Optimistic Nihilism

by David Landers

  I eventually did do LSD, at sixteen, a seasoned stoner by the time and a pretty good drinker as well. I had been talking to my experienced friend Chris about it for a while in preparation, our conversations feeling more like some sort of spiritual consultation than anything else. At the time, Chris worked (actually, lived) at Theater Gallery in Deep Ellum, the most punk venue in the punk scene in Dallas in the 1980s and early 1990s. One night I had made arrangements to spend the night out in hopes to make it to my first big show there, Bad Brains. As fate would have it, the show was sold out and Chris couldn’t sneak me in, given the significance of the event and my status as a mere wannabe. However, he was able to score some LSD, so we decided I would do that instead once the show was over and Chris was relieved. He would be my sober “guide,” something that was highly recommended among the more responsible acid-using crowd. The stuff that we were doing in Dallas in the late 80s always came on little pieces of paper, about a quarter-inch square. My first had a relatively boring graphic, just alternating orange and blue stripes. Except mine was just orange stripes, because it had accidentally had been through this guy Brian’s washing machine and the blue had washed away. I think Brian just gave it to us, or maybe it was $5. We didn’t even know if it was going to work.

  I waited around outside for the show to end and for Chris to be free, smoking and drinking out in the streets, but not as much as usual because I didn’t want to pollute the adventure to come. We went back to Chris’s house some time after midnight and I finally swallowed it. I had an experience that would become very familiar, although the first time was the best, in ways.

  For the first 30 to 45 minutes, nothing happened except natural giddiness and nervousness about what was to come—and, in this case, if anything was going to happen at all, given the washing machine factor. However, after about an hour something salient and novel did come over me, although its quality was somewhat unexpected: a discombobulated feeling of numbness and stupidity. I wasn’t discouraged, though, as my guide informed me this would be transient. As with most of the LSD experience, the feeling is difficult to describe but I somehow felt like my brain was purging, doing the neural equivalent of a colon cleanse to get rid of the old and to prepare for the new.

  Sure enough, the numbness only lasted for a few minutes until it was replaced by the opposite and more compelling and enduring sensation: My mind became extraordinarily clear, centered and lucid, in the present moment, eventually to a degree that was far beyond what I had ever experienced before during any sort of non-LSD consciousness—including being born again at camp years before. As intensely spiritual as that experience had been, it was still an event that occurred on Earth, an event that could be adequately conveyed in words, whereas LSD was otherworldly, very far from describable. A real writer, Aldous Huxley, came closest to capturing the profundity of psychedelia with words:

  “There seems to be plenty of it,” was all I would answer, when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time. Plenty of it, but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant. I could, of course, have looked at my watch; but my watch, I knew, was in another universe. My experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration or alternatively of a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse.3

  “Popping” was the best I could ever come up with, to describe this sensation that each moment was inexplicably more profound than the last, despite being perfectly convinced that the last was as incredible as a moment could be. But now I prefer “a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse.”

  As dramatic as these transitions were, I felt surprisingly comfortable during them. Any previous concerns about having a “bad trip” felt so remote, grossly unfounded, utterly ridiculous. Bad trips were off in some other universe, with Huxley’s watch. Clearly, this consciousness was the right one; the other one that I had been in for 16 years was the one of which to be leery. I would always use derivatives of the word rapture to attempt to describe the feeling, and was so overcome with it that I just sat there, mouth agape, looking around at the room, myself, and at Chris, speechless except able to utter an occasional “Wow …” or “Dude …” Everything looked so amazing and beautiful, and it all felt so … rapturous. Chris was smiling the whole time, because he knew. He would occasionally ask me, “Isn’t tripping cool?” And I would just say something, slowly, like, “I had no idea …” Indeed, no amount of book reading or interviewing seasoned users had prepared me for this.

  Similar to the rapturous feelings and sensations of enhanced consciousness, the visual hallucinations on LSD felt surprisingly comfortable, ego-syntonic, as some psychologists say—that is, a part of me, not alien or intrusive. The most simple scene on LSD, Chris’s living room even, was much more beautiful than anything I had seen in real life otherwise, whether landscapes, beaches, mountains, titties, whatever. Everything within eyesight—the floor, the rug on it, the walls, pictures, vases, and knickknacks—was more resolved, every color was brighter and more saturated, so much so that many colors seemed like they had never been perceived before. Every surface was literally vibrating, but comfortably, with a life that I had never noticed before but that had obviously been there all along. The longer I looked at anything the more alive and hypnotic it became, relatively expansive surfaces such as walls, floors, and ceilings being particularly vibrant tapestries for hallucination. At first glance, such a surface might be merely emitting an aura or shimmering, but if I held my gaze it would suddenly come alive and begin swirling, waving, and melting, somehow depending on its actual physical traits on Earth. Regardless, it was mesmerizing, beautiful, and as real-looking as real could be. There was not even the slightest sense of intoxication—although I never forgot I was on a drug. But it was hard to imagine how anything would look the same again once it was over. I’m forced to borrow from Huxley again: “I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence … ‘This is how one ought to see, how things really are.’ And yet there were reservations. For if one always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else.”4

  Evident without any provocation whatsoever were what we all called “tracers,” that is, the smeared afterimage of anything that moved across your visual field. Whenever Chris walked in front of me, from one side to the other, he would leave a continuous trail of himself that could grow to several feet long, then once he stopped, it would catch up to him and be absorbed with such salience that I could almost feel or hear it smacking his reality. With a lit cigarette in a dark room we could readily create what looked like ribbon dancing or time-lapse photographs of kids waving sparklers on the Fourth of July.

