New eScottology: 'That Kind Of Night'

A new installment of my increasingly sporadic column for Erowid, eScottology, has just been posted. Entitled "That Kind Of Night," the piece explores the perils of failing to control your set & setting while blasting your consciousness with nitrous oxide.

With notable enthusiasm, he puts the canister to his mouth and presses the trigger, inhaling as deeply as humanly possible. His lungs expand, his eyes close, shooting stars begin to ricochet around the inside of his head. The inside of his head begins to shimmer and his extremities begin to tingle; eventually he exhales in a burst, and gasps for air, which only seems to bring on the full flowering of the hit of nitrous. He keeps hearing strange and delightful sounds, music being played on alien instruments, the resonant hum of inner space. Whatever stimulating effect remains from the alphabetamine he took earlier in the evening is serving as a launch platform to send him deeper into the recesses of consciousness than a single nitrous cartridge could otherwise do. He is deep, he is surfing feedback signals from his own brain, he is coming close to some kind of unity. And in the midst of it, he hears–

“You can’t just ignore such a dangerous betrayal,” a voice behind him calls out. “You have to rely on the strength of your own convictions.”

–which, but wait, does this even yet make sense? Because, honestly, you can’t ignore dangerous betrayal… you just can’t, especially when you’re sliding through fractal realms and all your pleasure circuits are activated and firing at full throttle. When you’re on the verge of actually losing consciousness, or rather finding your consciousness subsumed by the larger “it” that can only be the thing that does that kind of subsuming in the first place, isn’t it obvious that you have to rely on the strength of your convictions? Or is it the case that this fact is being pointed out right here, right now, because it’s not obvious, because it’s a true danger, a spiral, one in which the betrayal comes from within?

Are these people even ground control or what?