Caught Halfway

I had met A-Boy and Dallas for the first time at a co-worker's house. Dennis was my co-worker and is one of the most intelligent people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. A-Boy and Dallas, however, came across as the most intelligent meth heads I had ever met. I felt sorry for them. At the time I met them I had been out of the speed scene for almost two years. Meth being one of the only truly neurotoxic substances on the planet was nothing I wanted anywhere near me. Our mutual friend, Dennis, had told me he wanted me to try 5-MeO-DMT because he wanted to hear about my reaction to the drug. A-Boy thought it was hilarious that I was going to try it. He said I would wake up and be overwhelmed with joy as soon as I realized I hadn't shat myself. He went on to say it was the most terrifying drug experience of his life and there was no way one could prepare for it.

"Dude, you're going to smoke it and be like, 'oh it tastes like plastic' and then you're going to be all like, 'oh God, oh God, oh God, please don't let me shit myself, not in front of anybody' and then you're going to be all like, 'AAAHHHHHH' and when you wake up and you realize you didn't shit yourself, you're going to be totally stoked."

He further dramatized his story by flopping back on the ground and flailing his arms around while screeching. Obviously he was twacked out of his mind, and talking just to hear himself, so I thought. I didn't know him well at this time, so I kind of blew him off.

It was the following Wednesday and I had just returned home from class. I had recently traded some pot to a friend for some 5-MeO-DMT. 5-MeO is a little different from its brother, DMT. The addition of the methoxy group to the molecule allows it to more easily pass through the blood brain barrier and be used by the brain. This explains its considerably lower threshold and dose-response curve. Dennis had measured out 20mg (+/- 2mg ) and wrapped it up in foil for me. My fiancée was at work and would be there until much later that evening. I figured it was the best time to try this. I was alone, in a safe environment, and had nothing to do. I didn't have anything to smoke it out of though. As previously mentioned my meth days were long over with and I was never a fan of smoking stuff off of aluminium foil. I needed a pipe.

I went down the street to the local head shop where there were signs prominently displayed against any mention of illegal drug use. I walked in and was greeted. The guy asked if I needed anything, I said glass. "Right back here," he said. He started showing me glass for smoking pot. I was not interested. I'm wondering how I ask for the kind of pipe I need without mentioning drugs. I said, in probably my unintentionally dorkiest voice, "Yes, I um.. I need a glass pipe more for vaporizing a hydrochloride salt so that one could inhale the fumes." The guy just blinked, shrugged, and replied with, "I have no idea what you're talking about." Shit, let's just be more direct about it, I thought. Let's put it into terms he can understand. "Ok, I need a buddy bowl for smoking ice." He understood this, walked over to a glass case, pulled two out and tried to go into his salesman talk about how one was thicker than the other, blah, blah, blah. I took the cheaper of the two for $7 and left.

Upon returning home, like a kid waking up to Christmas presents, I went into the bed room, dumped the little orange crystals into the bowl, got a butane lighter, and started to melt them down. I pulled out the stop clock started the timer and set it on the night stand. As soon as vapours started to form I turned the lighter up a little higher and started to suck the fumes down. It tasted like plastic smells when it melts. My lungs didn't feel like they were burning, not so much like DMT. Instead, they felt like someone was filling them up with concrete. I inhaled all of the vapours and held them in for as long as I could stand before I exhaled. Almost instantly the hair on my arms stood up and I heard beeping and a series of electrical chirps. I was overwhelmed with terror. I felt more disassociated from my physical self than I had ever felt in my life.
"OH GOD, OH GOD, I'm going to die. Nancy Reagan was right. I should have just said no. Drugs are bad. I'm going to be like this for the rest of my fucking life. Shit, this is horrible. Why did I ever do this? Oh shit, fuck, please dear God, don't let me die. Not like this..." All of these thoughts and more went through my mind more quickly than I thought possible. Was time expanding and getting longer?
As quickly as it had started the panic stopped. I was staring through the nearly transparent curtains over the bedroom window and the sunlight was shining through white. My visual canvas became washed over with white light, my head was light, but my body felt made of rod-iron. I fell back onto the bed and everything faded to white. Gravity then lost it's hold on my body, but still had an effect on my clothes. I could feel them tugging on me as I floated inches above the bed and gazed out the window. My mind was flooded with thought. I saw all the positive experiences of my entire life flash before my eyes: first baseball game I ever won, my 4th birthday party, getting straight A's, my first kiss, winning my first Taekwondo tournament, my friends, my family, feeling loved. My brain soared. I had never been able to think this quickly or freely. I felt completely disconnected from my physical body, the physical plane all together. I was tranquil and had never felt so content. My mind stopped with the positive imagery. I was just hovering there above the bed, encompassed in perfect lucidity. For a moment I even felt omniscient.

Gravity began to set in and I started falling away from the light. The bed wasn't under me any more. I fell down what I could only describe as a dark tunnel. The light became a pin point at the other end. Then I realized I wasn't falling any more, rather, I was being pulled. I felt these ominous black coils or tentacles wrap around me and I was being pulled down through this dark, oily fluid. I couldn't move, I couldn't breathe, and my entire body felt like every nerve ending was being stimulated at once. I felt like I was on fire. I tried to struggle, to fight, to get away, to swim through this muck, but nothing. I was completely powerless. If the light was a peaceful heaven, this was truly hell. Everything negative that had happened to me in my life was flashing through my head. Every wrong I had done or which had been done to me, they were all flipping through my head like pictures. It was like sitting in front of a psychologist showing me Rorschach blots. "Now, what did you do wrong here? What did you think you did that made this happen to you?" It wasn't my voice asking me these questions. I was hearing another narrator. I didn't like her. I came to own and accept the negativity that had happened in my life. I took all these instances was able to analyze them and accept their validity. Whether it was my fault or someone else's all together, it was there and there was nothing I could do about it now. I was ok with them for the first time. After what seemed like hours in this muck and seeing the pictures and hearing the questions apparently the narrator felt she had tortured me enough or perhaps my owning of all the negativity in my life is what she wanted. I felt the coils restricting my movement release me. I could move, I could swim through this fluid now.

I still felt like I was drowning but the light came into focus. The closer I got to the light the more at ease I felt. My body emerged from the dark oil and I could see the light and feel its warmth. I was back in Nirvana. Now the curtains came back into focus. I felt my body settle into the bed. I emerged in a state of artificial mania. Everything had trails and the light was brighter than ever. This altered visual state was fast fading and gone after 30 seconds. I reached over to the night stand, grabbed the stop watch, and stopped the timer. What felt like a 5 hour journey was only 7 minutes. How could it have seemed so long? My only explanation for this was that much in the way a computer's clock keeps the time by the speed of the processor. The computer knows how many cycles it can push in a second, based on its settings, it knows how long a second is. Apparently someone had over-clocked my processor without changing the settings. So many more cycles or thoughts happened in a second than I was accusomed that I perceived time as being longer. That is my only explanation for such a strange occurrence. I was sweating a little and had never in my life felt hungrier, otherwise I was completely baseline. I ran to the kitchen, and made 3 turkey sandwiches. I ate them all as fast as I could and washed them down with a glass of milk. If 5-MeO-DMT threw me into heaven then pulled me into hell, then real life was stuck somewhere in the middle, just caught halfway.