Microdosing Mushrooms

I hadn't taken psychedelic mushrooms in a long time for many reasons but mostly because I was afraid of having a bad experience. I wrote a blog post a while back about two experiences I had with large amounts of magic mushrooms. One experience was great and one was horrible so when thinking about taking mushrooms again I always worried about having another bad experience. Earlier this year, though, I decided to try them again but in a more deliberate way. Another reason to take less is that mushrooms can make you vomit or have diarrhea and that didn't seem like a pleasant experience, especially out in the woods. I decided to microdose instead of taking a larger amount and just see what happens.

On a couple of backpacking and camping trips that I went on earlier this year, I brought along some mushrooms. I brought enough to take a large dose but I didn't want to create unnecessary anxiety in a place that I knew I was already going to feel anxious. Sleeping in a tent in the forest provokes a lot of anxiety for me regardless of whether I'm alone or not and whether I'm in a campground or not. When I lay down in the dark my mind goes to work creating a series of fear-inducing imaginings and contemplations. I usually just accept the situation and try to convince myself that I'm ok and that I'm being irrational. 

The total amount of anxiety has gone down over the years with continued backing and camping trips but I still experience fear. Sometimes I just wait until I am completely exhausted or drunk but that isn't always preferred and I don't want to always rely on self-medication to deal with my negative mental states. That being said I decided to try some mushrooms this year to see if it would add to my enjoyment of the great outdoors. 

The first experience was on a fairly strenuous backpacking trip with my two friends. We trekked deep into the damp Washington wilderness where there didn't seem to be anyone anywhere nearby and made camp off the trail. It was lightly rainy most of the time but we didn't bring any dry wood so a great deal of effort was made in creating a suitable basecamp which included putting up a tarp for a dry area to eat and attempting to create fire from the horribly wet environment. 

It was late the first day and I took just a few bits of mushroom and started to roam the forest looking for pieces of wood that might help start and maintain the fire. After about ten minutes I noticed a definite change in both my visual perception and my mood. My vision seemed to widen and the trees around me became more vibrant and alive. I smiled when I realized that the mushrooms were working and the smile led to a deep feeling of joy. I was so happy to be in the forest, with its peaceful silence and earthy smells. 

Prior to the mushrooms, I had a somewhat serious demeanor that was focused on accomplishing goals related to setting up camp and thinking about what was next. After the mushrooms took effect I felt that the moment I was in was that only thing that mattered. Any sense of potential anxiety faded away and throughout the night I felt elevated happiness. Even while I was in my tent anticipating the inevitable anxiety of trying to sleep I felt that the only anxiety I might be feeling was a remnant of my expectation and a memory of past anxiety. There was no authentic anxiety which freed me up to meditate on other things as I fell asleep. 

The next evening I microdosed again and had a less intense version of the same experiences of the previous evening but still experienced an obvious change in mood. It seemed that either I took less or I had become slightly tolerant of the effects but they were definitely there. Less visual disruption but similar mood elevation. It all reminds me of a time when I took a supplement called New Mood from the company Onnit. New Mood is a product that is supposed to increase serotonin production in the brain which has an effect on many things including mood. 

My experience of taking New Mood was intensely powerful and my mood was elevated while I took it. I felt happy in an almost manic way but without any cognitive chaos. The problem was that when I didn't take it I felt a very intense sense of depression. Not taking it for just one day seemed to reduce my mood to something worse than before I started taking it at all. The supplement was very expensive to be taking every day and I knew that I didn't want to rely on it or have to pay for it forever so I had to stop taking it altogether. Taking it periodically would have created a roller coaster of emotional states that I think would be worse than feeling slightly depressed all the time. 

I don't know what the effects of continual microdosing mushrooms would be for me but I don't like the idea of relying on anything so much that I become a slave to it as a solution to issues that might be addressed through more sustainable means. Activities such as exercise, eating well, and generally taking control of my life have done more than any of these drugs or supplements have done for my mental and physical health but I still like the idea of altering my consciousness and experimenting with things that others have gotten value from. The experiences I had with microdosing were positive and I will likely do it again and maybe I will up the dose or try something else in the future as well. 

