Sometimes one is all you need.

I had been wanting to do another round of fresh mushroom in cream sauce for breakfast. The tub of Albino Stargazers pushed up a single large mushroom in a third flush; looking at it, I thought it might be enough for a trip all by itself. Once I got it pulled and weighed, it was 28.95g - just about perfect for a slightly-heavy trip. Off to the kitchen it went. This time, instead of pouring the gravy over eggs, I had it over a gluten-free English muffin (I have celiac disease, which is basically what gluten-free was before it was cool.) I added some watermelon chunks for visual contrast and to have something light and sweet to break up the rich creamy flavor of the mushroom and the starchy chewiness of the muffin. It was DELICIOUS. I'm still finding my way with the texture, partly because the volume is so limited and I don't have a lot of experimentation to figure it out, but it was entirely edible and I would not have hesitated to serve this to guests. Informed, consenting guests, of course - I wouldn't dose somebody without their knowledge - but I'm saying, there was nothing wrong with it as far as being good food. Having chewed dried whole mushrooms (mostly to see what the taste and texture was like) and having made tea with them, I can definitely say that cooking them from fresh makes a much more palatable culinary experience. The bitter flavor of the psilocybin is entirely missing from the fresh sauteed fruit. 

The body loading with this trip was quite strong. I didn't feel incapacitated at all; I was fully capable of walking, dictating volumes of text into my phone, seeing the world around me when I opened my eyes. I spent part of the time with my mask on, listening to music, but after a while I had to go get Lucy, our new dog, because she was making a ruckus barking at the construction workers in the creek. A lot of this is text that I sent to my virtual trip-sitter friends through Messenger. My friend MycelialDawn is the one who brought Lucy, our new dog, to us, so she understands a lot of the issues related to her. This is a long stream of consciousness ramble; I've left most of it intact, aside from cleaning up spelling and clarifying a couple of things. Some of this is very personal, and I know that often this kind of intensely inward-looking confessional writing can be so personal as to be opaque or boring to the reader - but this is what my trip was, so this is what I'm writing down. I want to have at least some of these entries reflect the experience of how it feels - and this one really does. There was another long burst of texts that I sent to my Husband which I'm not sharing here. 

I tried to take you video so you could see, because she is so insane. She's with me because she was barking at the construction. It was bothering Husband's work. He pinpointed how she is; she's an excellent cuddle dog, she's not a good tripping dog in the same way that Jackie is. She doesn't have a deep understanding, but she's good at being cuddly when I need cuddling. However, this morning she decided that I needed biting a great deal. She was like a little tornado of teeth and joy and love, it was beautiful but it was also very bitey. It was not exactly what I needed while I am very strongly tripping on mushrooms, and she has no understanding of that. But she went through the bedding like a storm. She's not actually destructive. She doesn't rip anything larger than her my fist. She has toys, and she tears some of them up, but only ones that are made of cloth or paper. She chews rawhides and bones a great deal. And I have found her chewing on some paper things, but she's not a chews-on-things-in-the-house dog. I've had that dog. I remember that our dog Kego got so anxious that she chewed the points off a quartz crystal. She chewed the baseboards of the house in Farmer's Branch. Lucy is actually fairly good at confinement. She now recognizes her name. Her ears perk up when I say it. Even in dictating it into the phone. She does not yet come when called, but we're working on that.

I miss Jackie like a limb of my body. She doesn't want to be next to me much when Lucy is too active. Jackie has never pulled backward like this on a walk. She can't be around Lucy when Lucy is crazy, it's almost like she's afraid the crazy will rub off on her, or she'll get in trouble for it. 

This morning, our cat Minnie, who often accompanies us on walks, went with us. She will go all the way around the block with paths of her own, secret cat paths. Lucy was going back and forth trying to pay attention to the cat and where she went, while at the same time looking forward and trying to pay attention to a squirrel, or in some cases a crow, or in some cases just a potential squirrel where she knew a squirrel might pop out of a tree. Jackie had her feet planted like a belligerent donkey, pulling backward against her leash. It hurts me to watch.

Husband and I both feel like it won't be more than a couple of weeks before they work this out. Lucy will figure out how to behave better, she will stop being quite so psycho about the squirrel. She will stop obsessing quite so much about the cat. And she will hopefully stop barking quite so much. She is a very loving and affectionate dog; there is no discipline in her background, but I think that there is space for it. We're working on it.

I've never been a dog trick person, like someone who trains their dog to do all kinds of things. I respect it in others; I've seen it done. I don't have the patience of mind. But I insist on at least good behavior on walks, and enough attention to me to get them to stop barking when I say stop. I know that many of the tricks are really just something to do with that attention. I recognize that they are just forging a pattern in the brain, they are just making a connection.

