Alternate states: Test 3

Before

So this has come up sooner than I expected, I mentioned recently that I had purchased some tabs of 1cP-LSD online and not only did they arrive earlier than expected but an opportunity to take them has also come up sooner than I anticipated it would. I also mentioned recently that I was going to be meeting with my two friends last Wednesday to try and plan out some kind of trip away last minute, as my break from work officially starts this Sunday and only lasts two weeks. Now we weren’t able to plan anything, although they did seem slightly remorseful about this failure to plan properly and keep in touch so we may try to plan something early next year instead.

In the short term however, after realising I had these tabs and that one of them had his place to himself all week as his parents are on holiday, we thought that it would be a good idea to get together tomorrow (Saturday, I know my break doesn’t officially start until the following day but I’ve actually been off work since Tuesday as I had to take a few days off for reasons I’ll explain in a second) and take a tab each. I’m a little nervous as he has a dog, a young puppy, and I don’t want to start freaking out if it runs into the room and starts yelping and trying to lick me while I’m tripping or something. The other friend who’ll be there seemed to feel similarly to me as well.

So it’s possible we’ll end up not doing it but we’ll see what happens. Either way, I’ve started writing this now so I’ll probably upload the post anyway as another failure like the first part in this series was if that happens. I’ll still have all five tabs, and there will be other opportunities. I imagine if we don’t take the tabs we’ll likely end up getting quite drunk instead and large quantities of alcohol can also lead to interesting experiences, so perhaps I’ll end up writing about that instead. We shall see, either way I expect I’ll end up staying the night and getting little sleep so I probably won’t start writing the “after” section of this post until Monday or even Tuesday.

Speaking of lack of sleep, I’ve actually been having some pretty bad insomnia all throughout this last week. Monday was when it started, the first day my dad got back from his trip away. He brought some ciders back for me from where he’d been, and I had two which isn’t much as they’re only about 4% alcohol content and the bottles aren’t too big, but they had quite an effect on me. Maybe it’s because I had very little to eat that day, boiled eggs and soldiers in the morning and we ordered pizza that night. Either way I felt very sleepy after drinking them and I went to bed a couple hours earlier than my usual time. Instead of falling off to sleep though, I just lay there getting warmer and warmer and more uncomfortable. I felt myself slowly sobering up, and the dehydration and dry mouth really started to become noticeable.

I had to work the next day, a late shift as well so I got to start late at least but I was meant to be there until nine in the evening. I looked at the clock at one point and it was now one in the morning (the usual time I go to bed), then a little while later and it was half past two, and then I checked again when my pillow had gone completely flat and my heart was starting to beat fast as I freaked out about how I’d handle the shift at work the next day and it was after four. I read some things about how to help falling asleep on my phone for about ten minutes and saw something about how you should get out of bed and do an activity then come back. So at half past four in the morning, I went and took one of my sleeping pills which I have for emergencies (I usually take them the night before a morning shift, but I don’t get those any more thankfully) and took half only as the effects last eight hours and then I went and spent the next twenty minutes having a shave.

I reasoned that it would be better to do it now and then I wouldn’t have to worry about getting up early to do it before work, if I still couldn’t sleep after that I could at least stay in bed until midday. Luckily it worked, I fell asleep shortly after returning to bed. I had forgotten to turn my alarm off though, and so at half past nine it went off and the daylight made it impossible to get back to sleep. So I figured I probably got about four hours that night, and went in to work. Now it’s been a long time since this happened but I did once stay up for over 36 hours and so I knew I could get though the day if I had to, but it was not fun. Luckily I didn’t have to deal with customers for too long, as the manager had a special job for me in the office (sorting out old papers, which took hours) and I went back to finish the last hour and a half of my shift but the girl working there who I was sharing the shift with could tell I was struggling to stay awake and she let me go home early. Which was really nice, but it didn’t help that much unfortunately as even though I was struggling to stay awake as soon as I got home and into bed I was suddenly no longer as tired.

I managed to fall asleep after a couple hours, I’d taken the other half of that pill after an hour and the complete exhaustion eventually overtook me. So I was fortunate that night, but the next day I woke up kind of groggy still, perhaps because I overcompensated and slept too much that night in the end. I probably got nine hours or more in total that time. This was Wednesday, so the day I met my friends and we made the plans we have for tomorrow, and that was fun but then that night I had the same problem. I went to bed at one in the morning, but after hours and hours of tossing and turning it was once again getting close to five am. So while some of my co-workers were getting up to start their morning shift, I was still trying to get to sleep, and I had to work again, this time until half past ten at night.

I did luckily fall asleep shortly after taking the a full sleeping pill, but then I ended up waking up before the alarm even went off for some reason at around eight. I assumed that the day would be impossible to get through, and so I called in sick and asked for the day off. My manager said it was fine, and gave me the Friday (today) off as well, which helped me to relax a bit. In fact I didn’t actually feel that tired yesterday somehow, it was the night in which I got the least sleep of all of them but I somehow felt fine all day. It certainly helped that I could just lie around at home instead of having to go in to work, and perhaps what little sleep I did get was of particularly high quality thanks to the pill I took. I don’t know, what I did know was that that night before bedtime would be like preparing to go to war and so I took precautions.

I decided that my current mattress was not good enough, there’s a big dip in the centre that’s got worse over the years and makes it hard to get comfortable, so I took a blow up air mattress that is for camping and used that instead. My dad let me use one of his pillows, as again mine have just been worn down over the years and have no substance left. My dad also went to the chemist while doing other shopping and they suggested these valerian root drops which I dropped in my chamomile tea that night. They have a nasty taste but seem to be helpful. I did 100 sit ups a few hours before bedtime, then had a cold shower a little after that. I had a banana one hour before going to bed, then turned off the laptop and read for a while and then finally got in to bed. It still took me a good hour or so, and I woke up in the middle of the night around four-ish and briefly freaked out before realising I had just woken up and already had some sleep, but I did get back to sleep a little while after that and so overall things were a success.

As for tonight I’m still a little worried, unlike yesterday I had a good night’s sleep last night so I’m not too tired yet even though it’s getting dark now. I have done 50 press ups and 50 bodyweight squats today just to use some energy up, and I’ll have a cold shower and do all the same stuff as last night later on, but I can’t say I’m not a little worried. Then again, maybe that worry is one of the things causing this. I know that after tomorrow I’ll have two weeks with no obligations to fix this, but I really don’t want to be running on half fuel tomorrow. Especially because I have heard a lot about how an LSD trip can make it difficult to sleep, so no matter what I’ll likely get very little sleep tomorrow night. Sunday will be unbearable if I have two nights in a row with only a few hours.

