LSD: Psychic Flex

Date/Time: Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - 2:30 PM

Age at time of experience: 45

Weight at time of experience: Approx. 190 lbs.

Substances/Doses:
  LSD - 3 blotter tabs

  Cannabis

  Caffeine - 2 or 3 cups of black tea

Setting: home

Companions: H

H came over to my place with a bunch of snacks and at 2:30 PM we dosed ourselves. H took two tabs, I took three. I always get pretty anxious right after I dose and this time was no exception. Those three tabs felt huge under my tongue. I nervously paced around and talked about it to get it out of my head. After a bit I decided to make tea and that calmed me down. We drank some tea, smoked some weed, and listened to some music while waiting for the come up.

At 3:00 PM an alarm in my phone went off reminding me to take notes on the experience. Thinking that I might be able to conduct real-time self-reportage on my trip, I’d set an alarm for every hour of the next 8 hours. I took the note “kicking in stevie wonder” and turned the rest of the alarms off. I knew right away that they were going to get on my nerves. At this time, H and I decided to put our phones in sleep mode because neither of us wanted to be bothered with social media, calls or texts.

Things were definitely starting to happen. A giddy, speediness came over me and I started feeling like I had macro vision. When I looked at my couch, I felt like I could see microscopically into the fibers of the upholstery. We started pacing around the apartment. For whatever reason, I wanted to listen to “Power, Corruption & Lies” by New Order and spent what felt like forever but what was probably 3 minutes looking for my LP and never found it (this would happen one or two more times during the day). I gave up and put on “Innervisions” by Stevie Wonder and we chilled on the couch for the duration of the album, talking about what perceptual changes were happening and laughing at the emotionally leading ballad tracks. When I looked out my living room window, there was a big distortion in my depth perception. Even though I logically knew the relative distances of the fog on my window and the power lines and the trees and the neighbors’ fences from me, all of them were randomly changing places with the foreground in my vision. A laugh began that kept going for the better part of the next 6 hours.

At 4:00 PM this trip was in full swing and H and I were in hysterics. I was making a lot of funny movements with my arms. My wall art would move around in a stuttering smear that would jump cut in its own flow and distort into wet, dayglo pixels. H reminded me that sundown was coming and that maybe we should go up on the roof and watch the sunset. 

We went up there and I almost immediately felt like we were superheroes or gods standing atop Mount Olympus. The sky was like a pink fleshy membrane. The far-field view of my Brooklyn neighborhood was undulating like gentle waves on an ocean made of beige suede. Watching the rush hour cars coming over the Brooklyn Bridge, I commented that I felt like I could see the people in the cars even though they were a couple of miles away and that the cars were going to drive up to my roof and be miniature when they arrived. A construction site across the street and down the block a bit looked like a giant pile of rusting steel wool. A tree in my neighbors’ yard reminded us both of the Ents in Lord of the Rings. In its branches, I saw a wooden, flying phoenix covered in flames made of pretzels. One of the neighboring roofs looked like it was covered in liquid metal and a bunch of David Bowie faces were poking out of it. A set of exhaust pipes on another neighboring roof looked like a rack of broken metal hockey sticks but also like objects one might skewer hors d’oeurves on. I was ranting, “It’s a cocktail garnish! Trust me!” One building on the Manhattan skyline looked to me like something out of the video game Katamari Damacy and I started calling it the “little sushi man” though I couldn’t really discern whether he was made of sushi or if he was a sushi chef or both.

We gave upon watching the sunset about 15 minutes before it happened because we were really cold. It was 30 degrees Fahrenheit and breezy up there on the roof. We went back inside to my apartment where it was a cozy 74 degrees. Heather started eating one of the bananas she brought over and gave me a bite. She asked me how that was and I told her I could feel little men working hard being the banana getting mashed up by my teeth. I made tea and we smoked some more herb and went back to chilling on the couch and listening to a playlist I’d made earlier.

My giddy excitement eventually mellowed to a warm, calm, and fuzzy but still-engaged euphoria. As the music played we both kind of slipped into a quiet zone-out. My idea of myself mostly disappeared and I found myself floating through visions that I seemed to partially control. It felt similar to my few experiences with lucid dreaming and astral projection and I imagined this state to be almost like the ideal realization of the daily mindfulness meditation I started practicing a few months ago.

