it has been over a week since i caught a glimpse of god/probably permanently damaged my brain. right afterwards, i didn't feel like i could put the experience into words. it was all too much. my head felt like a balloon that had been filled to bursting, or maybe a lightning rod that got struck. see, even now, i know that these words fail pathetically at trying to convey what happened.

so i was really depressed when george w bush "won" the election (i can't bring myself to believe it, what with all those machines that the republican-owned company diebold put into play. although strange glitches. like how bush got like 200,000 votes in town in florida that only had 35,000 people, or that town in ohio which registered with -2,500,000 votes for kerry. or all those voters who somehow ended up choosing bush when they really meant kerry. no paper trail. hah! how the hell did we just let them ass-rape us without even a word of protest?) in fact, i felt totally abandoned
by God. because i know within my heart of hearts that God wouldn't allow such heartless bastards like the Republicans rule the world.

I am left with Thomas Jefferson's deistic concept (later reiterated by Albert Camus) that if there is a God, he abandoned us a long time ago.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

And so I drank down two bottles of dextromethorphan[1][2][. I wasn't trying to commit suicide. I just wanted to try something new. I figured we were all going to hell in a handbasket soon enough, I might as well have as many novel experiences as possible before china and europe finally get pissed off with the u.s. and decide to invade, and effort that would probably be well funded by the russians, with a few nuclear missiles given as tokens of appreciation.

think about it. if the we mowed down 1,000,000 Chinese soldiers but ended up losing 100,000 of our own, or even only 50,000, they'd still have a hell of a lot of soldiers to lose, and we'd be rapidly on our way to getting screwed. think about it! even if we nuked shanghai, they've still got beijing, guangzhou, hong kong, nanjing, and lots more cities with more than a million inhabitants. and you know as well as i do that the russians would never tolerate something like that. as much as they've never liked the chinese, no one likes it when someone detonates a nuclear bomb on their continent.

but i digress.

so after i swallowed down 40 pills (which made it 600 mg, which, for my body habitus, equalled about 7 mg/kg, and which was not my intended dosage--somehow i had miscalculated my target) and nothing happened. sure, i got a little dizzy, but i figured i was just tired. what a crock. anyway, i didn't want to buy more than two bottles at the drug store lest they get wary of me. so i figured that i would only hit the second plateau at the most. i went to sleep disappointed and worried that i would get sick.

that's when the world pixellated.

now i've been reading about quantum gravity, and one of the compelling theories to get rid of quantum gravity's unexplainable infinite probabilities is to assume that space can only get so small--that there is a discrete unit of space and time. hence, pixels. welcome to the matrix, my friends.

so that was the first hallucination. as soon as i closed my eyes, there would be this digitizing effect. like i could detect individual photons hitting individual rods and cones. it's hard to explain. it was mostly colors and patterns. while being high on mdma made me hallucinate about paisley patterns that made me think of oriental carpets, my dxm hallucinations were very pixellated and digital.

and then somehow i was flung through time and space.

like the normal bounds of the universe had melted away. like i had somehow slipped through the quantized limits of normal space. like i fell into the space between spaces. i can't explain.

it was like a curtain parting, really.

and i felt the Presence.

it was not the kind of thing that born again Christians talk about, this bright glowing light that filled me with joy. the blinding white light that burned out saul's eyes on the road to damascus.

what it was was the feeling of meeting an old friend. a member of my family.

a feeling of familiarity, and with that, a feeling of easy security.

not awe that makes your knees tremble, that makes you want to puke.

but the kind of awe you can get when you meet your good friends' baby for the first time. the kind of awe embedded within a glorious sunrise, or a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. the moon's reflection shimmering off of the raging sea.

in many ways, the simple awe and wonder of a child.

there is a Presence that runs this whole shebang, in the interstices, in the places in between. where you don't expect it. you can't find it in normal space, this i'm sure.

and I felt like i was remembering things that i've always known, but have forgotten in my despair.

like the realization that i'm not the only one in this war between Good and Evil. that there are billions and trillions of like-minded warriors.