I do not recommend people microdose mushrooms or take any other drug at all. I don't care what others do with their bodies or consciousness but it seems that people are curious about how substances and activities can affect personal perspectives so I am glad to share my thoughts on this topic. I am glad that more research is being done on the benefits of psilocybin and I think that it is immoral to criminalize drug use of any kind. Knowledge of the effects of substances helps foster safety and efficacy and destigmatizes the unknown. There are reasons to take drugs and they aren't always pragmatic. Sometimes taking a risk in and of itself is valuable and we should all be free to live in a way that generates personal and interpersonal peace. 

 

Here is my previous post about a good and bad mushroom trip:

Re-Post: Shrooms: A Good Trip and a Bad Trip

A Pleasant Haunting

I hold many hymns inside my head.

A pleasant haunting from a time before.

I have a complicated relationship with "The Church".

There are two types of churches that I attended growing up. One was the mainstream small-town Christian Church. It had youth groups, Sunday school, basketball hoops, and a few hundred people would show up each Sunday. I was in a youth group that was a religious version of the Boy Scouts called Awanas. We memorized Bible verses, had sack-races and I'm sure there was some kind of music involved. It was not an unpleasant experience and I was pretty good at memorizing lines from the Bible. Later I would despise the idea of rote memorization and to this day do not put much effort into memorizing things. The idea of memorizing information that someone else thinks is important is offensive.

Also, I remember finding no joy in the words from the Bible. They were just sentences in a book that adults expected me to know. "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son," was just a line from a book and if I could recite it to an adult they would praise me. I don't remember anyone ever asking me if I believed in God. It was assumed, even by myself. Until one day I started to ask questions and found that none of it made any sense.

The second kind of church I attended was called the "Home Church", as it was not affiliated with any known group. Just a bunch of adults getting together to worship God. It was held at the homes' of its adherents and its leader was a permanent bachelor named Jim. The man had never been married or at least that is what I remember of him. He manufactured toilet paper holders with his huge CNC machines and lived alone. I remember visiting his house a few times. He lived in an upstairs apartment attached to his factory. I remember finding it generally unkempt but he had cool stuff like an airplane simulator on his PC and a massive sniper rifle. I suspect that no woman had ever made their way to his apartment long enough to have any input into its design or its inhabitant.

My father lived with Jim for some amount of time after my parents were separated. I always despised my father's lack of ambition and willingness to take from others. It seemed that he was more than happy to take the kindness of strangers until he outstayed his welcome. This is merely an impression I had/have of him but I don't have a lot of great evidence. Maybe it is an exaggerated notion born of my own resentment and ignorance.

"Home Church" was a nightmare. The sermons were dry and dark. I don't remember almost any of the actual content of the sermons but I remember some stuff about not being "worldly" and how to not go to hell. I think there were about 10-15 families at the most and its members changed throughout the years. It also expanded itself to other places a few times a year when we would go on camping trips. Those were a lot of fun and even though I still had to go to Chruch I would get to hang out with my best friend Caleb.

Honestly, Caleb was the best thing to come out of those early days going to Churches. Caleb and I would not stop talking. Even during sermons, we would exchange notes. I remember making fun of everything with him and getting into a little trouble for not paying attention and giggling a few too many times. We were mild scamps, whereas the older boys were the real trouble. They would call them "The Boys", like some kind of gang. "The Boys are going swimming," or "The Boys are going riding", they would say and I always wanted to be in that group. Caleb and I were still too young to go off and do things with "The Boys", so we did our own things. We had imaginations back then and had a lot of fun inventing situations and examining our lives.

As I was writing this I stopped and had a thought:
I should try to seek out good conversations and good conversationalists and not take them for granted. A good conversation is an invigorating thing.

