A Crazy Sunday, by Conor

From The Maze Where Realities Converge - the psychedelic encyclopedia of reality from The Ultimate Comment

A Crazy Sunday - Conor - 27.09.2005

This is a story about my friend Oracle. Oracle is the kind of guy who, unlike me, does illegal stuff sometimes.

Oracle got up about 1pm on Sunday, having been at a friend's 21st until 6 or 6:30 the previous night. He was hanging around his gaff, doing various things like posting a picture of David Icke on the forum of an insane psychedelic cult he's affiliated with, when out of the blue he gets a call from his friend Monk, saying that he had some ketamine going abegging, since the guy he was going to do it with was otherwise engaged.

Now, Oracle had never done K before, but had been curious about it for some time, because he'd heard it's unlike anything else, which is an appealing attribute, and because of the overenthusiastic K-heads who say it's 'beyond acid' and things like that. At two or three, after a few phonecalls back and forth, Oracle found Monk waiting for him in a park in the same spot where they'd both done acid for the first time. Monk produced a small metal box containing a small amount of white powder with brownish grains, which Monk said was enough ketamine for two good-sized doses. This was cut into four skinny lines - one for each nostil present - of length about 2cm.

It was easy to snort, with only a mild fizzing sensation in the nostrils. Less than a minute after snorting the substance, Oracle was aware of a physical numbness, with tingling, of a sort familiar to anyone who's been anaesthetized at a doctor's or dentist's, and a certain goofiness of mind. They decided to walk around the park and Oracle's legs felt funny under him - not weak so much as just numb. There was little visual distortion. Oracle is used to the 'traditional' (serotonergic) psychedelics and has sometimes marveled at how he can look around while on a DXM trip and see the world almost exactly as he would otherwise. He noticed this again with K. A few comparisons with Hunter S. Thompson's famous description of ether came to mind: the exaggerated and obvious motor impairment, the conscious knowledge that you're acting weird but being unable to stop it.

The duo sat down by a fungus-coated treestump in the park as the drug came into its full plateau - this is about five minutes after insufflation. The conversation was weird, but not poetic-weird like with traditional psychedelics, nor overexcited-weird like with ecstasy, more goofy-weird and stupid-weird (like when you're talking to someone who's half asleep) with both of them zoning out after every sentence. "People on ketamine make very poor conversationalists," Oracle remarked to Monk "You wouldn't invite them to a party."

There's no real motivation to talk; one would rather sit silently, thinking about nothing in particular but rather just staring off in a lotos-eyed sleepy trance. Monk drew attention to the treestump they were sitting by - its suedesque texture, its soft woodiness. Oracle felt compelled to tap it, explaining, "I know what it looks like and what it feels like, but I wanted to know what it sounds like." This points to a general effect of ketamine: one's consciousness seems to move away from the sensuous content of things towards their ideational content. One can groove under K, but its very different from grooving under psychedelics.

There were times when Oracle or Monk would point at something and say, "Check this out, man!", but the thing didn't really look cool so much as it just was cool. Sensuous enjoyment is killed by the numbing effect of the drug; 'meat pleasures' like food and sex are, of course, out of the picture. Ketamine is characterized largely by its anaesthetic quality; much of what is enjoyable about it is the same stuff that's enjoyable about the hypnagogic state. By taking an anaesthetic drug in sub-anaesthetic doses, you're pausing on the bridge between consciousness and unconsciousness, and that's just what it feels like. With ketamine you can stay in this headspace for an hour or two and have a good poke around in it, rather than just passing through. Your thoughts drift around and sometimes drift off altogether, your body is either euphorically relaxed or else so dead you forget about it. If you were to describe the effects of K in one word, you couldn't do much better than 'dreamlike'.

Memory is greatly impaired, both short-term memory ('What are we talking about?') and long-term memory ('What was this song called?'). This seems to be a necessary part of the headspace, if one's memory were functioning normally, one would be capable of all sorts of intellectual and organizational thought that just isn't consistent with the feeling being on horse tranqs.

