No point mentioning these bats…

When it comes to substance abuse, I take what most would refer to as "the Bill Hicks approach." In other words, I recognize it as childish and somewhat irresponsible behavior, and don’t do it anymore…but when I was younger I did enjoy it a great deal, and never suffered any negative repercussions whatsoever. Now, I’m not saying that I tried everything…in fact, there were only two drugs that I ever really dabbled in; marijuana, and psychedelic mushrooms. I never had any interest in speeders, or downers, or the big DARE no-no’s like crack, cocaine, and heroin…but the appeal of hallucinations and mind alteration had fascinated me from a young age. I wanted to see stuff. You know, whatever it was that you "saw," though horror stories regarding acid prevented me from having any interest in that one either. I figured if I stuck to non-habit forming organics I could walk the line between responsible and naughty, and succeeded in that effort completely.

 

I had a retractable moon roof in my first car when I was seventeen, and used to take one of the first girls that I ever really cared for on summer evening drives into the country to get high. We’d go to a particular place in the woods, off of a two track that was off of a dirt road, significant in it’s difficulty to drive to and it’s distant removal from civilization. It was a small clearing in the middle of a large patch of woods…a patch that was otherwise surrounded by corn fields and cow pastures. The forest floor was completely flat, and the trees were remarkably tall…it was very peaceful, and quiet, particularly in the evening. I would park there, turn on a little Mazzy Star, open the moon-roof, and watch her crawl up and out of it…her small legs dangling down by the dash board. I’d slide up and join her, and we’d pass a joint back and forth, listening to the music echo softly through the trees, watching the stars twinkle above the lofty bending branches. We’d talk, and relax, and eventually climb back into the car and drive back to my apartment to mingle among the sheets, in the humid box-fan-window breeze of old July.

If you’ve never tried marijuana, the effects of it are slight, and quite limited. Depending on how and when you do it, it can be exciting, and it can be completely lame– while remaining the same for both. It turns the contrast of the world up, while turning the brain down. Things generally seem more interesting, and lovely, but it only seems that way because your mind has been simplified…but as it’s accompanied by the side effect of physical and emotional euphoria, the good generally outweighs the bad in the situation, at least in the short-term.

Mushrooms on the other hand…damn. There’s nothing slight about the effects of mushrooms. My first encounter with those crazy things happened when I was nineteen, through a close friend who was a few years older than myself. He had found some stashed in a book somewhere, and invited me along on the little psychological adventure, as I had previously shown interest in it. It was a beautiful autumn day…bright and sunny with rich cloud cover, and a post-rain dampness clinging to everything. Our plan was to eat them up, wait for the effects to hit us, and then go two-tracking in his doorless jeep wrangler. So we made a couple of of peanut butter and mushroom sandwiches, and gobbled them down at my apartment. I had no idea what I was in for, or how it was going to work…but the mushrooms themselves looked all kinds of wrong. Strange white stalks and caps, some blue, some black. They smelled terrible, and tasted worse, even through a peanut butter sandwich…but after half an hour passed and nothing was happening I was beginning to think that we had just eaten disgusting mushrooms for no reason. My friend agreed that they were probably fake, so we decided to go downtown to the coffee shop, grab a drink, and hang out chit-chatting with mutual acquaintances.

The line at the register was quite long, and the cafe was completely packed. Some of my peers were loitering around the back entrance of the place, and my friend got hung up there in conversation…I, however, proceeded to get in line for a cup of coffee. I stood there for a good five minutes or so, slowly inching towards the counter while the line continued to grow behind me. The colors and lights in this particular coffee shop are a bit crazy…which you could only really understand if you actually saw it. There’s a lot of neon lighting, chrome sheeting, bright blue paint, striped red and white, and so forth…so it wasn’t really the most ideal place to suddenly start tripping balls, as they say, especially while standing in line surrounded by people. But, unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened.