I literally don't know if she's ever been told no.

I wish that I could give her mushrooms. I don't think that it's right for dogs. But I think that something like that would calm her brain down. I think that that's what's going on, she's just over excitable. She gets so barked up, she doesn't know what to do. She won't meet my eyes when she's like that she will when she's excited like that. She gets wound up and she is almost impossible to wind down. The only thing that I found that works at all, is to pick her up bodily and squeeze her against me. It will eventually, over the course of about 30 seconds, make it pass.

She hasn't offered to bite me when she's like that. She does try to get away. She tries to get out of her harness, she will try to gnaw and wiggle her way out of my grip, but she's not lunging or biting at me as a person. I feel like she still recognizes the difference. But it's a close thing. She's still in control as a little animal, her intellect is still driving her behavior.

Part of me says that I am wasting a trip, that I am staring at my phone and making commentary when I should be looking at the beautiful stained glass windows happening inside my head, but at the same time I am holding this beautiful little creature and in my mind exploring the nature of our connection, and that is the deepest and most astounding thing that I think that I have, and I don't think that I'm wasting anything.

It is difficult to dictate sometimes, I have to hold my phone so that I can see it, my eyes are full of tears

And obviously I'm talking instead of experiencing. But the experiencing is happening too. The dog is breathing quietly in my arms. The light show happens behind my eyes every time I close them. And I quite often, especially with this group (my little Messenger group of two trusted mushroom friends) dictate with my eyes closed for quite a while, and then open them check my spelling, and then press send. I don't correct much for us. Only when it makes a difference to understanding.

These mushrooms are strong. Or actually, this individual mushroom is strong; it was one monster, and it was just the right size for a trip. I literally argued with myself whether I should include the entire stem, but I did.

I don't feel particularly incapacitated. There's quite strong body loading, I do feel a little shaky, my left hand where it holds the phone so that I can see it trembles. When I get up to go to the bathroom, I am slightly unsteady on my feet. But I'm not staggering when I walk. I don't feel that an observer from the outside, not knowing what I've taken, would recognize that I am tripping rather than just clumsy. And I am plenty clumsy to explain any of the physical symptoms that they can observe. I am not graceful and agile in my body with the exception of some very specialized dance floor time in which I am highly trained and exceptionally powerful, and somewhat ironically, some sexual time when I am also highly powerful. 

This next part is a little bit of stream-of-consciousness therapeutic talk... it's stuff I needed to say, but not necessarily stuff that everybody will want to read. But, you know what? My blog... so, deal, or skip this bit. It's gross. You've been warned. 

I hate the fact that my bowels are not under more of my conscious control. They have betrayed me my entire life. Celiac disease has been the root of a lot of it, and knowing that helps. But I've always had anxious stomach, nervous digestion, "he gets upset and get diarrhea," that's just how my body expresses stress. I will go through periods where I have reasonably good control over it, but even when that is maintained, it is a regimen of morning and evening pills, powders, fiber, good behavior, proper food, pre and probiotics. It is a pain literally in the ass. My belly gurgles, I have gas, I shit myself. I have had to crap in a urinal in a crowded men's room, I have had to send my husband for oak leaves in a park because I had to poop before a theater performance, and that was the only way that I was going to get to the show with only a moderate amount of shit in my nice pants. I feel like I am way too smart to put up with the amount of feces that I've put up with. 

And it does not help that I am a gay man who enjoys anal sex. I know that that is kind of beyond the bound of our friendship here, but that's a thing.

One of the things that I like about the mushroom, is that I can have these strong feelings, without feeling traumatized, attached, upset, embarrassed, mortified. I just recognize that they were upsetting at the time, I feel a little echo of them flow through me, I release it. I know that it's past, and I'm okay.

I can still resent the fact that I have to fold up toilet paper and cram it in my butthole because I'm not entirely certain what's going to come out of there moment to moment when it's that kind of day. And that kind of day is not under my control. It's a very Buddhist sort of thing. I control the things that I can control, I try to control myself. I recognize that I am not always, and sometimes I can even admit that I am not often good at controlling my own mind about things like my food and my behavior in terms of keeping a perfect schedule, eating just the right foods, not eating junk, oh my God this book I just finished reading may shake me out of some of that complacency. But I know that when I am leaner, healthier, my body is in better shape, I am more muscular, and less fat from eating bad food my bowel habits are healthier and more regular. I know this to be the case intellectually. It is very difficult to wrestle the elephant down the path. 

Especially when there are Eminem's and chips in a basket on the credenza at work. I'm going to let that M&M stand. Because it's funny.

