Category Archives: mushrooms

anhedonia, depression, mushrooms

still

i THINK things are still going well, even though i’m still feeling like they aren’t, or shouldn’t be, or something… 😒

i’m about halfway through ripping the “questionable” albums, and i’ve discovered that, if i slow down and apply a little more patience to the process, instead of just deleting minor record skips and clicks and pops and stuff, if i enlarge the view to the point where i can see the individual samples — which is somewhere around 100 samples per .001 seconds — then i can use the “draw” tool in audacity, and actually REPAIR the sample wave! it doesn’t work very well when the record skips a groove, but every OTHER click and pop that i was able to find was really easily repaired… it makes the process of ripping albums take about three times as long, but for albums like The Nova Convention, the end result is a much more understandable and listenable recording. and i’ve FINALLY gotten around to buying blank record sleeves, cardboard covers, and plastic outer sleeves for the records that don’t already have them.

but i’m depressed and out of sorts and i don’t know why…

i guess it may be time for a macrodose. 🍄

depression, health, microdosing, mushrooms, quantity

i’ve heard it said before…

i’ve heard it said before that depression is like a weight, but i never really felt like that was true for me. it felt like a gloomy presence which infected everything, but not, specifically, as a “weight”… until today, the 6th day since i microdosed. i took 750mg this morning at 09:45 and proceeded to have one of the most bizarre trips i have ever had.

despite the outdoor temperature climbing, i got very cold, to the point where i put on a hoodie and closed it around my face to ward off chills. then i got very sleepy, so i took a nap for a couple of hours. when i got up i felt straight enough to drive to the place where i bought some storage media, and then i decided, on the spur of the moment, to go “out for a drive”…

and that’s when i realised: depression IS like a weight: it gets a little bit heavier, imperceptably, every minute of every hour of every day, until i go around wondering (like i was, only yesterday) how i don’t know i have the energy to do things until i’m actually doing them, only to be made more tired and exhausted by the things that i was doing that i didn’t know i had the energy to do, and doing things (like i did yesterday) like going to bed at 19:30 because i was so exhausted… and the only respite i seem to have is when i take enough mushrooms to be able to perceive that it is all an illusion. it was around this time last year that i had a profound, mushroom-induced brush with reality, and i really haven’t done anything BUT microdoses since then.

microdosing keeps the weight from getting too unbearable, but it still accumulates. i need regular macrodoses, as well, to keep things from getting too overwhelming.

because too much whelm is never a good thing for anyone. 😉

busking, circus, depression, frustration, medication, microdosing, mushrooms

meh… 😒

since 240214 i have had 5 circus classes, 4 unicycle classes, 3 moisture festival rehearsals, 2 counseling sessions, 2 dentist appointments (my first in over 20 years, and they STILL couldn’t find anything wrong with my teeth), and 1 eye appointment.

17 days, nominally (the only evens that were MORE THAN an hour were the dentist appointments), worth of “stuff” and 20 days of “no stuff”… almost A MONTH of sitting around reading what passes for social media these days (i still haven’t quit reddit, although i’m closer to it than ever), or taking off and playing a lonely, solo game of “this way, that way” (which is best played by three or more people), getting lost, and ending up in orting — and when i mentioned it in one of my circus classes, the coach said “orting? what’s that?”

😒

okay, i’ve done “routine” things, like splitting firewood, taking care of laundry, washing dishes, shopping, and that kind of thing, and i’ve done “important” things, like upgrading the NAS, and building a rack for the kayaks, on top of everything else, so i wasn’t REALLY frowsting on the internet tubes ALL the time, but there has been a SERIOUS LACK of things to do, recently.

plus, the glasses i got from the aforementioned eye appointment are WORSE than my current distance glasses, and they’re supposed to be reading glasses (which means that they REALLY don’t work), and moe went to bellingham today, and i didn’t, after spending the past two weeks saying that i wanted to go (and then, deciding at the last minute, last night, that i would stay here with the pets), so now i’m here, alone, with the two ADULT dogs (moe took the annoying puppy with her), a cat, a snake, and a parrot, in this REALLY QUIET house, and all i want to do is make noise and pretend like there’s somebody here… so i can hide from them in my office, because i don’t know how to interact with them like normal people.

but, for some reason, i haven’t even played other peoples’ music, and have just been sitting here with the silence, the sound of my keyboard tapping, and the occasional bong hit…

AND i haven’t been out busking AT ALL since february 14th, which makes my new micro-tuba REALLY sad… i’ve got to renew my pike place market busker permit before the 15th of april, which means going through the whole rigamarôle again, only this time it’s with new folks in charge, who i have never met before, and, what do you know? the “official rules” STILL say “no brass instruments or drums allowed” in one place, and “muted tubas will be accepted on a conditional basis, and added to the 2018 rules” in another place… except they weren’t, and nobody has bothered to define EXACTLY what they mean by a “muted tuba”, and nobody has bothered to update the rules since then. 😒 and that’s not to mention the fact that i’ve been hankering to go out with my harmonic flute, my hindu drum machine, and my electronic rig, to some place OTHER than the pike place market, but i haven’t done so for reasons which come down, basically, to paranoia and self-doubt. 😒

this is one of those “i’m feeling grouchy and out-of-sorts” experiences that, in the past, i would have solved by taking mushrooms, but… well… i’ve been taking ≈250mg of mushrooms, every other day, for the past 8 months, i have absolutely NO clue what “the protocol” is for microdosing, and, at this point, if i have a trip that isn’t at least partially decent, i’m going to get even more frustrated than i already am. part of what i’m doing about it is, the next batch of capsules are going to be 200 mg, rather than ≈250mg, but i still have ≈100 250 mg capsules left, so it’s going to be a while until i get to them. the weather has been playing around with being nice enough that hiking in the forest sounds feasable, but the weather is also hit-or-miss whether it’s going to be nice or rainy, and it’s probably going to be that way for the next few weeks.

medication, microdosing, mushrooms, pictures, quantity

🍄 capsule update

so i’m going to try a smaller dose for the next 100. i’ve learned a little more about how to make capsules more uniform, and i decided to make 200 milligram doses, rather than the (nominally) 250 milligram doses i’ve been taking. a “microdose”, by definition, is “subperceptual”, and, for the most part these are, but every now and then i get a little twinge of psychedelic-ness, and i KNOW that as little as 50 mg will affect my mood, so i figured why not go lower, just to see what happens.

turns out using a sieve to sift the powdered mushroom filters out the pieces that are big enough to cause problems with consistency, and makes it easier to re-powderise the remainder. i was able to get 100 capsules that range from 190 mg to 210 mg, compared to my last 100, unsifted “250 mg” doses, which were anywhere from 190 mg to 270 mg. i’ll take a 20% margin, but 80% is pretty close to unsatisfactory. 😉

i’m still about halfway through the 250 mg doses, but i’ve got the next 100 doses all ready, plus around another ounce or so of powdered mushrooms, and “30 gram” “ounce” of unpowdered mushrooms…

231106 capsule making in progress
231106 capsule making in progress
231106 capsule making results
231106 capsule making results
appliances, mushrooms, panto, x-mas

the last two weeks of the year…

it’s time to hunker down and ignore as much “xmas” music as humanly possible, while, at the same time, having a bunch of panto performances, and various other “xmas” party-like things happening…

so far, the panto performances have been going really well, in spite of the fact that one of our star performers, in an essential, featured rôle, got covid last week and had to be replaced by the understudy. she’s no slouch, and has stepped into the rôle more or less seamlessly, but… she’s a woman playing the rôle of “the dame” (which is characteristically played by a man, dressed as a woman), and it’s just… not… right… not to mention the fact that she really does a mediocre job of acting the part: she reads her lines acceptably well, but is either too “over the top” or not “over the top” enough, and her “act” feels forced, and not real.

and, then, a week after the new year, there’s more panto performances, my son’s 41st birthday (i still don’t really understand how that happened), and then we start gearing up for the moisture festival… again.

this year’s difficulties also includes three of our six pets having pretty much identical dental problems which may or may not require surger(y/ies), and the failure of the washing machine (AGAIN! 😠) which has required draining the machine, disconnecting the power, drain, and water supply connections, and tipping it over on its side — because “modern” washing machines don’t have any “user serviceable” parts, despite the fact that it’s pretty much exactly the same washing machine that it has been for the past 50 years — to access the drain pump, which can be replaced for $50 by ordering the part number on amazon, rather than paying some “appliance repair technician” $130 to come out and tell us that modern washing machines are only designed to last for 5 years or so, and we bought this about 5 years ago… 😒 once again, the frank zappa song “Flakes” comes to mind…

in spite of all that, my mood has been surprisingly adequate, although i am nearing the end of my most recent batch of 50 microdoses, and if i recall correctly, the next 100 microdoses include quite a few (if not all) that i made “manually” (rather than “in bulk”), which means that they’re likely going to be a lot more variable in their actual dosage. the plan is to obtain another ounce… somewhere… i thought i had two reliable resources, but it turns out that one of them is only sort of reliable, and the other, while seemingly a lot more reliable, is the one i find more “sketchy” (in that they’ve been selling psychedelic mushrooms, and accepting credit card payments, more or less openly, on the web, for at least ten years, and apparently, haven’t caught the attention of anyone who has the legal authority to shut them down), and, also, costs more than twice as much.

depression, medication, mushrooms

🍄

YESTERDAY: 1 g 🍄 @ 10:00 — which was DEFINITELY a mistake: not a “bad trip”, just a trip in a time and place where i would definitely have preferred NOT to be tripping, i.e. with a bunch of people (six, seven if you include moe), some of whom i don’t know really well, and one of whom i actively dislike (you know who you are). i took mushrooms as the result of a bunch of hasty and not-too-well-thought-out decisions which were contradicted almost immediately after it was too late, and the end result was that i slept for four hours and was high for another three or four hours after that, while everybody else had thanksgiving dinner. as i said, not a “bad trip”, just a rather unpleasant one which i would prefer not to repeat. thank you.

a very strong reminder that “set and setting” are two thirds of the trip… something you would think i would know by now… 😉😒🙄

TODAY: 250 mg 🍄 @ 08:30

medication, mushrooms, quantity

aw, yeah!!!

so, i tried measuring .01 grams of mushrooms, and it wouldn’t go, because the scale isn’t that accurate…

but now i have a MILLIGRAM scale, which measures down to .001 gram!

i wonder how this is going to work? i presume that i wait a couple of days, and then, instead of taking my .25 gram dose, i’ll measure out and take a .01 gram dose, and then wait a couple of days and take a .005 gram dose…

at this point, i’m going to wager that i’ll perceive something…

i’ve also been hearing that “microdosing is a placebo” and “there is minimal evidence to support microdosing”… but i can’t confirm who has been saying these things, so at this point they’re just propaganda, as far as i’m concerned.

because i now have a milligram scale, i can assess whether or not i’m actually taking .25 gram doses… average of 5 random capsules tested, range between 190 mg, and 270 mg, is 230 mg… which is REASONABLY close, given the procedure and methods used… not TERRIFICALLY close… and the procedure and methods used were haphazard, at best… 😉

medication, mushrooms, spoons

horse-whipple

today’s sequence of events: i woke up in a foul mood because of the dream which i wrote about earlier. then i took mushrooms. then, shortly before i was supposed to leave for my unicycle class, we discovered that, once again, our back fence has been destroyed by a dead tree from the neighbour’s yard, which had fallen on it.

on the way to my unicycle class, around 11:00, a dangerously aggressive driver in a red nissan pathfinder, washington license number CKF6505, cut me off on the right, as i was turning right from the right turn lane off SE 216th to renton-maple valley road — i.e. they passed me on the right shoulder, and cut me off as i was turning right from the right-turn lane — and then proceeded towards renton at 80+ miles per hour, where the normal speed limit is 45-50 miles per hour.

then i went to my unicycle class, in which my free-mount attempts were more than 50% successful, and my left-turn attempts were, also, more than 50% successful, which is highly unusual. then i went to glazer’s, downtown, to pick up moe’s xmas gift. then i went to issaquah, picked up orders from petco and home depot, and got groceries at fred meyer, and made it back by 15:00.

once home, i unloaded the car, switched the laundry, took the dry laundry upstairs and separated it prior to folding.

i think, probably, the biggest single event that contributes to my NOT STILL being in an irritable mood is my unicycle class. as is my usual habit, i showed up 15 minutes early, so i could practice, and my FIRST TWO attempts at free-mounting, AND turning left were successful, one right after the next… i don’t know what i am doing differently, but whatever it is, works.

the 250 mg mushroom capsule i took this morning MUST HAVE HAD ALL the good stuff in it, because, particularly at my unicycle class, i could DEFINITELY feel the psychedelic effects. it was not enough to alert other folks, but it was somewhat alarming that it was as powerful as it was, considering the dose.

i’ve definitely used up all my spoons for the day.

dreams, medication, mushrooms

🍄

.25 g 🍄 @ 08:00

i had a dream that i could remember, which is VERY unusual. AND it was really frustrating. there was a party at our house, which wasn’t our house, but it was, in the dream. i was in my office, hiding from the majority of the party, as i frequently do. there were a bunch of kids, with their parents, that were part of the party, and one little girl decided that it would be funny to film me with her tablet, when i was working on my computer, but the app that she was using to film me was one that steals your passwords and suchlike, and ships them off to russia without your knowledge, which, of course, she didn’t know, because she was a kid. i found out about this after she had filmed me entering MY password to somewhere, and i confronted her father, who said that i could have her tablet to try to delete any information that it had stolen, but, because of the fact that it wasn’t MY tablet, everything was set up differently, and i couldn’t figure out how to do it… and then they decided that they had to go home, and wanted her tablet back… 🤬

blood pressure, house stuff, medication, mushrooms, stress

maybe only 10 steps back…

blood pressure 120/90, which is pretty good considering how much stress i have been under. 😒

the workers showed up and dug some underneath the house… i didn’t really pay attention, because i was irritated with the company that sent them…

the sequence of events was as such: they originally came up with a plan to shore up our sinking foundation which involved drilling through the floor of the living room and dining room… which DID NOT work for us. so they figured out how to do it from under the house, but it turned out that they actually had to ADD another support beam… and, about this time, they switched the job to a new foreman who didn’t know anything except for the part where we said they can’t go through the floor. so when he showed up on friday, he DIDN’T HAVE THE PARTS to finish the job… and, today, it turns out that the company that was supposed to do this job in “one day”, NEGLECTED TO ORDER THE PARTS, which will take a week or so to arrive… so they dug around underneath the house for a while, and then i had to go out, and when i got back, they were gone, leaving behind three enormous holes outside the foundation, and, likely, some smaller holes inside the foundation, under the house, an oxy-acetylene welding rig, and a big pile of metal parts. meanwhile, they’ve taken $5,000 off the original quote, and it’s pouring buckets of rain into the really deep holes that they dug around the foundation of our house. 😖 HU knows when they are going to come back. 😒