Other than the good times with Caleb, the "Home Church" was generally boring and uneventful, other than the time when someone was expected to give a formal apology, in front of everyone, for separating from their husband and I think she still wasn't allowed to attend certain functions. I could be making that last part up. Or maybe the entire thing. Also, I remember how much pressure the church put on my brother when he got his girlfriend pregnant. They were very young and it was very stupid but the church and my father insisted that the two should get married. My brother, with the strong urging of my mother, decided not to marry her. This turned out to be an amazingly good decision.

Mostly I hate the idea of a "Church" as they represent a kind of propagandized inculcation that reminds me of my childhood and adolescence where I was convinced I was going to hell for most of the things I did and thought. There were so many ways to get there after all. I don't remember the last time I prayed to God but I do remember feeling very stupid for doing it that last time.

I do remember soothing myself by singing "Amazing Grace" while walking around Coos Bay at night because I was so nervous I would get into trouble for the raging High School party occurring at my mom's house, where I lived. My mom was in some high-level position at the same High School that most of the underage partiers went to during the week and she lived there too. She was out of town that weekend and my sister decided to invite a shit ton of underage people to the house to drink.

I might have been 21 at the time and as a resident, I probably would have been in trouble if the cops showed up. My sister was a junior or a senior at the time and had invited just about everyone from the school to come party at her house. I nearly had a panic attack when I realized how many young people were there so I decided to walk around the town in the dark singing to myself the words to "Amazing Grace" until I calmed down enough to go back to the house and deal with it. Nothing much happened, other than a teenage boy broke his leg while skateboarding in the basement. No cops showed up and no parents freaked out. I'm pretty sure my mom found a condom wrapper in one of the rooms. We hadn't cleaned up well enough.

The church represented a place to feel a part of a group that didn't seem to know or care much about me. Other than my friend Caleb I didn't feel connected to almost anyone else at church. It was a place of incoherent judgment and mundane philosophies.

One of my all-time favorite songs is "Hallelujah" by pretty much anyone who sings it. It is a masterful song. I recently started to learn how to play the violin and, more recently, the ukulele. Learning to play music (not that what I do should be considered "music") has completely changed my outlook and appreciation of music. It is simultaneously cognitive and imaginative. It requires a confluence of body and attention, all with the goal of making things better, easier and then automatic.

I am not ashamed or annoyed that I enjoy certain old fashioned religious music. It is one of the only things that I am glad for during my years of involuntary recruitment into "The Church".

Religion is just art turned upside down.

Building Film

Sometimes I forget the 7 years I spent building film.

When I was 19 I got my first management position working for a three screen movie theater. The man that hired me was a great example of how to be a good manager. He was knowledgeable, authoritative, balanced and had a great sense of humor. His honesty and strong work ethic was admirable and I learned a lot from him. I remember one time I decided to get entirely too high on a lunch break and when I was back on shift he noticed immediately. Instead of reacting with moral outrage or firing me, he made a few jokes and then after I had time to come down and realize how I had put my position in jeopardy, he took me aside and had a conversation about what he expected of me and how once he was done expressing his disappointment he made it a point to not keep a grudge. That's when I learned that you can be a leader by being honest about your expectations and not let the tension create a long lasting problem. 

That theater is also where I learned how to build film. Before digital cameras and digital projectors 35 milometer film dominated the film industry and it was a lot of fun to work with. A standard movie came on about three to six separate reels that had to be spliced together to make two very large reels. Then the two huge reels were threaded onto a huge metal platter. Also, the ads at the beginning of the movie had to be added in as well as the cues for the projector to turn off and the theater lights to go down and then back up had to be added. Then the film was threaded through a complex set of rollers, through the projector and back onto another platter from the inside out. 

