The smoke rose from my cigarette as I tried to move, unsuccessfully. Whatever was in those mushrooms was working, or wasn’t working depending on your perspective. I smiled at the thought, odd how success and failure is relative. I was sitting sideways in the chair, my body forming an ‘M’ with the armrests under my knees and neck. I smiled again at the thought, the so-called ‘proper way’ of sitting in a chair was relative.
The effort it took to ash my cigarette was monumental and I put the thing out to avoid the whole process again. Far too much work, far too few fucks given. I smiled at the thought that this could be a cure for smoking, or something like that. They say psychedelics have a lot of potential, if quitting smoking because moving is extremely difficult is one of them, I don’t know.
My buddy is a grad student in botany and always has the hookups for weird plants and fungi to eat. Some cacti he’s given me have been rocket ship rides to the center of some weird places, some mushrooms seem to just glide along with the tunes I bump. I smile at the fleeting thought of calling them ‘funky fungi.’ This was, in no uncertain terms, a non funky fungi. Well it was a fungi, just very, very not funky. It had come with words of warning that, all things considered, I probably should have heeded. I shrugged at the thought, or I thought I shrugged, not sure how in control of my body I am or how well my thoughts are translated into actions. The cigarette ashing incident for example.
He handed me the red caps with a laugh. I held them in my hand and they looked fake- or perhaps what the prop department would send down for magic mushrooms. Far too colorful, too fake. He mentioned rather emphatically that this would get weird. He said when he had tried the first generation of this strain he had foamed at the mouth, with the second he had been locked in some weird repetitive motion loop. He dropped his laptop on accident, then continued to pick it up and drop it. His horrified girlfriend sat in shock, then bemusement, then horror as the thing was slowly and steadily smashed by continued dropping. My worried face piqued his scientist sense of humor. He said the experiment was a double success, he found out what the mushroom does and he found out how many times his computer can be dropped before its case loses structural integrity. “28” he said laughing more. This third round was mellow, though, or at least it was for him and his girlfriend who I’m sure took a lot of convincing to participate.
They had been mellow, or are mellow, again depending on your perspective. I’d actually thought they were a bust at first- maybe in his efforts to breed out the negatives, my buddy had bred out all the fun too. When I was three puffs into my smoke, though, they hit me like a fucking freight train. Perhaps it was the mixture with the nicotine, I’ll have to tell my friend about that for his experiments. If I can ever stand up again. I smiled at the thought. Looks like the experiment was a success.
