I ate mushrooms the other day. It was awesome. I’m not gonna go about this in an analytical, intellectually persuasive essay format because I’m just not smart enough to make a physiological/psychological case for psychedelics. And I’m too lazy to do the research. This is a fucking b-word – I’m just gonna try to not sound stupid in explaining why adults should take mushrooms every so often.
Adults should take mushrooms every so often. First reason being, you should probably revisit something you only did when the fear of going home to your Mom or Dad’s house (or both, but people whose folks stayed together in high school need much more psychotherapy than a belly full of fungus can provide) overrode any secrets the psilocybin was willing to share and then you’re just staring in the rearview of your buddy’s ’89 Corolla trying to figure out how to make your novelty shop eyes look half-normal and it’s 6 degrees out there so let’s just listen to Pinkerton again in the post office parking lot.
Other reasons? The first one was actually all you need. But. We’re here.
The entirety of my 20’s – and I’m 110% certain I’m not alone here – I fell victim to a trendy condition of self-loathing. And that conditioning became conditioned because it was such a forced, self-manufactured manifestation of hatred – I didn’t really hate myself. It just became my knee-jerk line at a bar: “I hate myself” got me out of a jam. It got a few laughs and another beer, but I really like drinking, and you say something enough times to your dimwitted self, that jerk-off’s gonna start to believe it.
Let’s take two steps back and be perfectly clear about one thing: I tolerate myself. I think I’m fine. There’s nobody in here sucking me off, compiling a backlog of superblessed, happytobeme hashtags for the dark times. These days, nine out of ten days my “You’re not the worst!” voice uses a megaphone and I can send some emails to nowhere, go for a run and maybe meet up with a friend to occupy my time between beds. Anybody who broadcasts that their life is great or loving yourself is the first step to shut the fuck up, you can suck my dick. They’re so obliviously sad, it bums me out. But I don’t wanna talk about them and I’m done talking about the tenth day because this is about psilocybin making all that shit moot. If only for an afternoon.
“If you label it this, it can’t be that” is a code I’ve tried to adhere to since my quests as a teenage Spincase. So I’m breaking Ken Kesey’s (as told by Tom Wolfe) mantra here, but only partly because I would never do the miracle that are mushrooms the disservice of trying to portray with words the secrets that they can uncover and cover right-the-fuck back up if they so choose. Partly out of respect for them and partly from a stunted vocab and mostly because that first sip seems to be chasing me and these b-word things you gotta do in one fell.
For me, mushrooms are a lot like a Dr. Dog show. I’ve seen those guys a ton of times, but after the first few shows I saw, when they’d come around, I’d always have a “Dude, I’ve done it, I’ve seen it, I saw them back in ’06 when they were super eager...I’m too old for this shit. Fuckers dancing everywhere – I’m too old for this shit.” But I’d always begrudgingly get up and go. And low–and-behold, there’d I’d be stomping and grinning and dancing my dick into the dirt and begging for somebody younger to spill a beer on me so I could show them how much no worries it was. So a few years ago, I accepted it, I made a pact as I recently did with mushrooms: if they pass through town, you get off your droned candy-ass and you go. You buy a ticket, no matter the venue. You put those mushrooms in your mind- belly. Every. Time. Because it’s fucking awesome.
Wait. Don’t eat mushrooms at a concert – you’re way too old for that shit. Two separate things, if you weren’t following. What you do is you grab a bag of mushrooms and get North of San Francisco and you get to a higher place and look down on the City and the Sea and you find an odd spot to sit and flop around on like a land fish until it’s time to start dumping beers down your throat and reflect on the day. Because during those few hours, which seem like nobody’ll ever know, it’s the one time where it’s acceptable to accept a goddamned genuine brain-hug from yourself. In the frenzied quagmire that is a mushroom trip, you actually cut yourself a fucking break.
It was insane. And I remember the exact moment from the other day – one of those moments hurtling through Spain that are oft times impossible to throw a lasso around and tame – I remember amid the cacophonous spook parade in my mind, they all – and myself included – stopped and, in harmony in unison, laughed and agreed: I like hanging out with You. Even the real Fuckers. The Stalwarts of Doubt. Even they, in that moment, divulged that...they Like being Me. And it wasn’t just relief to not be somebody else. It was just...because we’re Me.
...you gotta hoist yer flag and then’a beat yer drum...mmmhmmm.
And then I woke up in the morning and truly, without any effort at all, hated myself and knew that the road ahead, the path I put my dumbass on without even really asking, was going to be at best awful and at who-gives-a-shit impossible and the reason it’s like this is probably because I bludgeoned myself with psychotropic drugs when my mind was malleable and green. Here’s lookin’ at you, Kid.