I was 17 years old when I first experimented with LSD, late one weekend night while my mom was at work at one of her several jobs. Somehow I had procured a few hits of microdot acid, and with my two best friends—whose names are obscured here because they now have jobs and husbands and children and shit—we proceeded to trip our balls off in the kitchen of my childhood home in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
I wanted to be a writer from the time I was eight or so, and while I kept a handwritten journal to chronicle the vagaries of my crushes and insecurities, part of my writerly fantasy involved sitting at my mother’s old typewriter and writing out stories. And so, as I started to get high while my friends and I waited for a pizza to be delivered*, it was my natural instinct to sit down at the typewriter and suss out what I was feeling.
“One with Buddha” is, I guess, how my rather ignorant Catholic self described being high, probably a side effect of reading too many late ’60s counter-culture tomes written by white male baby boomers. The most important observations here—other than the part where I’m apparently typing while moving around the notebook paper—include “I am changing what I am thinking because of typos,” a sentiment that could arguably apply to my mindset today; and, “I have no hymen. It is a rare medical disorder.” The former assertion was true; the latter was not.
I would go on to use LSD several more times in the following years, and who can blame me? There was not a lot to do as a teen in Wyoming, particularly for freaks and weirdos, and besides, it was way more fun than smoking weed, which left you lethargic and sticky. While I do NOT advise any teens today take illegal psychedelic drugs, I DO wonder if they still do; in the post-oxy era of zannies and molly and lean, are there youths out there blowing their freaking minds through the kinetic and freaky effects of lysergic acid diethylamide and, so we thought at the time, rat poison? And why are the people advocating microdosing always like, middle aged?
Despite these questions, I will always be grateful to my drug-dabbling teen years for expanding my mind and, most importantly, being the impetus for this document, which has become a classic among the aforementioned adult friends whose names are redacted. Later that night, after we neglected to eat the pizza, we retreated to my room where we paged through an issue of Thrasher magazine illuminated with a red flashlight. When we got to an ad that featured an illustration of a skateboarding Gremlin, we screamed. My mom was home by then, and busted in: “What are you yelling at?” All we could do was giggle and promise to be more quiet. Sorry for everything, ma.
*This proved to be a huge mistake. No one told me that the last thing you want to do on acid is eat food, and also the delivery guy’s eyes seemed silvery and reflective like those of a demonic snake, which was fucking terrifying.