The Mushrooms (Un)Did It All
Somebody commented on my year-and-a-half-old post and it led me back here to a part of my mind I seem to have forgotten. How tragic. And yet that last post marked a bizarre transition that metamorphosed into a flawed part of me that I can't elude. Or maybe it just illuminated that flaw. I don't know. I'll begin at the end. That's where all the learning happened.
Weeks ago I ingested 3.5 ounces of psylocibin mushrooms. It wasn't experimental. Science had nothing to do with my decision. I wanted an experience and I had one. It wasn't good.
Friends had put a positive spin on the drug. They cited its "magical" consequences: carpets grow, ceilings and walls reveal patterns heretofore unseen, hallways widen and morph, invisible beauty emerges from the new world forming in front of you. And believe me when I say it is a new world. A fresh and beautiful world. It's ordinariness romanticized. It's not just the colors and patterns, either. Glow sticks drip their colors into your hands and your body parts merge with the environment, almost as if they were never distinct in the first place. This description hardly does it justice. Your mind alters in such a way that you appreciate the beauty. You don't just see it; you understand it. In this hallucinogenic place everything feels spectacular...
...unless your mind takes control. Then there are the circles. It began when I looked at my feet. They grew monstrous. I pulled them apart. I separated my big toe from everything else, peeled the right foot like a banana, perceived the true and monstrous ugliness of my feet. L tried to call my attention to other things.
"I want you out of there."
I said nothing. The two feet aggregated, and in a bizarre twist of mind-sabotage, I recognized that these feet weren't mine. They were my brother's. I was my brother. My self, my whole ego, vanished in a puff of vague memory. I panicked.
"Out of there. Get out of your mind. That's not a good place to be right now." She called my attention to the glow sticks. "This is what these are for. I'm going for a little. Pay attention to these."
L left the room. She was stuck elsewhere, because accomplishing anything on mushrooms is next to impossible. Your mind moves quick, but it is difficult to act. Latching onto a single thought is like grabbing a molecule from a vat of water.
Still, with the time available to me, I created art out of the shiny sticks. A soft song played. It illustrated my solitude. It was a childlike loneliness, like I was left to the dark world of my own making, and there were toys right in front of me. I took three green lengths of glowstick. One I made into a circle. I arched the two others over top and bottom. I had created an eye. It stared at me. My mind reasoned that this was my eye; it was a metaphor for vanity. My vanity. It kept going. My vanity, I reasoned, is debilitating. It hinders me. It keeps me socially stagnant.
My identity dissolved, there was nothing to do but live out the next six hours of altered consciousness. I lay on L's bed and melded with the covers. She left the room as the speakers blared Entheogenic (an appropriate selection) and enhanced the impending nightmare. I was left to my thoughts. Intense layers and beats pulsed in my ears. They guided the visual hallucinations. Nightmare scenarios lied to me. The other three chatted in the living room. I heard laughter from their secret convene. They're laughing at me, I thought. L reentered. She pulled her mind away from the surreal playland, eschewing fun for the moment and focusing her attention on getting me out of my circular consciousness.
"Are you okay?" Words failed me. "Shane, I need you to tell me how you're doing." She continued like this for some time, but I muttered bollocks through the growing lump in my throat. "I need you to tell me how you're doing." My mouth moved, but like a stroke victim it only moved. Nothing elicited.
Five hours passed like this. During that time, I had taken to pulling out my dick and pissing all over L's carpet, muttering the depressing nut-speak "does everybody want me dead?" and "did that whale...? Life is a joke", and diving under the living-room table like one of K's frightened cats. That is that.
Why does this connect to the previous post?
The anonymous commenter led me here at a convenient transitional moment in my life. Passing college leaves you devoid of the social relations that defined the experience. Those people have moved on. They're elsewhere. I'm here, stuck in my loneliness, reinventing my life in a way that might lead to some mental sustainability. That involves the usual: get a job, make money (enough, anyway), get politically involved, attain higher learning, and so on. But for me, college was the pinnacle of my life. It embodied everything about me that I loved and hated. Every person described in my posts since 2003, when I was an infantile nuisance, meant something. They were a jigsaw piece, neatly fitting into the fabric of my existence.
The mushrooms--they did something spectacular to me. An experience like that can be a paradox, both terrible and amazing. In its lies, the mushrooms taught me truth. My college relationships were meaningful and fleeting, bizarre and eventful, life-affirming and life-debilitating. In the end, it produced social retardation that now hinders every room-filled experience. But it's just my mind that sabotages those experiences. The consequent interpretations are false. They used to be mere ruminations. Now interpretations happen in the moment. I analyze the social scenario as it happens. I ruminate before rumination. And it hinders. It hinders and betrays.
A year-and-a-half ago, I lingered on my weak social hinges. I both looked Paul in the eye and averted my gaze, telling an incongruous and depressing story. But was that story so unequally received? I interpreted the reaction written on his face. I couldn't claim to know its truth or beauty or complexity; I could only ask without answer. And I answered the question myself... perhaps incorrectly. None of it should matter. None of it does matter. It's the vanity that keeps me thinking. It's the ego that tethers me to the pain.
