Reddit’s “Today I Fucked Up” subreddit is filled with stories that range from “Yeah okay that definitely happened” to “Okay that could have happened I guess? But probably not. Go fuck yourself.”
Today’s story falls under the latter.
While people like to call out stories for being fake and full of bullshit I can see this one happening, mostly because there’s no catastrophic ending where the guy sees a dinosaur running to eat him and shits his pants in front of the entire class. The guy has a mild internal crisis, yes, but there’s no over-the-top ending that makes you automatically think the story is fake.
Then again, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ll just go fuck myself and take a bunch of acid like this guy.
I had just handed in a big assignment for my teacher training degree, it was a Friday, so I went out and had a nice time. The next day I hung out with friends and I was in a cocky mood. I had a small class workshop to give on the Monday, but I was getting the hang of this teaching lark and I wanted to let my hair down for a change. My friends decided to take some LSD that night and, having done other drugs before, I thought it would make me feel a bit funny, have a giggle with my mates, go to sleep, and that’d be that. I took some (it turned out to be a lot).
We were sitting around watching music videos, and I remember, as we were watching Slow by Kylie Minogue, her eyes started to resonate with different colours, and I started laughing at how beautiful she was. We then just hung out, the space of the room became gigantic, lying down made my sense of gravity make me feel like I was on a rollercoaster. Listening to people talk made your mind immerse in their sentence, their words altering your whole perception. Also when I crossed my legs they felt like they were intertwined, like that bit in the Mask.
Suddenly it’s 4am, everyone had gone to sleep, and all had become dark, in more ways than one. I thought I could hear my friend crying and that the trees outside were hands clawing at the window. The core of my intelligence knew that this was all imaginary, and took a detached, intrigued stance on the whole thing. Emotionally though I was fucked, and didn’t get any sleep. The next day, due to lack of sleep and my new role as a drug fiend, my mind had completely gone, and I was worrying it wouldn’t heal quick enough for the lesson, and this worry made it worse. It reached its nadir when, because my teeth had become numb, my tongue felt like it was feeling around the inside of a skull, which technically it was. Then I realised in the end my body was just made of nerve and bone, and my mind was an organ held inside a very fragile box.
Good times.
Anyway, I managed to get a bit of sleep, despite spending most of the night in the fetal position googling whether my mind was broken, and whether I might die. The next day I met all my coursemates at the school we were doing a class for. The minitrips were erratic and less intense, but still very much there. Suddenly I’m standing in the classroom, centre stage, with my coursemates watching. The kids came bounding in, innocent, curious, complete. It was at this point that my intelligence core said to me “you’re about to teach a class of kids, and you’re on LSD”, in the same way that a horrified Jesse turned to Walt and asked, “did you just bring a bomb into a hospital”. I kept rubbing my numb face and staring at the carpet pattern, which made me feel nice.
The lesson was demonstrating that cardboard prisms of different geometries could hold different weights. I demonstrated that the cylindrical cardboard could hold the most weight, which seemed to make some of the kids trip out as much as me. One of the kids asked whether a perfect cylinder would hold an infinite weight, which made my heart rate spike because I was expecting my mind to implode under its own imagination and exhaustion. I kept losing track of how many kids there were, I thought one of the kids had a copy of himself, and images of hands clawing at the windows kepts flashing up. I knew it wasn’t real, and I just kept viewing myself from outside, trying to act normally, which wasn’t hard because as I discovered the previous day, all I am is just an organ in a skull. I was absolutely petrified I was going to end up on the front page of a tabloid and/or in prison by the evening.
A few of my coursemates thought I was acting a bit weird, but I got through the rest of the day by saying I was ill, and they were all thinking about their lessons too much to care that much, thank christ.
[H/T Reddit, header image via Shutterstock]