So, about a week ago, I took acid. I'm not much of a drug user, but I think I romanticized LSD since tenth grade, or thereabouts. It's pretty easy to do when everything you like is described as psychedelic. I'd never done it because it was never offered to me for free.

Usually, I find the discrepancy between people's perception of me and my own view of myself kind of annoying. Sometimes, however, it's accurate. Most people view me as straight-edge, which is something I would never assign to myself- Because from the time I was in tenth grade, everything I liked was described as psychedelic, or made by people who were high. But pretty much any time I do a drug, I don't enjoy it, and kind of regret it.

This is not to say that my experience on acid was terrible. I think a lot of people will try to frame it in those "it is either totally awesome or completely terrifying" terms, because of how intense it is. But sometimes things are just intense but don't really make a strong impression. Like the movie INLAND EMPIRE.

It was kind of fun for the first hour or so, before it kicked in and when it started to kick in. I turned off the bright light in the living room and listened to Enon's Believo! and J Dilla's Donuts. These are both really good records. I started to have visual hallucinations I guess towards the beginning of Donuts. Sadly, they were not Blue Meanies and other imagery from the movie Yellow Submarine (which I love), but just little kaleidoscopic light patterns on the carpet. Also, my thought seemed to move faster- My own internal train of thought. That was fun, although those thoughts didn't really go anywhere. They just moved at speed high enough to be completely unable to slow down and then articulate to another person, which I really wanted to do, because communication is a pretty big part of life.

How it felt: The girl who gave me the drug lived with another girl who did it for the first time recently and said it felt really sexual. But she didn't mean this in terms of being aroused. The way she described it ended up being the same way I felt, I think. Basically, muscles tighten up (I figure) and nerves become more stimulated. I would compare it to the feeling of metal becoming magnetized. Again, this was early on, when I was listening to the last few songs on the Enon record. Towards the end I pretty much didn't feel anything besides a vague nervous energy.

I couldn't eat food. I knew this was going to happen, but after I took it I felt hungry and wanted to eat before it kicked in. Alex was making a Boboli pizza. It hadn't really kicked in at the time it went in the oven, but by the time it was out, I took a bite and it was really disgusting. The intensity was off-putting. It was like I could taste the bacterial cultures that turned the milk into cheese and that caused the bread to rise.

Anyway, eventually I went completely inside my own head. It was neither awesome nor nightmarish, but basically like dreams I have had in the past. I couldn't communicate, even though I wanted to, and attempts fell apart into crazy person gibbering. That was probably the majority of the trip. Eventually I just went to sleep because all I was doing was pacing around the house having weird thought-loops.

There was a part when things got really internal where the records put on after Dilla just kind of scanned as the sound of synapses firing. These include Keith Fullerton Whitman's Lisbon and the first disc of Godspeed You Black Emporer's Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven. I really needed the fast-paced weird pop pace of the stuff that I put on to serve as a point of contrast with the speed in my own head, to keep track of things.

Part of the romanticization of hallucinations is the promise of imagination. No big breakthroughs were reached, no epiphanies were had. The day after I just felt kind of tired. Writing is as tricky as ever, just as slow-going. The reason I finally wrote about it now is that I was working on these books and thought that the stuff I was writing now is actually less crazy and weird and vibrant and funny than what I was doing before. I don't think this is going to be trend, like I somehow damaged my brain, so much as just a thing that kind of happened due to other factors, but I thought it was worth chronicling.

I regret it inasmuch as it's easy to attribute the feeling of tiredness to the drug, and to know myself as a sober person and act like taking acid throws that off. In time I'll forget about it and my thoughts will get weird again, I took the doing of the drug pretty much in stride.

Listen to Enon's Believo, that record is the shit.