Halloween wants mushrooms.

I was hoping the recent bomb cyclone would sprout some down there below the porch, around the base of the plum, their usual spot. But, so far, nothing. Still, a couple days to go. So. Maybe.

Once it was Official Tradition hereabouts that when came Halloween you would wait impatiently for the day to be over, and the kiddies to go out in the evening for the treats, and then when all that was done, you would eat mushrooms, and go to the Road Raisin show, where Bob Burow would be dressed like a wizard, and play like one too. And a good time was had by all.

Mushrooms are their own Ruler, and so their potency, it is whatever they themselves decree. Thus, you never really know what you’ll get. Sometimes you can sufficiently maintain so you could, like, go in and apply for a bank loan. It’s just there’d be kind of a pinkish shimmer to things. Whereas, other times. You go to fucking outer space.

Once, on one of the bank-loan versions, we were sitting out on the porch there in Cazadero, in the sun, enjoying the body high—these were mushrooms that maybe thought they were MDMA—and this UFO showed.

It was your standard The Day The Earth Stood Still silvery saucer. It pulled up and hovered quietly over that ridge yonder. It was just Looking, at us. As we, were Looking at it.

“Is that really a UFO?” she asked. “Or is it a mushroom?”

“Same difference,” I offered.

I had recently received a brainshower that UFOs are how humans currently perceive some who-knows-what-it-is that’s been wandering the lands here since forever. When Ezekiel saw them, around 600 BCE or so, he described them as big-ass wheels, way up in the middle of the air. Because, his brain attempting to grasp deep strangeness, wheels, is what his brain, could relate them to. While the Whatevers at that time appearing over the Americas, they would not be described as wheels, because the humans there hadn’t invented any wheels: so they’d have to be compared to, like, corn, or some shit. Just as nobody anywhere ever reported any “flying saucers,” until after humans had invented aircraft, and started studding the skies with them. So, the brains of the humans, who are these days perceiving the who-knows-what-it-is, slot them as some sort of flying machine. Because that’s what, of their lived experience, they can relate them to.
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But that’s not really what they are.

Someday they’ll be seen in the Real. Though not so long as some 74 million people are voting for Kleagles. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know, even as also I am known.”

I have this book here that says mushrooms are actually space aliens who came to this planet to help humans Grow A Brain.

That could be real. That could be happening.

Joe Ben, she is totally about the who-knows-what-it-is, as seen through a glass darkly, in such as Ezekiel and the wheel. And so she found a big reproduction of that image posted there, in a book, and then gave it to Dave Hurst, who worked deep xerox magic, blowing it up big-ass, and then she framed it, and she hangs it, wherever she may go. It was hanging there in her little train car of a house, when came the fire. And the fire, it came a-rampaging, up to her place, but then it said: Whoa, better hold up, hosses, we can’t flame any such powerful shit, as that. And so the fire, it burned all around. But not the train car. With Ezekiel. And the wheel.

Meanwhile. Back in the mushrooms. Another time the guy who is today the lawyer for all the state’s children, he came at me with this bag of mushrooms, grown in a lab at UC Davis by a budding pharmacist of his acquaintance. He determined we needed to eat them, and then go see one of Jerry Garcia’s side projects, Reconstruction. And so, that happened.

The future lawyer, once in his being the mushrooms made themselves known, planted himself in front of the stage, about three feet from Garcia, and stood there, rooted, for the next four hours.

I was meanwhile sitting back at a table. Where I got knocked on my ass. The mushrooms collapsed my head onto the table, coming to rest in a little spilled beer, which became the primal ocean from which all life on this planet sprang, and I then leisurely traveled through all the time, from the first life inkling there in the waters, to when everybody will go swirling out, a la Childhood’s End.

Garcia, he is good accompaniment, to shit like that.

Then I was lying there in bed one morning with the Mill Valley woman. And I was telling her about the Halloween tradition of the mushrooms and the Road Raisins. And she said the only flaw she saw in that plan is why didn’t we start gobbling the mushrooms first thing in the morning, and then keep at it, all the livelong day, and all into the night?

And then she brought out the mushrooms. And we ate some.

A couple hours later, she’s standing there, at the foot of the bed, holding forth a blouse. And she is puzzled.

“But why,” she asks, “are there clothes?”

“Beats me,” I said. “I certainly don’t think you should ever wear any.”

And it was true. Hiding light like that, under a bushel of clothes—worser, in sin, even, than shooting at mockingbirds.

And now, in the mushrooms, the Mill Valley woman: she Knew, that.

She turned to a dresser, and began slowly removing the clothes.

“Help me with this,” she said. “We need to put them in a pile. Then, I’m going to burn them.”

“Well,” I said. “I don’t know that we need to be burning any clothes.”

These were serious mushrooms. More like LSD.

“If you don’t want them any more,” I suggested, “maybe you could donate them.”

“I would never do that,” she said, eyes wide. “I would never be responsible for anyone wearing clothes.”

But it developed it was too much work, gathering all the clothes—she had quite a lot of them—and so she decided instead we should just walk, naked, into the town. “I need to tell them about the no clothes,” she said.

Right. And then she could tell them about that at the jail, too.

A for sure thing about the hallucinogens, is you do not want to be on them, in any jail.

So I said: “We could do that. But let’s smoke some opium first.”

So we did that. And then, of course, there was no walking. Because opium is pretty much against that sort of movement. Its message is: it’s all just the ocean, so let’s just lie here, gentle, on the waves.

They say opium, it arrests the sex drive. Sometimes. But sometimes. Not.

[video:https://youtu.be/SM0NQroxuoQ]