Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I'm updating this from a portable computer on a satellite link about two or three hours away from civilization… As such, I haven't bothered to see who's chucking bombs at who today and will simply tell you about my night instead.

I've been having trouble sleeping lately. Apparently last winter some friends and I — through a serious of misadventures rather than malice — accidentally caused the death of three people (on separate occasions no less). Because the circumstances of their deaths were what I'd class as “questionable” we chose to dispose of the bodies ourselves, rather than report it to the authorities.

One corpse is buried at the edge and under the asphalt of a parking lot and I'm not terribly concerned about it being discovered any time soon. The other is buried in a relatively deep grave in the desert. The third is the one we screwed up on. We killed this person on a snowed in road and dragged him over the embankment at the side of the road.

I don't know what we were thinking as the grave was dug in the snow, preserving his body for someone to find. As of about six months ago, that body is fully exposed to the elements — but I've seen nothing on the news about it, so I can only assume that he rots away still. We had on our winter gear so I doubt we left any trace and that clothing has long since been disposed of.

Anyway, as I said I've not been sleeping well lately. Every night I have nightmares that the last body has been found and somehow they're closing in on me; this spectre looms closer and closer every day. Now, I'm 99% sure that I've simply dreamed up this sequence of events, but it's one of those dreams or delusions that haunts my waking moments as well.

UPDATE: SINCE THERE IS SOME CONFUSION FROM READERS, LET ME BE VERY CLEAR THAT THE ABOVE IS A *DREAM STORY*. IT DID NOT ACTUALLY HAPPEN. IF I MURDERED PEOPLE AND DIDN'T WANT TO GET CAUGHT, THE LAST THING I'D DO IS TELL THE STORY ONLINE (OR ANYWHERE)!

This isn't the first time though, so I'm not too worried. The last time I seriously took acid, probably close to ten years ago now, I consumed a little over 6000 micrograms (about a quarter of a standard strength sheet). Within ten minutes (seriously — I was really surprised as normally it takes an hour to hit me) I began having difficulty regulating my breathing.

I couldn't tell if I was breathing or not; the room was growing darker and darker. I summoned up all my strength and took a huge breath and the light re-entered the room. I kept and eye on my watch and attempted to keep my breathing regulated (let alone my erratically beating heart) as I stumbled back to my room (this was when I was living in residence — Vanier — at York University).

When I got there I was pretty sure my heart had mostly stopped. Now of course I realize that was an illusion brought on by the drug, but it felt real at the time. I left my body, and from an altitude of several hundred miles (I could see the entire planet) I watched my death, and then my funeral and burial.

As the drug wore off about six hours later (the more acid you take, the shorter the trip is, at least for me; I assume it's a tolerance related issue), I slipped back into my body, but felt like something wasn't quite right… No, this isn't the story about how one day I looked at my driver's license and saw a different middle name, confirming I'd returned to a different universe — that's a Ketamine story, plus it's not my story!

Anyway, I was pretty sure that I had actually died, and that everything that I was experiencing post-trip was actually a long drawn out hallucination that happened as my neurons were firing their last impulses… that this was a side-effect of death that everyone experienced.

For three years I thought I was dead (and waited for the end to come), and then thanks to a genuine overdose of tranquilizers and misprescribed anti-psychotics, I really was dead. Fully dead, no heartbeat, no breathing, and a trip in the ambulence followed by over a month in a hospital.

I'll tell that story another day, but goddamn after you've been dead do you ever feel alive!