The Magician

4

Resourcefulness, agency, knowledge, manifestation, power, creation

Though there are certain laws and constants of reality that cannot be broken, by understanding and aligning oneself with these fundamental forces, one can wield them in order to bend reality in accordance with their will. As much as the illusions and hallucinations of The Eclipse and Pareidolia seduced The Seeker beyond reason into the realms of madness, they also gave him glimpses of hidden knowledge and secrets of the universe invisible to those who remain slaves to the blueprint. The decision to take the plummet head first into reality stripped away the illusions that attached themselves to The Seeker as he traversed the darkness, leaving only the artefacts from the dream’s edges that could withstand the brutality of daylight, the harsh geometry of reality, the unforgiving hand of reason. As The Magician, The Seeker gains the ability to wield the knowledge and power of the darkness to affect changes in himself, his environment, and those around him, unmolested by the delusions he had to wade through along the way. He has become an agent, rather than a victim, of the momentum of the universe.

 Since then, I've learned that tripping on consecutive days diminishes the effects; in this case, that was very much untrue.

Once Tommy and William had both thrown up, we set off to some party, apparently at one of their friend's houses. I really didn't want to go to a party. But where the fuck else was I gonna go?

We walked through the city to the suburbs on the streets, since our wavey struts took up too much room to walk on the footpaths. The visuals quickly grew to a level light years beyond the previous night, and we all seemed to be seeing the same things. We kept imagining car headlights approaching us from all directions. The stars and streetlights shot beams of light at each other. Somewhere in the city, a random drunk girl started talking to us. Me, Tommy, and William were all pretty quiet and awkward, and she sort of cycled through us, talking to us one at a time trying to get a response, in a way that reminded me of a cat going around the room looking for pats from different people. She walked with us for a few blocks before getting bored and going off her own way. Weirdly, William and Tommy both said that they also got a feline impression from her. I distracted myself from my nausea, tiredness, and anxiety by experimenting with tricks of the mind. I experienced 360 degree vision by focusing on the lamp posts as I walked past them and keeping them in my mind's eye when they were behind me. Walking up a hill, we managed to trick ourselves into thinking we were walking downhill, eventually losing the ability to distinguish between the two.

We ended up walking along the beach again. I was silent, but Tommy and William were talkative. They said that they felt like they were in Oblivion, a video game they'd been playing. I didn't pick up on the reference, and thought that they were talking about oblivion as an abstract concept, which I found fitting: Back wandering the endless beach, out of place in the world with uncertain futures. Oblivion: The freedom of uncertainty.

Back in the suburbs, we stopped before a billboard, depicting a Rugby team of kids jumping into the air and shouting in celebration. To me, this was terrifying: The kids manifested as pale, gaunt-faced demons screaming in rage and agony. In the silence, I could tell Tommy and William saw the same thing. Eventually, Tommy said that we should just keep going. The rest of the walk was haunted by what we saw in their suffering faces.

Closing in on the party, we heard the sounds of people shouting and bottles being smashed. I started to feel anxious again. In the distance, illuminated by the street light, we could see a pack of drunk people causing chaos on the street.

'Look!' William shouted with joy, pointing at them. 'Loose cunts! Creatures!'

Then we laughed our way into the party.

At the party, I was introduced to William and Tommy's friend, Ree, who told us to put our excess layers of Tommy's jackets, hats, and hoodies in her room upstairs. After dumping a few layers on her bed, we noticed that the sliding door from her room led to a balcony and went out to check the view. It turned out the balcony was still under construction; all three of us hallucinated a guard rail at the edge, and we bounded up to it before realising at the last second that it wasn't there, and stopped just before the two-storey drop. Later that night, the three of us were sitting on the lawn at ground-level, and watched some drunk dude make the same mistake and storm right over the edge of the balcony, taking the two storey drop straight onto his neck in front of us. No one around us reacted at all, and the guy just got straight back up and returned to the party as if nothing happened. To this day, none of us know whether it actually happened. But we all saw it.

