I’m Working… I Swear

Ok so it turns out its not that good of an idea to give someone a car while loaning them the money for most of the value of the car and only taking 3000 dollars as a downpayment, without checking their credit, or getting any references on the person… whom you’ve never met. Who knew? Ok well you all definitely knew it and I sort of did as well, but I did it anyway. I’m not sure if I though it would be fun to try repossessing a car, or if I just had to much faith in humanity, but it definitely turned out to be a bad idea.

So random ethnic guy from Lancaster drives off with my car on December 8th. The first rolls around and surprise surprise, no proof of insurance or payment has arrived. I text him and he says its in the mail. A week later, still nothing, I give him a call back and my cellphone number is blocked. The freak out begins. I immediately hire a repo guy and wait 2 days before I drive up there myself with Brett. We were a little over prepared since we brought two handguns and an assault rifle as well as a kevlar vest but, better safe than sorry. Turns out this guy had tried to give me as much misleading information as possible. The address on the loan document was an empty foreclosed house he used to live at. We went to the house he had registered the car and discovered, via legal means, that Sachin’s Subaru was in the garage.

We went home that night and made plans to come back up and do some thorough staking out. I think I spent about 4 total days in Lancaster sitting outside this deadbeats house waiting for him to take the car for a drive. He obviously knew what was up because he always kept the car in the garage, and when he would leave he would never stop and get out of the car. He would just drive straight to the McDonalds drive thru, or drop his kid off at school or pick his kid up from school. Other than those three activities I don’t think he ever left the house. A good friend of mine from Lightning actually hooked me up on a free PI who found out that this particular deadbeat was quite awful and had collections all over his jobless self and never answered his phone or the door. It just confirmed to me that this guys intention, from the beginning, was to just pay as little as he could for a nice fast Subaru, and try to hold onto it as long as he could without making any payments. He was like a turtle, driving a stolen STi. Between me and all of my good friends that I convinced to accompany with me to this god forsaken town I think I probably spent 30 hours sitting in a car, pissing in bottles and eating beef jerky. At one point I did have a policeman roll up to me and say that someone had called the police because they thought I was drunk and passed out in my car for the last several hours. I explained my situation and the officer was more than understanding, giving me his direct number and saying “give me a call if it all goes to hell”. The other notable incident would be when we sent someone to go into the guys side yard to see if the car was there and he pulled up right as our man was about to sneak into the brothers side yard.

So anyway, one day my buddy said the PI was going to go and stake out deadbeats house and wait for a chance to snatch the car and that I needed to be there. I met him at the house at noon and around 1:45 the guy went to pick his kid up at school. The PI actually sort of lost him but I drove my old man’s Buick straight to the elementary school since I knew where he was going. I figured this would be another pointless drive as he wouldn’t get out of the car. But since we lost him I parked the Buick and started walking around the school looking for the Subaru with my iPod headphones in and my loud sunglasses on. I’m sure I was fitting right into the whole Lancaster Elementary School scene.

I finally spotted my car and figured out through the dark tinted glass that our deadbeat was sitting in the car in the parking spot. So I’m standing there, cursing, on the phone with the PI telling him that I’m 3 seconds away from walking up to the car and ripping our deadbeat out of it. But I wait, our boy gets out of the car and walks about 10 feet away from it and looks towards the school waiting for his kid. At that point I was fed up with sitting outside this guys house for 10 hours a day 3 times a week so I just walked up to the car with my copied key that I wasn’t sure would work. I get to the door and put the key in. I can’t remember which way to turn it, and the guy is still facing the other direction. I try to unlock it and the key just grinds in the lock and nothing happens. I force the key and the lock grinds and unlocks. I open the door and sit down in the car and look at the guy, who still hasn’t noticed me. The key grinds again as I try turning the ignition and the engine fires up. I rev the car up way too high as I pop it in reverse and deadbeat finally turns around and gives me a perplexed stare, and doesn’t move an inch. I back out slowly and drive off and immediately dial the police department. “Hi, I’m calling to let you know I’ve just repossessed a vehicle…?”

I had looked forward to making that phone call for weeks. It was a good day. I drove the Subaru home after filling it up with oil and came back up a few hours later to pickup my Dad’s Buick.

