PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

You may think me to be crazy, and you may be right to think so. I happen to think I might be a touch insane myself. After hearing my story you are likely to say it was just the effects of a hallucinogenic drug; that the little people I saw were just a figment of the imagination of a drug addled brain. And I'd have to agree that the rational part of my mind, the source of all reason and discernment, is quite inclined to agree with you. And yet, there is part of me still that is unable to shake the suspicion that what I saw was real. That there are universes to be found within our own and ours is but another universe enmeshed within many others. I will tell you my story, and it is a true story. This is not a work of fiction. You can decide what you think for yourself. As for me, I believe that the little people were real.

I was seventeen at the time, perpetually horny and filled to the brim with post-pubescent angst. I had just read The Catcher in the Rye for the first time, and found my own ponderings to mirror those of Holden Caulfield. In other words, I was a bit of a twat, an arrogant know it all, pissed off at the world for having the audacity to exist at all. Don't worry, every teenage boy goes through that particular phase at some time or another, most of us, myself included, manage to grow out of it. Call it a right of passage into manhood for a North American boy. In America we don't have to kill a lion with a knife in order to be considered a man, we don't have to stand on a pole in the elements without food or water for three days, and we certainly don't have to drink the drug laced piss of a South American shaman high as a kite on Fly Amanitia to be welcomed into society as an adult. All I had to do to become a man is turn eighteen years old. Yeah... what a fucking joke!

So here I am, seventeen, about to turn yet another year older, and I'm scared shitless at the idea of becoming a man. I never asked to be born, but whaddyafuckinkno! I was. I never asked for twelve years of manadatory indoctrination, sorry, I meant to say education! But the big people who couldn't keep their genitals apart one fated night in 1990 said I had to go. And I certainly never asked to grow up and "become a man," whatever the hell that means. I never had a say in the matter. But, and there is always a but, I did get to choose my first right of passage. Let's call it a vision quest for the sake of the narrative. I didn't know it then, but smoking Salvia Divinorum would forever and irretrievably shape the course of my personal philosophy. You see, that's when I broke through the veil of our present reality into another reality reeking of "otherness." A reality where the little people live. That's the day I realized just how infinite infinity really is. Hint, hint. It's bigger than you think...

I mentioned earlier about drinking a shaman's drug laced piss to go on a vision quest, aka, trip balls. Seriously, that's a real thing! You can look it up if you don't believe me. Fortunately, I didn't have to drink piss to go on my vision quest. All I had to do was smoke some plant indegenous to Central America called Salvia Divinorum. I did, however, meet a shaman, and he did sell me drugs. He probably didn't identify as a shaman. He probably identified as a Patel, or whatever the Indian equivalent of Smith happens to be. But I know a shaman when I see one, and this guy was definitely a shaman! And he sent me on a vision quest! Okay, I'm being a bit dramatic, he was just this Indian guy at a headshop who had no qualms selling drugs to underage kids. Strong drugs, potent drugs, melt your face off drugs, haunt your dreams for the next fifteen years drugs! You get what I mean.

So me, Nathan and Cory buy the salvia. The purple stuff. The strongest extract on the market at the time. I think it was $45 a gram. And we head out toward Cory's gold, hand-me-down Lexus with an egg-shaped bulge in the front passenger side tire, and we go for a drive. Nathan and Cory had smoked the stuff before so they at least had some inkling of what to expect. Me? Utterly fucking oblivious...

I was extremely excited, on account of having heard about Nathan's previous trip. It had been a few months earlier, on Good Friday as it would happen, and he smoked a bowl of the stuff while seated at a kitchen table. He told me that everything in the room went white, blindingly white, and then Jesus walked into the room wearing blue jeans and a plain white t-shirt, and he sits at the table across from Nathan. Nathan says, "Jesus, you died today!" Jesus smiles, saying, "It's okay, buddy, I'm coming back." And that's it. So I think, hey, I love Jesus! I'd like to sit down and have a conversation with Him. Let's see what this Salvia stuff is all about! But I didn't meet Jesus. No, I met the the little people and they scared the shit out of me! They scare the shit out of me still...

If you ever feel so inclined to smoke salvia (still legal in fourteen states, by the way) do yourself a favor and don't. Trust me, it's no fun, especially if you end up having as bad of a trip as the one I had. But if you're the kind of person who prefers to learn from mistakes over mentors, at the very least be kind to yourself and do your research first. Find a safe, comfortable place and make sure to be accompanied by an uninebriated babysitter to keep you from unintentionally harming yourself. Practice lots of deep breathing exercises the day of and make absolutely certain that your head is in a good place. Don't do what I did. For the love of all things holy, don't smoke it in the back seat of Cory's gold, hand-me-down Lexus with an egg-shaped bulge in the front passenger tire!

Cory parked, where I can't remember, but it was somewhere inconspicuous enough. I packed my little orange and blue glass bowl to the brim. My buddies tell me to take a deep drag before letting off the carb and hold it in for thirty seconds before exhaling. So I strike the flint, light the bowl, take a deep toke and start to count in my head. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi... all the way to twenty-two. It's right about the time that smoke rings start propelling themselves out of my third eye that I burst out into uncontrollable laughter; because all I can think of is how Aquaman from the Super Friends would do the same thing to summon the assistance of his marine dwelling lackeys. I'm not underwater, but I'm about to go under all the same. Not into the light like Nathan did. I fell into the darkness. Nathan says, "No! You didn't hold it in long enough!" Nathan didn't know what the hell he was talking about. If anything, I held it in too long. That's the last thing I remember before the world around me disappeared and everything went black.

Suddenly, out of the darkness, a small, wooden block man from my childhood appears; and I am the small, wooden block man. He looked just like these little toys I had as a kid. His head was triangle shaped and his arms, legs and crotch were all shaped in such a way that you could fit them together to form various geometric patterns. Then hundreds of the small, wooden block men appear. Then thousands. Then millions. Then exponentially more. And I am every single one of them simultaneously. And I can hear all their individual thoughts and feel all their individual emotions.

They, or we? or I? become magnetically attracted to one another, joining together to form into the pages of a book. So now, on top of being a small, wooden block man army, I am also thousands of two-dimensional sheets of paper. I am every individual page simulataneously, and I can hear all their individual thoughts and feel all their individual emotions. They, or we? or I? collectively join together to form a book. I turned into a friggin' book, man! A giant man picks me up and reads me. Talk about invasion of privacy! He turns my pages and I feel what it is like to be a turning page. He dog-ears one of the pages, for future reference. That was not a pleasant experience. If you only take one thing away from this story, I hope it is this. Please don't dog-ear your books, they don't like being dog-eared!

Suddenly, the room bursts into laughter as the book explodes into countless small, wooden block men. They encircle me, pointing at me laughing. I am no longer every small, wooden block man. I am but a singular, small wooden block man: humiliated, afraid and desperately trying to escape. I struggle free, briefly returning to reality, where Nathan and Cory are laughing hysterically at all the strange contortions of facial expression that I am making. I scarcely am able to blurt out a slur, "Stop laughing at me!" before the world goes dark again where the entire episode replays itself exactly as before, only this time in reverse, as though I were a rental VHS tape being rewound and returned to Blockbuster. And then I came back to reality, this time to stay, traumatized by the probing of my psyche and unable to speak to my friends. I had witnessed an entire universe be created and destroyed. It felt like an eternity, defiant of the parameters of time. An eternity encapsulated in the mind of an angsty teenager. I looked at the clock. Only four minutes had passed in real time...