Day 7 - February 18th

Day 7 - February 18th
As if I even considered never going to Red Square again... I fucking love this place
No sleep, lots of drugs
Yeah GOOD
My friends are so depressed...

        The acid rocked me pretty badly on the 17th, which was a Friday night. I did make it out to the club, but I remember being very fragile. When I got into town all my friends were hanging out in the alley down the side of Red Square where everyone used to sit and smoke cigs. Sam made a joke out of guarding me like an NFL player guarding the quarterback, his arms out while he shuffled around me yelling, “No one touch! VERY FRAGILE!!” – that made me feel a little better.
        I'm guessing we all took a shitload of pills on the Saturday morning and drank all day, because that's what we always did. I slipped back into my old pattern so easily, it was as if Bolivia had never happened.

        The other reason I'd gone to Bolivia was... well okay, so on Easter Sunday 2011 I took acid, and the trip lasted for 36 hours. It was exhausting and hellish, and made me realise that my life for the previous few years had been a complete wreck. In the months leading up to that acid trip I'd been fired from a job after I'd showed up for work at the end of a three-day bender, not realising that the time was 7am, rather than 7pm like I'd thought – I was so fried I didn't realise until I got to the pub, which was closed, looked up at the sky and saw the sun, “That's only there in the morning... whu? OOOOOH!”.
        For real.
        I went home to sleep until my shift actually started, only to wake up at midnight, now five hours late. My phone was full of messages telling me not to bother coming back.
        Also some friends and I found an abandoned car in a park near my parents' house and set it on fire, and then finally, worse than anything else, I'd been arrested for breaking into the back of a ute on the street one night, and only escaped a criminal conviction through the one-in-a-million chance of the ute being owned by a friend of a friend who felt like he owed someone a favour. That was and still is the most incredibly lucky thing that has ever happened to me. I often think about how different my life would have been had I copped that criminal conviction, about the trouble I'd have had getting jobs, going overseas – everything. Instead I just had to pay the friend of a friend $60 to repair the damage I caused. I paid the money, and like magic they dropped the charges.
        Maybe some people would thank god here, or say that a vague, “someone, somewhere,” took pity on them, but I can be more specific than that. It wasn't god, I know exactly who it was, it was that guy – the friend of a friend – who called me and told me that I'd fucked up, but that he was willing to make it right for me. That guy gave me a second chance, and I'll be thankful to him forever.

        Going to Bolivia, as much as it was about getting away from Grace, was also about ditching the self-destructive lifestyle I'd fallen into since waking up on my 18th birthday with more freedom than I knew what to do with.
        We were all so stuck in our ways: I remember having conversations with friends in various smoked-out sheds and garages where we wondered at HOW it was even POSSIBLE to do anything other than drink and take drugs: “What do people DO all day if they don't do this?! Fuck man, it's crazy!”
        It's not that we really wanted to waste our lives away like this, it's just that we didn't know anything else. It's easy to say no to drugs when you have something to do in the morning, but when you don't have anything to do, ever, suddenly getting fucked up the only thing that makes sense. Why wouldn't you? It's fun.
        I came back from Bolivia into a world unchanged. Nothing was different, and my friends were all as lost as I'd left them.

Click here to read the next part - Day 8 - February 23rd