I learned so much this month besides “Don’t loan random people money who don’t have any intention of paying you back”. The biggest lesson I learned really was how good it felt to know that my friends were there when I needed them. These days it seems like we all have such separate lives because we all have jobs and are extremely busy, but when shit hit the fan with this and I needed people to accompany me to a shitty ass neighborhood to sit in a car for hours on end, my friends were there for me. It’s a weird thing for me because I’ve never really had to rely on my friends for anything serious like this, but it felt good to know I had people supporting me. Ever since this happened I vowed I would always be the same to my friends, whenever they need me no matter what, they will come first. I also learned how lucky I am to have a girl in my life that understands when I need to handle my business and her willingness to help me out even when its a boring, waste of time, potentially dangerous activity. I’m thankful my friends never let it come down to my girl having to accompany me to Lancaster but she definitely is going to be the person who will always be there for me no matter how many times she tells me what I’m doing is a bad idea, and I do it anyway.

Oh and for all those people who asked me why I would do something like this, a big factor was my old man telling me he thought it was a good idea. I usually listen to the old man. I think I learn to be a little less trusting than he is.

Check out the video for what happens when me and Brett have been sitting inside a car for 8 hours straight.

Lancaster from Andrew Lang on Vimeo.

I had these photos and I needed to post them somewhere. Also facebook is blocked at work so that was a no go. Figured I’d write this up here. I found out that the way I deal with unpleasant things in my life is by occupying my time completely with random tasks, working on my car, my gym, or whatever. Anyway, here’s the end result of a break up and being really annoyed with what a friend of mine is doing. I bought some car parts and spent a good couple hours every night working on my M3. Since it has expired registration I also had to go to the DMV to get a ONE DAY driving permit so I could take it to the dyno to do this. It was pretty fun learning how to use a dyno. The M3 runs better now than it ever has so I guess I did something right.

I guess I should probably find a better way to deal with problems, like I dunno, face them.

Yeah so project super offensive/piece of car/veggie oil drinking mobile is pretty well under way at this point. The success of it is that we actually made it run on oil and despite a few minor problems, its still driveable. I’m waiting on a few things like a new relay and some new oil return lines to make everything easy to do on a daily basis but after that we’ll be set.

Collecting and filtering our first two cubes of egg roll oil from the Chinese place me and my father always go to was quite fun. We made a pretty serious mess since we had no idea what we were doing. We’re definitely going to work on setting up a better filtration system that is less of a hassle and less messy. I’m even thinking of investing in this nice fancy oil filtration system but… that might be down the road a bit.

I just added the first 5 gallons of real straight up egg roll oil to the gas tank. Before that we put in 10 gallons of clean brand new vegetable oil we bought from costco and the car smelled like corn when we drove it. I’m looking forward to the nice smell we’ll experience from the egg roll oil.

This has been a really entertaining experience overall and I’m glad I did it. 1600 for the car and 800 for the kit and we have a car that we can essentially drive around for free. Getting oil really isn’t hard, they just leave it outside the restaurant and we can come and pick it up when we need it. Then we take it home and filter it quickly and we can put it right into the gas tank. Is it really worth the money we save? Probably not. Is it hilarious and fun? Definitely. For me personally its definitely a good thing to have a terribly slow car to drive on a daily basis so the cops will stop impounding my car and threatening to imprison me.

Its also fun to have a car that you can put really offensive bumper stickers on without having to worry about your car getting keyed. I hope to finish up the hood rusting soon. My dad thinks we should give the car a nice paint job but with it leaking a gallon of motor oil per day I don’t really think that’s going to pay off in the long run. I’d really rather just continue taking all of the paint off the car and painting it RUST. Anyways if anyone ever wants to borrow a car to drive for a really long time let me know. Or if you just want to run a car in your friends garage and make it smell like egg rolls let me know, I can provide either.

Wow, so far this has been crazy for reasons I never would have expected. I mean what I expected was to see a bunch of animals and insects in the jungle. To be honest so far I haven’t really seen much at all but I’m not even disappointed about it.

My original guide Walter spoke a bit of english but on the boat ride out here he decided to announce that he was basically going to drop me off with a guide friend of his and come back in two days… At first I was pissed but then I got over it.

