The Haunted Winter

6

Isolation, darkness, wandering, numbness, resilience, survival

What remains of The Seeker walks shivering along a bleak and barren landscape, outside of light and darkness, alone but haunted by shadows without substance, shadows cast by the emptiness itself. He’s seen too much to remain a Fool; The Eclipse has passed and the illusions of Pareidolia have vanished in The Plummet; and The Magician’s secrets have been reduced to incomplete leprous quibble on yellowing pages under Death’s unyielding watch. There is nothing tending the light at the end of the tunnel, nothing to run from, and all of the atoms and molecules that make up The Seeker have been isolated and reduced to their component parts; all that remains intact is the will to survive this bleak and Haunted Winter. For lack of a better idea, The Seeker marches on through the cold.

 A few months later, I had my first real mushroom trip. It was a rainy night and I was walking home from work. I took a detour past a mushroom picking spot outside of Kura Park that William had showed me. I'd never seen a magic mushroom in real life before, but William had taken me and Ryan hunting a few times. We always ended up finding mushrooms that William referred to as 'imposter shrooms'; apparently, these looked exactly like psilocybin mushrooms, the only difference being that the stalks of these ones would bruise a brownish-red colour when picked, while magic mushroom stalks would bruise a blue-black colour. From this, I had a vague idea of what I was looking for.

After just a few minutes, foraging around a bark garden by phone light, I found a small patch of mushrooms that resembled the imposters. I picked them and took them out to the street light, hoping they would bruise blue. After a few minutes, the stalks got darker, but there wasn't enough light to discern the hue. Eventually, a droplet of rain on one of the mushrooms caught the light, refracting a hint of dark, metallic blue. I took this as confirmation and crammed them into my mouth. They tasted like dirt and made me gag a little, but they were easier to get down than datura flowers or nutmeg, and much, much easier than chugging mescaline sludge.

Excited at the prospect of finally having an actual mushroom trip, I got down on all fours and foraged deeper into the undergrowth by phone light. I found a few batches of imposters before I came across another shroom, but the next few came quickly after. I ate them as I found them, following the trail further into the trees. It was hard to tell the difference between psychedelic mushrooms and the imposters without picking them, but I soon noticed small differences that made it easier. The imposters grew in dense clusters of 5 or so, while the shrooms were generally by themselves, or in small clusters that were more spaced out than the imposters. The imposters were also flimsy, their stalks disintegrating into stringy sinew when I picked them.

I didn't keep track of how many I was eating, and, to some extent, forgot that they were even psychoactive. I just got completely absorbed in the task. The dirt and rain didn't bother me at all. In fact, I found the sensations weirdly satisfying. Periodic flashes of lightning illuminated the gardens as I searched. Though I didn't realise it yet, I was already coming up. I felt energised and focused, but also a little drunk. Nothing overtly psychedelic yet. My mind was fairly blank and invested in the game of finding more shrooms. It was comparable to the state of mind I'd found myself in when I skated well in contests, when I could forget the spectators and just flow without thinking or hesitating, following endless momentum. In this way, its effects were kind of the opposite of mescaline, which gave me a sense of viewing myself from the outside; and LSA, which made my surroundings feel alien and my mind fragmented and scattered.

Probably about half an hour after eating the first lot of mushrooms, I started to notice the first visuals, and a very strong body high, and gave up the hunt to feel the trip. I laid down on the damp grass and stared at the sky. The visuals were subtle at this point. The black shadows of the trees above me and the void of sky beyond no longer consisted of differing degrees of blackness, but seemed to be illuminated with a dark navy violet glow from within, and the almost-full moon emitted a fiery electric-blue aura. My body seemed to vibrate with an inner-warmth - similar to what I'd experience at later points with quality MDMA - which made the sensation of raindrops and cold, damp earth on my skin feel pleasantly tingly. I have no idea how many mushrooms I ended up eating; but, I'd gone from feeling a bit hungry to almost uncomfortably full. A violet flash of lightning seemed to tear open the sky, lingering as a misty blue after-image that faded over ten seconds or so, and I realised I was tripping balls.

I stayed in that spot for a while, completely immersed in the sensations. Each flash of lightning got brighter and more colourful - radiating along the green-blue-purple spectrum - and took on increasingly detailed imagery. One particularly bright flash manifested as an explosion of endless violet lizards scrambling out from the centre across the sky, and shocked me into awareness of my situation - I was lying on my back in a thunderstorm, completely soaked, peaking on mushrooms, and much more visible from the street than I thought. It was time to find shelter.

My flat was all the way on the other side of the park, so I set off to Ty's house, a few blocks away. I felt some sense of urgency about getting out of the rain, but I wasn't anxious - just slightly annoyed at the intrusion of practical, sober thoughts. My mood was euphoric and giddy. The reflections of the streetlights on the wet ground were multicoloured, like the rainbow shimmer of an oil slick. The wind had picked up, and the raucous sway of the trees seemed to be responding to the flashes of lightning, their movements feeding the crack of thunder that would follow. I tried to text Ty and make sure he was home, but I couldn't read any words past the glow of the screen, kaleidoscoping under the droplets of water.

I got to Ty's place and went to the basement, where a few people were drinking and getting stoned. Ty was a classic sociopath as opposed to psychopath by nature: Treat him good, he'll treat you better; treat him bad, he'll treat you worse. He was stoked to see me wet and wild-eyed on mushrooms, and got me a towel and a dry hoodie and pair of jeans to wear while my clothes dried off next to the portable stove top they were heating up knives on. My friends Stu, Gareth, Darren, and Bjorn were there, along with a person I hadn't met before, Dylan, who was Ty's cousin or something.

