Tripping
Oh let the sun beat down upon my face,
I am a traveler of both time and space,
To sit with elders of the gentle race,
Talk and song from tongues of lilting grace,
But not a word I heard could I relate.
–- Led Zeppelin, "Kashmir"
I sniffed enviously at the aroma of oatmeal still in the air under the kitchen's big shade tarp, and took another bite out of my granola bar. I'd come late to lunch, because the next meal happened any time whoever's name was next on the duty roster was sober enough to work a Coleman stove without burning his fingers off. Almost everybody else had already eaten and either wandered off towards Esplanade, or retreated into the cool but hazy and fetid air of the yurt to get high.
Marco was sitting in a camping chair, off to the side, being very quiet. I walked over and said hi. He looked up at me, slurred something unrecognizable, and his face twitched. I looked closer. His body sat still, nearly unmoving, while his eyes flitted back and forth in terror as if he were imprisoned somewhere deep within.
"Hey!" I said, slapping Gary's shoulder as he was scavenging marginally-edible pieces from a plate of melon rapidly rotting in the heat. "How long's Marco been sitting there?"
He shrugged. "He was there when I got here."
"What's he on?"
"E."
"The hell he is. Look at him."
I had been awake—I added it up—34 hours straight. 10 hours flying into Reno, 1 hour working out the screw-up with the rental car, 2 hours hooking up with other burners who needed a ride and loading up with supplies at Wal-Mart (I know, but it was full of burners, so shut up), 4 hours driving to the Playa. Then 4 hours driving down the gravel road in the line for the gate—that's less than one mile per hour—choking from the dust and getting a migraine from the exhaust. Thank God it was at night or the heat would've killed me. Two hours wandering around F and 4:15, looking for my camp, which I only found because I recognized Jim's voice, screaming into the night that he was God and that he loved us all.
Jim had decided sometime earlier that evening that it would be a good idea to take 9 tabs of acid at once. Federico and Gary had been babysitting him for hours already. Terrence was there too, but he was almost as flipped as Jim. Of course I immediately volunteered to watch them both so Federico and Gary could get some sleep, because it was fucking Burning Man and that's what burners do. So I listened to Jim and Terrence rave at each other about God and love and destiny, and pulled them apart when God told one of them to hit the other one, until about 5 in the morning, when Terrence had come down enough that I told him it was his turn with Jim, and went to set up my tent.
Just then the camp next door had decided to start their party. I don't know which was worse, the thumping bass of techno-pop, or the exhaust and the grinding roar of the 5000-watt generator they started up to power the speakers. So I had gone into the yurt and smoked some weed with my campers until the ravers gave it up a couple of hours past sunrise. By then it was about 130 degrees in my tent, and the Nevada sun was so bright I would have gotten a sunburn right through the nylon fly if I'd managed to fall asleep in it.
I was too tired to go wandering over the playa. So I'd kicked off the first stage of my own experiment with altered states, chewing up about a dozen dry, crumbly mushrooms from one of Nigel's plastic baggies. I had some issues I'd brought to the desert to work out on my own, and this was one way of doing it that being exhausted and unable to sleep wouldn't interfere with.
Now Marco was dangerously strung-out on something that was definitely not ecstasy, while I was just getting over the nausea and could feel the shrooms starting to pick off the sentries on the outskirts of my attentional system. I estimated I would still be the most sober and responsible person there for another ten minutes, so it was up to me to do something.
Gary and I stood over Marco, trying to communicate with him. He knew we were there; he desperately wanted to tell us something; but he was swimming through some very troubled waters trying to reach us.
"Marco," I said. "What did you take?"
"Was it E?" Gary asked. Marco nodded, slowly, his head sloshing up and down.
"Anything else?" I asked. "Alcohol?" Marco shook his head, and twitched again.
"Twitching is bad," I said.
"Twitching is bad," Gary agreed.
Marco made a gargling noise. I bent closer—not too close—and waited for him to try again. I kept being distracted by the way his hair would start to writhe unless I looked straight at it. He snorted air through his nose suddenly, like a diver coming up for a breath, and looked at me.
"Gotta ... piss," he said.
"Oh, fuck," I said.
Gary and I lifted him up between us and dragged him out into the dirt street, and towards the porta-potties a quarter mile away. I tried not to think about what we would do when we got there. He could walk, with guidance. By the time we got there, he had stopped twitching and recovered the power of speech. "I'm good," he said. We aimed him at an open porta-potty and crossed our fingers. He came out a short time later, without any obvious new stains, and said again that he was good.
