Lori in the Sky with Diamonds

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• December 21, 2015

Prologue:

Is it douchey to have a prologue for a blog? Probably. Whatever. I just wanted to share with you this important piece of information before we continue. I stopped eating red meat.  Okay, that information itself is not so important, but the reason why is.  I had bacon only a couple times in the last seven months and that was on accident, and I didn’t much care for it. This is most shocking news to any one who knows me. I love(d) bacon. I used to eat it almost every day. I was a bacon obsessed human who would order two sides of bacon at the diner because I have issues. When I was tripping on LSD, I wandered onto a farm, where I got within a few feet of a cow. This cow peed a waterfall of piss, which had a great affect on me. Anyhow, a few days later, I got a steak sandwich and became violently ill. The food poisoning was so bad, I was close to calling an ambulance because I was in so much pain. This, I’m sure, was a coincidence. I did eat red meat a couple times after (and did not get violently ill), but I didn’t feel so good afterwards. This is all mental, I’m sure. But that’s how powerful LSD can be.  I NEVER in my life thought I would stop eating bacon.  Never did I think I’d stop CRAVING bacon all the fucking time.  Even though I’ve had good experiences, doing drugs is not something I’m necessarily promoting here.  LSD is a powerful drug, and should be treated as such.

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

It’s 12:20pm.  On a Friday.  It’s the day before my birthday.  A tasteless LSD tab rests on my tongue.  I thought, for some reason, it would taste bitter.  I thought it would taste like something.  It had no flavor at all.

Psychedelic drugs always allured me.  Even from a young age.  While having experimented a fair amount of other substances, I feared I wasn’t mentally strong enough for acid.  Shrooms were out.  I have an allergy to penicillin.  I heard if you’re allergic to penicillin, you’re allergic to shrooms.  While the evidence of said statement is wishy-washy, I didn’t want to be tripping and breaking out in hives.

I have had some intense experiences on questionable weed.  I’ve had panic attacks from edibles. There was a time I smoked weed to induce panic attacks, just so I could get them over with and get on with my life. So for years, doing acid scared me a bit.  However, at this point in my life, I’m not sure if I just gave less fucks or I was actually in a better place mentally, I was surprising calm, and ready for the wave I was about to ride.

I did it with a friend, who, for her privacy, and as homage to one of my favorite stories, I’ll call Alice.  Alice and I walked a trail in woodsy upstate New York. She carried some fruit and water. I carried a notebook. I wrote:

“1:10, I feel gravity”

The drug takes an hour or so to kick in, and just before it does (it affects all differently), I feel as though I can feel gravity. The existence of the invisible force that keeps us tethered to our planet, which we do not notice or acknowledge till we’ve stepped on a scale, becomes perceptible. Perhaps the first thing that really seemed different was my teeth, and the awareness of saliva being produced, and the feeling of the muscles in the esophagus moving. It doesn’t hurt, but it is strange. Like a waterfall.

The senses heighten. Colors more vibrant. Smells, stronger.  Sounds can be felt. I got caught up running my hand through my hair, amazed at how soft it felt through my fingers. I almost immediately wondered what it would be like and wanted to have sex on LSD.  My notebook is filled with a lot of acid thoughts, some too odd to make out, other things quite inspirational, and then on every other page:

“Must try having sex on LSD.”

For the lack of a better term, LSD makes you feel a bit like a Jedi.  The Force is all around you. You can feel it.  And sometimes, you can actually see it. Everything affects you… sounds travel through you, shadows play with you’re imagination, and you feel so in tuned with mother Earth.

“Life is beautiful.

It’s all so beautiful.”

When I wrote I didn’t mean my life, or yours. I meant life in general. Anything where cells are reproducing. Plants and animals, even fungus and bacteria. The existence of any of it blew my tripping mind.

About two hours into the trip (and this is a drug that can last eight hours), we came to an open apple orchard. It was early spring, so there were no apples, but we decided to sit and take a break, and absorb the scenery, which would have been stunning sober.

Here, at the clearing, there was a patch of those plants with the really soft leaves that feels like a rabbit, or something that should exist in a Dr. Suess book over reality. So, I knelt down and started rubbing it. Of course, it was amazing. So I tore a leaf off. Because I wanted it. Then, I felt horrible. Why did I do that? Why didn’t I just gently pet the plant and move on? There was no need for me to injure this plant. Why? So I can hold onto its dead limb for a little while longer because I liked that it was soft?    And I felt the sound of a chainsaw in the distance drill through my veins, and then I realized… I always want more.  Humans always want more.  It’s what made us great.  It’s what made us terrible. And I said to myself, “forgive yourself, Lori. For being a fucking human being.” So I brought the soft leaf to Alice, who was sitting in the field. As soon as it was in her hand, her face lit up, and she rubbed it on her arm and smiled. I smiled too. Part of the human condition was wanting to share a positive experience with someone. That, I thought, might be our only redeeming quality.

“I can hear the wind in my hair….

I want to capture all the stories.”