HOWEVER… the mushrooms helped a lot more than i thought they would (comma gawd damn it!! 😉), PLUS i got TWO incense orders for a total of $125, i made 100 .25g capsules for my neighbour, and i found a copy of Vol. 2, by the Nihilist Spasm Band, which is something that i had in my pre-crack music collection that i was unable to recover… which, at this point, leaves me “adequate” instead of “meh”. a step up, i guess.

frustration, medication, mushrooms, stress, the very big stupid

one step forwards, fourteen steps back… 🙄

the workers haven’t showed up yet, but HoneyBucket® showed up, took away their porta-potty, and didn’t leave a new one — i suspect because they originally contracted a porta-potty for the “one day” that they said it would take, and never bothered to change the porta-potty contract when it turned out that it was going to take more than one day…

however, moe’s at work, won’t be home until 21:00, they SAID that the “scheduler” would call her on friday, but she didn’t, so even when the workers DO show up, they won’t know what to do, i don’t know what they should do, and moe is in surgery all day, which means that she may not be able to answer her phone.

they originally said that they “do this kind of job all the time”… i wonder if they screw up this badly on the jobs that they do “all the time”, and, if so, how they have managed to stay in business. 😠

.25 g 🍄 @ 08:00, but i don’t think it’s going to help. 😒

house stuff, medication, mushrooms, stress

here we go… 🙄

.25g 🍄 @ 08:15…

at 09:00, three guys showed up to jack up our house… allegedly in one day…

at 09:15, they’re in the “what have they done to us?” stage of the job, with one of them under the house, confirming that there ISN’T the three feet of headroom that they requested, in spite of the fact that they told us it would be okay, and that he has to put in an extra support beam, which they didn’t tell him about…

there are only three of them. 🙄

he’s currently on the phone with the structural engineer, who HAS YET to appear on site to see the house.

so far, the entire project has been planned by people who have NEVER seen the house. 😒

it’s DEFINITELY going to take them more than one day. 🙄

at 09:45 they have decided that they’re going to do SOME prep-work to get the site ready, but that the real job of jacking up the house is going to have to be postponed to a yet-to-be determined future date… and which will DEFINITELY take more than one day to complete. 🙄

it reminds me A LOT of the frank zappa song, Flakes

medication, mushrooms

🍄

.25 g 🍄 @ 13:30

The Fourth Way

by Georges I. Gurdjieff

The fourth way is sometimes called the way of the sly man. The “SLY MAN” knows some secret which the Fakir, the monk, and the Yogi do not know. How the “SLY MAN” learned this secret, it is not known: perhaps he found it in some old books, perhaps he inherited it, perhaps he bought it, perhaps he stole it from someone: it makes no difference. The “SLY MAN” knows the secret and, with its help, outstrips the Fakir, the monk, and the Yogi.

Of the four, the Fakir acts in the crudest manner: he knows very little and understands very little. Let us suppose that by a whole month of physical exercise and intense torture he develops in himself a certain energy, a certain substance which produces certain changes in him. He does it absolutely blindly, with eyes shut, knowing neither aim, methods, nor results, simply in imitation of others.

The monk knows what he wants a little better: he is guided by religious feeling, by religious tradition, by a desire for achievement, for salvation. He trusts his teacher who tells him what to do , and he believes that his efforts and sacrifices are “pleasing to God”: Let us suppose that a week of fasting, continual prayer, privations, and so on, enables him to attain what the Fakir develops in himself by a month of self torture.

The Yogi knows considerably more: he knows what he wants, he knows why he wants it, he knows how it can be acquired. He knows, for instance, that it is necessary for his purpose to produce a certain substance in himself. He knows that this substance can be produced in one day by a certain kind of mental exercise or concentration of consciousness; so he keeps his attention on these exercises for a whole day without allowing himself a single outside thought, and he obtains what he needs. In this way a Yogi spends on the same thing only one day compared with the month spent by the Fakir and a week spent by the monk.

But on the fourth way, knowledge is still more exact and perfect. A man who follows the fourth way knows quite definitely what substances he needs for his aims and he knows that these substances can be produced within the body by a month of physical suffering, by a week of emotional strain or by a day of mental exercises –and also that they can be introduced into the organism from without, if it is known how to do it; and so, instead of spending a whole day in exercises like the Yogi, a week in prayer like the monk, or a month of self torture like the Fakir, he simply prepares and swallows a little pill which contains all the substances he wants. And in this way, without loss of time, he obtains the required result.

cannabis, ganesha the car, homegrown, mushrooms, parades, snake suspenderz / alive

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230811 Goddess Kring
230811 Goddess Kring
cannabis update: all three plants, once again, are exhibiting strong female tendencies. i’m going to keep the two that are in the tent, in the tent, just to make sure. then, when the weather turns, and i move the outdoor plant inside, i’ll switch the light in the tent, move the clones in there, and move the flowering lights out into the shed, where the big plants can finish up. macque sez he’s going to come and get the rest of the cirque stuff out of the shed, so that will mean that i have even more space. there are now two clones: one came from the top of the outdoor plant, and it’s apparently doing fairly well, although it hasn’t grown very much. the other came from my neighbour, about a week ago. it is “train wreck”, but, at this point, i still don’t know whether or not it’s going to live. we’ve also talked about setting up an indoor grow, this fall, to replenish any shortfalls i may experience prior to then, which is fine with me. i’ve actually grown indoors a lot more than i’ve grown outdoors, so there’s that…

230811 salamandir and Goddess Kring
230811 salamandir and Goddess Kring
um… lemme see… .25g 🍄 230727, 230731, 230804, 230807, 230812, and 230814, snakez alive performances 230805 (gemma daggatt houseboat gig), and tomorrow, 230818 (PPM/sunset supper), plus regular busking at the market, on wednesdays, ganesha the car shown at the “Jet Blast Bash” 230805-06, briar sea scare parade 230809, 230811 at the Fircrest Residental Habilitation Facility in shoreline, and this weekend, 230819-20 at Fresh Paint in everett. at the briar sea scare parade, and at fircrest, i had the privilege of showing my car with Goddess Kring, aka Shannon Kringen, who is a local folk hero who performed strange art pieces on public access TV when i worked at micro$lop.

circus class cancelled today because of heat. i think i have successfully weaned myself off of twitter (which is now called “𝕏”, but it’s still at “twitter dot com”)…

circus, malfunctioning computers, mushrooms, music, videos

a series of okay things that have happened…

my NAS got overloaded:

230726 NAS at 80% capacity
230726 NAS at 80% capacity
the problem was that moe USED TO back up her laptop to the NAS, but then she got a new laptop, and, for some reason (i blame demons), it stopped being able to backup to the NAS. it said that there was already another backup there, so it couldn’t start a new one… and she let it slide for… um… a couple of system upgrades, so AT LEAST a year. when we finally got around to seeing what was really going on, we fired up TimeMachine™ and it said “there’s already a backup here… do you want to append it, or start new?”

WHICH IT HAS NEVER DONE BEFORE!!! 🤬

so, because it’s a new computer, we said “start new”… not realising that the backup that was already there was close to 2TB, and the NAS already has all of my data on it, so the probability that the new backup was actually going to fit was slim to none… 😒 so, when the new backup failed, due to lack of space, i suggested that we move the old backup to an external hard disk, and try it again… except that, for some unknown reason (i blame demons), i was UNABLE to copy the old backup, because of an “unknown error”… meanwhile, unbeknownst to either of us, TimeMachine™ had decided that the best alternative was to try again, which filled up the disk. literally… there was something like 40GB of available space on the 4TB NAS, and NO WAY to remove ANY of it, because, despite the fact that i AM “admin” on the disk, it wouldn’t let me delete or copy files, because, apparently, TimeMachine™ had screwed around with the permissions, and would no longer let me! 🤬 what ended up happening is that moe had an external hard disk which to which we were able to backup her laptop, and then we BOUGHT a new 2TB external hard disk to which i was able (finally… i blame demons 😒) to copy the old backup… but then, when i tried to actually DELETE the old backups from the NAS, it wouldn’t let me… because of an “unknown error”! 🤬🤬 at this point, i was getting really tired of this crap, so i called the place from which i bought the NAS, which also manages my offsite backups, and sicced them on the problem… and, after a couple of false starts, they were actually able to delete the two old backups and return the NAS to a more “normal” capacity.

230728 NAS at "normal" capacity
230728 NAS at “normal” capacity
now that everything is cleaned up, there’s even the possiblity that moe can, once again, point TimeMachine™ back at the NAS for its backup, without causing too much anxiety on my part. 😉

i got to “fly” on a flying trapeze, yesterday! 230727 salamandir on the flying trapeze (because, for some reason (i blame demons), i can’t put my own videos “in line”, like i can with youtube videos. 😒). it’s a circus skill by which i have always been intrigued. what i learned is that, if i wanted to do it more than once, i would probably have to make some sacrifices of other stuff i am doing — like “riding a unicycle” — and learn a WHOLE BUNCH of new shit… and, at this point, as fun as it is, i simply DO NOT have the space in my already-damaged brain, to store a whole bunch of new shit…

i got a capsule-making machine — as compared to the “capsule-making TOOLS” that i got on amazon, a couple of weeks ago, which are tools for making “one capsule at a time” 😒 which work exactly as advertised, but it is only one capsule at a time, which is REALLY time-consuming… — which is able to make ONE HUNDRED “double zero” capsules in about 15 minutes or less… and i used the machine to make a HUGE QUANTITY of quarter-gram doses of mushrooms. and, because of the fact that i made a HUGE QUANTITY of them, i have been spreading them around a little, to people i know who could use some microdosing antidepressants. 😈

on 230703 (almost a month ago), i ordered 2 CDs from Yello in germany. but, because of a wonky web form that was probably originally programmed to cater to audiences in germany, i ended up entering an address which, while TECHNICALLY points to my current location, probably WOULD NOT be understood by the “american” postal service. i realised this almost immediately, and went through a week of trying (and failing) to get in contact with the distributor of the recordings to correct the address. i succeeded in getting automated responses, in german, from a few different addresses, and i got a WHOLE BUNCH of bounce notifications, because, apparently, their email is handled through micro$lut, which has decided that the dedicated IP address which handles MY email — and ONLY my email! 🤬 — isn’t legitimate enough to be able to send email to their users. 😒 but i paid using paypal, which DOES have my correct address, so i decided to let paypal and the postal services figure it out. and, after being delayed TWO WEEKS being processed through incoming customs (for some reason… i blame demons?), i finally got the disks, today… and i discovered that one of the CDs is actually a 2 CD set of really early, unreleased stuff by boris blank… i just bought it because it has the same name as the music-generating app that i have for my tablet… 🤣

medication, mushrooms, quantity

🍄 capsule update

2 Comments

i got an actual capsule-making machine, capable of making 100 0-sized capsules at a shot. i tried it out, and the resulting capsules are between .31 and .36 grams, which is close enough to call them .25 gram doses — although, out of 25 grams of material, i had around 2 grams left, which i couldn’t insert into the capsules because they were already as full as i could make them… uh, lessee… instead of being .25 gram doses, they are .23 grams… as i said, close enough…

i haven’t taken mushrooms since tuesday (three days), and i’ve been “weaning off” buprprion since wednesday. according to my mood-tracking app, my mood has been somewhere between “irritable” and “adequate” with occasional diversions into “meh”… which is okay, considering.

.5 g 🍄 @ 1530

medication, mushrooms, quantity

mushroom 🍄 quantity

i went two days without microdosing, and at the end of the second day (yesterday), i noticed a distinct and sudden change in my mood, from more-or-less content, easy-going, and accepting, to sour, disagreeable, snappy and depressed. 😒

so, this morning (still sour and depressed), i made up five .25g capsules, one of which i took immediately (at 0800), and the rest i plan on taking every OTHER day, to see if that evens out my mood a little more.

at the recommendation of my counselor, i also installed a mood-tracking app on my phone. i’m still getting the hang of it, but — maybe — it will help figure out exactly how much i can take without overdoing it.

ETA: heh… listen to me talking about “overdoing” mushrooms… as though there is ANY SUCH THING as too many mushrooms… 🤣

mushrooms, ocf, pictures, players, videos

immediatly post-OCF

microdosing the fair was successful beyond my wildest imaginations!! i took a .25 gram capsule, every morning at 0700 or so, so if i were to have some kind of major psychedelic effects manifest, i would probably be over them by 1100, which was when our “call” was, every day.

i was actually able to relax(!), and have a good time(!!), despite the fact that i avoided the ritz, because of COVID concerns (mine, not theirs)… however, i will say that being, literally, right across the path from a place that makes mac and cheese with smoked salmon in ENORMOUS bowls didn’t hurt anything. 😉

AND i experienced at least two occasions where, absent the .25 gram dose, i would have been SIGNIFICANTLY more cranky and disagreeable afterwards. the first was yesterday, when the guitar player (chris gross) and i conspired to take a cart full of gear to our respective cars, because having two people drag a cart is infinitely easier than having to either drag it yourself, or having to wait, sometimes as much as an hour, for the cart to return… so we loaded up a bunch of gear that we were no longer using, and schlepped it out to the “SCOFlot”, where the “handicapped” people (and marginally-handicapped people, such as myself, who have a valid placard 😈) are allowed to park… only to discover that i had left my key-fob back in camp, three quarters of a mile away… so, i trudged back to camp and retrieved my key-fob, and we unloaded my gear into my car, but in our original schlepp-age, one of the cart’s tires had bit the dust, and we got about halfway to chris’s car when the inner-tube got wrapped around the axle, and ceased moving forward… so we spent 15 minutes untangling the inner-tube and schlepped another quarter mile out to chris’s car. chris unloaded his stuff, only to discover that he had left his guitar back in camp! 🤣 so we went back to camp AGAIN… the second was this morning. naturally, after a glorious, sun-shiney weekend, it rained monday morning, which meant that i had to put the tent away wet. i got everything packed up and moved out to the staging area (on the stage), and slogged out to retrieve my car, but when i got there, i couldn’t get the key-fob to work… like, AT ALL!… and it’s a new enough car that i haven’t poked around and actually FOUND the manual key slot… my comment (to no one in particular) was that it sucks AND blows: all things a good vacuum cleaner should do. 🤣 i phoned moe (thank cthulhu i had cell service) and she gave me some suggestions, and said she would look up a youtube video for me… and then i got the key-fob to work, ONCE, which was all it took… i was able to start the car by holding the key-fob up to the start button, and i was on my way… but when i got to camp, “somebody” (not a part of our group) had parked an ENORMOUS camper, with an ENORMOUS trailer, directly across the opening to our stage/staging area, blocking three cars IN and making it impossible for me to park remotely close to the stage. i started carrying a load of stuff around the camper-trailer-conflagration and i ran into (literally) someone who was helping a kid into the truck, and i asked them how long they were planning on staying there, to which they responded five minutes… fifteen minutes later, they were STILL there, so i got someone from our group to help me move the big, heavy, bulky power cart to a place where it blocked the camper, and went back to loading. 😈

the guy eventually left (after struggling to move the power cart by himself 😈), and i was able to pull in next to the stage, but when i shut my car off, the key-fob stopped working AGAIN, only, this time, because i was already in the car, i was able to get it started again, but it was only after i was in the car, ready to go, and the car said “key-fob not present” that i realised that it was the battery in the key-fob, and not something more serious… and, when i got home, i took the fob apart and replaced the battery. 😎

the panto is a re-run of one we did a few years ago, “Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs”, and it was together, with no missed cues from either the band OR the actors in record time: by the second day, we pretty much had it down, and the actors were starting to modify the script in ways that will be reflected in the productions this winter.

