TheGreenPhantom
Titanium Teammate
Calamus Root
(Transcribed from recording.)
August 22nd, 1998
Saturday, 1:59 PM
I'm about to chew about an ounce of calamus root. This I collected from a marsh in upstate New York — a messy, muddy and difficult enterprise. These suckers grow more than 2 feet deep in ground that slogs back into the hole the second you make it.
Practical LSD Manufacture by Uncle Fester details how to extract the active ingredient, 2, 4, 5-trimethoxyamphetamine (TMA-2), but that requires experience and lab materials I dont yet have.... TMA-2 in its pure form is supposedly 10x as strong as mescaline; but unlike mescaline, it does not intensify colour perception. This according to Uncle Fester. I've often read otherwise.
According to Richard Alan Miller in The Magical and Ritual Use of Herbs, chewing for around 4 minutes, then ingesting about 10 inches of root (the diameter of a pencil) will induce visions. The asarones are broken down in the stomach into TMA-2. I have three thick roots, which should be enough for a trip.
It doesn't have much taste, really; the texture is kind of... I don't know... but knowing its been in that muddy bog kind of sets me off to not wanting to ingest this. I think if people knew where their food has been, they probably wouldn't eat it. Looking at the root, all I can think of is crayfish and leaches and stuff... and slugs.
Anyway….
I just ate about 3 or 4 inches of root. This is an excellent stimulant. I mean, I feel up — though I feel relaxed. My nerves are calm, but Im energetic. Much better than cigarettes.
Calamus root is tough and fibrous. You have to chew it for a couple of minutes — like ten minutes. And it foams. A kind of indescribable frothy fibrous juice forms and emanates from the root on contact with your saliva.
Once there is no more foamy fibrous substance in the root, it just becomes this hard mass of plant matter... which I swallowed.
Now 3:09, about an hour later.... If this stuff has any hallucinogenic properties at all, they haven't come on yet, or they are very, very mild. Yeah — the effects are very, very mild. Who knows though -- they may come on in full force in a half hour, forty-five minutes or so.
I cant really describe what I'm feeling right now, because its very, very subtle. I guess I sort of feel the high that you get when you smoke a cigarette, and you haven't smoked for a long time — sort of get that head-rushy feeling... but not really. It has different energetic properties than tobacco.
Auditory and visual perception is about the same.
My nerves — they're oddly relaxed. And there's a general numbness — though not a tactile numbness, but awareness of my physical form is numb: a sort of feeling between the muscles and the bones, or within the muscles themselves.
Its 3:21. So far no noticeable effects. Or very, very mild effects.
I have a big hunk of root left. If it doesn't come on in an hour and a half, I'm going to make a tea out of it. (I didnt bother to do this.)
Im looking up at the clouds through my skylight and some big shadow just flew across the clouds. These are cirrus clouds, all right — like high up — and above them a shadow passed — a big round disk of a shadow, and it just passed over these cirrus clouds, man.
Awesome, man.
Its now 5:14. I fell asleep between last time I talked to you and now. For something like an hour and a half.
Nothing more has developed than a sleepy stoned feeling. No visions. No changes in auditory perception. No changes in visual perception. Tactile perception is a little off. Takes a little more pressure before you actually start to feel something.
Other than that, my analysis on calamus root is that eating 4 inches of it is an excellent stimulant -- it sort of makes you very energetic, yet it keeps your nerves in a very placid, mellow state.
