angstoutlet's Journal

the day has come...
When I created this journal I thought I might need for some angsty moment, when consulting a wonderfully anonymous cohort of netizens might prove helpful. To be honest, I doubted I’d ever actually use it.

What’s prompted me to write isn’t some great life decision, but instead (that other fertile blogging ground) a fucking mental mushroom trip.

I’d had a bit of a day of it. Went to this interview at the BBC, which was okay although the interviewer was a bit of a witch. Had a bit of grief off L, because I’d been working a lot and sleeping funny hours and not really giving her any ‘quality time’. After the interview I met C at about 2pm. I was meant to go to a meeting at Sams but then found out it was on Saturday. C wanted me to stay, but I thought L would be pissed off if I didn’t get home so I said I wouldn’t. Eventually though she talked me round to taking some mushrooms. I’ve taken a few light doses recently, but the last time I took a lot was in Amsterdam two years ago. Took them two days in a row and felt like shit; paranoid, didn’t know who I was, got lost. Which is, I guess, why I hadn’t really got battered on them since.

We took about 35g of Thais each, although I reckon I had slightly more – maybe 40g because C didn’t have the first few shrooms that I ate before we bought the yoghurt (very helpful). I wasn’t exactly sure how much we should take, because when I’d taken them before they’d been dried or liberty caps, which are different anyway. In fact, that’s actually a lie. I’d had a just under a quarter of a box when I was pissed on night and felt a bit funny, but not completely out of myself. Taking advice on dosage from someone who only three weeks before had knocked back 50 headache pills, maybe wasn’t a great idea.

I knew I had to get back to West Ruislip to pick my car so I asked a tube bod what time the last train went (12:20), although I thought I’d be all done by 10pm and ready to go home. I felt ill to start off with, which was to be expected. When I came up it did feel a bit strong and introverted. I was red like a tomato and felt like I was going to hyperventilate. We sat in a room with some other people from halls. Then we sat and watched Eastenders. Felt a bit more in control of it, words to the effect of “you just need to be on top of it.” The “camels” in the curtains were a bit weird, but the visuals were quite enjoyable while you could sit back and just enjoy them. The lifts have always been breaking down in halls and there were all these foreign schools kids piling into them. They all got stuck and the Vice-Warden had to come down and get them out. In our fucked state it was quite funny because a whole stream of about 40 kids seemed to pile out when it finally found the floor.

Then it all started to go pear-shaped. We were kind of wandering around in and out of halls. Two people we vaguely knew (obviously struggling to communicate with us) wondered off which was a bit jinxing. C was convinced that we’d caused the kids to get stuck in the lift. We decided to make our way to Tottenham Court Tube because I wanted to get back once we’d finished. We just about managed to make it there. C wanted to go to the Astoria, I thought it best if we just sat in a bar with some music. She started climbing over the barrier on the cross roads (Oxford Circus / T’Court) which freaked me out. She fell back into the road and almost ran across but I stopped her. She knocked out the battery from my phone (ex. A). outside Starbucks because she wanted to hold on to it and I was trying to wrestle it from her. I was really worried she was going to call L and that L would be worried.

Then it’s hard to say what happened. We went back to hall. C and I split up and then, I think, found each other again. Together we walked fucking everywhere…Montague Place, Gower Street, Bloomsbury Road, Bedford Avenue all ring bell, althoughI had be less than ten feet from them and count out the letters to make the words form. Of course, roughly speaking I know where all this places are -- something which really fucked me up in Amsterdam and its hoooldallloodastraass. But it didn’t help. The configuration of the roads kept changing before my eyes. Streets came and disappeared. C kept asking me “it’s not just me that’s fucked up, is it?”

After returning to the TV room, finally C and I decided to part company.I really wanted to just get home, snuggle up with L and watch TV. Not a simple prospect, but one that at several points I thought I could just will into existence since my mind was willing loads of other shit up. I had this idea that I could just go to any car and stick in the key. I can’t remember in the end whether C was entirely happy that I was leaving – she was vacillating from “yeah, yeah, you’ve got your home I’ve got mine” and “no, no please don’t leave, I love, please.” Not that she knew where she was going, although strangely it wasn’t like previous intensive trips when I’d lost all conception of who everyone was, so I could tell her she lived in Streatham. In fact, I knew almost obsessively who I was and that I needed to get to West Ruislip.

