
University of Georgia
March 1973
(lost in the post)
I would have probably been like that Chip dude anyway, always a little too soon or more often a little too late to everything, always just a little off and that little makes too much of a difference. I wish I could experience lifetimes in seconds, well I do but it is my own unfortunately, where a decade of actual life seems to go by in a few days and where I am always lost in a dark forest. Great eye opening adventure though, hope it set you on an enlightening path in life. Thanks for helping me, if only briefly, to focus. I hope I am coming down from a bad trip and find myself young and in a dorm room, and this 20 plus years was just a few minute dreary hallucination!
