The Bad Trip

this is the story of my bad trip. i have had a few bad trips, but all exclusively when smoking weed, which over the years i have learned makes me anxious, which is itself a leading factor for having bad trips. but despite maybe two years of sobriety, a month or so ago i impulsively took a tab i’ve been saving for a rainy day during a three-day-weekend. i finished all my chores early and i knew i’d be home alone for hours to do whatever i wanted, and struck with profound boredom i swallowed the 4x4 millimeter fleck of gel.

the sensations were familiar, if a little muted. not disappointing, but not the world-shaking thing i remember from a decade ago. i sprawled on the couch and watched thruhikers, finding them completely sensational, hilarious, and charming. but as the come-up waned so did my delight, and i began feeling anxious, insecure, and fixated on my bike. watching this segment of a path less pedaled video sent me into a spiral, inexplicably, for the next few hours. i spent the night trying to articulate my thoughts on it to sarah, and to my friends in the days that followed.

what i came to realize is that i subconsciously project myself onto the bike, and while i was tweaking out, i didn’t like what i was seeing in it. my ego was bruised upon inspection of the bike. the meticulously curated version of myself i hope to project on the world didn’t match the heavy, drab bike someone else built up with stock components. deep down, my love and obsession with my bike positions me in thinking of it as an extension of myself, and in seeing it for what it truly is—functional, but at the time also swagless—my illusion of self was shattered, and with it my self-confidence.

i know that sounds dramatic, but that’s how i felt. we live in a world of objects that are ripe with symbolic meaning. i feel the same way about my clothes and what i hope they say about me, my furniture and everything else i choose to surround myself with. but i love the act of biking more than i like the act of wearing clothes or sitting in a chair, so to reckon with the symbolic quality of my bike feels more significant, with more at stake. i am trying to listen to the lesson the molecule is trying to teach me, which is always something i know already but am avoiding examining meaningfully.

ultimately i am not my bike. i am not my clothes or a chair or my apartment. i am my body, the thing through which i have every experience. but i still want my own symbolic quality, my beliefs about myself and my taste, to come across through the the bike. paul from la chouette’s bike looks like him so unabashedly that it sent me into a crisis. thus i am faced with the question of if i should work on my bike to make it a closer reflection of me, or if i should reject entirely the absurd task of imbuing cultural meaning onto an object, which ultimately feels grossly capitalistic. is the bike just an object to decorate? am i the object?

assuming you’ve accepted the fact that you want to continue projecting yourself onto this machine, the followup questions are: what exactly are you trying to project with your bike, what are your goals in terms of representation? what is important to you? who are you? the whole thing has a sour, bitter flavor, but maybe accepting the absurdity of the task is just part of participating in the material world these days. what would zerzan say… i know he rides a bike.

is it synchronistic that the first intentional LSD trip took place on a bicycle, or is that a stretch?

all of this in mind, i have given in to the desire to represent, and thus to build. it makes me feel guilty because i like to think it doesn’t reflect my values, to buy stuff and change parts that work perfectly fine already for insignificant little gains, but privately i do feel a satisfaction from it. serious wrenching never appealed to me until this bike. it has been a slow process of accumulation, as bike stuff is expensive, and deciding what i want to do, how i want it all to come together cohesively, takes a lot of deliberation and experimentation. my beautiful ship of theseus bike has changed a lot since this experience, and so have i. i have cycled through every cell in my body, and i am always changing too. i feel joyous on this machine and tinkering with it brings us closer together. i am eternally thankful for what it teaches me.