Then, for the first time since we started tripping, we looked at the clouds. There were a lot of wispy clouds, with a good breeze that day. The type of day someone with a good imagination could gaze at for a while. Now, a person with a good imagination on drugs? Well…

“I saw God.

It was perfection.”

I am still an atheist, but behold, I saw angels. Clouds started moving in a kaleidoscope like way, as I lay in the grass and watched the show in the great beyond before me. The clouds were dancing, rhythmically, in a pattern.  My jaw was dropped.  I couldn’t believe what I seeing. Then, from the clouds… arms. Arms, reaching for each other. Just like Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam.” I saw God’s arm, reaching for Adam’s, and Adam not even trying. A million times. In the sky. Reaching, and retracting. Over and over, and over, all over the sky. Then, it changed. It wasn’t God or Adam. It was Angels. Men and women, with perfect bodies and celestial wings, reaching for reach other. No, not reaching for each other… They were orgasming. It was an orgy.

I suppose I have my Catholic upbringing to thank for both the divine visuals and sexual repression. It was among the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.  I was crying. My face was streaming with tears. Alice was crying too. She didn’t see what I saw exactly, but whatever she saw, she was crying too. I wiped my face, only to see the sky change again. This time, it was an ocean. It was like sitting on the bottom of a crystal clear ocean, looking up at all the activity. And I saw the silhouettes of all kinds of ocean activity.  I had my hands above my head, holding on to the grass for dear life, as if, if I let go, I would have fell into the sky.

“Everything has

a trail.

It moves in

waves.

See

the ripple…

how it affects

each other.

It’s all connected.”

At some point, after viewing a spectacle of the heavens, we decided to move on. It was probably about fifteen or twenty minutes of watching the clouds. I was only able to figure this out from my notes.  My concept of time was on the fritz.  For all I knew, we could have been there for two minutes or two hours.

We continued on our walk down the trail. I was talking to Alice, and I motioned something with my hand, only to notice my hand was followed by fifteen more of my hands. “Whoa,” I said, “that’s different.”

Looking at the trees, their leaves had trails. Everything that moved had a magnetic like wave. I could see it.  It was like a movie.  That’s the only way I could really describe it. It was like a special effect in a movie.

We indulged in some tanger-oranges, which were sensational. I wrote down one word, “reborn.” Because even though nothing is out of the ordinary, you feel like you’re seeing/experiencing it for the first time, and it’s blowing your mind.  The world is popping around you.

I thought of my nephew. He was almost eight months old at this point. Very new to this planet. When he got excited, he extended his arms forward, like superman, and they would shake, because he was just so stoked to eat carrots for the first time, or watch as I danced around the kitchen wearing a funny hat. And that’s how we felt. Like extending our arms and shaking. Because it is so exciting. Rebirth is astounding.

The cow was later. Alice, a bit more of an animal lover than I, ran up to the fence, “look at the cows!” I kept my distance. I looked into the cow’s eye with some suspicion. That’s when the cow pissed. I don’t know if you have ever seen a cow pee, but it’s a lot of liquid. I thought for a moment, that I too pissed myself.  Alice started cracking up, and I did too. I tend to be rather giggly while tripping. But both of us agreed later that something about that cow peeing would affect us long after the drug wore off.

“6:08 —

the comedown.

the affects are

still there… however

Just      Look    Up”

Hours passed of rediscovering the world we thought we knew we lived in.  The drug affects me in waves.  So they’ll be points where I thought I was sober, then… WHAM!  The bark in the trees are filled with moving faces.  It lasts a long time, but eventually it wanes, and you can tell.  Even so, I could tell I was still tripping a little bit when I looked at the clouds. I didn’t see angels anymore. We were beyond that at this point. But the clouds still moved in an impossible synchronized dance. I was glad I was coming down. It was so intense. I felt like I had lived a day being super human… and that is exhausting. Seeing energy forces, feeling a squirrel spring from a tree, hearing every twig snap. There was a feeling overall of love, well being, and belonging. At some point, I wanted to call my parents and tell them I loved them. But this would be an alarming red flag, since I never did that.  Really, this blog does no justice explaining to you all the things I felt and saw that day.  Not for the whole trip, but at many points, I felt a feeling that’s very foreign to me in my adult life… Peace.

I later wrote this while tripping:

“Acid trips were like living whole lifetimes in one day. It’s fucking crazy. Aside from all the weird shit you see, you always think answers will come. Answers to life and happiness, which are deep seeded within us, and we’d only be able to hold if we didn’t build such labyrinths around it. It’s not entirely our fault, I suppose. The labyrinth is built without your control, and it starts happening when you’re young. You don’t even realize this is happening, and that’s why it’s not your fault it’s there; you must never blame yourself for that. You built it, that’s why it’s scary. It’s the most goddamn horrific thing to ever not exist. Because you created it. It knows all your fears, and your insecurities, and it adapts like a mother fucker. It’s alive, do you understand? Are you following me? Because even now, as I write to you, the reader, be it you, or just me later, I’m not entirely sure what it is I’m writing.”