Last night I took two mescaline capsules, which my friend Steph had given to me before I left San Francisco. Apparently she just bought them legally from some sort of health / supplement store. There’s also a little bit of psilocybin in them, maybe 20%, the other 80% being mescaline . . . an Arnold Palmer of natural hallucinogens. So it’s crushed cactus and mushrooms ground into a green dust and put inside clear vegetable capsules.

I have been looking for mescaline for over a decade. I lived in Texas and California, Cactus Country more or less, and even still it eluded me. It’s just not as popular as LSD or mushrooms, probably because you just can’t get a hold of the stuff. Actual peyote cactus takes like thirty years to grow, but what I got comes from San Pedro cactus, which germinates and yields mescaline buttons much quicker. And now finally I had gotten my hands on the stuff. I would have preferred to eat the buttons whole, though I’ll tell you what, at this point in my life I’ll take what I what I can get, whatever it is . . .

And so it was that on the evening of April 6th, 2024 A.D., I ingested two capsules in the purple gloom my apartment. I washed them down with a cup of black coffee and thought: “Well baby, then aloha.” I sat at my desk and wrote some, and texted my friends, and on and on, while listening to chill music, waiting for the slow come-up, which is always one of the most exciting parts when eating any hallucinogen. It didn’t hit me that I was neck-deep in a dreamlike state till I stepped out onto my street an hour later to take my trash out. To me the high is immediately amplified or made obvious, whether it’s weed or mushrooms, because suddenly you’re in public and in view of other people. I stood there on the sidewalk watching the rainbow halo of irridescence now surrounding the street lights, and inside the apartments across the street, made all the brighter because of the peyote furnace raging inside me. It was a warm night and nearby people were sitting outside of little cafes and walking their dogs. My pupils were big empty zeroes and I felt like a cartoon character just then. I turned around and ran up four flights of stairs to get back to the coziness of my apartment. My stomach had that strange feeling and my fingertips felt cold, so I knew I was dipping my toe in Wacky World. I put on music and went into the kitchen to make green tea.

I’m not going to sit here and describe what a drug feels like other than to say that I felt euphoric and happy and talkative and my body felt warm and rubbery. This was just an EXPLORATORY trip, a trial run, and so I can’t say for sure what happens when you crank the dial and go full-blown cactus crazy. I figure I’ll save that for a long walk on for some weekend in May when it’s 70 degrees at night. But for now I stayed home and ate fruit and drank a gallon of water and called Laura. I played that new Zelda and was totally relaxed just flying around in the sky. At 5 am I put on BOB LE FLAMBEUR and hung out with it till the credits rolled. I had seen Roger Ebert recommend it in one of his reviews. It’s considered the first French New Wave film, and the grandfather of all heist movies. Man! I had a really good time watching that movie.

Bob is a washed up middle-aged up gambler who rolls dice and plays cards in little bars and clubs with his friends till six in the morning. He looks like a noir detective in a hat and a crumpled overcoat and a five o’clock shadow, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. Then he takes off his jacket and hat and drives home wearing his nice suit and in his nice car to get back to his beautiful apartment. He sleeps till the afternoon and wakes up to black coffee left by his maid. Once the sun goes down, Bob slicks back his hair and returns to the Parisian red light district to try his luck yet another night. Bob’s friends tend to be younger, and he has a sort of fatherly / mentor relationship with them. Later, Bob concocts the ultimate heist to pull off with his crew. Basically, Bob is cool as hell.

When the movie ended, I saw that the sun had come up behind the sheets hung over my windows, and I reckoned it was time to dream the dreams of the cactus. I brushed my teeth and got into bed and fell asleep immediately. I slept for seven hours and woke in the afternoon. I had no pain in my body whatsoever . . . it felt as though I was flooded with endorphins. I didn’t want to get out of bed, but when I checked the weather, seeing that it was 73 degrees outside, I knew I had to get up and SOAK UP as much of it as I could. So I popped open the tops of all my windows to let the air in and made coffee and sat outside on my balcony overlooking a forested place where little red squirrels with pointy ears live.

Well: Mescaline is great. I had what you might call a WHOLLY POSITIVE EXPERIENCE (WPE). So take that for whatever it’s worth. I’ll keep you ABREAST on my next go around, when I take a mid-level dose . . . or maybe I’ll do a hero’s dose and just dive head-first into the abyss. Why not? I’m not afraid. I already got some idea of what’s down there. And anyway, perhaps instead of plunging into darkness, a mescaline trip of that magnitude is more of an ascension. It’s got to be, and isn’t that nicer to think about? Either way, I will manifest it. I mean, Aldous Huxley wrote a whole book about eating that stuff, and getting real jazzed on it, and look how he turned out. Who’s to say I don’t come out the other side with the seed planted in me to someday grow older to become a Bob The Gambler type of dude. Bob is free and has a lot of friends and is the architect of his own destiny. I can think of worse fates.