Slithering through Paradise

The opposite of a ghost is a shadow. Both are outlines of something that is here and not here at the same time.
The guy who was with me the next morning called them Tree Spirits. They looked like a blur of a ghost to me. I was wondering if I would still see them when I wasn't on shrooms and LSD. Maybe I would.
Big Sur is a strange place
Earlier that night I had been dropped off there by my last ride, he pulled right into the lot and said this was the loose campground, the party spot.
It was.
That morning I had left everything behind, not even a backpack. Just shorts, a t-shirt , and a plastic bag half full of cubensis and 2 ten strips of farm fresh blotter, crammed down the front of my pants. I figured if I had to I could trade it for beads or wives or whatever.
But that didn't happen.
Dosing people with LSD was a competitive sport among the people I ran with at the time, and the shrooms were from a QP I got for a person earlier that day. So I figured what the fuck. Give it all away.
Soon after my arrival, I was invited to join some upscale looking freaks at their fire circle. A half circle really. So I sat down on the grass on the empty side and listened to them for awhile. By the time it got dark, I could tell these people were my people, so I passed the bag of cubes around, warning them there was a bunch of doses in there too.
They seemed pleased.
By the time the bag came back around to me it was just three doses and a couple grams of cube.
I ate the evidence.
I'm almost completely insane, so sometimes it can take a lot of drugs to reach me, to have an effect on me. Even so, within an hour I was really high. Flying thru cartoon land, if you know what I mean...
Across the fire from me was a guy in a lawn chair, who had a blue aura that looked like ball lightning, sizzling and pulsing. This guy was on some good clean coke. You could just tell. He looked healthy, but he was zipping right along. This was the mid 80s, so it was still very fashionable to be hoovering up the blow.
Right next to his lawn chair, this guy had a case of charcoal starter fluid. 4 of those big square metal cans that you squeeze and the fluid squirts out. About every twenty minutes, he would say "time for some more stuff" and grab the can of lighter fuel, then stand up and squirt a big stream of it right into the fire. Huge fireball, and a few laughs and some cheering from his friends.
They knew this maniac.
He would do that a few times in a row, trying to hold off that urge to go back to his RV and do a few more lines.
All night long he was blasting huge fireballs, lighting up that whole end of the campground.
Then he would go and tap one his friends on the shoulder and they would walk back to his RV and snort a few lines.
A different friend would go with him each time, but he did work his way through the line up several times that night.
"Time for some more stuff" Hiroshima "time for some stuff" Nagasaki "time for some more stuff" cocaine.
And that's it, end of story.