The Mushroom Diaries - vol. 25-26

 The mushroom will tell you... it always does... even before you ingest those lovely little bits into the system they are communicating with you and letting you know how much to take... i can see my dear reader sitting back and starting to think, "hmmm, fucking Kono may have gone off the deep end with his psychedelic research" but fear not, as a veteran psychonaut i'm well aware of where i'm at in the process... though i have discovered i go a bit further than some people my age.... in fact the Furious one was laughing at me for the amounts i sometimes take along with my love of dabs (for the uninitiated dabs are cannabis concentrates that regularly have THC contents of 80% and up, currently i have some diamond thc crystals that are a whopping 98.9% thc, i described at it as the stoners equivalent of shooting up, it starts at the top of the skull and washes over the body until one is grinning and tingling)... having stumbled upon some banging boomers, a batch so strong one really does have to be cognizant of how much one takes, the trips have been more than a tad bit interesting...

So one fine evening i weighed out a two or three grams of super strength boomers, my friend who had taken a gram or so said he didn't know how i did it with this batch because even a small amount was crazy... as stated my dose usually depends on any unwanted surprises, like say the night i had to go pick Disaster up when his friend bailed on his ride home, that night as previously stated i had taken what i'd call a maintenance or fun dose and not the research dose as i call it... this time i dove head first into the blue swirling waters and didn't look back... 

It's strange as how i've gotten older i've come to really enjoy doing absolutely nothing but sitting in a dark room with some music and letting the mushroom take me where it wants to go, how in my youth all i wanted to do was trip and run the streets and at other times stay in my apartment usually with friends who were all tripping as well, listening to music, laughing, hopefully acquiring female companionship for the night... now it's the solitude and the journey, the chance to learn something new, the chance to work out problems... 

On this night something both exhilirating and frightening would happen... once the mushrooms started to kick as i like to say, i took a deep breath, a sip of water and then sat back and enjoyed the ride... what i find most interesting in my experiences now is how i can drift in and out of consciousness, falling asleep yet being totally awake, how the mind just hums along with the universe and it's own cosmic music that flows through it, it's one of the most beautiful feelings there is, at least to me, akin to love and death and happiness... call it complete and total freedom from this mortal coil and all it' trappings.... and then something brilliant happened... i had come out of one of my slumbers and i was listening to a song when i realized i had no idea who or where i was... i couldn't remember my own fucking name! i was just there, this 76 odd inches of organic matter vibrating on a couch, i laughed out loud as i realized there was no El Kono, just this, what i was before i was, the ego and all had gone and i was nothing more than a buzzing, humming part of the universe from which i had been spat out of and to which soon i would return... no fear, no sadness, just a happy resignation that i was nothing... or nothing more than stardust temporarily organized into this being, a cosmic accident in a trillion cosmic accidents and i was back to the beginning? no name or classification... just is... 

I can't even be sure how long the state lasted, it wasn't long, maybe five minutes? maybe it was five seconds... but i remember smiling and thinking, who am i? what am i? what's the name people call me? and when it finally came back, when the id? was finally overtaken by the ego, when the name came floating back in, there was a bit of melancholy, i had found something but hadn't been there or nowhere long enough to really grasp what it was... though undoubtedly i will try to get back but then again i can't really try because to try would be to negate any chance of getting there, it's not up to me... and that may be the beauty of it... but at least now i know it's there and next time i happen to stumble upon it i won't be as startled as i was this time, because yes there is a moment when one is baffled, frightened, wondering if the mind has been lost and the answer is yes, the mind has most definitely been lost but in the best possible way... and when the mind comes back maybe there is some insight or even contentment in having been lost... one can only be lost if one is afraid, if one is worried about not being found... to surrender to the journey, to let go of the fear and anger and clinging to the silly trappings of consciousness (though i'm not sure that 's the right word), to realize you are nothing special and yet the most precious thing in the universe, mainly because you are the universe, not a single being or thing separated from it, but IT, of it, made out of it, a small piece of thread in an infinite fabric... 

