-10
mL Diethyl Ether
-200
mg Memantine
Day
2:
-25
mg 2C-C
-18
mg 4-AcO-MiPT
-10
mg 4-HO-MET
-12
mg 3-MeO-PCE
-75
ug LSD
Do not do this.
Day
1:
It was a hot day in the very middle
of July. I had just arrived home with a whole weekend stretched out before me
in the company of one of my dearest friends and a frequent partner in crimes
against sanity. He will be referred to as J. My other recurring comrade in
these ventures (who I also lived with) was away for the weekend, as were my
other roommates, leaving us the entire house to ourselves to see how we could
painfully contort our minds.
In the fridge I had been nursing a
small vial of diethyl ether for the past several months. It was pure lab-grade,
as I had swiped it from my organic chemistry lab. The summer was ending and I
would soon reach a hiatus in my explorations. I was desperate to round the
month out with some final experiments I never had the time to do before. The
Ether I had postponed for a while after reading that the smell lingers on the user
for quite some time after. I had nothing to do the next few days except for
more drugs, so I figured it was now or never. Another drug to add to the list,
another little point of prestige on the internet, another novel experience to
brag about at parties. What was I to lose?
I emptied the vial into a plastic
Ziploc bag and stationed myself in a bathroom with a fan. I was originally
going to indulge outside, but declined due to the intense summer heat, which I
feared would evaporate all the ether and allow it to slip by me before I could
wrangle it into my respiratory tract. J came into the bathroom to witness the
grim spectacle of me sitting on the floor, leaning against the toilet, and
inhaling vigorously from a Ziploc bag. The smell was offputting to him however
and he ducked out. So I was left alone, pummeled by Kode9 playing
unceremoniously off my phone, the rigid edges of the open bag wrapped around my
face. Each breath was vibrantly bitter. It was not the sort of sharp and sudden
acridity that makes one instantly recoil and hack and cough, rather it was a
smooth poisoning that slipped down my throat like a snake covered in gasoline.
It was at once sweet and repulsive, meek yet fiercely adverse to anything a
person should expect to inhale without consequence. As I drew my face away for
some fresh air I realized it was nowhere to be found. The ether had made a home
in my face and did not seem intent on dislodging anytime soon. It squatted in
my respiratory passages, tainting every breath I took with its illustrious odor.
The cognitive effects were lost in the sensory cornucopia- slight head buzz,
slight feeling of dissociation, slight numbness in my fingertips. All very
slight. It was like being buzzed.
I left the bathroom to air out the
fumes and smoked a prerolled joint in an attempt to stir the lingering dust of
the experience. Not much arose from this, with the overwhelming acrid flavor of
the ether camped stubbornly in my mouth. After about half an hour had passed,
this was all that remained of the chemical. It seemed to have evacuated my
nervous system and was content to be an irritating presence upon my senses. So
much for that experience. It was still early in the afternoon and we had the
entire house to ourselves until the next day. On to the next stage of debauchery.
We decided we were going to go heavy
on dissociatives in full view of the voyeuristic sun for once. Dissociatives
had historically for us only been taken in nighttime, when we could shelter
from our experiences in the darkness- or rather let the experiences loose like
a dog off of a leash, free to run their course in the fields of our minds. We
figured it would be interesting in the daylight, the experience stunned from us
in the shock of the sunlight, and us stunned from the experience. I decided to
bestow upon him the combination of 3-MeO-PCE and 3-MeO-PCP, a path I had tread
a few times before, a combination that lent itself to an intense, stormy, and unrelenting
experience, suitable for the experienced dissociative traveler who wanted to
swim deeper than they were used to. As for me, I chose mematine as my poison.
200 mg of it this time, a very hefty dose by most standards. My last foray with
memantine was 150 mg, and this proved to be an intense experience that dragged
on for 3 days. This dose involved
swallowing 20 pills at once- I highly doubt the inventor of memantine would
suspect that some chump would be taking 10x the highest recommended dose of
their drug.
These doses did not occur
concurrently- Memantine has a notoriously long comeup, similar to any marathon
hallucinogen like the DOx series, AMT, and 2C-P. J took his dose when I was a
solid 2 hours into my experience. The comeup was sterile and nondescript,
typical for memantine. Upon peaking, we turned the lights off, the room bathed
in the grey sunlight as it filtered through our thin blinds. We both soon found
ourselves up to our necks in the dissociative flood, with movement proving more
difficult by the minute. We both managed to take a hit of weed from the gravity
bong to really maximize our peak before indulging in our desired activity….
