Burning Man 16: Don't Try This At Home, Folks

I'm just going to skirt the issue of drug abuse by claiming NO ONE ELSE IN THE CAMP did any. I ate it all, except for what I gave to some other people in other camps (this will figure in later, with the story of Sketchy Bill, should I decide to tell it). If people start acting weird (and believe me, they do), you can draw your own conclusions--but for the record, it was all me.

There are two ways of talking about eating acid. The first is by massaging the number you took (almost always in an upward direction) based on some very subjective ideas such as the potency of the drug and who you're telling the story to. I hate this--there's nothing worse than being at a party and being stuck with the guy who decides I'll believe he ever took 20 hits of real, live LSD.

Unfortunately, I'm stuck--because at the end of this trip I DID take a massive amount of LSD, substantially more than 20, and you're just going to have to take me at my word on that. Why didn't I die? Well, several reasons:

1) I was at Burning Man--it's hard to get too mentally overloaded (once you get acclimated) because it's all too crazy to be real, ie, this is a rare moment when you can just sit back and enjoy the ride.

2) I was pretty much soaked in LSD from Tuesday night onward, with brief interludes of mushrooms and E. As some of you may know, it takes time for your body to recuperate, so you have to eat twice or three times the amount of what you did last time, just to have any effect. So it wasn't like taking 50 tabs the first time you'd ever done it, get it?

3) This stuff had been sitting around in a ziploc bag for a week, in an extremely hot and dry environment. You have to take care of your drugs, man, and there was really no way to take the right kind of care out there. What I'm saying here is that they weren't fresh, which means they weren't as strong.

So I've got to think about how I'm going to present this: I hate people who exaggerate, but I've already done so in the last post: I distinctly remember taking only three, but I just told you I did a half dozen. It's a dangerous precedent. The problem is, though, that if I hew to the idea that -I- did everything illegal, then those of you with your scratch paper at home aren't going to come up with the right number at the end of the game. If I'm completely accurate in my storytelling. A quandary indeed.

I think I'm just going to tell the story, and to hell with the consequences. Those of you who want to fact-check me on this stuff, well, you're just going to have to deal with a little poetic license.

Jeez, what a wasted post. I'll do a little work around the office and then try and get some narrative up, OK?