Turns out I like this guide he left me with way more. His name is Lucho and he lives out here in the jungle with his wife and four kids. By the way I’m pretty sure his 17 year old daughter was flirting with me, gross/hawt.  Anyways, he only speaks spanish and the local dialect so sometimes I have to pretend I understand him. He’s always pointing at animals and saying the names and I never know what I’m looking for until I see it.

He’s a really nice guy though, very real and simple. His father was a shaman and taught him everything about the medicinal plants in the jungle. He said he might try the ayahuasca with me tomorrow which would be a pleasant surprise since I’m a bit scared to do it alone.

I asked him how people originally learned about the medicinal value of the different plants and his answer was interesting, “the jungle tells them”. He said the people will go on a special diet and go out to the jungle for a long time and then come back knowing about the medicines.

Cool story.

I also asked him what the scariest thing that’s ever happened to him in the jungle and his answer was so strange. I expected like jaguar attack or alligator mauling or something but instead he described these evil spirits that are in the jungle. He said he’s been out here a few times alone and these spirits will fly across the air or they will just follow him in his boat. Apparently they are lost souls who died in the jungle and continue to roam terrorizing people.

The images he conveyed to me were terrifying so I had to comfort myself by remembering I don’t believe in spirits or gods or life after death.

Its really hard though to be so negative about the spiritual world with the types of things that have been happening to me lately. The san pedro ceremony and just hearing some of these stories and how convinced people are that they’re real.

As much as I want to believe in the spirit world and gods and such… my rationality stops me.

On another note his sons are really friggin’ cute. Contrast to the devil child on that Panamanian boat I was on, these kids will come up to me while I’m reading my kindle and just stare at it in amazement. They get so much joy from it when I just let them push the next page button once I’m done reading a page. They are so patient to they will just sit and wait until I’m done with the page and won’t be annoying at all. I hope my kids are like that. I can tell they have awesome imaginations because the one kid was amusing himself by just pretending to push buttons, so funny. Oh and they’ll just stand next to me and like pet my head and put their arm around me for some reason, its hilarious.

Its so nice being inside a mosquito net hammock with NO INSECTS inside it. I only had to destroy two when I got in.

My entire body is like on fire with bites right now its amazing.

I’m excited for ayahuasca tomorrow night. I’m also excited to go home and see that girl I like.

I’m also getting more and more ideas about how to give my mom LSD in a productive way both from my experience with the shaman and from that book I’m reading which is terribly interesting.

Andrew out.

Spending the night out in the jungle camping was actually a very pleasant experience. Just being here makes me realize how disconnected I really am with a simple life. I trip walking through the jungle and my stomach is always upset, I dread having to go to the bathroom because of the uncomfortableness of it all. Although it is nice at times I feel demoralized by the fact that if I was out here alone walking for more than a minute I would probably get lost and die. Meanwhile my guide is able to take me walking for an hour in the jungle to show me things and somehow knows exactly how to get back to our campsite in the pitch black darkness.

I guess the complete emasculation is part of it all. Although it wouldn’t really be that enjoyable I think it would really grow me as a person to come out here for two weeks or a month and spend a long time in the jungle just learning how to survive with just a few things. The type of camping they do here makes camping at home look like living in a mansion. They get by with less in their daily lives than we do with our camping gear now that I think about it.

Lucho took me for a cool hike this morning showing me all of the different medicinal plants in the jungle and sampling some. He only showed me a few but I swear they must have something for every purpose. Apparently they can cure diabetes? The weird thing is that there are some that aren’t simple and you have to wonder about the story he told about the jungle instructing them how to use the plants. There was one that was like pull the plant up, in the roots there’s like a potato type bulb. Boil the bulb, and them you can wrap it against a snake bite to pull the poison out from it. I mean seriously you don’t just figure that type of thing out my trial and error.

Lucho is a really nice guy, I have trouble understanding him most of the time but maybe that’s part of why I like him. He told me about how he wants to do this type of work on his own and be his own boss so to speak. I said maybe I could help by making him a website and getting his email sorted out so people could find him and contact him. It really wouldn’t be much time or money for me to make and host a website for him and maybe it would give him more income and independence in his work.

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I’ve been trying to prepare myself both physically and psychologically for this whole evening. The book I’ve buried my head in for the last few days and am almost to the end of is incredibly interesting and is a strange companion to the weird spiritual stories I’ve been hearing this week, and, which is very unlike me, partially buying into.