The first thing that hit me was the mood– that feeling you get in your chest right before you’re about to cry, or laugh, only it was diluted somehow, and rubbery. I remember thinking something along the lines of shit, in that small window of time, before my normal frame of mind was lost completely. The line moved forward a few paces, and I stepped forward in suit, despite the fact that there were severe changes coming over me in rapid succession. If one’s normal train of thought can be metaphorically seen as, say, peering down from a high vantage point at various networks of rail ways, and rail cars, while dictating from above which way the various trains should go…then the type of thought process that I slipped into at that particular moment would be more akin to flying down and strapping one’s self to the hood of one of the engines, and just riding it without any ability to see where it was going, or where it had been…yet despite that, somehow everything made sense, and the simple nature of this caused me to want to laugh (the corners of my mouth literally force themselves upwards, despite my efforts to stop them). The air in the room condensed, and grew extremely warm, and I felt like I was underwater in a bath tub. My body became an odd shade of numb…though not in the way that alcohol numbs the body. I felt, rather, that I was made of wax…and that the nerve endings in my skin were fighting through some kind of oily barrier. By this time I had forgotten why I was standing there, and was gripped only with the singular desire to get the hell out. I felt like I was suffocating on the soupy air, and the entire place was quickly taking on a foreign menacing quality. Every sound was distorted, every laugh sinister…and it seemed as though everything going on in the room was being directed at me. Every pair of eyes seemed glued to me, like the Mona Lisa, and my sense of sight was getting weirder and weirder with each passing moment. The corners of the room began to stretch out, like you see in movies from time to time when someone is drugged or dreaming, and the back door that I came in suddenly looked like it was a million miles away. Then the lights began messing with me…flickering slightly…growing dim, and then bright again, but all the while becoming more and more red in tone. The sound of the crowd was inaudible, and deafening, and my mind filled the mess of sounds with alien words and phrases that weren’t actually there. It was hell on earth, and I could finally bear it no longer…I quickly ditched the line, and made my way toward the d

oor. I retained my motor skills, fortunately, and glided through the crowd without much trouble, grabbing my friend by the collar as I went. I burst through the back door, and could literally feel the air of the building expel me out of it, like I was opening the door to a room full of water from the inside. I could almost see the congested indoor air flowing out around me…and like anyone in that situation, the feeling of going from that to having thin fresh air at last was absolutely amazing. To this day, that moment of bursting through that door is among the most pleasurable moments in my life.

 

 

 

*Part Two*

 

 

 

Now then, where was I? Ah yes…the parking lot, after escaping from Hades itself. I stood there for quite a while, indulging myself on the fresh air…the freshest air I have ever experienced, in fact. My mind continued to leap around, though all of the sinister overtones that had dominated the experience inside the building were completely washed away, replaced instead with what I can only describe as a divine presence. The symmetry of things around me seemed emboldened, and emphasized; the deliberate spacing between the planted city trees, the number of windows per floor on the buildings, and so forth. Immobile things moved, but yet they didn’t move…if I looked at anything, the dimensions of the object would bend and sway…bulge, and sink, but all the while with an enchanting reassuring quality– complete and total peace.

We saddled up the jeep and took off for the country…as the drug didn’t affect motor skills or reaction time, driving was on our side, though the complete lack of depth perception made the experience rather interesting. Streets that were once completely familiar to me looked long and alien, and as we drove I found myself completely lost until we came to an intersection. It wasn’t that things looked too strange to tell where we were, it was that the overriding sense of noticed symmetry made all of the streets look completely identical to one another. We kept to our compass bearing, however, and eventuality finally brought us out into the country, and into the network of comfortable abandoned logging trails. We laughed, and conversed, and just putzed around enjoying the experience. He dropped me off at home a few hours later, though the effects of the drug were still on me as hard as ever, so I took a walk in the growing dusk, down to the water front. A fog had set in, and strolling out to the breakwall light house was as magical of an earthly experience as I could ever hope to enjoy. I nearly felt like I was flying through a dream, the old cement walkway stretching on before me into eternity, with the rest of the universe clouded in gray. Wrapped up the evening later by watching Mulholland Drive for the first time…which, in my diminishing state of mind, made a remarkable impression on me.

