To: shroomm@geocities.com
Subjet: stop the press! I edited my story!
- The following is a 'nutshelled' tale of my second experience with magic mushrooms.
Three friends and myself drove to Malaney (on the Queesland coast) to hunt down the fabled head spinners.
"D" had a friend who lived in the mountains and he drew us a map of the surrounding area, indicating the best spots to look. The first paddock we came to was filled with cows.
Okay, I only know two basic things about 'shrooms' both of which, I had previously read in a fabulous furry freak brothers comic book;
The first, to verify that the thing you just picked is indeed a magic mushroom and not some nasty fungi that could kill you, you pinch the stem near the top. If it turns bluey-purple after awhile...bingo. (this is not a sure fire a method so don't treat it as one...mmmk?)
The second, they grow in cow flops.
Unfortunately a dilemma arose from the word go. We had found some mushrooms and did the pinch test, but some went blue - some didn't. I put them all in the container "M1" had bought along and kept picking. The ones that didn't turn blue at first, did later so that cleared itself up.
The mood was good and cheerful. It was fun stuff, cruising around a paddock, mooing at cows, picking mushies. General tomfoolery. "M1" seemed especially cheerful. He declared it a fun Sunday. We hunted for an hour or two and came up with maybe fifty shrooms...and that was only from one paddock!
"M2" and I had eaten some along the way, "D" flatly refused and "M1" wanted to drop only when we were safely on the path home again, in case of some mental freak- out I guess.
Good thinking, since he was our designated driver.
As we were ducking under the barb wire fence to leave, the owner of the property and the cows that dwelled in it, rode up to us on a motorbike.
"What're you fellas doing?"
"Going for a stroll in the country." I said, not sure if I was high, or even able to talk to this guy in any normal way. He looked a little like my father and I wondered briefly what my Dad would think of an errand like this.
"You should have asked permission, what if I had put the dog traps out today?" He glanced from me to the bucket with the shrooms in it. He couldn't see them but probably had a pretty good idea what was in it. In fact, he looked like this wasn't the first time he had to tell off trespassers. I smiled.
"If we went to you and asked permission, would you have let us?" I inquired this while the others looked on gravely.
"It's just nice to be asked, okay?"He rode off back to his house and an old fella who was shaking his head comically. We drove off then, looking for another paddock.
By the time we found another, everyone was a little wigged out by the dog-trap comment. So we not only scanned for fungi but traps which could possibly take your foot off. At first "M2" didn't want to leave the car at all but after some coaxing, he did. I was feeling good, if not wonderful. I could hear Frank Zappa's warped music playing in my head. I kept trying to feed "M2" more shrooms and for every one he had, I chomped down two or three. "M1" and "D" found this quite amusing.
We only collected a small batch from the second paddock as the sun got too fierce. All I wanted to do was get back to "D's" friends house and have a transcendental experience,... -or something to that equivalent.
"M2" and myself spent the next hour or so (it was hard to tell exactly) playing moody, crazy jazz on borrowed instruments. I remember having little 'mind movies' while doing so.
One minute I could clearly picture us in a dingy bar somewhere in New Orleans maybe, we were being heckled by the conservative folk. A moment later we're perched up in a tree-house, playing a concert for the wildlife below us. Sometimes I thought I could hear invisible accompaniment, like a violin or Irish whistle.
It was defiantly the highlight of my trip.
-But there were also times when I felt no so comfortable in my own skin. I had chased the second dosage of fungi I had with some beer and that almost made me puke. At one point "M2" had a minor spin out. He always carried with him a small pocket book in which he scribbled poems and other things that interested him. He took it out that afternoon, intending to jot some things about the experience but discovered he couldn't put any of it to words.
Furthermore, he couldn't read any of the stuff he had previously penned. I tried to comfort him, by reading out some passages from his notebook. Assuring him it was 'still there'. But then I started to feel weird as the content was way too personal for my liking. I got around this by putting an instrument in his shaky hands and ordering him to play it... he did.
After much talking, laughing and general nonsense we set off back to Brisbane. "D" played us some tapes of an extremely bizarre nature and "M2" spent the ride home with his head in his hands giggling uncontrollably....sometimes stopping to tell me about snippets of his childhood, he was barely legible, but it was a laugh. "M1" Our faithful driver, chomped about six shrooms about halfway home and as we were just coming into brisbane he kept saying "I can't believe I'm driving a car. A car."
I thought about food on the way home and what I was going to tell my girlfriend that I had been doing all day. She doesn't exactly approve of "recreational enlightenment."
I had a small stash saved from that day and when I got home, I immediately confessed telling her the same things I just told you.
We went 'shrooming' the following weekend and had a ball.
Luka --- contactluka@hotmail.com
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