Divine Salvation

So, if you have never heard of Salvia, you probably don't have any friends that do drugs or spend time online researching naturally occurring chemicals with hallucinogenic properties. So, it's a good thing you read this blog! Now then, to start with, let me give you a little background. I'm not really into drugs, especially chemically manufactured ones because of the additives and risks associated, plus none of them really sound like that much fun. I like the idea of recreational drugs, I do drink alcohol and... well, that's really as far as I'm willing to go on the internet. I was first introduced to Salvia by a friend who had been introduced to it by another friend... ahh the cycle of illicit substances, how it perpetuates itself. At any rate, he brought some over to try and also told me numerous accounts from other people of their experiences with it. Going into it, I knew the following:

It has different sort of effects on people in terms of what the actual hallucination experience is like.

It's really expensive and difficult to smoke, requiring that you really burn it for a while and hold as much smoke in your lungs as you can for as long as possible.

It only lasts for 5 minutes.

So it sounds like a great hallucinogen to try out right? No real side effects, you trip for a short amount of time and come back pretty quickly... So I did. My friend pinched a small amount into a bowl and I tried it. At the risk of ruining the suspense, my experience was not very exciting the first time, though it was fascinating in that it was unlike anything I'd ever experienced before. Upon exhaling, I immediately became overcome by this pleasant cooling sensation and the room seemed to darken and become more quiet. Like I was in a cave or something. I felt like I was sinking into the floor a little and my first reaction was to open my mouth and try to speak, only to find that I had apparently lost control of my mouth and/or vocal chords and as such sounded to my ears much like this retarded kid who used to go to school with me. I decided this was hilarious and proceeded to start laughing uncontrollably at my inability to coherently form words and the whole time I was pretty cognizant of the people around me and was able to speak with them. The whole experience probably did only last 5 minutes, leaving me with a mild sense of euphoria and a wonder that other people had had such amazing experiences. I decided it simply must not be for me and as it is too expensive for me to want to buy, wrote it off entirely as a novelty drug and not one that necessarily provided recreational benefits the way that *ahem* alcohol does.

