After Dark

This is one of those posts where I write because I feel like writing, not because I actually have something to say. I'm not quite sure why I bother to make these public; they're essentially a warm-up that I do, sort of like writing calisthenics, before I tackle my novel manuscript or a short story... just a way to get my fingers moving and my voice working and everything flowing especially since it's been a little while since I got any work done.

That still doesn't explain why I feel the need to share this utterly mundane and uninteresting rambling with you. I imagine if I thought about it long enough, I could ascribe some nonsensical reason to the behavior; off the top of my head, I'm going to go with pure narcissism, which is the fuel for about fifty percent of the Internet's content, anyway. Seriously, stop and think about it for a moment. Think about everything that you've placed on the Internet, all of the content that you've created. Not content that you've consumed, not things you've perused or enjoyed, but things that you've actually inserted into the greater series of tubes that is the Intertron. How much of it are pictures of you or the people around you? How much of your written material is dialogue about your life, shared with your friends? Perhaps I should ask this question a different; of everything that you've ever put up online, public or private, for whatever reason, how much of it is not about you?

This is not to imply that such a perspective is wrong. The reality is that this is a tool for facilitating communication between people. It's not a repository for artistic endeavor, any more than my phone is meant to be. But it never fails to amuse me (and I'm just as guilty of this as any individual) that so much of our social cyber-construction is built to carve little niches of ourselves, to put as much or as little of ourselves out there in the digital world. If you think about it, we're all vying for a little quasi-immortality (a phrase, incidentally, that amuses as much as "most unique"). Long after you've moved on, there are relics of your history floating around on the Internet, buried just below the surface, waiting to be unearthed with a little digging. These bits of data, these pieces left in the wake of your interest long after you've moved on will remain forever, as long as there exists a server to hold them. And it's always interesting to see how your little relics and artifacts can reappear, sometimes when you don't even expect it (and sometimes that's not a good thing).

For example, back when I was developing fledgling html skills, I made a series of websites on various free services, starting at a place called Express Pages before moving to Fortune City to Geocities and eventually, to Angelfire. At least one of those Angelfire pages is still up and active, because apparently, it's considered the primary resource for information on the drow god Vhaeraun on Wikipedia. Seriously, click the link and scroll down to the external links: "Citadel of the Mask Lord" was a website I put up years and years ago and then promptly forgot about. I'm not the one that found it and cited it for Wikipedia; I've actually never submitted anything to Wikipedia, ever, which rolls into the whole thing about all of my content online being about me.

Just something to think about.

I love this video!

Click the link. And be sure your volume is turned up. And yeah, it's SFW... unless all of your co-workers are Republicans. Then it's probably not safe at all.

Just got back from a backpacking trip, pictures are posted on my Facebook. I might migrate them over here later, if I feel up to it. At the moment, I just want to ice my knee, lie down and pass out watching a movie.

Sounds good. I'm going to go do that.

I will admit, this is totally cheesy, but it's the truth. There's a Chinese fortune that I got out of a cookie once that I keep in my wallet. It says, very simply, "Killing time murders opportunity." Which is really more advice than fortune telling.

I just want to take this moment and reflect how one event, no matter how irritating it might be, can lead directly to something wonderful and exciting, if you have but the willingness to follow the path and the courage to act before you second guess yourself to inaction.

This is a post about Salvia.

Before I begin my story, I want to make a few things clear. First of all, no, I'm not a hardcore drug addict; alcohol and the (very) occasional cigar are my only real vices. I've done salvia once before and it was a weird, admittedly amusing experience, and for the moment, it's still legal in my state. Also, I don't care what you think about it because of that legality; this isn't some goddamn Fisher-Price version of shrooms. If you do it right (or wrong, as you'll see in my case) you fucking trip, and you trip hard.

This post is about my second salvia trip last night, the hallucinations that I had, and the realization that followed.

The first time I tried salvia, I was with my brother and some of his friends. I'm aware (now) that it's not meant to be a party drug, but I didn't know that at the time. All I knew is that he'd smoke a little and then for the next ten minutes, he'd be giggling hysterically, rolling around on the floor. Sometimes, he'd try to take all his clothes off. Like I said, harmless. Amusing. Fun. I thought he was smoking doing something illegal until he showed me the recent from some smoke shop. So, okay, I gave it a try.

I thought I was turning into glass. This is less frightening than it sounds to me now; at the time, I was aware of this intensely weird pressure in my throat that slowly spread out to my arms, my chest and my legs. I couldn't move at the time, but I was aware that there were people around me and I guess when somebody asked me what it felt like, I said (in a silly, high-pitched voice) that "I'm being squeezed." It only lasted for a few minutes and then I was able to move again and everything returned to normal.

Easy. Somewhat amusing. Short. No problem. Right?

That was a few months ago. Now, fast forward to last night. I get home from work, and as I'm walking up to my apartment, I get a call from Zach saying that Justin brought over some salvia and that he just spent the last twenty minutes "tripping balls." At this point, I'd done some research on salvia and I'd learned that it was not a party drug, as I said, that it was meant for meditative purposes and not for recreational use. That's fine, I figured. I have a strong mind; I create fucking worlds in my head. I'll focus my thoughts, direct my experience, and it will be great.

