inhale inhale you're the victim

I’ve only told a few people about this time in my life. A brief segue between smoking weed and
graduating to hard drugs in high school found me sitting in a basement with a few friends, fellow
burnouts, stoners...what had appeared in the dimness to be a paper bag assumed to contain strong
drink made its way around the rotation but when it was handed to me it felt empty. I peered inside
and the intense smell of gasoline assaulted my face, fumes rising from a soaked wad of paper towels
at the bottom.

“Uhhh…”

“Just put your face in and breathe in and out really deeply dude, you’ll get pretty wasted.”

A lot of harder drug users will sort of sink to whatever level is available to them in terms of intoxicants
in order to keep normality at bay, and I was to prove no different. Our main weed guy was busted
several days earlier and we were as dry as a bone. Being 15 with no income does not make it
easy to acquire alcohol. We had yet to become aware of the thriving crystal meth scene lurking
behind every curtain in our town (though that would come hard and fast later). A group of older kids a
year earlier had taught my friends how to huff paint from a breadbag, and they reveled in the ease
with which they could get profoundly stoned using things commonly found in any garage. I looked
at the bag for a second and in retrospect it is my experience that at that moment of truth for anyone
that goes with such a chemical approach there is an extremely short list of thoughts that go through
one’s mind, and they’re all terrible, empty, lonely, lost thoughts. One hit from the bag is enough to
diagnose someone with depression, anxiety, trauma.

Anyway.

What kind of story would this be if I’d said no thanks and that was that? Of course I was eager
to feel anything that was not my normal feelings or to feel nothing, to feel literally any deviation
at all. Breathe deep, molecules begin to buzz, time ceases to exist. Who knows how much was
actually inhaled that night, considering the trip lasts around 10 minutes but we were tripping all
night and into the next day without sleep. Blink once and it is 8 pm, blink again and it is 6:45 pm,
blink again and it’s noon the next day, erratically time travelling. Full blown apocalyptic end-times
hallucinations, gods, angels, and speaking in tongues. Multiple high speed oscillations between
life and death that I wouldn’t recognize as “ego death” until psychedelics years later. Elves, aliens,
insects, alien elvish insects. Ghosts and demons. Ultradimensional conversations with mutating
starling-swarms of disembodied voices. Complete dissociation while my body was still active and
interacting with the world. Extremely negative interactions.

One of the friends dragged us outside at some point, and told us a story about finding a
crate of actual dynamite near an abandoned railroad line that was a half mile from the
house when he was like 9. In my fried state I believed he’d told us he had the dynamite
right then and was going to blow up the house, me, the school, I was growing more and more
paranoid and frantic that it would be up to me to prevent a terrorist attack. It was later related
to me that out of nowhere I began attacking one of the others and yelling disconnected
gibberish, fought my way upstairs where the parents were sleeping while yelling about a bomb,
let both dogs out of the house into the woods and tried to start the adults’ car (it was a manual
transmission so luckily I couldn’t)....somehow none of this woke anyone, and around 2 that
morning a friend brough us some weed and I calmed down a little, though everything was
mostly blur and glitch. The next morning we left (driving, with milk jug full of gas to huff in the
car) and it had snowed a little. We took a curve too fast and swerved into the other lane badly
and then fishtailed almost off the road, right as a cop car went by….it had its lights flashing,
was going very fast the other way and did not stop for us….another mile up the road and the
driver blew through a stop sign and nearly hit a small child, screeching to a halt so close to him
that we couldn’t see him over the hood. The kid was sitting with his legs a foot underneath the
car, eyeballs an inch from the bumper. Driver tells the kid to never speak a word of this or we’ll
run him over for real next time and picks him up and plants him on the sidewalk and we drove off…..

Of course this did not put me off further experiences with inhalants, and the experiences got far
weirder and more stressful. Was probably huffing gas, paint, or ether once or twice a week for
maybe 6 months, and continued to occasionally use computer duster for another 6 months as we’d
convinced ourselves it was cleaner, whether or not that is the case...I began to think about how to
express some of the stranger chemical experiences recently after a discussion about putting
together a book about bad trips. I’ve had more than my fair share, and a lot of them involve
drugs that aren’t anywhere near psychedelics, unknown research chems, chems that are typically
incredible harmful to humans and not intended to be anywhere near our insides...I guess I feel it
necessary to record these experiences and experiments for several as-yet-unknown reasons.

Posterity? :D

Thought what better place to store these particular ramblings than here, where no one reads?