I told Gary I wasn't going back to camp. Screw that. When I'd left, Nigel was lying spread-eagled on his back in the center of the yurt, naked, with his head propped up, high on God knew what, staring into the eyes of everyone around with an intense high-priest gaze, alternately spouting bullshit about love and working out some grand scheme for saving the world from itself with Jim and Terrence. I was not up for another marijuana-fueled bleeding-heart gang-banging of reality and common sense.
Gary took Marco back to camp. I put my goggles on and headed in the other direction, looking for someplace shady with a place to sit and trip in peace. I had a bag, a book, most of a canteen full of water, WalMart's biggest camouflage cowboy hat, and a cavernous white Lawrence of Arabia robe already stained with sweat and the chalky tan alkaline dust of the playa.
* * * * *
I am not part of the "drug culture". I don't go in for anything more addictive than coffee. I don't touch LSD since this time at my house I was in the process of undressing a beautiful and horny young woman who was visiting from California and had used a lot of it there back in the day, and something triggered a flashback and she was suddenly convinced I was hiding a knife behind my back and ended up sleeping on my couch. Weed and alcohol are mildly amusing, and both eventually make you stupid. Or maybe the potheads I knew had started that way? I wasn't going to run that experiment.
To name psilocybin in the same breath as those things is a sin. Shrooms show you things. See, inside your head is O'Hare International Airport, with planes flying in from all directions or lining up to take off, and there's a little man saying, "You line up over there, you two start your approach now on parallel runways, you hold and follow that other plane five minutes behind."
Psilocybin puts that little man to sleep. You start seeing, hearing, feeling, and thinking things unfiltered, uncorrelated. One moment, you're intensely aware of the pull of gravity. The next, the scent of baked stone from the gravel underfoot. The next, the whisper of a couple walking by on the other side of the streets pours into your ear, painfully loud. You see the patterns your tidy little air traffic controller thinks you're better off not seeing.
If you focus on something, you'll see it just as you normally would. You have to deliberately unfocus, let yourself drift, until things start creeping in around the edges. You have to work at it, with a Zen kind of un-work.
Shrooms don't lie, but they don't tell the truth. They just show you what you already believe. I wouldn't call them dangerous. But I wouldn't call them safe.
Burning Man is the worst possible place on the surface of the Earth to experiment with drugs, short of the slopes of Everest. Nobody wants to sit with you for hours and supervise your trip, unless they're already so stoned that somebody should be keeping them away from you. Just finding a shady place to sit can be a challenge. If you take off your hat, or forget to drink water, or fall asleep—all easy even for a sober person to do—it's heatstroke and a severe sunburn. If you need to vomit, good luck reaching the porta-potty a quarter of a mile away and cleaning up afterwards with no water. If you wander off into the desert, you may die.
On the other hand, you can walk down the street wearing dark goggles to hide the bugged-out look in your eye, and no one will think it's strange. Or at least that's what I was hoping. I sat on a sofa in the shade at the Lost Penguin, God bless them. I would have loved a drink, but I'd run out of gift trinkets. I knew the bartender would give me a drink for free if I asked. He had to. It was Burning Man. He might ask me to do some kind of sexual pantomime, or he might give me a dirty look. Or he might just smile. But I couldn't bring myself to ask. I couldn't get my head into the universal friendship bullshit that was supposed to make everything work by gifting. Like that was some kind of social experiment. Like the people in Reno and Dallas and Kansas City would look at us and suddenly say, "Hey, we don't need money! We can give everything away for free!" and dance in the streets around bonfires of burning dollar bills hugging and kissing each other. Maybe in San Francisco and Austin. I was starting to appreciate how Hoover had felt about communists.
Not for the first time, I wished they would just take my fucking money. All this counter-consumerism was giving me an appreciation for what great stuff money was.
I sat on the sofa and stared at the old carpet laid out on the desert floor. It was covered in a rich paisley pattern, perfect for the shrooms to grasp onto. One of the first things I learned from psilocybin is that the universe is in everything. That's how a shaman would say it. It sounds all wise and shit. All it means is that anything big enough to see has more complexity in it than we can comprehend. I think it was Tom Brown Jr. who told me to mark out one square meter of ground in a field and watch it for four hours. You'd think you'd run out of things to discover, in one square meter, after four hours, but you don't. The man's a smug-eyed asshole, but he knows things. When you're on shrooms, you can look at an art masterpiece, or a bare concrete wall, and they're both beautiful, they'll both talk to you. I let myself drift. I could see the carpet start to ripple, and softly rise and fall in three dimensions. The patterns began to circulate around it like multi-colored rivers.