Now we enter phase 2 of the clinical trial of Salvia's effects on the human mind. Another different friend of mine apparently on a whim decided to buy some salvia. I remember him relating to me his experiences when he tried it which are pretty humorous actually. I'll have to get him to write them down or see if he's posted them online anywhere. He claims there's a whole section of Something Awful forums dedicated to people posting their experiences... I don't really go there though myself unless a humorous link finds it's way to me so I don't know. So upon hearing his accounting of the events that took place after he tried it, and after he offered to let me try some myself, I decided to take it upon myself to actually have a decent experience with the drug. I even did some research about it online just to see if anyone else had written about it in any scholarly manner and the best I could come up with was the aforementioned wikipedia article and vague references to a chemical that happens to be a selective Kappa opioid receptor agonist. This didn't really make a whole lot of sense to me, not having any idea what a kappa opioid receptor is or does and further research yielded not very much information. At any rate, nothing mentioned any dangers whatsoever, giving a top hallucination time of 15 minutes. This I guess is an average and why it is so short, I don't know. At any rate, so I'm still not terribly keen on trying it out but at the same time I am thinking the worst that could happen is it would just be yet another disenchanting experience like the first one. So, I got over to my friend's place and after watching another friend of mine try it, and react fairly mildly, I thought "oh well it'll be cool to just have that feeling again..." I couldn't get over this nagging anxiety though as I was about to take my turn at it. It was that feeling of anticipation and I couldn't seem to make myself relax so I though well, if I'm going to do it at all I may as well get it over with. The thing is, maybe the mindset you approach it with affects it somehow. I don't know. But I had myself a nice little bowl's worth and proceed to light it and inhale, making sure the entire thing caught before removing the flame. I inhaled for as long as I could, not bothering to keep time (it may not have mattered anyways) and when I was done, held my breath, set the pipe down and exhaled. I sat there for a moment thinking to myself and wondering when the tell tale signs of different feeling would emerge and I was vaguely aware of others sitting around me. I could feel a tingling sensation begin within the center of my body that began to rise up within me. I sort of tried to concentrate on it but it was almost like trying to scoop up water off of pavement with a bucket. I suddenly came to and realized I had been sitting in that spot for years. Or I thought I had at least. I suddenly could no longer remember who I was or where I was or what had even happened. All I knew for sure is that something was stuck in the back of my throat or had somehow driven it's way into my brain. I felt like a plant had been ripped out roots and all or my brain had flipped upside down maybe. My mouth kept opening wider and wider until suddenly I realized that reality itself was spilling forth in steady bands of nostalgic and passive primary colors. The entire world was just sort of issuing forth and there was nothing for my mind to focus on. I didn't even have a mind as far as I knew. I rolled off the couch and suddenly was standing up in the middle of the room when I realized something was horribly wrong with my brain. I had no idea what just occurred but I need to get it our or fix it and I kept trying to explain to whatever apparitions I could focus on in front of me and tell them that my brain was broken and to please fix it. However they couldn't do anything for me so I proceeded to try and leave as best as possible. I felt like when I moved I was moving through reality the way a character in a flip book animation does. one frame at a time that somehow I was able to focus on individual moments but not connect them together or construct them into an artificially seamless reality. I tried as hard as possible to leave and get away, knowing somehow that this feeling wasn't right and had to be ejected but I didn't know what it would result in. I was afraid that the only alternative to my present state of existence was death. I had to leave! Everything unseen was infinite blackness. Everything was sideways and inside out all at the same time and I still was missing my lower jaw and incapable of coherent thought. Next thing I knew, I was trying to show my friends how all I had to do was reach down and grab the concrete outside and it would simply peel away revealing to them all that the surfaces that we see are simply a result of clipping and that if you peel away and look from the other side, you see that nothing actually exists there at all. It's just a collection of points and molecules. Like a video game graphics engine rendering polygons on one side only, reality was falling apart. I think it was around this time I finally started to come down. But before I actually regained full sense of my faculties, I know I was overcome by intense and primal fear that resulted in me violently punching someone who tried to tell me that the bare scraps of reality I was able to grab hold of weren't even real. It even took me a while before I remembered who was even around me and had to ask one of the people in the apartment who all was there. I gradually came back to a normal way of reconstructing reality but the palpable sense of terror and anguish that resulted from the condition didn't ever really leave.

I was amazed at how the experience left me that much more aware of some of the senses that are talked about in terms of how we perceive the world. The most affected were vision and my sense of proprioception. I couldn't figure out how I related to my body anymore and how I was interpreting reality since my eyes were worthless. I could hear okay but not process what was being said and I felt like I had shrank within myself or actually had removed myself from my body. I could feel palpably how reality stopped at the surface of my eyes and body and how I fit into it and I thought that as I was coming down it felt as if I was fitting myself back into my body like a glove or something.

It was like I was wearing a suit and somebody came along and bumped me really hard so that the suit got all messed up and pushed around and the eyeholes were no longer where they were supposed to be and the head was loose and flapping around in addition to there being excess where there shouldn't be. I really thought I was dying. It was simultaneously the most wonderful and terrifying thing I will never do again but am really glad to have experienced.

So now there you have it. If you've never done it, I'm not gonna recommend it. But I'll leave you with a little free-associative writing I did the night of while it was still wearing off.

"At first, nothing, as my mind slowly emptied out like someone opened a sieve in my brain.
everything just left.
It was like going insane
everything spinning upwards blue yellow and red lines
the couch rolling me up
the giant tongue of reality
licking me up from the ground
I had to get out away
the needle of reality
shoved up through the bottom of my brain
resting on the blade of a knife
no, my spine.
every step a risk of slipping
shredding to a thousand pieces
trying to grab hold of them all
explaining
to hold them out and show everyone
look! my brain is falling out!
disintegrating to pieces
my mouth is unhinging, I can't speak!
I can't explain anything
I reach out I have a hand
and it is capable
I have (can)
ripping through reality
like a sheet of paper
everything ink smearing across a page
I can't
I feel again.
for a second before I am devoured again,
nothing is actually real at all
My brain lost the ability to project meaning
to project my self.
it was just a hunk of meat and flesh."

So I guess you could say I dared to experiment with reality and see if there truly is such a thing as objectivity at all. The answer is terrifyingly, no. Looking through the empty blackness of the abyss, I saw not God, but... nothing.

