I used to do NO a fair bit. Saw Buddha once - resplendent, berobed and alight, his slim fingers folded into elegant mudras, sitting half lotus at the center of an intricate mandala of infinite complexity that pulsed with multifaceted celestial intensity, bathing the entirety of my vision with gentle orange glows. He smiled that bodhisattvic half-smile of his, and told me that I was seeing him because my brain was out of oxygen, and that if I kept doing nitrous I would die. Then I fell out of my chair.
Many years later, I got back into it again, as part of an extinction burst as I was quitting drinking. Before it was over, I was literally ankle deep in empty bulbs - @Mister44’s photo above is uncomfortable but nowhere near that depravity. My arm operated as a kind of mechanical ratchet: place bulb in cream charger, screw holder down crack!, raise tip to mouth, whooosh, over and over and over. No Buddha this time. After I was done I had half a dozen garbage bags, double-bagged, as full of empty green, blue, and silver bulbs as they could be without tearing. I hauled them out over the course of two weeks, trying to be discreet, thanking the Great Whatever that I didn’t know anyone with crack, or meth, or heroin on hand. I went back to therapy after that.
And before all that, there was the talented bassist of a band I knew in my early 20s who died with a gas mask on his face, hooked up to a nitrous tank. Dumb way to go. Just fucking dumb. Or more recently, the perpetually childlike pajama-wearing candy raver who’d hit the balloon until he heard the helicopters and passed out, then wake up and hit it some more, mixing it with whatever the hell else he’d put in his head that night. The last time I saw him was very late on a New Year’s Eve several years ago, yelling at a mutual friend of ours - a long-unrequited crush of his - and insisting with acid-skewed sincerity that she was a witch. He fled in his Hyundai.
So…yeah. @YeomanRando’s got ahold of it, I think.
Fuck that gas.
