The experience begins with a friend; let's call him Columbus. I arrive at Columbus' house at-or-about-or-around 10pm, the day being laden with Oxycodone+Diazepam post-bliss and a nicely filled stomach. The proposal was quite simple: the rest of his stash of Methoxetamine. Perhaps his willingness to fork over the powder for nothing should've been some sort of precursor to what would unfold, but in defense of my own naivete, the Brain was prepared. For the moment.

Dosing consisted of pouring out the powder onto the top of an old 8-way router. The substance looked innocuous; bright white, fluffy, and crystalline. Harmless, even. After much debate on the merits of dosing, insnufflation versus packing the powder inside of a gelcap, I went with the latter. I separated the powder into two small piles, packing roughly half of the dose into the first gelcap. The bag was somewhat translucent, with minute amounts of Methoxetamine still caked inside of it. I disposed of it properly: I ripped it open and licked all of the powder out. The taste was somewhat like a sour, bitter, salt, but worse. Disgusting, really. With the first gelcap ready for dosing, I threw it in my mouth and tried to swallow it. Unfortunately, things did not go smoothly, with my poor ability to swallow pills resulting in my throat closing around the gelcap, it molesting my throat on the way down. But it was down!

T plus 30 minutes. Columbus and I are watching some overdubbed Kung Fu film, muting it in favor of some Wu-Tang Clan. WTC is not choice for this experience, so it's turned off rather quickly and replaced with several different short videos explaining how things are made. Soda cans, mechanically separated meats, pills. These films are pleasing, massaging my now melting brain, easing my consciousness over into dissociation. Dissociation is not something that is easy to describe. Imagine your own dimensions: you have a general idea of how tall you are, what you weigh; your social standing; your own fears; self-doubts; whatever. That is reality. That is what truly is. Dissociation, however, tosses the proverbial wavelengths out of the window. It has been compared to schizophrenia, something I think is a true injustice, but the description is somewhat apt. Within yourself, without yourself, yet in yourself. Got it? Good.

A phenomenon known as "Alice in Wonderland Syndrome" is a hallmark of the dissociative experience. Consider this: you are sitting on a chair in a room, watching something on a television. However, you cannot tell if said television is a foot away from your face, across the room, or a mile away. You lean forward to touch the screen, appreciating the crackling of the static as it touches your fingertips, confirming it to only be a few feet away. But that's not how it appears. Your depth perception is completely flipped, only adding to the confusion of the experience. I, personally, do not find it strange to be in strange positions, either. Blankets are a wonderful thing, rolled up like a crepe, laying on a floor that seems to be pulsating, breathing. But I'm getting lost in my own thoughts again. Let's backtrack.

T plus 45 minutes. The films are over, only at my insistence. Meat chopped up in grinders and squeezed out of metal tubes can be quite disconcerting in this state, so it is a relief to see the screen off. I find my feet, or what my brain claims are my feet, to be somewhat useable. Walking is rather strange, my feet seemingly forcing themselves to walk with my toes pointed at each other, shuffling over the carpet. I find it to be a good time to measure out my next dose, and with great difficulty I cut the powder even finer, shoving it inside another capsule. I consider taking it then, then consider my state of mind and pocket it. This was my only good decision that day. For the remainder of the powder, I find myself licking my fingers and blotting up the remainder, taking every last microgram I could detect with my vision growing increasingly poor by the second.

Columbus decides that it's a good time to get me out of his house. I agree, on the condition that he walk me over to... well, let's call him ... Bellingshausen. Bellingshausen's house. The first steps outside are strange, in the twenty-something degree Fahrenheit weather that my skin cannot feel. Smoking cigarettes in this weather feels strange, not knowing where smoke exhalation ends and vapor begins. I descend the stairs with grace I have never known. Handrails and intuition aside, it's a miracle I did not lose some teeth on the banister. Shuffling across the parking lot, I found myself loaded with dormant energy. Of course, to a sober mind, hopping over a curb would be nothing. However, in my state I found it nothing short of exhilarating. The frost forming on the grass was quite beautiful, reflecting off of the half-moon that in retrospect was QUITE terrifying to look at. Thankfully, it is close to 1 in the morning, so crossing over the street wasn't as deadly as it could have been. I find the march to Bellingshausen's house (reality, 5 or 6 houses away) to be excruciatingly long, but my feet did an admiral job of getting me there, hopping, skipping, jumping along the way. We knock on his window, and his door, and he answers.

Bellingshausen emerges from his home completely zonked out on a lovely mixture of opiates and benzodiazepenes. I admit finding great humor in his state, as well in the fact that I'm actually able to communicate better than HIM! Our farce of a conversation can be summed up as: "Dude, you're fuckin' nodding out! And I'm fuckin' tripping my nuts off!" Not quite verbatim, or remotely intelligent, but regardless, it would have been an interesting situation had his roommate showed up that night. Journeying inside, I found a great calm washing over me, being in a familiar, safe place to finish out the rest of the experience. But oh, the capsule I pocketed? It comes into play. Oh, my, it comes into play.

