Man of Science

I have a strong resistance to peer pressure. But the thing is, I usually want to do these things. If I think it’ll be fun, or interesting, or merely something I’ve never done before, I’ll try it. So it only took a few moments of convincing, mainly an explanation of the side effects, before I bottom-upped a bottle of Robitussin.

The main ingredient of Robitussin is DXM (dextromethylsomething). In small amounts, its an intoxicant, like booze. In large amounts, you trip balls. For me, nothing happened. For the first hour, anyway. I merely lay back and type in this blog, astounding everyone with ability to type without looking. Easily impressed, these Louisville folks are.

I stand up to get a drink of water, but immediately feel woozy. You know that feeling you get when you stand up too fast? It was like that, and presumably for the same reason. I thought nothing of it. It would take another half an hour before I felt anything.

Do you know what my problem is? I’ll give you a hint: It has nothing to do with the fact that I drank Robitussin for fun. See, I’m a compulsive scientist. Everything I do is a test or experiment. It can be as trivial as testing a bounce function of a free rubber ball, or as pathological as my dating life.

But I’m not treading new ground here. Exploring altered consciousness is as old as illicit drugs. The terminology because famous with the rise of college students and LSD – Psychonauts, spaced out in their own brain.

I continued typing on my laptop, and thanks to it, I can describe pretty well what the experience was like. However, it’s worth noting that I was able to do that at all. The screen was fuzzy and wrong. My sense of touch was lacking, my arms felt distant and tyrannosaurus small, the ground shook under me. But my laptop was always held delicately, placed gently, typed accurately, despite lack of coherence in my thoughts.

Really, a hallucination is hard to describe if you aren’t experiencing it, but I’ll try. Imagine the world is like a giant posterboard. There are creases in reality. Things are flat and 2 dimensional. People look like cartoons, and occasionally dogs. The room behind me was a different dimension, and open doorways were solid barriers. People sitting next to me ceased to exist until they spoke, at which point they flipped from the ceiling into reality. Time was irrelevant; conversations took either 5 seconds or 2 weeks. I could easily get up and walk around, maybe to go to the bathroom or get a cup of water, but I couldn’t remember I did it until I saw the full cup. The whole time I was convinced I was dreaming the whole thing and was still in my apartment in St. Louis.

The hardest to understand is the art of the conversation. The hippies in Nashville tried to explain the concept of “non-linear discussion” to me, but it made no sense for obvious reasons. A discussion must follow a linear flow of logic to make any sense. Unless you’re on drugs. The laptop would not suffice; I pulled out my audio recorder.

Puzzled by it, my new friends asked, and recoiled in understandable horror when I said I was a reporter. But we quickly changed topics to talk about cowboys, and I forgot the rest. I frequently had to stop and ask them how we got to where we were in the conversation. They didn’t know either.

I still don’t know what “Vermin Love Supreme leads rainbow parades” means.

Perhaps the most interesting thing was my watch. Time may have been irrelevant, but it remained concrete and unflinching no matter where my mind went. I could be in a different world, but a quick glance at my watch would immediately pull me back. It remained a constant tether to reality.

Really, I think the Louisville folks enjoyed robotripping with me. They warned me not to drink as much as I did, but I simply took that as a challenge. They feared I’d freak out or need babysitting, but I found the experience exhilarating and liberating. Sure, shit was bananas, but no matter how fucked I was, I knew it was simply a matter of perception. An 8.0 earthquake rattled the world as I took a piss, but the stream stayed steady. I announced what I thought and felt as I said them, and illuminated the process to them fresh. They’re so used to it, they forget how remarkable the experience truly is. I let them remember by telling them.

But this wasn’t just about jollies and fun. I’m a man of science, dammit, and my quest to experiment with alternate consciousness was quenched. I’m done, right?...