The Year Was 1987
Okay, so clearly I'm not doing these chapters in order. Oh well. Here goes!
There was a time, believe it or not, when I was an innocent 12 year old kid who had no personal experience with drugs of any kind. I think it's important to mention that, because I was a little behind the curve compared to other hood rats when it came to basic knowledge about mind altering substances.
I had a good friend, God rest his soul, who used to get high off air duster and super glue all the time. I never really understood what he got out of it because there was no way that I was going to do that. At least, not intentionally!
That Fateful Day
I remember it was a particularly beautiful day that summer. I had just come home from spending hours at the local game room playing Bad Dudes on the arcade. It was an especially epic day because the owner of the business had just installed a new record into the Jukebox. It was Guns n Roses Appetite for Destruction. The whole day Sweet Child o Mine was on a loop. It was the coolest band anyone had ever heard and we were loving it.
I remember riding my bmx bike home singing 'Where do we goooo now, where do we gooo' over and over again. When I got home, my little brother was sitting on the front porch of our apartment looking at baseball cards. I dropped my bike carelessly on the lawn and walked up and sat next to him.
Jason: Hey Rick, do you even know who any of these players are?
Me: Dude, I hate baseball. I have no idea who any of them are.
Jason: Well, let me just try to see if you recognize some of the logos. I'll show you a card and cover the team name, then you try to guess what it is based on the ball cap.
Me: Okay, whatever. I'll give it a try.
He began getting together a stack of cards with all different teams. While he was doing that, I noticed a strong odor of gasoline. I turned around, and next to me was a large bush with a massive plastic container full of gasoline sitting under it.
I never knew why, but I always had a weird attraction to the smell of gas. I had no idea that it could 'get you high' or that there were actually people out there that used it in this way. I simply liked the smell. Boy was I about to learn.
The Evil Fumes
The sweet smell of the lawnmower fuel was drawing me in. I have no idea what the hell I was thinking, but I reached over, popped the lid off and took a little sniff. Ahhhh!
Jason: (looking oddly at me) What the hell dude? Whatever, anyway are you ready?
Me: (feeling slightly lightheaded) Yeah sure bro.. Let's do it
I put the can down and started looking at the cards and tried to guess a few. I remember doing horribly. But the tiny sniff that I took off the gas tank was making me feel giddy. I just started laughing every time I guessed the wrong team to my brother's annoyance.
He started getting unnecessarily pissed off at me for laughing at him, and yelled out the team name every time I got it wrong. One after the other. I started getting the urge to smell that gas again. I thought to myself, wow, how did I not know that smelling gas could make me feel this way? Why has no one told me this?
I grabbed the can, and this time wrapped my hand around the nozzle and blocked all the air out, breathing in as deeply as I could. Immediately after putting the container down, I was overcome with insane, indescribable euphoria. My brother was just staring at me with this WTF look on his face.
I stood up in absolute bliss and amusement.
Me: Dude! OMG hahahahaha.. Wow, this is incredible. All the colors.. Everything is so.. colorful!
Jason: Rick stop doing that, it can't be good!
Me: It's fine man.. I can't even tell you how crazy it feels.
I went out into the yard and looked down at the grass. At first, everything looked mostly normal, but the colors were extremely vivid. Kind of like one of those horrible real estate photos where the cameraman doesn't understand that it's possible to overdo HDR.
Trippin' Balls Time
Suddenly, things took a really weird turn. Everything was still extremely hilarious, but reality began to distort.... Big time.
As I was staring at the grass, the vivid colors suddenly became flat, unshaded vivid colors. Like instead of subtle color variances, every object became one precise color. As if the world turned into a series of cartoon cels, like Coyote and Roadrunner.
The grass became pure green, and the sky became pure blue. The sounds around me also became very 2 dimensional. As I looked up at the sky and brought my gaze back down toward the ground, I could see my own face in 3rd person with a big creepy smile, looking downward.