It was too loud and crowded for me inside, so I went out to the backyard to trip in the dark by myself. Eventually, Tommy joined me, and we spent a long time describing what we were seeing. It was like we could control each other's hallucinations - when Tommy would describe what he saw in the shape of the trees or lights in the distance, I would start to see the same thing,. It got hard to tell whose hallucinations were whose, and whether we were describing what we were seeing or seeing what we were describing. Sometimes, I couldn't even tell which one of us was talking.

A while later, William found us and told us that the lounge was empty, so we followed him back inside to trip out in relative comfort. William and Tommy took a couch each to sprawl on and I found an armchair to recline into. I closed my eyes and went into my trip for a little while, until a horrible song blared from the speaker: Some sassy female vocalist pouting lyrics along the lines of 'Little prick, limp dick motherfucker!' My mind started looping incoherently about my virginity and general sexual insecurity, eventually forcing my eyes open. William, Tommy, and I all looked at each other and William said, 'Man, I don't think I like this song,' and everything was funny again for a while.

As the drunks started to filter back into the lounge, I zoned out completely, and watched the party like a timelapse from behind my trip. The visuals were more immersive and detailed than any I'd experienced aside from on datura. They started at the edge of my vision, like a border, and would gradually progress toward my focal point, completely taking over my visual field until I shifted my attention away, resetting the process. They were constantly moving and evolving, and usually consisted of intricate geometric patterns and strange, lizardlike lifeforms reminiscent of MC Escher's dimensionally improbable drawings. There was always a sense of progressing deeper into the patterns, like travelling through a psychedelic tunnel. They also encompassed my other senses to an unusual degree - I could hear the movement of the patterns and lifeforms as I moved into them, a weird kind of alien squelching sound, and, when I went deep enough, could even feel them dribbling past on my skin. My mood was conflicted. I was amazed by the visions and sensations, but too uncomfortable in the environment to let myself get completely absorbed in them. Eventually, I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep, hoping everyone would leave me to it.

But, of course, William ended up snapping me out of it, shaking me back to reality by the shoulder.

'It's all good, we got this. Just gotta stand our ground,' he said.

At first, I thought he was referencing the hunger, exhaustion, and psychedelic intensity of the trip. But, alas, this was William, and there were three dudes amping up to fight us because William made out with one of their girlfriends.

All I could do was stare blankly, watching the situation unfold through blurred psychedelia and distorted voices. Though I was still wide awake, my body and mind were too exhausted to keep grip on reality, and I couldn't focus on the external world for more than a few seconds at a time without the trip taking over. I'm not sure how the events transpired from then. Though before my body and mind gave in completely to exhaustion, William excitedly filled me in on some details, telling me that while he was spooning that girl he felt like she was a guitar and started strumming her. Feeling on the verge of total collapse, I gathered some pillows, blankets, and discarded clothes from around the lounge and made myself a nest in a dark corner of the room and eventually finally got some sleep, hallucinating like a motherfucker all the way back home.

I woke up a few hours later in a pile of couch cushions and clothes, the sun just starting to rise, my stomach screaming for food that wasn't cactus. Amazingly, William was still awake. He told me that Tommy went back home hours ago and said we couldn't go with him. As I slept, William had made himself cocktails from the dregs of all the leftover bottles and cans of booze, and entertained himself by trying to stand up an egg by surrounding its base with grains of salt.

Achy and half-blind, I hauled myself up from the ground and set off to Tommy's house with William to pick up our boards and backpacks. William said that he knew of another cactus we could harvest, and, on the first night of mescaline, had convinced our friend Darren to let us brew it at his flat.

So we now had our next mission after retrieving our belongings from Tommy's house: Stealing the cactus and getting it to Darren's flat, which I could only assume would be my home until further notice.

Nodus Tollens part four

LSA

As unlikely as it seems, our instincts had been right: The mescaline weekend did, somehow, undo the lingering psychosis of our datura trip. Both of us found some kind of stability after that weekend: I made some efforts to reconnect with my parents, and mum helped me find a flat and get on the sickness benefit. William found himself a job stocking shelves at the supermarket. Though for most people these are pretty rudimentary attainments, from the starting point of datura-induced psychosis, the two of us had come a long way. We were still obsessed with psychedelics and shamanism, but in a much more balanced way; and - after maybe a month or so occupying any household that would let us brew cactus there - we entered 2008 as somewhat functional humans.