I just don’t understand why this has happened to me this week, once every couple months I’ll have a particularly bad night like Monday or Wednesday this week were, but this is something new. I’m really worried that I’m going to inherit my mother’s chronic insomnia, which is weird because she only seemed to develop it quite late in life. Maybe I’m wrong, but it really only seemed to start while I was in my very early teens, and she had me when she was 39 so it was her late 40s by the time she started to experience difficulty sleeping. So for most of her life it wasn’t a problem, or maybe I was just not told about it who knows.

Now even though LSD might cause sleeping trouble in the short term, the ray of hope I have is that there is some evidence to suggest that in the long term it can actually help with insomnia among other things. It’s mostly anecdotal, as far as I’m aware there haven’t been any medical studies like with the positive benefits of certain psychedelics for depression and PTSD, but you can certainly find reports of people online who say that LSD and other psychs like psylocibin helped with sleeping troubles.

Now of course I’m not actually taking LSD, and this is the last thing I wanted to talk about before ending this section. I’m actually going to be taking a chemical called 1cP-LSD. From what I understand there are several analogues to LSD that have been synthesised over the decades since it was made illegal, and 1cP-LSD is one of the most recently created. From what I understand though, what’s on the tab is a slightly different chemical but once consumed it becomes indistinguishable from LSD proper. There are a few trip reports I’ve been able to find, which seem to describe it as an incredibly similar experience although a little less long lasting (which is preferable actually), but it is a relatively new and untested thing and that is a little concerning.

I only bought it because it was the only one I could find when I went looking, on the “clearnet” anyway, as I still haven’t figured out how to buy bitcoin without using ID. I was initially looking to buy 1P-LSD, a much more well known and established alternative, but the company that manufactures and distributes it is based in Germany which recently banned the substance. Conveniently though, this new alternative just so happened to be discovered as this law came into effect. There’s actually a bit of a conspiracy theory that the company has made this new substance up and is actually just selling their old 1P-LSD off claiming it’s something new when it actually isn’t. Who knows, who really cares. I would actually prefer that to be true, I’m a little nervous about trying something with very few existing reports around and I did initially intend to just buy 1P-LSD. Either way, I don’t have anything else to say now.

After

Ok, I’ve delayed writing this because I’ve been feeling a little odd the last couple days, but I think I’m ready now. I’m sure that it was in part a drawn out “come down”, but what’s odd is that I’ve been told that the come down from pyschedelics is usually very warm and more like an afterglow than the kind of experience usually associated with coming down from a high. I don’t really understand exactly what these terms are meant to be for, obviously I’m not frequent drug user and I kind of have a bit of disgust for drug culture and psychedelic/ pot culture especially so. I’m just being honest, I don’t like the way they talk or express themselves, I don’t like the aesthetics or style associated with people like that, and a lot of them seem really dense as well.

My point in saying that is that I’m possibly using terms slightly wrong, but from my understanding the “come down” is the period in the day or so following a drug experience. It’s basically another word for a hangover, maybe a hangover is more describing the physical effect of alcohol (dehydration primarily, which is why drinking lots of water can significantly minimise hangover effects) but it is also about the altered state of mind. So the term come down might more be describing the state of mind but I think the bodily feeling is also considered. It’s a matter of emphasis, that’s all. At least that is how I have interpreted it in reading the reports of others.

So this kind of leads me into the first very noteworthy thing about the whole experience actually, which is the physical effect of the drug. It was something I was quite unprepared for, and I’m very glad that one of the friends there (the very much more normie one of course) was around to explain to me how normal what I was feeling was. Within half an hour of swallowing the tab I felt very constricted, like my chest was being crushed and it was hard to breathe almost. If I had been on my own and started experiencing this it would have terrified me, but he explained how it was pretty standard and it would pass shortly. See he didn’t actually take the drug, only me and the other friend (the one who’s place we were staying at) took a tab.

Now this other friend didn’t have anywhere near as intense an experience as me, I have no idea why but it seemed to hardly affect him at all at first. While I was burying my head in my arms, or the sofa, the two of them were just chatting normally. I had more to eat than him because I had a full meal that morning and a pizza at his, I’m quite a bit taller than him and so probably weigh more although I am quite skinny and he is quite overweight at the moment (his weight fluctuates pretty drastically, I’ve seen him go from as big as he is now to skinnier than me and back to being fat again), it’s very odd. He is quite a resilient individual, he also rarely seems to suffer from hangovers after we drink whereas a bad hangover for me can last two days. So eventually he decided he needed to walk his dog, about an hour after we took the tabs.

They were considering leaving me behind because I didn’t seem up to it apparently, but I insisted on coming along. As soon as we stepped outside I felt better, the cool late afternoon breeze immediately lessened the heavy feeling I had. See as well as the constricted feeling I had also begun to feel very heavy and slow, and I had a weird feeling that is close to nausea but I would say was something different. I didn’t feel like throwing up at all, there was no feeling like that, but it was related to that feeling you have when you do need to throw up in a way I can’t quite articulate. A sort of sickly, unpleasant sensation like how it is right before you start to feel that way, but drawn out.

So we went to take the lift downstairs and I remember as soon as we were inside it these feelings got worse again. I had to crouch down, leaning on the wall somewhat, to keep my composure. The dog did not enjoy being inside the lift at all, it was bouncing around and kept pawing at me as if I could somehow help. I did feel a certain connection to the dog because of this. I hate using that word to describe the experience, because it makes me sound exactly like the kind of people I was talking about at the start of this section of the entry, but I can’t think of a better word for it. I was able to empathise with it, dare I say to relate. I could understand how it felt, because as soon as I was inside the lift I also felt instinctively uneasy.

It’s weird, I’ve been in lifts many times and never had this problem but this time I did feel it. “I’m stuck in a small metal box with no window, no escape!”. Of course the dog would freak out, it doesn’t know what the hell is going on when it’s brought inside such a place. It’s an environment that is so far removed from the kind of place any mammal would seek out in the wild. So I guess this means that the drug somehow allowed me to be more in touch with or closer to my “natural state”. I was still conscious, I was still ultimately me with all my individual and civilised peculiarities but there was this clarity. I was a little more aware of how unusual said peculiarities were than I usually am. The thing is though, most drugs can do this to me. Even alcohol, the first time I got really seriously drunk I remember remarking that I felt like “what normal people feel like all of the time”.

