As I’ve probably already detailed somewhere in this here blog, I have an affinity for teh drugs. I like them, sometimes too much. Especially uppers of any variety, which is why I stay away from them altogether as much as possible.

But, there are certain drugs which aren’t much of a problem for my addictive nature. Mushrooms are one of them. They couldn’t exactly be considered an upper; they’re more in the downer/hallucinogen category, which makes them safe for me. There’s little chance that I could become addicted (I can’t even imagine trying to work on mushrooms), so they pose little threat. Also, I prefer taking them with other people since I would imagine that I would freak myself out too much if I were to do them alone. One needs partners in crime for that sort of thing.

Mushrooms are an event. They’re not something you just take for the hell of it. Alright, say, one has a bag in the freezer and a spare Tuesday afternoon, one might take them for the hell of it, but generally, it’s best to plan these things out in advance. You need to know where you are going to be, what you are going to do while on them, and with whom you’re going to take them. Personally, I prefer someplace where no one who is not on mushrooms could possibly stumble across those of us who are… i.e. a house.

The first time I ever did them I was entirely worried; partly due to my addictive nature and partly since I had never done them before – fear of the unknown and all of that rot. I was in a house with maybe a dozen people. We made a stew of them. For those dear readers who have never done mushrooms, they taste horrible. They’re just about the foulest thing you’ll ever put in your mouth. Granted, I hate regular mushrooms anyway. They’re fungus. They grow on poop. They’re foul little things and I’m not entirely sure they’re actually edible.

Anyway, this stew is probably toxic, or at the very least, not good for you. You swill it around and down it goes leaving you with a taste in your mouth like you just ingested a rotted corpse. And then, you wait. Wait wait wait. Oooh, I think I feel a little something. Maybe not. Then, wooooooosh, to the moon.

That particular night, our little mushroom party divided squarely into two camps. There were the serious folk who were all intent on feeeeeeling and thiiiiiinking about the larger world at hand. How do we bring about world peace? What is the meaning of butter?

And then, there were the rest of us. One of us was wearing overalls so we all had to be wearing them. Whomever’s house we were in seemed to have a surplus of overalls and outfitted the rest of us like a bizarre uniform. The overall crew would peep around corners into the other room where the serious-minded folk had set up camp and laugh like naughty 5 year olds who snuck out of bed to spy on their parents’ party.

We also had a keeper of of the bounce. One of us had to be bouncing at all times otherwise… well, I don’t know what would happen otherwise actually, but it was imperative that someone always be bouncing. We took turns bouncing in shifts. Drugs, you know. Things don’t exactly make any sense. Not at all really. That’s kind of the point.

The morning came and I returned my overalls to someone who was still a complete stranger really, yet, we shared the bounce. We will always have the bounce.

When I first moved to Los Angeles with my best friend, we had little money, lots of time with both us being unemployed, and a big fat bag of the best mushrooms I have ever come across in my entire life. In fact, these mushrooms were so damn good that they have spoiled every other mushroom I have run across since.

Once in a while, this friend of mine and I would take what became known as a Vacation Day. Vacation days involved waking up and tripping out of our minds all damn day until the sun went down. We would play gin (a difficult task when you’re on hallucinogens), watch movies (The Big Lebowski is positively made for mushrooms), have desk chair races, etc., etc. Those were the best of all days. We could forget the fact that we were fast running out of money. We could completely ignore the fact that Los Angeles had been not very nice to us at all and had been trying to shake us off from the moment we got there. “Go home. You are not wanted here,” the city would say in a loud and demanding way. The bag of happiness in our freezer was a brief respite from the rudeness of Los Angeles.

A few months ago, another friend of mine happened to come across another big, fat bag, so we planned a little adventure at my house. I now live in a house with a yard so it’s the perfect little sanctuary for activities such as that. There were three of us. Two of us, myself included, were hit hard, while the other went off by himself (he spent a good hour or two in the bathroom trying to rub one out and failed).

My backyard (like a lot of yards in Los Angeles) is not exactly lush with greenery, but my roommate has taken to experimenting with a garden. We had all sorts of vegetables and herbs growing in the backyard, along with an overly healthy lemon tree that produces more lemons than entirely necessary by a long shot. Nobody needs 300 lemons a week.

These are the results of my latest experiment:

• Possums (or Opossums if you want to get fancy about it) wear their skulls on the outside of their heads. I won’t consider them proper beasts until they put their skulls back inside their skin where they belong. Creepy fuckers.

  

• The foliage on our lemon tree is made entirely of Chinese dragons. They were friendly dragons though, so it was alright. In fact, the trunk of said lemon tree is mighty nice to hug. It hugged back.

  

• Piles of dirt are scary. The Earth was showing us its faces and they weren’t particularly nice faces to gaze upon. They were mean, horrible faces that only a pile of dirt could have.

• My house has a lot of tile in it. Both bathrooms, the kitchen and the sunroom are covered in floor tiles. These particular tiles all have faces in them, just like the dirt. Every single one of these tiles had at least a few faces trapped underneath them that were trying to get out. You can’t walk on faces. That’s just not proper. Since they were on the floor, this made it particularly difficult to use the bathroom. I had to jump to the bathmat and lean over to the toilet. Quite a difficult prospect indeed, especially when you’re tripping balls.

• All human faces look like floor tiles – distorted and weird – and human faces move! ARGH! But at least they’re not trying to drag you down with them.

• My cat is a strange creature to begin with, but on mushrooms… well, you see where I’m going with this. He has a face, too.

• Cucumber plants are fucking evil. If you’ve never seen a cucumber plant, they have tendrils that reach out and grab things, whatever things happen to be close at hand, and drag themselves outwards to grow. Granted, the kung fu grip of the cucumber plant is so slow that even a turtle could outrun it. Our cucumber plant was doing an outstanding job of choking the life out of its neighbor, the zucchini. The zucchini didn’t seem to mind. I find this particular facet of the cucumber to be odd completely sober, but on mushrooms, the scariest thing in my yard, by far, was the plant with prehensile hands. I wouldn’t go within ten feet of it or it would try to grab me, too. It would drag me down to the Earth with it and the Earth is made of scary faces. That’s no good at all. Back to get a hug from the lemon tree and its friendly dragons. Ahhh.

  

• There’s no appreciable difference between watching Blade Runner sober and watching it on drugs. Therefore, Blade Runner just might be the best movie ever made.