Justin lights up before me and has an extremely mild trip; basically just giggled for a few minutes, rolled out of his chair onto the floor and stumbled a little bit. Over in five minutes, tops.

Now it's my turn.

I will note at this point in my story that my complete inexperience with drug culture made for some amusement at this point. The first time I tried to take a hit, I sucked the salvia into the pipe itself. I also almost lit my hand on fire, which meant that Zach had to help me. He coached me through the technique and I took a big, and I mean BIG, hit. Most people don't know this, but I do like to sing, at least on Rock Band and when I'm driving. Point is, my lungs are pretty strong, so if I want to hold my breath, I can hold my breath for a damn long while. I kept that smoke in waaaay longer than I ever thought I could hold my breath, until finally I was forced to blow it out and suck down some good air. Right away, I started to feel "weird" and I knew it was taking effect. I leaned back in my chair and waited to fly, or have a conversation with my hand, or something funny/cool to happen.

That's when reality started to disintegrate. I remember hearing somebody (I think it was Justin) ask me "are you flying yet?" and right as he said that, the entire wall of my apartment collapsed into a vortex that started zooming towards me. I gasped something like "Not flying... hyperspace!" And that was pretty cool, at first. Really quickly, though, it started to go bad. I turned my vision away from the wall, and I think I saw Zach or Justin, because suddenly, I was watching human flesh get torn apart by this vortex of reality and it was like seeing skin and muscle stretched out into infinity. I couldn't get the vortex to disappear; no matter where I looked, the hyperspace effect consumed the world before my eyes. I watched my apartment disintegrate and my friends liquefy in this psychedelic warp of color (at this point, it was flesh combined with red and green.) I remember seeing teeth in the vortex.

Then I turned to my other side and that's when things started to really go wrong. I suddenly was gripped by the terrible fear that I had experienced this exact same trip before; that everything I was doing and seeing had happened to me before, and I knew how it was going to end, and it did not end well. I started to panic. That's when I realized I was hearing voices, and I'm not sure if they were my friends or if I was imagining something that wasn't there, because the voices started to tell me that "it's okay, it's over, you're fine" which was fucking impossible since I was watching that person get consumed by a vortex.

I started to have deja vu to an incredible degree: I wasn't just having the feeling that this has happened before, I felt like I was able to predict what the voices were going to say before they said anything.

And then the paranoia began. I started to come out of my hyperspace experience and I could see my friends and I could see my apartment. The problem was, even though everything started to look "normal," I could feel my hands spasming and I felt like I was folding in half, that I could tear myself out of my skin just by pulling my hands over my face. I think this is when I got up, because it wasn't funny at this point, because it wasn't stopping. It'd been ten minutes, surely. Why was I still seeing reality fold in on itself? Why would Zach look normal for a moment, and then peel the skin away from his face to reveal nothing but grinning teeth and nothing else.

That's when my mind came to the conclusion: if this is still happening, then nothing is real. I'm not real. Everything that I am, everything that I thought I knew was just a thinly veiled illusion. All the beliefs I had about myself, the philosophizing to prove that I exist, all of it was stripped away by this tiny little plant, and I was left with nothing. I watched the world disintegrate around me and it was like a video game that's glitching out. I could see things move, I saw people dissolve, and all of this proved to me that I was seeing the glitches of reality, that we were nothing more than a collection of desires and intentions.

It was terrifying. I kept asking "is this real?" "Am I real?" And I know my friends were trying to help me by saying "yeah, this is real," but to me, that was terrifying, because it was validating what I was seeing. It was proving to me that, yeah, reality is over, you fucking broke it and now you get to enjoy the void. You see, that's the Truth. There is no life, there is no death, there's just this corrupted little human simulation, this Matthew Video Game, World of MattCraft, suspended over an abyss of absolute emptiness. It was like being trapped in a lucid nightmare, one where you're fully conscious, fully aware of what's happening, and you keep trying to wake up, you keep trying to make it stop. I realized later that I was covered in water, and I guess at some point, I told my friends to pour water on me, to wake me up. That was the worst part, the feeling of being trapped in this nightmare world, unable to make it go away, unable to regain control of what you're seeing or feeling.

A lot of my memory is scattered. I oscillated between points of lucidity and delusion, which made it worse, because I kept wanting it to be over so badly, and then my arm would turn into a snake and try to eat my other arm, or I'd watch the world bend around me. I know that I left my apartment at one point, hoping that if I walked far enough, I'd find my way out of dreamland and back into reality. It didn't work.

The oscillations between normal and hallucination made it worse, too. Every time I thought I started to come down, every time I was "back," I would see something wrong and terrifying, and it was like when you have a nightmare, and you think you wake up safe in your bed, but you're still dreaming, and now the nightmare is far more terrifying, because you believe that it's reality. I didn't think I was hallucinating at this point. I was convinced that reality itself had fractured and there was no going back, no way to make this go away, no way to make it stop.