230706 some random hippie
230706 some random hippie
230707 some random hippie
230707 some random hippie
230708 some random hippie
230708 some random hippie
230709 some random hippie
230709 some random hippie

also,

230709 simon neale
230709 simon neale

and,

230708
230708
230708 i invited her to morningwood odditorium, where we had been pasting googly eyes on everything, but she never showed up
230708 i invited her to morningwood odditorium, where we had been pasting googly eyes on everything, but she never showed up
230709 i asked him if he was the Muffin Man, and he said no, he's a cupcake
230709 i asked him if he was the Muffin Man, and he said no, he’s a cupcake, so i had to mention the line from the frank zappa song about the muffin man: “some people like cupcakes better. i, for one, care less for them.” 🤣 he said he had heard that a few times.

finally,

salamandir and harmonic flute, and sam and fujara

medication, mushrooms, quantity

tea

i forgot how much i like mushroom tea…

i took “some” mushrooms, today… “some” meaning “measured by eye, approximately, somewhere between a half gram and a gram, maybe a little more”. i took them around four… or, rather, 16:00… and it’s currently almost 21:00 and i still definitely feel it, but, because of the fact that i made tea this time, it has struck me completely differently. i spent at least three hours in the back yard, in the hammock, alternately sleeping, meditating, and laughing at the squirrel, who had been used to climbing up the blueberry bush and launching himself over to the suet feeder, where he had been gorging himself… so i moved the suet feeder about 6 inches further away from the blueberry bush, and, now, the squirrel launches off the bush and hits the squirrel baffle, making a lovely “clang”… 🤣 EVERY! SINGLE! FUCKING! TIME! 🤣🤣🤣

then i sat on the front porch while the sprinkler was going in the front yard… then i came in and listened to an album of mash ups with moe, while she edited her book… and i think i’m going to bed soonishly…

ah, my “don’t give a fuck pill” comes in convenient tea form, as well. 😉

miscellaneous, mushrooms, ocf, players, stress

less than a week until OCF… why am i paralyzed with anxiety? 😒

officially, less than a week until OCF, and i’ve been accomplishing a lot, but i feel like i’m headed for doom… my list of things to take to OCF is about 80% complete and prepared, and i’m already getting things staged to load up the car on monday, because the probability is very high that we (moe, me, and three dogs) are going to leave EARLY tuesday morning, and go some place remote, where there are few people and fireworks… because we have a dog who is afraid of fireworks

she, literally, hides, when people shoot guns, in the distance, which is a fairly common occurrence around these parts, and we’ve learned that, if we go somewhere remote, we can have a good time and the dogs don’t get so stressed out.

i’ve got most of the camping gear assembled, and about 90% of the music stuff assembled (including the harmonic flute/electronics, and the foghorn). pretty much the only thing i haven’t packed yet are my “working clothes” (costumes) and my “mundane clothes” (for hiding in large crowds), a few essential items, and the hats, which i haven’t even decided what i’m going to bring yet…

i ordered a “capsule filling machine” the other day (it’s supposed to be delivered tomorrow), which SHOULD make it easier to fill capsules… which is a good thing, because 1) i have a (new) connection to more psychedelic mushrooms, and 2) i already have one person who wants to buy some, and another person who is interested, but hasn’t committed yet, and filling the capsules by hand is time-consuming, messy, and wasteful. i still marvel at the fact that what was one of my favourite illegal drugs, when i was in my 20s, is, in my 60s, on the verge of legitimacy, and widely praised for it’s qualities.

monday was the “panic rehearsal” for the pre-OCF panto — usually the “panic rehearsal” gets finished at 23:00 or thereabouts, because it’s SUPPOSED TO BE the last complete runthrough before the fair… it’s usually, also, the FIRST complete runthrough before the fair, which it WAS NOT this time… and it actually got out at 21:00 instead, which is when it is supposed to be finished. tuesday, i had an alto sax to work on, which went far easier and faster than i anticipated. the alto belongs to one of the members of the fremont phil, who is going to OCF, so it was important that i got it done post haste, and i delivered it to him on tuesday evening, at the sousa band rehearsal… because he’s thinking about joining the sousa band, because he’s got a serrusophone, and various other things that would fit right in to sousa’s music. 😉 wednesday i went busking with thaddeus. we didn’t make that much ($17 a piece), but it was enough to cover parking with some left over, and it’s kind of difficult to compare with the last time we busked, which was at the fremont solstice festival, where we busked for 3 hours and made almost $100 a piece. but, while we were busking, thaddeus got email from the PDA, asking us if we want to play for another “sunset supper” in august. thursday (today) i went to my circus class, rode my unicycle for the longest time i have EVER ridden it, TWICE, and rode in a complete, 360° circle, TWICE, but i totally forgot that i was going to take some medication from home (for moe’s mom’s dog, her name is lacey, but we call her “the unicorn”), stop by the clinic to pick up more medication for moe’s mom’s dog, and deliver both of them to moe’s mom before my class. 😖 so, AFTER my class, i went to the clinic to pick up the most necessary medication, and delivered that to moe’s mom… she can wait a few days for the other one.

tomorrow, i’ve got to get the last few, essential items for the fair, and i might take mushrooms, if everything works out… because i really need to “not give a fuck” for a while.

medication, mushrooms, quantity

impending OCF 🍄 post

i am on the verge of deciding that i am going to “microdose” mushrooms at OCF: .25 grams EVERY DAY for the period of time i am there, to get more control of my mood… i have been feeling TREMENDOUSLY depressed, and anxious about going, despite the fact that i also know that OCF has been one of my all-time favourite things, in the past, and i’m afraid the depression and anxiety are going to control my actions… so, if i take .25 grams of mushrooms every day, it will give me the “twinkle” that i desire, and reduce my depression and anxiety, without making it so that i can’t function as a part of a group which has been assigned to do two performances a day for three days.

i may take a few extra 1 gram capsules to spread around, or to eat myself, if i’m feeling adventuresome… 😈

busking, COVID19, didjeriflute, ganesha the car, miscellaneous, mushrooms, ocf, SACBO, tuba

impending SACBO update

SACBO officially starts tomorrow, but it generally involves a caravan to various weird places around seattle, and, because of the fact that the caravan is done by a different person, and the people participating don’t always have radios, or ways to contact the “leader” in case they get lost, there is a lot of chaos, usually involving lost people being followed by other art cars because “they should know where we’re going”, or “they should know where they’re going”, or something like that, which isn’t actually the case about half the time… and, not having a radio myself, i opted out of the art car caravans a LONG time ago. i’m going for the actual festival, though, which is saturday and sunday. i’m taking my canopy, busking gear, and my harmonic flute and affiliated electronics, and MAYBE some incense, if there is enough room and i’m not too lazy. thaddeus is supposed to show up saturday for busking activities, but i’ll probably be on my own sunday.

i got a new tuba hard case. it is smaller than the previous case, which is both an advantage and a problem: the advantage is that it is smaller, and somewhat easier to lug around, but it doesn’t have a handle on the end, as the old case did, which makes lifting it a bit more difficult. and, the fact that it is smaller also means that there isn’t the separate case, inside, to keep mouthpieces, my tuba strap, and polishing cloths, which is a problem. it also doesn’t have wheels, and is a more rounded shape at the bell end, which means that it only fits on my folding hand cart one way, and it is the wrong way… but it cost $950, which means that i’ve got to get creative to solve these problems, because i’m not just going to send it back and look for a tuba case somewhere else. a lot of the cases don’t fit the instrument (particularly those sold by amazon(⁇⁇), sweeTWATer, and others), or cost WAY too much to order, wait for delivery, discover that it’s for a “right-hand bell” tuba, and send it back… it turns out that the ONLY place to buy a case for a conn 2J is allied supply — the same company that i have been ordering musical instrument parts and materials from for… <mumble, mumble> 30-some years — and i actually have an account with allied… so i ordered it from allied, and instead of paying $1800 for it from a local retailer, i paid $550… and another $400 for shipping… 😧

it came in a BIG box!! with a lot of plastic packing materials that couldn’t be recycled, so i put it out with the trash last night, and some time during the night, bears came and raided our trash can, spreading plastic packing materials all over… 😒

i actually, successfully, “microdosed” mushrooms last weekend. it all started on saturday, 230527, when the BSSB played at folklife. apparently, at some time during my stay at the TREMENDOUSLY CROWDED seattle center grounds (which included several people who wanted to take pictures with me, because i was wearing my fancy band outfit), i was exposed to COVID AGAIN, and i tested positive on 230528. 😒 unfortunately, we had scheduled a birthday party for moe’s mom on the 28th, which got cancelled… and then moe got COVID, as well… 🤬 ultimately, we put off the birthday party until 230611, two weeks later (when both moe and i were testing clear), but i woke up on the 11th in an absolutely FOUL mood, and moe was also feeling under the weather and disagreeable… so i took 0.05 grams, just as moe’s mom was getting here… not enough to really get me off, but definitely enough to change my mood… and, sure enough, it changed my mood. it was moe’s mom, so i wasn’t exactly exuberant or anything, but i wasn’t snapping at everybody and hiding in my office. my case of COVID was mild: i probably wouldn’t have even noticed i had it, if i hadn’t tested. and the good part is that now i’ve got “natural immunity” for the next 2 or 3 months, which means that i WON’T get COVID and not be able to go to the oregon country fair, AND, even if i get exposed at the fair, the probably is fairly high that i won’t get it at the fair, either… i hope… 😉

medication, mushrooms, quantity

🍄 hmmm…

i tried to measure out .01 gram of mushrooms. it wouldn’t go. i tried measuring .05 gram, and that worked… in the process of reducing the measure, i observed the scale registering .04 gram, momentarily, but i get the very strong impression that my electronic scale (which i bought through amazon) won’t do the trick. i’ve got an old triple-beam scientific scale, out in the garage, that, it’s my recollection, will measure down to .001 gram, but the last time i used it (which was shortly after we first moved in to our OLD house, i.e. close to 20 years ago), i recall having to put a small coil of wire that weighed a tenth of a gram, on the platten to get it to balance correctly… but it’s an analogue scale, so there’s pretty much nothing that can go wrong, apart from corrosion and dust…

on the other hand, i could start titrating up, starting at 1 gram, just to keep things “scientific”… 😉 and to satisfy my desire for a REAL trip… 😉😉 i’ve actually got enough that i could take 5 or 10 grams without too much difficulty… unfortunately, my experience leads me to believe that such an event would be a multi-day process, and, at this point, there’s not an awful lot that would prevent me from doing things for which i might get in trouble during a multi-day trip, which is NOT my goal. 😉😉😉😉

enlightenment, medication, mushrooms, quantity

i wonder if this is what everyone has been looking for…

today i took 1g (= two 00 capsules) and went for a walk with rye (our oldest dog). while i was out, i experienced a couple of things i have never experienced before. the first was, about halfway through the walk, i decided that i really wanted to be at home, taking a nap, instead of floating around deep in the forest.

ordinarily, when i have taken mushrooms, the LAST thing on my mind is taking a nap…

so, instead of going forwards deeper into the forest, i went back, and on the way i felt, distinctly, a couple of times, like i have in the past, just prior to passing out… only i didn’t pass out (if i had passed out, it turned out that there was an older couple, with a couple of yappy dogs, that would have found me within a few minutes), but, instead, i experienced a distinct “raising up” and “seperation” of my consciousness, to a point a little behind, and about 5 feet above where my body was — i remember looking at the path ahead of me, which i had always thought was relatively level, and thinking that it looked a lot more down-hill than i remembered — and, because of the fact that i was walking with a dog, i experienced a distinctly odd sensation as my body walked along behind the dog, but i was not part of my body. i got the distinct impression that, as it were, my body was an “automaton” that i was, nominally, in control of, but “i” was not a part of that body.

i have read a fair amount about ego death, both positive and negative, but it has always been a lot more of a “view from the outside”, as i was never really certain what, ultimately, they were talking about. 😉

but this puts everything in an entirely new perspective: if “i” — who i think i am — is NOT my body, then what is it? who am “i”, if not my body? and if my body is not “myself”, then, apparently, regardless of what happens to my body, “i” will continue to exist… अहं ब्रह्मण्सि तत्त्वमसि — AHAM BRAHMANSI. TAT TVAM ASI — “I am God. That Thou Art.” 😉

it’s possible that i experienced nirvikalpa samadhi. ॐ🙏

the amusing part is that i have read stories of people taking higher and higher doses of psychedelics in their attempts to achieve this mythical “ego death”, but i seem to have done it with a controlled, 1 gram dose. 🤣

the whole experience lasted, maybe, 45 minutes… from the time i was crossing the creek, including meeting with the older couple. basically, until i got to my car, which brought me back into my body again. i want to go back there.

ॐ अरुणाछलिष्वरय नमः — AUM ARUNACHALESWARAYA NAMAH

and, i want to tell you, it was a REALLY interesting experience when the aforementioned older couple and their aforementioned yappy dogs came down the path… i — or rather, my body stood to the side and put a hand on my dog as they approached, with their yappy dogs getting yappier and more aggressive, to the point where they had to pick them up, and walked past me with snarling, snapping little curs (to which i, or rather “my body” said “don’t worry, i understand”), all the while “i” was high up in the air, behind my body, making it go through the motions and try not to appear as altered as i really was… 🤣

medication, mushrooms, quantity, snoose junction, trude

🍄

0.05g = ⅓ of a 0-size capsule
1200 ingested
1300 nothing. going for a walk.
1600 – after going up to the “yellow gate”* and getting my car stuck in ¾ of an inch of snow (🙄), i ended up going down to landsburg and walking down to the bridge. i DEFINITELY got the parts of the mushroom that were the most potent, this time (damn it! 😠), because, while i wasn’t inebriated, i was definitely feeling good… nothing visual, though. after walking to the bridge and back, i chanced upon a friendly bearded guy coming out of the security gate at landsburg crossing, so i asked him if there were public tours of the areas behind the “no trespassing” signs, with specific emphasis on trude and snoose junction. he gave me a physical address in north bend, and told me to inquire there… which is more information than i have gotten from internet in two years of hunting!