It’s a bit like what I talked about in this older entry, in a sense. I talked about quite a few things, but there’s a similarity in that I’m talking about similar ideas. I suppose, if you haven’t already, by checking that post you’ll have a better understanding of the deeper point I’m trying to make in this one. Possibly anyway, although I admit that post isn’t one of my best. It’s from very soon after I started writing so there are mistakes, and I don’t agree with everything I said as I have evolved in my thinking as I’ve been writing this blog, however it’s good to have a record of how my thoughts have developed. Back to the account of the trip though.

So we got outside and were walking down the side streets as my pupils had become rather dilated and I was a little worried about people noticing. Shortly after the dog needed to poo, and so my friend pulled a plastic bag out to pick it up. I of course was a little disgusted by the sight, and we were all joking about how gross it was and being silly. I made a retching noise, in jest, but by doing so I actually felt myself doing it genuinely. I somehow willed myself to actually feel like vomiting, and I had to sit down to relax or I might have actually thrown up. Perhaps I was in a more malleable state, I’m not sure, it was very odd. So I sat down on the curb, and looked down at the ground.

This was when I had my first odd visual experience of the evening. It was a very mild one, much like what I experienced on 2-CB, really just a slight distortion of what was already there in front of me. See I was intending to just sit down for a second to relax, and then I was going to catch up with my friends, but instead one of them came running back from some distance away and said I’d been there for ages. What happened was that I had just been admiring the pattern on the tarmac and completely lost track of time, I can’t really explain why because it wasn’t really very different from how it usually looks. I was just drawn in by the complexity of the swirls and little stones, there was also a pinkish glow coming from it and I imagine that was because of the drugs.

So I was completely and totally contented to just sit there staring forever and I kind of forgot about anything else entirely. Then as I said my friend came and brought me out of that state. I was a bit shaken at first, and when he asked me if I was doing ok I just mumbled something about how I was doing fine and had just been enjoying the patterns. He seemed to find my response very amusing, but also seemed a little concerned and he said we should probably get back inside soon. I’d had a few seconds to get my bearings now though, so I explained that I didn’t mean I was just seeing imaginary patterns I meant the patterns that were already there. So we caught back up with the friend walking the dog and walked for a few more minutes before going back to his flat.

We got back inside, and the friend who was sitting (trip sitting that is, as in he was the one not taking the drug) decided that maybe we should put some music on. We had started watching The Two Towers before we left, but we had hardly been paying attention. Not that it matters, I’ve seen all three of the Peter Jackson LoTR films so many times I basically know every line that’s going to be said before a character says it. At this point any unpleasant bodily feeling had left, and I sank into the sofa with the fan right next to me feeling incredibly comfortable. So one of them opened up spotify on his xbox, they were signed into my spotify account already from earlier that day, and someone handed the controller to me. For some reason, in recent years when the three of us hang out I’m put in charge of the soundtrack.

I was flicking through the albums and being really indecisive, to be fair I was very easily distracted in this state and finding it hard to focus on more than one thing at once so every turn of the conversation took me away from deciding what music to put on, but eventually I decided to play something by The Cure. They are my favourite band after all, and I haven’t listened to anything from them for a while so I thought that in this state something familiar would be nice and so I decided to go with Wish. I thought that their earlier stuff would not fit the mood whatsoever, I wanted something more cheerful, and the cover of this one really stood out to me. I’ve never really paid attention to it before, but for some reason the art just really stood out to me this time.

It’s a really cool album cover actually, and The Cure have a lot of fantastic album covers but after this I might have to say this one is my favourite. That’s partly because I had what was probably the most crazy hallucinatory experience of the evening while staring at it though, so there’s a memory attached to it now. I’ve also really changed my mind about this album since I last talked about it, I think maybe I overlooked it which is easy to do as it’s overshadowed by Disintegration which came right before it but I actually think it has a real charm. It’s probably the best of the “cheery” Cure albums to be honest, and sure it still has a somewhat melancholic undertone this is The Cure we’re talking about but it did a great job of bringing me out of the dip I was in after the somewhat unpleasant come up experience.

So, we were listening to that for a while and I was somewhat zoned out for a while, but the dog was really energetic because the short walk had woken him up and he was running around the flat and jumping on the sofa barking and panting. Now while that would usually bother me as I’m not great with animals and I’ve always been a little uncomfortable around dogs I actually wasn’t bothered by it at all. Despite having very little energy all of a sudden after returning from the walk, I kind of just wanted to sit on the sofa and let the fan cool me, I ended up playing with the dog quite a bit. I played tug of war with it, it bit onto this rope and we’d both pull against one another, and then after that I sat back down and it came and sat down right next to me and leaned against me.

Honestly this was the most comfortable I’ve ever felt around a dog, I was completely at ease even though it was right next to me. I put my arm around it and rested my head on it’s side and I was so comforted that I remember thinking to myself that the thing I was most concerned might lead to a frightening or negative experience was the thing that helped me the most. There was something about how innocent and full of energy and life it was that was weirdly very reassuring for me. It’s hard to explain how I felt, but it was something I hadn’t experienced before.

It got bored of just sitting there after a short while though, and the friend who hadn’t taken anything decided to go and play with it some more to help get him to settle and relax. So at this point I turned back to the television screen to look at the album art some more and I noticed it slowly start to move. Take a brief look at it, as I said it’s the image in the header. Now to me it looks a little like sperm and egg cells, the black stringy ink figures might be people or creatures of some kind (they also mostly form into eye shapes, but notice in the top right there’s also some kind of bird or bug) but when taken as a whole the image does resemble a microscopic image of sperm and egg cells meeting. Well they started moving, just lightly swaying from side to side in time with the music at first.

Then the blue circle, which could be representative of an egg cell (life, I suppose) but also has a blue and white pattern inside like the sky on a summer’s day, appeared to be closer towards me than the rest of the album. It’s hard to explain the effect, but the closest example I can think of that might give you a good impression is like when you see a 3D film at the cinema. How some things will pop out from the screen, and seem closer to you than others. It was like that, but only slight. The egg (which I’ll call it from now on) seemed to be floating out in front of the rest of the image, but only ever so slightly. It wasn’t right in my face by any means.

