Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs: From Toad Slime to Ecstasy

Rating:
Summary: A Stratospheric Delight!
Review: The essays within this wavy tome range from the literally high echelon articulations of the late Terence McKenna to the average Joe Tripster unused to having his brain massively dilated from a dose of mushrooms but somehow able to write about it afterwards. I was especially humored by the story of Charles Olson ,the Maximus poet, flipping out in the woods after dropping some geniune Sandoz with friends, thinking he was an Arcadian Brick Maker of a bygone epoch. He was later transported back home by a local cop who didn't have the psychedelic acumen to understand what was really going on. An essay describing a group of teenagers tripping in their parents's kitchen was also intriguing. One of the tripsters started ball point penning her communiques with god directly onto her mother's linen table cloth while another was busy smearing butter all over the walls in some greasy act of hallucinogenic gratitude. Another story I found amusing was about some guy jacking off at a Grateful Dead concert (obviously their horrible music wasn't doing it for him). People formed a fifty foot circle around the dosed up onanizer as he shot his paisley patterned load with a 'shroom eating grin on his face. Maybe it was a good thing there was no egg waiting around for his seed. R.U. Sirius's essay on tripping with the Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Noise crowd was one of the more poignant samples of social commentary in the book, but a bit of a downer nonetheless. Quite a statement R.U. makes on the emptiness of it all and how far these so called celebrities go in order to deny that their names always will be cardboard in the ultimate scheme of things.

I tended to favor the essays on or by such hallucinogenic luminaries as Dr. John Lilly, Ralph Metzner and Timothy Leary mainly because of their evident deftness in translating their drug experiences into words. There's a short but touching piece by Robert Anton Wilson about his realization that a Christmas Tree actually loved him during one of his first Peyote trips way back in 1962. How odd for an agnostic like him to say that! The early drug pioneers had the fortune of having a much more pristine setting to trip in, unlike today where a trip may only help you perceive the matrix more and more clearly but not offer you a way out of it. This is one of the main reasons I haven't imbibed in anything for over fourteen years and probably never will again the way things are going these days on the grid.

However, for a card carrying member of the sugar cube and ecstacy tab smashing Temperance League like myself, I was easily able to get a contact high from much of the text without having to suffer the after effects, so vivid, alive and effective is the compilation Krassner has put together. After reading the essay on John Lilly and his cetacean epiphanies, I felt the urge to go on a bicycle ride. I told my father who I was visiting at the time that `I was going to sermonize the Sunfish.' over in the state park. That sounded really lysergic when it came out of my mouth. As my book high started to further kick in, the tires of my mountain bike turned into Uroboric snakes with neon knobby patterns on their backs. Some Jivaro Indians in a neighbor's pumpkin patch down the road were laughing at me as I rolled on by. One of the Amazon shamans shot some kind of snuff into my nose through a particle beam accelerator. Everything became alive in a most unusual way. I then rounded a corner, passed by a 'Support Our Troops' sign in some redneck's yard and then did pho wa on a thirteen stripe gopher that was covered with flies and wished it a better life next time around.

As I pedaled away from the rigor mortised rodent, all of a sudden I felt these archetypal tripsters surrounding me, occupying, in Paul Bunyan dimensions, the glacially honed rural landscape. Terence McKenna, Tim Leary and other post-mortem entheonauts rose out of the terminal moraine and thundered permission to me to open my awareness to the wildest realities they so willingly and lovingly offered. No small feat for someone like myself who could sell his urine on the black market, so clean it is at the moment. I then went swimming and just felt myself dissolve like I have not done for so long. No anxieties, no agendas. Surely it was more than the power of suggestion. I truly believe I was tapping into something that Mr. Krassner has been subliminally and lovingly cultivating for many, many year. What a gift that he is sharing it with us now, in the era of such savage retrogression via the D.A.R.E. trolls hiding under all of our synaptic bridges.

When I dog paddled back to shore, I flashed the Rat Pack licking toads on a Las Vegas stage and instantly tripping their brains out. Dean Martin analyzed the fractal patterns coming out of Frank's forehead and sang about it. Fortunately I was able to put a stop to the vision before it got too ugly and before the mafia arrived to prevent me from leaving the club. Maybe this was matrix intrusion or some kind of punishment for the good time I was having with my naturally expanded mind within the cool confines of the kettle lake I was grooving on. After rescuing a Horse Fly from some lake foam that I initially tried top kill, I then thought that it sure would be interesting if Paul could be George W. Bush's trip guide like he was for Groucho Marx. In a way it would be a kind of ultimate challenge-trying to expand a mind that really doesn't exist in the first place. A real Zen Koan in the making.

