Someone at work was selling an XBox 360 with hard drive, extra controller and four games for £160. I know I can barely afford to eat, but it was £160 for God’s sake. And he says it’s barely used. He says it’s nearly new - only been played like ten times or something. I had to buy it, you understand that, right?
So now I’m sat at work with an XBox 360 on my desk. Thing is, my desk faces a great big disused Samsung LCD HD panel. It just sits there, never getting used. Now that’s frustrating.
Only just a little frustrating though, coz I’m leaving at 12 today for the xmas hols. After that there is only the minor XBox impeding inconvenience of going to the cinema with my son to see Bee Movie. Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll not like it and want to leave half-way through.
Oh, crap and I need to get some last minute shopping in too. It’s like the universe is conspiring against my XBox and me.
On an entirely unrelated note, I thought I’d do some unfashionable meta-blogging.
I used to blog quite a lot. Then I basically stopped. This time round though I seem to be having a different problem. I create draft posts and then never publish them. In the past I would post any old crap and then read it back later and wonder why on earth I made my ill-considered thoughts public. Now I write stuff but don’t publish it because I want it to be a little more considered and less ranting.
I know that this is bad for the blog. The secret to blogging is just to keep writing, even if what you put out there is crap. If you lose momentum, you lose the blog.
Perhaps over Christmas I’ll return to my drafts, consider them carefully and publish them anyway. If I’m not too busy with my XBox.
December 21st, 2007
Sorry, this is a long post. You might want to read it in bits or something. Without ruining the story, it gets freaky later on.
I’m not the sort of person to have ever taken drugs. It’s not that I have a hard moral line on the issue, it’s more of a fear of permanently brain damaging myself. I’m also quite unlucky and forgetful. I would be that one in a million case in the Daily Mail who forgot whether he was supposed to drink lots of water or try to avoid water and ends up spearheading some sort of campaign from beyond the grave. I can see my face now in some sort of newspaper campaign logo surrounded by the words “The remember Ian campaign”. The logo would be pasted onto photographs of loutish people on a night out and terrifying looking tablets.
Thing is, I have an idea of what drugs are low risk and what ones are high risk. It’s just that when I was a student, I classed them all as ‘high risk’ and so didn’t try any of them at a time when opportunities were rich. These days I have a better idea of drugs but ironically zero opportunity to try them.
So for last weekend’s trip to Amsterdam, I though that perhaps, if I have time, I might try some hash. It would satisfy a curiosity and tick off that item on life’s list of things to try out.
So we wandered around Amsterdam doing the touristy things (It really is a nice place, you should go there) and eventually came to a coffee shop, in some alley. We popped in and were greeted by a smiling man who offered us the ’smokes menu’. He really did smile an awful lot. In fact he didn’t stop smiling once. It became slightly sinister and in light of the fact that I’m alive and telling this story, the Daily Mail would be better with him for their campaign logo.
So anyway, we decided that rather than embarrass ourselves with naive touristy asthma attacks in response to the smoke, we would go for the hash-cake which would provide us with a simple, low-risk way of ticking off our ‘things to do in Amsterdam’ card.
So a slice of cake and a coffee later, we went on our way to see the sex museum to tick off something else.
After about an hour, we got slightly giggly and I lost just a little bit of hand-eye coordination. It was like being slightly drunk. “This is good,” I thought, “If you’re going to get giggly, then a sex museum is probably the best place to blend in”. And I was right, and it was fine, and it wore off.
We decided to head back to the hotel, which involved a train ride to the airport followed by a shuttle-bus to the hotel. First stop though would be at the train station where we decided to get some snacks. Oreos, Toblerones and a bottle of water. At least I think that was the first stop since my memories of what happened next are kinda in the wrong order. The problem is that they don’t really connect back into any sensible order if I stop to try to make sense of it.
I know that we did go to a shop though, and I know that we put Oreos, Toblerones and water into a basket, and I know that that was early on. It’s just that the shop may actually have been in the airport, but the story makes better sense to me if it’s in the train station.