  Chris did a great job at being my guide, usurping Patsy, you know, the woman who had taken me on my relatively measly spiritual adventure at camp previously. He kept showing me stuff that I might enjoy, like album art, books, trinkets, and rocks. Eventually, once he became convinced I was comfortable, he raised the bar a little. He told me that in order to really see what LSD can do, you have to sit still and stare at something so that it has time to manifest. He suggested I stare at my hand. It didn’t sound like a strange request at all at the time; in fact, it sounded like a great idea. So I sat down, him right next to me, and I just stared at my hand, palm facing me, fingers fanned out comfortably.

  After a few seconds, the skin on my hand began to undulate, to pulsate, as if something were inside it, moving and wanting out. Again, it wasn’t scary at all—just mesmerizing. The undulations gave way to melting, my skin a river of wax running down my wrist and out of sight, but a fantastic, M.C. Escher-type perpetual melting so that there was always more hand to come, never any blood, muscle or bone. Over time, this gave way to more idiosyncratic hallucinations, so that eventually five little eyeballs formed, one on each of the most distal joints of my five fingers, you know, where your fingerprints are. Each looked like the eye on the back of a dollar bill, just an eye, looking at me, but they were ali
ve, each blinking at its own pace, independent from the others, and each seemed to have its own little expression or personality even. I was completely enthralled by this scene, like I have never been enthralled before, and for some reason it was funny. I just giggled at the magnificence of it all. Then, each eye morphed further, so that they were no longer eyes but some other living shapes—my fingertips became little clams, like those barnacles that attach to garbage in the Gulf. As the eyes that had been blinking before, the clams were snapping, little mouths that didn’t make any noise, and each continued to have its own personality of sorts. I kept giggling; I must have had the most wonderful smile on my face.

  Later, when I was “peaking,” the hallucinations would come much more readily, requiring less staring to get them going. I remember us going into the kitchen because Chris wanted to see if I’d like to try some food. While he was digging through the fridge, I perused the little dining/bill-writing table in the corner and found an 8 x 10 piece of paper, only it was filled with a magnificent design, akin to an oriental rug—curly, ornate, symmetric with paisleys, but the detail was so fine I couldn’t begin to speculate how it was drawn. I studied it, soaked it in while Chris kept digging through the fridge. The picture looked unworldly, like it must have been printed by alien technology, but I realized I had taken a drug and of course it wasn’t from outer space. Still, I asked Chris, incredulously, “Dude, where did you get this?” He looked at me, incredulous himself—I think he thought for a moment I was joking—and said, “That’s a blank sheet of paper.” And apparently it was. I put it down kinda abruptly, startled. Good news is, that was the most unsettled I became all night, those few seconds.

  Turns out, food is kinda gross when you’re tripping. I can imagine someone converting to vegetarianism after the experience. Some things, like oranges and orange juice, are orgasmic, but meat is just gross on LSD, reminiscent of how it’s depicted in a Jan Svankmeyer film (I bet that dude is “experienced”). And you’re not horny, either. I loved to touch things on acid, but never wanted to touch another person, especially their goo. People look ugly, usually, but in a comical way, not necessarily frightening. They’re all bulbous and meaty and start to melt if you look at them too long. And your own skin feels kinda grimy; all things considered, the last thing on your mind is sex. You’re way, way beyond it when on LSD. It becomes a trivial thing, something that lesser beings do because they don’t have this.

  Eventually, when the sun was about to start coming up, Chris felt comfortable enough to leave me unsupervised and decided to go to sleep. We both got into his big bed, slumber party-style. He told me not to leave the room because his folks would be getting up soon, and he fell fast asleep. I just lay there and kept having the time of my life. I took a hand-held mirror with me to bed and just stared into it. My face, like my hand earlier, began to look kinda peculiar, as if it wasn’t mine anymore, like I was wearing a mask but it was part of me at the same time. Then, in what was now a well-lit room, as clear as day, that mask (my face) began to distort. My upper lip became a huge harelip, grotesque but hilarious. I had to strain to not laugh out loud and wake Chris, but I was literally shaking with stifled laughter as my harelip kept growing, proceeding up to my nose, then through it and beyond, all the way between my eyes and up behind my longish hair. My eyes began to crawl about my face similarly until the face in the mirror became wholly unrecognizable as a face. I shook my head and it started over.

  The hallucinations finally began to dwindle and I could tell that I was coming back to the world, which was an experience in itself. I had been so far away that I had kinda forgotten what regular reality was like. I guess that’s why they call it “tripping.” Despite how profound it had all been, I had had my fill and was ready to be back, back in the world of obligation, worry, and pretension. It’s strange: LSD may be the only drug that can truly be satisfying, where you sincerely feel that you’ve had enough.

