P97 = The Ghost of Christmas Future??
Honestly, I think this stuff is psychedelic.
Tonight the wife was working, I’d had a great day and was in a great mood, so I figured I’d run out to a couple of the neighborhood bars and stir up trouble. I had a crisp new bottle of grapefruit P97 and a license to ill. So I spiked 30mcg of the stuff and headed out ready to make friends and influence people.
A pheromone rush came over me something fierce. I live on the fourth floor, and by the end of the elevator ride I was literally laughing out loud. I thought this was going to be a fun and very social night.
First stop was a clubby, fratty kind of place in my neighborhood. I needed some food so I ordered up a hippy-dippy salad full of broccoli and crap like that, along with a beer. Immediately a couple of hairdos squeeze in next to me, crying about one of them’s life falling apart. They’re the kind of girls who are a hit at the frat parties… not pretty enough to be really selective, but stubborn enough to keep up the act. The blond whose life is falling apart is the hotter of the two; looks like Paris Hilton with a hooknose and manhands. The brunette facing toward me looks a little like a mouseketeer version of Kelly Osbourne. I catch her eye and smile, and in return get a weird sort of hesitant, crumbling grimace. Hm. Not the reaction I was expecting.
I sit there at the bar alone ignoring the olsen twins and drinking my beer, waiting for some opening to talk to anyone around me. To my right are a couple black dudes laughing to each other about “white boys”… not really the direction I want to take the evening. My salad comes out and I start eating, being careful to eat in a way that conveys dignity and status. Now the sorority sisters are joined by a vietnamese girl who becomes the mouthpiece of the group, and I notice that she is looking at me while whispering something into the brunette’s ear, which is in turn whispered into the blonde’s ear, followed by the blonde making an ambiguous gesture in my direction. Now I’m lost in the situation, so I just keep eating my salad, but my internal dialog is beginning to take on a life of its own. I’m having a discussion with myself about all the strange people around me, while they ignore me firmly.
After I finish I head out of there (never a fan of that bar anyway) and go to another neighborhood bar, more of a dive but usually more communal, quieter music. Everyone is sitting in groups at the tables, and the bar is empty. It’s only about 10 so I figure I’ll plop down at the bar anyway and wait for somebody to come around to chat up. After spraying another 30mcgs of P97 in the bathroom, that is (now at 60mcgs total).
Nada. Zilch. Zero. An angry-looking fellow sits down to a burger and glues his eyes to his cell-phone; a toothless old couple sits down on the other side of me and starts sucking down jack & cokes in silence. Am I in some kind of movie??
Eventually the bartender says something I can pick up on, but when I try to make smalltalk he extricates himself immediately even though he doesn’t seem to have anything else to do. A pretty cocktail waitress keeps hiding in corners and staring at me. When I look over at her and smile, she smiles back, maintains eye contact for a minute, and then disappears. This happens 3 or 4 times over the course of the 40 minutes or so I’m there.
The whole time, my brain is feeling hypersocial, but there’s nothing around me to plug into. I’m kind of backpedaling, trying to keep from flipping over. And by now I’m getting a little bit drunk.
I head out of there and off to a third bar a couple blocks away – now mind you it’s about 1 degree Fahrenheit and windy as hell, so the two-block walk is hellacious. I get there and am stared down by the girl at the hostess stand whose job I think it is to card me, but she just kind of looks at me with this blank smile. I say “hi” and smile at her, and kind of wait for her to tell me what to do, but she just keeps staring through me. So I walk over to the bar and sit down in the empty space between a couple of seriously drunk girls, one of whom is resting the back of her head in the other’s chest and being petted like a dog. To my right are a couple who are both buried in their cellphones, and there is some kind of Pantera bullshit blasting in there, and no sooner have I taken off my coat and scarf than I realize I need to get the hell out there before somebody starts making me drink more beer. I walk home fast, talking to myself the whole way and trying like hell to engage anyone on the street in any small way as my lips are freezing onto my teeth. Horrific!
An hour at home with a couple of egg nogs has started to bring me back down to earth. I don’t know if this journal entry is going to be useful to anyone, or if anyone will be able to help me decode these experiences. I hope there is some sense to be made. I don’t know if this weird night had anything to do with the mones or if it’s just been an off night in an arctic town a few days before winter solstice. But it did manage to bring out some of my more peculiar forms of approach anxiety and alienation, and sent my mind spinning in some ways it hasn’t in quite some time.
