"Sorry America, I really hope it wasn’t my fault … "
Election day, Nov. 8, was a long day for me — I waited in an atrociously long line to vote. Since I live in a non-competitive state, I voted third party. I was sure Hillary was going to run away with it anyway, win by a landslide, and it would just be the same as under Obama and Bush and Bill and so on. Same ol’ same ol’ same ol’.
But that didn’t happen, did it? I think it was all my fault.
After voting, I went to my friends’ apartment. They weren’t watching the election coverage — I was fine with that. At that point I was so done with the whole thing, so sick of Hillary and Donald already. I told my friends I just wanted to get away from it all. One of them grinned at me and said he had just the thing for a healthy escape: DMT. Otherwise known as the spirit molecule, it’s a life changing drug, a systematic flooding style of spiritual enlightenment. It's scary, weird, and at that point, I'd never done it. It was just another Tuesday night, another boring election, so there weren't going to be parties or anything. Why not?
“This should be enough for you to break through to the other side,” said my friend as he torched his rig’s nail to a searing hot temperature.
“What the fuck does that mean?” I asked.
“Trust me,” he said, flicking the torch. “You’ll know when you get there.”
Before I had even exhaled, I was higher than I had ever been in my entire life. Instantly, the carpet rapidly shifted in geometric patterns. Life had this really bizarre Instagram filter. It was exactly like the kind of exaggerated magic mushroom hallucinations you see in movies, with bright, neon purple beams of energy shooting every which way across the air as my entire field of vision became polka-dotted, and fantastic tie-dye shadows appeared on my friends.
“Guys, this is too fucking weird," I barely got out. I thought closing my eyes might help, but it only made things stranger. I had never felt anything remotely similar to this in my entire life, and felt like I was traveling to a different dimension. Eventually, after a few minutes (which seemed a hell of a lot longer), I got used to it and calmed down a bit. From there on out, it was a blast. Afterwards, I was breathing heavily and smiling so hard my face ached.
Then I came to. I was back in this reality. This same old reality.
But my friends were all looking right at me like somebody had died.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Wordlessly, one of them flipped from the History Channel to CNN. It was showing a newsman wearing a grave face.
“Donald Trump is confirmed to be the 45th president of the United States,” he said.
It was a mindfuck unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced in my entire life. Even after you come down from DMT, you still feel strange, like your brain is trying to make sense out of the doors of perception being blown off their hinges with high explosives. And, in that state, watching Trump — that old reality show host who always implied how much he wanted to bang his own daughter — I couldn’t escape the nagging feeling that I had traveled through other dimensions and tripped myself into an alternate timeline.
Would that little orange Twitter goblin have lost if I didn’t smoke DMT? Fuck man, why couldn’t I have tripped over to the universe where Bernie Sanders won?
I kept reliving the old videos of Trump forcibly buzzing Vince McMahon’s hair on Wrestlemania, feeling like I had arrived in some sort of cartoon parody of the real world. While all my housemates and my friends and pretty much everyone else were all pissed off, I was just sitting there with my mouth agape, fried like Louisiana chicken, wondering if my DMT trip had flipped reality on its head just for myself, and for everybody else in the world for that matter.
The moral? A wonderful, beautiful molecule like dimethyltryptamine should be done in a peaceful and serene environment, when there’s not something like, say, the fate of Western civilization hanging in the balance. And while smoking DMT on election night will fuck with me until my last day, I do think that the amazing, cerebral roller coaster of the trip helped me realize life is still worth living — even with Tangerine Emperor Nero in charge of the nukes.
Sorry America, I really hope it wasn’t my fault.
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