Will Self

William Woodard "Will" Self (born 26 September 1961) is an English author, journalist and television personality.


 * "As for myself, I think I probably only really did the Hofmannesque bike ride once — by which I mean full-blown hallucinations, ego death and rebirth. And that’s where you came in: with me lying on a bed in my college room in 1979, staring up at the interior of a spire stitched together out of mouths screaming my own annihilation — and everyone else’s.


 * At the time it seemed that acid trips, far from being some avant-garde voyaging, were already hopelessly passé: cheap day returns to the garden of earthy delights taken by already ageing hippies in Gandalf costumes.


 * Illegal since the late Sixties, acid was just another street drug.


 * Or was it? True, I probably ended up taking it scores of times — perhaps as many as a hundred — but at an unconscious level I always ensured I didn’t ingest sufficiently to return me to the spire of nothingness. Once was enough.


 * However, every time I did take acid I had the same epiphany: I might’ve been getting pissed, smoking weed, and taking all manner of other intoxicants, but when my pulse began to accelerate, and my pupils dilated until their blackness smudged my pasty face, and the objects in the room became charged with an unearthly vitality, and the faces of my companions took on the aspect of masks either comic or tragic…


 * Well, it dawned on me once again that this was what was meant by “drugs” — all the rest of it was mere doodling in the margins of consciousness, while this was shaking the Etch A Sketch of your mind until it disintegrated.
 * - Will Self: Recreating Albert Hofmann’s Basel Bike Ride On LSD - Esquire, 02 May 2013.

William Woodard "Will" Self (born 26 September 1961) is an English author, journalist and television personality.


 * "As for myself, I think I probably only really did the Hofmannesque bike ride once — by which I mean full-blown hallucinations, ego death and rebirth. And that’s where you came in: with me lying on a bed in my college room in 1979, staring up at the interior of a spire stitched together out of mouths screaming my own annihilation — and everyone else’s.


 * At the time it seemed that acid trips, far from being some avant-garde voyaging, were already hopelessly passé: cheap day returns to the garden of earthy delights taken by already ageing hippies in Gandalf costumes.


 * Illegal since the late Sixties, acid was just another street drug.


 * Or was it? True, I probably ended up taking it scores of times — perhaps as many as a hundred — but at an unconscious level I always ensured I didn’t ingest sufficiently to return me to the spire of nothingness. Once was enough.


 * However, every time I did take acid I had the same epiphany: I might’ve been getting pissed, smoking weed, and taking all manner of other intoxicants, but when my pulse began to accelerate, and my pupils dilated until their blackness smudged my pasty face, and the objects in the room became charged with an unearthly vitality, and the faces of my companions took on the aspect of masks either comic or tragic…


 * Well, it dawned on me once again that this was what was meant by “drugs” — all the rest of it was mere doodling in the margins of consciousness, while this was shaking the Etch A Sketch of your mind until it disintegrated.
 * - Will Self: Recreating Albert Hofmann’s Basel Bike Ride On LSD - Esquire, 02 May 2013.