An older, overweight man stood against a wall, nursing a drink. Shifting colors pulsed around the sleeves and hem of his Hawaiian shirt. Blue, orange, red, yellow, red, orange, blue. Was the orange chasing the red, or running from the blue?
He was staring at me. Had been staring at me all along, while the flowers on his shirt had rippled in the current of colors. I pulled yesterday's Black Rock Gazette out of my bag and held it up as if I were reading it. I let my eyes unfocus. The letters in the periphery of my vision morphed, danced, and re-assembled into the baroquely-serifed symbols of some forgotten script. They vanished if I looked straight at them. Deciphering them was going to be difficult.
The man came over and sat beside me on the sofa. I turned the page, pretending to read. The flowers waved their pistils lewdly at me. He laid his big meaty hand on the cushion between us, blotchy moist mottled pink-red-white, meat wrapped in wrinkled salmon shag an inch from my leg, and asked, "So how's your burn?"
Orange. Orange was missing. Blue had gotten it.
Maybe I was paranoid. All I knew for sure was that I was too far gone to know how far gone I was. A voice in the back of my head said I was safe at the Lost Penguin, but the meat lying between me and the man sweated and shook in anticipation of some pagan ecstasy. I was afraid to stay and afraid to try to stand up. So many muscles to contract, all in the right order. I wished I'd taken notes on how it was done. I lurched to my feet, just like a human, I thought—success!—and slipped back into the street before big-hands could follow, my feet pulled along in the ghost river that rippled over the dust and snaked north towards the Man.
Just after crossing Bottom there was a dance pavilion pumping out electro-trash, with kids covered in paint and tattoos and earrings anyplace other than ears and not much else flailing around like the strobe lights were giving them seizures. Every time I sidled up to the edge of the floor to look, some sweaty burner with a fake sparkly smile would grab my arm and try to get me to dance. I couldn't dance. I could never dance. They could see that from the way I moved, the way I stood. They wanted to make me look like a fool.
I shook them off and went back down F, drawn toward the glaring, white-hot sun shining out over the middle of the playa. The goggles protected me from having to meet the gazes of the burners passing by. I'd come here for the community, the openness, and now it creeped me out. It had taken me years to figure out when to make eye contact with someone (at 12 feet away), how much to smile (10 to 20 degrees, depending on familiarity and formality), and how close to get before breaking off eye contact (6 feet). I never did it well but I was usually able to get through the day without making a fool of myself. Now all the rules had changed.
Before I knew it, I'd reached Esplanade. The fact that I crossed it without getting run down by a mutant vehicle proves you can still perceive the real world on shrooms. Also, that I'm an idiot.
It was almost redundant to be on shrooms at Burning Man. Trucks disguised as yachts, pirate ships, sharks, and tentacled creatures from the nightmares of H. R. Giger drove to and fro, each obeying the traffic laws of their home planet. Sparkle ponies (they're not what you think, brothers) writhed to the electronic dance music that they blared as they went by. Mad, metallic sculptures lined the street. Further out, giant wooden structures—a Ferris wheel, a Trojan horse—stood waiting to burn. Out across the sands, in the middle of the playa, in a haze of wind-swept dust, I could see the Man raising his arms into the sky. It didn't look that far away. I kept walking.
Photo from Burning Man 2011 by Scott London. Used with permission.
* * * * *
I stopped a man at random as he passed by in the other direction. "Which pony are you?" I asked, just to see if he knew what the hell I was talking about. I had a hunch that a lot of people here would.
"I'm a cross between Twilight and Pinkie," he said with a smile.
"That's impossible. Your head would explode."
He put a finger to his forehead. "It already has, my friend," he said before walking on.
The scene before me, I reflected, was what you would get if you crossed Twilight with Pinkie—long, hard, technically-brilliant engineering work, harnessed to the purposes of a manic party-animal. Or maybe Twilight with Rainbow. Burning Man was where the cool smart kids went to play. Maybe if I kept my goggles on, they wouldn't notice that I was only smart. I took another drink from my canteen, and headed out towards the Man.
Ponies were one of the things I'd come to the desert to work out. Enough people I respected—two, but I don't respect many people—were into this kid's show, My Little Pony, that I'd watched a few episodes. Within a few weeks, I'd watched the entire first season. That was more TV than I'd watched in all the years since the end of Buffy. Something about it resonated with something in me, and this irritated me more than the alkaline dust crawling down my socks and burning my legs and feet red. It was a kid's show: Simple, naïve, and just well thought-out enough to drive you crazy with the glaring inconsistencies.
