IntroductionLittle did I know when I began this blog that I would be writing so much about my cannabis/THC experiences—originally the blog was just going to be thoughts about the music I write and produce. The only reason I’ve posted my cannabis experiences
here is because they have had a profound effect on how I hear music and sound, and thus on my songwriting.
I didn’t really begin exploring cannabis until I moved to Portland in 2020, so all of this is relatively new territory for me.
Synchronicitously or perhaps
serendipitously (or both), during my tincture evenings I’ve also discovered
free jazz and the
Beat Generation, particularly the works and lives of
Allen Ginsberg and
William S. Burroughs, and those have also opened up new avenues for perception and expression.
I have had thoughts or visions of some strange concepts, like being a universal receptor of ideas in an
infinite geometric wonderland ...
Click image for larger view; opens in new window.
... or of various “gods and entities” (
see below). And recently, I find I have a renewed sense of self-confidence in myself as a musician and artist.
It’s a long story I might tell another time, but the first time I ingested cannabis, it was so intense I actually ended up calling 911. What really puzzled me was the effect seemed more like what I would expect from LSD: my head felt like it was about ten feet above my body, and my eyes felt like they were about ten feet in front of my head. And then I began having “the little shakes” (
see below) and that’s when I called 911.
When I take my tincture (I use
Siskiyou Sungrown product, by the way), I use the eyedropper and place the dose on a cookie or donut. I don’t like putting the tincture directly from the eyedropper under my tongue, and the few times I’ve done it that way the effect seems much less intense than when ingested with food. I have read that THC metabolizes (or something like that) in fat, so perhaps the cookie or the donut “activates” it. The effect usually last about five hours, peaking after about two. Taking a higher than usual dose creates a more intense effect, but the timeframe seems to remain the same. However, for the last few weeks I’ve been ingesting it with a tablespoon of coconut oil, and the effects seem to last much longer, about eight hours.
Generally, I experience the following, most of which seem common for most users of cannabis:
☆ I get a little dizzy. Not so dizzy I can’t stand, walk, go up and down stairs, or ride a bus, but I definitely would not try to drive in this condition. But unlike drinking alcohol, which can also make me feel dizzy, I don’t feel sleepy.
☆ Sometimes I feel “heavy” ... not sluggish, like I can’t get out of bed, but sort of like I’m “falling in place”. It’s difficult to explain.
☆ Time seems to slow down. For example, watching a half hour sitcom episode, even one I’m familiar with, seems to take two or three times as long to watch! Brushing my teeth seems to take forever. Taking a leak seems to take forever.
However, I don’t get the munchies, ever. My usual routine is to do as described above with the cookie or donut, then I have dinner about 15 minutes later. It’s not a huge dinner, just an average-sized one for me, and not once have I ever gotten the munchies. I do, however, get very cottonmouthed. I drink both water and coconut water throughout the evening, though neither seems to alleviate that sensation.
I also haven’t experienced paranoia or anxiety at all. The only unpleasantness I’ve had, besides the aforementioned cottonmouth, is an occasional
very slight, momentary nausea, but that’s it.
Drugs: do you do them? What do you think of them? – Tom C. (Nottingham, UK)
Kind of what I think of cars. Cars can be incredibly useful, fun, and life-changing if you understand how cars work and know how to drive safely. If you don’t know anything about driving or you tend to drive recklessly, you’re probably not ready to use cars.
—blogger Tim Urban, of WaitButWhy.com (source)
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The following seem less typical for most cannabis users. For example ...
☆ My focus seems much sharper, but also much narrower. If I’m watching a movie and start thinking about what I’m going to have for breakfast the next day, it’s as if the movie doesn’t exist, even though it’s still visible to my eyes and audible to my ears. This may explain the next item ...
☆ There is a feeling of “disassociation”, which I usually notice when watching a movie, particularly one that has been dubbed. If I concentrate on the dialogue, pretty soon it “separates” from the action on the screen. I can easily imagine the dubbers in a studio recording the dialogue, but with the screen action “disassociated”, it seems more like I’m listening to a
very strange, out-of-context radio play. This creates a sense of incongruity, which often leads to giggles—see next item.
☆ I get the giggles, but not like in the movies, where everything is just automatically funny. I’ve watched some of my favorite comedies while stoned, anticipating some really good giggle fits, but no, that doesn’t happen consistently. Nor does being stoned make everything seem better: I watched one of my favorite films (
Black Lizard, dir. Kinji Fukasaku, 1968) while stoned, and found myself disappointed in it.
Often when I get the giggles, it’s due to some incongruity rather than something being ha-ha funny—
The Benny Hill Show,
The Carol Burnett Show, and
Mystery Science Theater 3000 were particularly good at this kind of humor. For example: my best friend in high school and I recorded a dozen albums of music over thirty years ago. Listening to those tapes now, some of the songs remind me of the B-52s. I then easily picture the
real B-52s singing our songs, but with
our words and
our voices coming out of the mouths of Fred, Cindy, and Kate. Yet it seems perfectly natural, creating a sort of
paradoxical incongruity. I felt if the real B-52s ever performed these songs, the audience wouldn’t think, “Hey, this sounds like some dumb kids wrote this!” but “Wow, are they on a bad acid trip or what?”
The longest laugh I ever got out of a paradoxical incongruity was when I listened to a musical version of
The Blob that my friend and I mostly improvised. At one point a character excuses herself to go to the bathroom (where the Blob will come up through the toilet to devour her) and she sings about having to take a dump ...
