» Drugs

Do you remember that brief around 2005 when mushrooms were legal?
I do, I'm not much of a drug taker never taken any pills, just a bit of weed and a few mushrooms. Anyway in July 2005 they closed the loophole in the law (something to do with natural occurring unaltered produce cannot be prohibited for sale in the EU), and they became illegal again. During that period a number of small shops selling mushrooms and related paraphernalia had cropped up, naturally they had to close. What happens when shops close down? That's right a closing down sale, so instead of the usual 10 grams of Mexican shrooms, we bought about 50g of some really weird looking blue Amazonian thingies for the same price.

Being the sensible sorts we decided to try and eat them all in one night. Queue much fun and hilarity as 2 of us got pleasantly mashed on our own. Then we made a big mistake, we left the house to meet our, relatively, sober friends who had gone down to the local park to have a bbq and some beers. It turns out I wasn't quite in the right frame of mind for this. I should have guessed it was a bad idea when my mate started talking to a rabbit about me and making me really paranoid.

This was nothing compared to the levels of paranoia that were induced by trying to talk to my normal sober friends sitting around a fire, not helped by each sip of beer threatening to turn me into ice, and getting hit the face by someone collecting firewood and thinking I was going to turn into a tree. By the time one of my friends had become a fire demon and was dancing round the fire beckoning me to join him, I decided it was time to leave.

Walking home on my own in the dark Sheffield streets was a horrible experience peering round each corner hoping to not see anyone or anything that might talk to me in this state. I eventually made it home still in a horrible way and wanting to make it stop. I couldn't sleep or watch TV (over stimulation I remember flicking it on to Big Brother and seeing people screaming running round the BB house and having to switch it off and leave the room). I ended up sitting in the garden in my boxers feeling like a right dick. In the end I passed the time watching golf (the least stimulating thing I could find), and being becalmed by the soothing voice of Gary Linekar and sleeping in my housemates room because it was white and calmer.

I don't know how much we ate in the end, but my friend's housemate came back that night and polished off what was left and he said he got trapped in 2D and didn't like it very much.

Took me a good few days to recover, I've never touched shrooms or any other hallucinogenics since, it put my off smoking weed for a long time. It made me realise that there is a reason why they are illegal.

(Apologies for length etc. This is my first post on QOTW after a few years of hanging round here, so be nice)
(Fri 17th Sep 2010, 23:32, More)

» Annoying Partners

Just because you can, doesn't mean you have to...
Wavy lines to 10 years ago and first year of university...

Met a nice girl, a few boundary and ex boyfriend issues but generally a good solid girlfriend other little quirks included finding sex a bit painful and encouraging me to finish as quickly as possible (not normally a problem) and only giving me a blow job if I wore a condom. So after a few weeks together it was the Easter break and living in halls meant we both had to go back to our respective home towns. No great problem it was only 2 weeks and we both had Orange mobiles, she had the Orange everyday 50 (or 60 I can't remember exactly) plan, which meant she could phone me every day for free for 50 minutes.

So she did!

Everyday I got, in minute detail, what she had been doing, normally the same thing as the day before, it would normally take about 5 minutes to bore each other with our day's limited activity. Then I would be subjected to 45 minutes of tedium about life growing up in a small Welsh village, random drivel and awkward long silences whilst I counted down the minutes. As soon as the 50 minutes had passed, and I felt I had performed my boyfriend duty I would gently remind her that we (she) had been talking for 50 minutes. She, without fail, would say that it was only 1p a minute anyway so we can continue talking until I could find a reason to hang up (even to the point of rubbing my stubble on the receiver to sound like interference and a bad line).

Anyway after about 10 days of this she called me whilst quite drunk, I had just poured myself a generous Vodka and Orange when she called, I don't remember any of the conversation and I woke up hungover to a text message saying "I hope we can still be friends".

We didn't really see each other much after that, although it did turn out that it wasn't 1p a minute after she had used her allowance and she had ended up spending a fortune on boring me to tears and ending our relationship, oh well.
(Thu 4th Aug 2011, 18:19, More)

» Waste of money

Arriving in Bangkok airport
I was greeted by a friendly looking Thai lady offering me a taxi, I explained I had no Thai money on me at the time, so she took me to a cash machine and waited while I took out some money.

Feeling bad that she had waited around for me and not knowing any other way to get a taxi I asked her how much. 800 baht, she replied, which back then was about £20. I knew it would take about half an hour to get to the centre so it seemed reasonable to me. After giving her a 1000 baht note, she looks at me and very slowly and deliberately counts out 6 notes into my hand. I wasn't fully aware of the denominations of Thai currency but I was pretty sure they didn't have 33.333 baht notes, so I waited smiling with my hand outstretched, and she smiled and give me a couple more notes. Satisfied I sat down to wait, thinking smugly to myself, I may have just got off a 13 hour flight and am tired as fuck, but you still have to get up pretty early in the morning to catch out the Captain.

Half an hour later of waiting my smugness started to dwindle, they had finally recruited another willing passenger and we were bundled into a taxi.

An uncomfortable ride later I get to my destination on Khao San road, where I learnt from other travellers that a taxi from the airport should cost around 50 baht.