Standing up, Oracle realized how much his spatial awareness was fuckedup, and that it was far moreso in the vertical plane than the horizontal. When he stood up, he couldn't get his head around how far away from the ground he was now, how far down he'd been while sitting down or how tall anything was. Moving on through the park, Oracle and Judge came to a very short, very steep hill which they thought it might be fun to roll down. There was some is-this-or-isn't-it-a-good-idea hesitation, like with any drug, but they went for it, after a much longer hesitation while their impaired minds trying to figure out how to do it without dropping or crushing their stuff. The roll lasted for two or three of the most fun seconds of Oracle's life. Now, rolling down hills, laughing for no reason and walking like a Slinky in public would make people paranoid on some drugs, but with the ketamine (by now I think we can assert that what Oracle and Monk snorted was the real McK) the feeling of paranoia was displaced by numb laughter within about half a second - before it could really manifest.

Oracle and Monk headed to a stone stairway behind a fountain in this park. The area was closed to the public and they had to climb an iron-wrought gate. They said it felt like they just melted through the gate. They spent a while around the top of the walkway, looking at various stuff, doing the ideational-type grooving I've described. Oracle found that if he leaned on the iron handrail and closed his eyes (closed-eye visuals were as scarce as the open-eye kind, by the way) he felt the anaesthetized tingling and sensation of pressure on his hands grow until they dominated his consciousness. He'd read about 'carrier waves', where a repeating noise seems to become louder and louder to the K user and it seems to carry the trip with it. This was the tactile equivalent. He felt the weight, the solidity of the wroughtiron in his grip and this became his universe. This could probably only happen with an auditory or tactile stimulus; the visual doesn't seem important enough and K isn't likely to make you stare hard at something for any length of time.

Auditory hallucinations are common, perhaps even universal. I don't imagine music would sound much good with K and people's voices sound deep and distorted, plus there are plenty of things you'll hear that would seem to be purely hallucinatory. Oracle and Monk were leaving the walkway and were at the exit gate when Oracle said, "I think I might be nauseous, but I've forgotten exactly what nausea is." The numbness included his guts and the feeling was not unpleasant, but nauseous he was and he vomited what seemed to him at the time to be mostly liquid behind a tree.

They commenced to walk out when Oracle decided he wasn't done and went behind another tree. When he turned back, Monk was nowhere to be seen and instead there was a shiny white car with GARDA printed on the side in yellow on the far side of the fence. Two men came out of it and walked towards Oracle. One was, in Oracle's words, "a fat, fat, pudgy bogger with no neck and no hair", the other he couldn't remember, beyond the fact that his hair was black.

Now, Oracle had no chance of hiding from these pigs that he was on horse tranqs and he knew this. On the plus side, they would search him and find nothing on him (this he also knew, even in the state he was in), if they called his home, his parents were away and would be for more than a week (he knew this, too) and furthermore, ketamine doesn't show up on any drug tests (he also knew this at the time).

In short, he had these fuckers beat and he knew it. He was clean as a whistle. The first thing he remembers the cops asking is, "Have you taken any drugs, any medication?" They asked him his name, he replied truthfully. They asked for I.D.; he gave them a driver's license. They asked his address; he referred them to the driver's licence. He gave them his phone number. They told him to empty out his pockets: coins, phone, dice and not much else. They patted his pockets, but didn't search him at all well. Oracle has been in situations before that have made him marvel at how crap the Irish cops are at searching people; here his belief was borne out again.

He was leaning against the rail for support and the cops told him to stand freely and remarked at how unsteady he was on his feet. The two cops then left him (to search the area for a stash, he later surmised) and the third policeman who had been behind the wheel came out of the car to watch him. "Hi!" said Oracle and offered his hand to shake, "I'm Oracle." The cop wasn't gonna do social niceties and blanked him, giving Oracle the chance to laugh at the cops, which had been his intent with the gesture. "Are there more of you?" asked the third policeman. "More of me?!" said Oracle, baffled at this profound questioning of the nature of ego and human formstate. At some point here, Monk phoned to see what was going on. "I'm in a bit of a situation" said Oracle "Keep your distance." After a while the two cops came back and said some stuff that he can't remember.

