I’d been wanting to try ketamine for a while and recently I’ve had the opportunity to try it a few times. So far I think it is very strange and intriguing.
The first time I was at Friend’s apartment. Plug had come over to sell her acid and I asked if he had ketamine and he said yes but not with him. Friend was like, "I have ketamine! Wanna try it?" We all went into her room and Plug crushed up Friend’s K and I told him it was my first time. He cut me a small line.
It was the first time I’d ever insufflated a drug that wasn’t cocaine. It kinda tasted like I snorted a Christmas tree but it didn’t bother me. I always think it’s weird when people complain about the taste of drugs. Or the drip. He said the drip sucks. I was a heavy cigarette smoker for decades and it gave me a never-ending post-nasal drip. Drip that gets you actually high is not something I complain about.
Anyway, we were all standing and chattering while snorting our drugs off the top of Friend’s dresser. I soon felt like I was half-drunk, which was weird since I hadn’t drank in around 5 months. I started giggling a little bit and my vision started narrowing as if through a fish-eye lens. Friend and Plug had nowhere to move to get further away from me but they seemed much further away. The small bedroom felt expanded.
I went to look out the window and moving around felt like my body was blackout drunk even though I pretty much was walking normally and my mind was totally lucid. I felt like I had to tiptoe. Outside the window, the city spread out before me like a title sequence to a dark science fiction movie despite my field of vision being limited to one city block at its furthest. I was giggling like Butt-head but felt more like Rick Deckard.
Plug had another appointment and when he left the apartment, Friend and I did too. We walked a few blocks to a nearby bar to see some live music. On the walk I had a hard time judging the size of my own body, especially when passing oncoming pedestrians. It was like I was walking behind myself, viewing my own body from slightly behind and slightly above. We took a beat to brace ourselves before entering the bar.
I’d been to this bar many times before. It is small. A 10-seat bar on the left wall and six small tables lining the storefront windows and right wall. The space separating them is only as wide as the door leading to the performance space, a glorified hallway lined with two-tops and a beautifully lit stage about the size of two dinner tables.
But when we walked in, high on dissociative anesthesia, the bar room was big and empty and dark. I felt like the two people in there were looking at us funny and, while it’s possible there was reason to, there probably wasn’t. Neither Friend nor I wanted to drink alcohol. I made a wonky strut over to the bar and was trying really hard not to look fucked up. I ordered a “seltzer water and a water water” and was polite and deferential and tipped more than I normally would have.
We ducked into the back room performance space and it looked so much bigger than I remembered. There were no seats to be had in the crowded little room so we both crouched down in the middle of the floor at the back of a row of other people doing the same. After only a minute or so, I decided I wasn’t comfortable so I stood back up and took a spot in the back corner of the space.
There was a 4-piece band performing; four enthusiastic, goofy looking 20-somethings with acoustic instruments. There was a fiddle player, a guitarist, an upright bass player, and a banjo player. They all sang around a single microphone in the center. I said to myself, “this is a bluegrass band,” and it clearly was. However, something about ketamine’s effects made me unable to really understand or feel what they were doing. The style of music did not feel familiar. The words they sang didn’t resonate with me in even a minimally human way. Even their physical bodies seemed to exist in a foreign unreality. It was as if space aliens came down to earth, heard a single bluegrass song, and then tried to assimilate into that musical culture. All the people in the audience seemed distant and alien to me as well. When Friend stood up and came over to where I was standing I said, “They all look like a bunch of little flesh nubbins.”
We soon left and, at my suggestion, went back to Friend’s place to bump a little more K. I felt the soft addictive pull of this drug and made a mental note of it. She recently moved into a fancy, new, north Brooklyn building where the management company sets you up with roommates. When we entered, one of her roommates and his girlfriend were watching that movie “The Meg” in the living room. We did our best to act normal as we went in her room to snort more drugs.
After that we left the house again and took Friend’s dog for a long walk. We had a long rambling conversation during this walk. It was full of strange disjunctures. I felt like we would be talking about one thing, get sidetracked for an extended period of time, then return to the original subject without ever really noticing we’d been sidetracked. I sort of felt like neither one of us was making much h sense but that somehow we both knew what each other was talking about. It started to rain and we headed back to Friend’s place. We were both pretty beat and I went home.
In the days following, I had a hard time describing the experience I had to people. I felt like the effects at the dose I took were much more subtle than I expected. It’s only in retrospect that I was really able to put it into words.
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A few weeks later, I got in touch with Plug to get some LSD and some K of my own. He came by in the early evening. I bought a 10-strip and a gram. He wanted to “show me how to do K.” I’d already done K with him before but I’m a noob and I didn’t mind the "tutelage." He crushed up some big crystals from his stash in a bill until it was a powder. He cut some small lines up on my coffee table. I have a milligram scale but we didn’t weigh anything. We just snorted the lines and hung out.