*the “yellow gate” is the “secret back entrance” to taylor mountain, but it’s still more snowy than my jikatabi like, and it’s up hill, which, along with getting my car stuck, just didn’t seem worth the effort… and i got my car unstuck, for which PRAISE GANESHA! 🐘

medication, mushrooms, quantity

🍄

0.10 g = ⅔ of a 0-size capsule
1530 ingested

i’m not expecting much in the way of sensations, but, judging by the previous encounters, we shall see.

1630 nothing. however, i am going for a walk.

around 1730 i noticed a definite change in my mood, but nothing else.

1830 nothing psychedelic visually or otherwise, but a definite change in my mood…

gawd DAMN it. 😠

bssb, moisture festival, mushrooms, unicycle

w(h)oo…

seven performances of the moisture festival later…

the first performance of the moisture festival, i wore my purple suit, with the purple bow tie and the purple tando hat… and the guy who was in the attendent’s booth at the parking garage had a blue beard, and was dressed all in blue. when he saw me, he said “you’re as purple as i am blue!”… he said his name is blue. 😉 i’m taking monique to a moisture festival show on sunday, specifically because i want to see this guy called “the broken juggler” — michael rayner — who, i think, lives in tacoma, and is around 60 years old. he has a regular thing where he posts videos of himself: he has a pillow that has nicholas cage’s face made out of sequins, and, while he’s rocking on a rola-bola, or standing on a spring-loaded wiggle-board, or something like that, he does some sort of complicated juggling thing, or he spins a flaming cheeseburger on a parasol, or he does some fancy flower-stick maneuvers with a tennis racket, or something like that, with one hand, and, with the other hand, he strokes the sequins on the pillow so that nicholas cage’s face appears, and then he throws the nicholas cage pillow over his back, and sinks it in a basketball hoop behind him. 🤣

i’ve got a sousa band rehearsal this evening. first one of the 2023 season. we’re down a tuba player and at least one trombone player – the tuba player and his wife, who plays E♭ saxhorn (it’s a small horn that looks like a baritone, only with a trombone-like bore, and tuned in E♭, so it is between a french horn and a baritone. reads in treble clef. she plays french horn parts, most of the time.) are moving to portugal and the trombone player is moving to italy. i MAY have located one or two other trombone players, which would free me up to play tuba, although i don’t really want to, because i know ALL the trombone parts, but i know NONE of the tuba parts… and tuba is a really important instrument in a large ensemble, which means i am not even the best choice for a replacement tuba player…

i haven’t taken mushrooms for 10 days, and the weather is changing to the kind of weather in which i like to take mushrooms. this year, moe got permits to go and cut firewood in the “campbell-global snoqualmie tree farm”, a huge tract of land northeast of fall city, which, technically, is all private property (unless you have a permit). there are a whole bunch of rules about what you can, and cannot do while accessing their property, and there are even more restrictive rules about who gets a permit, which mean that, if i decide to go there to hike while taking mushrooms, i can’t bring a friend (other than moe, who also has rights to a permit) unless they buy a “day pass” at the perimeter gate, they can’t ride in my car, and they can’t take their own car in to the main parking lot, which is about five miles uphill from the perimeter gate. 😒 but, apart from that, it goes from I5 in the south, all the way up to highway 2, in the north, and it’s probably 25 miles from east to west, and it’s all forest, logging roads, and no civilisation for miles.

before the moisture festival started, i had my first serious fall off my unicycle… but, because of the fact that i had bought safety gear (knee and elbow pads), literally THE DAY BEFORE, and was actually WEARING that safety gear, i didn’t get as injured as i could have. however, i did get a scrape on the side of my left hand, and i bent my glasses to the point where i had to take the lenses out to get them straight-ish… and they’re still not as straight as they were. i’ve got an appointment with a new eye doctor, with my new vision insurance (thanks to moe), on friday.

medication, mushrooms, quantity

🍄

1 Comment

0.25g = 1 0 capsule
12:00 pm ingested
at 1:00 i noticed some yawning and a desire to pee
at 2:00 i noticed some twinkly edges around things, and had a strong desire to be somewhere other than in front of the computer, but i can resist for a while, because i also got 4 new CDs in the mail, and i’m working on transcribing them onto my cloud drive… yes, music takes priority over everything.
at 4:00 i’m still yawning, and i definitely feel elevated, but not necessarily high… unless i hold still for 30 seconds or more, then i can REALLY feel it. 😒

what i am learning from titrating like this is, basically, no matter how fine you grind it, any one 00 capsule, or one 0 capsule, is going to be VASTLY different from any other 00 or 0 capsule. 😒 NOT what i wanted to learn — primarily because i could have told you that before i started this experiment… 🤬

busking, COVID19, doggles, growing, moe, mushrooms, orlando, players

it’s already almost halfway through january… 😒

moe is going to orlando on saturday. we finished with the panto last weekend, and, yesterday, macque tested positive for COVID, which means that he likely was exposed at the panto. moe sez she’s going to wear her mask religiously, except for when she’s drinking water, but… i was potentially exposed to macque, and moe was potentially exposed to me, and nobody will know anything until she’s already in orlando. we’ve arranged for a puppy-sitter to take quill (the new puppy), so that i won’t have to deal with an un-trained seven-month-old puppy, which is a good thing, because i actually have a paying gig on saturday (the day moe leaves for orlando), in georgetown, and, with moe in orlando, a puppy would put a severe strain on my ability to perform successfully.

i harvested around 15 dried grams of wavy caps from my experimental mushroom patch, and, as far as i can tell, the mycelium has grown into the ground, which means a much higher possibility of more wavy caps, if not soon, at least next year. dare i say, this is a long-term project that appears to have gone right, for a change.

growing, mushrooms, pictures

🍄🍄🍄🍄🍄🍄🍄‼‼‼

so, this happened… 😉

230103 Psilocybe cyanescens
230103 Psilocybe cyanescens

at first, i wasn’t completely sure (it’s always a good idea to be skeptical with mushrooms), so i plugged it into PictureMushroom which confirmed that they are, in fact, Psilocybe cyanescens, a “Toxic” mushroom.

230103 PictureMushroom identification
230103 PictureMushroom identification

specifically:

Wavy caps and should be treated as a moderately poisonous mushroom, best avoided. Ingestion of wavy caps can induce symptoms that include vomiting, nausea, fever, psychosis and seizures.”

it goes on to describe almost exactly the same environment, region, climate, and time of year. combine that with the fact that i INTENTIONALLY propagated P. cyanescens spores, and i’ve got about as much confirmation as i need… 🍄😉🍄😎🍄👍🍄‼

busking, ganesha the car, growing, moe, moisture festival, mushrooms, new year, philharmonic

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blah blah, new year, new me, blah blah blah… 😒 i’ll tell you what: i’m going to do the best that i can NOT to kill myself this year, through direct or indirect action (indirect, in case you’re dense, refers to COVID or something like that). my “new years intention” (because “resolutions” are too restrictive) is less depression.

along those lines, i didn’t get a harvest from my “experimental” mushroom patch last year, but it has developed LOADS of mycelia… now, there’s no GUARANTEE that they’re “the right kind” of mycelia, and, until they start sprouting mushrooms, there will be no way to know for sure, but… it was three unplanted containers of sterile potting soil, covered with a thin layer of wood chips and straw, which i inoculated with mycelia LAST YEAR. i didn’t plant anything else in the containers, and, basically, i have left them alone for a year… apart from watering them occasionally, during the dry months last summer. i don’t KNOW that the mycelia i propagated is the one i’m looking at, but… well… there’s enough mycelia that all i had to do was disturb the top layer of wood chips SLIGHTLY to expose A LOT of mycelium… so there’s always hope…

however, even with auxiliary mushrooms from matrix genetix, the weather has been snowy/rainy/awful enough that it has been difficult to take as much mushrooms as i like, so i’ve been taking “microdoses” that i can’t perceive, but which smooth out the bumps to the point where i’m not snapping at people, complaining about everything, and being a complete recluse… but i’m still not particularly pleasant to be around. 😒

i’ve got to have my car serviced. i’ve been noticing a significant decrease in mileage for the past few months, i may need new tires, and, apparently there are “firmware upgrades” that are only available from the dealer. but the closest hyundai dealer is in renton, and i’ve pretty much burnt my bridges with the renton hyundai dealer years ago. there’s a dealer in auburn, with whom i haven’t burnt as many bridges, and there’s the dealer in puyallup where i bought the car, but this is sunday AND new year’s day, so i’m not even going to be able to call anyone about it until tomorrow. meanwhile, i’ve got to go to costco (tomorrow), and moe is leaving for a week in orlando on the 14th, which, coincidentally, is the same day thaddeus and i have our first paying gig of the year.

i got a “small” package, yesterday, of incense from one of the more reliable US distributors i deal with (“small” meaning only two kilos 😉), delivered by USPS, which was totally saturated, as though it had sat outside in the rain overnight, or something like that — which it certainly did not do outside of my house. 😠 only half a kilo of the two kilos of incense were damaged, and i have notified the shipper, but (once again) it is the new year, which means at least there won’t be anybody there until tomorrow, and i’m not sure there is anything that can be done about it, anyway. 😒

the moisture festival is happening. hooray(?). it’s going to be at the broadway performance hall, a “union shop” — meaning that there are going to be people not associated with the moisture festival doing things like managing the stage, moving sets, setting lights, operating spotlights and other suchlike stuff, and there’s nothing that can be done to change it. i’m kind of wondering how they’re going to deal with the fact that the bands are definitely not union organisations, but, at the same time, it’s for someone else to deal with. 😒 fortunately. 😒

circus, depression, ketchup, mushrooms, OM, unicycle

in the humdrum

monday moe was in vegas. i got a whole bunch of spam, DIDN’T have my regular counselling appointment because of a misread calendar, two weeks ago, DIDN’T get my tires rotated in spite of waiting around for an hour while they DIDN’T rotate my tires… 😒 i’m still not totally sure what happened: i made an appointment, showed up before i was supposed to be there, told the guy that i had an appointment, which he confirmed, and then… i waited for an hour, went up to the counter to inquire when they were going to get to my car, and was told “within the hour”, but i had other places to be, so i had to bail and come back later in the week…

and i was already ripe for mushrooms… 😒

wednesday, the smoke from wildfires (i never bothered to find out where they were) was bad enough that both seattle and portland had the WORST air quality in the world — worse than singapore or hong kong. also, apparently, someone dumped, and burned, a human body just up the street from the trailhead to the back side of taylor mountain, where i walk a lot… where i saw the bear… 😒 moe came home. i picked up quill at the puppy-sitter’s place near lake desire at 8:30, and picked up moe at the airport at 9:30.

thursday i had my circus class, and on the way back home, driving down I5, the smoke was bad enough that i couldn’t see more than a mile or so in front of me. 😒 then got my tires rotated — for real, this time. i was in and out inside of 15 minutes. a guy i had never seen before, but who i assumed was one of the managers, said that he “knew all about” the fiasco on monday, and that they’d get to my car right away… and they did, which kind of surprised me…

friday i decided that i was not going to take as many mushrooms as i had planned, because, by that time, the smoke from the wildfires was really awful. we bought some inflatable halloween decorations — a unicorn skeleton, and two enormous, flashing eyeballs. when it got dark, it started raining, so, naturally, monique decided that was the time to put them out… and the eyeballs (which were my part of the deal) only had one set of tethers, which meant that i had to cut and singe nylon string, in the dark-and-rain…

saturday i actually took mushrooms. instead of four capsules, i only took two, but — as is seemingly fairly typical — all the “good stuff” had filtered to the bottom of the bag, which meant that two capsules was SIGNIFICANTLY more than the past couple of times i had taken four capsules… and it was raining REALLY HARD, so even if i wanted to go up to taylor mountain and risk being high on mushrooms in the vicinity of an actual murder investigation(!!), it was raining hard enough that there was standing water in our back yard, which usually indicates that the trails on taylor are flooded, as well.

it was weird not being able to walk around while tripping balls, as is my usual habit, but i got through it okay… although i REALLY need a beanbag chair, because the only “comfortable” chair in the house is directly in front of the TV set (because that’s where moe usually sits), and, while it is actually big enough for two of us, i REALLY DO NOT want to watch TV while high on mushrooms… so i sat for a couple of hours in the 2nd-most comfortable chair in the house, which is on the opposite end of the house, until i got done peaking, and then it was — more or less — life as usual, only “usual” included being high on mushrooms this time.

we had a karaoke party last night — about 10 people… including one of our next door neighbours, kelly, who i talked to fairly extensively regarding our respective weed crops this year… it still ASTOUNDS me that it is legal, and, while still not technically legal, i have a mental health professional RECOMMENDING that i take mushrooms… 😲

today was the last unicycle class of the session — a new session starts next sunday — and i think i may have gotten back to the point i was at the end of spring session, before “the summer from hell” (which is how i have been referring to the summer of 2022), during which i had very little time, and even less motivation, to practice unicycle.

i have a sousa band rehearsal on tuesday, a circus class on thursday, tracy and kelly (next door neighbours) are having a “costumes optional” halloween party on saturday, and halloween, proper, is on sunday. i have been making more Operation Mindfuck envelopes to be distributed to random people, while in costume, over the coming week.

doggles, incense of the month club, moe, mushrooms, purple, stripe sucks

grumble…

moe went to las vegas today. she’ll be back wednesday. the puppy went to stay with someone who is more able to handle a rambunctious puppy who doesn’t realise how big he is. i’m supposed to pick him up on wednesday, before i pick up moe at the airport. the other two dogs are “adults” (and know how to behave), but they are already concerned that moe is gone and won’t be back for a while. under ordinary circumstances, this would be a minor inconvenience, but because of the fact that the north american continent is experiencing YET ANOTHER COVID surge (thanks, republicunt anti-vax morons 🤬), airports are going to be especially dangerous, and vegas (as always) is going to be full of tourists from who-knows-where, who all think that COVID is no longer a concern, because our extremely NOT #drumpf president, joe biden, said that COVID is over. 🤬 and the ones who think joe biden lost the election are the ones who got us this far into the pandemic without any hope in sight, to begin with! 🤬

yeah, i know, it has been a couple months and i really need a mushroom break, but i can’t really take a break from the dogs, and i can’t really take two dogs on a 4-hour hike in the forest while i’m on mushrooms… moe could probably do it… she doesn’t take psychedelics that often, but it’s my impression that the part of her brain that speaks dog isn’t that affected by them. 😉

my stripe problems have vanished. i swiched from stripe to square, disabled the stripe plugin, and that’s the end of it. i’m actually NOT going to cancel my account right away, because i’ve still got 15 IOTM accounts to sell, and i’m really not motivated enough to figure out how to do that on square, in the middle of the run (so to speak). but it feels REALLY good to be quit of them.

