Mushrooms

my first hallucinogen. an eighth sent me into fractals, weird twisted visions, time viewed from an angle and pillars of reality growing and refocusing eternity into every angle - time is just the position you view it from. doors that didn't exist kept swinging open and shut, and printed immobile hair blew in nonexistent wind. that night was a long one, after i got back to my dorm; i stayed awake, huddled under a blanket, waiting for the day to begin so the world would wake up and it wouldn't seem so weird that i was still up.

i took the next day off and just slept.

the few times since have been back and forth. once, with a somewhat smaller dosage and considerably better friends, we controlled the lightning for an hour, watching it from a couch, by candlelight, passing around a bowl.

there's another story to tell.

one night i had about 12 hours to kill before a friend was due to come save me from a house that wasn't mine. i had a large mushroom cap, a gram of heroin, a bunch of weed, music, and a big beautiful apartment to myself. unfortunately there really wasn't much food, there was no internet, and the person i'd been staying with there had done a pretty good job making the place unlivable before being sent off to the psyche ward which he was (on this night) inhabiting.

so, i thought, all this time to kill, and all these drugs - i think i see a solution here!

i did about half the heroin first, and realistically if i'd finished the rest of it later in the night i might've been fine. then i ate the mushroom stem; after about an hour, as the heroin was starting to wear off and the stem had yet to kick in, i ate the cap.

for a while i listened to boards of canada. i took photos of the way the light was reflected on the walls and made art out of it, art which to this day i'm pretty damn proud of.

but then the art was done and the music was gone and the walls were still painted in those -maddeningly- beautiful shards of light... and the hours were many, the light was little, i was hungry and there were moldy donuts and some tea that i decided was poison, so i went out with my last three dollars to spend half of it on a disgusting microwave lasagna dish which i ate with my fingers which then got wiped on the walls, which also were drawn on.

the time just wasn't fucking passing, though.

have you ever heard of modernist painter mark rothko? google him. better yet, try wikipedia. as the myth goes, at the end of his life he was working primarily with 8"x10" canvasses. his studio also happened to be 8'x10'. when he committed suicide, he turned the studio into his last piece, using his body and blood as the media on the canvas of his floor.

i decided to one-up him. i'd use body and blood, but there was going to be sculpture, and innards, skin, and paint. i built a monument for myself in the living room, set a tape recorder to tape, scrawled some farewell messages here and there, climbed my funeral pyre, knives and paint in hand...

but it just wasn't enough. i couldn't go out like this, in such a barren place... the walls were too boring.

i left again to spend my remaining 1.50 on crayons. as i left i realized that the doorpeople recognized me not only as someone who wasn't supposed to be living in that building but as staying in a room that was supposed to be empty. i knew i couldn't come back, and after buying my crayons spent some time stomping the streets. god knows what i might have done if i'd actually encountered anyone. i stayed out and about for a while until, cold (mid-january i was wearing jeans a t-shirt and a scarf), i called the only people in the area i knew. they let me into their house where i crazied out the end of my trip, they showed me the most beautiful place i'd ever seen, and then i got rescued.

the end. (?)