Of course it should be stated that not all these forays into mushroom world are some kind of half-assed psychedelic research by an aging nutter... no sometimes one's gotta take them just for fun you know? and so the next time i took a smaller dose from a different batch, the last of an ounce i had bought a few years back... it always amazes me how well these bits of fungi hold up if you take care of them... and so i took my dose, pulled out the pen and took a few long pulls of a lovely indica and waited... now one of the things i've learned is with smaller doses you still drift along and reach those glorious states of nothingness they just don't last as long, one comes in and out of them quicker... but on this day i had a bit of a plan, once they did kick i was going to listen to one of those records that had such an impact on me back in the day, August and Everything After, hell it even had it's own post way back when, probably make the greatest hits on the lounge if there were such a thing and as things around me went quiet i sat back and listened...

As previously relayed this record was often played on the jukebox in the bar around the corner from the Fry Hut where i was working, where i'd play foosball with my boss and co-workers drinking away our hour long breaks before heading back to the heat... (it was always funny when the people saw us walking out of the bar and then straight back to work, little did they know what else went on among those of us known as The Chemical Crew)... it was the summer of Kono's Discontent but even amid the shit crumbling around me i still found it a brilliant time... there was something oddly beautiful in the regimentation of life at the time, the never ending grind of the Fry Hut coupled with my second job next door slinging roast beef sandwiches, between the two it provided me with enough free sustenance to survive amid the ridiculous amounts of boozing and drugging, add in the wacko Jesus freak joint two blocks away that served free dinner every Thursday and breakfast every day and i managed to keep myself fed on the cheap for the most part... a grad school dropout with long dreads living hand to mouth and the famous exchange between our hero and the woman at the Jesus joint, "you look like John the Baptist" she said... "thank you" i replied, "but he ended up with his head on a platter." I laughed and got my free ice cream and left. 

Back to the beach and the bar, as i lay in the dark listening to the songs, the images came floating in, sometimes so vivid it felt like i could reach out and slide the mug of beer towards me and put it to my lips... towards the end of summer back in good old 95, i was sitting in that bar, The Cork Bar, it was a slow night and i sat at the corner of the bar in the dim light watching the people walk down the boardwalk towards their hotels, sipping at my ice cold beer, beer so cold a tiny ring of ice would form across the top, i remembering pulling out some crumpled up one dollar bills and playing most of the record as i sat and listened and thought about the summer that had just passed, how the Waitress and i were close to splitting up, how the hovel i lived in was actually condemned but the landlord let all the tenants stay for some strange reason, how my roommates were such shitheads that even though my rent was paid and i was broke i moved out and down to 2nd St. with a co-worker for the last month i lived there, how earlier that summer Elise and i had spent a night sitting by the bay and re-hashing our summer of 93 and how she said she'd find me when she came back down at the end of the summer with her parents, by which time the Waitress had left and we spent the weekend drinking and fucking after i got off work even though by this time i was thoroughly exhausted and would have been content to just sleep... 

And yet even with all the shit that happened... the roommates, the Waitress, being down to my last 4 dollars at one point, knocking my head off a shelf so hard i gave myself a concussion along with a half dozen or so stitches, there was something eminently beautiful about my existence... eating acid and going to work, wandering the streets til all hours of the night, always hearing my name called out as i strolled along, sometimes being dragged into bars or house parties where i'd be handed beers and drugs, hanging with the guys i worked with and partying like the madmen we were, the Fry Boys, the guys who worked the grimiest, sweatiest job on the boardwalk... and then of course this record, which got me through it all, the good times and the bad, the quiet times where like that night i would sit and listen and think, sometimes it's the simplest of things, the simple pleasures as they say, that get us from sunrise to sunset and back again... and there in the dark with Phat Paco chilling next to me, i was smiling once again at how gorgeous life can be...