hybrid elephant, incense, mushrooms, stripe sucks

Ƭȟȉȿ Ⱥǹƌ Țħăţ

today i talked, face-to-face, with an actual person at BECU, who told me that “zelle for businesses” is “not a thing”, and that there is ONLY zelle for personal accounts.

however, in order to open a business account at BECU, i had to open a personal account… which has never been used for anything, because i do business through my business account… but there’s no rule that says that personal accounts CAN’T be used for businesses, especially if the only transactions in that personal account are ones that ONLY apply to a business, so i activated my personal account for zelle, and made it so that any money paid to that account automatically gets transferred to my business account, where it belongs.

thus ends the stripe fiasco. all i gotta do now is switch payment gateways on my web site, and i’m quit of stripe.

and good riddance to bad rubbish! 😠

on the other paw, i got two incense orders today, one of which was for 5 boxes of incense, shipped to houston, texas, and one which was for 4 boxes of incense, shipped to ashanti, ghana. the one to houston was addressed to a person named “Nwogbo”, and the one to ashanti went to someone named “Agbogah”… and the one to ashanti was for $5.00 worth of incense! i REALLY DO NOT understand people from remote countries outside of the united states, who order relatively small quantities of incense that i’m POSITIVE are sold locally, and then pay more for shipping than they did for incense. it happens regularly enough that i’ve stopped asking why, and just sending it out, but it’s really mystifying to me.

oh, and on an entirely different subject all together, i have stumbled upon a RELIABLE, LONG-TERM source for mushrooms 🍄 on internet (of all places)… i got the first batch through a twitter acquaintance (which was REALLY weird), and the second batch i got “direct from the manufacturer” — a place called Matrix Genetix — which was an experience so far beyond “really weird” that it defies description… i got an ounce of APEs, which are a strain of cubensis. not my all-time favourite, but, at this point, any port in a storm…

220923 1oz illegal mushrooms
mushrooms, pictures, stress

my “don’t give a fuck” pill 🍄

mushrooms.

mushrooms are my “don’t give a fuck” pill.

when i get cranky, depressed, irritable, out-of-sorts, and tired of doing anything, my “don’t give a fuck” pill helps me survive all of the unjust, inconsiderate, and outright wrong things that are happening to and around me. 😒

yeah, it doesn’t make the problems go away, or even diminish noticably, but what it does is gives me the ability to “not give a fuck” rather than letting them fuck with my brain to the point of incapacity.

that’s what MEDICINE SHOULD DO!

my MENTAL HEALTH PRACTICIONER TOLD ME to take mushrooms. — it still BLOWS MY MIND that i was given this instruction 🤯

she was right. 😉

so, instead of griping about how unjust my life is these days, and how many things have gone irretrievably wrong, i’m going to post pictures of my cannabis plants, and my trip in the forest. 😉

220826 cannabis flowers
220826 cannabis flowers
220826 cannabis flowers
220826 cannabis flowers
220826 cannabis flowers
220826 cannabis flowers

and it’s only the end of august! 😋

i went up road K again, where i saw the bear last year. no bears this year, but plenty of evidence that they had been there. 😉

220826 where i saw the bear
220826 where i saw the bear
220826 bear shit, five steps away
220826 bear shit, five steps away

because of the fact that it has been so dry, i actually went all the way up road K to the place where there isn’t any road, and there’s a sign that says “trail under construction, use different routes”. i could have gone further, but i was tired, and it was uphill. uphill is great when i’m “on my way up”, but by that time, i had reached a plateau, and uphill was asking too much.

so i walked back down to the old homestead, where i meditated for about an hour.

220826 looks like a duck
220826 looks like a duck

looks can be decieving… is something my father would have said. 😒

220826 duck, from the other side!
220826 duck, from the other side!
220826 MUSHROOMS!
220826 MUSHROOMS!
220826 MUSHROOMS!
220826 MUSHROOMS!
220826 i'm in the middle of nowhere, and i'm not really sure why i'm here, but I EXIST, AND I AM IMPORTANT!
220826 i’m in the middle of nowhere, and i’m not really sure why i’m here, but I EXIST, AND I AM IMPORTANT!
220826 intersection
220826 intersection

and the difference in my mood will definitely be to my advantage tomorrow, when there’s going to be game night at the burke’s, and on sunday, when the sousa band is playing at the ballard locks. 😉

depression, mushrooms, ocf, pictures, rye, spoons

what the…?

i don’t know for sure, because i don’t know what it would be like if i HADN’T taken mushrooms a week ago, but i will say that it’s PROBABLY a good thing i took mushrooms a week ago, because the intervening week was depressing beyond belief.

last tuesday, which was also our 24th wedding anniversary, when i was IN THE MIDST of a significantly more powerful psychedelic experience than i EXPECTED (considering how weak and impotent the immediately previous psychedelic experience had been), i got a text from moe, which said that some unknown thing had happened to rye (currently, our most senior dog, at 11½ years), and he was having trouble walking, moving, and standing — quelle horreur!!

220624 injured rye
220624 injured rye
when moe came home (still in the midst of a significantly more powerful psychedelic experience than i was expecting), rye was barely recognisable: he was curled up and bent over like a dog that was in SEVERE pain, he could barely walk, and he couldn’t even manage the two stairs leading from the garage to the back yard. they had done everything they could at moe’s veterinary practice to alleviate his pain, but they didn’t have a clue, and when they sent his x-rays out to a specialist, there was still no clue why he was in pain, so thursday, he had an MRI, and had surgery on his neck THAT DAY, because it was that emergent. 😱

the neurologist said that they were suprised the dog was walking at all. 😟

he came home from the hospital friday, and has been recovering ever since… which, basically, means that his movement is severely restricted: he lives in an ExPen, in the living room, full time, except for 4 or 5 bathroom breaks every 24 hours, and he sleeps in a kennel in monique’s office. it’s going to be two weeks before he will be allowed to go up and down stairs again, so moe has moved all of her stuff downstairs for a couple weeks.

SINCE THEN, i have had to deal with, suddenly, being in the middle of rehearsal season (rehearsals wendesday, sunday, monday, tuesday, wednesday, and so on) which i haven’t experienced AT ALL for two years, AND i’m going to the oregon country fair, for the first time in two years, which TERRIFIES me, even though i really want to go, AND (oh, joy), we’re getting a NEW PUPPY WHILE i will be at the oregon country fair… which means that, when i get home from OCF, we’re going to have a disabled dog, and a new puppy, AT THE SAME TIME…

😩😰

i am running low enough on spoons that i actually cancelled busking this week, because i have a rehearsal later that day, and i’m pretty sure that if i went busking, i would be totally useless by the time the rehearsal came around.

quite apart from it being EXTREMELY WEIRD to be high on mushrooms while dealing with emotional people (who don’t know i am on mushrooms), and a severely injured dog, and quite apart from the fact that i am committed to doing something (OCF) that simultaneously terrifies me and is something i REALLY want to do, this entire sequence of events has not been particularly easy or enjoyable for me… 😒

and i’m REALLY not sure how i would have been able to handle it if it were NOT for mushrooms.

depression, frustration, medication, mushrooms

🍄mush🍄room🍄satis🍄faction🍄

the other day i took one 00-sized capsule of dried mushroom, and experienced an OVERWHELMINGLY ASTOUNDING reduction of my depression, but a heightening of my FRUSTRATION that it “wasn’t enough”.

and it wasn’t enough, dammit! when i take psychedelic mushrooms, i expect to FEEL something… not just be less depressed! 😉

(i’ll take being less depressed, if that’s all it’ll give me, but, seriously… it ain’t enough.)

so, today, i took FOUR 00-sized capsules of dried mushroom.

no more frustration. 😉🍄

frustration, mushrooms

🍄mush🍄room 🍄frustration🍄

once again, i have stooped to buying mushrooms through twitter.

this time, apparently, i was more successful.

i got two 3.5g packages (¼oz total) — professionally produced, expensive packages (which, in themselves, make me wonder A LOT about their provenance) — of APEs, which are a variety of p. cubensis.

they definitely appear to be “the right thing”, however, once again, i run HARD into this frustration that i may or may not have expressed previously, which is, specifically, that i take MINISCULE amounts of this “drug”: one 00-sized capsule of pulverised mushroom — so small an amount that i notice absolutely NO “psychedelic” effects WHATSOEVER — and, yet, there is an OVERWHELMINGLY ASTOUNDING reduction in the level and quality of my depression.

i HATE IT that this drug is so good. i HATE IT that, in spite of everything, this drug remains illegal. i HATE the bizarre hoops that i’ve had to jump through to obtain it…

and i HATE that i am unable to take enough more that i can actually get some psychedelic experiences out of it, because i don’t know when (or if) i’m going to be able to get more. 🤬

growing, mushrooms

further mush 🍄 room fun

the mycelia that i inoculated back in february have been making themselves evident for about a month now, and everything i’ve read seems to indicate that distributing the mycelia, once it’s growing, doesn’t necessarily require sterile components… I THINK that means i can put NON-sterile potting soil, and NON-sterile wood chips into my planter bags, and move them outside pretty much any time… at this point, i’m going to experiment, by putting half of the mushroom spawn in sterile media, and half in not-sterile media, to see if there’s any difference.

the sooner i transfer the spawn, the sooner i will have a crop. at this point i’m thinking, maybe, august or september… 😉

growing, mushrooms

mushroom 🍄 landmark

innoculated P. cyanescens using the “90-second-perfect-every-time” brown rice method for spawn, today at 4:20 pm.

alledgedly, the planters are getting here next thursday. they will be filled with sterile potting soil and STERILE wood chips(‼🍄) and deposited in a secure location outdoors, and the spawn will be introduced… erm… when it’s ready.

how will i know it’s ready? when the mycelium makes itself evident!

that’s it…

if everything goes the way i’m hoping it will, i should have a healthy, self-regenerating crop in 3 to 6 months.

depression, mushrooms, pictures

mush room 🍄

i took “the rest” of my mushrooms today, at 12:00 pm. i don’t know how many there were, in terms of “mushrooms”, but it was between 1 and 2 grams (two 00-sized gel-caps, plus a tiny amount) of powder, mushroom bits and detritus at the very bottom of the bag. this trip followed the predictable pattern of ramp up, peak, maintain, and ramp down, but it was a great deal more than i expected, considering how mediocre my recent mushroom escapades have been. i must have been taking the parts that didn’t have the right stuff, before, because this trip made up for it “in spades”. 😉

the fact that i actually logged in here, and am making what i suppose is something like sense, at this point, at 5:00 pm, is somewhat amazing, and is made even more amazing by the fact that i went out and got a prescription refill for moe, a 12-pack of diet ginger ale, and canned salt-free green beans for dog food, an hour ago. i have discovered that driving while high on mushrooms has, apparently, been affected by both the fact that i have been driving NOT on mushrooms for quite a bit longer than the last time i did so (which was in my 20s), and the fact that cars, these days, are a lot more “hands off” than they were fourty years ago… following distance, speed limits, road-center detection… even an amount of steering… are all “automatic” at this point.

“high self”, meet “normal self”. 😉

while i was out walking in the woods today, i saw a fallen branch with moss growing off of it… and it looked just like a lazy duck with green hair.

220209 is this just a fallen log, or...?
220209 is this just a fallen log, or…?
220209 is this just a fallen log, or...?
220209 is this just a fallen log, or…?

i knew those emergency eyeballs would come in handy… 😉

i confirmed that the big tree that has been speaking to me, is a “Tree of Being”… the only other one that i know of is on sehome hill. this one appears to be around 600+ years old. i sat beneath it, today.

this better have some lasting anti-depressant effects, otherwise i’m going to have to do it again. 😉

mushrooms, pictures

see, this is the problem…

210825 woods walk
210825 woods walk
even under the best of circumstances, “microdosing” mushrooms is a hit-or-miss proposition…

a couple weeks ago, i decided i was going to take a “proper” mushroom trip, and, towards that end, i prepared two 00-sized capsules with the oldest of my mushroom stash. by last week, i had decided that i didn’t want to take the whole thing, all at once, so i took the larger one…

and didn’t feel anything… 😞

which was really dissapointing, but i figured the mushrooms were old enough that they’d lost all their potency. despite the fact that i didn’t “feel” anything, i definitely noticed the “characteristic” anti-depressant effects of the psilocybin, and so, this week, i decided to take the other, smaller capsule.

that was at 12:30 this afternoon…

this time, i DEFINITELY feel something…

despite the fact that the capsule was approximately 25% SMALLER than the one i took last week, i’ve definitely had a marvelously melty afternoon, after going for a ≈5 mile walk in the woods, i came home and spent the afternoon doodling and listening to music over headphones…

it’s now approximately 6:00…

210825 mushroom drawing
210825 mushroom drawing

something i haven’t done in a very long time… stupid brain injury… 😒

mushrooms

this is to move the previous post down so i don’t have to look at it any longer

i took a mushroom hike today. three 🍄🍄🍄 mushrooms, for the record. took them in a gel-cap. they took about an hour to come on. the whole hike was from 1:30 or so, until around 4:00.

210622 mushroom hike 9.5km
210622 mushroom hike 9.5km
the last part of it, the part along carey creek, was blocked off on both ends because of “trail damage”. the “trail damage” in question refers to two places where what was a logging road, many years ago (like, more than the 60+ that i’ve been around), has decided to wash out into the stream bed below. both of the places look like they’ve been there for at least five years, and both of them have very well established trails around the damaged part of what used to be the road, and it LOOKS LIKE the county — or whoever is responsible — is, basically, NOT going to do anything about it… other than blocking off access to both ends of the trail… which ALSO have fairly well established trails AROUND them… 😕

then, there’s this…

210622 um... where's the stream?
210622 um… where’s the stream?
there’s the stream bed… it looks like a fairly well established stream bed… so…
210622 um... where's the stream?
210622 um… where’s the stream?
WHERE’S THE STREAM?? 😕 and don’t tell me we’re having a drought, i know. the pond across the street is at the level it was at last august, when the neighbour next door was saying that he’d never seen it that low before. 😒

and, look! 😉 i’ve moved that annoying post down where i can’t see it. 😉

depression, medication, mushrooms, pictures, uncle al

depression art?