Psilocybin was a way to look inside my psyche and see what those pastel ponies were doing in there. Shrooms will work on thoughts as well as pictures. Anything that can hold a pattern. Right then, I was noticing how similar all the artwork at Burning Man was to the things that I saw on shrooms. The big picture, the realism, the structure, was nothing. The tiny filigrees, the repetition of a simple pattern, layer after layer, was everything. The music at Burning Man was the same—simple patterns, repeated endlessly. All art, I saw, had two aspects—the baroque, recursive, physically-resonant, psychedelic; and the refined, organized, purposeful, intellectual, which was completely absent here. Burners worshipped Dionysus, not Apollo. Bright colors, celtic knots, wild vine-like growths with bulbous protuberances, steel sculpted into irregular crystals, all spread across the desert to a soundtrack with the pounding rhythm of sex. The laughing burners walking by seemed to feel right at home with it. It made me ill. Every mysterious, unattainable joy that tortured me, every natural impulse that my strict Christian upbringing had forever associated with revulsion and shame, was flaunted, raw and exposed except for a millimeter-thick skin of fake granfalloon friendship that was more annoying than a friendship report by Twilight Sparkle. Try that in the real world, burners. See how far the magic of friendship takes you. But they wouldn't. Half the burners here would dump their trash on the side of the highway and piss in the river before they got back to Reno. They had to be fake. Something in me couldn't stand for them to be happy and smart and good, all at the same time.
I was wasting the trip by walking. Shrooms need patience. They can't work their magic while you're focused on getting from here to there. But I had a sense that if I were going to get some revelation, it would be at the Man. Surely that was some kind of psychic nexus.
Of course, nothing happened. I climbed up him, and came back down, and that was all. The Man was just foma. Or maybe it was me. The spirits would talk to assholes like Tom Brown Jr., but never to me. The spirits were probably assholes too.
Farther off in the desert, I saw the temple. My canteen was empty, but I figured it couldn't be more than one or two football fields away. I ought to see it while I was out here. I started walking. If I collapsed, somebody would see me and help.
Brothers, don't get high and wander out onto the playa alone.
Photo from Burning Man 2011 by Scott London. Used with permission.
If they let people sell things at Burning Man, somebody would be out here on the playa selling overpriced bottled water and ice cream, and I'd pony up gladly. If there were a booth that charged $30 for a shower, I'd get that too. If I'd had any enlightenment so far, it was to really appreciate capitalism.
The temple didn't seem to be getting any closer. I turned around and saw the Man had dwindled behind me, and I realized: The temple was enormous. It dwarfed the Man in size. Those little things I could just barely make out crawling around and across it were people. It was not one or two football fields away. It was a long goddamn way away, and I had come a long goddamn way out into the middle of the playa, alone, with no water, tripped out of my mind. If I turned around now, I could probably get back to Esplanade before I passed out.
Then the dust storm came.
I held my handkerchief over my mouth and waited to find out whether I'd get run over by a mutant vehicle before the winds abated. It wasn't that bad. The wind wasn't cool, since it was hotter than I was, but it evaporated my sweat. The sky full of dust finally provided shade from the relentless sun that had been beating down on me all day. The downside was that no one would see me collapse, and dust storms sometimes lasted for hours. That would be—too long. I tried to sit, but the clay was too hot.
I had paid $2000 in airfare, car rental, hotels, tickets, camp fees, and supplies to get where I was, standing by myself in the middle of the desert in the middle of a dust storm that might kill me, hot, sweaty, exhausted, thirsty, pissed off at my friends and at burners in general, so I could find myself. Well, I had found myself: I was bitter, cynical, and too old for this shit.
It's moments like this that I save up episodes of My Little Pony for. I don't watch them when they come out. I download them and save them until I feel like killing myself, and then I think, "Well, I've still got those episodes of My Little Pony that I haven't seen. I'd like to see them before I die." Then I watch them until either I feel better, or I run out of episodes. So far, it's always been the former.
I looked into the dust swirling around me. There were patterns in the dust. It was fast, but maybe I could work with it. I tried to call up images of ponies.
You can ask the shrooms to show you things. But you should never force the shrooms. It's wrong, very wrong. Don't ask me how I know. But it's wrong.
But I didn't give a shit anymore. I wanted to see ponies.
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1204597 Look at that gay
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Apart from dickhead mcgee above me this was a nice story :D
This story has potential
story + potential = a fave and a watch from me ^_^
mrbarlow.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/drugs-are-bad.jpg
And what is a "Sparkle pony" at that place?