I looked back at the black figures, and at this point they weren’t simply swaying they were dancing. There’s no other way to put it, they were moving completely in time with the music. I can so vividly remember it, the song Doing The Unstuck was playing and they were so crisp and clear when they moved they looked like real living beings. I was shocked, completely taken aback. I remember putting my hand over my mouth unthinkingly, thunderstruck almost and unsure how to respond. I turned to my friend after watching them for a moment, the one who had taken a tab with me, “you see this too?”. He said he couldn’t, even after I explained what exactly I was seeing. I had thought perhaps it might be an effect of the app, bringing album art to life somehow, but in retrospect that couldn’t have been true.

I turned back, and now instead of just a static blue and white inside the egg I could actually see a sky inside of it. Like looking through a portal, or a window in a brick wall, I could see clouds gliding past from one side and disappearing as they reached the other. It was amazing, like there was another world I could climb through to on the other side of the egg. And yes, all this time the boys all around it continued to dance and shimmy. The music slowed down, I think the song Trust was playing, and so they were moving without as much gusto as at first but they were still at it. Then from the bottom of the album cover I noticed that there was smoke rising, as if an invisible bonfire was there just beneath it.

I was of course quite enthralled by this scene playing out in front of me, and so I spent quite some time just staring at it. At least, I think I did but it was really hard to keep track of time at this point. In some cases things seemed to move faster than they actually did and in others things lasted longer. See the “peak” of the trip which started with me putting Wish on seemed to last around half an hour but in hindsight it was actually closer to two hours. On the other hand the entire experience went by really fast, a whole ten hours that seemed to last half that time. Shortly after this my friend was quite annoyed that he wasn’t experiencing any effects when I clearly was, so I offered him the third tab which I had intended for the other friend to take initially. Instead, they cut in in half diagonally and took one piece each.

Which means the one friend who had taken the tab initially with me was now on 150ug, I was on 100ug, and the other friend was now on a minor dose of 50ug. The friend who took just the half tab didn’t seem to experience much, but after about an hour the friend who took 150ug in total started laughing pretty uncontrollably. It was a laughing fit really, he didn’t stop for more than a minute at most over a period of about two hours, even when he went to go and take a piss I could hear his laughter loudly through the walls. He didn’t however, experience any hallucinations apparently, which was interesting.

There were some more minor hallucinations I experienced, but none that quite stuck with me like that first one. One was when I was looking at the cover for a different album we played a few songs from before getting bored, Virtue by The Voidz, the grid/ cube thing in the background (the whole thing is up on youtube if you’re interested) was rotating in a way that didn’t make any sense and small coloured beads/ or lights were moving along the white lines of said grid like electrical signals or something. The colourful V shaped graph line thing in the foreground was also seemingly coming out of the screen like the egg had been as well.

Later on I was just staring at the ceiling and I noticed that it felt like a reptile’s belly, like we were staring at the underside of some giant lizard. It was like it was breathing and moving, it’s very hard to put into words but think of how you can just tell when you look at an animal that it’s alive by how it throbs and pulsates. The ceiling was like that, like a living being. I say reptilian because the wallpaper pattern my friend has looked like the scales of a crocodile, in fact it even had a slightly greenish hue but that might have been coming from the television. Much later after I thought the visual aspect of the trip was completely over I looked back up at the ceiling and noticed a more traditional LSD/ trippy pattern all around the lampshade. Colourful geometric shapes and patterns spinning around it, although they were very faint and I had to really concentrate to see them.

So eventually the peak of the trip ended, and for the rest of the night (which was quite some time) I would describe my experience as a pretty generic “high”. A little similar to after smoking weed or having a few beers, but most similar of all to my experience with the morning glory seeds a few weeks ago. Which makes a certain sense I suppose, they are both psychedelics and therefore the most similar. I’ve also heard it said that at lower doses most drugs seem pretty similar, and it’s only really at the higher doses that the unique aspects of a drug really shine. Which leads me into what I want to talk about to finish this post.

I’m not sure if I should have taken this drug this way, remember that I’m not really someone who engages in recreational drug use and I really started looking into these drugs because of all the stories about how they can be mentally beneficial and even have a healing effect. I’m not really looking for a good time, and in fact when speaking to the friend who only took the half tab about this disappointed feeling late that night he said that the more introspective experience really requires that you take the drug alone. He also advised that I don’t do such a thing though, and I don’t plan to in the short term as I want to let any tolerance I’ve built up (and psychedelic tolerance builds up very quickly, it’s even possible my experience with the morning glory seeds lessened the strength of this trip) go back down, but I think I have to do it alone next time.

So now I have two tabs left, which is 200ug in total. When I do eventually have a day alone, and both the day off work and the day following off as well, do I take both tabs or just one? I’ll be honest, if the body load I experienced at the beginning will be twice as intense on 200ug I’m a bit scared to do it. I won’t have my friend around to reassure me that it’s normal and part of the come up experience this time as well. I just feel like if I don’t take a higher dose, and 200ug isn’t an insane amount by any means, I’ll never get anything even like what I’m looking for from these drugs. The experience described in this post, while certainly very interesting and different for me, was not particularly helpful in any long term way.

Alternate states: Test 2

Before

I wasn’t planning on doing a “before” this second time, but I’ve just got home (I decided I would go out for a walk in the end) and I feel really shitty right now so I’ll take the excuse to vent about it.

I guess it wasn’t a night walk, but more of an afternoon walk. It’s half past eight now and I got home about half an hour ago. I left as soon as I uploaded the last post, which was I think around five-ish. The walk itself was pretty uneventful, I walked down and along a similar route that the bus ride I took in the last walk I made a post about went down. I stopped to sit for a while at one point, and later on I walked right past the restaurant I went to with my co-workers a few months ago.

Of course I’ve walked past it hundreds of times in my life, I used to live a few minutes walk away from it just behind the town hall actually before moving to where I live now. It’s noteworthy because when I noticed it I briefly thought about them, my co-workers that is. What are they doing right now? Well one is working I think, but most are probably out enjoying the evening doing typical normie things with good company. They’re happy, I bet. I’m not envious I wouldn’t say, I’m glad for them. I can’t help but feel like it is unfair, that’s all. It would take so little for me to be happy, not even a gf just having a couple of friends who actually wanted to spend time with me like I had when I was at school would be nice. I’ve always been a bit of a loner, but the last year it’s gotten worse than it ever has been. I have basically no one in my life.

