Born in Tel Aviv, Israel, Adi Khavous also known by the moniker Adida Fallen Angel is a nomadic artist who has created street art installations, intensive line art, complex doodling, and a bunch of abstract geometrical free flow lines, across the globe. He shared this story at Psychedelic Stories 920 Montreal 2015

I did copious amounts of mushrooms when I was younger, and I don’t remember much but I think I would like to tell you about my first time.

I just moved to California about a half hour away from Tijuana. I was living on a beach on a youth hostel that looked, pretty bad. It was very cheap to live there so it was just fine for me.

Some of the friends­ ­– I called them friends but I actually don’t really know them – just met them a week ago said “Adida come have some mushrooms with us.” And because I wanted to be cool said “Sure I do lots of mushrooms. All the time, come on, bring it!” Not a good idea.

We tried I think they were Hawaiian mushrooms. I ate them like candy. Tried to hide the face when you eat mushrooms. “Ya I love it, good taste. Fresh!” I had no idea what I’m doing.

We’re about six people. Half of them are German, a Dutchman, an Australian, everybody’s talking, the hostel is right there on the beach. We go sit down on the beach and everybody slowly starts tripping out, and nothing is happening to me.

Half an hour passes by. The Germans go check some fire. Disappeared. I think the Australians start playing with a dog that went by. The others decided to go eat something. Still I’m not feeling anything. I think an hour went by. I’m alone there on the sand and the sunset starts to come. I feel like something’s wrong with me because I should be tripping but I don’t feel anything.

So I’m bummed sitting there, can’t find no one, it’s getting dark. Sadness falls upon me.

Slowly I look at my feet which are deep and stuck into the sand. For some reason I notice there’s snakes all around me.

Under the sand. Moving. Slowly.

“I’m ok. I don’t think California beaches have snakes. Definitely not 20,000 of them. Circling me. In a very mathematical pattern.”

So I decide to stand up and enjoy the show and at the same time freak the fuck out.

I decide to go to a higher area. There’s a pile of rocks behind me so I go up. It’s about a meter or two. I was able to see the beach in a better way. When I went on top of the pile of rocks which took me forever to climb, even though later I found out it was about this high, and I’m not short so…I look at the beach, I see the horizon and the entire beach is moving with a gazillion snakes.

Obviously my brain is telling me this cannot be possible, the San Diego Zoo did not unleash 20,000 snakes on the beach at this moment. I took the time to see if something here is beyond me, beyond my reasoning. I noticed that the waves work extremely together with the waves. So as the ‘water wave’ crashed, the ripple effect continued on the sand, hit the wall of the boardwalk and came back, as if it was under water experiencing sand.

This was fantastic. It was super beautiful.

I started to understand that everything’s connected together; that the sand is part of the ocean, it’s all part of the land, there’s all waves, electromagnetics, things I don’t even know nothing about.

Made sense at that moment. I immediately wanted to find my friends to tell them. But there was no one around. So I decided I have to go back to the hostel and find people to see this adventure I just discovered.

The second that I climbed over the wall of the boardwalk, my feet touched cement. And everything went dark.

Cement does not move. It is pretty cold. I became sad again. And even terrified because it was not as fun as walking on sand. I felt I was part of Earth.

If you’ve ever done mushrooms, you have this longing for nature. That does not happen when you go into a city. I decided I don’t like this. This is not moving, it’s not fun. There’s no snakes here. I’ll walk to the hostel and hope I’ll find the people I just met and hope the adventure continues. I got lost. I went into a street which I thought was the street of the hostel. I was going completely the wrong way.

I started noticing mathematical equation in the city. Streets were parallel. Cars were parallel. Buildings right next to each other in a very man-made form. And that really pissed me off. I remember that like “This is not fun, this is not organic like there, the ocean, where things move. Why would we make something like this? Nobody answered me because this was in my head.

As I kept walking I stared at living rooms. I love doing that. If you’ve ever done it, you walk down the street and you imagine life inside that living room.

I saw pattern there also: people watching television, people eating; people watching television, people eating; people eating, people watching television. People watching television while eating. Somebody’s sleeping on the couch.

I didn’t know how to digest it because these are scenes I’ve seen all the time. But I start to understand it, like the search for entertainment and security has made us boxed-in environments man-made.

The cars really pissed me off. I would hit them like “what is this metal beast?” Surprisingly, I did not get arrested that day. It is California so I think it was completely ok. “Why would we build these machines of death? And why are they parking in a row and not a nice swirvly way?”

Slowly I started to understand that I’m tripping really bad, and I loved it but I was scared because I was lost. I was surrounded in this concrete jungle, which I found no passion, no desire to be in. I decided I would just search the beach so I kept on walking and I made it back to the hostel.

Obviously, there was nobody there and after a while I realized it took me two hours to get there, which is about 10 minutes-walk from where I was. I probably did every possible road around the hostel before getting there. The hostel is close to the beach so I was like “ok I’m gonna get back to the beach and finish the trip because this was not fun, I need some fun back, I need some snakes.”

I went back and the pattern, it took time, but it came back. Slowly I decided to sit there and let it come down. It was my first time and I was really aware that I was full of shit. I should not have lied or tried to be cool. I was actually very happy being alone. At that moment I realized that the earth is connected, that we should always be part of nature, that the water touched my feet and I looked to gaze into the stars and understand the entire universe back then.

And that was it. The trip faded peacefully. I went back to the hostel and nothing was the same ever since.

And that’s it. Enjoy your ride.