The Fool

0

Beginnings, innocence, spontaneity, recklessness, freedom, possibility

The beginning of the journey; a reckless dive into the unknown; unlimited potential and the seductive possibilities of life beyond the horizon of understanding. The mind is blank and fearless, anxiety becomes the dizziness of freedom, a nauseous excitement of what is to come. The blueprint that has confined The Fool up until this point disintegrates, revealing the true sublime and infinite nature of reality, and The Fool takes his first step onto the path of The Seeker, pauses, looks around, then forgets the past, and bounds way out to the dream’s edges, head sealed, pointing at the great unseen.

 
Nodus Tollens Part one

L’appel Du Vide (Call of the Void)

It all started with the big bang. Then, like 13 billion years later, I took datura.

I'll start with the year leading up to my first datura trip. This was 2007. I turned 17 that year, and was living in my hometown of Newmouth. I'd been smoking weed and drinking alcohol occasionally for a few years by then, but I didn't find either of them all that interesting or enjoyable; my life revolved around skateboarding at that point, and anything that would distract me from this obsession was of no interest to me. But that changed drastically in the end of year school holidays in the summer of 2006, when my life fell into chaos after the death of my older brother, succumbing to his lifelong heart condition at the age of seventeen.

Being an emotionally immature and apathetic sixteen-year-old, I selfishly avoided the complex emotional landscape of my parental home out in the country, where I'd lived with my mum, step-dad, and brother since I was about 12. I spent most of the school holidays staying on whatever couch would keep me afloat, sleeping at the skatepark when all else failed. I discovered legal party pills, and often took them and skated around the city by myself all night, trying to figure out my place in this increasingly strange world. The main ingredient in these pills was BZP, a powerful stimulant with unpleasant side-effects. Some contained a second ingredient called TFMPP. This did nothing by itself; but, when combined with BZP, had hallucinogenic effects that stopped just short of being psychedelic - comparable to something like MDA. This quickly became my drug of choice. After my brother's funeral, some of his friends from school ended up getting wasted with my parents and forming a lasting friendship; me and my friends got drunk in the city on beers we stole from the wake. That summer, the only times I went back home were when my brother's friends would find me in the city, malnourished and sleep-deprived, and deliver me to my parents.

Though I still went to school during my seventeenth year, this did very little to reduce the chaos of my life. I attended when I felt like it, often under the influence of drugs - my favourite being nutmeg - and was often met with a 'Well look who's decided to grace us with their presence' look from my teachers. A small collective formed out of the stoners who hadn't dropped out yet, and we got wasted most lunchtimes at the gully across the road, and went back to school if we felt like it. My best friend at the time, Luke, also lived out in the country, and sometimes joined me sleeping rough. We always made sure to leave the couches outside the common room on Friday nights to crash on after partying. The school referred me to a psychiatrist, who prescribed me Citalopram, Zopiclone, and Ritalin to try fix Mother Nature's mistake.

About halfway through the year, me and Luke took psychedelics for the first time, with our friends Joe and Riley. The drug was mescaline. Since it was a low dose, we got mostly stimulant effects, and scrambled around the city being delinquents all night, doing dumb shit like putting road cones on top of cars and drawing on walls. It was much more subtle than the BZP/TFMPP pills I'd been taking, but I could feel a greater potential lurking below the surface, a quiet sapience that hinted at a completely new mode of thinking. By the time it wore off, I was dead set on finding more. After a lot of searching, we managed to find an inconsistent acid contact. Though the tabs were expensive and dosed low, it instantly became my favourite drug, and I always looked forward to the days when I could get my hands on it. I only managed to take acid four times that year, but it seemed to affect me even in between trips. It reignited my childhood love of drawing, combining it with my adolescent love of delinquency. I spent most of those acid trips skating around the city all night, drawing pictures on whatever walls and surfaces I could find. These would only last a few days before being painted over with a white square. I took advantage of this by writing stupid shit like 'Fuck the police' on spots I thought would be cool to draw on. White squares would appear on top of my tags a few days later, which I'd use as canvases to draw on when I got my hands on some acid.

Later on in the year, I befriended a girl from the year below me at school, Vicky, who was as into drugs as I was. Her alcoholic mother had recently run off with some guy, leaving her living alone. I started using one of the empty rooms as a place to crash, and, by the end of the year, had essentially moved in. We formed a strangely beautiful domestic partnership. I was basically asexual as a teenager, thanks to my depression, anxiety, and severe aversion to physical contact, so it was nothing romantic or sexual. But we banded together, two fucked up kids trying to figure out the adult world, and supported each other in our own way. Vicky worked a few nights a week at a restaurant, but rarely had any money leftover for essentials thanks to her weed and party pill addiction. So I'd shoplift whatever we needed to pay my way.