 

The last time I ever did them was at a weekend music festival, and it is because of what happened that particular evening that has prevented me from ever doing them since. I got to the festival early, and parked my car in the day lot, even though I had planned on staying the entire evening in one tent or another. The forecast called for rain, so I purchased a rain coat on my way out there, which turned out to be a fantastic idea, as it began drizzling almost immediately. The festival was set up as follows; the main stage area up front, near the day parking, with a large patch of open field for people to pitch chairs and watch the entertainment. Behind the people were the vendors, and behind the venders were the woods, where most of the people who were there for the music made camp. Behind the woods was what was known as the back 40, which is where all the people that just went there to party made camp, in an extremely large field. Most of my friends were back there, as they could care less about hippie music, and were just there being social-whores like almost everyone else. Although the drunken loser frat boys in the back vastly outnumbered the hippies for whom the festival was actually for, the event always had, for lack of a better term, like real positive vibes, mann. It was my plan to enjoy those positive vibes with another peanut butter and mushroom sandwich, which I ate in the dryness of my car shortly before dark, after strolling around for a while. Things were a bit drab, and I was getting somewhat bored, and I thought that it might perk things up a bit…which may very well have been the worst judgement call I have ever made in my life.

By the time the effect kicked in I was completely soaked from head to toe, freezing cold, and without anywhere in particular that I wanted to be. The rain had begun to come down harder, and the paths that were made to the fields for the cars to drive down had turned into trenches of mud that were knee deep. The main gate that people had been coming in was closed, and littered with tilting campers that were stuck in the sludgy mire, which also happened to be the only way out. I was sitting with some friends in the back 40 when it hit me, right around the time that I decided that they were all way too annoying to stomach. I couldn’t sit still and listen to their inane drunken conversation, so I set out again to cross the field, stroll through the woods, and warm up once again in my car…but the fact that I had descended into a complete nightmare made this journey extremely difficult and frightening. I couldn’t make out any subtle details in the terrain…all of the trails had vanished on me, somehow. There was no privacy, and no escape, and all the screaming and glow sticks and bumping car stereos were maddening in the wet darkness. The rain kept pouring down, and I was only aware of my own physical misery…I felt like I was in some kind of terrible dream about an evil carnival, fueled by the horrible noise and the dark leaning campers stuck in the makeshift road ways. The grass had turned into a fern-like pattern in front of me, and I couldn’t distinguish any bit of it from the next. Consequentially, I plowed into the woods at a random point, which was haunted by camp site lights, and after stumbling around into branches for a while, I had to just turn around and walk back out into the field. I just wanted out of there…some peace and privacy. I tried going into a urinal for a moment, but someone was at the door in a matter of minutes trying to open it. Finally, I just walked around the forest, and back to my car, where I sat in a very very dark state of mind, feeling trapped and miserable, cursing myself for even being there at all. I decided that I was going to get out of there, somehow, and started my car, which was alone in a patch of un-mudded grass, but surrounded by trenches of deep black nastiness on all sides…somehow I found a place to cross into another part of the field that was still drivable, and all of a sudden there was a man in front of me with a flashlight, pointing to some boards that some

one had laid out in the mud. He was like an angel, sent from heaven, and after a quick dip down and around, my tires finally hit the pavement of the main road, and I was home free…speeding off down the highway at 3:30 in the morning, in a state of unprecedented euphoric liberation.

The effects of mushrooms are, in a word, astounding. Their direct influence comes from a poisonous toxin, which infects the brain and causes it to hemorrhage…flooding parts of it with blood that otherwise go unused, and activating them. Everyone who tries it will have a different result, as it caters to the individual…if, like me, you are of independent mind, and feel most comfortable alone, then you will have a strong need to be alone when you do them. A common misconception is the idea that you have no control over what happens to you once you do them, when in fact you have complete control…though it’s a different sort of control than one is used to. You can only sort of push your thoughts and perceptions in the direction you want, which should be good enough to avoid diving into bad places….unless, however, you find yourself foolishly trapped, and without the means to acquire the sorts of surroundings and comfort that you desire.

Little is actually known about the substance, and studies on it have only recently reopened after a several decade hiatus. A John Hopkins university study recently revealed enormous positive potential for the drug, reporting that over sixty percent of the people that sampled it in a controlled study reported substantial increases in life satisfaction, positive behavior, and an overall sense of unity and happiness…no one was worse off because of their participation, according to the report:

 

http://www.times-standard.com/davestancliff/ci_11710419