210617 stele progress
210617 stele progress
it has taken a really long time to get this far, and i have been going miserably slow, because i’ve had to source materials (and made some pretty dramatic “compromises” in order to simply get the project started… 😒), and because of other things (read “databases”) taking my attention…

AND because i’m being a perfectionist about it, and not being satisfied with the work that i’ve already done… seriously, there have been a couple of times when, despite the work that i’ve already done, i’ve thought about trashing the whole thing and starting over, because ONE TINY DETAIL is slightly askew, which nobody except the most hard-core thelemite would notice…

but, see, that’s the thing… i’m making this because I AM a “hard-core thelemite” (among other things), and, seriously, i want it to be as close to the original as absolutely possible, while, at the same time, being 40% smaller, and entirely made by hand…

AND, BUT, ALSO… a NEW CAR!! 😒 no, no, no… AND because i have been depressed enough that, even when i am doing nothing else, for EXTENDED periods of time, i have been having difficulty finding the motivation to work on it, and i kind of DON’T want it to turn into “depression art”, it being a spiritual piece, and everything…

what i am doing to combat depression:

  1. taking 100mg of bupropion every day. whether it’s doing anything or not remains to be seen.
  2. taking mushrooms occasionally, but not as frequently as i’d like (the most recent time was last tuesday, three mushrooms). along those same lines, i am still:
    • planning on growing mushrooms in the near future
    • got expert advice on call
    • got the spores
    • got the substrate: “Uncle Ben’s 90 minute rice — 90 minutes, perfect every time!”
    • got a still-air egg incubator
    • still need to find information about how and when to transfer from the sterile substrate to “growing boxes”
    • bought some size 00 capsules. am going to try grinding the mushrooms and putting them in capsules to see if i can standardise the dosage a little better. 😉
  3. read “Wired For Love”, planning on buying the book.
  4. convinced moe to read “Wired For Love” (she starts it this weekend)
  5. going as slow as necessary
  6. being as easy on myself as i can.

possibly other things i don’t recall at this time.

whether those things are actually having any effect remains to be seen. i’m afraid to think of what comes next if they’re not having any effect. 😒

mushrooms, pictures

the last of the mushrooms… 🍄

i had one relatively large mushroom, approximately half a gram, or so, and some leftover stems and pieces of cap that, all together, made up, maybe a gram, total… i.e. not very much, under the best of circumstances, and they were, also, at least three years old… so they weren’t particularly powerful, anyway…

… but… 😉

i definitely felt something — a little shimmering and sparkling around the edges of the forest — and the antidepressant effects are plainly evident. 😉

i went for a walk up the back side of taylor mountain. i started out going down the carey creek trail, which hasn’t been open since i’ve lived here. i walked down that for about half a mile, until i got to the edge of a king county park (on the map i found, it’s called “donkey engine”) when i noticed that i had been walking down a railroad grade, it started getting more steep, and i realised that i wouldn’t want to be walking uphill when i was coming down from a mushroom trip, so i turned around and went back the other direction.

where i parked was at the southeast 208th st. “back” entrance to taylor mountain, right across the street from the dire warning no trespassing cedar river watershed signs. after walking down the carey creek trail, i walked up “road G” until i came to the intersection of “road A”, which was closed because of a washout… evidently, a couple of years ago, at least, because there was a fairly well established trail through the washout, that skirted the “official” “road closed” signs and fences. 😉

and, i walked from the washout to the intersection of “road K”, which is when i realised that this end of “road A” connects up to the end of “road A” that comes out at the “front” entrance to taylor mountain, about 5 miles up issaquah-hobart road, just off highway 18.

here’s what i saw:

210406 moss
210406 moss

to my mushroom-induced mind, this moss took the form of a tall, shapely woman with long hair, walking away from me… it doesn’t look anything like that now, but it was startlingly clear enough that i took the picture AND remembered what it was.

210406 20-foot stump
210406 20-foot stump

the tree growing out of this stump is four feet in diameter. the stump, itself, is around twenty feet in diameter. 🤯

210406 trees
210406 trees

i was tripping on mushrooms, so, of course, i had to take a picture of the sky, through the trees… 😉

210406 tree
210406 tree

this could be another “Tree of Being”… i’m not sure, but it speaks to me… 😉

210406 spiral
210406 spiral

this is taken at the end of an overflow pipe that is supposed to sluice water away from the washout… it was, evidently, uneffective, because it is well above the washout. it is a place that, insinctively, i stuck my head into, and started humming to find the resonant frequency. it’s definitely some place that i should return to, accompanied by my harmonic flute and electronic stuff… and, it’s especially appropriate because it’s a spiral, and i was tripping on mushrooms (although, by the time i came across it, i was already mostly down from my trip 😉)

depression, house stuff, medication, moisture festival, mushrooms, pictures, snowpocalypse, tuba

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snow is mostly gone… there’s still some large piles, where whoever it was that ploughed our street piled it up at the head of the road, and in the ditches, but everywhere else, it’s gone.

210222 gutter overflow
210222 gutter overflow

i had to take a ladder out and climb up to clean out the gutter, in front. it had collected a bunch of tree detritus and, what with all the melting snow, combined with torrential rain, the gutter was totally clogged and overflowing into our driveway… it all ran away from the house, though, and once i cleared the obstruction, the downspout did what it was supposed to do, so that’s good.

i’m the default tuba player for the SANCApators at the moisture festival, this year. the moisture festival was cancelled, at the last minute, last year (because of COVID), and this year, instead of having live performances, they’re releasing some videos of performers that would have been live, except for COVID… and their regular tuba player is ill (no word on whether or not it’s COVID) and can’t make the videos that they asked for from the musicians, so i got tagged. last week i got the parts, and the tracks to play along with, so i practiced for a few days and sent the videos to “doc” sprinsock, so that he can combine them with everyone else’s videos and — hopefully — get some reasonably “together” music out of the whole deal…

When I’m 64 tag – tuba part

but i’m not holding my breath… particularly with the thing that said “Rock” for the style, but the backing track was played as straight as an arrow, with no “swing” or “rock” stylings at all… and that’s what i played, because there was no way to “swing” a part that hadn’t been recorded to “swing”, so… i’m not holding my breath. we’ll see what happens when everybody else’s videos are part of the mix. 😖

no word on the phremont fillharmonic’s addition to the chaos, yet. i contacted kiki last week, and she said she’d heard about it, but is waiting for further instructions from “the powers that be”, whoever that is.

and i think the antidepressant may be working. i’m not sure i agree with georgia doctor, who wanted to boost my prescription back up to the level that was causing me frantic anxiety and restlessness, plus she wanted to add ANOTHER antidepressent — lexapro — to the mix. at the time, i wasn’t sure whether it was working or not, so i said i’d rather wait on the new scrip until i had a better idea of whether the current one was working, and she agreed to hold off… which is good for a number of reasons, not the least of which is reinforcing personal boundaries.

and she had never heard of psilocybin… 🤯

because of her accent, i asked where she’s from, and she said she’s from “africer”… but i can’t imagine a psychiatric nurse-practitioner who has never heard of psilocybin. i said that the “common” name for them is “magic mushrooms”, and she immediately started ranting about heroin and cocaine, and said that it’s possible that they contained psilocybin… 😕

so i still don’t have any solid information about the interaction of bupropion and psilocybin, which is a little scary, but within tolerable limits. and actual mushrooms are still a ways off, yet, so there’s still time to gather more information.

but the fact that there’s some “good” stuff happening in my life seems to indicate that something has changed.

circus, medication, mushrooms

a number of things have happened, part 2

a number of things have happened since the last time i posted this — which, admittedly, was less than a week ago, but they’re significant enough to warrant another post.

the first is that i have now attended three weeks worth of circus classes. today i walked the entire length of the tight wire, backwards, with a pole in only one hand… and when i reached the end, it was a surprise. i thought i had two or three more steps to go. yay! go me! 👍

i talked with jo, the coach, about foot juggling, as well… she said they’ve got the doohickey that you lie on to do foot juggling, so… 😉

also, i got confirmation that my spore order was received, and i got confirmation that my order was shipped out, AND… they’re arriving friday!!!

(woo hoo!!!) 😉

so, i am feeling A LOT more positive, and i still can’t tell whether the medication is having any effect…

AND…

it is my understanding that i probably shouldn’t take mushrooms while i’m taking bupropion, because mushrooms are a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, and there’s some danger of an adverse reaction to the inhibition of the uptake of norepinephrine and dopamine that bupropion does… and i’m not sure how to ask dr. akinyele about this, because of the legality issue, combined with the fact that she’s far enough away from me that she doesn’t have any concept of the political climate of the region in which i live.

(but the spores will be here friday, so i’d better figure it out pretty soon…) 😉

anhedonia, busking, COVID19, depression, mushrooms, political

a number of things have happened

1 Comment

a number of things have happened over the past couple of weeks, which disguise whether or not the medication i am taking is actually working. those things are:

  • the actual innauguration of somebody other than donald j. trump, and his actual leaving of the white house without having to be handcuffed… although i’m still hoping that they’re coming later… because he deserves them. 😒
  • i actually GOT the first COVID vaccine (before they ran out of doses 😒) on monday, and i have the second dose scheduled for 18th february.

and the fact that i had to rely HEAVILY on my disability weighs heavy on my conscience. if i had NOT emphasised my disability, i would probably not have gotten the vaccine until march or april, and the fact that i got it means that someone else, possibly someone more deserving, did not get it — and won’t until who-knows-when, because they ran out and nobody knows when they’re going to get more. 😒

  • SANCA opened up for classes! yay! circus! 🤡🎉🎊 i’m getting my regular circus workout again! i had NO IDEA how much that meant to me!
  • the fact that i got my first covid vaccine makes it more likely that i’m going to go out and do stuff like busk, and… HEY! my friend stuart, the guitar player for the fremont phil, is starting up a monthly “dagger moon” concert, and wants me and my harmonic flute to start the whole thing out. bonus! 👍
  • i’ve found what appears to be a reliable source of spores. 🍄 i sent away for 6 spore syringes, four 🍄 of cubensis 🍄 🍄 and two 🍄 of cyanescens. 🍄 i hope to be growing my own mushrooms very soon. 🍄🍄🍄

so, i’ve been taking this “medication” that’s “supposed to” inhibit the uptake of norepinephrine and dopamine” in my brain — but who knows for sure what it really does… not even dr. akinyele is 100% sure — but which also causes all kinds of wonderful side effects — which were to the point of intolerable until we reduced the dose, and are still perceptible although not as emergent…

seriously… they prescribe a “medication” among whose side effects are ANXIETY, to treat… ANXIETY… next thing they’ll be telling me is that homeopathy works… 🙄

and i can’t tell whether the “anti-depressent” effects of this medication are improving my mood…

or if the external effects of four years of overt #drumpf and a year of hiding out from covid are finally starting to wear off.

brain injury, depression, frustration, health, mushrooms

IT’S STUPID! 😠🤬

IT’S STUPID that i have to be “addicted” to this drug — it supposedly takes a couple of weeks to “start working”, and i’m not supposed to stop abruptly, because it has “unpleasant withdrawal effects” if i just stop taking it — which has current side effects (i’ve only been taking it for four days!) that i do not like… like volatility, restlessness, and anger (on top of the already short fuse i have as a result of my injury), as well as physical effects like ears ringing, jitters and lack of focus… as well as interacting with alcohol in a way that makes me not want a beer, or a shot of rum, every now and then… 😠

a brief list of side effects i have been experiencing for the past couple of days: anxiety, irritability, restlessness, shaking, tinnitus, trouble concentrating, anger, need to keep moving, sweating… 😒

rather than take a drug that is “illegal” — psilocybin — but has NO side effects (except for ones that are “fun” 😉), works better, lasts longer, doesn’t require me to be “addicted” to anything, and won’t care if i have a beer now and then.

IT’S STUPID IT’S STUPID IT’S STUPID 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

it has all the negative effects of LSD, but none of the positive effects. i can definitely see how this might lead people to commit suicide… which is another side effect. 😒

mushrooms

okay, so not “phenomenally”, but still stupid

i am cautiously confident that my phenomally stupid actions over last weekend have not attracted the attention of law enforcement, but they definitely have, 100% guaranteed attracted the attention of fraud-meisters on twitter, who have been bombarding me with DM requests advertising various different — illegal — substances for sale… 😒

needless to say, i have not become their sucker. as they say, once bitten, twice shy. 🤬 which is to say that, every chance i get, i have been interjecting myself into @psychedelicbloc’s advertisements with an inquiry about when they’re going to refund my money. i don’t expect them to actually refund anything, but if i convince even one person to be cautious enough to avoid this guy, it will be worth it. 😒

on the other hand, this afternoon, i actually had a face-to-face talk with a good friend who is interested — and knowledgable — concerning psychedelic mushroom growing, who is currently in communication with a medical doctor(!) neighbour of his, who can get reliable spores and knows about the correct mediums in which to grow them… but neither of them have a place to grow… so i may, actually, have found myself the most reliable supplier of psychedelics possible, which is myself… 😇

depression, mushrooms

okay, i may have done something PHENOMENALLY stupid

1 Comment

i bought 10 grams of cubensis over twitter.

this person @psychedelicbloc, otherwise known as Psychedelic home, is not somebody i know. his (her?) profile, and paypal indicate that they’re in colorado, but i don’t know this person. their twitter profile is a few months old. they’re shipping to me using a company i have never heard of before, “Mega Cargo Logistics” which hasn’t been updating their web site as often as i’d like…

mushrooms from @psychedelicbloc
mushrooms from @psychedelicbloc
  • i don’t know this person
  • i don’t know whether or not they truly know what they’re doing
  • i don’t know whether or not they’re going to send me truly psychedelic mushrooms, or poisonous mushrooms, or “inert” mushrooms, or NOTHING AT ALL
  • i don’t know whether or not the cops are going to be waiting for me when i pick them up

moe isn’t home, and i was feeling desperate… and this guy blatantly advertised on twitter, which is already a very shady sign…

so, if i get busted, it’s @psychedelicbloc’s fault.

