Suggested Audio Trip:

 

[1] Paul Rutherford “Get Real”

[2] Garden of Eden “Serpent in The Garden”

 

 

LSD {lysergic acid diethylamide}

noun:
a synthetic crystalline compound which is a powerful hallucinogenic drug.

 

One tab… one miniscule little tab. That’s all it took. A piece of blotting paper no larger than your little fingernail. How dropping something that diminutive then proceed to take you on a magical mystery tour the likes of which would alter the depth of your reality forevermore, is an alien concept to Keeper. Alteration is exactly what it achieved, revealing a layer of my grey matter which had laid dormant my whole life and painting it with its stark kaleidoscope of color. I’ve had some numbers done on me in my lifetime but none as doozy-like as the effect of taking that first trip.

I excitedly shuffled to our local town square and picked up my ‘cid for the week. In addition I’d grab some spares, a whole sheet for safe keeping, rainy day material. Consequently it poured down regularly and I carried on necking my meds with great frequency as I frantically pursued to plunder once again that first buzz. It never came. That’s the downer I’m afraid, your mind can be opened and reopened but that first wide-eyed reveal is always the most lurid. Our bodies built a resistance but our minds do too. They expect the element of surprise which makes for less of a revelation when it comes.

Trolley Folly

That isn’t to say that there weren’t priceless moments…Keeper has a trove of memories all based around my acidic exploration and, in true me style, I shall reveal as many as I can gather from my Hippocampus and lay before y’all. I laughed…oh how I laughed. Until my bladder burst no less. One occasion, in a discarded shopping trolley, actually incited excavation as I trundled unwittingly into the path of queuing cinema-goers, much to their intense disapproval. To make matters worse, I was then forced into sharing an auditorium with said growlers whilst emitting a vague hint of piss. Needless to say…I sat alone.

That was just one of many instances where my dignity was relinquished and the kicker is…I love to be the clown. Never one to fend off my inner-Harlequin, I enjoyed nothing more than being the butt of a joke and set myself up to achieve this status habitually. My maiden voyage presented me with a plethora of ways in which to act the hoon and I took each of them in turn. I was aided by the fact that I regularly shaved my bonce, bearing a distinct resemblance to an extra from Alien 3. What do you mean they were all extras?

Chicken Run

 

One instance involved me and a gaggle of fellow tripheads venturing to a location where we could enjoy six-way solitude, the warm confines of a friend’s house. We were thwarted on this occasion by a missing key and had to shack up in the conservatory for the crux. No creature comforts, no telly, no stereo, just six rowdy teens and a sheet of ‘cid. There were three notable items in our inventory that night…a short plank of timber, a 700W microwave and a porcelain chicken. That, as it turned out, was all we required.

As my head was as bald as a coot, less light whiskers, I took it upon myself to place the uppermost tier of the poultry upside my head and exit the room, boldly stating that “this will give you a laugh guys”. They conferred in my absence, pledging not to so much as crack a smile, leaving me as the village idiot with a ceramic chicken segment on my noggin. They failed spectacularly as I strolled in nonchalantly, looking like a guy who wasn’t wearing such a ludicrous bonnet and they were sent into rapture. Acid did that…all by itself and I came away Billy Big Bollocks.

Buoyed from my comedic entrance, I replaced said chicken lid and shoved it in the microwave, setting it at one minute thirty if I recall. For those ninety seconds pre-Bing, we snorted akin to leisurely swines and I believe, on this occasion, all our bladders were in peril. What better way to celebrate than to remove the fowl once more and give it the send-off warranted. It walked the plank, or slid to be precise like a catwalk capon, reveling in the fact that it had reduced us to silage. That evening will forever be stained on my memory and I still catch a whiff of over-cooked chicken from time to time even now. Must be one of those flashbacks they all talk about.

LSD affects each user in its own way, depending on two factors…state of mind and the social setting in which they are used. Its short-term effects are well documented and include garish color, rippling surfaces, altered sense of time and, my own personal darling, the eidetic effect. This takes place behind your shut blinkers and manifests through lucid primal colors and geometric patterns. My Sony Walkman went everywhere when ‘cid was to be dropped, grabbing 40 psychedelic winks was an integral part of the high as it allowed for the most effervescent hallucinations, all within your own eyelids. Talk about contained buzz.

Honey I Shrunk Both My Parents…WTF?

 

I remember the dissolution felt between myself, fellow users and the rest of the free world. Any social interaction became excruciating as it was ‘our little high’ and nobody elses. The intensity in just purchasing a bar of candy was enough to send you through to the other side. Meanwhile, entering any building as yet untraversed afforded moments of macabre I have never since felt. Case in point: after one particularly outlandish trip I returned to my home and popped my head in with my folks sheepishly after they called me in to the living room. My attempts at stealth had failed and it was time to mask my fully diluted pupils and act normal. Fat chance.

As my peepers rolled across to meet them I was horrified and amused in equal measure as they had shrunk to the size of a pair of bookends. Alternatively, the TV set had grown to around the size of an industrial cooker. I vacated with fleet of foot and scarpered to the stairwell, only to be met with dilemma number two. Each step appeared over a foot tall and I clambered up to the summit like a crippled gecko. How I managed to recompose myself to say goodbye on exit I will never know.

If the user is in an unsettling locale, or is not emotionally prepared for the omnipotent distortions in perception and thought that LSD provokes, then the bad trip is only ever one Purple Ohm away. Eventually, after many courtships with madness, it began to go spectacularly off-kilter. Paranoia took hold and with some tenacity as my distant dream began to fritter away before me. I ended my days on ‘cid curled up in a ball and shaking like a gelatine lanyard. It was time to close Pandora’s box, forsake its delights and hold onto any semblance of reality before it slipped from my grasp.

I tend not to regret and would never replace any of the memories I procured under the influence of lysergic acid diethylamide. I had me a blast and ultimately knew when to call quits. The rose-tinted recollections remain and it will never be known whether a piece of my mind is now perpetually lost. Being the eternal optimist, I prefer to consider that a fragment of my psyche is now perpetually open and for that, and only that, I thank ‘cid.