I tried an unknown narcotic herb yesterday. At least it was unknown to me. I had only just walked into a friend's livingroom and sat down, when he and two other guys I barely know began to tell me about this stuff they'd all just tried. Salvia Darluria I think it was called. Noah, the kid from Canada pronounced it proudly and knowledgably. Like a lifelong herbalist tells some party-goers about his most interesting field discovery. Nodding his head very slowly and smiling inwardly.

I need to say now that I don't often take new, unknown drugs at the spur of the moment, such as at dinnertime on President's day. But Noah the weed-grower always had a handle on this stuff. He read High Times, he was hip to all kinds of strains of indoor cannabis from Vancouver and Oaksterdam. Noah said that this was a simple, herbal narcotic availible in tobacco shops. It comes in a little bag and looks like dark, shredded chewing tobacco leaves. When I agreed to try it, Noah made me a bong load of the strange stuff (salvia!), mixed with a bit of weed to give it body. I will remmeber for a long time how those black leaves turned orange as I sucked the oxygen and flames through them.

The bong gurgled GLUNK GLUNK GLUNK GLUNK.

With a lungful of mystery, I put the bong down on the table, and returned the stare the three chaps were giving me. It seemed they could barley conceal laughter. Noah handed me an electric lap steel guitar, and I put in on my lap. He put a jar in my left-hand. Play that thing man, he said. I still wasn't feeling the full onset of the buzz. What the hell could this be I thought. It's over-the-counter, sage based extract. I thought it couldn't possibly be stronger than RUSH. Headshops always have herbal replacemenst for sale. Bullshit I've always thought.

But my eyes felt like they were swelling. There was heat and outward pressure on my eyes. It wasn't unpleasant yet, I thought. But at the steady rate it's increasing, it's not going to be nice in a moment. imagined I must have looked like someone who got a hundred wasps stings on the eyes. Or maybe bad movie makeup, like Rocky V. But I could no longer see. I laughed nonetheless. Hey, I can't see man!

I was out for a while they tell me. I only remember coming back slowly to the present moment in time. This was the part I'll never ever forget.

These three guys are still sitting
across from me in the 1970s panelled livingroom,
but there is a hot white electric neon frame
around my view,
and the guys are arranged like
figures on a playing card.
And they're fucking all laughing at me.
They guy on my right is really big
he has thick red hair,
He looks like John Goodman,
and he's laughing exactly like Fred Flintstone.
He didn't fit in the scene.

And then I was pulled backwards. There was something tethered to the bottom of my brain, and it pulled me backwards in the chair like a spinning car on the carnival Zipper ride. In a rush of vertigo I was spun upside down, and another version of myself, and the whole setting of the room that looked like a court card flipped into its place. I was down below and there was another me sitting up there. A wave of panic came over me.

I don't like this.

And then I felt that heavy gravititional pull on my cortex, and the Zipper ride flipped the room around again. I was back on top, and the ersatz moment of reality was down below. Or was it? Which one of these is the one I belong in. Someone is fucking with me. I'm going to lose my place in the universe. Someone was lughing and I hated it.

We were shuffling through frames of time, so slowly that I could see the edge of the frame, like an optcial printer slowing down film footage and and pulling out to show the sprocket holes. I hated it. I wanted to get off the ride, but the ride operator didn't know that I was up at the top of the Zipper, and I was spinning round, from moment to moment, and I didn't know which one was the past and which was the presnt. I could see both at once and they were pretty much the same.

I could also say that the passing of moments resembled the plastic number leaves that flip downwards on analog clock radios. I came back really slow. I hated that pulling on the back of my head. Sean the red-haired guy was still laughing at nme, or so it seemed. I felt embarassed and fuming angry, like a kid who is embarassed to be woken up from a nap with everyone watching and laughing. WHO ARE YOU? I shouted at Sean.

IGOTTA GO I said, and I got up to go outside. My clothes were so hot. I went for the door, even though I no longer believed that it was the same old world outside. Everything was a clockradio that could change with a click, and the dropping of a leaf. The guys stopped me from leaving. Noah came and said, you don't want to do that. He stood in front of the door. I was not at all insistent. I had little will. Plenty of dementia.

When I recovred myself half an hour later and was laughing with guys about the strange experinece, they all agreed that I had a difficult comeback from it. I had taken a massive hit, mixed with pot. But it was worth it. I don't think I'll do it again though. From when I checked out with the swollen eyes, until that eskimo roll on the alarm clock of time space continuum, I was powerless to understand what was happening around me. And it took a long time to get everything reset again.