The PCP Trilogy 2: Urbex

 This experience was planned for weeks. On a free night, I finally met up with a dear old friend who I describe in the report. We go back to high school and have always loved exploring abandoned buildings together. In this report, we explore an abandoned trash incineration plant. It was always a delightful youthful activity, and this experience hearkened to a lot of nostalgia, it had been a while since I had last done this. It is a brutal cold dark January night. I wanted to see how the drug affected being in potentially scary spaces, there’s always an inherent eeriness and tension in abandoned buildings. I wanted to see how it affected being in claustrophobic spaces, on narrow spaces; I wanted to see how it affected my ability to climb and navigate with agility as abandoned buildings often demand. I wanted to see how it interacted with a focused, intentional activity, and how it interacted with a sense of adventure and danger.

 

NOTE: THE DOSES I TAKE ARE EXTREMELY HIGH FOR ANYONE. I HAVE A HIGH TOLERANCE TO DISSOCIATIVES, NECESSITATING I TAKE SUCH HIGH DOSES. AN EXPERIENCE LIKE THIS WOULD BE FOUND AT AROUND 10-12 MG FOR THE AVERAGE PERSON. DO NOT TAKE THE DOSES I TAKE IN THESE REPORTS.

Age: 30

Weight: 130 lbs

Dosage: 29 mg intranasal

Setting: Abandoned trash incineration plant, my house

 

T0:00- Dose quietly snorted- cubic crystals with a slight odor of ether crushed down into a powder and snorted into a line that stings and slightly numbs the mucous membranes. A toothy little tingle.

 

T0:15- First notes of the experience as my fingertips go numb and my heart starts to race.

 

T0:20- I am currently in my house, but I am preparing to go explore an abandoned industrial waste incineration facility with a friend. I love urban exploration. It’s a hobby I have been committed to since I was a teenager. My accomplice was a friend from high school; We had done urbex together since we were teens, they also feature in many of my older reports. A lifelong friend and artist who I have grown with and trust dearly.

I am starting to feel a little numb in my extremities and lightheaded. I am getting my bag together- gloves, respirator, a balaclava, bandanas, Baofeng radios, knives and multi tools, water, multiple lights, sturdy steel toe boots, a first aid kit, a joint. I am definitely overpacking for how simple of a run this will be but it’s fun to prepare for everything and feel like I’m on a mission; it is fun to get geared up. I am buoyed by anticipation. I feel most of my upper body still, but my lower body is drifting and skating. I feel like a ghost drifting and floating through my house as it builds and leaving trails behind. My vision is starting to slightly strobe as I bounce from task to task.

 

T0:30- I smoke a bit of cannabis, rushing dissociation going through my limbs and into my extremities. Pulsing down. I am jittery and stimulated. I feel very bouncy.

 

T1:20- My friend picks me up, it is a whirlwind of cold and dark. We are in the car, we are committed to the mission, we are doing this. It feels cool. I am just swept up into this. It feels odd to transfer from one space to another, it feels like I am wrapped in saran wrap this entire time. I am socializing normally, stumbling on words a bit and getting a bit into manic rants, where I talk with attack. But I am able to restrain myself a bit.

 

T1:43- We arrive on site and gear up. We smoke a joint. I am able to walk normally, there is a bit of bounce in my step. The cannabis kicks things up into a higher gear as textures and colors begin to bleed into the edges of my vision, tickling and tracing like rivulets of water running down from a flash flood of static. It is such a bitter cold January night, but I don’t feel it at all.

 

T1:45- I am warm and floaty and buzzy, bumbling along. We parked in an empty stretch of industrial road and we make a quiet approach to the building- it is completely open, no fences or boarding. It is a simple affair to just walk right in. As I walk into the open yawning doorway, it feels like the building swallows me, it’s entire dark opaque silhouette frames me and cracks me in. Writhing pulsing lines in dark navy and teal thrash like ropes around my form and push me forwards into the dark portal. The air changes when I step in- still and musty and ladened with a steady rain of dust. My skin is tingling- There were huge boilers and deep concrete hoppers and pits for waste disposal. The main attraction of this building are immense incinerator furnaces that we sought to climb and explore eventually.

 

T1:54- I trickily navigate a ladder- I am a little wobbly but my coordination is still intact enough for me to do so safely. We explore a smashed up bathroom, remarking on seeing the tags of someone we were friends with in high school. It’s cool to know other people I know have been in here too, completely independently. Another ascent up a collapsing metal staircase and we come into a massive open space with holes in the roof. The dissociation starts to hit me like a blast of warm air, tracing around my body and swirling my essence on pulsing sine waves. I can tighten my muscles and make my balance more precise if I focus, but otherwise I find myself  more unsteady on my feet. We walk through the space, watching for the holes in the floor, appreciating all of the colorful graffiti. I can’t tell if I am inside or outside- and perhaps with the roof so collapsed I am technically both. But the air feels heavy like it is enclosing and covering me, casting a shadow on me in the darkness of the night. The rubble and intricate tags are clear in beams of our headlamps but in the enclosing darkness around them, subtle flashing textures drift in like tree roots. When I close my eyes I see similar patterns flowing with successive pulses of dull, dense light tracing them in low reds and oranges.

