Personal Narrative Outline

Warning: Explicit language and drug use

Imagine a wooden table. Your standard wooden table with four wooden legs and a rectangular wooden tabletop, about knee height. Over a period of two years this Table occupied a strangely central role in my drug-fueled adventures at the University of Mississippi.

I have reason to believe that this Table has occupied one apartment in the Northgate Apartments complex for at least thirty-five years. The Table is part of a set of army surplus decorations for Northgate Apartment C-202, a sparsely decorated apartment permanently stuck in the 1970’s. Northgate Apartments are located on the edge of the northern side of campus on an intersection with Sorority Row; creating an already odd part of campus even stranger. They are owned by the University but are slightly more independent than the dorms, allowing students to come and go as they please yet still under the supervision of the University. My freshman year the Table sat in the apartment of a Junior named Drew. My first story happened during the first semester of my freshman year. I had recently begun spending time with Drew; he opened my eyes to the world of cannabis. He became a sort of older brother figure to me and guided my transformation from naivety to “hoodrat”-dum. At this time I only smoked weed every few days or on the weekends and this story does not rely as heavily on weed than it does alcohol, but it makes a reappearance about a year from this story.

It was a Saturday, sometime in November 2015, and the Rebs were playing football away from campus. Drew, myself, and our friend Chris had some people over to watch the game, and in typical Drew fashion the party grew to about twenty people when it was originally meant for maybe six or seven. In our marijuana-induced fugue state, Chris left a handle of Fireball whiskey on the Table instructing me, hurriedly, that I was to be the keeper of the Fireball, and that I alone was to decide the fate of those who wanted to drink of its fiery nectar. His last imposition on me was that I could drink as much as I wanted, as long as there was some left for him. First off, why should I let anyone drink it at all? Why do I need to choose who is worthy and who isn’t? Nevertheless this gesture empowered me and I guarded the bottle that sat on the Table. This day began a long series of events that brought me back to this Table time and time again.

The next two stories take place about a year later, on October 27th, 2016. My current partner and I had begun seeing each other not even two weeks before and had recently began spending most of our days together. Despite this new occurrence in my life, this Thursday wasn’t much different than any other day, until around one o clock. On my way to Arabic class, my partner’s best friend Chris approached me in the lobby of our dorm. Chris pulled me aside quickly and said:

“Dude, I’m like, tripping really hard right now.”

“No fucking way dude! On what?”

“1-P LSD. It’s like LSD except made in a lab for research. I’ve never tripped before and I kinda bought this impulsively.”

“Shit man, I kinda wanna explore this with you.”

“You wanna go out into the woods and chill?”

“Wait, what? That was random as fuck! But yeah sure man, I’ll even smoke you out.”

“That sounds excellent.”

So a smoke sesh and deep conversation in the woods turned into the most emotionally, physically, mentally, and visually enthralling experience of my night. To pay me back for the weed, Chris gave me a tab of LSD and thrust me into the world of psychedelia. Little did I know that, not only had Chris purchased LSD, he had also bought a substance known as 4-AcO-DMT which imitates a psilocybin mushroom and turns into the psychoactive compound psilocin in the body. Later that evening, Chris, my partner, our other two best friends (amicably referred to as the Gays), and I all gathered in apartment C-202 of Northgate Apartments, now occupied by the Gays. It was so bizarre to me that somehow, my new best friends occupied the same apartment that I spent days and days in my freshman year before the departure of Drew. And, sitting in the middle of the living room, was the Table.

On that night, we realized the table was the center of our universe. On that Table, the doses of DMT were split up and taken. We returned that night, time and time again circled around the Table, for many activities. We suffered a problem on a number of occasions where we struggled to pack a bowl of weed to smoke and just left it lying around on the table, until there were tidily constructed piles on each corner of the table. It was also on that night and the next morning that my partner and I decided to start dating and is now our anniversary.

I just realized that these were supposed to be in outline form but it was too fun to write the last one in the beginnings of a narrative format. I will do this last story in an outline format.

Participants: Myself, Grace (my partner), Chris (born in super-poor town outside of Jackson, MS, completely eschews what was expected of him to become first to go to college. Exceptionally intellectual and an avid reader of philosophy texts, also a hoodrat), Colt (another of Grace’s friends, think frat boy with class), Ian (army brat, soon to ship off to Basic), the Gays (both come from Mississippi trash and are Socialists to the core. Very intellectual except on a shallow level. My best friends during my sophomore year)

We were all smoking together in the apartment with weed strewn across the Table. Suddenly we hear the jingling of what sounds like a collar and the sounds of dozens of steps coming up the stairs. A loud knock on the door followed with “University Police! Open up!” Everyone except owners were taken outside, frisked, and questioned before being let go. Upstairs, around the Table, the Gays were intensely questioned, intimidated by the officers, and even told they were resisting and were physically restrained for no reason. This story is meant to wrap up the narrative in a serious tone to talk about the criminalization of cannabis and how the police spend too much time intimidating cannabis users and way too much effort jailing young black men across the country for petty drug crimes that set them up for failure in life. Emphasis placed on my hometown of Baltimore.