This story was posted a LONG time ago, but it got lost in the redesign, I guess. Here’s almost the whole thing, for your reading pleasure.

[color=red][u]THIS IS IN NO WAY AN ENDORSEMENT FOR IMBIBING ANY ILLEGAL SUBSTANCE!!!![/u][/color]

I did mushrooms once. My mom would be really upset to hear that these aren’t the little canned mushrooms that you buy at the grocery store. These are the nasty little shit-tasting mushrooms that you buy from some wanna-be botanist with a very unprofessional lab in his basement. Anyway, I had never tried them and when the opportunity arose, I jumped at the chance. I had always been intrigued by the thought of taking acid, but I just couldn’t get up the cajones. I had heard a good deal of interesting, funny stories about people under the influence of acid, but I had also heard the typical horror stories of bad trips and long nights of drug-induced paranoia! I knew that usually, mushrooms were a bit more tame. A friend of a friend told us where we could get some so we hopped in the car one June day back in 1994 and drove over. The dudes who grew these ‘shrooms were chemical engineering students who were attending the local technical college so we were assured that what we were getting were top-notch.

We made “the buy” (sounds pretty serious, huh?) and stopped by Burger King before heading back home. When we got back to my buddy’s apartment, we plopped a generous helping of shrooms on our Whoppers and proceeded to chow. The nasty, dry, crappy tasting mushrooms were tough to get down, but the Whopper made it easier to take. After eating, we sat around watching some CNN and waiting for the cyllisybin (sp.?) to kick in. I decided to take a shower because the day had been particularly warm. Everything went normally in the shower until I began to dry off. As I wiped myself down (scary mental image, huh?) I looked over and watched a drop of water wiggle very un-drop-of-water-like down the side of the shower. That was my first strange experience.

After getting dressed, I joined the rest of my friends in the living room. Things proceeded to get more and more strange from that point. Five of us had ingested the ‘shrooms – Pete, Hilary, Jamie, Kathy and myself – and it seemed that we sort of went about doing our own things for a bit. I remember talking to my friend Pete about what I was experiencing and he kept saying that I was looking at him “really strangely” and that I was staring at him. In actuality, I had to focus so intently on his mouth, that I probably looked like I was staring at him. I was also following him around the apartment “like a stalker.” When a friend of ours who was living in North Carolina called and asked to speak to me, I said “Why does he want to talk to me?” Can you sense that we were a bit paranoid at that point? Anyway, I finally decided to talk to him on the phone. We said our pleasantries and then he asked me to remember some important information. I was supposed to relay to Jamie when his plane would be arriving at the airport because Jamie was supposed to pick him up at that time. Well, needless to say, I could not seem to remember the details so Eli asked to talk to Jamie himself. In a sudden bout of paranoia, I said “Eli, I can’t talk to you anymore…” and put the phone down as I walked off to do something else. The phone sat there for about 10 minutes before anyone realized that Eli was still on the other end! Don’t worry, Jamie got Eli at the airport at the appropriate time.

At this point, it seemd that I could not remember ever being in a normal state of mind and I could think of nothing else but what my life would be like if I never came out of my present state of mind. I began to panic a bit. I was smart enough to just sit down and try to calm myself. I sat in an overstuffed chair in the living room and pulled my baseball cap down over my eyes as the party went on around me. I was hot and sweating like mad, so I sort of pulled into myself and closed my eyes. I began to see the most incredible colors and vivid images on the movie screen of my eyelids. I “came to” about 45 minutes later and I felt a LOT better – much less paranoid. It was as though I had passed the worst of it and I had found some kind of a shelter in the storm. I pulled my hat up and noticed that the front of the hat and the bill was soaked through with sweat. It was quite literally drenched with sweat. The rest of the night went pretty smoothly except for the neighbors pulling the fire alarm and the whole apartment building have to empty out into the parking lot for about an hour while the police and fire department made sure the place was safe. The lights of the emergency vehicles sure were pretty, though.

The yard in front of our house was not overly large, but it always provided us with plenty of room to play. Whether we were jumping into piles of freshly raked leaves or playing a game of “red light green light” on the concrete walkway leading down to the road, we children were rarely bored. The yard was “fenced” off from our neighbor’s yard (my aunt Jessie was our neighbor for many years, so it didn’t keep us out of her yard by any means) by a wall of tall lilac bushes. I remember the overwhelming scent of the lilac flowers bourne on a gentle breeze. Between the lilacs and the road was a huge oak tree on the corner of our lot. This was just one of three oaks that provided us with ammunition for our acorn fights. A couple of maples and beeches were spread around the front yard as well. With all these trees, shade was abundant in the summer months and I would often sit in a beach chair and read novels or comic books to escape the heat in our house. A single stunted mountain laurel provided beautiful white flowers in the late summer and fall.