Sitting on the couches curled into balls with our eyes closed listening to
music…. Honestly we could’ve just done this at night, it really made no
difference. Nevertheless, the two of us were entirely incapacitated and content
in the safety of knowing we would not be disturbed for the duration of this
experience. Both of us were sinking into our respective holes, being consumed
by the battering of soundwaves, the gentle teeth of the music chewing us up
from all sides, that filtered grey light of the sun disintegrating and
cascading onto our catatonic bodies.
Part of my experiment was to
determine whether or not memantine made me feel and think of the cold just
because I took it in the dead of winter. Though it was almost 90 degrees
outside, I once again found myself at the mercy of winter’s spears, shards of
ice piercing my bones and zapping my muscles into uncontrollable shivers. I
felt raw, exposed, curled up on a dry winter night, severely underdressed,
where the frost hangs in the air and the wind saps all semblance of heat. I
found myself drifting amidst the same dark winter landscape as before, pillars
of trees screeching into the auroral sky. Vast dark fields would interject my
journey, grids and intersecting planes and the same looming spectral
lo-fidelity beings that drifted this realm aimlessly. After a few hours of
immobility and grey, grey stillness, of us both drowning in our respective
dissociative maelstroms, our experiences let up a bit. I knew from my previous
experiments with memantine that this was but a brief respite- that it would all
come crashing back down with force in due time. The taste of ether still
lingered on my breath, so sickeningly sweet… I was eventually stricken by an intense
nausea- not the sorta twisting cramps and eager discomfort of psychedelics, but
more of a soft swirling queasiness, like motion sickness. This was no doubt
exacerbated by those stubborn ether fumes. I ran upstairs and purged for what
would be the first of several occasions that night.
J had mostly come down. I was lucid
but still cruising, still teetering on the edge. 2 friends came over- one of
whom practiced music with my friend in the basement. I spent the time lounged
on the couch upstairs, dreamily staring at the ceiling and the intricate suture
patterns that were dancing across it, still awash in nausea and the same cold
sterile dissociation. Lying down was the most comfortable position for me right
now. Soon another friend came over. I managed to ignore my discomfort enough to
interact with everyone. They were interested in exploring substances too so I
cut them both 25 mg doses of 4-HO-DET, as it wasn’t my favorite chemical and I
had plenty to dispense.
It was now about 6 hours since I had
originally dosed. The rest of the night was fairly foggy and nondescript. I
felt cold, I curled into a ball and fell back into the hole occasionally with
liberal applications of cannabis. The trip’s intensity came in rolling waves. All
of my interactions had a potent psychedelic edge combined with a dissociative
fogginess that kept anything from adhering too hard to my memory, except as
specters of what they once were. The taste of ether persisted in my mouth and I
had to vomit several more times. My other friends seemed to have fun on their
trips, save for one who didn’t feel his dose of 4-HO-DET at all. Odd. The night
wound down with us playing videogames and enjoying one of the last weekends I
would get to spend in the place that had been my home for 2 years, where I had
had so many formative experiences and formed so many fond memories. I went to
sleep as the sun was rising, my skin still numb and my equilibrium still jilted
astray.
Day 2:
My first step out of bed set the
mood for the whole day, the feeling like I was stepping into the deck of a
rocking ship, that whatever surface my feet set upon was sitting atop
undulating waves. I forget how I spent most of this day. Lazying around,
cruising on my residual dissociation I suppose. It felt like the aftershowers
of sparks from fireworks but drawn out for multiple days. Each crackle was a
synapse going silent as the same dissociative chills crawled across my skin.
I had originally planned on stacking
psychedelics onto my memantine trip. I figured it would make for an interesting
combination, especially considering that my baseline state right now was just
raw chemical dissociation. I decided to go with my habit of mixing up a party
pill- some absurd, “carefully” chosen concoction of chemicals. This cocktail was 25 mg 2C-C, 18 mg 4-HO-MiPT,
10 mg 4-HO-MET, 12 mg 3-MeO-PCE and 75 ug LSD combined into a single cellulose
capsule. The different crystalline layers of different colors and consistencies
made for a pleasing confectionary, the partial tab of LSD jammed unceremoniously
into the pile. J decided to go for a trip too, something shorter- he opted for
4-HO-DET. I’m not sure what the plan was for the next few hours- the same
lazing around? Who knows. I was just going to occupy the soft spaces downstairs
with him.