So maybe this is a start. A rickety one, but one all the same.
Weeks ago I ingested 3.5 ounces of psylocibin mushrooms. It wasn't experimental. Science had nothing to do with my decision. I wanted an experience and I had one. It wasn't good.
Friends had put a positive spin on the drug. They cited its "magical" consequences: carpets grow, ceilings and walls reveal patterns heretofore unseen, hallways widen and morph, invisible beauty emerges from the new world forming in front of you. And believe me when I say it is a new world. A fresh and beautiful world. It's ordinariness romanticized. It's not just the colors and patterns, either. Glow sticks drip their colors into your hands and your body parts merge with the environment, almost as if they were never distinct in the first place. This description hardly does it justice. Your mind alters in such a way that you appreciate the beauty. You don't just see it; you understand it. In this hallucinogenic place everything feels spectacular...
...unless your mind takes control. Then there are the circles. It began when I looked at my feet. They grew monstrous. I pulled them apart. I separated my big toe from everything else, peeled the right foot like a banana, perceived the true and monstrous ugliness of my feet. L tried to call my attention to other things.
"I want you out of there."
I said nothing. The two feet aggregated, and in a bizarre twist of mind-sabotage, I recognized that these feet weren't mine. They were my brother's. I was my brother. My self, my whole ego, vanished in a puff of vague memory. I panicked.
"Out of there. Get out of your mind. That's not a good place to be right now." She called my attention to the glow sticks. "This is what these are for. I'm going for a little. Pay attention to these."
L left the room. She was stuck elsewhere, because accomplishing anything on mushrooms is next to impossible. Your mind moves quick, but it is difficult to act. Latching onto a single thought is like grabbing a molecule from a vat of water.
Still, with the time available to me, I created art out of the shiny sticks. A soft song played. It illustrated my solitude. It was a childlike loneliness, like I was left to the dark world of my own making, and there were toys right in front of me. I took three green lengths of glowstick. One I made into a circle. I arched the two others over top and bottom. I had created an eye. It stared at me. My mind reasoned that this was my eye; it was a metaphor for vanity. My vanity. It kept going. My vanity, I reasoned, is debilitating. It hinders me. It keeps me socially stagnant.
My identity dissolved, there was nothing to do but live out the next six hours of altered consciousness. I lay on L's bed and melded with the covers. She left the room as the speakers blared Entheogenic (an appropriate selection) and enhanced the impending nightmare. I was left to my thoughts. Intense layers and beats pulsed in my ears. They guided the visual hallucinations. Nightmare scenarios lied to me. The other three chatted in the living room. I heard laughter from their secret convene. They're laughing at me, I thought. L reentered. She pulled her mind away from the surreal playland, eschewing fun for the moment and focusing her attention on getting me out of my circular consciousness.
"Are you okay?" Words failed me. "Shane, I need you to tell me how you're doing." She continued like this for some time, but I muttered bollocks through the growing lump in my throat. "I need you to tell me how you're doing." My mouth moved, but like a stroke victim it only moved. Nothing elicited.
Five hours passed like this. During that time, I had taken to pulling out my dick and pissing all over L's carpet, muttering the depressing nut-speak "does everybody want me dead?" and "did that whale...? Life is a joke", and diving under the living-room table like one of K's frightened cats. That is that.
Why does this connect to the previous post?
The anonymous commenter led me here at a convenient transitional moment in my life. Passing college leaves you devoid of the social relations that defined the experience. Those people have moved on. They're elsewhere. I'm here, stuck in my loneliness, reinventing my life in a way that might lead to some mental sustainability. That involves the usual: get a job, make money (enough, anyway), get politically involved, attain higher learning, and so on. But for me, college was the pinnacle of my life. It embodied everything about me that I loved and hated. Every person described in my posts since 2003, when I was an infantile nuisance, meant something. They were a jigsaw piece, neatly fitting into the fabric of my existence.
The mushrooms--they did something spectacular to me. An experience like that can be a paradox, both terrible and amazing. In its lies, the mushrooms taught me truth. My college relationships were meaningful and fleeting, bizarre and eventful, life-affirming and life-debilitating. In the end, it produced social retardation that now hinders every room-filled experience. But it's just my mind that sabotages those experiences. The consequent interpretations are false. They used to be mere ruminations. Now interpretations happen in the moment. I analyze the social scenario as it happens. I ruminate before rumination. And it hinders. It hinders and betrays.
A year-and-a-half ago, I lingered on my weak social hinges. I both looked Paul in the eye and averted my gaze, telling an incongruous and depressing story. But was that story so unequally received? I interpreted the reaction written on his face. I couldn't claim to know its truth or beauty or complexity; I could only ask without answer. And I answered the question myself... perhaps incorrectly. None of it should matter. None of it does matter. It's the vanity that keeps me thinking. It's the ego that tethers me to the pain.
So maybe this is a start. A rickety one, but one all the same.