At the back of the shop, my wife came to me and said that the room was swaying.
“I think we’re on a boat”
“We’re not on a boat, we’re in a shop. We’re buying chocolate.”
“No, the floor is swaying.”
She took my arm and the room was indeed swaying back and forth like we were on a boat.
“Can’t you hear the water?”
I listened a bit, “Yeah, actually I can hear the water.” I heard the boat’s engines too, but I didn’t tell her that because there was still a part of my brain that knew that the water was someone pushing boxes about, and the engines were refrigerators.
“Where are we? What are we doing here?”
“Ok, we’re not on a boat. We’re in a train station. No… a bus station. We need to get a train. Or a bus.”
I put the basket on the floor and decided to make a conscious, controlled effort to get out of the shop.
At this point I’m a little confused about the order of events, because I remember us on the train to the airport feeling fine, and in fact a little disappointed by the lack of any effect from the cake. In my memory there are two places where things started to happen - once in the shop and once on the train. I can’t remember which is the true story because I can’t remember where the shop was.
So we’re sitting on the train, and I feel a peculiar sensation of being lifted upwards. It was as though my skull, my legs, my arms were all being pulled up to the roof by some sort of magnet. I tried to explain it to my wife, who looked concerned at my demented passion in trying to explain that what I was saying was true. I was being lifted out of my seat and was passionately explaining that this must be why it’s called getting high. We weren’t worried though, because we were both laughing too much, and it seemed to go away after a minute or so.
Then my wife had a strange sensation too. She drew lines on her head with her finger, indicating thoughts in her head traveling from the back of her skull to the front, and thoughts moving from the left to the right, blocking the other thoughts. She was concerned that she could only remember the thoughts at the front and not the thoughts at the back, but she couldn’t keep them at the front. She didn’t know what the sideways thoughts were doing.
Like me though, she became impassioned with an urge to convince me that what she was saying was true and she didn’t accept that I believed her.
Then there’s a blank bit. I can actually fill in the blanks by thinking about them, but without that additional concentration, they just seem blank. I’ll just skip to the next thing that I know happened.
We’re coming up the escalator from the train platforms into the main entrance hall at Amsterdam airport. From there, we need to walk across the hall to the exit, which is right next to our bus stance. Short and simple.
We started walking towards the exit in a straight line but the airport keeps changing, and time seems to be moving far too slowly. I look up to where the exit is. It’s not there, and I don’t recognise the wall in its place. I turn around and turn back again, and again the wall is different. I can spin 360 degrees and find that the airport looks different on every revolution. It’s impossible to find your way in an airport that changes its appearance and layout every time you turn your head.
Walking was like moving through treacle. It was as though time was slowed down, but at the same time was moving at the normal speed. I saw the burger king next to the escalator where we had started, its big round logo flashing into my vision for what must have seemed like the fifth time. In an effort to finally make sense of this labyrinth, I moved burger king to my right and checked the direction of the floor tiles, all the while with my wife becoming more nervous and paranoid, and all the while trying to convince her that she was going to be ok, and that I wasn’t yet affected by it and that she should trust me to get her out of there.
We were about halfway to the exit and the disorientation began again. We seemed to be walking towards a car rental place instead of an exit. Where were we anyway? Why are we in a bus station? Are we supposed to be catching a train? Amsterdam. We are in Amsterdam.
“We’re going to find the exit, we are going to get on a bus and then go to the hotel. At the hotel, we are going to get off the bus, we are going to go to our hotel room where we will be safe until this wears off”
With a memory that lasted no more than a second at a time, I found it useful to re-state exactly what was going on over and over so that I didn’t forget where I was.
My wife stopped, “Give me the camera”
“Ok, what for?”
She started recording a video of us in our sorry state.
“Ben, Mummy loves you and wants you to know that. I don’t think we’re going to be ok. I’m convinced that I’m going to die tonight.”
