August 1975 ~

I had bought five hits of blotter from a friend before returning to college for my sophomore year.  I was editor of the yearbook so I had permission to arrive to Cornell early in order to photograph new student orientation and the move-in process.  The acid had an uncertain provenance.  I was told it might be on the weak side, but the vendor had no personal experience.

The day after I moved in I decided to see what was up with the acid.  Because I was told it was 'light', I ate two tabs.  By this time I had had around 20 trips, about once a month for the previous 20 months.  It was a pleasant afternoon.  I got high on pot while awaiting the results.  Little happened.  The time between eating LSD and experiencing its effects is a lot like being on a roller coaster right after you get strapped in, riding up the hill to the first drop.  Nothing's happening but expectation.  You couldn't bail out if you wanted to.

And nothing happened for three hours.  A pleasant pot high listening to my new stereo set-up.  I'd bought a reel-to-reel tape deck and I'd constructed some really good (but really ugly) speakers.  Nothing.

So I decided to eat the remaining three tabs of acid.  I put on Van Cliburn playing Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto #1 on the reel to reel.  And then the first two hits of acid hit hard.  I remember feeling that I could perceive everyone in the small dormitory - maybe about seven other people living their lives in this rehabilitated turn-of-the-century hotel.  I could feel each person in his room.  I wondered if they could each feel me.  I lay on my bed and watched the paisleys do 360s on the Indian print bedspread that covered my ceiling.  Eventually I noticed that the tape was over.  Flip flip flip flip flip flip as the reel turned.

I wanted to walk across campus.  It was dinner time.  I took my camera.  I got to the trees, and it was monarch butterfly migrating season.  I was tripping and there were thousands of monarchs flying around me!  Utterly magical.  I shot a few photos, but they were laughably inept - laughably black and white in that swirl of color movement and life.  It would have been overwhelming to see so many butterflies when sober, and then here I was, very not sober.

Eventually I went over to the commons and the dining hall.  I arrived about five minutes after serving time.  Part of this Methodist college experience was having sit-down family style dinners.  We would gather at tables of six, eight?  The food service work-study students would bring out the bowls of food for each table.  Arriving late, I sat with my friends.  I had to trouble them to pass around the serving bowls of food as I filled my plate.  I looked at it.  I shook my head and said, "I'm sorry but I can't eat that" and I left.  The next day as I was debriefing myself from the trip I wondered how I came across to my friends at the table.  I asked a friend at the table.  He said that he thought that no one at the table knew I was tripping, that I was voicing what they all felt individually. 

After dinner, the new student orientation program showed some movies.  Remember this is 1975 and no video.  I went.  The first movie was the Marx Brothers' Horse Feathers.  A great movie for freshman orientation.  The second movie was Psycho.  I could imagine that it would be troublesome for someone tripping, but Hitchcock telegraphed everything before he did it.  It was suspense to have the twist intimated, and then demonstrated.  It was a good education in fabrication.  I wasn't troubled.  But.  As I was leaving I met a person who was a friend of my fiance's from high school.  (Who should be 18 with a fiance?)  The movie had really rattled her.  So I walked her back to her dorm, Dows, to insure that no psycho killer would jump out of the bushes of Mount Vernon, Iowa.