I’ve done everything that I’m supposed to, I’m considerate and I’m a good listener and when I am able to relax and act normal people generally seem to enjoy my company. I can make people laugh, and I can hold their attention. People do tend to like me that’s what I don’t understand, but yet I’m a complete outcast. Always kept at a slight distance.

Eventually I ended up at a book store, again one I’ve been to hundreds of times before but the last time was half a decade or more probably. Notice how I say that a lot on this blog, I guess I haven’t really done anything in the last half decade.. I went up to the second floor and the history section, and started looking through the stuff they had on the second world war and the third reich. I was just trying to pass the time, I also had a look to see what translations they had of The Iliad and Odyssey as I’ve been considering re-reading them but in verse this time and there was a book about recent genetic studies from the Anglo-Saxon migration period that I almost bought a copy of.

At some point this small jewish woman started talking to me, at least she claimed to be but she also stopped herself from saying she was “part black” just before that so I’m a little suspicious. I think it was actually just a normal old (not that old, my guess would be she was in her late 50s) woman looking for someone to talk to, some human contact. She saw what I was looking at, and so decided to give a normie/ boomer take about how it’s important that we learn about that regime so it never happens again. The usual thing you’ve all heard before.

Now I wouldn’t call myself a fascist I don’t think but the idea of a socially right wing authoritarian regime seems preferable to the current state of affairs in this country if I’m being honest, I contained my power level however. I went along and agreed with her sentiment, “of course, terrible period indeed yes”. I tried to contribute to the conversation a little because I felt bad for her, she seemed lonely, but it was hard to follow along. She went away for a while and then later came back, she had this hot take about the second world war and “empire” as a concept or something and then she left.

I left the shop myself a little after that, I then sat down in this very small park right outside the shop and observed the other people around me. There were a few couples, and I noticed that while some of the women seemed like they might have been young-ish (around my age, or slightly above) not a single one of the men looked younger than 30. They all had beards as well, those well groomed two or three week old looking beards.

I realised as well while sitting there that I don’t even really see other men as “competition”, like most men seem to view one another. I don’t mean that in an arrogant way, like I’m implying I’m not concerned about them being better looking or more confident or rich or whatever the fuck women want, because clearly I’m actually losing in that regard seeing as I’m still a khv and they’re not. What I mean is that I never catch myself comparing myself with other men, I never look at a couple and think “he’s more/ less [whatever important trait] than me”, which does seem uncharacteristic compared to other robots/ incels who obsess about things like “being mogged” or “being inferior”, etc. You also get a lot of complaints by robots who see men they consider as worse than them getting laid while they can’t.

Just for the record and I know this is going to make me seem like a bit of a shitty person but I don’t really care anymore, after this realisation in the park I started making a deliberate effort as I walked home to compare myself with other men who looked like they were in a couple. And I would generally say that I was better looking (and taller, something 4chan likes to remind me of the importance of every day) than most of them, and there were quite a few couples as it’s a Saturday evening in a busy area with loads of bars, pubs and restaurants. I saw plenty of women who I would consider to be “out of my league” (although again, all women are out of my league) walking alongside, holding hands with, or kissing men who as I said were not as attractive as I am.

I know that some people might start to think of the “they must be rich then” cope, but that’s not the case. These were similarly aged (late 20s/ early 30s) hipster couples in a middle class area, these were just normal relationships. They were archetypal normalfags, peak normie if you will.

I feel gross saying that stuff about how I am in comparison to other guys btw, just as gross as it probably felt to read it, but it’s true. I’m not saying I’m remarkably good looking or anything like that, but I realise now that I am reasonably handsome and I don’t need to try and do this whole fake modesty thing because I feel uncomfortable ever saying something positive about myself. I’ve had enough experiences to justify that statement and view of myself, I’ve talked about this in other posts already. I’ve been told that I am by quite a few people, including several who were not related nor had any reason to try to merely flatter me.

I think I bought into the blackpill meme too hard and started to doubt my own fucking eyes, but I know what I look like. I see myself every time I brush my teeth. Frankly holding onto the black pill when it’s false means I’m not moving in the right direction, and it is false. There’s some truth to the lookism subject, and sure for other incels the way they look plays a role in their situation more but not in my case. There’s doesn’t seem to be one “pill” meme that fits everyone in this situation, unfortunately.

I got completely distracted though, I had an insight which I thought was interesting. See I don’t compare myself with other men generally sure, but I realised that I often compare myself with or feel like I’m competing with women. Not just women in relationships in fact, any woman I see, just one of the customers I might see while working for example. There’s this idea in the blackpill/ incel community of the “looksmatch”, the idea being that in the fair world or the incel utopia or whatever that men and women will be matched with someone of equal attractiveness to themselves. This of course builds on the foundational beliefs of incel ideology, which are that

a) women and men only care about looks when it comes to a partner

b) women in modern society are able to date/ sleep with men who are far more comparably attractive than themselves with relative ease

I actually would say I agree with the second one for the most part, but the first seems untrue to me. Looks are important sure, maybe even the most important thing when it comes to finding a partner, but not solely important. The problem is that men and women aren’t comparably attractive when you take the two groups as a whole. There was this OkCupid study which showed that women rate like 80% of men as below average, whereas male cumulative ratings actually distributed women fairly evenly across the standard 1 to 10 scale usually used for rating attractiveness. I can’t be bothered to find the link, but it should be easy to find the study it’s been talked about so much. I’ve linked to it in other posts as well. So basically in the eyes of men, 10% of women are a 1/10, 10% are a 2/10, and so on.

Therefore there must be other factors as well as physical attractiveness that spread men more evenly along the 1 to 10 scale. A woman will be a 6, thanks to looks, but the male “6” that she “should” match up with is a “6” thanks to a variety of factors including but not limited to looks. As I said though, these days a female “6” can get a male “8” with no trouble at all, at least for casual sex. Of course there is no should, I might have an authoritarian streak but I can’t bring myself to suggest anything like this should be enforced. I suppose in the worldview of a lot of incels this didn’t need to be enforced in the past it just happened naturally until one day something changed.

