Acid Opens the Door

I've said it many times by now, I know the exactly moment I woke up, became conscious. Although now I just view it as one of my many moments of waking. It seems these opportunities come and you get what people call a moment of clarity. But never the less, the biggest of these moments was February of 1992. I was twenty two years old and lived in the dorms at San Jose State. I know, I'd been on the planet for 22 years, and I say life started then? It was only looking back from 22 that I felt that way, I didn't walk through the previous years thinking, wow, why won't my life get going?

I was a resident adviser on the seventh floor of Joe West Hall. A combination of things had happened leading up to this point, my very restrictive boyfriend dumped me over the summer, and I was working with an amazing woman named Vengerfulatta. No really! Her full name was even more awesome than that! And she was (I suppose still is!) an incredible woman. She proved to be a great mentor and really helped me out of my shell. I considered myself painfully shy most of my life, until I met her. (She later claimed to have created a monster! Who me??) So there I was becoming more and more outgoing, and rebounding in a serious way, ready to explore and try new things. The catalyst was provided by my best friend who had been going to the Renaissance faire for a while now and was having some wild adventures. She had met this couple and one weekend she came back talking about acid.

I was curious. Her description of going to the grocery store and being so involved with the colors and textures of the dry and canned goods was too rich. Although up till that point I had only really smoked pot, intentionally at least. I rarely even drank. There were a few other chemicals I ingested, but only cause it was ON the pot and I had no idea what I was doing. (see above pronouncement where I said I had woke up? See what happens to you!) But this time I had questions; I wanted to check it out. So one weekend she got a couple of hits and we took it in my dorm room. I'll spare all the high guy details of the eight hours or more, but basically I took it and then went ignorantly to the dining commons. She waited in my room. This seemed reasonable to me, I thought I'd just go get something to eat, completely unaware of what was growing in my blood supply and mind; what was coming for me. Everyone at my table grew funnier and funnier as the time went by, and

golly

time stopped having any import at all. I completely forgot anyone was waiting for me in my room until one of my residents came to fetch me because my BF, in the grips of her peaking trip had grabbed him and said MY GOD MAN! YOU MUST RETRIEVE HER! SHE KNOWS NOT WHAT SHE IS DOING! and she was right, I had no idea....I was completely in the moment.

We spent the day laughing our asses off, and I found myself looking at life with joy and bliss in a completely different way. I experienced the moment between when I stepped into a puddle, and when the water finally soaked through and hit my skin. It was delicious standing there on San Salvador street in the sun feeling that and then, well I had a wet sock and wet foot and wet shoe, that wasn't so nice. But it was nice in some strange way. We walked to Seven Eleven. I couldn't make out how money worked at all, and held out a wad of cash for the guy behind the counter. My sweaty palm, the sweaty bills all crumpled up. That was hysterical to me, and the trust I felt and the lack of attachment to the money itself.

A delicious lack of attachment and attention to detail.

I remember looking out my window and seeing all the red in the scene, a red car, a red hydrant, red signs all tying things together in a pleasing way. I knew I could create photo's in a completely different way with this new insight. About six hours into it I looked at my BF and said, WAIT? This is going to END!! I didn't want it to end, and I wanted to know when we could do it again. I didn't trust my ability to take the experience from one acid trip and be able to keep it, to have it inform my art.

I tried to write something in my journal. I tried to write to my future self, the self that would read the writing and I got tripped up (ah HAHA, trip? get it? haha sorry) in the fascination with time, and the knowledge that who I was from minute to minute was different and changing. The past me would not be the same as the future me. I felt like sending a bottle off to a completely different person on a different continent. And in a sense I was.

Later after all the hilarity and the insights, the confusion and clarity I realized how asleep I'd been my whole life. How I ended up in a college with barely any thought about it at all. How I'd grasped at the one thing I loved, drawing, to get me here. How I did what other people told me and wanted me to do, almost without question. The next day I felt an surge of delight and apprehension. I wondered how I made it this far just blindly following along. Oh shit I thought, it's up to me. Now this is not an abnormal thought for a human to get. All of us I suspect, if given a life of sufficient safety where we can think about things other than pure survival, and even in those lifetimes when we can't, many of us get to a point where we realize we are the masters of our own destiny. I just felt I had reached it abnormally late.

And I wondered what I'd been doing that whole time anyway?
How was I getting through life if it was only now that I felt I was fully inhabiting my body?
Who had been making those choices for me?
What was my life like and why was I so absent from it?
And what the fuck was I going to do now????

That was the big question, now what?

What was more drugs and more experiences, what, for a while was trying to get a grip on this thing I had ended up in, that I considered reality.

But what about my childhood? Who was this previously quiet girl, and how did she get to the point where she'd ingest some LSD?