I was just reading about the author tell a story of how he felt a poltergeist entered his apartment after a hard DPT (dipropyltryptamine a DMT analogue) trip. Could it be that enough experimentation with these plants and chemicals opens your mind to the spirit world on a more real level? I always thought my porn star Buddhist friend was a bit insane for thinking she had a ghost in her apartment and could physically see peoples auras but, maybe the amount of entheogenic exploration she has done has given her a permanent window into whatever other realm or dimension might exist. Or her brain is just fried.

The more I think about it the more perplexed I am by the fact that there are plants that produce incredibly complex chemicals that produce hallucinations and visions in men that are incredibly complex and eye opening.

More than that, in regards to ayahuasca, why did indians ever decide to boil these two plants together and consume them? I suppose that separately each of them might have some small effect and they tried the combination? Regardless its still mind blowing.

I still can’t believe that I’m going to be drinking this fluid with a woman from Spain and a 17 year old daughter of Lucho, perhaps Lucho as well.

I went to the bathroom and I am having serious doubts at my ability to locate it while high, much less coordinate hovering over the tiny whole in the ground. I guess ill cross that bridge when and if I come to it. For those of you that don’t know one of ayahuascas normal effects is constant vomiting and diarhea. Fun!

The sky here is so clear, there’s so many stars. I like the place we are going to do this in. Its a house with no walls but a roof. We each have our hammocks with our mosquito nets around them. I hope that if I don’t get sick I can just lay in my hammock and close my eyes and have my visions. With some luck…

Trip Repor furst ataguaca experience:

All of us were on the floor of the room that was actually the place they cook all of our food in. They closed it up as best they could because they said darkness makes the visions easier to achieve.

I first drank the fluid along with two chaser type things designed to take the taste away. It was a pretty horrible taste but sadly I’m accustomed to this kind of thing. At first I really didn’t feel much of anything at when he asked what I was feeling I exaggerated and said “nothing, can I have some more?”

After that second helping I felt like I was on the brink of overwhelming insanity… I closed my eyes and started seeing weird colorful patterns of every color.

Suddenly then my Dad was there and I was having the talk with him I want to have when I get home. He seemed slightly disappointed but understood.

About 2 hours in a threw up in the provided vomit pan. The two girls next to me were throwing up almost the entire time. My only complaint was that it made my own concentration difficult to maintain.

I went through talking to all the people I wanted to talk to when I got home. It was like a dream, They responded to my questions how I felt they might. I guess in someway it was a bit of rehearsal for when the proper time comes.

The drug was incredibly hard on my coordination. I tried to get up to go to the bathroom and fell onto my knees. Someone had to guide me right to somewhere I could use as a bathroom.. It was absurd.

Finally, after more chanting and seeing shit we all went to our hamocks to sleep. My coordination was obliterated, I fell onto the floor trying to sit on the hammock while zipping up the net. At that point everything was fading away, I never got to see the insightful visions that ayahuasca is famous for.

Ill dread trying it again considering the awful taste and constant nausea.

Quite honestly though I’ve never experienced such an intense and overwhelming feeling from taken something like this. I recall opening my eyes and looking around the room and just feeling the overwhelming a motor skill failure similar to salvia.

Still though after reading that shamanism book I can’t help but wonder the those drugs just play tricks on our brain, or… Are they really  allowing us to see another dimension of existence.

Even today weird things still linger for me. Up until just about now I had totally lost the ability to read anything closer that one meter from my face. It was absurd but the Shaman said that was normal and would revert back after some time. After a painstaking journey I finally ended up back at the five dollar hostel (it felt like a five star resort at that point). I bought a couple pieces of cake from next door because they hadn’t given me lunch. As I slowly ate it while sitting on my bed I noticed the crumbs on the floor seemed to move, as if they had some kind of unstable electrical charge to them. Beyond that as I was writing my notes this morning the letters at the beginning and end of the words I typed were blue and red respectively. It was just odd to me that the effects lasted so long after, I feel as if the ayahuasca opened my mind up to a more subtle reality that I didn’t see before. Or maybe I just took too much.

For the first time under the influence I felt out of control, today I just feel humbled by the  incredible power the ayahuasca had to wreck my physical body and my mind.

