Every year, in the spooky month of October, fanatics of music, food, culture, and wild experiences flood City Park in New Orleans to get their fix and fill of all of the above and much, much more at Voodoo Festival.

Voodoo Fest is a unique music festival, featuring a wide variety of people and cultures mixed with authentic New Orleans cuisine and music. This year’s Voodoo Experience brought in acts like Stone Temple Pilots, Nine Inch Nails, Lil Wayne, Wyclef Jean, R.E.M., and a whole mess of brass bands, and Butthole Surfers. But there are always some extracurricular activities taking place …

It was about four o’clock Saturday afternoon when a friend of mine handed me an Altoid® that had been dipped in LSD. I exhaled very deeply, knowing what I was about to get into (eight hours or so of a catatonic inner meltdown), then I put the dosed mint on my tongue. Shortly after, I ate another one … just for good measure. I wanted to let my brain know that I meant business. I had no intention of returning to normalcy any time soon.

By the time Lil Wayne had exited the stage, the acid was starting to take hold. I remember watching two green, alien women walk by. We all started to giggle, and the giggling didn’t stop until The Mars Volta took the stage. I remember watching Victor Dooley roll and squirm on the ground in uncontrollable fits of laughter throughout the set.

Dooley can best be described as Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) from The Big Lebowski: He’s not wrong; he’s just an a–hole. Well, that’s Dooley: He’s just a charismatic a–hole that everyone loves. He’s never wrong, in his mind, but he’s always fun to watch in action. Whether he’s arguing with security guards, picking fights with, well, anyone or everyone, sneaking onto the observation deck on the side of the stage, or hooking up with some random guy’s girlfriend, Dooley is always a trip – even more so when he is, in fact, tripping.

The extreme sounds of The Mars Volta melted my mind and built it back up again, just to melt it some more. By the end of the set, my brain was like a warped, overused candle. At one point of the show, I didn’t know whether to crap my pants, piss my pants, cream my pants, or all of the above simultaneously.

Afterward, I sprawled out on the ground, trying to recuperate from the insanity of the band’s nonstop intensity. I remember Dooley turning back to scream at me during the show, “The monkey won’t stop, the monkey won’t stop …”

He was right. The “Monkey” (The Mars Volta’s lead singer, Cedric Bixler Zavala) wouldn’t stop. As a matter of fact, the band never stopped making noise for an entire hour’s worth of music. Never stopped.

I talked with my sister-in-law on Sunday, and she said, “Mars Volta sucked. It was just a bunch of bad noise that never stopped.” Well, she wasn’t high on acid. To me, it was a bunch of intense noise that severed my head from my spinal cord, in a good way.

While we were on our backs recovering, we could hear Ghostland Observatory playing across the way. Before Nine Inch Nails took the main stage, we stayed on our backs and enjoyed an extraordinary laser-light show that was very reminiscent of a Star Wars battle.

I was at the peak of my trip as Trent Reznor and N.I.N. took the stage and scared me into a visual trance. I don’t know which was more frightening: the acid or the mental picture of Reznor f–king me like an animal.

I guess, in a way, I did let Trent violate, desecrate, and penetrate me. Uh! Gross.

“I wanna feel you from the inside.”

“Help me …”

Dooley was doing the robot and trying to find the person asking for help. Of course, he didn’t realize it was the backup singers of the band singing, “Help me.”

When the sorcery wizards of the stage/light show (N.I.N.) turned the stage into a red curtain, bleeding while being repeatedly stabbed by an unseen blade, it was time to back out of the pit.

Besides, the guy next to me was having trouble controlling his hooker. The bitch kept spilling her drink on everyone as she dry-humped this dude and stuck her nasty, herpes-infected tongue down his throat, saying, “I’m going to f–k you so hard when we get home tonight!” It was clear that it was time to get out of there and seek refuge.

So here’s my synopsis of the acts:

Erykah Badu: beautiful hair.

Wyclef Jean: good show, but he got too political. He overly endorsed Barack Obama, mentioning his name at least sixty times throughout his set. He even played the national anthem.

Stone Temple Pilots: awesome. I was vomiting and head-banging at the same time, seriously. Scott Weiland never ceases to entertain me. Clean and sober or smacked out of his mind, he’s always entertaining.

Lil Weezy: off the heezy fo’ sheezy. I was hoping he would play something from his Tha Block is Hot album, but he never did. He did, however, demonstrate his “love stroke,” as he got down on all fours and humped the stage, singing, “She, she lick me like a lollipop,” and “So I can get it juicy for ya.” Yeah! It was super good.

The Mars Volta: super intense and nonstop energy – on acid: fantastic; sober: sucked balls.

N.I.N.: wild craziness, nightmarish goodness – everything you’d expect.

Panic at the Disco: Go kill yourselves.

Butthole Surfers: too f–ked up to put on even a somewhat entertaining show.