I’d been listening to Stereolab since before Plug arrived but once the K kicked in, Plug was like, “This isn’t K music.” I agreed and suggested G Jones, which he was totally into. We hung out shooting the shit and talking about music. I got up a couple of times to fuck with the air conditioning and the lighting. Plug warned me to not make too many sudden movements because I might be clumsy - which was a good call - but I was fine.
Plug was telling me about how he teaches classes on spinning these light-disc things whose trade name I can’t remember but which are apparently popular with ravers. I didn’t really know what he was talking about so he broke his out and started spinning them even though their batteries were dead. I watched him do his weird wook flow art shit and let out sedate giggles. He’d flip them around and the movements reminded me a little bit of how things move in my DMT trips. It was weird and I didn't really know what to make of it.
Eventually, Plug left to go to another appointment. I got the idea that maybe I’d try smoking DMT on top of the fading K. I loaded up about 35 mg in my new Yocan Evolve Plus (I need to write a report on my switch to this ROA) and meditated a bit before blasting off. I had a pleasant sub-breakthrough experience. During the come-up there was a vibe like the DMT spirits knew that another chemical was in me and were like “What’s this?” I felt almost guilty, like I was cheating or something. I laid back in the dark and watched a flow of indistinct, ghostly scenery move toward and over me. The vibe was very mellow and the visuals had a very sexual nature to them.
When I came down, slightly dazed and bathing in afterglow, I went around the corner to a friend's place to smoke weed and listen to music. I was pretty out of it and was having trouble articulating my thoughts on anything. After a couple off hours I had to admit I was cooked and needed to go home and go to bed.
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About 3 weeks later, on July 5th, I did my first solo experimentation with ketamine. The day before, I’d taken LSD and went to a rooftop party. Most times when I take LSD, I experience a comforting afterglow for a few days following. This time I was super depressed and it was no mystery to me why.
I’d been fighting a depressive episode for a couple of weeks ever since my birthday dinner at my parents’ house spiraled into a grotesque of absurd, misdirected rage and violence. It was upsetting and disappointing and was a harsh reminder of why I chose to not speak to them for 6 years. I have a lifetime of material with which I could write a whole book about them and their malignant, covert narcissism but there are better ways to spend my energy.
Anyway, I’d been really fucking bummed all day long. I tried to do self-care things to get myself out of my shitty head space. I cleaned the house. I meditated. I did some writing. I cooked some food. Watched some TV. The funk was unshakable. Knowing that S-Ketamine is now being used to treat major depression, I thought this might be a really good time to do some experimenting. Still, I was a nervous about using this drug alone for the first time.
Around 10:00 PM, I dimmed the lights, broke out my gear, ands set up my Netflix with an episode of Our Planet about deep sea life. At 10:10 I weighed out 42 mg and - with some hesitation - snorted it off the scale and leaned back.
When I trip on mushrooms, I always get this pleasurable sensation in my neck and head during the come up. It’s like I’m creating static electricity from snuggling up against the warmth of the creative light of the universe. As I felt the first signals of the K kicking in, I rolled my neck around and felt a similar feeling but it was colder, less electric, more robotic. Like hydraulic fluid moving through servos. My central air conditioning is really loud and I started to get annoyed with it. When I stood up to turn it off, I felt the wonkiness all over my whole body. I felt unsteady. I kept my center of gravity low and sort of crept across the room toward the thermostat. I came back to the couch and laid down.
I don’t really know how to describe the next 90 minutes. I felt very safe and very apart from things. I watched this nature show and felt like I was inside it despite also finding everything in it completely alien. I was unsure of what was going on in my body because I felt so still and not inclined to move. A few times I swallowed to make sure I was still there. At one point I touched my face and realized I had a line of tears rolling down one side but I was not crying or irritated.
Fifteen minutes after the first bump I took another 16 mg bump. Twenty minutes after that I took a 21 mg bump. Neither of these took me to a place any deeper, they just sustained the high I had going. I considered a third bump but I had a thought about the habit forming potential of ketamine and thought maybe I should just stop now. An hour after my last re-dose, I made a smooth landing.
Here’s where things actually got interesting for me. Once the effects of the K wore off, my depression was gone. Like completely gone. I felt fucking fantastic. The torrent of angry, hurt thoughts I’d been laboring under for a week had ceased. I felt at peace with myself and with the world. This anxiolytic and antidepressant effect lasted for a good three days after this experiment. I was really thrilled and excited for this new discovery and I very much wanted to try it again soon. That want made me a little nervous. I know that I have addictive tendencies and when I indulge them, my life usually gets shitty. I told myself to wait at least a week, if not a month, before doing it again.
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I haven’t used ketamine since my last experiment but I’m sure I will soon. I eventually want to see what it’s like in the K-hole. For now, I’m just happy to learn that the new drug in my arsenal is so effective at blowing out the blues.
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