Definitely something you couldn’t do often but something that everyonet the stomach for a mind bending experience should try. Now its time for me to fly home and go back to my normal life… if that’s possible.

Well,

Last night me and Shreena attended something quite amazing. A San Pedro Fire Ceremony deep in the mountains of Medellin Columbia. There were only about 4 total foreigners there out of the 59 attendees, we counted ourselves quite lucky and in a unique place.

I hesitatingly decided to post this for several reasons.

I know that there’s a large number of my family out there that is going to read this and probably disapprove. As I’m sure you all know by now, I have stopped seeking the approval of others, even my close family. You might see this in how I openly admit my atheism despite coming from a very religious background. The reason I decided to post this is because although some people might things its simply a recount of someone taking drugs, to me it was much more, and I went into the experience with the intention of finding something meaningful, and I feel like I did.

The real reason I post this is because I hope that by reading things, it will open your mind to possibilities you hadn’t thought of before. Maybe a world of spirituality you didn’t think existed or was even worth conceiving. There are other avenues to spirituality besides the ones you’ve grown up with. This is just a small example, there are many societies around the world doing things like this, and if you find them you can join as well.

I ask you to read this with an open mind and not to judge something that you have never experienced, but to open your mind to the idea of spirituality in what may seem like an unnatural way to our culture:

We began the evening in a large tent type of building specialty built for this type of ceremony. There are three phases.
1) Smoke a tobacco cigar wrapped in a type of corn husk and think about the issue you want to resolve. This tobacco cigar turned out to be very important throughout the ceremony. They used it to blow smoke onto people and many other things. It was smoked often.
2) Then they said a prayer thanking the spirit for their ancestors showing them the medicine and its power for healing. We then drank the san pedro tea which actually tasted a great deal better than what I’ve had in the past. It was only about half a mug of very non-viscous fluid that had a bitter and lemon infused taste.

I haven’t eaten for many hours so the onset should be quite quick. There are about thirty people in the room and only four of us are foreigners. Many people look like indigenous people. I met a cool guy from LA named John Livingston (I wrote down his full name so I wouldn’t forget to find him on facebook). He goes to UCLA and majors in physics. Really interesting guy, his mother has spent a lot of time in the Amazon and he’s tried ayahuasca in the same city I am thinking of trying it in.

It’s about 11:30 pm and we just ingested the tea. Everyone is sitting… Basically in silence staring at the fire or meditating. We are basically the only people talking.

At around 12:15 am they started playing some songs with a drum and a shaker that are supposed to encourage the spirit of the plant. I tried to record a bit with my video camera.

They pass around the thing that has the beans in it or something… a shaker for making simple music. They accompany it with a drum with a constant beat that never changes. If you want to sing a song then you just start playing. If not then you just place it on your heart and pass it onto the next person.

The third step of the process is the cleansing ceremony, I would later find out that this would last from about 1 am to late into the morning, around 9 am. There were 59 people to “cleanse”.

I meant to skip the cleansing ceremony but me and Shreena were first in line and didn’t know how to say no. First we rubbed our pretty much naked bodies down with some wet plant material. We then washed ourselves in a similar way with a smoothed cold stone. Then they ran some plant all over our bodies that caused terrible pain, it was just bad enough to tolerate without freaking out and screaming. It felt like getting stung by a poisonous plant all over your body. To make it go away they gave us alcohol and had us rub it all over our bodies. This made the stinging subside a bit.

Then they sprayed us with alcohol and lit us on fire. I distinctly remember the back of my legs burning for a long time and someone having to blow them out. It hurt. Shreenas dress caught on fire for a few seconds.

I’m pretty sure its just some kind of pain/relief/weird sensation thing. Such a strange experience but I’m glad I did it.

They also had us put out these flaming alcohol soaked leaves with both our hands and our feet.

Things are definitely beginning to get weird. At first I wasn’t feeling much but before the cleansing they came around with “san pedro pasta” an awful tasting thing and had us wash down the tablespoon they gave us with another half cup of the same tea we started with.
As soon as I put that awful spoonful in my mouth things intensified.

Its now 2 am and my skin still stings in a weird way from the “cleansing” shreena has bumps all over her arm.

