What did you do this weekend?

I took a trip alright. Story time.

I mentioned I had a half-dose of magic mushrooms for the first time a couple months back. This time, however, I took 4 grams instead of 1.5 grams. I went a bit high because I wanted to see what the deal was with the hallucinations, only got a little whiff of them last time and I liked it.

I had a friend coming over who hadn't tripped on mushies before but wanted to try them. The plan was for him to pop by and we'd take the full dose and hang out for a day. He calls me up while he's on the road and tells me he ate them while he was driving, and I should eat mine before he gets here. (wtf!) So I wolf them down and wait for him to show up.

The problem was, this friend had the weight loss surgery where they disconnect your stomach. His mushies went directly into his small intestine, so he just barely made it here before he had an aggressive liftoff. Neither one of us thought of that and I feel like I should have. They hit him like a train much faster than they did for me. The usual one hour onset was, for him, about twenty minutes. He was a bit panicked and had a rough first hour (including those annoying muscle/activity loops) but after that it was fine.

I spent some time just chilling out in a clover patch in the backyard watching the clouds through the trees, and it was great. Just sitting on the deck and watching the lawn reveal its colors in the sunlight was incredible. It's a view I get every day and I feel like I only saw it for the first time on Friday. Normal vision/color is so washed out compared to that, it's like real life is black and white and you don't get to see the real colors of things until those shrooms are in your head. Now I know what solarpunk needs to look like, but film can never capture those colors. Reminded me a bit of cerenkov radiation in a nuclear reactor, same kind of eldritch glow, but on everything being hit by sunlight.

I had some pretty spectacular visuals this time. I wonder if my aphantasia has some effect on how I process hallucinations. The world went into high-contrast mode and everything I looked at that should have been stationary was moving a bit, the 'breathing' effect you see people talk about. I did have some genuine not-there hallucinations, but it wasn't at all what I expected.

I'd hallucinate for example that some small insect flew up near my face, try to focus on it, and it'd fly away. I was wearing a wide-brimmed hat to keep the real bugs away - for a few minutes there I was swatting at the non-real ones like an idiot. Audio hallucinations were just small things, like hearing a mosquito an inch from my ear that wasn't there. After the first couple times that happened I could easily tell the difference between real/fake. The not-there stuff looked rather like those 3D images you see in those hidden image posters. Semi-transparent, small, and likely to run away if you try hard to focus on them.

There was something incredibly... strange about it. When you're tripping like that you really get a sense of how bad and narrow our interpretations of the world are through our senses. Watching my brain present me with a fiction through sight, and then taking time to really look at that those tiny fictions, catching them when they fade in or out of perception, was really interesting. I feel like I trust my senses just a bit less now, and that's a good thing.

The trip lasted about six hours. I think the bad part of it, by far, is that the psilocybin has a tendency to place you into both thought and action loops. Worse still, anything you're doing right now that you're happy with will bore you to death within five minutes. It was utterly impossible to sit and chill on this stuff in front of a screen or while listening to music. Any attempts to do so would start that irritating introspective slide. Sleep is similarly impossible, it will not let you sleep, or even lie down long or sit still in a chair for more than a minute. The solution was simple, of course - get off my ass and move around.

I feel like I have a greater appreciation for what my autistic grand-niece's perspective is like after this trip. For a little while, my ability to focus became very similar to hers. Was I really like that as a child? I certainly don't remember it at this age. It was very cool to experience that for a little while.

We came down from the trip as the sun was setting, and set off a bunch of fireworks in the driveway (and yes, those are infinitely better if you have that shine in your vision). Not long after that the high abated, and we spent the evening playing Betrayal which is an awesome tabletop game.

This stuff is so different from drugs like cannabis or alcohol. Taking mushies is like walking a tightrope, you need to manage your high and keep mentally on top of it for the entire trip - there's no taking it back or turning it off again. I am very glad I did a half-dose the first time to prepare for the full dose. I'd already learned how to deal with it over a much shorter time frame and less intense trip, so when I was on the full ride this time I was very confident and had no trouble managing it.

