All Hallows Eve is coming up, and I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about scary things lately. And I’ve also been hearing a lot of talk about scary places. Well, dear reader let me tell you what is truly scary in life: opium dens. I’ve been trying to keep this close to the vest, but I’ve been doing some experimenting with time travel. My goal is to be able to go back in time and get in on one of those Roman orgies, but that’s for another article.

Point is, I finally got it to work a couple of weeks ago, and here I am in an opium den in San Francisco in 1888. Real nice place, too. All class…well, except for the people that were smoking opium. Apparently, the seediest men in China were brought over to this place for the sole purpose of looking scary and doing epic amounts of opium.

So here I was, stuck in this pee-pee soaked heck hole, vainly looking for a way to get back to the present day, where people do more sensible things to remove themselves from their banal existences like huff paint thinner and take tranquilizers meant for animals a thousand pounds bigger than themselves.

But I digress. I accepted that I wouldn’t be returning to the present anytime soon, and then I picked up a bottle that would change my life for the next five days. Simply put, I went on the laudanum bender to end all laudanum benders. Over the next five days I hallucinated the following things:

– A clone army consisting of 1,000 versions of myself, dressed in full papal regalia

– A talking wax cylinder, dispensing sage advice on how to dress one’s dog for formal occasions. I also believe that said cylinder was the mayor of a municipality in Oregon.

– Doing the no-pants dance with your mom. I later found out that what I believed to be sex with her was actually intercourse with a lemon.

– Perpetually drowning in chocolate milk

– Painting a mural of everything that happened in the Crimean War with goat semen.

– Everyone else around me consisting on a diet of Spirographs and babies.

And that’s just the stuff that won’t make you question your continued existence on this earth. But yeah, I eventually got home safe!—wait, scratch that. I got into a knife fight with one of the proprietors over the going rate for his sister’s companionship, and died. Apparently, I thought she was worth 10 cents per hour, in 1888 dollars, and he thought I shouldn’t be paying her for sex. So, yeah, the moral of the story is opium dens are scary because you can get stabbed to death there.