We’ve all seen this ancient meme from /r9k/ before haven’t we? Or at least I think it’s from /r9k/ it certainly has been posted there over and over probably since it was still called robot9000.

Well it illustrates the idea perfectly, the left hand side is what incels generally speaking seem to think is the fair and natural order of things. Now, I just don’t think it is. I don’t think reality works out so neatly, as nice as it would be to have things end up that way. I would say that the right image is a little exaggerated also, as I’ve talked about before there is a weird cope I’ve noticed where some incels try to make it seem like their situation is more common than it actually is.

What I think though, is that this image and the culture that produced it have seeped into my unconscious and so that’s why I compare myself to women rather than men. Every woman I meet I think, “is she above or below me” on this stupid made up totem pole. What’s so crazy is that a good amount of the women who’ve shown interest in me or approached me I would have considered to be above me. While several of my oneitises or crushes (all of whom never seemed to feel similarly about me), whatever term you prefer, in retrospect I probably considered lower than me on there. My self perception fluctuates quite a bit though, as I’m sure any long term reader realises.

Either way though, to compare myself with women is incredibly feminine. Literally, it’s what women do. I imagine I’m not the only one doing it either, I bet a lot of people from r9k have picked up a similar habit. It’s funny I never really experience the usual macho posturing stuff when talking with other guys as well. Sure me and my two friends (if they’re still my friends, it’s been a year since we met up last and I’m starting to feel like they’re drifting away from me for good this time) joke about and insult each other in good humour, standard male friendship stuff you know. I’m talking more with men I’m not close with, my co-workers, male customers, etc. When I see two other men interact there’s this tension, almost sizing one another up. I don’t do that, like I said I don’t have this view of them as “competition”.

I’m not comfortable around most people, but generally speaking I’m a little more comfortable around men than women. Whereas most men seem more at ease in the company of females, I’m the opposite. I’m not sure what other men think when I’m around them, but I feel like because I am this way it puts them at ease. Which again you could say makes me into more of a feminine figure. I don’t know I’m just kind of speculating pretty wildly now, this was meant to be a quick little thing to vent but I got completely sidetracked.

Continuing with the walk, for the last step instead of following the street I walked back through another park near where I live. I was listening to Lonerism by Tame Impala at the time with my headphones and I eventually had to cross this big field which was filled with people. See during summer loads of groups come out to just sit there and stuff, when I was a little boy I was taken along there many times, and people set up barbecues and serve drinks or have picnics. So I was walking through the dirt path right through the centre of the field surrounded by all these people, and the specific song that was playing was Keep On Lying. See the song ends with this section several minutes long that’s intended to sound like a dinner party that you’re not involved in. It’s meant to sound like you’re at this dinner party, but no one is acknowledging you exist and you’re kept out of every conversation. So you’re surrounded by people, but yet completely invisible. I just thought there was a certain irony in the way that synched up.

I then went to a small supermarket on the street just below where I live, bought some lemon juice because it supposedly helps with the nausea from the seeds I’ll be taking tomorrow, and considered going to buy alcohol but decided against it.

I’m feeling a lot better now, it’s been a few hours since I got home, but I was not feeling good at all when I started writing this. Going out there, seeing all the normal people with their normal lives that just fell into place without a second thought for any of them, it does get you down. I just feel so insignificant, I’m nothing. I have no value, I have no desires or passions to pursue, I do honestly sometimes wish I just hadn’t ever been born. I don’t enjoy being alive. I don’t have much else to say either, but for the sake of science (really just because I wanted to vent), this is the general state of mind I’m in at the moment before going into this trip. That is, assuming I didn’t also get screwed on these other seeds as well.

After

Ok, these were definitely not duds at least, but I would hesitate to describe my experience yesterday evening as psychedelic. I’ve been going over in my head how I should explain what happened, since last night even. I tried to write down how I was feeling as it was happening but I just couldn’t concentrate. See it’s a bit of a blur now, and I think that I might miss some stuff but I’m going to go through the day’s events chronologically and hopefully cover as much as I can.

So because I wanted to avoid the nausea which supposedly comes with eating so many seeds, I originally tried 130, I decided to attempt a cold water extraction of the LSA in the seeds. So I boiled some water in the morning for some instant ramen and I poured about 100ml extra into a small container and left it to cool. When it got to room temperature I then put it into the fridge to get colder, and I wrapped the container in tin foil. A little after midday, maybe closer to one o’clock, I took the seeds and using my mother’s old coffee grinder I made a powder out of them. I then dropped about three lids worth of the lemon juice I bought the night before into the water and scooped the powder out of the grinder and dropped it in there also. I then left it in the fridge, completely covered with tin foil and went back to stir it every 15 to 20 minutes for about an hour or so.

At around half past two, I poured the drink into a glass using a folded up piece of kitchen towel to filter out the seed matter/ gunk. I then drank it all, and waited for a while. The seed matter I threw away, only eating the little bits that got stuck on my fingers. I began to feel ever so slightly nauseous after about 20 minutes or so, but that was about it. Other than that I felt pretty much normal, in fact at four o’clock I was still feeling normal and I was disappointed that the seeds had again not worked. I began to do some more reading about this cold extraction technique and realised that I may have made a few mistakes. The water was not boiled in an open container, I might have not left the seeds in the solution long enough, etc. So I took out another hundred seeds, and just chewed them up and swallowed them straight, with a can of fizzy pineapple juice to wash them down.

Now, I still experienced almost no nausea at all the entire evening. In fact the slight stomach discomfort I did already have seemed to go away after eating the second batch of seeds. What happened was I gradually began to feel very sleepy, sedated almost by the time it really got going but the onset was very gradual. It was so slight at first I thought I was experiencing some kind of placebo effect, like how when you’re a little bit drunk but can seem more so in the right circumstances. I’ve noticed this a lot, if you have a desire to be drunk and you drink a little you can almost will yourself to be more affected by it than you might otherwise be. This is something a lot of people drinking in groups will do, they are almost high on the energy of the moment. Alternatively when you’re very drunk, I find that if you really sit down and concentrate you can bring yourself a couple of degrees closer to sobriety for a brief moment. This might be what people describe as “letting go”, giving into the drug rather than trying to keep as much self control as possible.