And honestly, it will not stop me from hoarding food in the work refrigerator; there is a packet of cookie dough that is supposed to be broken out and cooked, but I eat them by the lump, raw. I have gone into the supply closet and eaten Snickers bars and Baby Ruth's and chips with the door locked. I know this is unhealthy both physically and mentally. I've talked to my therapist about some of it. I've talked to my physical doctor about some of it.  

I'm better about some of it now that I was before the mushrooms. But some of the cravings are still very intense and some habits are not completely broken. They are things that I'm still working on. Some of them are things that I have just now, for the first time vocalized. That thing with the locked door has never been spoken before. I have very little shame with my therapist, some of it quite honestly I just don't think of. But some of it I do think I subconsciously hide. Some of the things I think that I spare his feelings. He's a gay man in the community, he's gone through a lot of similar weight and shame and creative issues with feelings that I've gone through. And some of the sexual liberation and the creative energy that I'm going through right now I feel like I am slapping him in the face. It is occasionally difficult to get through a therapy session without censoring myself a little bit, partly because he's never had psychedelics, but mostly because he is not in some respects as intrepid as I am, or he doesn't want to delve as deeply. We often speak at length about his family dynamics, his relationship with a guy he met at a convention, his feelings with his roommate. My therapy sessions are often a quarter his therapy sessions. I feel like honestly the experience of making that kind of space for a friend and opening my mind to the experience of another person who is not my husband and not part of my family has been exceptionally valuable, and doing it in a ritualized therapy environment allows it to be safe and understood and measured in a way that is very different from just hanging out, but I do occasionally begrudge the amount of time that it takes up. I have talked to him about this. I will occasionally enforce boundaries around it if something is important and I need to not have his emotional needs take up 15 minutes out of my fifty minute therapy session.

Speaking of which, I recognize that the little heads (in Messenger) that indicate that you've been following along have not been following along, and I do not insist that you read all of this; a lot of it honestly is me speaking, to say the things that I need to say. I appreciate that you make it a space for me to say those things, and say them without judgment, but if you want to skim, skip, or quite frankly just delete large portions of this conversation. I am not angry about that. Either one of you. I know that I am a lot to read; I know that my tripping is very, very densely worded; my thoughts are complicated, often difficult to follow; suspended, extended, and ramified. I love you both. And with the mushroom moving through me, to say that is like a physical thing. I pause when I say emotional things like that and they echo like a bell through me. They move through me like water.

I know that both of you are creative people, I know that both of you have passionate feelings. The way that I feel that I am in the mushroom, I am very open, connecting, engaged. I feel a great deal of love. I feel like I am in touch with the two of you in a way that that goes beyond just having you read this window of text; we've shared culture in a literal sense, we have led one another down dark paths. I have given you both things that rot. That sounds very strange, but for me mushrooms are death and life. The idea of compost and decay is so whole, it is so engaged and meaningful and important, it is so much of life on Earth. I'm just now understanding in my fifties how much life on Earth depends on fungus, how much those little threads, the hyphae, connect everything. They are so entangled with trees, plants, the very organisms that feed us, our own bodies, a lot of the problems in my belly have to do on a weekly and daily and monthly basis with getting the right and wrong things happening in there and quite frankly me feeding the the fungus and the biofilms and all of the little bugs and things that live inside me the right and the wrong foods.

When I was in college, I had a roommate from France. At one point he said something that shook me, he said if everybody wears deodorant, and everybody uses these soaps with the deodorant in them, how can you smell your friends?

I have put my hands on both of you. I have literally shared my culture with you. That sounds almost creepy to a lot of people, but I think that you get it in a way that a lot of people won't. I have swelled you both. My smell is very different when I'm in the mushroom. I have a special mushrooms sweat. I can smell it in my laundry.

I'm not going to go back and try to correct the spelling in that paragraph but what I meant is not swelled but smelled. My nose gets congested when I trip, partly because of emotion and crying, but I think part of the crying is just the trip itself. I think part of it is a mushroom side effect. The congestion interferes with my dictation sometimes. 

One friend says: 

On the road

Will read in a few hours

It's a damned novel.

There are parts of it for which I apologize. Some of that is a lot, even for friends like us.

Some of my experience in life is very gross, some of my understanding and my exploration of it does not admit of the kind of delicate manners that a lot of social people have. Husband has to remind me on a regular basis that we don't talk about that kind of thing over dinner. I talk about that kind of thing over dinner. My mother was a registered nurse, my father was an engineer chasing Patrick chemicals. 

Petrochemicals. I'm going to let that Patrick stand because it's funny. But we discussed that kind of thing over dinner.

