DOSE:

3.5 g

oral

Mushrooms

(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

200 lb

Writing this is hard--I have always been an introvert (someone once said to me 'you live in your head--that's bad'), but mushrooms have made even more so. I have always wanted to be a writer, I have always written, but since taking mushrooms, I feel like the words I externalize are more consequential; I fear them. But that's just a risidual--the experience itself (my second) was way more scary. But to tell you that story, I have to tell you this one:

My first experience with mushrooms was four months ago, in early November. I was (and am) a Freshman in college. My roomate and I had seen some of our friends tripping when the first wave of mushrooms rushed through the campus; we missed out. And then a month later, our friend (and dealer, but mostly friend) said he had something for us. We were elated. It was only an eigth, but we held onto it all week until friday came. I got out of my Buddhist Poestry class, he out of his French, and then we gobbled them up. What followed was the best night of my life, bar none.

After eating them, my friend and I walked out to the quad to find G and D, two of my most chemically experienced friends; we followed them around and did errands, and all the while, a tingly warmth was building inside of me. Eventually I wound up with this group in the room of another friend. And I was staring at the posters on his walls: a lighning bolt, illuminating clouds in a dark night; a Kill Bill poster. Now, an art teacher had once explained to me that a vertical line symbolized stability and strength--and this Kill Bill Poster had a verticle line right down its golden middle, and it made me feel so secure, and my flesh felt like it was falling off my spine, and I was warm and safe. And then I noticed, the poster not only had a verticle line, but a horizontal one: a cross. I had to write a haikku:

I never noticed
The religious image
In the Kill Bill poster.

One sylable over, but hey, they can't all be winners--like this one:

If I hold this pee
For very much longer now--
A great expulsion.

This went on; I wrote about forty haikkus that night, and I smoked about forty cigarettes, and I bummed even more, and I talked mad Buddhist philosophy with my roomate, and every friend I had at school was there. No visuals--just this warmth and extreme giddiness, and a cavernous feeling in every room. And I had something to look forward to: in the end, I got to go work sound opperations for this show, with a friend right beside me working lights. Only there was this blunt pain, growing in the right side of my skull. And it grew into the worst headache ever. In the sound booth, I had my friends to talk me down, but I was in so much pain. The headache was mercifully brief--only about an hour and a half. Then I went to bed, at 9PM. Tame, harmless fun.

And I planned to do it again: a month later, on the last day of school before Wither break, my roomate and a friend and I each consumed over an eigth. The boomers were golden, almost all caps. There were good times, of which I remember only snapshots and brief, hazy happenings. There were visuals: every light was a star, and there were rainbows everywhere, and I saw a technicolor cross, and my friend's face turned into a prism, and so on. It was almost too much to handle. I was hearing strange music--auditory halucinations: in a bathroom, for instance, the drips of a faucet and the shuddering of the flourescent lights, and my feet squeaking on the cold floor, they all cooperated to make a crazy song.

There were vibes everywhere--different moods for different room, and such. From my loved ones, I felt huge, billowing effluviums of love; my enemies filled the room with hate and darkness and a fear that I was just as awful as them. That fear filled the night, but I managed to ignore it. For a while. Eventually I ended up in a friend's room, my two friends still with me, shrooming away. And we talked. And then my roomate told everyone to be quiet, and then I saw something wicked in his face. The contours of his mouth shifted, his eyes darkened, and he seemed to whisper 'get the fuck out of here.' Did he really? I don't know; sometimes I question our friendship.

Regardless, I left those three in the room. I decided to go out for a cigarette, but as I made my way outside, I noticed something: the walls were moving; black, slimy leaches were writhing on every surface. And they were outside, wriggling on the sidewalk. And then they began to migrate, to move and they wanted me to move with them, to walk as fast as possible away from the dorm, away from campus, away from everything I knew, because it all hated me. They all wished I was gone, and I wasn't going to burden them or fool myself any longer.

But then I knew I had to stop. I went back in the room, and turned out all the lights and waited for the end. And then my roomate came, worried, asked me where I had been, and then he took my to where our friends were. The parties had all gotten out, and everyone was smoking, laughing. I felt wonderful, safe and accepted again, but there was that dull pain again, growing at my temple.

And then I saw their faces: my friend Robby, he looked over at me and, in an instant, his face aged sixty years. And Julius looked over at me, and his face shrunk with age. I got out of there, but on the way back to my room, I noticed--my face had lost all feeling. My jaw hung from my face, my skin sagged; the pain at my temple had turned to numbness, and the numbness spead across my face, like a great power outage.

I got back to my room, but it didn't stop there. The numbness spead to my chest, and then to my upper arms. I felt like I couldn't breath, like a great stone had been sat upon my chest. I turned out all the lights, and waited, but it wouldn't end. I went to the hospital.

And this is were the story gets kind of funny. My school is in a small town in rural Minnesota, so the nurses had no idea what to do when they rolled me through the ER in a wheelchair. 'What's peyote?' one dumpy, frustrated nurse asked me. I was the only patient in the whole emergency room, yet the doctor still acted like I was a waste of time, a wastoid. He did nothing; I just sat in my bed, paralyzed, listening to the hick nurses make fun of me in the next room. Two and a half hours later, I got out of that oakie hospital, feeling everything. They charged me two thousand dollars. I went home and went to bed. I woke up the next morning and boarded a plane and left school for a month.

The numbness is still there. It comes and goes in waves, sometimes overtaking my whole body. It always starts at my temples. It's gotten better; each morning I wake up with a little more feeling. Stress provokes it--I'm feeling numb right now, as I write this. I've seen doctors, I've had an MRI, but nothing--I am completely heathly. And, as I've mentioned before, I've been more introverted. Sometimes I feel intense panic, and my thoughs just spiral until I collapse--it's the same thing as shrooming, but without the high: your thoughts just stretch on forever; there is no limit to the number of thoughts your mind can produce. That's scary sometimes. But I've learned to deal. And if I'm crazy, so be it; one less answer to search for.

Exp Year: 2004	ExpID: 41268
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jun 2, 2007	Views: 18,496
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Mushrooms (39) : Difficult Experiences (5), Post Trip Problems (8), Health Problems (27), Various (28)