When my vision reached the ground, my feet were no longer there and neither was the grass. My feet were replaced with two battleships attached to my legs that seemed to be a mile long. The grass had bee replaced by an endless ocean, perfectly still reaching out to infinity in all directions.
For some reason, I was not immediately frightened by this but found it extremely hilarious. I lifted my eyes to look at my arms, but all I saw where these two wavy tubes that went in either direction into eternity. They wiggled around like those wacky waving tube-men you see at car lots.
I started to get a sensation of sinking on one side of my body so I quickly looked down. I noticed that the two ships were firing on each other and one was sinking quickly! Oh shit, I thought. I have to rescue my foot!
A Short Trip Back to Reality
After a few minutes of this madness, it all started to wear off and I was back to feeling just lightheaded and funny. My brother was still over by the door staring at me with quite a concerned look.
Jason: Dude! What is going on? Why are you dancing around the yard laughing?
Me: I can't explain it!! Hang on, I gotta go tell sis!
My sister is quite a few years older than me and was already moved out, living in an apartment just across the street. I don't know why I was compelled to do so, but I booked it over to her house and busted in the front door.
Me: Hey sis!! Wow, I am tripping out. This is amazing
Sis: Ricky what the hell are you talking about?
Me: I was just smelling some gas and everything looks really funny. Did you know about this?
Sis: stares at me for a good 15 seconds, shakes her head and walks away
Me: What???!? This is so nuts!!
Sis: Rick, go home and tell mom what you just told me.
Me: Okay, whatever.
I left my sister's house, still feeling amazing. I was a little annoyed by her lack of enthusiasm, but I didn't let it get me down.
If I Had Only Stopped There
I ran back over to where my brother was still seated playing with his cards. I sat down next to him again.
Jason: Are you done with the gas? You wanna play some more?
Me: Sure, let's go. (eyeballing the gas can)
He began showing me cards again, and I began guessing incorrectly again. After a few rounds of this, I could no longer resist the temptation. I picked up that gas tank and took the biggest breath in that I could possibly take. I breathed out, and did it once more. After all, if a little bit could make me feel that amazing, what could a lot do. Well, A LOT.
The feeling of euphoria ramped up immediately to extreme heights, just as expected. I turned around to my brother and he kept throwing up cards in my face. At this point I was totally enthralled with movement and no longer had any interest in the game. Each movement of my brother's hand was like a frame in an old film strip. I could see the illusion of time itself, and the paper thin, fragile nature of reality.
I felt my entire spine light up. I was sitting crosslegged and my spine went extremely rigid and upright without my control. I felt energy coursing through my back, from the bottom of my tailbone to the base of my skull. In the back of my neck I felt an intense tightness, like a huge energy buildup in the bottom rear of my brain.
I began to hear a faint low frequency oscillation coming from inside of my head. Kind of like a Skrillex wobble bass repeating over and over again. Then I could feel this waveform inside of my skull getting stronger. The sound got louder and louder, as the frequency got higher and higher. The euphoria was at its absolute peak at this point.
As the frequency rose higher and higher and higher, I to feel the energy that was all along my spine starting to drain downward toward my tailbone. As the energy moved downward, it seemed to take all of the substance of my existence down with it. I don't know how to explain it other than to say imagine a cup of water with a hole in the bottom. As the water drains, the cup becomes empty. That's what my body felt like. Except it wasn't so much emptying as concentrating my entire being down to the size of an infinitely small dot at the base of my spine.
Blast Off!
Finally, as all of the energy reached the base of my spine, I remember sensing that I was utterly gone and there was nothing but a pair of eyes somehow seeing everything. Somehow though, I could hear the now very high frequency oscillation beginning to coalesce into one single high pitched sine-wave pitch. As soon as it did, that was it. Rick Nuthman the human from before was gone. In fact, he never existed and was just a figment of my imagination.