Rating:
Summary: A Stratospheric Delight!
Review: The essays within this wavy tome range from the literally high echelon articulations of the late Terence McKenna to the average Joe Tripster unused to having his brain massively dilated from a dose of mushrooms but somehow able to write about it afterwards. I was especially humored by the story of Charles Olson ,the Maximus poet, flipping out in the woods after dropping some geniune Sandoz with friends, thinking he was an Arcadian Brick Maker of a bygone epoch. He was later transported back home by a local cop who didn't have the psychedelic acumen to understand what was really going on. An essay describing a group of teenagers tripping in their parents's kitchen was also intriguing. One of the tripsters started ball point penning her communiques with god directly onto her mother's linen table cloth while another was busy smearing butter all over the walls in some greasy act of hallucinogenic gratitude. Another story I found amusing was about some guy jacking off at a Grateful Dead concert (obviously their horrible music wasn't doing it for him). People formed a fifty foot circle around the dosed up onanizer as he shot his paisley patterned load with a 'shroom eating grin on his face. Maybe it was a good thing there was no egg waiting around for his seed. R.U. Sirius's essay on tripping with the Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Noise crowd was one of the more poignant samples of social commentary in the book, but a bit of a downer nonetheless. Quite a statement R.U. makes on the emptiness of it all and how far these so called celebrities go in order to deny that their names always will be cardboard in the ultimate scheme of things.

I tended to favor the essays on or by such hallucinogenic luminaries as Dr. John Lilly, Ralph Metzner and Timothy Leary mainly because of their evident deftness in translating their drug experiences into words. There's a short but touching piece by Robert Anton Wilson about his realization that a Christmas Tree actually loved him during one of his first Peyote trips way back in 1962. How odd for an agnostic like him to say that! The early drug pioneers had the fortune of having a much more pristine setting to trip in, unlike today where a trip may only help you perceive the matrix more and more clearly but not offer you a way out of it. This is one of the main reasons I haven't imbibed in anything for over fourteen years and probably never will again the way things are going these days on the grid.

However, for a card carrying member of the sugar cube and ecstacy tab smashing Temperance League like myself, I was easily able to get a contact high from much of the text without having to suffer the after effects, so vivid, alive and effective is the compilation Krassner has put together. After reading the essay on John Lilly and his cetacean epiphanies, I felt the urge to go on a bicycle ride. I told my father who I was visiting at the time that 'I was going to sermonize the Sunfish.' over in the state park. That sounded really lysergic when it came out of my mouth. As my book high started to further kick in, the tires of my mountain bike turned into Uroboric snakes with neon knobby patterns on their backs. Some Jivaro Indians in a neighbor's pumpkin patch down the road were laughing at me as I rolled on by. One of the Amazon shamans shot some kind of snuff into my nose through a particle beam accelerator. Everything became alive in a most unusual way. I then rounded a corner, passed by a 'Support Our Troops' sign in some redneck's yard and then did pho wa on a thirteen stripe gopher that was covered with flies and wished it a better life next time around.

As I pedaled away from the rigor mortised rodent, all of a sudden I felt these archetypal tripsters surrounding me, occupying, in Paul Bunyan dimensions, the glacially honed rural landscape. Terence McKenna, Tim Leary and other post-mortem entheonauts rose out of the terminal moraine and thundered permission to me to open my awareness to the wildest realities they so willingly and lovingly offered. No small feat for someone like myself who could sell his urine on the black market, so clean it is at the moment. I then went swimming and just felt myself dissolve like I have not done for so long. No anxieties, no agendas. Surely it was more than the power of suggestion. I truly believe I was tapping into something that Mr. Krassner has been subliminally and lovingly cultivating for many, many year. What a gift that he is sharing it with us now, in the era of such savage retrogression via the D.A.R.E. trolls hiding under all of our synaptic bridges.

When I dog paddled back to shore, I flashed the Rat Pack licking toads on a Las Vegas stage and instantly tripping their brains out. Dean Martin analyzed the fractal patterns coming out of Frank's forehead and sang about it. Fortunately I was able to put a stop to the vision before it got too ugly and before the mafia arrived to prevent me from leaving the club. Maybe this was matrix intrusion or some kind of punishment for the good time I was having with my naturally expanded mind within the cool confines of the kettle lake I was grooving on. After rescuing a Horse Fly from some lake foam that I initially tried top kill, I then thought that it sure would be interesting if Paul could be George W. Bush's trip guide like he was for Groucho Marx. In a way it would be a kind of ultimate challenge-trying to expand a mind that really doesn't exist in the first place. A real Zen Koan in the making.

Rating:
Summary: entertaining collection of stories--but still no Pot Stories
Review: This is Krassner's third collection of drug stories, to go along with his collection of marijuana stories (Pot Stories for the Soul) and LSD stories (Psychedelic Trips for the Mind). This is a good collection of tales about experiences with magic mushrooms, ecstasy, peyote, mescaline, THC, opium, cocaine, ayahuasca, belladonna, ketamine, PCP, STP, "toad slime," and others. The chapters on magic mushrooms and ayahuasca are pretty good-sized collections of interesting stories; many of the others are quite small. There are only a few that have quite the humor value of many of the stories in Pot Stories for the Soul, but I think this volume is a better collection than Psychedelic Trips for the Mind.