It wasn’t just the ridiculous nature of the lyrics I found so hilarious, but the thought, “Imagine if someone paid big bucks for tickets to a Broadway show starring Patti Lupone, and
this was the song she sang, and in
that voice!” That kept me laughing for about a week! Not constantly, but all I had to do was think of that song and I’d get the giggles. For a while I thought I had broken my brain, lol. And see also “
Dogs on Ice”, from our
Blackjack album.
☆ I get the occasional muscle tremors or spasms, what I like to call “the little shakes”, especially if what I’m watching or listening to has an abrupt change in brightness, volume, or intensity. I did a little research and things like anxiety, low room temperature, or being over-caffeinated seem to be the common causes, but none of these apply in my situations. My guess is “the little shakes” are just a more intense kinesthetic response. You hear a loud noise, you jump. You’re watching a night scene in a movie and it suddenly goes to bright daylight, you squint. Anyway, they don’t seem to be causing me any harm and I kinda like when it happens. They’re not constant or so intense it interferes with any physical activity or movement.
☆ My sense of hearing, or at least the way I interpret what I hear, is now forever changed, even when I’m not stoned. It’s like I hear everything more
deeply, like I went from watching a movie on an old VHS tape to watching it on Blu-ray. If I’m listening to music, it’s as if I’m in the middle of the band, hearing each instrument crystal clear. I do think sometimes I hear things that aren’t there. I don’t mean, for example, that I suddenly hear a glockenspiel while listening to a clarinet. My guess, and I’m not an acoustical engineer or
psychoacoustician, is because I’m hearing more “deeply”, everyday or familiar sounds are “blended” differently and my brain interprets these sounds as best it can, almost like a audio Rorschach test.
There was one time when I was listening to a mallsoft song, and would’ve sworn I heard someone counting to four repeatedly in Spanish, deep in the background. What a cool idea, thought I! But it didn’t seem to be there when I’ve listened on subsequent occasions. However, I thought the idea was so cool
I used it in one of my songs. Unfortunately, after attending a particularly loud rock concert,
I now have moderate tinnitus.
☆ I don’t get perplexed by “typical stoner thoughts”, like “if oranges are called oranges, why aren’t apples called reds?” I don’t marvel at how my bedsheets feel, how blank the ceiling is, etc. I do, however, get some really mind-blowing thoughts, like the “meta-pine tree” I saw
while watching Noh theater, or how Nomad (from the original Star Trek series episode “The Changeling”)
kills security guards with an energy beam. I struggle to understand why those thoughts are so powerful and significant, but also with how to express them in writing (for example, this paragraph is taking forever to write). I’m not freaked out or disturbed by such thoughts; quite the opposite. I know there are no such things as meta-pine trees or an all-powerful
Godcat entity who merely contemplates us but otherwise takes no part in human affairs, yet the fact I imagine such things makes me feel as if my perception or interpretation of things has changed. For that reason, I always keep paper and pencil by my bed while I’m stoned, to jot down such thoughts and ideas. Perhaps it’s more important right now that I simply record these thoughts and acknowledge them, rather than trying to understand them.
This is music played at such a pitch of impatience and self-criticism that every note bursts with expression, a bustle of question-marks, a hive of conflicting vectors. If it’s all too much, it’s because you’re frightened to be alive.
—writer Ben Watson, in 2010, reviewing Nipples, a 1969 album by the late Peter Brötzmann
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I have made a few guesses why my reactions seem atypical:
☆ As an artist and musician, I already look at and listen to the world in different ways than the average person.
☆ Long, long before I began experimenting, I typically had surreal and elaborate dreams, and not of the “I dreamt I saw a purple dog, the end” variety. My dreams frequently take place in improbably large shopping malls or office buildings, or in vast landscapes, though not always. Here’s a random sampling of some of those dreams, and these occurred when I was
not stoned!
I found myself in China trying to get home à la The Wizard of Oz with several strange companions.
I participated in Olympic dodgeball (without actually playing), which was held in a castle. I took first place on a technicality and the prize was all of Scotland.
I worked in a warehouse building the size of several city blocks, and several hundred feet tall.
I went to a Mexican border town, which was entirely inside a cave, and beyond which lay a frozen wasteland.
I tied for first place in Eurovision (and like the Olympic dream, I did so without competing).
I went to a bar that had a “samba machine” into which you strapped people and it would manipulate their bodies rhythmically to teach them how to samba. |
And so, I
already have had some pretty trippy visions and imaginings.
☆ I don’t smoke cannabis, I take a tincture. It’s my understanding that ingesting it provides a more psychedelic, trippier experience than smoking it. I’ve tried smoking it in the past but it never seemed to do much (if anything) for me.
☆ I was a pretty precocious kid, reading science books and such (written for much older readers) in elementary school. I supposedly tested at a 12th grade reading level in 6th grade. As a teen, I “got” films like
Zardoz,
Dark Star, and
THX-1138. And in high school I really grooved on Marvel’s
What If? #32, “What if the Avengers had Become the Pawns of Korvac?” (April 1982), which introduced me to cosmic entities like Master Order and Lord Chaos (who are not unlike Hinduism’s Vishnu the Preserver and Shiva the Destroyer).
AfternoteI’m currently reading a book called “Your Psilocybin Mushroom Guide” by
Michelle Janikian (Ulysses Press, 2019). I’ve never done LSD or mushrooms or other psychedelics, but I’ve long been curious after reading the profound experiences of people like Steve Jobs, Harry Nilsson, Carl Sagan, Gerald Heard, etc., even after just a one-time experience. Heck, actor Jack Nicholson said he had seen the face of God, which is exactly how I felt while watching Noh actors or Nomad. Janikian’s descriptions of how psilocybin feels sounds very much like my experience with THC. It just makes me wonder; if I trip out this much on THC, what will happen when I try mushrooms?
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