TheGreenPhantom
Titanium Teammate
Periwinkle Tea
1 cup, 2 cup, 3 cup, 4 —
I wasn't getting high so
drank three cups more....
(Filled a tea ball each time.)
Next day I felt like a stick figure. Like my arms, legs and torso were the breadth of a pencil line. I felt pressed and stretched out, and like I was viewing everything from a few inches above and behind my head. This feeling was slight, not overwhelming.
Having felt similar sensations during meditation, I paid it no mind.
Then at 1 in the morning while watching Outer Limits in the dark with my sister, **30 hours after my last cup,** everything goes spherical — like, whatever I was looking at was sort of warped like when you get a new pair of glasses, and far away at the same time as though I were seeing it from the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. Physically I felt as though I were falling backwards and into myself. I'd close my eyes and a void space would engulf me.
I ran up into my room and tried to meditate, but every time I closed my eyes I saw phantoms – chromatic abstract figures – humans, plants, star trek type humanoids – trying to coerce my soul to leave my body for good, using spiritual "gravimetrics" to disalign me from my body and bring me out of myself. NOT FUN. At the same time, my heart rate was so slow and shallow I thought I would have a heart attack.
Luckily for me I had niacin (Vitamin B3) in the house in 500mg capsules (my pop loves this stuff – don't ask me why). Niacin speeds up your heart rate and dilates your blood vessels so you turn red as an apple for 20 minutes and itch all over like your leg after sleeping on it all night long. So I take 2, then 1 every hour after. Then to flush myself out, I started drinking iced tea – wound up drinking a gallon of it over the course of the night, sitting in my backyard, pondering life and death – the meaning of my own.
I started conceiving Everything — my surroundings, even ideas and the ways others have influenced me, etc. – as narrow threads of energy that branched out from an ocean of such energy threads into my navel. And now these threads were being plucked and twanged at by phantoms trying to dislodge them from myself in an attempt to summon my soul forth into the realm of the unborn.
I woke up in the afternoon with the effects still there — feeling physically distended, phantoms trying to grab at the cords of energy that keep me embodied whenever I closed my eyes, with the center of my brain feeling like it was being clenched by a fist.
By dinnertime I'd been peaked out on periwinkle for 18 hours. I was going out of my skull thinking I'd be stuck in this state forever. And it wasnt helping that I was having dinner with my family while they watched Rocky dubbed en español at top volume.
After dinner I go to my pop: "Dad, I think you need to take me to the hospital... I drank funny tea…." My pop gives me this looo-nng look down his nose and puckers his lips sideways, all haughty-like as if to say **going to the hospital for a bad trip is something only for losers who can't handle their drugs.**
So he takes me into my room, lights up a moxa stick, takes the hawk feather I found in a field upstate New York, and fans the smoke over my chest and belly for a couple minutes while talking to the things he told me were making me sick, having made their home in my viscera. I wont tell you my old mans technique, but in about 15 minutes I was feeling pretty damn straight.
If this trip did anything for me, it helped me appreciate my life more. I made a resolution in the midst of it that if I made it through alive, I would make a point of being more social — something I eschewed and was quite intimidated by at the time. Within three weeks, I had gone from a lone gunman in collage to a veritable party animal after falling in with a bunch of crazy writers and artists on the Lower East Side — probably the most abrupt and meaningful change in my life. That got the ball rolling in terms of my learning to create the life I wanted for myself.
I only drank periwinkle one time after, and all I experienced was torpor and slight dehydration after a cup or two.
==August/September, 1998==