During this reverie I had this idea of “PSYCHIC FLEX” which I then unsuccessfully attempted to explain to Heather on and off for the next several hours. I made a note of it in my phone which verbatim reads: “The psychic flex it’s like the twist the whimper at the flex at the 3nd [sic] of the world squeak the whimper at the point of flexion.” I’m sure I won’t be able to make this make sense now so I can only report on things I saw and felt. The visual representation of the psychic flex in my mind was made out of a malleable, almost liquid, silvery metal. I pictured spiral ropes of this metal twisting together. I pictured fists of this metal squeezing and relaxing. I pictured spheres of metal being twisted at their center until the bodies of the two halves were nearly touching. I had visions of curved metal bodies flowing past each other with only subatomic space between them and with zero friction. I made a bunch of jokes while trying in to explain this to Heather. (“Buy my new book, The Psychic Flex! You can find it in the Non-Friction section of your local bookstore!”) While I was meditating on this a raga from Ravi Shankar came on and it seemed like the sonic equivalent of the psychic flex. The drone of the tambura seemed to occupy the subatomic space between the polar bodies of the flex. The tight twisted connection between them glowed with a white light that I perceived as the “end of the world” or the “fusion of all things.” In that twisting there was a tension that I could feel in my heart. There was a sound like a whimper or a squeak that came from it. The twisting felt like an act of joining with a deeply buried point of deeply hurt weirdness inside me without fear. I had a sort of cathartic grokking of the simultaneous uniqueness and banality and universality of all the traumatized, creepy, fuckedness of my heart and I wasn’t afraid of it. At one point I opened my eyes and I felt that my face was covered in tears.

Around 9:00, Heather suggested we order a pizza and I was very much into that idea. Calling the pizzeria without collapsing into hysterics was a bit of a challenge but it worked. Around this time I also stood up and announced to Heather that we, being the marginally-employed 40-somethings tripping on acid on a Tuesday afternoon that we were, were in fact the coolest people on the planet at that moment. The pizza arrived 11 minutes later and was glorious. An idealized vision of steaming bread and sauce and cheese. We attacked that pizza like we’d been crawling across a desert for a week without food. We also ate bananas and peanuts and even some leftover shepherd’s pie that I had in the refrigerator, laughing at ourselves for our insane appetite.

At some point, I suggested watching something on the television and, when we started looking for something to watch, I immediately regretted it. We started to watch some crime thriller from the 70s with Faye Dunaway and as soon as the opening credits finished rolling I was like, “This is killing my head. Do you mind if I shut this off?” I felt embarrassed for suggesting it in the first place, because I know better. I shut the TV off and put the music back on.

For the next few hours we hung out, swinging between talking a lot and totally spacing out. I found myself examining and talking about the unhealthy and embarrassing alcoholic behavior in my past with an unflinching candor. I don’t really drink very often these days and every new psychedelic experience I have seems to push me further and further away from any desire to consume alcohol. In past experiences with heroic doses of mushrooms, I’ve come out of the void shouting “SPIRITUAL FITNESS” and feeling like my zen could rival any Buddhist guru (or, you know, something like that or whatever). This experience felt like another one of these workouts, so to speak. I may have been physically tired but my sense of “true self” felt stronger than ever.

At around 2:30 AM I walked Heather home. On the way, she got me a hot chocolate at the deli and drinking it made me feel like a happy child. When we got to her house I hugger her and thanked her for accompanying me on a journey. I ran into a friend on my walk home and we talked for a couple of hours. When I got home, I slept like a baby.

I’m still trying to sort out the psychic flex.

This is a list of a bunch of the music we listened to over the course of the day. Some of it is a darker and more aggressive than I’d imagine than most go for on acid but I was pretty into it:

Stevie Wonder - “Innervisions” (full album)

Blind Faith - “Do What You Like”

Can - “Halleluhwah”

Grateful Dead - “Alligator”

Ravi Shankar - “Raga Jog” and “Raga Malgunji”

James Holden & Animal Spirits - “Each Moment Like The First”

Jon Hopkins - “Everything Connected”

Swans - “The Great Annihilator”

Blanck Mass - “Rhesus Negative”

Bleep Bloop - “Encounter”

Aphex Twin - “diskhat ALL prepared1mixed 13” (This kinda sucks. I almost skipped it.)

Deerhunter - “Nothing Ever Happened”

Genesis - “Abacab”

Konono No. 1 - “Nakobala Lisusu Te”

Liquid Liquid - “Optimo”

Tobacco - “Street Trash”

Harmonia - “Monza (Rauf Und Runter)

The Brian Jonestown Massacre - “Anemone”

Kraftwerk - “The Robots”

Helium - “XXX” and “OOO”

The Necks - “Drive By” (full album)

Steve Miller Band - “Fly Like an Eagle” (most of the album)

Sherbet - “Howzat,” “Life,” and “Midsummer Madness”

Skyhooks - “Horror Movie”

The B-52’s - “Mesopotamia,” “Give Me Back My Man,” “Dance This Mess Around, “52 Girls”

Tom Tom Club - “Wordy Rappinghood” and “Genius of Love”

Steely Dan - “Aja” (whole album)

ABBA - “People Need Love”

Tortoise - “DJed”

Cocteau Twins - “Blue Bell Knoll”

William Tyler - “Highway Anxiety”

Dopplereffekt - “Superior Race”

Cybotron - “Clear”

Large Mechanics - “Alien FM”

Miles Davis Quintet - “If I Were a Bell”

Forest Swords - “War It”

The Cramps - “TV Set”