That said, the other 30% of the experience is annoying as hell - rubbery limbs, muscles that twitch like your leg does when you are tired in the evenings, lack of focus... I can see why this drug gets on top of some people. Definitely not the sort of thing you want to do in public. Sign me up for a better version of this drug in the future - I like the mental effects, but the physical ones not so much. I wonder if it's possible to avoid them.

The afterglow is still on right now a couple days later - I feel like a million bucks. It definitely kicks depression to the curb on a long timeframe, far longer than the actual trip lasts. I think I'll limit this drug to at most once a year. It's fun once in a while but the trips have that annoying component. There were times I was watching the clock. My friend enjoyed it once he got past the hard liftoff but he has the same opinion. Definitely clear your calendar for the entire day and have some not-high people around if you ever decide to try this stuff. Also, take it with some food, it slows the onset and softens it. I did it on an empty stomach and my guts were churning.

Edit/Update: I did not take four grams here. It was one quarter ounce - or 7.28 grams. Tripped up by the metric system. I got the hero's journey without the pressure. It did not dent my aphantasia. I did some googling and apparently for at least one person, Ayahuasca cured their aphantasia. I'm adding that trip to my bucket list. Psilocybin hasn't got the juice, but it does make for a lovely weekend.

Elotes, tamales, tacos, horchata, and drag queens in the Texas heat!

My favorite elotes place has been looking for a new permanent spot for a couple of months now after getting kicked out of their old place and doing the occasional popup in the meantime. This weekend there was an Latinx LGBTQ+ popup event with them included, so went to that with the core friend group. Much fun was had, much delicious food was consumed, much respect for drag queens dancing in the heat in amazing (and amazingly hot) costumes was shown.

Sunday evening was an attempt to take my father out for belated father's day dinner (I don't do popular holidays on the day of to avoid the unnecessary crowds) only to find that somewhere between me clicking the reservations button on the restaurant's website and it being submitted the location I chose got switched from my local area to one on the east coast and since they were packed the only other option was to submit a reservation for 30 minutes prior to close which just sounds like hell for everyone involved.

Went for a walk and stayed in a while in a field taking pictures of insects. Having a macro lens is a lot of fun, you can really spend hours try to catch bugs (there's so many of them in the right place) :

https://imgur.com/a/WzbMPqH

Downside is that I got bitten by mosquitoes, my legs are all red today...

I went to the Unicorn Festival with my sister and her kid and another niece I took with me. It was definitely geared towards kids, but there was neat stuff, lots of vendors to check out, Princesses and unicorns abound. The nieces enjoyed it, they're both 6 so it was right up their alley. It kind of got stormy but we'd already been there a couple of hours so we beat feet as the rain and wind picked up. But it seemed like they had a good time!

I also installed my first test blind from my company, and I'm just so shocked at how much it improves the look and atmosphere of the room, like holy shit. It makes me want them in the other rooms of my apartment lol.

Here in the PNW, I’ve been sitting in the dark in the one room small enough to be effectively air conditioned with my small portable unit, while fighting existential dread about climate change. Supposed to hit 109 today. It’s been rough.

Saw the first live music I’ve seen since the pandemic started. A band of our friends played at a record shop in the afternoon. It was very chill.

Bought a raspberry pi, put Ubuntu Focal on it, tried to set up a Wordpress website and hit a snag with MySQL. It's my weekend project, and I want to try to connect it to the internet somehow, probably through Azure (since I'm studying for a couple certs).

I hung out with my brother and his fiancee last night, we watched Bo Burnham's "Inside," which was really cool, I think.

My cousins came to town with their families, so we had a get together in the back yard with pizza and root beer floats.

I got a meal planning app and tried it out. It seems pretty good. Last night we had rice bowls with beans, guacamole, and salsa. The recipe had jalapeños, which turned out too hot for our mild palates. Will adjust if I make it again.