Because there is no way I'm going to go there myself to satisfy my curiosity. And I'm not your brother.
1204597
And this is why we need a flag button for comments.
i1256.photobucket.com/albums/ii485/Church8/truestory.jpg
I also want to see ponies. Give me more ponies.
This story taught me something.
Ponies.
1204749 Is it not allowed to have one chapter without ponies?
1204954 No. I was referring to the end of the story specifically.
Ponies.
I think that's only frowned upon if you submit to EqD.
This is... really weird. Interesting, but weird.
So, what the heck is a "sparkle pony," anyways?
>fomas and granfaloons
:brohoof:
1205049>>1204694 Sparkle ponies exist only in the eye of the beholder - no one would say they were one. It's a derogatory term, supposedly for a burner who likes attention but doesn't want to help out. In practice it's usually used for young women who would wear glitter (until it was banned) and shiny stuff and not many clothes, get high on ecstasy, and dance all night. For some reason some people hate them. Probably because they won't have sex with them.
There's a hipster burner culture, exemplified by the writers of "Piss Clear", that loves to talk about how much better burners they are than everyone else and how much longer they've been going to burning man, and these are some of the people whom you find talking about sparkle ponies.
"hipster burner culture"
I don't even know where to start with that one.
And that's speaking as a member of the nation that invented "Freikörperkultur"!
I think I prefer my ponies pastel colored. Thank you.
Interesting. I really don't know what else to say.
This is an outstanding travelogue ... and I have no idea how well it's going to work as a pony story. (I'll probably click on the next chapter with gritted teeth, ready to wince, and then be pleasantly surprised. Not that I don't already like your pony stories -- but with your setup, there's not a lot of things you can write that won't (A) completely leave your premise behind, or (B) carry Ch1's painful cynicism into a cruel and twisted Equestria. The meat of the rest of the story will be in how you pull off that balancing act.)
One thing I'd argue with your main character's view of drugs is that it's not the choice of substance that draws the line between worthwhile and worthless. Of course if you take shrooms seriously and let the universe talk to you, you'll have meaningful experiences. Respecting how they remove your mental blocks is part of the good mindset that leads to good trips. The same thing can happen if you drop acid -- it's a subtly different effect; you start seeing how everything is connected to everything else -- or even take heroic doses of pot. There's a sacred space, I don't use the term lightly, that drugs can take you to if you wanted to go there in the first place.
If you didn't, things can get fucked up.
Similarly -- I suspect your main character will learn how mistaken his contention "sleep deprivation doesn't matter to shrooms" really is. Set and setting, man. Set and setting.
Interesting take on Human/Pony shenanigans. I'm quite curious to where this will end up.
1205651 I didn't know that about pot. Unfortunately it makes me ill at low doses. You're wiser than my character. Short answer: He's got bigger problems than choice of drug. I didn't take option A or option B.
1205667 I finished the first draft 2 months ago, but didn't finish revising it and submit it until yesterday. His problem with gift culture is supposed to be part of his alienation. He doesn't like it because interacting with people is scary, and money is simpler and he can handle it. I probably shouldn't have said that; explaining the story is cheating. (I'm not wild about gift culture myself. It works better if you're socially adept. It works better when people are more equal, whereas at Burning Man there's three economic classes: Big camp member or RV camper, Car camper, Flew into Reno with a backpack. It's more stressful in a physically-demanding environment. For some people, being able to shower is an important factor in how much they can enjoy Burning Man, and it's a big @#$* deal to get a shower because of gift culture.)
I'll post again at midnight if the universe doesn't have other plans.
I've been curious about Burning Man for awhile, ever since I first got introduced to the concept by a few stoner friends of mine, and now... well, I want to experience it even more. I wonder if I took shrooms, would I see ponies? I'd love to... Anyhoo, off to chapter two!
What the hell? I
I don't think I can read this. This is the third thing I could not read (other than a few graphs) the first being the Jerusalem Bible, and the second being Left Behind. A set of christian books for after the salvation.
But really, What the hell?
Acid shows you things too man,
just more intensely.
Round and round like the bicycle wheel,
Showing me things none can unfeel.
Fractal Patterns on the wall,
The ants follow them at a crawl.
Like the wheel with its spokes,
What a painful and cruel joke,
From whose lips was it spoke?
"You can ask the shrooms to show you things. But you should never force the shrooms. It's wrong, very wrong. Don't ask me how I know. But it's wrong."
"But I didn't give a shit anymore. I wanted to see ponies."
Oh man, I am eager to see our bitter narrator get fucked up by ponies.