  On the other hand, there was also a slight sense of sadness, because this had clearly been the most captivating eight hours or so of my life. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit it, but yeah, there was a feeling of revelation, as if LSD had been waiting for me all this time and that it was my new best friend. It was the most marvelous thing that had ever happened to anyone, and resonated with me perfectly like nothing else before or since.

  Important to note, even though LSD made my salvation at church summer camp years before pale in comparison, it didn’t diminish the value of that previous experience. At least for the time being, the glory of tripping existed in parallel—not in lieu of—the glory of Jesus. If anything, the net effect of having taken LSD only raised the bar of my expectations of heaven. If God would allow me to have the psychedelic experience on Earth for five ridiculous dollars, via 200 millionths of a gram of a drug derived from a fungus that grows on rye, of all things, imagine what must await me after death! Certainly, heaven would ultimately make even LSD pale in comparison.

  Despite being so smitten, I only tripped about thirty times over the next three years or so. It just didn’t feel like something that should be summoned frivolously. I respected it, even revered it, the way boy scouts are taught to respect the wild, like bears and rapid rivers and freezing mountainsides. These things are beautiful and magnificent but you gotta behold them cautiously or they can turn on you and even destroy you.

  Alas, I eventually became reckless and broke the cardinal rule of tripping: I took some acid impulsively, and sure enough had a trip that was as hellish as the first had been wonderful.

  Everyone learns in LSD 101 that you don’t take it under certain circumstances, like when you’re upset, anxious, or depressed—or when you have obligations in the near future. My mistake was that I took it one evening when I knew I had to be home later that same night and there simply wasn’t enough time to let it run its course; I was 19 and still had something like a curfew, which was definitely in effect that night. Tripping in my house was just a terrible idea; I might as well be doing it at school or at a job interview—way too risky. If nothing else, my house was just too small, and my room was kinda in the middle of it, a converted den that also served as a bit of a thoroughfare. There were two doors to my room, one on each end, and I couldn’t even close them because the window air conditioning unit that cooled the whole house was in my room. There was nowhere for me to hide in my house, a luxury I always envied of my peers.

  I had actually tripped the night before, coincidentally with Chris. We had spent the entire day having a great time at the Galleria, one of the fancier shopping malls in Dallas, in the north, Ross Perot part of town. Without having slept that night, the next day I was telling my homeboys about the Galleria experience, which got them excited so that they wanted to trip that evening themselves. So, we went out and got some more acid, including a hit for me, in the stupidity of my sleep deprivation. It was “Saturn,” this notoriously “serious” shit with a picture of the planet on it. I think it was around eight o’clock when we “dropped,” and I had to be home by two a.m., not negotiable. I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking.

  After an hour had passed and I didn’t feel anything I made another mistake by beginning to hope that it wasn’t going to work. I had never tried to trip two days in a row before, but I had read that we build tolerance to hallucinogens very quickly. Maybe I wouldn’t get off at all or perhaps if I did it’d be relatively mild. Contrasting the hope that it might not work was a wish that it would hurry up and start, if it was going to happen at all. I had to be home in about five hours—if it starts later versus sooner, I’m gonna be peaking right about the time I have to go home! Fuck.

  We got in the car and drove around to do the usual playground circuit, to play on swings and look at the trees and stars and stuff. Tragically, I eventually did begin to get off, a record two hours after I took the acid. And the initial weird, unsettled feelings never gave way to comfort as they had thirty times before.

  I started feeling anxious, but decided not to say anyth
ing, partially out of simple courtesy: I just didn’t want to bring anyone else down. Not entirely irrational, I was kinda afraid that if I told them I was having a bad time it might be contagious and cause someone else to become upset, too.

  As the hallucinations started, there was an unpleasant tone that I hadn’t experienced before. Things were ugly as they often are on acid, but for the first time it wasn’t cartoon-y and comical. Ugly was finally bad. Everywhere we went, everything had this moss growing on it—a damp, greenish-black moss that was thick and disgusting. I didn’t want to see it, but it was everywhere, on the ground, on cars, and even on my friends.

  Miraculously, over time, the anxiety and tension seemed to level off and maybe even wane. Perhaps getting through a couple of hours without the others noticing increased my confidence; they were clearly having a good time, and I never had any paranoid feelings involving them directly. I was beginning to feel pretty sure I wasn’t going to have a bad trip, the kind you read about in the newspaper or hear via urban myth. I had only been close, thank God.

  When it was time for the guys to take me home, I actually thought I might be alright. Perhaps once I was alone the pressure of having to keep my freak-out a secret would dissipate and I could just ride out the rest in peace. All I had to do was avoid my parents, which shouldn’t be too much to ask. They were almost always asleep this late.

  When we got to my house, the lights were indeed out and my folks were apparently asleep, which was a momentous relief. I don’t know what the fuck I would have done if they had been awake; probably would have just ran away. There’s no way I could have faced either of them like that. The cat would have finally come out of the bag, whatever that would have meant.