The strain that I've got currently in two tubs, PE7, is famous for its active-chemical strength and its bizarre "flower cap" mutation. Mushroom hybridizers chase down both psilocybin content and weird beauty. They enter competitions, like you do with champion dogs. There's a strain that looks like the whole tub is filled with hydrangea blossoms; there is a strain that looks like the swirling skirts of a flamenco dancer in shades of cinnamon and dark chocolate. There are strains with colors ranging from dark brown through pure white, orange, golden, tan, and silver... with a surreal foray into BLUE, because the psilocybin is blue, and so some of the strains have been bred for such strength of trip-inducing alkaloids and no pigmentation at all, it's like you can see through the mushroom to visualize it like a vessel carrying the chemical. These PE7 (Penis Envy 7) are supposed to be fat substantial mushrooms, with these beautiful caps that look kind of like a flower. I had a MASSIVE pinset, and then because I'm still learning what the mushrooms need in terms of air and humidity, I had a LOT of aborts.
At this point, pretty much everything was still healthy. These were spry little gonna-be-mushrooms, and they were looking good. And then they seemed like they were getting too dry, so I made it more humid with arranging their plastic humidity dome - you can't spray water on them, they're like African Violets, and the water makes them weird if it's not atmospheric condensation. Or so some of the sources say. I have nothing like enough time behind the tiny shovel to have an opinion about this. I'm working on it, though. I have zero interest in ever selling them, but I think this is a super-cool barter or gift item for certain interesting friends - and they have helped me so much, I want to help other people. Once I've had some controlled trials with nearly-identical populations, allowing for isolation of the specific difference... well, then, I could have an educated opinion. More likely, it's going to happen organically, where bit by bit I get to where I can diagnose and manage their needs. But so far, I can definitely say that the mushrooms that I sprayed directly with water were looking back at me like a wet and angry cat that you've just squirted with the hose. Like this stare of disappointed betrayal. "You should have known better! We will only make healthy mushrooms if the humidity is perfect, BUT, if you keep us sealed in tight enough to effectively control that humidity, you cut off the FAE and ha, ha, ha, YOU SUCK, and we're going to abort now." (Fresh Air Exchange - mushrooms take in oxygen for their respiration and then release carbon dioxide, like how people do. If there's too much carbon dioxide and not enough oxygen, guess what... they abort.)
This is starting to look wrong; I increased FAE, because that's what you're supposed to do, and the poor things just keep saying, "Why?? WHYYYY? We were so happy. Your field capacity for the coir was PERFECT. You smoothed down the substrate with the hamburger press so that the entire surface was smooth and even and firmly-packed, and the pinset was EPIC. WHY DO YOU HATE US, DADDY?" For all that I have gotten REALLY fascinated with them, and I've got friends who've raised their own, and people who advise me by internet with photos and detailed answers to my questions - I have never held in my hand a mushroom grown by someone else. One friend gave us some chocolates he had made, little Reese's-cup shaped things with the mushroom ground in them, but I haven't yet touched a mushroom that I didn't personally raise from mycelium. I'm torn between wishing I had a Shroom Guru who would show me their ways, and enjoying the strong knowledge that I'm building by reading, watching videos, asking questions, and lots and LOTS of trial and error. It's more the way I work with most things.
Almost the entire beautiful tub of chestnut-brown darlings got too dry, and/or too much sun (a sunbeam hit them that I didn't realize would be able to; this too has been accounted for in future placement of the tubs) and they just stopped growing. They were starting to shrivel, and I know from reading that if they're not pulled out once they start to go to that weird not-ripe state, they'll rot and poison the whole cake, and so people advise going after them with gloves and a sterilized scalpel. I was much less concerned about the sterile aspect, because these are shit mushrooms, they naturally grow in cow manure, and I Pasteurize but do NOT sterilize my substrate, because Bodhisatta said so, because I have DONE THE READING, and I'm careful with the sterile work with agar, but I refuse to be overly-worried about the stuff they do in the tub in terms of sterility.
I think there are five healthy mushrooms in this photo. Everything else failed weirdly in one way or another; some of them got to be as big as the last two joints of my pinkie finger, but they're just going nowhere. They're like standing dead trees, almost. The healthy ones have literally lapped them - I harvested and dried healthy ones, and the next flush of healthy ones is pushing up now.
