Shrooms

Max and I sat down in a field behind my house.  It was late in the afternoon and the moon would soon replace the sun.  Earlier, we had met at the mall where I left my car while Max drove us around, for safety reasons, obviously.  

“Whatcha feelin’,” asked Max, as he settled himself into the grass.

“Nothin’ yet,” I replied, eyeing the forest that surrounded us, “It should kick in soon.  Hopefully before it gets any colder.”

The wind was breathing heavier, stirring the cold air, but we knew the field and forest were safe for a first-time trip.  We had been preparing for weeks leading up to this moment, familiarizing ourselves with the common effects of Psilocybin mushrooms, better known as psychedelic mushrooms.

Max piped up again, “Do you remember how the trip starts?”

“Yea, kindof.  Whatever I’m looking at should start to shift and the colors will become bright, more intense for lack of a better word.”  I tore a clump of grass from the ground and peered at its thin verdure, awaiting some sort of hallucination.  After a moment of regularity, I let the grass slip between my fingers and float back to the ground. 

“Sounds like a hardcore high.”

I chuckled at the reference to weed.  I had only started smoking weed six months ago and now I sat in a field behind my house anticipating shrooms to take me away.  LSD and DMT were also on my to-do-list.

“I don’t think so,” I said to Max, “I have a feeling it’s gonna be a lot more visual and enlightening.  I’m hoping to experience enlightenment,” I turned on a more serious tone, “Something I can take away and something that will last long after the trip.”

Max casually took my response and let it wisp by him.  As my sober sitter I think he wanted this five hour ordeal to be over.

“So, what do you want to do after it gets dark,” said Max.

I wanted to go somewhere familiar, yet calm.

“We could go visit the people where I work,” I suggested, blatantly ignoring my own idea of “calm”.  “All right,” he responded, swinging himself to a stand.  Now on his feet, “Dude, good view from this position.  You should get up.”

Reluctant, I slowly lifted myself.  As I rose, I espied the torn grass that I had let fall.  It was moving ever so slightly and it was not wishful thinking that swayed the grass.  Instead, as I looked around, the shrooms began to do their magic.

"Damn, that sunset is something," Max noted, unaware. I brushed my pants clean and stared blankly at the radiance he mentioned.
It was like looking at a different sun than I had looked at for the past 18 years. Bright, boisterous and beautiful, it felt like watching your first movie in IMAX 3-D. Everything was crisp and colorful, almost overpowering. The sunset left red streaks which coated the sky in a crimson hunger, struggling to consume the melancholy yellow backdrop that melted into a fierce orange.  An airplane drifting by broke my gaze.  The funny thing is, I did not recognize the airplane as something big far away, but rather something small against a flat backdrop.
Awestruck, I sputtered this, "I think this is it, Max."

“You feelin’ it, now?”

“Yea, man, this is so weird.  It’s like looking through a new lens.  Like I had always been using a worn filter to see the world, and now I’m not using one at all.”  I looked away from the plane and let my eyes wander, absorbing the new world.  Nature was a wonder in of itself, with countless networks of life and ecosystems that I never noticed when sober.  Flora and fauna, insects and earth, all lived separately but existed coherently.  It was overwhelming.  So I laughed - loudly. 

I broke Max from the sunset’s glare, “Something funny over there,” he asked.

“Dude, there’s so much going on in this forest right now, let’s get outta here,” I gasped as I turned towards the car.  Max followed close behind while I stumbled like a drunkard, intoxicated with joy and food poisoning, making my way to his sedan.  Once I closed the door I felt strapped into the car from Back to the Future, ready to blast off into a different world.  I closed my eyes and let the hallucinations of rainbow waves lead me to my workplace.

“Did you take the shrooms,” Trish, my co worker, was questioning me through rolls of laughter, “How do you feel?”  She and some of my other co-workers had congregated to the backroom to watch me in delirium.  I had worked along them for around two years.

“I don’t even know. I just don’t know,” I choked.