except our weapon has never been obvious, has never been something with which to cut and tear and rend. what we do is the opposite. we mend, we patch, we bring together. we heal.

and then i somehow came to the conclusion that i wasn't the first manifestation of a particular template. my brain, my consciousness, was fashioned from a prototype, and we have been spread far and wide in space time. some of me are people like myself. others are embedded in trees in the forest, in whales in the wide ocean. in planets. in stars. in AIs running asteroid sized factories. in cyborgs, in starships.

there was one AI that I knew was myself, running a small part of an aforementioned asteroid-sized planet, and i felt outrage. clearly this was a task that was far less than what this AI could accomplish. and yet now, I realize that there is no job too small or too great.

i kind of wonder if that AI had chosen his own hell, had chosen Sisyphus' punishment. to forever roll up that stone, only to have it roll back again. and yet, i realize that part of our strategy is to do things that are clearly futile. just because something is futile doesn't mean it isn't right.

i think of the battle of maldan. of sir thomas more. of don quixote and his impossible dream.

the rational part of me deconstructs this experience this way: i think, because DXM is a dissociative, and basically fragments the brain at least temporarily, various nuclei in my brain were trying to maintain a sense of self. but beccause there were limited pathways that were still intact, a lot of these nuclei generated fragmented selves, unable to sync properly with other parts of the brain. it would be like if the internet had several parts cut. usually the twelve root nameservers are sync'ed and act like one computer, but if the internet breaks apart, each one can act independently.

this is why, perhaps, despite massive strokes, most people retain a good sense of identity.

from there it gets murky. at one point, i somehow met my supposed future wife. disembodied as i was, i was watching her give birth to our son.

there were two parts during my trip that i wept. one was when i realized that i wasn't bound by time and space. the other was when i saw the woman who is supposed to be my wife.

there were parts when i felt like i was dying, and that i was lying in a stretcher, with an IV in my arm, being resuscitated by the ER team.

like i was starting to flip in-and-out of this ad hoc constructed reality into another, more familiar, but no more real, other world.

even right now, i kind of have this sense of unease as to what the real world was, as i flipped between those three states: in my bed, in the ER, and unbounded in time-and-space. I at least recognized the last of those as unreal.

like, what if i'm just trapped in a permanent hallucination, while my body sits in an ICU, intubated, ventilated, and comatose?

eerie, huh?

it's the whole vanilla sky thing. what if you're all solipsistic manifestations of my deranged brain?

anyway, it probably didn't help that i had been reading a lot of phillip k dick [1][2]

maybe i met valis.

the weird thing i remember is that as i was floating through space time, i remember catching a glimpse of john titor floating down an alternate time track.

but today i left work, wondering why it was that i no longer felt heartache. i met another cute girl today, but i seriously doubt anything will come of it. usually thoughts like that depress me, but for some reason i don't care.

maybe i've finally accepted that this feeling of fragmentation, this feeling of being alone in the world, this feeling of being unwhole and incomplete, is the normal state when you're bound by space-time. completeness only comes when you're free, and, except for these brief glimpses allowed by dissociatives like DXM, PCP, and ketamine, the only way to reach that kind of freedom is to die.

to quote tyler durden: "i say, let me never be complete. i say, may i never be content."

it's death baby. or birth. in a lot of deep and fundamental ways, it's kind of the same thing. especially if you believe in space-time, and that you've already made all your decisions, it's only a matter of travelling through the fourth dimension to experience them all.

i hope that this feeling of complete incompleteness never loses its freshness. i hope i never start longing again for what i cannot have.

i hope that i will stay not wanting. once you nip desire, once you ignore all those false worlds containing the decisions that you never made, you're left experience the choices you did make with pleasure. because, i am sure, that when you reach the last frame, if you made your decisions wisely, you'll be happy to go unbounded.

know that your future self is looking out for you, maybe?

in many ways that's perhaps what i feel.

of course, this feeling could simply be permanent or at least long-term brain damage.

after my trip, i lost an entire day. i maybe woke up once or twice in the next twenty four hours to pee or drink water, but that was about it. i had my trip on wednesday night and i didn't get out of bed until friday morning.