Written About the Second Time I Took Mushrooms...

It was at a friends' house party years ago (we'll call him Joey... cause, well... that's his name, ha! And I'm sure he'd appreciate not being anonymous, because he's too much of a character to be anonymous) back in my mostly French-speaking, Catholic hometown of Plamondon, AB.

At the time, Joey lived way out with his dad in the country, a part of a small White Russian community—1 of 3 north American settlements. One in Oregon, one in Alaska, and one just outside of my hometown of French speaking Plamondonianites, a town flavoured with the odd mixture of Anglos, Francos and Ruskies; a town whom few have even heard of let alone been too.

The Russians were known for many things. They were known for often having—if not always having—outdoor wooden saunas on their estates. They were also famous for their unique Russian wine, called Braga. And yes, it very much deserves the status of being capitalized, if not also italicized.

The Russians would make barrels and barrels of the stuff, so having a house party at Joey's meant there was always free booze if you didn't have some. Or you would just drink Braga anyway, cause it was good, and it got you drunk very quickly, and it was delicious, and made very simply out of a collection of different wild berries, meaning there could be a variety of different kinds, or, more appropriately, "flavours," of Braga, (the quotation marks surrounding the word "flavours" can only be understood by a person who has experienced a variety of "flavours" of this uniquely blended, sometimes pure, kind of Braga, that was brewed in our specific place in the Solar System... Well, let's just say the fucking Universe... 'cause why be so specific?)

Anyway, I should finish rambling and tell you that mixing this, with what was a good amount of mushrooms to keep you hallucinating the whole night through, up to about 9 in the morning, having taken them only 7 or 8 hours earlier. These almost indescribable hallucinations that were induced by the unique mixture of these relatively dirty kind of psilocybin mushrooms, and this strong, alcoholic grapefruit juice that went down like the coolest water on the warmest of summer days, turned into a visual symphony of my spinal chord reacting with all the other nerves in my body, the myelin sheaths glowing and growing into different shapes, colours, sizes, and shades. The Braga was causing everything to drift slowly by, while the mushrooms took that drifting and turned it into a literal melting pot of sounds and sights. I was swimming through my nervous system with my eyes were closed, and I felt like I was in a strange dream. My eyes, closed, showed me the truth of what my body was capable of. Capable of shooting all kinds of differing and/or juxtaposed signals in every which way, to every and all other places in my body.

When I opened my eyes was when I saw the lies. The faces and the clocks, the seventy style couches one might have heard referred to as the "Chesterfield." But why Chesterfield? To whom did that term hold any kind of endearment? And where were we going on this, what was really just a sofa, but what someone had decided to refer to with veneration as a Chesterfield in this chosen, or randomly unchosen, time and place? Why was I experiencing this and why was I expecting it to yield something for, or to, me? It must have been for something—certainly there was something to learn through the presentation of these cosmic details of all our most important and profound physiological inner workings. Even the quadriplegic knows his decidedly minute amount of working nerves canals (in comparison to the average, healthy human being) are doing something incredibly indescribable. Because no matter what you or I, or the quadriplegic, does to consciously try to make it stop, we can't. It isn't our choice and will never be able to be our choice. Even if we shoot ourselves in the face or slit our wrists, the last neurons firing will be doing so in opposition, in a bald faced defiance of our attempts to make it stop.

And when 9 am came, and the light was out and the hallucinations had stopped, I still realized that, no matter what, it wouldn't, it couldn't, and maybe for all I know, will never STOP!