Suddenly I found myself (my eyes?) in an infinitely large yet impossibly small space, utterly trapped. What is the difference between large and small if there is nothing other than the observer? The euphoria was gone and replaced by a terror that escapes any possibility of description using human language. I could sense that all of existence was contained within my consciousness. I was burdened with the knowledge that I was both everything and nothing. There was nothing beyond me. Everything was me, and always was me. I had never left this place. I dreamed up the entire world to hide from the fact that I was utterly alone, fixated in a single spot. a singularity with no boundaries but completely empty of substance.
I became blatantly aware that this existence was real and that everything else I'd ever experienced was a fantasy. Even my sense of time was completely decimated. There was no longer passing of time, but a weird mechanical cause/effect thing happening. It is impossible to put into words because it's nothing like normal waking life.
Imagine the most awake you've ever been. It would still be nothing like the realness that I felt in this experience. Although I was in blackness, what was left of my fragmented ego kept trying to build a new fantasy to escape from this horror. I kept jumping into different scenes from my life. But time wasn't working right. Everything twisted and turned into place, in a terrifying recursive cruelty. Imagine seeing cause and effect on the most basic level in each individual now moment. It feels as if you are stuck in a slideshow with fixed frame intervals. You cry out in horror and then you see the effect of that cry and how it manifests the next moment of reality. But you didn't cause yourself to cry, it was already going to happen. There was never a you there, only a helpless bystander watching the brutal, unloving clockwork of a constantly changing, twisting, turning, experience unfold.
At some point I ended up back in the endless expanse of darkness. I remember hearing a repeating tune which sounded like 8 bit monophonic tones which you'd hear coming from a Pokey chip in an Atari. The music was in perfect sync with the unfolding of the clockwork, recursive 'movements' of reality. This music completely stopped and I was left in the darkest darkness I had ever experienced
The End of the Line
There was nothing. Complete silence. Suddenly I could hear the sound of crickets. It was sort of like a cosmic joke kind of sound. The crickets had no reverb as if it was a single cricket right inside of my brain. The cricket sound stopped and I heard myself let out a gasp of air in otherwise perfect silence also quite eerie with no reverberation.
At this point I began to hear the sound of a door opening and closing. Once again, no reverb. I know that this is a weird thing to keep saying, but it added to the surreal nature of the experience. It was like a sample of a door closing sound playing over and over again in perfectly timed intervals.
The sound of the door slamming and opening with a creak got louder and louder until it was almost deafening. Way off in the distance, a doorway appeared in the darkness. As the sound got louder, the doorway got closer and closer. As the door opened and closed, you could see a bright light behind the door with the brightest most pure light that you can imagine.
Suddenly, I started to hear that high pitched tone again, and felt myself as a tiny singularity at the base of my spine being sucked directly toward the doorway with a velocity that felt unimaginable. The terror was overwhelming. I knew this was the end of whatever I was. My youth and innocence was over. The child had died and left behind this terrified infinite prisoner who was being dragged back to hell an eternal hell of endless solitude.
Waking Up
Just as I reached the threshold of the door, I woke up.... Sort of. I was back in 'normal' reality but nothing would ever be normal again. I ran in the house and started to cry, but stopped immediately. The cry felt utterly hopeless because no one was real to hear it. I became permanently stuck in a state which 20 years later I learned was called DP/DR (Depersonalization/Derealization disorder). To this day, I still have flashbacks and jump into that 'locked in' mind state where reality starts twisting and turning like a Rubik's cube and it feels like I'm stuck in a recursive loop. The only way I can describe it, is to ask you to imagine that you are experiencing permanent dejavu. On top of that, imagine you are in a room and you run for the door. When you open the door and walk through, you realize that you are standing in the same spot you were before going through the door. You freak out and someone asks you "What's wrong?". That freaks you out further because you knew they were going to say that.. It's part of the loop after all. It is horrible!
This is something that I've been dealing with ever since that day in the late 80s. I have somewhat learnt to deal with it since I have no other choice. But some days I get so exhausted and wish that I could just for one day live life again like a normal, fully integrated human being.
This by far was the dumbest thing that I've ever done.