 

T2:20- Reaching an outdoor portion, my friend traverses a rickety balcony. I suppose I still have enough of my head about me to forgo this. Not with my level of balance right now. We traverse piles of some unknown granulated materials and poke around an external building covered in vines, barren for the winter they just appear as a dense tangle of ropes. I feel like I am in a video game, I feel like I should have a rifle leveled and a HUD as I move around. There is danger in this, in that I can already notice that it insulates me from a sense of consequence. This can inspire recklessness but I was able to consciously suppress such impulses- in this kind of setting, stupid decisions only accumulate. For now I can enjoy that the grainy-static of the sky and the diffused and blunted lights and shadows make the whole setting appear low-poly lo-fidelity buzzing like an old PS2 game in the glow of a CRT television. Despite being outside on such a cold night I still don’t really feel cold at all. Not even in my extremities. But that was clearly not my default state.

 

T2:40- I feel less and less sure of my limbs just walking as we pick around the main space that contained several large furnaces. This ultimately leads to climbing through a small doorway then across the ladders and catwalks of the furnaces to access a crumbling staircase that led to the underground depths of the facility, where a labyrinth of tunnels was accessed by crawling through another small portal. Despite my unsteadiness, for brief moments I was able to sharply focus and attain what felt like even greater control of my limbs and extremities than normal.

In the depths of the tunnels we put on our respirators. The air was thick with dust- at the time we had no idea what the place was used for, so in retrospect it was a great decision to not breathe in decades old burnt trash dust. Donning the respirator reoriented my relation to my body and the space around it- I suddenly felt enclosed, like I was wearing some kind of special suit- it felt like it was some external layer that was propelling my limbs forward, keeping my skin warm and numb, and pulsing electricity through my bones. It was like I was piloting a mech suit of myself. This made the exploration of these tunnels all the more thrilling and exciting.

Twisting diverging paths of all different sizes, in uniform brick and concrete, the graffiti slowly becoming less and less as it plumbed deeper to where people figured no one would see their name. It felt like a place to shelter and hide, an insect burrowing away into the most obscure crevasse of a rotten log so it could never be found. Perhaps it was massaging against the manic paranoia fomented by the drug; my spouse always likened me to a prey animal, alert and ready to dart away at any moment. Those instincts felt like they were being amplified in full force- by the PCP, by the setting I was in; the anxiety was lush and intensely fanged. In the throes of the mania, however, it was revelrous and thrilling like a horror movie.

I normally pride myself on my ability to navigate, but the dissociation severely interfered with that. The inhibition of short term memory keeps me from memorizing landmarks. I feel lost in these tunnels, familiar spaces already appear unfamiliar; though the space is small enough that there are eventually only so many directions one can go, there is still a deep sense of being completely and totally lost. We do easily make it out though, climbing back over the furnaces and out into the main space.

 

T3:30- We are satisfied with what we have seen- I think at this point we had visited every room in the building. The numbness and warmth of the drug are beginning to wear off and the cold is starting to seep in through my layers. Icy fingers driving through my flesh like black fungal mycelium. A chill runs down my spine. I am glad we didn’t run into any trouble at any point during the outing from police or hostile people. I am relieved that I didn’t lose my balance and fall off of anything high. I am glad that we did not get lost in the basement. I am glad I didn’t cut myself on rusty metal or glass caked in the ashes of incinerated trash. It feels like a successful journey.

I take off my balaclava and take a deep breath of the relatively fresh, crisp, cool air. It is sharp and I cough as it pierces my lungs. Having my head out in the open cold feels like being in a dark box and having the lid ripped off and being blinded as it floods with light- I wasn’t blinded by light seeing as it was late at night, but the sudden sensation of cold air on my naked head was a disorienting sensory overload that almost made me lose balance on my feet. The kiss of the cold on my skin sent ripples and chills through my entire body. I quickly throw on a beanie and put my hood up and it feels like sinking back into a warm bath.

Despite the mania and racing thoughts I am quiet as we walk back. I don’t know what I was so absorbed in, maybe nothing at all, maybe my mind was just blank. But this is a very old friend who I feel comfortable around, it doesn’t feel like an awkward silence, and even if I sound awkward and disjointed when I do talk, it doesn’t bother me or make me anxious.