Tommy went in a different direction after the trip. For a few months, none of us heard from him. When he finally left his seclusion, he was almost unrecognisable. He'd shaved his long hair down to the scalp, stopped smoking weed, and was getting some kind of counselling or therapy for an anxiety disorder no one could have suspected. Turns out, his carefree, stoner persona was really a way to disguise his deep-seated insecurity and crippling social anxiety. He started hanging out with me and William again; and, having replaced weed with alcohol, those two often got blind drunk. William and I encouraged him to sidestep his anxiety through recklessness - me, with the wisdom of an anxious and reckless person; William with the wisdom of a reckless person who didn't seem capable of feeling anxiety.

Around this time, I spent a lot of time hanging out with Mitch at the head shop, learning about the world of drugs, trying all kinds of legal highs, and reading books by countercultural figures such as Timothy Leary, Alexander Shulgin, and Terrence McKenna. Mitch was perpetually high on kratom, but also possessed encyclopaedic knowledge about the history of drug laws, and the chemistry and psychology of their effects. His rants occasionally veered into the conspiratorial realms of the paranoid druggy, but, even when they weren't so informative, they were at least entertaining.

Mitch was also very passionate about drug legalisation, always on the lookout for loop holes or legal grey areas to exploit. He started importing the LSA-containing Hawaiian Baby Woodrose seeds, and experimented with making legal highs from them, adding certain herbs or chemicals to mitigate the nausea, anxiety, and other less desirable effects. Before making these concoctions available to the public, he would give them to me to test out. The seeds themselves didn't really do much besides making me sleepy and a bit sick, but some of the pills and other concoctions had effects comparable to illegal psychedelics, if slightly milder. This probably played a part in me letting my guard down when I tried Morning Glory seeds.

'They say that 300 seeds is enough to send a man to the moon,' he told me, before selling me a bag that he estimated to contain 300 seeds.

That night, me and William went to Tommy's house, where we halved the bag between us and chewed them up. Tommy and William got a bottle of tequila and a box of beers. We hung out in Tommy's room for a few hours listening to music, William and Tommy drinking beer, me waiting for the trip to kick in. William said he was starting to trip, but I didn't feel anything yet. Maybe he just chews his food more thoroughly than me.

Eventually, out of boredom, I decided to do about ten consecutive tequila shots. Though I'd been reckless and excessive with many different drugs before, alcohol was not one of them. I just figured that if the drugs weren't doing anything then at least the alcohol would.

About ten minutes later, I felt extremely restless and annoyed at Tommy and William for being boring, so I ditched them to go to Kura Park and burn off some energy. I suspect that the LSA was starting to affect me subtly by then, as I was feeling very manic and edgy, but alcohol also tends to be pretty energising for me.

At the park, I had a lot of fun scrambling through the bushes and climbing trees in the dark, mostly unconcerned about whether the alcohol or LSA was affecting me. Once I got bored of that, I went to the playground. I was playing on the swings when a group of drunk people showed up and started shouting at me, threatening to beat me up. I got off the swings and mouthed off back to them, backing away from them slowly as they advanced on me, and we exchanged insults until they lost interest and went back to the trees.

I was amping up when I got back to Tommy's house. Without saying a word, I stormed into his room, grabbed his pocket knife, and tried to leave. William stopped me and I told them about my run in at the park, and explained that I just wanted to scare them. William and Tommy were also quite drunk by then, and they decided to come with me and bring Tommy's BB gun.

When we got back to the park, I was taken over by another manic spell of energy, and took off into the bush to hunt my prey, feeling like I was in a video game. I found Tommy and William later, and they told me that they had spotted the drunks and sniped them from the trees. After getting a few shots at them, they realised that they knew one of them, and tried to apologise only to both get punched in the face. We then went back to Tommy's, both of them slightly annoyed at me.

By then, I'd burned off enough energy to play drinking games with Tommy and William for the rest of the night, though I was still annoyed that I hadn't got any effects from the LSA besides energy and mild nausea. Tommy passed out at about 5AM, and William brought the barbeque into Tommy's room to have spots.