PSILOCYBIN PSILINESS

With all the dire shit that's going on lately, both in my own world and the world at large, I have been focusing on positive thoughts and fond memories, and during the evening's reverie I was reminded of the following heartwarming story. Let's set the Wayback Machine to New Year's Eve, 1986 (going into '87): 

I was back from college for winter break and my mom was gearing up to go out for the night to a party. I was granted leave to throw a party of my own in the house, so I invited the usual suspects and one of them brought a big bag of mushrooms that we planned to stew down into a tea. While my mother was still getting ready to head out, I took a suace pot and began brewing down the mushrooms. Before she left, mom saw the simmering pot and asked what it was. I told her it was a Chinese delicacy a friend had brought over and that it had to cook down carefully or it would taste unpleasant and bitter. My mom is very much a "right now" person, so her foodie curiosity was not granted immediate gratification, which disappointed her, but I promised I would save her some of the "soup." That made her happy, but when she got back hours later she was at first annoyed to find out there was nothing left.

Myself and the friend who'd brought the 'shrooms were by that time tripping balls but having a blast, so mom only noted that we seemed happier than usual. (She somehow failed to note that our pupils were as big as eggs.) When she started to bitch about me not having saved any of the soup for her, I was able to avoid a tongue-lashing by telling her it turned out the ingredients my friend had brought had been measured improperly and the end result tasted like bitter tar, so we poured it down the kitchen sink's drain and chucked the solid remains. I showed her the simmered-down mushrooms in the trash, and she totally bought the story. 

From there my buddy and I spent the next couple of hours entertaining my very wasted party guests — most of whom my mother did not realize were bombed; she was very naive — and frequently retreated to the screened-in back porch to smoke joints and marvel at the beauty of the crust on the iced-over snow, which caught the moonlight in a panoply of psychedlic colors. At one point, standing there in the freezing cold, utterly tripped out and mesmerized, the silence was broken when my buddy simply observed "Dontcha love nature?"