3am.. Or so..
They gave everyone another round of the tea. Me and Shreena both seemed to feel as if we’d had enough as we both declined any more of it. It’s so strange seeing people constantly in their underwear next to me getting sprayed with ignited alcohol. I’m not supposed to be able to see this but my seat happens to be halfway behind the black separator between the main area of the teepee and the area in which they are doing the cleansing. Me and Shreena still feel everything on our skin, stinging, from the plant.
I’m beginning to wonder (as I usually do with this type of substance) how much longer this will last. I don’t really feel like this situation is anything that will really allow me to get answers to the questions I set out to answer at the beginning.

All I’ve been able to really contemplate is how silly all these rituals and singing seem. Are these people really trying to make religion out of the drugs they are taking?

It’s strange because talking to these people before hand I know many of them are educated. But… You’re seriously just taking drugs and letting some glorified old man spit alcohol all over your half naked body.

Is this really what you believe in?

All the songs they sing talk about the plants and their souls… These plants evolved defense mechanisms to keep people from eating them. They aren’t a gift to you from mother earth or god. If they were a gift then why are you throwing up?
Why does it taste like shit when you drink it?

Please, stop trying to pretend like all the negative side effects of this poison are somehow designed by god to help you. Throwing up is not a good thing, you aren’t cleansing your body of any toxins (besides the ones you just ingested).

I feel so strange furiously typing on my phone with a blanket over it to hide what I’m doing. I’m assuming its against their rules since one of the assistant shaman dudes told me not to drink this bottle of water I had… idiot, its never a good idea to not drink water, are you trying to dehydrate me into well being?

It seems to me like every group of humanity finds something to be in awe of, or terrified of, and they worship it. These people just happened to choose entheogenic plants as something they could sing songs about, consume, and basically worship.

Wow…
Its six in the morning and there is still a bunch of “sinners” that need to be “cleansed”. The singers voices are beginning to strain with desperation and tiredness.

You have to admire their dedication to the community to continue on although the most noticeable effects of their “medicine” has long faded.

Its funny that I still seem to have some kind of contempt for what they’ve done with this plant. I can clearly see the positive aspects of their gatherings just like I do with other religions. Here there is a sense of community, the members grow close to one another through these ceremonies (probably closer than would be seen in other religions). But still I can’t help but feel any happiness this brings them is just as meaningless as other religions because it’s still based on falsehood, the belief that some kind of supernatural being exists.
Not only that but its based on false emotions as well, the I don’t really believe the plant or drug has a spirit, it just has certain psychological effects that make you feel open to forming deep emotional attachments to the people around you.

Ok 9 am:
Despite all the criticisms I made, the leader of this group speaks beautifully about the group as his family, as a group that comes together to help each other, talk to each other, and come together to seek their purpose in life and eliminate their ignorance. Very few other religions or spiritual practicies I’ve encountered have placed such an emphasis on eliminating ignorance, Buddhism excluded. It’s obvious that all these people come from different walks of life. He’s talking about how we need to be responsible for our own decisions in life and that we are walking a path that makes us happy. We should be doing work that brings truth and happiness to our life, and if you aren’t, that’s your own fault, don’t blame anyone. He’s saying we should always think the way we think now (not exactly possible but a nice thought).

This was a good night. He is proud that he cleansed 59 people (I had no idea there were so many people in here).
He is so thankful for this medicine, for this family, and that everyone loves and respects each other.

The speakers words, translated roughly by me:

“Learn to live well, learn to live true, leave the idiocy that’s in your mind. There’s nothing good and bad, things are how they are and that’s the end of it. There is only a man and a woman, not good and bad. That is the only duality.”

He said bring the water.

They brought a bucket, started chanting and singing. “Pajaro limpiando” were two words they kept repeating, I think the bird is the San Pedro.

I must admit I really respect the message they try to convey here, they focus so much on respecting their origins, respecting the love between a man and a woman. They pray that those brothers and sisters that haven’t found their match will find it soon, because they see that as the most valuable thing in life.

The leaders words:
“In the night you see clearly. In the daytime you see nothing. At night you see everyone is different. During the daylight everyone looks the same. People in his home town have said to him: ‘Be careful getting too much spirituality into your head, because you still have to live in the real world.’

