Sun
26-Nov-2006

k west

Coming up from Charles and Miranda's place yesterday morning, after Charles cooked us a hearty breakfast of salmon scrambled eggs, we dropped in on Michal's place. Honza and Przemek were over for the weekend, so they had all gone out clubbing the night before and were powering on through the day, along with Gaz. We joined in with them for a couple of hours, taking K, basking in the sun through the window and heading off into various far fetched K worlds and conversations...

Ketamine distorts time and space, but as I've become more comfortable with the drug, I've been really getting into the time distorting dimension recently. It is a very different experience from other hallucinogenic drugs. There's an amazing feeling you can have of plunging into memories and feeling like you are there, remembering the future. At points, you can have the blissful feeling of transcending time, floating above paths of memory and seeing the roots of present relationships and situations in joyful clarity.

It also makes you fall over if you try to walk, but that's part of the fun too.

Tue
29-Aug-2006

acid in august!

Alex, Jim, Kal and I took a fairly heroic dose of Al's LSD on Saturday! I had been out to Popstarz with Benjie, Lewis and Simon the night before and got rather more drunk than I intended so it took me a while to get going that morning. I headed down to Angel to meet up with Jordan and Benjie at 1pm – they were at the N1 Shopping Centre supporting Tyron doing some sign-singing to raise money for the British Deaf Association. Tyron is really good at sign-singing – I particularly enjoyed I Will Always Love You, with expansive dramatic gestures that matched the histrionics of Whitney Houston's version of the song.

Kal then joined me, we had a half pint or two of beer, and then bade goodbye to people there and headed off to Alex's flat in Old Street for our psychoactive adventure.

We took the acid on sugar cubes, and began to feel the effects pretty quickly, within twenty minutes or so. We then climbed up on the roof and spent a little time up there, getting gradually more fucked till suddenly the visuals really started to kick in and the patterns of dirt on the roof began to swirl around in writhing hieroglyphic patterns. Me and Jim reckoned that we'd feel a lot more comfortable if we came down from the roof and climbed down to recline in the armchairs outside the back door. This allowed the visuals to bloom into a colourful kaleidoscope of pixellating craziness. The sky and clouds were swirling around, the tower of St Luke's rose up above us like an almighty white phallus, and when we waved our arms about, a trail of limbs were left imprinted in their wake.

I quickly lost the ability to speak and was only able to contribute the occasional verbal outburst for the rest of the trip – Alex and Jim remained pretty talkative, with Kal somewhere in between. The trip was very strong, very visual and very funny, with great rushes of elation and excitement at the joy and terror of being. It was a real blow your head open kind of trip!

Around sundown, we decided to head out and walk the streets of London. The visuals had calmed down a lot, but we were still tripping heavily. We went from place to place, and decided to head up the steps on to the raised levels of the Barbican, enjoying the well designed calm of the Barbican walkways up above the streets. After some searching around, we found an entrance to the complex and began a lengthy tour of the interior, which turned into a rather profound conversation with 1960s modernist architecture.

In our receptive state of mind we began to understand the genius of the Barbican's design, the way that we were able to wander round the place for over an hour without meeting a single other person, the way we walked seamlessly from the street, to the cinemas, to the corridors, to the flats, to vague offices that might have been part of some instrutable administration keeping the place going, and through the corridors again, endlessly opening doors and never seeming to reach a place that was truly private and cut off from the public domain. The lifts would move from floor to floor, depositing us in another corridor that looked much the same as the last corridor, moving us between different buildings as if we had been teleported. The building brought out a bold and questioning mindset: one that said "you can go anywhere you want – all of this belongs to you". You could never tell whether you were "inside" or "outside" – at any given time you could have been in your own bedroom, or in someone else's bedroom, or in an office – every space seemed at once intimate and public.

And this was the point of these bold optimistic designs of the 1960s – the idea was to create a public space that belonged to everyone, that we could all trust each other to live together in. Yet how quickly all that public space, all those empty corridors and intimate rooms, became dangerous places, full of darkness and muggings, the naive trust invested in their design subverted by poverty and fear. It was so easy to understand the mindset of the original designers when on acid – I was really grateful for this chance to return to first principles and follow those brave and optimistic thoughts wherever they took us.

There was a certain stylishness about the interior of the Barbican that suited our tripping – the way the whole place felt like we were striding through the futuristic set of our own urban movie. It was great fun.

We then wandered further around town, slowly making our way back to Al's house, where after a bit, Abbie came and joined us, and regaled us with drunken tales of Crystal Palace Gardens, which also sound like a good location for psychoactive journeys. We also played a game involving guessing who our "celebrity alter ego" would be, and for some reason I thought mine would be a miniature Dermot O'Leary wearing a monkey suit, leaping around manically. This vision pleased me for some reason!

By about 3am, Abbie and Jim headed off to their current abode in Notting Hill, Al went to bed, and Kal and I shared a pleasant chatty walk back to our respective flats in North London...