Garrett, a pencil-thin-never-talked-to-girls-creeping-recluse, put in his two-cents: “Man, you looked so fucked up right now.  What are you thinking about?  Does stuff look really weird, man?”

“I mean, yea, I guess,” I began to focus on the visuals; “Everything has a yellowish, greenish tint and most things are vibrating.  I can feel the vibrating on my eyes and it feels funny and different.  It’s really funny.  Also I can’t tell the difference in space dimensionally,” I put that last part in there to sound smart.  To seem like I was holding onto sanity.

Joshua, who was unfavorably shaped like a Matryoshka doll and talked nearly as much as one, snuck his way into the conversation, “So how long does this last?”

I looked his way to respond, and when we met eyes, his head slowly transfigured into a nodding elephant’s head with bright, green-tinted eyes and a swirling snout. 

“I guess five to seven hours,” I uttered, while still delighted by his giant, gray trunk.

“You should do some work while you’re here,” chimed in the suave Belle.

Belle’s one, little thought carried across the room, through my ears, and struck a deep chord within.  Suddenly, everything made sense.  I could literally see the concept and fabric of relationships, I fully understood the idea of putting others first, I needed to do work, even though I was off the clock.  I walked over to a mop that hung limply against the wall and started to do the clean-up duties I typically dreaded.  I had fervor to help others and learn anything I could get my hand and mind around.  With an inexhaustible work ethic and a motive to make the world a better place for progress, I became one with myself and threw away the ego.  The shrooms had effectively destroyed my ego.  

Cutting out of this thought, I looked back to Trish and my friends as I finished work for them. 

“Whoa, Alex, are you okay?  You are mopping everywhere and pupils are really big,” exclaimed Belle.

I could only manage, “Yea, I feel great. This is amazing. I just don’t know. I just don’t.”

“Just be careful,” Belle continued, “Don’t drive, and Max,” she turned to Max and with arms akimbo stared him down, “Watch him closely.”

Somehow I think this made Max uncomfortable.  He reached into his pocket, came out with a cigarette, and lit it.  The burning end eroded into the form of a cherry that lay at the end of a fiery cylinder.

“Yo, let’s go back to my house for a bit, I gotta turn off some lights.  We can figure out what we wanna do afterwards,” he told me with urge.  I was fine with anything, so I dropped the mop, we said our goodbyes, and ambled away.

For what it is worth, I do not remember much of the car rides we made throughout the night.  Only destinations seemed to matter, everything in between was dross amongst thoughts, night between the days.  So, we arrived at Max’s house unscathed, and unprepared for what awaited us inside. 

“Dude, are your parents home?”

“Nah, I’m pretty sure they are somewhere else.”

Although Max’s response was far from reassuring, we ventured into his house.  Once inside, I soon found his fluffy, golden dog by the sofa and proceeded to teach said dog about relationships and community.  The dog seemed attentive and patient as I explained how everything is so simple, and always had been so simple, all people needed to do was let go of their own troubles.  And, on a side-note, dogs are probably one of the coolest things to interact with while tripping.  They represent unfiltered emotion and basic needs, something I was currently swimming through.

Max quickly returned from shutting off his house lights, creating a dim glow from outside. 

“Hey, what you want to do now?  We probably don’t want to stay here much longer, my parents will be comin’ home soon.”

I held out my hand for Max’s dog to lick. The dog’s tongue slowly slipped across my hand sending light shocks throughout my body, sharpening colors and increasing sound. 

I started to think about how long we had roved, maybe four or five hours?  I turned to Max, “I guess we should get back to my car soon.  It must be gettin’ late.”

“Aight.  Let’s go.” 

The sparkle from outside led us to his car.  As quick as we came, we left; and behind us his house darkled into the night.

Panic is all I remember after leaving Max’s house.  A soliloquy of chaos, as Gangstarr would say.  Or, as hippies dub it: a bad, bad trip.

We arrived at the mall parking lot and stepped outside into the nightly air.  I knew I was feeling different, less certain as I began to probe into relationships and “big ideas”. 

“So you wanna go find you car, man,” Max noted as he locked his car.

