Ok, so I’m in a legal state, naked hot spring, get high and soak for awhile. And then I realize I’m sad. Sad about my divorce, what could have been, losing my love and my faith both in a short amount of time. I’ve been reading a book on psychedelic drugs and it mentions set and setting being important in determining what kind of experience you have, and how you approach it can be everything.

I start talking to my exwife in my head.

I tell her part of me will always love her, goodbye for the millionth time, go be happy, yada yada yada. She left about a year ago. And then I decide I’m done suffering. I want to be a new person. Maybe a ritual would help. Maybe … a baptism.

So I say to myself, in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, weed, and sex, I baptize you. May you be happy, and not sad. May this be the first day of the rest of your life, may you be a new person, confident in your new life and not longing for your old one. May you make a clean break, may this be the beginning of your new life. Amen.

And I immerse in the warm, healing mineral water. In the dark. Naked. Alone.

And then I come up, and I have no idea if it’s gonna work, or just be a silly memory. But I figured what the hell. Why not give it a shot.

Weed has a way of making me forget where I was two minutes ago. So when I came out of the water, it felt like a new beginning. Like nothing had come before. And that was kinda cool.

It’s the first day of the rest of my life.