The thing is, with this experience yesterday I didn’t feel very much like I wasn’t in control of my thoughts. I wasn’t mentally sober exactly, I was definitely in what I at the time felt was an alternate state of consciousness to day to day life (I actually changed the original title of the last post later that night because I liked that wording), but I was still lucid for the most part. More than anything my body was what was affected by the seeds, I actually felt quite detached from it. I couldn’t completely control my arms or legs, walking around was like being in a moving vehicle. I remember swaying from side to side and almost losing my balance trying to walk to the bathroom to piss. It took me a long while to will myself to go and take a piss in the first place as well, I sat there on the floor knowing I needed to go for a good 20 minutes before I managed to push myself to stand up and go do it.

When I finished I looked into the mirror, again because I was wondering if I was just being weird or if this was the drug and after seeing how much my pupils had dilated I can pretty conclusively say that I was definitely not just imagining it. I’ve never seen my pupils that large ever, they were presumably pretty big when I took 2C-B but that was in a field at night in the countryside so there were no mirrors for me to check at the time. I then came back into the main room and with any doubt I had now put to rest I was able to relax and just enjoy it. Again though this wasn’t a psychedelic trip at all, it was far closer to the experience you have with alcohol.

There were no changes to my visual perception whatsoever at any point during the evening, there were neither open nor closed eye visuals of any kind. I also didn’t experience what I did when taking 2C-B where I was connecting all these different things in my mind. I was certainly thinking about things, my mind was very active and I kept trying to start writing my thoughts down but I was so drowsy and sedated almost that any kind of expense of energy was very draining. I do wish I had gotten a few more notes down though, I think that just the ideas alone I had could have been the inspiration for a few different posts. I do have another 270 seeds left, so I will consider taking those again some other time and trying to make sure I do write down my thoughts.

The only effect I can recall that does seem to sound like what I’ve been told psychedelics are like is that the music I was listening to sounded so much better. I never really planned the evening out much see, so I didn’t have music set up in advance. Once I realised I was probably going to be too lazy to do anything other than listen to music, after taking five minutes just to walk back from the bathroom to the main room, I brought spotify up on my laptop and just scrolled through the albums I have saved looking for something. The thing is, nothing there seemed quite what I was looking for, until I saw Era Extraña by Neon Indian. Now I’ve only listened to it once, someone on /mu/ recommended it and I had left it saved but I didn’t really enjoy it very much. This time though, it was like one of the most beautiful things I had ever heard.

I was filled with all this emotion, every little sound was so much more noticeable. Often a lot of the different things going on in a piece of music can blur together somewhat. The reason I like The Cure so much might be because there’s generally a lot more “space” between the sounds so I can more easily get everything from their music. It was like that with this record, every thing about it stood out. It was very emotional as well for some reason, unlike the sounds I was finding it even harder than usual to pay attention to the lyrics but I could feel the tone very strongly. It felt a lot louder as well, all the music I ended up listening to as the evening went on, I spend quite a long time at one point just leaning over the balcony staring into the trees with the music in the background.

That’s another thing, and probably the most pleasant aspect of the entire experience. I was so unbelievably content, for the first time in god knows how long I was able to simply just enjoy things as they are without this creeping self doubt making me second guess everything. I could stare at the trees for an hour, or play some vidya as I did for a while at one point, and I didn’t have this voice in my head that’s usually always there telling me that while I do this all alone other people are out there with people they love and care about having fun. For years and years I’ve been unable to enjoy simple entertainment like videogames and so on, because this voice is there telling me I don’t really enjoy it and it’s simply a substitute for what I would rather be doing which is spending time with other people. For the first time since probably around the time I played through Mass Effect 3 (2013?) I was able to just enjoy playing vidya (I didn’t play anything for long though, as my motor functions were off and I was having trouble concentrating as I said) and watching stupid videos on youtube.

I was able to simply take things as they were, rather than getting sad because they reminded me of how they could be. Now unfortunately this isn’t something that has carried over into today, I am back to normal and when I was reading for a little while earlier that niggling voice in my head telling me that all entertainment (maybe entertainment isn’t the perfect word here, as I read for other reasons than simply entertaining myself, but it’s the best I can think of right now) is a cope was back again. It’s not a literal disembodied voice I’m talking about btw, I’m being figurative. I’m not schizophrenic thankfully. I’m just using it to describe this feeling that seems to always arise whenever I engage in any recreational activity, even writing something for this blog. The only time I don’t have it, is when I’m with my friends and enjoying spending time with them, which of course further validates that doubt.

The only thing that did carry over to today was the slight physical unease, when I woke up I was very dizzy and I stumbled around walking to the kitchen. I made myself a black coffee, which is something I almost never drink, and after that and a cold shower I was mostly back to normal. I’ve also looked in the mirror and my pupils have definitely gone back to normal. I think I’m going to order a pizza tonight, I wanted to late last night but I was not sure I’d be able to go downstairs and collect it and even if I did I was worried the delivery guy, or worse my neighbours, would see my eyes and realise something was up. All I had to eat in the end was a bowl of tinned asparagus soup, and some hard bread, which was still pretty nice but not very filling.

Alternate states: Test 1

Before

Tomorrow, Saturday the 3rd, I’m going to take four Hawaiian baby woodrose seeds (Argyreia nervosa) and I plan to write a “trip report” to document the experience. That is assuming anything of note actually happens of course, there’s reports I’ve read online that these seeds don’t actually have much or any effect on you. Now for every story like that I’ve probably read ten which describe vivid hallucinatory experiences and these seeds absolutely do contain a genuine naturally occurring psychedelic (LSA), but it’s possible there are duds or fakes going around. Now because I bought these online and not at the local garden centre I am a little concerned I got some of these, but hopefully they’ll turn out to be the real deal.

See that’s the amazing thing, these seeds are still legal even here in England, not just to possess for personal use but to openly buy and sell. No different than a bottle of whisky or a jar of ground coffee. You can go to a garden centre or a garden supplies store and they’ll probably sell them. I don’t know why but for some reason they aren’t covered by the almost blanket ban on psychoactive substances that was passed in 2016. Now if I were to try and perform an extraction and separate the LSA from the rest of the seed matter, that LSA would be illegal to own. I’m not sure I’m comfortable messing around with lighter fluid though, so I’ll just take the seeds straight (or probably ground up, and mixed with a milkshake) and push through the stomach pains and nausea that come when you use this method.