Live isn’t just finding clarity and happiness, what this experience can give you is peace, not absolute happiness. When you have peace you can live with the good and bad and life and continue on with your life regardless of the positive and negative things that happen to you. Fiding peace will give you the clarity you are looking for, and sometimes… The darkness.
My family comes here to see well, to see with love.

This water closes everything we have opened. Finishes everything we have been looking for by coming here. This water is all we need at this moment and in this form we are just fine. We won’t hold anything or anyone responsible besides ourselves.”
Finally… After dragging it out ceremoniously…

They gave us water from a bucket to drink. It was supposed to be the first water we drank all night.
I can see on my legs the singed hair from the “cleansing” ceremony, AKA lighting me on fire.

Almost 10 am…
I think it’s remarkable that I never found any answers to my questions when I thought I was supposed to. But the talk the man gave this morning was beautiful and I feel like it gave me exactly what I needed right now. Funny how things do work themselves out when you’re looking for an answer.

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Its funny for me to read this and see how drastically my view of the ceremony changed during the actual process. At first I had so much contempt for what they were doing, their methods, and their practice. Finally it ended up that I really respect what they do because, unlike what many people do with the same substances in our society, these people use drugs with a purpose. They unite a community and seem answers to their problems. Just the fact that they get together in this way as a community and discuss their problems to me is a positive thing.

I also have to admit that ever since I first tried these chemicals I had an idea that something like this would be a positive thing, and I always wanted to experience it and I’m glad I had. To me I feel like its one of the most real “spiritual” experiences someone could have. Some people might frown on the fact that they are basically accelerating their spirituality by artificial means but to them, this is part of their spirituality, and I can see why.

There are very few religious or spiritual practices that I have come to respect, but this is definitely one of them. In the end I’m very glad I participated, and I would do it again.

Besides the few photos I got I’m also putting up a video that is really more of an audio clip. I probably was not supposed to take any photos or these sounds clips but I wanted to so I could give people a better idea of what this was like. The sound clips blend together in a sharp way, sorry. There is one point towards the end where I was bold enough to video the ceremony once the sun came up, its short but can give you a small idea of what I saw for many hours. That’s Shreena coughing occasionally due to the insanely smoke filled room.

Thanks to Mike for the spare Blackberry battery, without which only half of this would have been possible.

San Pedro Fire Ceremony Chanting from Andrew Lang on Vimeo.

Ok so I’m known to do things quite randomly that sometimes involve large expenditures of money without really thinking it through. Starting a gym for example. The next incarnation of my incredibly irresponsible decision making has been this new project. It originated when Evan said “hey, did you know you can buy an old mercedes on craigs list for like a thousand dollars and convert it to run on veggie oil and not have to pay for gas?”

“Really? Lets do it.” I said. And it was so. Working together me and Evan managed to find a nice vehicle listed on CL for around 2100$. Thanks to my sparkling charm and friendly personality I was able to negotiate the purchase down to 1600$ and project Veg was officially underway. Sure the car leaked a bunch of oil, but for the most part it seemed mechanically sound. It was also convenient in that my other two cars are either 1) in detention or 2) in the shop getting fixed from me driving the piss out of it.

It’s actually quite satisfying driving around a 27 year old car when you know you could afford something much nicer. Its pretty much like driving a couch around and you never have to really worry about hitting things or speeding because the car is a ridiculously slow tank with no monetary value.  We began with the goal to simply make a car that will run off of the used vegetable oil that we could acquire from restaurants for free. We did our research and found the conversion kit we liked. Essentially all it needed to do was heat up the oil coming from the gas tank to 150 degrees Farenheit before entering the engine. Simple enough. The kit is in the mail so we’ll see how hard that is to install.

The other part was figuring out where to source the oil and how to filter it. We researched filtering old vegetable oil, quite a simple process really, I’ll be keeping a large plastic drum in my garage with a pump attached, sort of a makeshift gas station if you will. The filtering process will have two stages we decided. The oil will first be filtered with a more coarse 50 micron filter, the passed through a more fine 5 micron filter to remove any food material or impurities before the grease even enters the gas tank.

Veggie oil is much thicker than traditional diesel gasoline but once it is at 150 degrees it begins to act like diesel fuel and as such it can run the car just fine. I managed to talk to the owner of the Chinese restaurant I go to with my Dad a few times a week and they would be more than happy to give us their old vegetable oil after they are done using it. Normally they would have to pay to have it disposed of so this is a good deal for them as well.