Whilst the amount of money lost was fairly small, the lesson was invaluable, don't trust the natives. It held me in good stead throughout Asia and South America, and probably helped me avoid, having all my possessions stolen, all kinds of s.t.d.s, massive bar tabs, coming home with ill fitting suits and expensive polished glass, being used as a drugs mule, losing a kidney and being sold into the sex trade. All the above may or may not have happened to people I know.
(Thu 30th Sep 2010, 21:35, More)

» What was I thinking?

Not your typical I didn't shag someone story
Sorry about the length, skip to the end for the digested read:

So wavy lines and all, 5 years or so ago I was travelling on my own through Thailand, I started in Bangkok and after a few miserable lonely days there I hopped on a train to Chaing Mai, this is about 16 hours long and provides beds, food and beer. Where I finally met some people, A slightly mental Brummie (he's another story), a fit, American girl and a hideous, ginger, Aussie Sheila. So after staying up drinking with the 2 ladies who were sort of travelling together, the Thai train attendants turned our seats into beds. We carried on drinking I carried on being charming until everyone was ready for bed.

So guess which one crawled into my bed minutes after I had got in myself. Nope it wasn't the attractive, funny, smart septic, it was the Aussie.

"What you doing?" She grunted.
"Nothing just looking at the stars watching the jungle go by, but it's making me tired, but I can't sleep because I'm missing my girlfriend." Trying to sound as disinterested and tired as possible.
"Yeah, it's really romantic" She said grabbing my hand, obviously grasping subtle hints not being one of her strong points."I really like holding hands," she whispered into my ear "What do you like?"
I looked at her and said "Blowjobs!"

I don't know why I thought that would turn her off, in my drunken state I had already lied about having a girlfriend back in England, I didn't want to tell one of the first people to be friendly to me in days to fuck off, but I thought that something so crass like that would make her think twice and bugger off.

It didn't within seconds she hand her hands in my pants and was swinging her pendulous udders in my face. Everytime she tried to kiss me I kept on repeating "I have a girlfriend it would feel like cheating if we kissed but you know, that's not cheating" and I would sort of encourage her head down again. I didn't really want to kiss her, and even less so after her mouth had been round my cock, but I was drunk and getting really horny and turned off in equal measures, so finishing seemed like a pipe dream. Eventually after spurning her attempts at kissing one time to many she gave up, went to her bunk, I had a posh wank and tossed it out into the Thai countryside (sorry Thailand).

The next morning I wake up complete with massive hangover and sense of shame and meet her again and her son, she was travelling with her six year old son, who was sleeping a couple of feet away while she was licking my love pump the night before, she probably kissed him goodnight with the taste of my cock still on her lips. That made me feel like a bigger twat than before.

Unable to look her in the eye, and any attempts to talk to the American girl were swiftly blocked by the territorial antipodean. In the end I ended up befriending her son, who was cool. We stayed travelling together for a few more days, it was hard to say no, and I continued to spurn her advances.

As we approached our final night together, I had mentioned that I was going to be in Melbourne around Christmas time, so she invited me to her house for Christmas. I instinctively wanted to say no, but I had actually become quite close to her son, and he was clearly lacking a father figure, and it broke my heart to say no to him. So I promised him I would visit him.

So fast forward a few months and I visited their home in the Aussie sticks, where possum hunting was rife, and hygiene still a myth. After meeting her racist, but welcoming family and seeing her son turn into a spoilt little brat, by the third night in a row of having been woken up in the middle of the night by her, scantily clad prodding me with her finger and wanting to "talk", I found myself thinking "What was I thinking?" I was trapped with these bogans, with no way back to civilisation without their assistance. I felt like I was being held hostage there until I agreed to marry her. After 5 days of this hell, I was finally taken back to Melbourne, all limbs in tact and no physical only mental scarring.

I do feel bad writing this, because they did welcome me into their home, cook for me and look after me, they weren't all bad, but it really was an unpleasant experience and one that I should have seen coming, but I thought Christmas with a family would have been better than sitting on my own in a hostel feeling homesick. I was wrong.

Summary: Women throws herself at me I don't have sex with her I didn't regret it.
(Wed 29th Sep 2010, 14:57, More)

» Losing it

Am I losing it?
I sometimes ask myself this, not because I forget things or put things in the wrong place, in fact I am very good at not losing things and know exactly where everything is in my usually untidy room.

I worry I am losing it because sometimes I create sounds in my head that are so loud I hear them with my ears, it is a very strange feeling. Sometimes it is like a bang or a scream or sometimes it is like music that I think I am listening to, but I am not it is in my head. Whatever it is, even though I know that it is completely silent, I hear loud noises.

Other times normal everyday sounds and noises start to sound like words, not words I understand but not like noises, like someone trying to communicate with me. Then I get worried that these sounds I create in my head my form into words, and that at some point I will hear voices in my head, but I never do.

I have very vivid complex dreams that would make excellent books/films if I could concentrate long enough to write them down, sometimes they are so disorientating I wake up not knowing where I am, what I do or even which way up in the bed I am. The most severe case of this took me a good 5 minutes to piece my life together, it was a normal day, waking up at a normal time and I couldn't even remember my girlfriend. What if one day I wake up and it takes longer, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, all day?

sometimes I am worried I might be losing it, should I be?
(Tue 26th Jul 2011, 1:38, More)