“Dude, just hold on, I can’t remember where I parked it.  Just give me a second.”

I turned my head owlishly, frantically searching for where I had parked.  Even though I looked for only a few seconds, my mind was racing, I had no attention span.  Time, as I perceived it, slowed down drastically.

“Dude, what time is it,” I asked through quaking madness.

“It’s only… uh, seven thirty.”

Impossible, I had only started tripping three hours ago if Max was right.

“Are you sure?”

“Yea, man.  And I gotta go home in like an hour.  Are you gonna be good by then?”

Max’s questioning only exacerbated my situation.  Now I had to worry about being alone, insane, and without any idea of how to regain sanity. 

“Just shut up, I gotta find my car, man.”

Walking away from Max and out into the parking lot, I started to bite my keys and twist my head violently as I struggled to make sense of what was happening.  Apparently time had been dilated the entire night. The high of being in either bliss or chaos altered time in such a way that it slowed down dramatically. This made it nearly impossible to make heads or tails of what was happening.

I roamed the parking lot, trying to stir my memory and find my car.  Max stood silently and lit another cigarette.  Instead of a cherry the end now represented a burning timer, winding down my chances to keep sane.

“Yo,” Max called out, “It’s getting’ a little cold out here.  Let’s head inside and figure out what to do in there.”

Without responding I started to walk toward the mall entrance, still biting my keys and now lips.

Catching up with me Max decided this was the proper time to point out that I was bleeding on my lower lip.  Needless to say, this had less than a calming effect.

We entered the mall by the food court and sat down in a crowd.  Looking around I realized that nothing was appealing: I could hear every purposeless conversation and feel the dolor and din of people.

Thankfully, Max dragged me back to reality, “You feelin’ any better?  You were actin’ weird outside…”

“I feel sick.  Like in my stomach.  I don’t know, like what’s goin’ on.  I can’t do this, man.  I’m losin’ it.”

“Just keep calm. Talk through it with me and keep your mind open.  You’ll be good.”

I wanted to believe what Max was saying.  I wanted to hold onto reality and know that this would soon be over.  But I was in a place of insanity.  I was in the mind of a mad man; I knew what it felt like to be strapped into a single-cell insane asylum.  It is a place no person wants to be, when your gut turns on you and your mind is infantile with no knowledge of language.  When you lose the ability to reason and your world is illogical and ineluctable.  This is a bad trip, insanity.

We sat watching people order and eat their food, talk and laugh, sit and saunter.  My anxiety rose the longer we waited, and soon enough I could not bear the thoughts crossing my mind.  I realized that my ego had not only returned, but was consuming me.  Earlier, I had experienced life without an ego and now it was all I knew.   My ego was driving me to suicidal ideation.

“Yo, I’m gonna walk around.  I just gotta,” I told Max as he pleaded me not to wander.  I ordered him to stay seated as I would need to find him again.  Soon after I got up, I looked back, we met eyes, and then he disappeared, simply melted before my eyes like ice on a summer’s day.  Horrified, I gripped onto consciousness and shook myself, I had to make it home.

I clambered through the mall letting muscle memory lead me to my car.  I strapped myself in, but this time it was no joy ride.  As I began to drive away everything transmogrified into Crash Bandicoot with incredible dimensions, and candy-colored pixels.  I was unable to keep a constant speed, constantly fluctuated between twenty and sixty MPH.  And this whole time I was battling with which lie to choose when I my parents confronted me at home.  I finally chose to blame it on my other friend, Daniel, and his relationship problems.

I eventually got home, blabbered something to my parents about Daniel that got them off my back, and sat in my room for the next hour silent.  In the last five hours I had experienced enlightenment and entrapment all due to my ego.  I had seen what I thought was impossible and felt the ineffable.  But most importantly, I forgot to tell Max that I left the mall.  Later I learned that he met up with another kid and they alerted the mall cops that I disappeared, sending them on a thirty minute hunt for me.  Oh well. 

Blissfully unaware, I fell onto my bed and let the rest of my trip fade away, while on the other side Max lit his final cigarette of the night on his drive back home.