 

3:40 -We get in their car and set out for my house. I am well past the peak but being in the passenger seat is exhilarating and feels like it accelerates the experience as the world rushes past me. It feels like being in a spaceship, not that I know what that feels like. Probably something like this. They get McDonalds on the ride home. The fries smell delicious and it feels like it stimulates my appetite a bit but I don’t feel much desire to eat at all. They are listening to Billy Woods. It is intense and serious and bleak but creates a soundscape that matches the cold run-down industrial zone we drive through.

 

T4:00- Home. Once again a change of scenery breathes life back into the experience that felt it was fading. Perhaps habituation to my surroundings became a habituation to the sensation of the drug, reset to its maximum power when I shift to a new place, a new amount of light, a new temperature. Being back in my warm bright house feels like it blasts heat waves through my field of vision, with cascades of angular shapes breathing up and off of them like stray flickering embers from a wood fire. Shapes like feathers or fronds of ferns catch the fire’s glow and reflect it back in every which direction. The physical dissociation and tension wells up in my and runs down my limbs into my extremities. We smoke a bowl together as soon as we get inside.

 

T4:30- The cannabis breathes some life back into the experience but it is clearly on its way out now. We play Super Smash Bros. 64 together. We are just rotating through all the characters and messing around with items and playing against computers. Nothing too serious. We talk about art and life and our many mutual friends. My friend is a professional painter, we have made art together since we were teenagers. I love their works and its always so fascinating to hear them talk about their method, their inspirations, what they seek to express with their work, semi-abstract pieces that tap deep into their identity with streams of recurring motifs. It’s a lovely subject for conversation, I notice I am much more sociable on the comedown of the experience, more articulate and less inhibited.

 

T5:00- I am coming down faster, still feeling it a bit but it’s more subtle now. Most of the physical dissociation has left but the mania and stimulation rages on. My friend leaves for home and I am just alone in the house now. I smoke more and try to play video games but end up just caught in loops of thought. Manic dissociatives make one extremely self absorbed and self centered. I am thinking so much about how I will be perceived when I write this report- am I too old to be taking PCP and exploring abandoned buildings? Is one ever too old for that? Am I just a circus animal doing tricks by taking drugs for an audience of voyeurs online who encourage and enable me? Does this make me look like an edgelord? Am I just too old to be doing this in general? I should be mature, I should have my shit together. But also who cares? I don’t think it’s that deep at all. I don’t think anyone gives me that much thought or energy other than the person that writes a lot of reports. I don’t think anyone is thinking about me long enough to pass judgments on me like that, and if they do so what? Why should I care? Maybe it is embarrassing to be acting like an edgy teenager at this age, but fuck there’s much worse things I could be doing. Why am I wasting so much time and energy thinking about this? I should be thinking about the people I love, the world at large, the starry night sky and the bugs in the grass and the warmth of the sun my skin and my career and employment and my hobbies and what I was going to eat next. And that’s the cool thing about mania, is I can think about all of that, at the same time, consistently and thoroughly, everything feels possible, I have the energy for everything, I can do whatever I want and seem however I want.

 

T6:00- My mind is racing less at this point, all that remains is some muscle tension and stimulation. Maybe a sort of exhausted mental dissociation but I am for the most part back to baseline.

 

T7:00- Feel completely back to normal now.

 

T9:00- Lie down for bed. Lying in the dark with no stimulus seems to bring the experience back form the dead. I am kept awake by loud racing thoughts, colored by anxiety and paranoia for some indeterminate amount of time. I eventually fall into a restless sleep.

 

Conclusion: There’s really something to PCP and dingy decaying buildings. A combination made in heaven. I don’t recommend doing this. Like I said in the report, I’m lucky I didn’t lose my balance and fall from high places or scrape myself on something nasty. The risk was certainly there. Oddly enough, despite baseline feeling numb and dizzy, if I really focused I could lock in and it felt like I had almost perfect control of my limbs, that I could perfectly compensate for their momentum for tight, precise movements. I notice this property with many other manic dissociatives too. This drug is warming. I barely felt the cold until I had been out in it for a few hours and the peak began to wear off. Engaging in some kind of activity, being up and moving around, all seem to suppress the intensity of the drug, as this felt weaker than an identical dose in the neutral setting. I felt extremely mindful and present while I was engaged in an activity. It wasn’t until I was home alone that my mind began ruminating, restless and paranoid. This drug doesn’t always feel great and when I start feeling bad it is really easy for it to amplify and spiral. I cannot urge enough to be mindful of mindset, conditions, stressors when taking this drug. I can force one to confront them in a disorienting way that can sometimes be productive but can also be quite destructive.