So, I have a whole jar full of aborts. I've read that they will often be stronger. I was NOT PREPARED. It was like the equivalent of intending to gently slide a needle into a vein, and then looking down and seeing it sticking out through the other side of your arm, and going, "Well, crap."
I knew they were likely to be weird - either very strong, or not at all strong, and so I took a SINGLE GRAM dose, and prepared it in my usual favorite technique - powdered in the coffee grinder, then mixed with the juice of a whole fresh lemon to help convert the psilocybin into psilocin, rested for twenty minutes, then added about a quarter cup of fresh grated ginger (helps with any nausea, plus it's delicious and makes the drink spicy) and then a cup of boiling water, another five minutes to steep, then strained, sweetened slightly with Splenda or honey, and drunk. It's kind of a cross between Lemon Tek and Shroom Tea, and it's an entirely palatable way to take them. Husband likes his beverage hot; I like mine iced. The more I look at this idea, the more it seems like I want to figure out a dose-per-shot-glass version, and set it up with an absinthe jar, one of those with the spigot. Like, you draw off an once, it's a half-gram serving. How awesome would that be at just the right kind of party? Everyone would have to really have their shit together, though, because if anybody throws the classic "I'm not getting high fast enough" fit, and takes an extra dose or two... somebody's not going to have a nice afternoon.
I usually have enough time to walk the dogs (less than 20 minutes) before the lightshow starts in earnest. So, I walked the dogs. I could start to feel the body load tugging on me even before we were done. I'm still fasted from last night; being fasted helps intensify the trip, but also makes it go through its stages more swiftly - you get slower dissolving and absorption of the active chemicals if your belly is full of food. I took my Lion's Mane, my Ibuprofen, my electrolyte drink - these help with headache and dehydration. I had my sippy cup of iced drink by the bed. I was well-prepared; my Set and Setting were on point. I went and laid down in the darkened bedroom, in the bed with the long curtains, and let it take me over.
Husband works downstairs in his home office. I can hear him talking with clients, and I know that he'd come and rescue me, hold my hand, if I got to a place where I was in so much distress that I couldn't handle it alone - but it never went quite that far. It was close. This was like a Heroic Dose level of visuals and weirdness, without ever losing track of open-eyed reality or being unable to walk. It was stronger than the one time I've had four grams. It lasted about four hours, including the mobile part at the end where I'm up and talking but the world is still gently writhing under my eyes, which is fairly typical for Lemon Tek for me. The acid chemistry from the juice helps to start the reaction faster, dephosphorylating the prodrug psilocybin into the active version psilocin, and it burns out faster. I had decided that this wasn't going to be a Big Therapy trip; this was going to be a Look At the Beautifulness of All This Beauty trip. And holy fuck y'all, it was.
The body loading was in waves; it reminds me of when a cat "makes biscuits" on your chest, but at a very intense, large, rolling scale over the entire body. It's mostly not unpleasant, although sometimes it does get a little rollicking and can make me a little queasy. Having no food in my stomach helps with that aspect, too. The light-show of this particular experience was INTENSE - I was still able to sit up and blink much of it away when I needed to pee, but if I didn't, I was surrounded by little brilliantly-colored shapes, some of them clearly creatures, others inorganic things like mechanical gears... and they all had noises, and they were all working, adjusting levels of color, moving fluids from one place to another, carrying little parcels of stuff or light or shapes. One of them made a hammering noise, like somebody dropping a tiny ball bearing on a glass plate, hard enough that it bounces. Tick, tick, ticticticcccc. Many of them buzzed or hummed. Some of them were the apparent visual size of a mosquito; others were as big as my head. I really DID feel like I was in Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" - and I could totally see how if I had fought this, if I had struggled, it could have been terrifying. You have to surrender. That video with Pete Holmes ends with "The difference between a bad trip and a good trip is the word yes." There's a sense of learning to breathe underwater, of realizing that everything is illusory and the body is safely lying in bed, that I learned in lucid dreaming, and that training in mind-craft has stood me in excellent stead with the mushroom experience.