Critical Thinking: What is a kappa opioid receptor? Perhaps insights into this drug's unique effects upon it could lead to a greater understanding of how the human brain constructs ideas such as ego and the self and gives us the capability to project them onto the outside world?

Hmm...

Okay, so sorry there haven't been any illuminating half-truths or incoherent and vague ramblings lately. I've been reading a lot of science news still though and if you look over on the right side of the page there, you'll see a gadget thing has been added to display news items I come across that I decide to share as an rss feed. I'm going to start sharing any cool articles I find about whatever from my google reader, hopefully to spark conversation but mainly just cause there's some stuff going on that everyone should know about and knowledge is pretty cool. Anyways, so check it out from time to time and hopefully you'll find something interesting there.

Now for my next trick, I'm going to teach you how to destroy reality in a manner that is completely legal. In Texas at least.

for lack of a better post

I was at wizard world recently and picked up the first hardcover volume of supreme power, having recently come to J. Michael Straczynski thanks to his run on Amazing Spiderman and also from reading a few issues of Squadron Supreme. I thought I'd check out how that whole supremaverse reboot began. Turns out it is a really good read but it isn't just the work as a whole that brings me to this virtual repository for brain droppings but something that according to his introduction he put forth as a deliberate challenge for himself in approaching writing this particular comic. Throughout the book, he chose to not one single time use the caption as a story telling device. For those of you who just came in, a caption in comic books usually consists of a floating box in which we are let in on the secret inner thoughts of the person who's point of view we happen to be seeing the action through. Sometimes it would be narration from the writer, sometimes it's voice over from the protagonist in a very noir style. Stan Lee and Ed Brubaker respectively come time mind as examples of those two types. Now, the interesting thing is that because comics provide that one of a kind presentation of story through visuals and written words, you would think that everyone would be using captions all the time. I mean it's a pretty easy way to give insight into deeper happenings within your narrative that you might not otherwise get across by just using dialogue or action. Book writers do it a lot. Straczynski however showed that he was more than capable of producing a coherent and fascinating narrative through only showing you action and dialogue. I liked it a lot. And I started paying more attention to other writers that do so. I don't know about you but when I first got into comics, I used to really love the captions. I loved seeing the innermost thoughts of a character and the reasonings behind their actions laid out in perfect prose. It was sort of a way to get away with adding poetry to comics and elevated them to some higher literary form in my mind. Sometimes it got to be too much though and a lot of writers are guilty of Naval Gazing and completely taking you out of the story by providing you with aimless stream of consciousness meanderings from the characters that make you want to shout at the page "GET TO THE FUCKING POINT!"

I guess the thing is, comics are a visual medium of story telling. The words are necessary and maybe needed at times when there's more that you need to explain than there is room on a page to convey. It's possible though that if there is such a thing as perfection as an ideal that can be approached by comics writers, it may just not have any room for captions. After all if pictures are worth any amount of words, shouldn't the visuals speak for themselves and be capable of providing more of an emotional context for your story than any silly captions could?

THE DISCLAIMER
I still love captions. They're really well used by people like Ed Brubaker and Allan Moore and Paul Jenkins (when he isn't naval gazing) and I do think they are relevant in comics as a useful and even positive story telling device. So don't get all reactionary. Or do.

nobody fucks with the truth

Some things you will see in this blog:
(coming soon!)

uneducated, philosophical pseudo-scientific ramblings
poetry?
stuff that's more enlightening than what you'll find here.
discussion and ramblings that may intersect with what you'll find here
maybe some stuff about writing
maybe some musical stuff
maybe nothing at all! piss off!

Some things you will not see in this blog:

Intelligent Design

Intellectual Dishonesty

IDiocy

if you are capable of looking at the universe and seeing intelligence in its so called design, that calls into question your definition of intelligence.


So welcome one and all! If you are here by invitation please move to the back so I can address the ones who got here through the magic of the interweb.

Humanity is like a seething leviathan. Separate we are unique and odd individuals. Lonely even... Together, we form like voltron into a not so cooperative species where the individual parts are no longer discernible from the whole. A thriving and bountiful species of groups, sub-groups, categories and... individuals? This will become my outlet for the things that I discover and learn and read about.

It's pretty cool to be alive.