200120 MegaCargoLogistics email
200120 MegaCargoLogistics email
ETA: 200120 okay, i knew it had to be too good to be true. the shipping company i’ve never heard of before, Mega Cargo Logistics, sent me a very poorly worded (like, the author’s native language is very definitely NOT english) email, with the entire message in the subject line, informing me that my package was “on hold” until i paid a “refundable $100 insurance” fee.

in bitcoin… 😒

@psychedelicbloc said “bro… you’ve got nothing to worry about.” and “bro… i assure you the insurance will be refundable to as you receive your package.” — but when i responded that i simply didn’t have any more money, he recommended that i “can do the agency web mail and chat with them so the can explain things more better to you.” SO, i went on their web chat, and they told me “sir, the insurance you are about to pay is refundable as you receive your package. And which of the payment method are you okay with.” when i responded that i didn’t have the money, they said “Sir we understand that this is too much on you but as you receive your package the insurance will be refundable to you”, at which point i said “if i had known about the extra $100 charge for insurance, i would not have made the order, because I DO NOT HAVE THAT MUCH MONEY… PERIOD.” whereupon their response was “Sir we have many clients to attend to and of you are not serious please wasting our time here”

so, i’m not getting mushrooms. 🤬

although, all things considered, it’s probably just as well…

and, when i asked @psychedelicbloc to refund my money, they, too, started spouting stuff that makes it sound VERY MUCH like their native language is not english — “i need to apply for the to refund the package back to me if the do do i will refund your package” — which makes me think that, since paypal says they won’t actually receive the funds until the 23rd, i might actually be able to file a dispute with them, so that they won’t get it… and when i suggested i file a dispute, @psychedelicbloc suddenly vanished…

which makes me doubtful that they’re a cop… but at the same time, i don’t know whether or not i’m actually going to see that $100 again…

anhedonia, moisture festival, mushrooms

moisture + anhedonia

now there’s 18 and possibly 19 shares: Peanut Envy is going to be fluffing at least one night, and there’s a rumour that Snake Suspenders — as a trio, or, possibly with a fill-in drummer — is going to get at least one stage slot.

and, i never, in a million years, thought i would be able to say this, but i have been, essentially, commanded to take mushrooms, by what passes for a doctor in my life these days… except for the fact that it’s been snowy for the past couple of days, and more rain is forcast; my house is falling apart — currently everything that is usually in the closet in the master bedroom, is in the living room, while the closet is gutted down to the studs and rebuilt, to get rid of the mold and moisture problems; and, friday, moe is scheduled to leave for (ETA: 200117 – denver) orlando (or some gawdawful place like that) and won’t be back until wednesday.

which means that, taking my thursday unicycle class into account, it’s entirely likely that a week from friday is going to be the first day that i have to take mushrooms. 😒

busking, depression, hats, incense, mushrooms, pictures, san diego

before the mushrooms kick in…

#drumpf is in the midst of impeachment, but it doesn’t appear to be making a whole lot of difference (thus, the mushrooms), but there have been some good things happening.

i have been getting A LOT of incense orders: 13 since the first of october, compared to 5 or fewer per month from january to september. also, i’ve gotten more orders from england and germany, since the first of october, than i have in the entire year previous. i still don’t entirely know what’s happening, but the end result is that i’ve now got more than $4,000 in my hybrid elephant account… which is somewhat startling…

191102 moe
191102 moe
last weekend, moe and i took a mini-vacation to san diego, for one night. ostensibly, moe had to rack up enough airline miles to qualify for “gold status”, because she has been travelling A LOT recently — mostly because of her newfound notariety as the author of a revolutionary book on animal behaviour — which, naturally, means that i have to stay at home and look after the pets.

seriously, folks… i’m married to a famous author! this week, she’s staying at a hotel in times square! it’s probably about as close to famous as i’m ever going to be! 😎

so moe decided that she would find a pet sitter and we would go off on our own (which i really appreciate). she chose san diego because she has been there before, and i haven’t, but i realised that san diego is the home of not one, but two outlets of the Village Hat Shop, which is where i bought my red fedora, and it is also home to the naval amphibious base coronado, which is a building shaped like a swastika.

i saw where it was when we were flying in, but i didn’t actually see the building because we were at too shallow an angle, and you pretty much have to be directly overhead to actually see that it’s shaped like a swastika…

so we flew to san diego to go hat shopping. i bought a pork pie made out of paper (a paper pork pie), and exhibited a great deal of self restraint becauuse i really wanted to take home about half the shop.

we actually stayed on coronado island

Hotel del Coronado - you see that large, famous, historic hotel over there? where we stayed is right behind it, in the Glorietta Bay Inn.
Hotel del Coronado – you see that large, famous, historic hotel over there? where we stayed is right behind it, in the Glorietta Bay Inn.

we stayed in a hotel room that is so “far above our station” that i almost got a nosebleed. 😉

and we flew home the next day, which was sunday.

i went busking yesterday, which was good, despite the fact that we only made about $20 a piece for 2 hours of busking. today i took two packages to the post office to ship out, and went to the dispensary, where i spent it all on weed and weed-related products.

and no w m y jmushrooms have kikckedk in ahd i heeed to be g oijn go ut for a wal,,k oris oemething lll…. 😁

anhedonia, busking, mushrooms

fump

anhedonia has made me ambivalent about the fact that i am leaving on thursday for 11 days of PAID busking(‼) at the Oregon State Fair in Salem.

then i’m returning home for a couple of weeks, and then i’m going to Yakima for 10 days of PAID busking(‼) at the Central Washington State Fair.

i’m getting PAID(‼) $825 for oregon and $750 for yakima, plus half of whatever we make passing the hat (because real buskers can actually do that), which we have been recommended to do about every 15 or 20 minutes. we’re working (in oregon) from 11:30 am to 8:30 pm, but they only want 4 to 5 hours of busking in that time period. we have to pay for a hotel room in oregon, but a hotel room is included in yakima.

i got some more mushrooms from macque, and i got a whole bunch of encouragement regarding growing mushrooms from macque (who is, apparently, an expert. who knew?) and from rossi, who is an art cartist and the friend of ranger’s, who i got the mushrooms from last year. i’m taking some to salem. who knows whether or not i will be motivated to use them during the time i’m gone…

in other news, i got a pair of blue sunglasses, because looking at the world through 💩-coloured glasses was making me REALLY depressed, despite how much i liked them — and how many of my clothes matched the 💩-coloured sunglasses… but i really like the blue sunglasses even more, despite the fact that they’re not polarised, which makes driving in the bright sunlight a little difficult.

anhedonia, corruption, depression, drumpf, malfunctioning people, mushrooms, ocf, political, stupid people, the very big stupid

bleah…

i’ve been under the attack of anhedonia and depression. my mushrooms have lost their potency: the last time i tried, i took 6 of them and they had, essentially, no effect at all. i connected with a person at SACBO — ranger’s connection — but she is only one step closer to the source… although she did mention that starter kits are available on ebay, and that they practically grow themselves, so that’s worth looking into.

part of the reason i have been so depressed is because of what i call the “political situation”: that is, drumpf and his latest atrocities. it just keeps on getting worse, and, when i think there’s no way he can get any worse, he blows the world away with the magnitude of his atrocities… and his republicon base of supporters get upset about a black disney princess and a pair of nike sneakers, but totally ignore the concentration camps and the gestapo Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, not to mention the totally inept people, including his own children, he’s put in charge of such things as education, housing, healthcare and the environment. it’s literally going to take us 100 years JUST to fix his fuckups, and that’s not taking into account the fact that the world is already in a crisis mode. it’s almost as though everything i’ve ever fought for throughout my entire life has been eliminated by this orange babboon in less than 3 years, and replaced with climate-change deniers, corporate stooges, forced-birth and anti-vax controversies, and so-called “christian” love, which is only for the so-called “christians”.

drumpf spent $92 million, which he appropriated from the national parks department (🤬), on a “military parade” in washington DC, complete with tanks and a flyover by the blue angels and “airforce one” — which, of course, wasn’t “airforce one” because the #SCROTUS was on the ground, observing the flyover… and the tanks were stationary, because, apparently, if they had moving tanks, they would have destroyed the streets and damaged the lincoln memorial… but the only people who could view this were his donors, because everyone else had to pay to get in… and then it rained, HARD and everything was postponed. the photos and videos i’ve seen show a very few thoroughly wet people and drumpf giving a long, boring, confusing speech that one writer i read compared to having been written by artificial intelligence, and a retired admiral said that it was on the level of an 8th grade history lesson… and the live video feeds from the top of the washington memorial, and the lincoln memorial were inexplicably shut down and removed from the whitehouse dot gov address, apparently to cover up how few people actually attended this debacle.

so, basically, we, the american people, threw away $92,000,000,000 on an egotistical, childish, boorish, dictator-emulating orange rapist with the IQ of half a rock, instead of addressing the concentration camps, or the homeless issue, or the healthcare issue, or… 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

as can be well imagined, despite my love for exploding things, i take little interest in such activities in celebration of this country, this year… which is, also, at least partially, because of the fact that we now have a dog who is totally terrified of fireworks, AND a next-door neighbour who is prone to setting off a ton of fireworks which ignite their lawn, and other suchlike wonderful things. 😒

OCF is 5 days away, and i’m hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst. by this time, we’ve usually had one run through, and have some rough idea of how long the show will be. this year, we’re nowhere close to that, despite the fact that we started out with a working script, which we created 15 years ago, when we did this show (Jack And The Beanstalk) the last time. and we’re still missing two songs, one of which is probably not going to make it into the show for OCF.

and, on top of everything else, MAD magazine is shutting down! PBLFLLT!! 😠

mushrooms, pictures

interesting? unusual?

approximately 6:30 pm — so far it’s been interesting? unusual?

i have been, and continue to be high, in certain ways (clumsy typing among them), and i continue to “see things” that are there, perhaps in ways that i might not if i were not “altered”, but…

190605 i’m not looking directly at the sun, my camera is! 😜

(also, the previous one was taken yesterday, so it may not count)

190606 three faces

what, you don’t see three faces? they’ve been looking out of my neighbour’s fence for a few years, now…

190606 imagine…

imagine a torso on that pair of legs… 😉

then, when i got home from my walk, i got a letter in the mail from the pike place market foundation…

190606 TINA CHOPP IS GOD!

it’s as “official” as it can be, at this point. they say “This stainless steel Charm will dance and shine on the new MarketFront Plaza for generations”, but they said the same thing about my tile, back in the ’80s, and look what happened there…

i’m “high”, but it’s different. instead of being euphoric, i’m depressed… but high. things “feel” okay, but i know that, when i am not “high”, they’re actually going to be a lot worse than i have allowed myself to imagine, because i am “high”…

it’s not an unpleasant sensation, but i’m not sure a repeat of it would be entirely welcome.

mushrooms

once again

🍄🍄🍄🍄🍄🍄

approximately 2:00 pm – it’s been a few months, and i stopped because i was running low and didn’t have any resources for more… i still have, essentially, no resources apart from one guy at the market who said he was waiting for his connection, and another, possible resource who is a friend of the last guy i got them from, who, allegedly, grows them on a more or less “commercial” basis.

at this point, i just swallowed them about 5 minutes ago. nothing has happened, yet, but i don’t really expect them to kick in for 20 to 30 minutes.

cannabis, forward into the past, mushrooms, vaping

🍄🕉🍄🕉

i started an experiment a few days ago: i bought a vape-pen and, for the past three days, i have been vaping instead of smoking pot. i noticed a couple of things right off the top, which are that i get SIGNIFICANTLY higher from vaping than i do from smoking — although i knew that already, from vaping using darol’s pipette-and-lighter method. the second is that i haven’t been wheezing as much, particularly at night… which is a good thing. it’s bizarre, though, because i’ve got a few buds and my bong sitting on my desk next to me, and they haven’t been being used, and i don’t know when i am going to be motivated to use them, or do something with them… another thing that is kind of strange is that i bought a gram of “wax” (for under $35) that looks like it’s going to last me at least a week, and possibly two.

i went for a walk today, and, while in jovita park, i encountered a random, ambient smell that was kind of minty, that immediately reminded me of music, trombones, and my 4th grade school music locker. it’s possible that whatever made that smell is used in a cleaning product that was used in the music locker, or on the instruments, i have no clue. also, the smell was quite random: i smelled it, and then it was gone, and i stopped when i smelled it because the recollection was so powerful… and then, on the way back, i smelled it again, and stopped, and the smell was gone in just a couple of seconds. it was a musty, minty, trombone-y smell. 👃

bssb, busking, mushrooms

aaaannd…

tomorrow is the sousa bash, in the evening. i may go busking in the morning, but i haven’t decided yet… in a way, i really want to get out there and make myself more known to people who might call me for sets later on, but another part of me says that it rained most of the day today, and it’s probably going to rain tomorrow, which can be aleviated by rain-gear, but it also means that there will be fewer suckers paying audience members out there… and tomorrow is the return to standard time, which means that 9:00 am comes at 8:00 tomorrow… or is the other way around… i can never remember, and it always takes me a week or so to adjust, every time. 😕

only a white man could come up with the idea of cutting two inches off of one end of a blanket, sewing it onto the other end, and selling it as a bigger blanket.
     — some Native American wise guy

🍄 one mushroom today: 14 total. running low. need more…

this “microdosing” is starting to really bug me, in a way. i REALLY want to take 100 mushrooms or more, but i don’t have 100 mushrooms to begin with, and even if i did, i don’t have the time or the setting to be able to take that many without freaking out… i was talking with norma at trolloween about mushrooms, and she was saying that she really doesn’t like feeling “altered”… and i realised that i do, REALLY like feeling “altered”. microdosing does what it’s supposed to do, which has made my life a lot more tolerable recently, but it also reminds me, EVERY! SINGLE! TIME! i do it, that i’m not really doing what i would like to be doing. a trip to the mushroom fields outside of mount vernon may be in order. i literally know where they grow ’em… 😉

miscellaneous, mushrooms, politicians, the battle of the computer, trolloween

bleh 11

#drumpf. 🖕 the less said about him, the better.

🍄 one mushroom yesterday. i went out for a walk and had pretty much the entire “trip” while i was out, which wasn’t very much. depression sneaking back in, but not in unmanagable amounts… yet… fewer mushrooms every time this happens, and eventually i’ll run out. hopefully i will have either wildcrafted, or obtained some more by then, but who knows… they are illegal, after all, even though my doctor counsellor recommended them… 😒

trolloween on wednesday. i’m doing sound effects, which means bullroarer “pre-show” and thunder for the first part of the show. nothing else, which means that i’ll be able to actually haunt fremont, for the first time ever… i’ve been a part of the show at the troll, and the dance afterwards many, many times, but i’ve never gotten to go on the haunt… mushrooms? it’s possible… but i think i’d have to find a place to crash in town, if so. i’ll ask macque…

so, in the realm of the computer, i’ve decided that, if i tiptoe around this version of kubuntu, it works 95% of the time. i have, literally, changed the way i interact with the computer interface, in order to prevent it from crashing on a more regular basis: kontact/kmail/akregator — which used to be a relatively stable part of the distribution — has become something which works if i DON’T do things like try to open links in akregator using the middle mouse button (right click and choose “open in external browser” works, though, which is annoying), or forward a message, about half of the time (which is something i do on a regular basis when i’m reporting spam). and kubuntu, itself, has got some annoying bugs which i don’t know to whom to report… which, in itself, is annoying… when i boot the computer, the desktop wallpaper appears to be set to “blur” around the background, even though when i look at the configure panel, it’s set to “solid color”, and when i set it to “blur”, nothing happens, but if i, then, set it back to “solid color”, lo-and-behold, it suddenly displays with a solid colour background. and, because of the fact that it’s part of the system settings, i don’t have the first clue who should get the bug report.

and i’ve, basically, given up on amarok. i love the interface, but the fact is, my music is on a disk that isn’t mounted at startup — because it is a NAS, mounted via WIFI — and amarok refuses to see it. i haven’t figured out how to get it to mount at startup, and it appears that the amarok user list is, for all intents and purposes, dead… which is really annoying.

on the other hand, i’ve figured out a way to play the music on my NAS from my phone, my tablet, and from the linux box, at the same time, using the same application, which is VLC media player. i don’t love the interface, but it’s definitely better than nothing, and the fact that i can play my music, basically, anywhere, without having to make copies of it, should make the copyright drones happy.

and i found the disks containing approximately 10,000 fonts, left over from when i worked in a print shop… and i can get around 90% to 95% of them to work on both my mac and my linux box, also from my NAS, which makes sharing documents a lot more reliable.

depression, mushrooms

mushroom 🍄 adventures

🍄 so far, i have taken eleven mushrooms… yep, only eleven: 🍄 🍄 two on 181007, 🍄 one 🍄 each on 181008 and 09, 🍄 two 🍄 on 181011, 🍄 three🍄 🍄 on 181015 and two 🍄 🍄 today.

which is pretty phenomenal, considering that the average dose for me during my 20s was anywhere from 100 to 500, but that was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

well, it was actually in bellingham, but that’s another story…

and that’s not to say that the thought of taking that many isn’t appealing, because it is — very much so, in fact — but i don’t need that many… one or two at a time is more than enough. 🍄

mushrooms

is it that obvious???