"Can I take back my effects now?" said Oracle, indicating the contents of his pockets and feeling pleased that he'd gotten in a good archaism. The cops nodded and told him to leave the park. Oracle felt he should make some bad excuse for his behaviour, just to give them something to work with, and said he just wasn't feeling well that day. "You're stoned," one said, "Do you think it's my first day on the job?" Oracle left the park and called Monk to meet up again. They found each other in another nearby park.

What blew both their minds was that the total time elapsed since the snorting of the ketamine was fortyfive minutes. Oracle would have guessed about two hours. Monk said he wanted to check out this university museum that was closed on a Sunday but that he, as a student of the university, had access to. There, Monk claimed, he had found the White Rabbit's rabbithole and the entrance to Wonderland. In they went and after grooving on the pretty rocks and exhibits for a few minutes, Monk showed Oracle this round hole in the wall underneath a stone stairway.

Oracle climbed through the hole, down a short tunnel into an inkdark chamber with dust and broken bits of something lying around. From this chamber - all this topography was figured out by the sense of touch - came another short tunnel which opened out onto some kind of bottomless pit. There was a pipe or metal strut or something spanning the pit, but after some deliberation, it was decided that shimmying blind across a narrow metal strip over a longwaydown is not a wise thing to do on horse tranquilizers. Also, no one would ever find your body. It was decided to leave Wonderland for another day.

Here concludes the trip and the tale of the adventures of Monk and Oracle. What follows is what happened to me on the same day, starting at roughly the same time that the above story concludes. The main difference is that I only do that which is legal and moral.

I got home to a free gaff with Rob, and we found that my sister had a grand aul' party swinging to celebrate the eleventh day of the life of her wee godson. That's cool, we figured, free party. I was hungry and grabbed a plate of food and went to mingle a little. I was feling pretty chilled for reasons I won't get into and the diffculty in being sociable with strangers was not from inhibitions but from laziness. At one point a guy came up to me and asked if the records inside were mine. I told him they were and he offered to buy Naturally by Three Dog Night, saying he was a DJ and had been collecting funk recently. So that was pretty funny. I dug up a copy of 'You Want To Tell The Kids You're Hallucinating In A Way That Won't Embarrass Them', or else Rob had one, I forget, and explained the deal to a few people with an average response.

I got talking to a guy called Crazydave who'd I've had a few good talks with in the past when I've hung out with him. I was actually harbouring a vague suspicion that he might be a certain member of this here forum, but when, after a good natter about theology, mysticism and The Bible, I asked him if he'd heard of The Ultimate Comment, he said no. I told him it was a psychedelic cult that had sprung up around me and my friends and handed him the leaflet. Now Crazydave is an interesting guy; he's into hardcore electronica, Christianity and other kinds of weird cool shit. Also, as his name suggests, he's pretty crazy. When he started reading the leaflet, he was more enthralled than anyone I've ever introduced to The Ultimate Comment, so much so that other people in the party started noticing this guy reading this leaflet.

He was asking questions like what does the engraving on the spoon say, and from the answers he 'got' that this was a crazily complex system. Everyone started crowding around this little cluster of enchantment, and Rob and I were explaining The Ultimate Comment leftrightandcentre, with the glowing feeling that you're the most interesting person at the party and people are looking at your face even when you're not looking at them. Anyway, as I said before, Rob and I were both pretty myonged and as the party wound down (early, people were heading into town from it), Rob went home and I went to my room to sleep a bit (I had only got a few hours the previous night) and type up some of this. When I woke up, about ten, I heard 'The Mollusk' by Ween drifting into my room and found that another party had started downstairs. Sister #2 had a few friends over and a few cans.

There were three guys there who I had known to be in San Francisco that summer and at Burning Man. I'd been trying to look them up over there but had failed to make contact. Anyway, the four of us got to talking about Burning Man. "Did you go to Spike's?" "Where were you guys camped?" "What did you do the night of the burn?" "Did you see that huge flower thing?" "What kind of costume did you have?" It was a repeat of the party a few hours ago: I was having by far the most interesting and coolest talk at the party and everyone else pretty much shut up and listened or else made attempts at conversation which seemed puny by comparison. Overall, a pretty fun day.

See also

• Ketamine
• Drugs