Even after the visions stopped, for hours afterward, the paranoia remained, the sense that at any moment, reality could collapse. The fear that I pulled away a veil I was not supposed to look behind and I saw the seams of reality, I saw the lines of code that make us, and I saw how fragile and weak the world is that we erected out lives on. This is not poetic ruminating, not some nihilistic fantasy. I really believed this, heart and soul, believed it as firmly as I believed in my own name.

I eventually curled up in the dark, in a corner of my room, with my cell phone pressed against my ear, and talked to my mom to help me come out of the paranoia. You might think that's weird, but she was the only person I knew who would understand what I was going through, because until you have a bad trip, you don't understand. You think you know what it's like to hallucinate, what it's like to see things bend and look weird, but you won't really know what it's like until your fight-or-flight reflex has been triggered, your heart is pounding in your chest and you truly think that you're about to become unmade.

I have some thoughts on why my trip went wrong. First of all, and this is not to disrespect any of you guys (because I know that you'll be reading this) but when it comes to our minds, you guys are a little different from me. I'm not trying to put myself up on a pedestal or saying how incredibly complex my mind is compared to everybody else, nothing like that. But I am a writer, and I've created realities in my thoughts. I've created worlds in my head, entire lives of people that according to all of the rules of their existence, are defined as real according to what I have made them feel. And I've wondered about that, for many an hour. The characters in my stories and in my games; they can't perceive their virtual world. How would they know that they aren't real? Consciousness isn't an effective defense, because we don't even know what it really is, do we? We don't really know how to define what's alive and what isn't. We can't explain why a living body has the exact same number of molecules as a dead one. How do we know we're not characters in a writer's mind? Simple: we can't know, unless our writer wishes us to know. "I think, therefore I am" is not an effective defense, because my characters think. I'm the one doing the thinking for them, but they don't know that. To them, they think that they're real, that their world is real, and I won't ever let them believe otherwise, because it would ruin the story.

That's the sort of shit that goes on in my mind. That's why I'm convinced that salvia, sooner or later, will make you face your greatest fear. I'm not talking about spiders or clowns or phobias. I'm talking about the fear that makes or breaks you as a person, the fear that you carry with you your entire life, always lurking just beyond the limits of your perception, and you're never quite entirely sure of what it is, except in the abstract. You might think that you're afraid of die, that you're afraid of losing your loved ones, that you're afraid of growing old and weak. But you can't really know, until you've been forced to experience it. For me, my greatest fear is that I'm an illusion; that my existence is only wishful thinking, that I'm just a few lines of distorted programming code suspended on a silk thread above the void.

I saw that void last night, how easily reality can break. And it fucking terrified me. I saw it again last night when I tried to sleep (incidentally, I only slept about two hours) and I know that what I saw, what I felt, these things will be with me for the rest of my life.

I'm not going to tell you what to do or how you should react to my story. To be honest, I'm only writing this down because it happened and I know that, despite how terrifying it was, it would be far worse to simply ignore it than to come to terms with what I saw and what I felt. Salvia isn't illegal yet, but I'm now fully convinced that it will be eventually. And I think that it should, because I don't think the mind should have to deal with the things that I saw. And you know, maybe that was just me. Maybe it was just my specific combination of my brain and my trip, and nobody else will ever endure what I did. Except that I know that's not true, because I'm not unique. I know that there are other minds like mine, and honestly, I think that every person has the potential to feel and think as I do, if they choose to embrace their creative spirit. And that means that anybody can see what I did, and I don't want that for them. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

So please, if you've read this far, keep these things in mind. For all the videos out there of people giggling and drooling and having fun, the fact is, I don't think this drug is a game. I don't think people really respect what it can do, what it's capable of. I know that my story will be dismissed because "hell, it's poor man's acid or just a weak version of weed" or whatever. But I know what I saw, and the people who were there with me know what I was doing. And the truth is, this isn't something I want to mess around with again.

-Matt

This is but one of the many reasons why I am afraid of spiders. I mean, look at this evidence? Goddamn spiders and their war on all forms of less frightening life.

Clearly, something needs to be done about the spider menace. Or else we'll be next.

Played with the layout a little bit. Also took out that silly vanity hit counter thing that served no purpose other than to stroke my ego. Did I really need that? No, no I did not.

Also, speaking of ego and vanity, I added a widget to link this blog to my twitter feed! Go look at it. It's neat! And then go join twitter, and follow me, so we can have epic 140 character discussions about chaos theory!

It happened a few days ago, but the semester ended and summer is here. Totally sweet. I've got a list of goals and things I hope to accomplish this summer, essentially just good habits that I want to start cultivating now that I don't have anything on my plate except for work.

Hmm. Internet seems kind of boring today. No interesting news or links to share. Ah well. Time to go back into my hole.

I'm glad I'm a vegetarian so I don't have to worry about things like this.

Woke up early to write a paper, which was a very weird experience for me. Not sure if I like it better than the classic "stay up until 4 am" approach.

Anyway, I have two links for you. First, this is why I can't go to Australia. Ever.

Second, an announcement about a new movie that makes me happy. Here's hoping it's handled well.

So, that's it for today. So you in a month, probably.