I messaged with Husband some on Messenger; I let him know that I had underestimated the strength of the mushroom dose I took, but that I was, barely, OK without needing him to come and sit with me. I chatted some with a couple of psychonaut friends with whom I've shared mushroom cultivation stuff. I was pleasantly surprised at how well this particular trip was allowing me to text on my phone; sometimes it can be very difficult, and I struggle with each word, LETTER BY LETTER, as they writhe and dance under my fingers. This time, at least Autofill was helping me out some, and my English was cogent and properly punctuated. As it was, I had to type about five or six words, maybe a couple of sentences, and then drop my phone on my chest with a thump and rest for a bit. I'm a very words-oriented person; it's the primary way that I engage with other human beings, as well as the main way that I organize my own internal experience, and I appreciate being able to elucidate my thoughts in a trip like this. Also, I'm sure there's a significant portion of "I'm getting better at typing while tripping, because I am practicing trippy typing" going on. I know that it worked that way for me with THC, and as I'm typing this now late in the night of the same day, I'm fifteen milligrams high into an edible buzz, and I'm still managing to pretty much wrangle all my verb tenses and close the parentheses I open. I'll tweak things over the course of a couple of days, too, because I find something that fits better, or I make a little explanatory paragraph to make sense out of a quote from a chat window.
I have had several people stand in the garden, with the lush riot of vegetation, and all the truly bizarre plants - the one that has tiny plantlets on its leaf tips, the one where every clump of leaves is a three, never paired, always threes, the special Zaatar oregano that I had to have because OMG, have you TRIED Zaatar? The one whose giant starfish blossoms smell of rotting meat, and will be covered with maggots on the second day... people stand in this garden and watch the snowberry clearwing moth that pretends to be a bumblebee dipping nectar from the Dr. Seuss-looking purple monardas, and the Gulf Fritillary butterflies, brilliant orange with aluminum-paint spangles on their underwings, flying up in a three-butterfly helix, battling for territorial supremacy... and they say, "Wow, this is a really trippy place." And it IS. And then, you walk around and look at all this shit with what probably amounted to four grams worth of psilocybin from that single gram of tiny mushroom boogers, and it's like pointing your telescope at the sun. Drinking from the firehose. Trippy Beauty Overload.
Then the philosophical musings portion of the afternoon began. Even though I'm not thinking of this as a Big Therapy trip, I feel like I'm re-threading my mental loom on some things - going back and re-attaching my good sentiments to peak memories that I've kind of blurred over and forgotten to feel amazing about... and when I'm done with a particular tract of emotional ground, then that part feels OK and right; my memory has had the grunge scrubbed off of it, and the wires have been straightened out and firmly re-soldered. I really do feel like I'm experiencing, directly, the rewiring of parts of my brain, across the literal course of an afternoon. Shit that I have been working on for four years in weekly therapy, dealing with daily by meditation multiple times per day, combined with a barrage of psychoactive prescription medications that failed me one after another... dissolves and fades away in a kind of racking sob, and I almost feel like I'm going to hack them up and spit them out... but then the ick is just GONE. That path down memory lane has been cleared of thistles and brambles and dumped trash. I didn't realize how much I was NOT remembering, if that makes sense. Like, I knew that there were a bunch of memories from long ago, but my sense of biographical narrative, my "and then we" version of stories... it was VERY blurry. And now, it's not. Sometimes it almost feels like my little note cards for a speech got dropped, and working my way back through it in a narrative arc is re-wiring the connections between all the little fragments of the stories that are my autobiography, putting that particular deck back in order. My sense of self, my "story of me" is getting healed. I have nothing like an eidetic memory, but I've always been good with memorizing when I need to, and I've done some of the mental equivalents of gymnastics and strength training, and I feel like these memories in their re-structured form are a different thing altogether from the ones where I'm processing stuck trauma. It's like the difference between cutting out all the damaged spots (trauma) in a batch of slightly iffy strawberries, and the process of making them into jam (memory consolidation). My previous practice in meditation, lucid dreaming, Buddhist thought, visualization, witchcraft, has given me skills that I can utilize to slice out the bad spots and fix my head, once I've got the right knife in my hand. I feel like I'm looking down over the circuit board of my brain, and using a soldering iron to reconnect strings of memory. Or maybe a needle and thread, stitching the patches back into a quilt. Solve et coagula, it makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE NOW. [I like his alchemy; JUST barely enough to tolerate the Jesusy bit at the end, but he does redeem himself by naming the Ouroboros.]