T plus 2 hours. I am sitting on Bellingshausen's bed, watching the fibers in the carpet swirl and blow across each other like a field of wheat. We eventually agree on a record to listen to, one which I cannot remember, (EDIT: This Is Our Science, Astronautilus) and force out conversation as we can find it. My stomach feeling somewhat upset, I head for the bathroom, with inconclusive results. Wiping my own ass felt disgusting, but washing my hands restored my purity. I felt clean again. I found myself pacing the hallways and other rooms of Bellingshausen's house, overcome by the previously mentioned dormant energy. I do attempt to make contact with his roommate. Her presence had a profound effect on my last Methoxetamine experience, and seemingly kept the dark thoughts away. More on this later. No dice on the phone calls, though. Quite rude, really, to call so late, I realized after a few unsuccessful dials. Venturing back into Bellingshausen's room, we burned through a few bowls of so called 'herbal incense' (I am assuming it contains an AM-12**/20** derivative. I could be wrong.) that noticeably heightened my confusion, but in the best way possible. But this is near the point in the story where everything changed.

-- Details are kind of strange and fuzzy here, but bear with me --

Feeling rather thirsty, I walked into the kitchen and got myself a glass of water. I recalled having the other capsule in my pocket, so I fished it out and stared at it, contemplating on what to do with it. I could just swallow it and wait an hour, or get the most available bang from it by breaking it open and snorting it. I did the latter, but not just yet. I emptied the powder out onto a textbook, and swallowed the capsule and the remaining few milligrams that were left inside of it. Figuring I would take baby steps for the rest of the night, I walked around carrying the rest of the powder on the book, staring at it, wanting it, but knowing better. Things were still positive at this point; I could feel the effects of the Methoxetamine wearing off ever so slightly, but I seemed to have forgotten about the capsule I swallowed only minutes prior, and decided to rail the rest of the powder. I trimmed down a straw, and got down to business. Given my gait, it was hard to close one nostril, keep the straw steady, and not cough, but I managed. Pulling with all my might, I railed every last little bit of powder into my sinuses, and licked the textbook clean. Done deal, all of this chemical is in me now. I returned to Bellingshausen's bedroom and took a seat.

T plus 3, 3.5 hours. Consciousness, reality, whatever you want to call it, is something you don't really appreciate until your grasp on it is wretched away from you. Oddly enough, while being dissociated I was not -myself- per se, I still knew WHO I was, and found myself visualizing old memories that I hadn't remembered in over a decade. Not pretty. Luckily, (I could be wrong) I didn't find myself blabbing about them, but I found myself trapped in recursive loops of five. Five stages of being. In the first stage, I was myself, high in this room, listening to a song. I came to realize the second stage was something in my subconscious, something primordial -- something to the effect of: we are one consciousness, breathing, throbbing, clustered into nodes; yet seperated by our houses, our relationships, our societal statuses, our self worth. The third stage was death. My "mantra" was more of a phrase I kept repeating mentally: Breathe. Just breathe. Just breathe and you will not die. I came to the conclusion that death was inevitable. I will die, everything I ever cared about will die, my own lineage will die out, but that is the way. The fourth stage was characterized by visual distortions, recursive loops inside of other recursive loops, a combination of the other stages but with regret for every wrong I've done; a constant build up of pressure under me, as if my "soul" wanted to explode out of me like a rocket. I felt childlike, naive, and completely alien. The fifth stage seemed to be transendence. Removed from the world as it is, yet remaining in the world, but not as myself, but as looking within myself from without myself. Not something that is easy to put into words without rambling (which is what this entire essay is turning out to be). It felt linked to the third stage, going back to death, but with less fear. Even if I die, the world will continue to be. If this at all seems illogical, bear in mind that the stages progressed 1 through 4, repeating, until the fifth, at which I yelled at Bellingshausen to turn off the music! I couldn't take it. He gave me some Diazepam. It was absolutely terrifying and I never wish to experience it again. I felt as if something inside of me had died to never return. I wanted to isolate myself from the light and sounds of the room, so I laid on his roommate's bed. I planned on returning. I didn't.

T plus 4 hours. Calm washed over me, but it wasn't over. The fear had subsided, but the redose I had taken was reaching it's peak. I don't know if I was crying in the bed, but emotionally it felt the same. I did not have many visual hallucinations up until this point, which I think was triggered by the darkness of the room. The ceiling of the room gradually slid away, sliding up, until there was nothing above me but darkness. No God to speak of, no higher power, no nothing. Just myself and emptiness. Thin white lines began to draw themselves above me, as if Euclid's formula was playing out before my eyes. No colors but white and black, no faces, no sound, just lines, etching themselves. The depth perception distortion returned, but on another level. I could see for miles, and miles... And there was nothing.

T plus 13 hours. I awoke on my back. The ceiling was normal again, everything was normal again! I was not quite baseline, and even now (T plus 15 hours) I still don't feel quite right. I feel I summed it up in the car ride home, paraphrasing "To be AND not to be, that is the answer to the question." What I can say for sure is that I have incredible respect for this chemical, and no plans to touch it again in the near future.

Do forgive my ramblings. I'm going to take a cold shower and try to make sense of it all.

Thanks for reading.

John S
01/16/12