Lucy just f***** her way across the master bedroom like a baby goat. I meant b u c k e d. I think that it is funny and telling that my phone wanted it to be the other. It was almost like her legs took a minute to get under her conscious control, and she had so much energy that she just had to bounce. That little bucking motion [pronking] is so common with baby goats; I think that they are working out the enervation of their limbs, figuring out how they can climb and run and jump. I think that a lot of that games Lucy you know how to get up here come on come on come here come on I'm not going to get on the ground and wrestle with you come on are you in a play you want to play

Once again I'm going to let that stand because it's funny [that was me, trying to get Lucy to stop barking and get up on the bed].

The other friend says: 

I just read all of your tripping experience. Your mind becomes an open book. I realize that your trip opens the flood gate of emotions, thoughts and experiences of past and present. These are the innermost thoughts that go on every second of every day. It seems like shrooms remove most all of the filtering that we use to communicate with other humans. It's a glimpse into your psyche as you experience  it.

Yes. It's like therapy in some sort of overdrive mode. I have access to material that I don't even remember that I remember sometimes. It's very helpful for me going back through it. I manage to clean off a lot of emotional gunk.

The process of speaking it out or typing it out and then later reflecting and writing it into thoughtful prose helps me to consolidate and integrate the psychedelic experience into my daily life. It allows me to take the growth and the new expanded territory and make it part of my comfortable home range.

Again and again in the literature I see that integration is the most important part of successful management of a psychedelic experience as a therapeutic tool. In order to make it something that helps rather than just something that is awesome, I have to go back and reclaim the space. It almost reminds me of slash and burn agriculture, first you go in and cut the jungle, but then you go back and you plant, and you have to keep going at it to keep the clearing in the jungle as a garden.

To some extent the space that I've cleared and the memories that I've cleaned from the fog and the gunk of decades remain fine. I don't feel a strong fear that the jungle is going to reclaim the space that I have made. I do have a lot that I need to finish working on.

I assume that both of you read Flowers for Algernon when you were in school. It was a formative piece of literature for me. I still, with this psychedelic experience, have some concern. I know that I've voiced this before. But that's the thing that keeps me vigilant, the idea that if I'm not careful, I can slip and lose it. So I make a point of digging as deep every time as I can. I keep my shovel sharp.

I think that that is part of why there is so much volume that comes out of me in terms of words when I trip. Part of it is so much backed up emotion, so many complicated feelings that I shoved down, that I didn't allow myself to feel fully when they happened, that I tried to repress or make smaller or not bother people with.

But I feel like if I don't thrash out every bit of the emotional content from these memories, if I leave stuff stuck in there, it won't come clean. The depression will come back. I will not tolerate that.

"keep my shovel sharp" - liked that one.

There's a folk song that Ann Hills and Cindy Mangsen sing called The Housewife's Lament. It cuts me in half as a piece of music, but also as a testament to how people live, especially women of a certain type. My grandmother was one of these women. She lived her whole life in a struggle with dirt. When the civil authorities had to release the dam and flooded their house to the tops of the light switches and stinking muddy river water filled their house and floated their furniture it broke her.

I went back on one of the early days when we were cleaning up. I used a crowbar to break the fronts off the drawers of the apothecary's cabinet, and looked for one last time at photographs of our smiling family. The film emulsion separated and there was no reclaiming those Polaroids. There were drawers of doll heads and doll arms like tiny horrible little sardines. There was unfortunately no saving that grand and beautiful piece of furniture. I think it was Victorian, but it might have been much earlier. I have a couple of her old pieces. Husband had the clock put back together for me. I need to have it taken 2:00 maker again. I'm leaving that one again because it's funny. I need to take it to a clock make her. Okay CLOCK MAKER. A person who fixes them. It hasn't ticked for a few years. There's a gear that dropped. But I used to be the only one who would help her fix the thing. It's from the 1700s. Fortunately they had wired it to the wall about a year before the flood, so although the cabinet was devastated, it didn't float and ruin the works. When the clock maker that we took it to did the work he was able to see the signatures of other clockmakers going back into the 1800s where it had been repaired and signed on the brass plates. This clock was made before Ford and Edison, each gear was cut by hand. None of it is machined. The face was written in ink. The birds and flowers were painted with encaustic wax and you can still see a little bit of the glow.

I asked the clock maker if he signed it. He said that normally he doesn't, but this one was a rascal, and with my permission he signed it. I took it to him several times. I think he's probably dead by now. He was quite old when I lived in Farmer's Branch, and that was before 2009. I tried to look him up recently and can't find him. I don't know if he has a successor in his work.