Your “It’s An Image, Not A Homage” Wednesday Evening Open Thread

It’s kind of a long one, but…okay.

So I was in Amsterdam for a couple days on the tail end of my trip through Europe before I headed to South Africa. I thought it would be fun to take shrooms and go look at fish at the aquarium, which was at the city zoo. I got to the zoo, ate my shrooms, and decided it would be a good idea to empty my bladder while I still had my wits about me. While buttoning up, the button of my shorts popped off. Being at the zoo, surrounded by families with young children, with shorts that kept falling down was not something that was going to be okay.

So I communicated to the bathroom attendant my problem. She very helpfully managed to turn up a needle – a gigantic thing, like three inches long – and some thread, so I set to work fixing my button while the oncoming psychedelics hovered over my head like a black cloud. This did not set a good tone for the experience.

Once I was tripping, I spent maybe a half an hour looking at fish. Then I started to feel queasy. So I headed outside and found myself a spot on the lawn to relax a little bit. Within a few more minutes I threw up all over myself. I used the fleece I was wearing to bundle most of it up. I imagine I wasn’t as conspicuous as I felt, because nobody paid much attention to me, but I still felt like the biggest druggie on earth while I looked around at the families enjoying the zoo.

So I fled.

I went back to my hostel, tossing my vomit-encrusted fleece into a garbage can on the way. I got into bed and just laid there for hours, wishing for the drugs to wear off and the day to end. It took a very long time, because it was the summer solstice. It finally did. I suppose I got dinner at some point, and later on found myself playing a drinking game in the hostel dorm with a pair of young Irish guys and a pair of Finnish girls. After the game had escalated to a spin-the-bottle type equivalent, I ended up going to bed with one of the Finnish girls. Getting lucky was actually the last thing on my mind that evening, but sometimes the stars align, I guess.