Naturally, the house turned into a hangout for a small group of wasters. The main group was a pack of friendly stoners from wealthy backgrounds who went to a different high school than Vicky and I. Others were connected through Vicky's boyfriend, Stu, who was in my year at school. One of these subgroups consisted of his stoner/surfer friends; the other was a more sinister group of budding skinheads and psychopaths. These groups all cross-matrixed to some degree with me, Vicky, and Stu at the centre. When Vicky wasn't at school or hanging out with Stu, the two of us spent our days trying to scrounge together money for weed and pills. I was always keen to indulge, but my mind had moved on to finding more psychedelics. Over that year, I tripped on mescaline and LSD a few times, tried DXM and datura, and tripped on nutmeg regularly. Besides nutmeg, I took these all at low doses, but I could tell there was something deeper, something beyond the relatively superficial highs of weed and pills; and, by the time I finished my last year of school, I had my heart set on diving headfirst into this mysterious and enticing new world. This was the only direction I had in my life at this point.

Nodus Tollens part two

Datura

The night in question started at Vicky's, sometime toward the end of 2007. Most of the main group was there, along with a few of Stu's other friends. Though I felt very welcome in my new friend group, the only real friendship I had was with Vicky. The others seemed to view me as a fucked up but friendly runaway, and kept some distance from me without excluding me. I liked the idea of being a runaway, so I indulged in the role, only later realising it was actually a pretty accurate description. It was comforting to hang out with people without being close to them in any way. I enjoyed the invisibility. Over time, I made friends with an unpredictable and reckless character called William, who seemed to be vaguely connected to the group through both the rich stoners and the psychos. Though the others tolerated and even sometimes welcomed his company, this was with weary acceptance, and he was generally regarded as an annoying and often dangerous liability. But I got along with him well. This was mostly because he shared my fascination with hallucinogens, and had travelled further down that path than me; and, like me, he suspected that there was more to them than just getting high. We had both tried datura before, but only got vague and uncomfortable effects such as dry mouth, confusion, and vivid dreams. We were both very interested in doing it properly.

The plan that night was to go to some party in the city. It was a warm summer night. Vicky and I took some party pills, and the rest of the group drank and smoked weed. William said that he knew of a datura tree down the road from the party and our fate was sealed: We were doing datura that night, and doing it properly.

We turned up at the party - a pack of about twelve of us - a little after sundown. It was a classic, end of school year, teenager party: Parents away, kids all rowdy and way too drunk, catastrophe waiting to happen as soon as it found its form. I had quite severe social anxiety back then, and felt out of place in social situations; I was much more interested in taking datura than trying to navigate a party. Rather than making me more sociable, the party pills increased my anxiety, and I ended up hyper-fixating on datura. I kept trying to talk William into taking me to the tree; but, being an alcoholic who seemed to be comfortable in any situation, he wanted to stay and party. He managed to shake me off and join the crowd, so I tried to forget about datura and socialise; this mostly consisted of clinging to someone I didn't feel anxious around and talking rabidly about drugs. A few hours into the party, William - now very drunk - found me and told me it was time to trip.

It was about a five minute walk to the tree, which was just down the road from William's parents' house. We were determined to have the full experience, and decided to eat six flowers each. This ended up being quite a mission, as the flowers had an acute, acrid taste, and seemed to dry my mouth out instantly. My mouth was already pretty dry from the party pills, and the only liquid we had was a bottle of beer, so I was starting to struggle by the time I got to my second flower, which I could only stomach by peeling off narrow strips and rolling them into balls and washing them down with beer. When the beer was finished, we both ripped off a branch with several flowers on it each, and ate as much as we could manage on the way back to the party, loudly singing a slightly modified version of the chorus to Day Tripper by The Beatles: 'We're on daaaaaaaaaay-tura! One way ticket, yeah!'

Back at the party, I got myself some water and sat outside to try and get through the rest of the flowers. Even with liquid, the party pills made eating extremely uncomfortable, and I gave up after throwing up my fourth or fifth flower. I sat outside by myself for a while before going back in, and I found William slumped on the couch with one eye closed, mumbling incoherently, while some drunk kids tried to balance empty cans and other objects on him. I didn’t feel any effects of the datura yet, but I felt more and more wired, clenching my jaw and grasping at my clothes compulsively. From this I concluded that datura enhanced whatever you were feeling at the time: William had been drunk, and was now maxed-out on drunkenness; I had been wired, and was now hyper-stimulated.

Even though I didn't realise it at the time, the datura had already started to affect me. I was extremely forgetful and distractible. At one point, Vicky found me and asked me if it had kicked in yet, saying that I looked wasted. For some reason, I was convinced I'd smoked a joint and was really stoned. I was very talkative, but kept forgetting what I was saying mid-sentence, with an infuriating feeling that I was about to say something really important. So I'd just keep talking, figuring I'd cycle around to my main point eventually. According to Vicky, I was articulate and composed in demeanour, but was rambling on in confusing monologues that made little sense and went nowhere. It made sense to me that the combination of weed and party pills would have this effect. My rant eventually found the conclusion that I needed to go for a walk to use some of my energy. Vicky agreed and I wandered off into the night with her blessing.