So I tried to get home which is when the shit really hit the fan. I went to Euston, Russell Square and I think Tottenham Court Road and Holborn stations – or one with green tiles anyway. I went up and down those lifts in Russell Square seemingly five or ten times each time convinced that the door wouldn’t open (got a bit of claustrophobia). It’s very had to distinguish what happened where, although apart from one tube ride (Euston to Holborn maybe?) I think I pretty much walked everywhere – round and round Russell Square unable to find the exit to where I lived. All the lights were really bizarre, like those camera shots where you speed it to about an hour a minute and the day changes colour. All the shadows were switching on and off.

The tube stations were undoubtedly the scariest bit. Although the carpets and tiles in the toilet had been fucked up (something I’d experienced before) it was nothing like the underground. I know I purchased yet another 6 zone travelcard (ex. B, I had two when I came to) in Euston and I remember asking (supposedly) the same tube bod I’d asked for directions earlier, for them again. I looked at the tube maps but they made no sense. The spidery one outside Euston was really fucking weird – I knew West Ruislip was one of the terminus points but everywhere was either High Barnet or Edgware. As I walked round my sense of perspective became really weird and the tube tunnels seemed to squeeze tighter together, trapping me in. Every time I went to a platform there wasn’t a time leaving and instead I’d just peer down the black tunnel, which seemed pretty chilling.

Other interesting sensations:

- Whenever I touched stuff in my pockets I was sure I was breaking it, but it was more that it was fragmenting into shards of glass
- I was convinced that I could remember, in details, what had happened in previous trips, particularly the bad one in Amsterdam and that when you’re fucked I thought you went to live in a different part of your brain (I recall having the feeling before, though) Interestingly though I remember being pissed off because I couldn’t understand what people were saying in my own language, and that at least in Amsterdam I could have expected not to have understood.
- I postulated a theory the reason why there were so many fucked people round Tottenham Court Road was because when people were fucked they all migrated to a place they knew and loads of people knew their way round there (seems suddenly less profound subsequently)
- Every time I looked at my clock it said 22:27

All the time I thought L was going to hate me for not getting home. I rang her at some point to tell her how made I was, despite my earlier reticence about the phone.

Eventually failing to find my way back, I returned to halls. I took a bottle out of the bin and filled it up with water to drink out off, then let myself into my room. Realising that some foreign schoolkid has made his bed there, I collapsed in it anyway.

My tube station wanderings continued in my dreams, such that I still can’t really tell what actually happened – although the exhibits and the dialled calls lists on my phone cover a lot of it. I got woken up at about quarter past twelve by the vice-warden. He asked me what I was doing and I just spouted scatter-brained rubbish at him. Obviously tired, he left me with John the porter (notoriously skilled at talking jobsworthy rubbish) and I gave him back my spare key and left.

I felt dreadful that I’d not got back for L and made her worry about me – I’m glad she had the sense not to tell my parents. I was bricking myself that C had hurt herself but J said she was alright.

In short, I felt like a complete tit.

I got a minicab to West Ruislip (£28 I didn’t begrudge). I got pulled over by the cops because I left my fog light on, was driving quite slowly and got breathalysed. My pupils were dilated so they looked convinced I would fail but obviously I didn’t. Not that I’m especially proud of that, because I don’t like to drive when I’m fucked Although to be honest, I think it was just coincidence as I’d fully come off. Fortunately they didn’t look in my car and find the ounce of weed I’d bought.

My first response was that I’m never taking hallucinogens again. I’ve said before and then had an itch to scratch….you know how it is. But this time I’m pretty sure. I was petrified. Even a few hours after I find it hard to exactly remember the fear I experienced but it was like nothing else.

I’m glad I went there, because it was an informing experience. And the feeling of well being afterwards (tempered admittedly by thinking it was lucky we didn’t kill ourselves and that I’d treated L pretty badly) was pretty good. A feeling of contentment and perspective, like a weight had been lifted. Stimulants make you happy, but no other drug gives you that.

My only regret is that the experience was so intensely bad that I’ll probably never try acid (which I had been thinking about). I went into this thinking I’d overcooked it and acutely aware that the last time I’d done that I went mental and the result? I went even more mental! I think I’ve lost my fearlessness, alas. But I’m getting too old for this shit.

And so to bed perchance to dream. Just hopefully not of the Victoria line. Jxx.

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