1 Comment

181015 — 4:20 pm: sitting next to 5 mile lake, high on mushrooms. (i could get to like this… 😉)

an early-20-ish, young female jogger approaches.

YFJ: excuse me, sir… do you know what is in this lake?

ME: um… water?

YFJ: i mean, is it, like, safe to swim in? there’s no sharks?

ME: (trying hard not to laugh), no, there are no sharks in this fresh-water lake…

YFJ: thanks! 😃

ME: 😕😕😕😕😕⁇⁇🤯

depression, mushrooms

okay, so…

moe and i went to see VOLTA yesterday, and it was AWESOME!!! i haven’t enjoyed a show that much in a LONG time! it was colourful and exciting and funny and outrageous and awe-inspiring and inspiring in general… the guy who was sitting to my left shouting “woo!” over and over again didn’t even distract me from how amazing it was.

but i didn’t take mushrooms yesterday, because i had to drive to volta, and because i was still feeling pretty good from the day before.

when i woke up this morning, however, something was different. moe is going to boston (for one night, she’ll be back tomorrow, which is bizarre enough, by itself), and i had to drive her and ross to the airport at 7:30, which is earlier than i like to get up. after i had got up and dressed, i noticed that i felt REALLY depressed. i mentioned to moe that i said i didn’t know what it was like to feel depressed any longer, a few days ago, but i felt depressed now. she said that it’s not too surprising, when you understand the brain chemistry. i don’t completely understand the meaning of her comment, but after i dropped them off at the airport, i went for a long drive, which made me feel a lot better. i’ve been really cold the past couple of days, so i turned the seat-warmer on high, and when i got home i didn’t do much except sit at my computer all day, and i feel significantly better. smoking pot helped a lot more than it usually does, too, which is encouraging. i thought i would try another mushroom, earlier, but going for a long drive helped so much that, by the time i got home, i had decided to see what else happened first.

i’m sure this is what kate was talking about, expecting more of a change in perception, but not so much actual lack of depression, as one might expect from a truly antidepressive drug… very much like what i experienced when i started taking 5HTP: i didn’t notice a lack of depression, what i noticed was a new awareness of when i was depressed, and more motivation to do stuff in spite of it.

depression, mushrooms

weird

i took two mushrooms on sunday, and determined that two is too many if i’m “microdosing”. i took one on monday, and didn’t feel anything… but, to be honest, the relaxed “okay with whatever happens” attitude that i experienced on sunday was having an extended effect, so it didn’t really matter that much. i took one on tuesday and had almost as high a trip as i had on sunday, with two… plus i got all domestic, and went out grocery shopping, which turned into me being as efficient as i could be and getting out of the costco crowds… and having to drive while “altered” — even a little bit — was a little more stress that i could do without. so i decided that i’d only take mushrooms on days when i don’t have anything else on the schedule.

which was a good thing, because wednesday (yesterday) started with my circus class — in which the instructor, amber, said that i “looked different” — and then finished up with a snake suspenderz gig in the skyview observatory in the columbia tower in downtown seattle, which started, for me, at 2:30, when i left to pick up hobbit at 3:30 to be at the columbia tower at 5:00, play for 2 hours and 45 minutes…

and being told that i was not allowed to drink alcohol in the bar, by the bartender, despite having been told specifically by the guy that hired us that it was okay for us to eat food and drink beverages on our breaks… 🤨

pack up and finally leave the building — after being abandoned by the guy who hired us, who took a “secret” elevator that was different from the one we got on, and when the elevator we got on finally arrived, it was inhabited by a hispanic guy who didn’t speak that much english, and took us from the 78th floor (or the 84th, or whatever floor we were on) to the 4th floor, then to the loading dock, then to the 3rd floor, then to the 4th floor, then to the 3rd floor again, while assiduously AVOIDING pressing the button that would take us to the 1st floor, which is WHERE WE SAID — REPEATEDLY — THAT WE WANTED TO GO… (damn it)… and having been paid $15 extra, specifically to cover parking, only to discover that parking for 5 hours and 47 minutes at the columbia tower costs $31… and then i had to take hobbit to lynnwood, and i didn’t get home until after midnight, because of three lanes of the freeway being closed through downtown seattle.

🤦

so i decided that i would start over again today. at first i was going to throw caution to the wind, and take five, but i chickened out at the last moment, and only took two. it’s a good thing i didn’t have anything else scheduled for today, although it isn’t as profound as sunday’s trip.

i’ve also got to conserve, until i have a better supply lined up. probably not going to do any more until next week… although, at this point, i would say that, overall, it has been a success, because, quite honestly, i don’t even remember what it was like to feel depressed any longer.

i wonder how long it will last?

then, today, i went out for a walk, like i usually do. while i was out, five random people waved at me, from their cars, from their front yards, from their lawn mowers… one of them said “how ya’ doin’?”… plus, the mail delivery lady, who i know, also waved at me. what is it about me that is, all of a sudden, causing people to acknowledge my existence? what is it about me — that isn’t a direct result of consuming a socially inappropriate substance — is different from the guy who wears a burnous and freaks people out? it makes me feel like i’ve gained some sort of notariety that i haven’t found out about yet.

also, this whole thing of being recommended to take psychedelic mushrooms by my counsellor goes right along with the unreal-ness of being able to walk into a local dispensary and walk out with an ounce of medical-grade weed without being busted… and the unreal-ness of #drumpf in the white house, and his unrelenting battle against plain ordinary folks who didn’t do harm to anybody… i’ve fallen through the cracks and ended up in bizarro-world, for sure. 😕

mushrooms

mushroom adventure has started

i have started my investigation of mushrooms as an antidepressant.

so far it appears to be working:

2 smallish baeocystis at 5:00 pm 181007

5:30 two mushrooms is above conscious awareness: they have kicked in. i am relaxed, life is better than it has been in a long time, and it doesn’t even matter that i am out on a walk and it’s starting to rain.

7:00 after peak – it’s not an astonishingly high trip, but considering that i only took two smallish mushrooms, i think that “microdosing” may involved fractions of one. i wonder how long it will last.

8:15 one shot of single-grain malt whiskey and one beer.

ETA 181008: these mushrooms are DEFINITELY more potent than semilanceata or pelliculosa. i was still high at 10:30, when we went to sleep. i feel better today than i have for months.

depression, mushrooms, stress, web design

broken

i’m pretty severely broken today.

i think that, possibly, the only reason i even noticed is because of the 5HTP that i’ve been taking for the past 6 months or so, but it hasn’t done anything to relieve the symptoms, which are: to start with, i wasn’t even motivated to get out of bed until well after noon, despite the fact that i woke up around 5:00, when moe left for a 5-day trip to alberta… in fact, it’s 7:00 pm now, and it feels as though it should be around 1:00, based on when i normally get out of bed.

and, sad to say, a majority of the time i spent in bed this morning was poking through farcebook, and checking email. then i got up, turned on the computer and started poking through my RSS feed, when farcebook got boring.

i’ve been reading a lot about micro-dosing with LSD, and the effects of mushrooms on PTSD survivors, and how LSD apparently cures farcebook addiction, and all of these things have driven me to the inescapable conclusion that i really should take those 100 dried mushrooms that i found a couple years ago… except that i don’t know whether they retain their potency, and i really need to do some more research before i actually do it, for my own comfort.

anyway, all but two of my plants have died, and, when i was kneeling on the floor scrubbing the toilet, it made my right knee hurt so much, when i got up, that it’s a miracle i didn’t fall. i hobbled over to the bed and it was 45 minutes of heavy breathing on my back before the pain had subsided enough that i could get up and hobble around again. then, after my knee had more or less recovered, i went to deposit one of moe’s $3,500 checks for all of the travelling that she’s been doing recently, and then i went down to auburn to the post office, where i hoped to ask them if they’ve seen the package for which i payed $35, which was shipped from italy on march 4th, and still hasn’t shown up at my house yet… but by the time i got there, it was closed. 😐

oh, and i haven’t even remotely been motivated to eat anything. i forced myself to eat at jack-in-the-box while i was out, and i’ve had a couple of protein bars. i really need to find out where i can get less than a dozen bottles of soylent, because i really like the idea, it’s probably 10 times more healthy than jack-in-the-box… and it’s named after a movie that gives most people the squicks. on the other hand, the smallest number you can buy on their web site is 12, and if i don’t like it, it probably wouldn’t do to try to foist them off on other people.

i’m having the hybrid elephant site redesigned. since i’m not doing it myself, i’m switching “platforms” from oscommerce to wordpress/woo-commerce. i don’t know if i like it so far, but i remember when i was working on oscommerce, at first it really looked horrible, but the closer i got to what i wanted, the more i liked it. an advantage to switching platforms is that i will have a way to process credit cards that is not paypal, about which i am REALLY jazzed, and, even if the site doesn’t come out exactly the way i like, it will be worth it, just for that.

cannabis, drugs, mushrooms

Happy Bicycle Day

What do we now know about LSD (spoiler: it doesn’t destroy your DNA, and it probably won’t make you think you can fly)

Bicycle Day

during my first year of college, towards the end of the year (spring, 1979) a person who is still a good friend of mine (now, 30-plus years later) and i were having a discussion about drugs. at 19, i was still getting a handle on how i felt about drugs in general (after having been staunchly anti-drug throughout my childhood), although i was already an inveterate consumer of cannabis. my friend asked me about “acid” and i said that the only things i had heard about acid were that art linkletter’s daughter had “thought she could fly” and fell out of a 3rd story window to her death “because of LSD”. and, to be honest, i couldn’t imagine how people could enjoy dripping “battery acid” on their skin in hopes of getting high. after having a hearty laugh at my ignorance of the subject, my friend suggested that if i liked cannabis, then i would love LSD, and proceded to get me a hit of blotter to prove it.

i don’t remember much about that trip, apart from meeting another friend of mine somewhat later on, and commenting on how everything seemed hyper-real…

but my friend was right, i learned to love LSD, although these days i much prefer it’s precursor, psylocybin. in fact, according to my estimation, i have taken more acid than all of the other people i know, COMBINED. there were several years where i took LSD two or three times a week, all year around. it got to the point where i would take five hits, get a headache and go to sleep — although, to give some comparison, the first time i took five hits (and several hundred mushrooms, at the same time) i didn’t sleep for 5 nights, and, among other things, had an intimate, revealing conversation with the engine of my girlfriend’s truck.

the last time i took acid, with my wife, we spent a very enjoyable day on the beach in central oregon, with our dogs… i have pictures around here somewhere, but they are actual photographs, taken with actual film, so i would have to find them and scan them before i post any here… i got entranced by the patterns of waves in the shallow water, and i took a whole bunch of really interesting pictures… 😎

i collected some psylocybe semilanceata a couple of years ago, and have been storing them in an airtight container in the freezer… and ever since i found that article about mushroom-induced brain rewiring being the key to fighting mental illness, i have been trying to find myself in a situation where i had the required 3 days to trip (one to prepare, one to trip, and one to “come down”)…

articles, i am a terrorist, links, mushrooms

Mushroom-induced brain rewiring could hold the key to fighting mental illness

Mushroom-induced brain rewiring could hold the key to fighting mental illness
Scott Kaufman
31 Oct 2014

Psychedelic mushrooms dramatically increase connectivity between otherwise uncommunicative parts of the brain, according to researchers from Imperial College London in an article to be published in the November edition of the Royal Society’s journal Interface.

Paul Expert and his team analyzed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from two groups of people — one who had ingested a small amount of the active agent in hallucinogenic mushrooms, psilocybin, and another group who was given a placebo.

They found that the main effect was the creation of stable connections between parts of the brain that, under normal conditions, only communicate with each other in dream states — such as the hippocampus (which deals with short term memory and spatial recognition) and anterior cingulate cortex (which regulates rational cognitive functions).

The result of this stable cross-wiring is a more interconnected brain, as shown on the diagram below:

brain rewiring on mushrooms

On the left is a data visualization of a brain administered the placebo; on the right, one that has been subjected to a mild dose of psilocybin.

“We can speculate on the implications of such an organization,” Dr. Expert said. “One possible by-product of this greater communication across the whole brain is the phenomenon of synaesthesia” — which is the experience of having senses overlap, such that certain smells are accompanied by flashes of color, or certain sounds are accompanied by tastes.

It is also believed that rewiring the brain in this manner may allow scientists to find more effective ways to treat depression or help smokers and alcoholics battle their addictions.

This research is only possible thanks to a a recent loosening on the regulations regarding the study of psychedelic drugs for medical purposes. This is a positive measure, said study co-author Giovanni Petri, who told Wired that “in a normal brain, many things are happening. You don’t know what is going on, or what is responsible for that. So you try to perturb the state of consciousness a bit, and see what happens.”

mushrooms, pictures

Psilocybe semilanceata

Psilocybe semilanceata spore prints

Psilocybe semilanceata spore-prints. i found about 100 of them at moe’s sheep field. i’m absolutely positive that there are more out there… 😎

it was REALLY strange to be finding, and picking mushrooms with other people, doing other things, in the same field… usually, if there’s the first hint of other people in the field, i usually take my mushrooming activities elsewhere… this time, moe, and the actual owner of the field (whose name is jim) were also in the field, talking about sheep… it was really difficult for me to continue (despite having found a hoard of mushrooms) and not walk, slowly and deliberately, in the opposite direction…