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THE ELECTRIC JIMMY SWAGGART ACID TEST
It can be really intense when you take acid and I’m not talking about fake shit. I mean reality and real intensity. There was one time when I dosed with a few friends. It was good liquid about 250 mikes a hit. I indulged in two hits.
We were restless so someone go the bright idea to cruise over to Lambertville and climb the Devil’s Tea Table. This was a small mountain in New Jersey that had a small rock formation at the top known as the Devil’s Tea Table.
So now you have 6 guys with heads full of acid climbing a mountain at sunset with a single flashlight. Everyone made it up the mountain alive but it the sun had quickly faded into night. It was time to head back down the mountain. The batteries in the flashlight went dead on us so we were trying to use lighters. The lighters didn’t provide much in the way of light. The crescent moon wasn’t providing much help either.
There were points that it was real dark. You could occasionally hear animals and insects and it was hard to see what you were stepping on. It was a dangerous game played in the dark. I remember almost stepping off a cliff. A couple times tree branches sought for support were snapped by our weight.
There were portions of the descent, I was simply on my back sliding down the cliff slowly. It was a truly life affirming experience. My survival instincts kicked into overdrive. I was like: “ I want to live! I WANT TO LIVE!”
Let me get down off this mountain. I reached a point that I didn’t care about the dirt. I didn’t care about the bugs or the poison ivy. I just want to get down off this mountain. We all used our voices to guide one another and we all slowly made our way down the mountain.
“I want to live!” and live I did. We all got down the mountain alive and returned to a friend’s house. We were all hyperventilating. A couple guys left and went home. There’s a couple guys from this night that I never saw again.
A couple of us dropped another hit and drank some more beer. It was now morning. The TV was on and somehow the channel we turned on featured Jimmy Swaggart putting on a hilarious performance. He was pointing out all us sinners. We were all in stitches laughing at his sermon. It was incredibly funny at that particular moment.
To put it in context, I foolishly risk my life on a mountain for no good reason and return to this shit: a flimflam preacher related to Jerry Lee Lewis going on a rampage. It takes a strong dose of acid to be able to appreciate the subtle absurdity of the moment. Kareem Abdul Jabbar was right. The dilemmas life throws at us are often rather insane and absurd but at least now we can all laugh about it.
