By: Billy BeerSlugger
I am by no means a druggie. I have been to known to smoke weed from time to time but most of my inebriation occurs from drinking. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t dabble in the occasional recreational chemical back in the day. I just got a call from my buddy Teddy Toronto and he mentioned doing some mushies sometime this summer, possibly in a beach scenario. “Just when I thought I was out… They pull me back in.”.
While I’ll never seriously consider putting a powdery substance up my nose, mushrooms hold a special place in my dead brain cells heart. As a freshman in (community) college I had a friend who worked as a freelance street pharmacist. While his main product was colored green, once in a while he would come across a large bag of mushrooms to distribute. Being such a close friend with the lad I was given a steep discount off of street value, $15-$20 an 1/8.
Having just gone through a breakup with my high school girlfriend I was looking to express myself and my newly found college independence (even though I still lived at home). What a better way to test my mettle then by taking mushrooms once or twice a week for a little more than a month. Does a month qualify as a binge?
Anyway, I can remember going to the movies and eating mushrooms in the parking lot. My friends and I went in and saw The Sixth Sense, a movie at the time, while on mushrooms, I thought was utterly terrible. I was too messed up to follow it and amused myself by throwing popcorn at people and laughing at parts of the movie that weren’t supposed to be funny. After the movie will mark the only time I have ever driven a motor vehicle on mushrooms. Going 60mph in a 25 like I was in some sort of video game and all I had to do was push the reset button if I crashed. Turfing up a local sports field until my friend had convinced me to drive back to his house and put the car in park. Laughing the whole time, shit eating grin from ear to ear.
There was a night when a group of my friends took them and hung out in one of our bedrooms with a blacklight and strobe light on at the same time. What an amazing and moving trip that was, especially when the strobe light was shut off and the black light was still on. “Whoaaaaa!!!” was articulated by everyone in the room in unison. It was on this trip that I just couldn’t fathom why the Notorious BIG had to die.
Another time I took what amounted to one and a half eighth’s (sorry I didn’t feel like converting the metrics on that). The most I have ever taken and this was the only time I really felt like I was seeing things. We walked to a local pizza shop and a graveyard on the way seemed cartoonish, but only out of the corner of my eye. If I looked at it straight on it was a regular graveyard. It was as if this whole other world was hiding from me yet inviting me to join it at the same time. Coming down from this trip, sitting alone in a chair on an enclosed porch, I still to this day am convinced I had figured out at least 84.37541% of the worlds problems. I only wish I had a tape recorder to capture the ideas racing through my head for those two or so hours. The world may be a better place.
I guess the last time I took any sort of mushroom product was while living at my fraternity house. A gentleman was passing out mushrooms during hell weekend and soon after a talking dolphin disguised as mailbox began shouting at the pledges… RABBLE, RABBLE, RABBLE RABBLE. I never laughed so hard in my life.
Those were the days.
Some things I’ve noticed while on them is yawning on the onset of tripping (these things aren’t working). A heightened sense of awareness and want to go out and “do stuff” while on them. Mushrooms are definitely an outdoor activity. If I couldn’t speed walk somewhere while on mushrooms I’d probably eat my own head off. You can drink a ton on Mushrooms. I guess since you are tripping you really don’t notice you’re drunk or something. There is a sense of kinship with the other people you took them with while tripping. They may be the only people on the planet who get what you are going through at that point and there’s an unspoken understanding of that.
I am in no way condoning the use of Magic Mushrooms, just telling you some of the hijinks and experiences I got into while I was on them.
Stay off drugs kids…
Sincerely,
W.J. BeerSlugger