Such
was the plan.
What
really happened though-
On the couch I sat unsuspecting- I
had just cast the die into a divine fire, entrusted my concoction of spells to
the belly of the earth and turned my back to its cacophonous prismatic fire as it
screamed into the darkening sky. From that womb of jagged dissociative stillness,
of cold towering spires and the paleness of death was birthed a colossus, it’s
thunderous gaze like black steel trusses cast across the grey sky. It crept
from its birthplace, it lumbered towards its unsuspecting summoner, it heaved
and dragged itself, ruining the earth behind it, ruining time before it, its
essence drifting along like creek froth caught in a riffle. Breathing, heaving,
it extended a single blocky discordant appendage towards me, tapped me on the shoulder,
by now I realized I had been fully drenched by its shadow.
“I
think I have to go upstairs”
The colossus, the colossi, the colossal,
whatever they are, unclear in number, unclear in form, unclear in collectivity –
they and it ushered me up the stairs, looming spectral sentinels with ritual
smog a veil over their eyes. The colossus wailed at me for hours, scrubbing my
memory mostly clean the way one would scrape the fat from bone. Their shouts
were nothing to the kaleidoscopic zenith spiraling above them, looming, always
one thing looming over another, all gray, all a lacework of intricate vessels
and conduits cast in cold concrete relief. The great sky above, those upper
waters of the firmament were a testament to an even greater screaming,
something deafening, something bigger, golden mycelia from the twisted infected
world above seized me and the colossus rose to meet me at eye level, its gaze
vivisecting me and casting my neurons aside like bycatch, cleaning and gutting
me before the even greater beyond could taste me.
Like crackles of electricity, like
getting whipped by braided cables, the yawning above swallowed me whole, an
infinite obsidian cathedral, its buttresses glaring over me, taking me into a
place where my mind was naught but a jumble of dirty wires, scrapyard refuse
cut from more effective machines, and the grey grey dappled light from above
shone down on it like an altar, and in the corners of that light, forms, a
single form manifest as many, or maybe all of them coming together as one,
nevertheless their shadow is at first speculative, but then pervasive, and soon
looming. Something is always looming. And me, tangled and flocculating,
twitching with clonus and feeling sick and knowing that I am on the precipice
of even greater and more terrifying things.
And I think about how much deeper
this can go, about what unknown beyond lies beyond this beyond, about how notions
of ‘knowing’ and ‘unknowing’ would not exist in the further beyond, as the
concept of even existing would be a foreign theorem to the other beyonds. I
felt ensnared in rusty shredded wires, writhing on cold concrete, muck and refuse
about me as the glistening rains danced on prismatic puddles catching neon
lights somewhere out of view. I do not know where these wires went or where
they came from, but they were always tightening, always pulling me somewhere.
Eventually I reached the point where
memory, along with existence, being, knowing, breathing and feeling were
dismissed as foreign ideals, outlanders to be locked out from the bunker of
this, of pure thought, of a mind left to deplete itself of all those trivialities,
grow deep in its chamber alone and untouched and unbothered, allowed to flourish
in the pitch darkness- not the darkness of light obscured or denied from those
who seek it, simply the darkness from the total absence of light, the denial of
it as a concept. This young sprout, it truly had to grow as pure as it could
desire. In this not-darkness, in this not-being, I was invited to have an
audience with the growth, having been appropriately stripped of every fundamental
of my being. A bare nervous system now before the growth, it asked me to peer
into what I could see, here where light and dark did not even exist. I saw
chaos, the Sisyphean cognition of fever dreams, of things going where they don’t
and shouldn’t, of non-things going where the things go and should, but most
horrifyingly, it kept going, beckoning deeper, a minute cavity with golden
tendrils- but I could not.
This could not go further, but perhaps
I would be truly lost. What would I come back to after this? I destroyed the
familiar world, would I be able to adapt again? The consistent explosions of gridded
color around me seemed to speak otherwise. And yet there was grounding in
delusions, the clawing of tangled and incomprehensible conspiracies based in a
very material reality at the edges of my being, ideas of mind control, of other
entities intruding on my autonomy at its very core, of my mind being the plaything
of powers beyond my comprehension.
