Brothers, I share your pain…
I too had a disappointing new year.
My best mate and I travelled to a 4 day psychedelic dance festival in a remote corner of our home state, where we would camp in 40 + degree temperatures over the course of the New Year transition period. This would be our first rave experience so far; we had only acquired the tickets and organised our voyage a week or less prior to the festival, so were unprepared to a degree. This manifested in the substances used.
We had planed to take a variety of psychoactives with us to enjoy our stay and dance ourselves into a blissful trance with all the other trippers.
Although, to our dismay, this did not happen as planed.
Our brain-food consisted of a moderate amount of our high potency home-grown cannabis with accompanying smoking apparatus, a small variety of ecstasy that we had acquired over the twilight months of 07; including 3 red bulls we had saved, however resentfully because of their speedy cut, and also 4 anomalous and unproven tablets (beige fubu’s) that we had randomly acquired from a friend of ours, which we were anticipating on evaluating. We considered bringing a modest quantity of DXM, yet decided against doing so because we deemed disassociatives to be inappropriate for this situation. We also planed on attempting to acquire some acid, which would serve to stimulate our psychedelic tastes; although the chance passed us by. Mushrooms were an option, yet both in hindsight and foresight we decided that the sacrosanctity of psilocybin mushrooms would be profane in this instance. We refused to bring alcohol, although a few drinks would have been pleasurable in retrospect.
We drove about 3 hours to our destination in blistering heat, and on arriving, set up our camp which consisted merely of my car in which I slept, and a small tent for my friend. We spent the first day simply smoking countless times and relaxing to escape the heat; there was no way we could muster the agility and fortitude to go and dance in these temperatures during the day, despite the ecstatic beats emanating from the two nearby stages, which swam through my mind and provided great tranquillity. This trend continued throughout the festival, and resulted in us refusing to dance during daylight hours, and an inability to dance during the night, because of the unrelenting heat and lack of energy that resulted from our physical exhaustion and constant consumption of cannabis.
During the first night, we decided after some contemplation to consume the red bulls and save the others for new years, even after previously agreeing to constrain our use of ecstasy to New Years Eve alone. We decided on these pills because we had already used them previously and had found their cut somewhat removed from what we seek when using MDMA alone. Because of this, we reserved our faith in the anomalous pills that we had received only a week prior to the festival, and not knowing their worth, assumed that they would be of high quality because of the degree of trust we had in the supplier, although he himself had not used them.
This decision turned out to be a dire mistake, for although we thoroughly enjoyed our experience on that first night, with deep and loving discussions running the course of the evening, preoccupying our surging desire to dance and consuming the majority of that night, our faith in the unknown pills was our downfall. When new years arrived and hours after ingesting the questionable pills, neither me nor my friend got any psychoactive effect from them whatsoever, despite throwing up violently. The pills themselves looked and smelt bizarre from the first observation of them, yet we did not want to pass up an opportunity for ecstasy just because we didn’t know the contents of the pills indefinitely. It is usually impossible to know the contents of an externally acquired tablet without testing it; and so we put our faith in an unknown, rather than playing it safe and reserving the proven goods until last. This resulted in us both wasting our new year’s night, and feeling quite cheated, in addition to vomiting.
The harmonious and affectionate expectations of our fellow ravers was the most disappointing aspect of this experience; although we were surrounded by people with supposedly comparable interests to our own, our time at this festival was generally devoid of profound communal interaction, because most of our fellows were simply restraining themselves to their own camps and not making much of an attempt to get to know unfamiliar others, including ourselves. We on the other hand yearend so much to talk with other like minded individuals, yet if we were being disregarded on the basis of ignorance and complacency, we were in no state to submit ourselves to these people who would not show any attempt at community so supposedly inherent within the rave culture. We did however form a good relationship with a few people, primarily with an older tripper who was camping adjacent to us and joined our deep conversation on that first night; we retained a connection with him throughout the length of the festival. If only more people had been loving and embracing of strangers and connections like the one which we shared with our neighbour, we would have had a lot more fun than we did. It’s disappointing to see that even a psychedelic rave can be full of glorified junkies; it simply made our introduction to the rave scene disheartening and unpleasant.
So in the end, we had a pretty backwards introduction to 2008.
It ended up being draining on our bodies, minds, and wallets.
I hope our next rave experience is a lot more enjoyable than this one.
A Datura poisoning would be fitting as retribution for the bad ecstasy!
Peace, and happy new year to you all!
