The northlondonhippy

Archive for October 19th, 2007

Yep, me again. And no, it’s not the threat­ened review of my brand new, shiny, lick­able and super­fast iMac. It’s com­ing. So is xmas. Xmas will not come first, because as we all know, com­ing first is rude.

As I was thread­ing my way through the rush hour traf­fic this morn­ing, strug­gling to get myself home, I started think­ing how much I could really do with get seri­ously out of my skull.

What I mean is, I could really do with a psy­che­delic trip that got me totally off my face. I need to see some pretty colours!

I’ve done acid a hand­ful of times, the last time around 10 years ago. I also used to enjoy magic mush­rooms, around every week or so. I’ve lost count of the num­ber of shroom trips I’ve had.

Magic mush­rooms grow wild all over the UK and a friend of mine would take an annual pil­grim­age to the West Coun­try every autumn to col­lect them. He was always very gen­er­ous with them and I ended up with a few trips yearly.

Then, in 2003 I dis­cov­ered that fresh magic mush­rooms were avail­able, legally to pur­chase and con­sume. I didn’t believe it at first, that you could really buy them that eas­ily. At first, I thought it was some sort of a scam. How wrong I was!

I first ordered them from EDIT my friends who are now the exclu­sive dis­trib­u­tors of my NLH deluxe bong. They arrived the fol­low­ing day and were exactly as described. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

I started research­ing shrooms, learn­ing about dif­fer­ent strains, poten­cies and dosages. With my friend’s West Coun­try shrooms, I never mea­sured them; they were dried and rel­a­tively easy to con­sume, if not totally disgusting.

Fresh shrooms are even nas­tier, slimy and cold, with the flavour of what I expect the insides of a rot­ting corpse might taste like. Gross!

I started out on 30 grams of Mex­i­can p-cubes, which is a rea­son­able, but not overly strong dose — for me any­way. Over the few years I did them reg­u­larly, I worked my way up to higher doses, peak­ing around 55 grams or so.

The trips were amaz­ing, I got to hang out with the mush­room god. Search for him on my site, if you want to know more. Basi­cally, if you eat enough shrooms, the mush­room god vis­its you and shows you the pretty colours!

Shrooms take a while to hit you. On an empty stom­ach, it would take 60–90 min­utes before feel­ing the first effects, with a peak reached any­where from 2–4 hours and last­ing for 4–6 hours. It pretty much wasted a whole day, but what way to waste it!

Psy­che­delic drugs enhance your per­cep­tion; the sim­ple way to under­stand it is they make the synap­tic nerves in your brain fire faster, giv­ing you more sen­sory input. Your vision sharp­ens, as does your hear­ing which makes music sound amaz­ing. As you get fur­ther into your trip, pat­terns in things swish and swirl, wood grain flows like a river.

On one par­tic­u­larly pleas­ant trip, on some Colom­bian p-cubes, right at the point where I peaked, I saw a burst of rain­bow colours in the air, in a sun-filled room. It was astound­ingly beau­ti­ful and com­pletely unex­pected. Colom­bians are appar­ently known for the colours they pro­duce, but try as I did, I was unable to repeat the experience.

No two trips are exactly alike, which is why I had no chance of repeat­ing my explo­sion of colour by pre­med­i­tat­ing it. Shrooms take you on the jour­ney, though I can’t say I really lost any con­trol. Except once…

For my birth­day a few years back, I had some Hawai­ian shrooms, which are very well known for their ultra-high potency. I had tried them before, elect­ing to exper­i­ment with the rec­om­mended starter dose of 10 grams. They didn’t do that much for me. Then, I did some­thing stu­pid, I dou­bled the dose.

Bad move! I had a seri­ously strong trip which ended with me hid­ing under my duvet with my eyes closed for sev­eral hours, still see­ing a multi-coloured geo­met­ric pat­tern stretched from right in front of me, all the way to infin­ity. I couldn’t see what my eyes were see­ing, I could only “see” what my brain was gen­er­at­ing. Kids, I seri­ously rec­om­mend you do NOT try this at home!

A few months after that, the gov­ern­ment put fresh magic mush­rooms into Class A, which is the same cat­e­gory as coke and smack.…the fuck­ers! In no way are shrooms any­where near as bad for you as heroin or crack. Used respon­si­bly, they are very safe, good fun!

Thanks to the actions of some stu­pid tourists, the Dutch have just banned shrooms as well. So much for tol­er­ant Hol­land! The tourists in ques­tion were all drink­ing as well, but booze had noth­ing to do with their unfor­tu­nate inci­dents. Sure thing! Booze never causes any­one any trou­ble, does it?

I think I read that shroom farm­ing is a 14 mil­lion pound a year busi­ness in Hol­land. That’s an awful lot of money to be just throw­ing away. And peo­ple will still want their shrooms, they will just have to go under­ground for them.

I haven’t had any shrooms since the gov­ern­ment out­lawed them. It’s not because I haven’t had the chance, one can still get them, if one knows where to look — like online! You can still get grow kits from Europe, if you really want some and they’re dead easy to grow. I haven’t had any shrooms because I don’t do Class A drugs and haven’t done since I gave up coke and E’s over 5 years ago.

I still love weed and con­tinue to sam­ple lots of dif­fer­ent legal highs, and as of today, I wouldn’t mind some­thing psy­che­delic. I don’t think I will actively seek any­thing elec­tric, but should I be offered some shrooms or even a blot­ter, I would be sorely tempted to accept the universe’s gen­eros­ity. I could really use a lit­tle break from real­ity right now, I think it would do my men­tal health a world of good.