When some functionality came about
me I did some cursory reading into memantine and some dubious readings into its
pharmalogical profile had me call in an abortion of the mission due to serious
concerns of neurotoxicity and pervasive cognitive effects. This was likely a
panic response to the unexpected intensity of the severe undoing I had just
done. Something about it being an anticholinergic? Something about this being
triggered by combining it with 5-HT2A agonists? I’m not sure what papers I cherrypicked
to come to this conclusion. But the fear of having truly damaged my mind this
time was tangible. I aborted with 5 mg Aripiprazole and 1 mg clonazepam.
As
I crawled out of the craven cavity / non-cavity from where I was cast, from
where that junk colossus had abandoned me, I thought to myself “why am I still doing
this?”
“why
am I still subjecting myself to being thrashed by non-entities? What have I
learned from this? What have I learned from any of this in a while? What am I trying
to achieve? Will I be able to live like this forever?”
Which
led to thoughts of:
“Do
I tell my parents how bad its been, under their noses, though they suspected
the whole time, do I come clean about what my hobby for the past 4 years has
been, but with a footnote, promise I’ll stop, risk getting disowned, break
their hearts again but really come clean and start over?”
But
then:
“Do
I really want to stop? Where will I find the novelty and whimsy within the
boundaries of my mind? This is something you’re good at, something you’re competent
at that has lead to a great deal of creative and productive output- this is
good for you”
It
matters not what I settled on. I felt shaken, shaken by my own hubris, shaken
by what lie ahead, shaken by so much uncertainty, from such a certainty of a
world where certainty was not even a thing.
When
I had come down a little bit I returned downstairs, now caught in the snowdrifts
of a benzo fog, courtesy of the clonazepam. My mind was more gathered, I felt
burnt though, raw and unstable. J was still down there, his trip mostly having
passed at this point. He said it was just okay, nothing special. I was bummed
that I was absent the whole time. As I came down more and more that traumatized
fear was replaced by a sort of mania, I was giddy at having survived that
trial, that my mind seemed to have come out mostly unscathed, that I was a
person again. My roommate came home later to me babbling with a certain fear
and fascination about my ‘experience’, which I had labeled as not even being an
experience, but exposure to something… not even a thing but a state? Some word
that doesn’t capture the non-existence of that existence. Perhaps language is not
meant to address such absurd contradictions and betrayals of normal reality. J
went for a snack run at some point, and being in no state to leave the house I
had him get me some cranberry juice to try and wash the memantine out. J left later
into the night while I pondered my future, shaken and fearful but hopeful. As
the night progressed the chemicals in my cocktail fizzled out, leaving the
great monolithic bedrock of memantine behind, that same cold dissociation I had
woken up with, the first guest to come to the party and the last to leave. We
smoked weed and hung out long into the night, each introduction of the cannabis
flaring the dissociation up a bit. As the night wound down and the clonazepam
demanded my attention I went to sleep.
Day
3: My job grants me 3-day weekends, a blessing. Today is recovery day. I wake
up, take a step and have the same familiar feeling from yesterday. My
equilibrium and balance are immediately off. I am spacy and dissociated all
day, it feels the same as it did the day before, before I took all the other
stuff. The clonazepam from yesterday only thickens the fog. I vaguely remember going
to the corner store and buying a whole bunch more cranberry juice. Other than that,
this day is lost to time. Probably smoked weed a bunch and lazed around with my
roommate or alone in my room. Probably took a nap.
Day
4: I get out of bed and go to work. This is worrisome. My balance is still off
kilter, I still feel like I could very easily stumble and fall if I’m not paying
enough attention. I still feel spacy and distant, conversing with people proves
difficult and confusing. I make it through the day without incident though and
return home. I spent the rest of the night relaxing on my own, smoking, still
trying to make sense of the past few days.
Day
5: I get out of bed and go to work again. This time I feel a little better,
still feeling dissociated, still off balance, still spacey, still a bit numb.
The feeling has passed by the time I go to bed. I awaken on the 6th
day back to baseline.
This
was probably the most intense trial I have subjected myself to, both for the
number and intensity of the substances involved. I did not go into this
thinking I was subjecting myself to a trial, it was more aimless hedonism. But
I came out shocked and changed, my perspective on how I use drugs shaken to the
core. I think it prepared me for taking a step back with my drug use for the following
months where my living situation wasn’t conducive to it. But alas, nothing
stays the same and the siren song would come calling again…