For many years a wooden picnic table sat off to the side, in front of the lilacs and behind a path worn into the grass by the contstant bike and foot traffic leading past the big oak and down towards the road. Moving around to the side of the house, a couple of shady pines provided more shade and a beech leaned out towards the house where it’s trunk had been broken by the strong wind and ice of a winter storm. We didn’t work hard to take care of the trees, and we knew one day this one would finally give way and fall onto the roof. Hopefully, it wouldn’t cause any damage when it did! The wall on this side of the house was weather beaten due to the peeling white paint that no longer provided much protection from tree-splattered rainfall. Towards the left side and just beyond these trees was the low, wide stump of an old weeping willow that often served as an alternative “base” for my Star Wars action figures. One of my earliest memories of a budding interest in phtography was setting up my figures and taking pictures of them on this stump. Over the years, that stump was also the target of our knives and hatchets and throwing stars.

Now moving towards the rear of our house, the visitor was greeted by just a single tree in the center of the back yard. Grass — sometimes a foot high — covered the ground as far as about 40 feet from the house. At this point, our old “garden” area became a tangle of sumac trees and grass. At one point, we had planted and maintained a large garden in this area. It provided vegetables for a couple of years, but our interest waned and the garden became overgrown. The tree that grew in the cleared area of the yard was planted by my father around the time I was born. As I grew, so did it and it became one of my favorite trees to climb into and sit among it’s branches in my early teens. Flanking my tree was an old tree trunk that served to anchor one end of our clothesline. The other end was attached to the rear wall of the house. In the autumn and winter winds, the aluminum wheels of those pulleys would rattle and squeak as we sat indoors. In the summer, I would often follow my mother as she hung the wet laundry on the line. I can still remember the sounds of wooden clothespins being dropped into the bottom of the milkjug we used to store and carry them.

The yard in front of our house was not overly large, but it always provided us with plenty of room to play. Whether we were jumping into piles of freshly raked leaves or playing a game of “red light green light” on the concrete walkway leading down to the road, we children were rarely bored. The yard was “fenced” off from our neighbor’s yard (my aunt Jessie was our neighbor for many years, so it didn’t keep us out of her yard by any means) by a wall of tall lilac bushes. I remember the overwhelming scent of the lilac flowers bourne on a gentle breeze. Between the lilacs and the road was a huge oak tree on the corner of our lot. This was just one of three oaks that provided us with ammunition for our acorn fights. A couple of maples and beeches were spread around the front yard as well. With all these trees, shade was abundant in the summer months and I would often sit in a beach chair and read novels or comic books to escape the heat in our house. A single stunted mountain laurel provided beautiful white flowers in the late summer and fall.

For many years a wooden picnic table sat off to the side, in front of the lilacs and behind a path worn into the grass by the contstant bike and foot traffic leading past the big oak and down towards the road. Moving around to the side of the house, a couple of shady pines provided more shade and a beech leaned out towards the house where it’s trunk had been broken by the strong wind and ice of a winter storm. We didn’t work hard to take care of the trees, and we knew one day this one would finally give way and fall onto the roof. Hopefully, it wouldn’t cause any damage when it did! The wall on this side of the house was weather beaten due to the peeling white paint that no longer provided much protection from tree-splattered rainfall. Towards the left side and just beyond these trees was the low, wide stump of an old weeping willow that often served as an alternative “base” for my Star Wars action figures. One of my earliest memories of a budding interest in phtography was setting up my figures and taking pictures of them on this stump. Over the years, that stump was also the target of our knives and hatchets and throwing stars.

Now moving towards the rear of our house, the visitor was greeted by just a single tree in the center of the back yard. Grass — sometimes a foot high — covered the ground as far as about 40 feet from the house. At this point, our old “garden” area became a tangle of sumac trees and grass. At one point, we had planted and maintained a large garden in this area. It provided vegetables for a couple of years, but our interest waned and the garden became overgrown. The tree that grew in the cleared area of the yard was planted by my father around the time I was born. As I grew, so did it and it became one of my favorite trees to climb into and sit among it’s branches in my early teens. Flanking my tree was an old tree trunk that served to anchor one end of our clothesline. The other end was attached to the rear wall of the house. In the autumn and winter winds, the aluminum wheels of those pulleys would rattle and squeak as we sat indoors. In the summer, I would often follow my mother as she hung the wet laundry on the line. I can still remember the sounds of wooden clothespins being dropped into the bottom of the milkjug we used to store and carry them.