Strippers and Acid 6: An Aside

I think it's important to give you guys some background on my feelings on LSD. Those of you who've read Sketchy Bill or Burning Man 19: Butterfly Girls probably have had your fill of this, but for the new people among you, here you go:

Taking LSD is one of the most intense experiences you're liable to have in your life, unless you wake up every morning and BASE jump into your cigarette boat to get to work for the CIA. It permanently changes the way you look at the world, and for me and the majority of my friends that change has been for the better.

But again, it's very, very intense, and it should always be used with great care in very controlled situations. Unless you're just nuts, like me, in which case you find ways to challenge your mental strength of will by doing deliberately crazy stuff like going to the mall to play hacky sack with cops. Or Jim, who gobbled a bunch before getting on a plane to Dallas several years ago. Now, that doesn't sound TOO difficult, until you think about being strapped into a seat (a window seat, at that) in a cigar tube full of complete strangers, feeling every vibration and bump along the way. And the takeoff g's would probably cause my head to implode.

So it's not for everybody, and I've heard it can cause real and permanent damage to people's psyches. Thus, giving LSD to a rational, aware person is a little risky. Giving it to someone who doesn't KNOW they've been dosed: that's downright criminal.

Let me clarify this: I've never, ever slipped anyone any sort of drug without their full and complete knowledge and consent. People that do this run the risk of causing problems for the dosee, compounded with the weird shit that person's liable to do before he or she realizes that it's just a drug. Think about it--what would YOU do if, on a normal Saturday afternoon, trees began to sparkle and blinds began to breathe like fish gills? Or, hey, what if you were DRIVING? Wow, that's too cool! Billy Ray's gonna be so fucked up!

Assholes. Complete and utter fucktards. To do this to a young woman who obviously wasn't quite right in the head to begin with is truly reprehensible.

And to make matters worse, I was apparently the only person around who had any experience dealing in bad trips, or with people who were freaked out. Most of the boys didn't seem to care one way or the other, and Jim's a little too...intense...to do much good.

Even better, the acid couldn't have been in the champagne for more than 3 or 4 minutes--for chrissake, the paper wasn't even soaked yet. I have a hard time believing that this girl got enough acid in the one or two sips she no doubt took before she saw the paper floating around in her glass to make a difference, except in her mind. Perhaps she'd had a bad trip before. Perhaps she'd heard about bad trips. Whatever the case, she was completely geebered out and quite sure she was going to die, which, thankfully, is something I have some experience dealing with (not dying, obviously, but THINKING I'm going to die). The bad news is that getting over that generally requires a quiet place with one person's undivided attention, which isn't exactly where we were going. All I could hope for was convincing the other morons to go inside the club and leave me alone with her, so she didn't march right to the first payphone and finger me as a big drug dealer. Maybe, if we hurried, I could get her calmed down before the other ten hits of acid met up with the first five and started making balloon animals with my visual cortex. It was going to be close.