HEROIC DOSE

IMPORTANT

THIS IS NOT FOR ALL PATRONS. NOT EVERYONE CAN TAKE THE FULL HEROIC DOSE.

There are many art experiences throughout cultural histories around the world/s that abandon form and change lives and could help with:

a) dread, alienation, loneliness, panic
b) guilt, confession, repentance, relief, absolution and correct blame
c) headaches, fever, constipation, anger fugues, ague, colony collapse disorder and allergies
d) severe criticism, irony, lack of irony, too much inbetweenism

The use of LSD to create new art shows promise and Rude Mechs is interested in radical culture addressing these afflictions.

Follow your feelings, emotions and knowledge, if this Cultural Event speaks to you. You are more than welcome to join us!

For the months of May and June, the trip guides sent our group of dosers a personalized missive asking for information in order to aid them in concocting the perfect artistic blend for their heroic dose. The answers are still being compiled and are on view for our official dosers in a location only they now.

June 21 – 27, 2021 For our first in-person event, we invited you to explore the world that lies just beneath the surface at Uncommon Objects. At its end, you will have found not just a bear that will unlock a future event, but hopefully a love for horses, and a deeper understanding of curio and a key. Our out of town and/or missing friends were assigned tasks, the completion of which will be reward enough.

July 29 – August 1, 2021 – Exclusive Doser Weekend (Thurs – Sun 6pm-10pm)
No sign up is necessary for our Dosers – you know who you are.
August 5 – August 15, 2021 – Public Viewing (Thurs – Sun 7pm-10pm)
Sign up to attend August 5 – 15, 2021

A true facsimile of the Mellon Family’s Millbrook Estate
including the grounds
and one room
in which Dr. Richard Alpert
departed on his final trip from Millbrook. 

In 1963
Margaret Mellon “Peggy” Hitchcock
gave use of the estate and its grounds
to Drs. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert
after they had been fired by Harvard University.

The support was intended to allow Leary and Alpert
to continued their controlled scientific research
into the power of a new drug, LSD.

While at Harvard
Leary and Alpert had created many experiments showing huge potential for the drug
in everything from decreasing recidivism (The Concord Prison Experiment)…
to increasing spiritual awareness (The Marsh Chapel Experiment).

However,
once at Millbrook
the scientists and their subjects were hounded
by the county’s assistant District Attorney
G. Gordon Liddy
who recruited narcs and moles
under the banner of the Blue Goose Org.
creating a culture of paranoia
and the experiments began to go awry. 

Dr. Leary was willing to fight Liddy to the bitter end
but Dr. Alpert, sensing it was time to find a new path
prepared himself for his greatest trip to date
with this greatest trip to date—

So step inside yourself,
enjoy a cool beverage,
relax in the forest,
explore the mansion,
and be careful who you talk to.

We offer a safe but mind-bending trip taking off on 4/19 to commemorate Bicycle Day. No, we don’t mean World Bicycle Day, which celebrates “the uniqueness, longevity and versatility of the bicycle, which has been in use for two centuries, and that it is a simple, affordable, reliable, clean and environmentally fit sustainable means of transport.”^[2]

Settle in and let us tell you this tiny LSD origin story.

Bicycle Day celebrates the first LSD trip in 1943.

But LSD wasn’t invented in 1943. LSD was actually first synthesized in 1938 by Dr. Albert Hoffman. The intended use of the drug was the help with respiration. It was meant to synthetically mimic the fungus ergot, which healers had used since the middle ages to induce abortions and also to stop maternal bleeding after birth. It was mistakenly believed that midwives were giving it to women to help them breathe through the pain or something like that. LSD didn’t help with respiration and it was shelved.

But Dr. Albert Hoffman had a memory of this drug he had created that he couldn’t shake. He knew it must be good for something. So he recreated it years later and in the process thought he might have accidentally ingested some of it. It gave him weird feeling so he went home to lie down.

A few days later Dr. Hoffman decided to purposefully dose himself, to test if in fact the LSD had made him feel strange. He thought he would start with a very small dose, a mere 250 micrograms. Well, it turns out LSD is highly reactive and what would be a small dose of other substances is a pretty large or Heroic Dose of LSD.

Dr. Hoffman started to feel strange again and decided to bike home and lie down. But as he biked home the trip became intense. The world transformed. He saw colors and felt a connection to the vastness of the universe. One the most interesting features of LSD is that it affects the brain’s temporal experiences. Dr. Hoffman got home on his bike in a typical amount of time, but because of the LSD, his experience of the bike ride was epic and extensive, worthy of a special day to celebrate. In fact, it is entirely possible that Dr. Albert Hoffman is still out there, riding, feeling the wind in his face and colors of the brilliant spring day spiraling in his mind.

Let’s all get outside and do something small with great impact today.

Heroic Dose is a box-office-funded project.

Rude Mechs is supported in part by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department, The Texas Commission on the Arts, and The National Endowment for the Arts.