I put the camera away and saw some chairs back the way we had come. We should walk to the chairs somehow, if we can find them, and wait for it to wear off a bit. No! Wait! There’s the exit.
The exit was right next to the car rentals, and we were standing right by it.
“Of course! Here it is! The floor tiles are horizontal, we were in control the whole time! Let me see your feet as you walk”
I looked at my wife’s feet and was relieved to see that her stride was of a normal length. This meant that the time distortion wasn’t a result of us walking incredibly slowly like a pair of lunatics, and that we’re probably not attracting too much unwanted attention.
Outside we waited on the bus and felt happier that we seemed to be getting somewhere. Once the bus came we climbed on board and noticed that there was ten minutes before it was going to leave. Half an hour passed and I looked at the clock again which had only moved five minutes. It was then that I realised were were in for a long night.
“That man is looking at us”
“No, he’s not”
The man was standing because the bus was crowded. He did seem to be glancing over, but I thought that he had a squint, so I didn’t share my wife’s paranoia. I was concerned that she didn’t tip over the edge and start a scene.
“He is, he’s looking over at us. Why is he looking at us?”
“He’s not. I think I heard him humming a tune while he did it. I don’t think he’s really looking at us”
“Ok. That wasn’t hash in that cake, was it?”
“No.”
“What was it?”
“I’m not sure, but I think it was LSD”
My wife’s face gaped open in genuine shock.
“Oh no. Oh my God”
My wife’s face was twisting around. Not a hallucintation - she was just pulling it into weird shapes and writing her hands around. She was rubbing her twisting face with the backs of her hands like she was a squirrel trying to clean its ears.
“Oh God, what if this is permanent? I don’t want to be stuck like this.”
My mind went back to the coffee shop, remembering that the menu had simply said “Cake”. I wondered idly about what was happening to my Shatner’s Bassoon.
The only other thing I remember from the bus journey was a genuine concern about being able to put my hand through the straps of my bag when the bus stopped. The bag was on my lap, and the straps were easily graspable, but for some reason this concerned me greatly. In the end, I managed to pick it up just fine.
In the hotel room we went to the bathroom where my wife watched worried at her contorting face, panicking about being left alone. I remember wanting to video it more to document the experience, but the camera was on the edge of the bed. I stood outside the bathroom where I could see the camera and see my wife. I knew that the journey to the bed could take several minutes in this new universe, but I thought that if I dashed, I could be back quickly. I reassured my wife that I would only be a moment and reached forward to get the camera.
On the way I noticed the giant painting of a rose on the wall and turned away from it. I really didn’t want to look at anything that might trigger an unpleasant hallucination. I returned with the camera and was relieved that I hadn’t been subjected to some sort of time warp along the way.
“Everything is… broken. Broken up”
I knew exactly what she meant because it was the same for me. Thoughts were fragmented into little pieces, barely tangible, only to assemble themselves together for a moment, making sense briefly before being shattered into forgotten memories a second later.
“Why is it all broken?”
The answers to questions would come out of my mouth before I’d heard the question. Only when I heard the question would my own answer make sense. Several times I decided that I was experiencing what time travel must be like.
I won’t bore you with the rest of the evening. Let’s just say that it continued in that vein.
The following evening, when the effects had fully worn off, I asked my wife if she regretted eating the cake. We both agreed that it was an incredibly stupid thing to do, but neither of us could really regret it. It was certainly a new and fascinating experience.
I can see also how people often link drugs with spiritualism. Although what I experienced was undoubtedly extreme confusion, it didn’t feel like that at the time despite being fully aware of what was going on inside my own mind and how I’d got like that. It felt more like I was looking at the universe in a different and unfamiliar way. It wasn’t that I was looking at the universe through confusion-goggles, it was as though I was looking at familiar things in a way I hadn’t been able to see before.
This is of course nonsense, but it made all the spiritualistic shops that pepper Amsterdam’s streets fit right in so much more logically.
Don’t do drugs kids, it’s not big and it’s not clever. Especially when you don’t know what you’re taking.
December 10th, 2007