There are a few interesting legal implications to a project like this. Its not really illegal to do the modification to the car, but it is slightly illegal to run a car off of vegetable oil for several reasons. First, the government doesn’t like you getting out of paying fuel taxes, so in reality you are supposed to pay them a 2500 dollar fee to run a vehicle like this. Futhermore, to collect the oil like we are planning on doing you should have a certificate from the people… who… give certificates to handle food and waste and such. Also, you’re supposed to have a permit to burn vegetable oil, which we obviously don’t have. So basically our plan is just to not advertize what we are doing by putting something like “I DON”T PAY FOR GAS” on the car anywhere. I thought maybe just a vinyl decal of brocoli on the gas door would be subtle enough that THE MAN wouldn’t catch on.

Beyond the vegetable aspect Evan and I also decided that this would be a great car to slap tons of religiously offensive stuff on since, if someone banged the car up because they were fanatical Christian idiots, it wouldn’t really be that big of a loss. So, we went online and bought enough religiously hilarious bumper stickers to cover the whole rear bumper.

That wasn’t enough though. We definitely needed to take this a step further. Initially we had thought that if the car continued to run well we’d pay to have it painted a flat black, we thought that’d look quite nice. Instead though we thought it’d be much more interesting to let someone tag up the car with spray cans, make it into a sort of art car with an anti-religion theme. Some of our ideas included a bloody pentagram on the roof or hood. Blood red 666 racing numbers on the door, and Karl Marx quotations like “Religion is the opiate of the masses” written on the car.

We thought this would all be fun and potentially result in me having to get into fights in public which is always a plus. My favorite part about this project is it’s a very obvious way to show how little I take my life seriously. I mean I guess I could be driving around a 2009 Mercedes SLK AMG 49234020 but…. why? I totally enjoy driving around this old piece of crap knowing that I have two beautiful cars that I love sitting at home safe in my garage. Beyond that I truly believe that getting used to having nice things is a weakness.  I feel bad for people who wouldn’t be comfortable driving around my 1982 Mercedes everyday because they are so used to their cushy life, you’ll never be able to travel around the world with next to nothing, sleeping on the floor, meeting strange people or eating food that makes you constantly sick. Sucks for you, enjoy your boring life. I’m gonna go drive my smoking/incredibly offensive vehicle.

I’m sure that this will be the first of many blog posts on this subject. Stay tuned.

“Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.” -Henry David Thoreau, Walden

1982 Mercedes 300D WVO Project Car

So life is pretty interesting lately. I’ll start from the latest happs and move my way back. I was driving pretty normal today, just going around a corner like I do, tail on the Subie slid out just a bit and a cop pulled me over and yelled “WHAT WERE YOU THINKING, I’M TAKING YOUR CAR”. And he did. Car was impounded and I was given a ticket for reckless driving and exhibition of speed. Pretty intense. Not a fun situation. A random dude stopped and picked me up cuz he said he figured I was having a bad day and could use some help. Right on buddy, but I expect things like this to happen to me with how I drive.

The gym stuff is going surprisingly well, I have a wad of cash in my car from people buying gatorades and stuff from us, that’s kinda nice of them. We really need to get focused on stuff though because I keep telling James we’re going to go bankrupt if we don’t. PS everyone should go check out the best MMA gym in orange county.

On Monday I snuck out of work for a “business meeting”. Me and Joker, James, and some other cool peeps went sky diving in san diego which was pretty nice. I was actually pretty relaxed about it. The scariest part was definitely, you guessed it, jumping out of the plane. But after about half a second I found that I got ridiculously calm on the way down, i guess its becasue there wasn’t too much to think about. Aftewards I felt like I’d smoked a bunch of marijuana or something it was absurd, I would definitely do it again.

That’s the haps lately fools.

Ok so as sad as it is, I seem to be obsessed with fast cars. Its a weakness. This is sixth gear in Sachin’s STi. I’m the only one in the car so don’t get mad at me for endangering anyone elses life but my own. You’ll notice the speedometer only goes to 160 but it stops there pretty early in the video.

Your Car is Slow from Andrew Lang on Vimeo.