The reels would arrive in large metal tins containing the separate reels and trailers that would be added. Sometimes the tins would have code names so that the handlers wouldn't know what movie it was and steal it. This was always a fun part of the business because it meant that I knew something most people did not and that what I was working with was very important and expensive. After the media would arrive I would have to create the approved trailer reel. At the beginning end of a reel were many frames of black that would have to be cut off with a splicer tool and when two ends would meet I would tape them together on each side of the seam. It was important to cut exactly at the frame ends and the connect them smoothly. With 24 frames per second and about an inch per frame a two hour movie was roughly 170,000 inches or 14,400 feet (~4 miles), so it took quite a while to turn separate pieces of discrete media into one coherent presentation. 

I can remember one time, when I was first starting in the projection booth, I was alone trying to build a film late at night when most of an entire reel fell to the floor. I spent hours, cursing and sweating, trying to wind up and disentangle long lines of dark film strewn this way and that across the floor. I would often stay up until 4 or 5 in the morning previewing the films that I built to make sure there weren't any errors. I watched "The Notebook", "Veggie Tales" and many other terrible movies but I also watched some of the best movies alone or with work mates after hours where we had the entire theater to ourselves. 

I spent hundreds of hours working in dark booths manipulating hundreds of miles of 35 mm film and developed an expertise in an area that would soon become obsolete but I met a lot of great people, had great conversations and learned a lot in projection booths. I worked hard and learned most of what there was to know about the projection profession, when I wasn't distracted from my work by an amazing scene in the next great movie or surveying the theater from the booth window watching people eating entire dinners or engaging in public sexual acts. It was a time well spent but to no real end. Soon after I left the theater I worked at converted to all digital and building film changed to organizing files on a computer. There are still theaters that haven't converted and there will always be those who appreciate film and the older ways and I'm glad I got the experience of being a small part of the real film industry.

*Here are some pictures from the internet that projectionists might appreciate. 

Mill St. Apartment

The first day I moved into the place on Mill St. a U.S. Marshall asked me if I knew which apartment was number two. Being my first day there I had no idea. As I walked up to my new apartment, on the second floor, I looked back to see two men in body armor serve a forced entry warrant on the neighbors directly below where I would end up living for over three years. I quickly made it to my new apartment and waited as to not get in the way of any armed men. After waiting a few minutes I looked outside my bathroom window and parked in front was a murdered out van and even more officers with "U.S. Marshall" on their backs talking to each other on the sidewalk. An abrupt way to learn about the neighborhood.

Not more than three days later there was a uniformed officer standing outside the neighbor to the right's house. He stood there for a long time and a police car was parked outside for a long time as well. The next day I talked to my new neighbor, Tony and he said that it was a suicide but I never confirmed that so who knows what happened. 

Even with the troubles that come with living in a cheap apartment, run by slum lords, in downtown Springfield, Oregon I miss that place just a little. It had ants once, mice twice and I received 4 tickets for parking on the curb next to it. I had a neighbor who had seizers and was slashed by a knife in the head, by a bum, down at the park nearby. There was a beehive swarming with thousands of bees right outside the back door most of the time and the cops came by a few more times. 

But I am still fond of that apartment. It was the first place I had all to myself. Well, at first I shared it with my girlfriend at the time but it was technically mine. We made a little life there for a while but broke up around a year or so into living there. That's when I found out what it is like to really have my own space. 

I started going on bike rides along a bike path that ran along the beautiful Willamette River which was just a few hundred yards away. I would go on long walks along the river watching the water rush and churn along the banks and think about life. I found a few different swimming spots that I would bike to in the summer. 

The opposite direction of the river was Main Street. There was a market that sold exotic meats like elk, rabbit, and chicken. There was an amazing restaurant where you could get an amazing burger and a great beer. There were great Tai and Mexican places too, and some decent breakfast places; all within walking distance. 

I had a lot of sex in that apartment. I decided to start to act like I cared about myself and my future in that apartment. I changed my outlook more than a few times and had many great conversations in that apartment. I got too high off of a pot cookie and stayed up until 4:30 in the morning pacing around contemplating life in that apartment.

Mill Street was a base camp for adventures in self-discovery and a jumping off point to the new things I am doing now.