A friend of mine, replying to my Facebook post about being dive-bombed by a mockingbird, said that I looked to her like an egg eater. This brought up these thoughts:
Guilty. I have eaten eggs my whole life. My crimes against birdkind are legion; I am probably unpardonable. I have even kept backyard birds in what the PETA people will tell me was SLAVERY, forcing them to produce eggs to sate my unholy hungers, and then when they ceased to be able to lay, serving the hens themselves over noodles at special dinners with family. I'm pretty much an unrepentant monster, if you look at it from a bird point of view.
However, I am a mammal, and that's kind of baked into our biology... and no amount of TOFU or hydrolyzed-vegetable-protein bullcrap will do the wonderful things that eggs do in the kitchen. And the PETA people make me sad, because they generally have their hearts in the right place, but they totally fail to understand biology and how the world works.
I learned from my friend ED how to plunge the merciful knife into the brain, and how to make good groceries out of ornery roosters. Standing in the Farmstead at the living history museum where I worked and she volunteered, unapologetically showing the Girl Scouts who came for a special tour, how we turned animals into food. We did all the bloody work before they arrived, so they didn't see the actual violence - and there's ALWAYS violence - but they saw us pluck, and part, and dress and we were basically doing the kitchen-work equivalent of peeling and chopping potatoes by the time the museum opened. That's probably way, WAY more than your comment was intended to open up.
Then when we had backyard hens, after a couple of weird false starts in Farmers Branch when we moved to Oak Cliff and we had all this beautiful yard... I had to face the difficult choice of whether we were going to be a retirement home for aged hens, or whether I was going to remember how to work the knife, and learn a whole new set of skills - because butchering a four-year-old hen who's finished her laying life, is a totally different thing. If you can picture giving a bath to a healthy athletic three-year-old, and then giving a similar bath to a crotchety obese eighty-year-old... it was like that. Every part of it was the same, but totally different at the same time. Every bit of sinew was toughened by age, every part of the hens was battle-hardened and fatty. Every stroke with the knife was harder, not because the knives were dull, but because the hens were tough. I had to boil those old gals for SIX HOURS to get the meat off the bones. But you've never tasted better Chicken and Noodles. Old hens are basically dark meat all the way through, and all the bugs and lizards and life experience gives them flavor that no grocery-store chicken can touch. There were a few years when we took it to Thanksgiving at my cousin KD's house, and we called it NAMED Chicken and Noodles, because this one was Ruby, that one was Cardamom.
I wish we'd had the pressure cooker then, because I know that all the tough cartilage would have been GLORIOUS with pressure cooking. As it was, the stock had enough gelatin to glue your lips together, and that's when I learned that I could bounce a ball of the refrigerated stock on the kitchen counter.
And then, because OF COURSE it keeps on... I saw a post on a friend's Facebook page about urgently needing to find fosterage for three tiny kittens that he found abandoned in his yard, and the friend came by with the kittens, and I set them up in an appropriately prepared bathroom with water and lots of towels and a thin flat litter box made from a planting tray. Then he drove up to the corner store and bought gushy food because I was still way too fucked up to drive. If he'd been coming from a few towns further north, I might have walked to the store. I felt perfectly physically OK, I just didn't feel quite mentally nimble enough to safely pilot a motor vehicle. And we sat and talked for two hours or so. We talked about the frog eggs in the pond and how they never even hatch because the mosquito fish are VORACIOUS, and how everything wants to pretend to be a bee. We talked about the elderberries, the figs, the herbs, the blackberries, and how different family members of my family, and his, cooked and canned and jammed and pickled. For two hours, we talked about life, and our histories, and the garden and the plants therein, and we talked about the mushrooms, and about mental health and how beautiful it can be.
I'm not a kitten rehabber myself, but I consider myself part of the kitten underground railroad. I know the people to take them to if they need the every-two-hours syringe feeding, or if they just need controlled, weighed and measured, daily care from dedicated kitten-carers. These guys are actually in pretty great shape, but they went to Kitten Safehouse anyway, to make sure that they get just the right dose of wormer and the perfect food mix because they look like they're only JUST weaned, and probably need some milk and a lot of TLC. We are almost certainly going to end up keeping two of them, but getting from three weeks to six weeks in a place where they'll be very well-supported, their growth charted on a graph to show how they're eating and growing, will make them SLIGHTLY less insane to try to manage.
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