Before the knife comes LSD

 Intended to blog on a not so wonderful knife event but today a memory surfaced in this old brain of mine and I can't refrain from writing about it.

Around 1972 or 73(I am guessing 73) I bought two tabs of Yellow Sunshine which was slang for a particularly popular form of LSD that hippies loved in the 60s, early 70s. I had never taken LSD but as an experimenter the idea sounded intriguing to me.

Picked up my friend(he was a pot smoking buddy too)at his house one morning on the way to school(daily carpool) and revealed the goodies.  We made it as far as campus(he lived only a few blocks away) but only drove around it before committing ourselves to going elsewhere. School would be skipped that day as we were going to take a trip. 

Subsequent to ingesting the yellow goodies we decided to smoke some pot to take the edge off things since it would be a while before the hippie stuff  hit our respective bloodstreams. The pot was strong and in no time we were already ascending.

This is where things go fuzzy. At some point we decided to drive out into the country and go east. I felt things were unsafe when I could no longer tell what color a light was at a given intersection. Oh, I could see greens, reds and yellows but what they signified escaped me at times!  And they were beginning to be accompanied by other colors!

Before that eastern excursion there was a must stop for gasoline. Yours truly and yours truly tripping at this point, went in to pay for gas. What I saw inside the store I will never know if  the vision was real, imagined or a combination. I suspect the latter.

 I extended a wad of cash to the clerk and a blue tinged midget held out a hand to receive it. Yeah. It gets worse.  His blue tinged arms were connected directly to his torso! There were no arms between the shoulders and elbows. It was as if the elbows were attached at said torso. Scary. How would you feel handing over cash and receiving change from a blue midget with deformed arms and not knowing if he were real or not?

Strangely enough, I don't recall any of the eastern excursion into the country other than at some point we decided to turn around before we got lost. Yep. Next up we were at the beautiful lake close to where I lived and worked. We decided to drive around it slowly. 

By this point things were more than heavy. We were in full blown trip mode and the best way I can describe it is as an extremely surreal dream. It was as if we had transcended into a wonderful land full of colors, reflections and all manner of intense amazement that words really just don't capture. My friend and I had ventured down the rabbit hole.  Would we see Alice?

 At what I recall as being the peak of my enjoyment, things got scary. "Did you see that", said the other rabbit hole occupant with a fearful tone of voice. "See what"?  "The ground opened up and laughed at me!" I said "yes" to pacify my rabbit hole partner but his fear created fear in me. Madness was upon us!

As I vacillated back and forth between watching the lake road and my increasingly fearful friend I noticed his eyes. They were lost. He was lost. More and more his mumbles about this and that became unintelligible. Then I could not comprehend him at all. He began to write on paper to communicate(thank God for school supplies). Everything he wrote(that which made sense) scared the hell out of me. He was having a bad trip.  My own good trip was gone as the only thing I could focus on was him now.  He was not calm. 

When he could no longer communicate by mouth or pencil I decided to head to the hospital. Scary, scary stuff. He was now paralyzed, frozen in his seat. Gone. I really wished Alice would show up. As I got nearer to the hospital he shrieked and the closer I got the louder he became. It was more than obvious he didn't want to go in and how was I going to get a paralyzed, shrieking at ear piercing levels person out of the car and into the hospital? The dream had become a nightmare. 

Inspiration. Maybe if I went to the grocery store where I worked I could get some advice from another pot smoking, drug taking friend. I knew he worked the day shift so I pulled in and watched the doors waiting for him to bring out a customers groceries(they did that in those days). Suddenly he came out and I waved him down.

He took his 15 minute break and the two of us somehow got him out of the car to stand up. Amazing. Mr. Grocery Store friend started telling jokes and it became apparent that Mr. Paralyzed friend could now take small steps. Hmmm. We slowly walked behind the store and then we started hearing little bits of giggling.Giggles became laughter!  He came out of it!  Back to the car and off to our respective homes!

Later my girlfriend asked "where were you and so and so all day?" She had no clue I smoked pot let alone do anything else. Not wanting to lie to her because after all I was an honest guy, went to church with her and she was so sweet. So I told her the truth. 

We went to the lake today.