Now LSA is an interesting drug, it’s a component that is used in the production of LSD (which I’m sure everyone has heard of before) and in fact Albert Hoffman, the first man to synthesise LSD, was supposedly inspired by an experience with LSA extracted from the fungus called Ergot which also contains it. Now how true is this story? I don’t know, it could be completely made up but someone said it in a youtube video and it’d be cool if it were true. What is true is that he definitely took LSD, he was the first man to do so, and he considered that to be a profound and insightful experience. He was supposedly surprised when a couple of decades later in the 60s it had become widely used as a recreational substance as after taking it he foresaw it becoming a sort of therapy-aid. In the long run I guess he was vindicated at least, as that seems to be the direction that psychedelics seem to be taking generally speaking.

Now the effects are supposedly fairly similar to LSD, although it’s hard to figure out exactly as individual LSD trips even at similar doses can vary quite wildly, but generally the visual/ hallucinogenic element seems to be much less prominent in an LSA trip compared to an LSD trip. This is especially true at lower doses, higher doses of either will lead to some pretty crazy visuals of course but a low to medium dose of LSA will be more thoughtful and introspective than visually impressive. Which is perfectly fine with me, as cool as the funny shapes and colours may be they’re not what I’m really doing this for.

I’m taking a low dose this first time, I have 50 of these seeds in total so the option is there for higher doses in future, as I’m alone and have very little psychedelic experience. I’ll try writing my thoughts down and describing what happens as it’s taking place, but if I’m unable to concentrate or what I write ends up being completely incomprehensible I probably won’t include it. The ideal post though will have a before, during and after section. A lot of “trip reports” I read only seem to be a document of what happened written after the fact, but from what I’ve learned from reading and watching things on the subject your mindset going in to a psychedelic experience is very important. So I want to have that included in the post, and so I’ll do that now.

I’m not feeling very good this evening if I’m being honest, I had a pretty shitty day. Not an especially bad day, nothing bad actually happened to me, but nothing good happened either. Nothing really happened at all, my dad is away at the moment so I’m doing everything at home and so I did all the cleaning and washing before heading to work this morning. None of the interactions with my co-workers went very well either, which again is normal but still gets to me a little every time. Nothing particularly bad happened, I just felt like in every interaction the other person was uncomfortable. The thing is I just don’t understand it, I’ve now had several interactions with all of these people that didn’t go like that. I’ve been chatty and friendly and didn’t get any of those kind of vibes from each one of them on multiple occasions each so I don’t understand why I still do on other days.

It always feels particularly shitty when every single interaction in a given day goes this way though, like it did today. I suppose the first interaction with the deputy manager right at the start of the day was fine, I’ve never mentioned this particular co-worker before but she started a few months after I did and is always really friendly. She’s probably the nicest person there actually, and she definitely has a strong “sweet/ naïve young girl” aura about her but who knows how accurate that actually is. Later though we had to speak back and forth for a while over text about some stuff to do with the shop and while at first she was her usual warm/ amicable self her last message seemed uncharacteristically curt. At the time and until writing about it I felt like it might be because I was being “too friendly” and she was creeped out or trying to subtly tell me not to get any ideas (which I’m not for the record, not that she isn’t pretty and a pleasant person to be around but I think I’m immunised against oneitis at this point and she has a boyfriend).

Thinking about it now though it was probably not intentional at all, I don’t think I even cross this person’s mind at all when we’re not together at work (the same goes for all of my co-workers I’m sure) and that she’d even think that would be necessary. The response was too quick as well for any kind of deliberate subtext like that to have been considered now I think about it. I’m just incredibly insecure, so I obsess over these stupid things. That is something I’m hoping psychedelics can help with actually. Although frankly just writing these last couple paragraphs has made me feel a lot better, that and listening to Deathconsciousness with the volume really high as it got dark earlier this evening. The insecurity spike I’ve been experiencing since early this afternoon seems to have finally steadied.

I know it may seem like such a small concern, but most interactions I’ve had (and I really mean most, the overwhelming majority) in the last decade have been awkward or uncomfortable like today’s ones and it really does wear you down after a while. See after long enough every time it happens again you’re reminded of all the other times and how long it’s been this way. It feels more and more like it’ll never be any other way. I’m not sure what to expect tomorrow, I don’t think that psychedelics are going to be this mental panacea that a lot of people make them out to be if I’m being honest. I’m pretty sceptical about the whole thing, but I’ve got to try because I don’t really have any other options left. I’m going to make some chamomile tea, and read for a little while before going to bed. Hopefully tomorrow will be beneficial in some way.

After

Well I hate to say it but my concerns were well founded it seems, as I have experienced no effects whatsoever. Now I considered simply deleting this post, but I have instead decided to keep it anyway. There are going to be some set backs along the way, and it’ll be good to have a record of them. It’s also been a good week almost since my last upload and while I have been writing up another post over the last week it’s a long one (3000 words already and I’m not close to finishing) and will take a while to finish. I’ve noticed as well that there have actually been quite a few visitors over the last few days so clearly you want some kind of update and so I can finish this up tonight and give you that.

Now luckily I have a back up plan already in place, there is another kind of seed which contains the same substance as the HWBR seeds, Morning Glory seeds, and I did also buy a packet of those some months back. They seem actually to be more reliable, I can’t find any stories of these ones having no effect like I can with HWBR. The only reason I chose the HWBR was because you only have to take a few whereas the LSA content in Morning Glory seeds is far lower. I will have to take about 100 to 150, I’m erring towards taking the larger amount after today’s experience but I’ll decide tomorrow afternoon when I take them. This means that, assuming they aren’t also duds or something, the nausea will probably be pretty bad.

I’m not really sure what to do with myself now, it’s not like I usually have plans but I deliberately kept the day as free as possible today for obvious reasons and it’s been pretty boring. I tried reading, I tried writing some more on that other post I’m working on, but I just couldn’t stay focused as I was still nervous because of the anticipation at first and after that pissed off that I was sold dud seeds. I got a lot of cleaning done at least, the flat hasn’t looked this nice in years, but now I’ve got a whole evening with nothing to do at all. I’m considering going for a /nightwalk/, the last one I went on was a pretty miserable experience but that was almost a year ago and I used to do it all the time. Seeing all the happy normalfags out enjoying their Saturday night might make me feel even worse than I do now though, so maybe it’s best to stay home.