Ty offered me a beer and a spot, but I didn't feel like either, and asked him if he had a pen and paper I could draw on. He gave me a permanent marker and told me to draw on the walls. Drawing on shrooms was interesting in a different way than mescaline, which would create visuals on the surface that I would trace; instead, razor thin neon colours manifested on the outsides of the thick, black lines, and the cream-coloured walls appeared to have depth and contours, like the curved face of a cave wall. I used the illusionary peaks and valleys as a guideline for the distance from fore-mid-background as I drew a landscape of imagined plants and creatures.

As I drew, my attention split off in two directions. One followed my body as it clambered around on the furniture and in between people, following my hand along the wall. This one was passive and instinctual, almost like I was just keeping an eye on my body to make sure it didn't do anything too whacky.

The other consciousness was a much more active one. As my body moved along the walls, my mind was trying to solve a complex, labyrinthine puzzle: What the other people in the room were talking about. Eventually, I realised I was actually listening to three different conversations. One one side of me, Stu and Gareth were talking about hunting goats in the bush. On the other side, Ty was talking to Bjorn about a mission he'd been on into the mountain ranges to tend to his weed crops. On the couch opposite them, Dylan was telling Darren about some kind of boot camp juvenile detention centre he'd recently been released from, that was run at a compound which, by the sounds of it, was located in a bush on an island off the coast somewhere, or maybe some kind of area largely surrounded by ocean.

In my mind, this was all one conversation. I imagined them to be describing some kind of militantly run grow operation on an island forest, where the workers stayed in a compound, and were woken up at 6AM and forced to do push-ups and run laps of the perimeter, before patrolling the island with guns, hunting any animal or human life that might threaten their operation. Both the initial task of weaving the story together from separate units of information, and the later task of deconstructing the fiction into its component parts, were very entertaining and satisfying. I enjoyed the 'aha!' moments of piecing something together almost as much as the 'wait, what?' moments when I realised it was the product of my hyper-stimulated imagination.

For whatever reason, the shrooms that grow in Newmouth are unusually potent and plentiful. Because of this, there was always a lot of folklore and superstition around them. Most of this was along the same lines as the 'acid stays in your spine and causes flashbacks' or 'if you've had over twenty trips you're considered legally insane' myths that proliferated in the first acid wave of the sixties. Shrooms that grew in a certain part would give you a bad trip. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who bought a dog off someone whose cousin ate the wrong mushroom and was now stuck in a trip. The trip only kicks in when you take the first piss. Shrooms were only illegal once you picked them, so if you ate them straight from the ground without using your hands you weren't breaking the law. A load of shit, mostly. But there was one that I found to be eerily accurate, even though it was an obvious bastardization of the 'chasing the dragon' myth - usually attributed to either shooting up opiates or smoking meth - which states that after your first experience with that drug or route of administration or whatever, then you'd spend the rest of your life trying to capture that feeling again.

I've heard a few different versions of this myth. The most common - and, I think, furthest from the truth - was that the first shrooms of the season would give you a bright, colourful, euphoric trip; but, as the season progresses, the shrooms became more less psychedelic and more psychotic, until the last generation that grows at the end of winter, which would drive you insane. A slightly more grounded version states that the first trip of the season is always the best; but, from there, each successive trip becomes less visual and euphoric, until all they do is make you confused and depressed. I think it's all just generations of shroom heads trying to say that it's best to space out your trips. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. You can have too much of a good thing. Something like that. My first trip had all the most fun and exciting parts of acid, mescaline, and LSA, but without any of the confusion, nausea, or anxiety - so much so that it seemed to set me on a mission to prove that urban myth right.

I still don't know whether this next part was a dream.

At about 4AM, the morning after my first shroom trip, I woke up to William standing in my doorway, silhouetted against the searing kitchen light, with a dog. I have no idea whose dog it was or how he got into my flat. He asked me whether I wanted to go for a shroom hunt with him. I told him to fuck off and rolled over to go back to sleep. Indignant, William said, 'Fine I'll just go then,' and left.

A few days later, me and William were hanging out with Ryan at his flat. That night, I got a message from Ty telling me to come over because him and Bjorn were boiling up a bunch of shrooms. I asked if I could bring Ryan and William, and he said it was fine as long as William doesn't be too much of a fuckwit. So that was us three up and off to Ty's.

For everyone except me, this was the first shroom trip of the season; for Ryan, it was his first ever shroom trip. We arrived at the basement with a cup of mushroom tea each waiting for us. I have no idea what kind of dose it was, outside of Bjorn's metric of, 'Like a shopping bag.'

We all started to feel the trip about ten minutes after drinking our tea. It came on much faster than my last one, but seemed to reach its peak in like half an hour, and stayed at that level for three or four hours without building up or wearing off.

It was a lot milder than my first trip. I continued my drawing on the walls. Ty and Ryan smoked weed and talked shit, both uncharacteristically animated and giggly. Bjorn, a punk rocker and budding opiate addict, strummed his guitar with a CD as a pick, occasionally crooning incoherent lyrics in a guttural, almost Cobain-ish howl that reeked of benzos as much as it did shrooms. I didn't notice how unusually quiet William had been, until Ty made an astute observation and announced it to the group: 'Oi what the fuck? William's fucking crying!'

I turned away from my drawing, and, sure enough, William was sitting with his eyes closed, tears running down his cheek. I wanted to talk to him, but I felt disconnected from the situation, and didn't want to do it with the whole room watching him. This wasn't the kind of crowd to provide comfort or understanding. The only sympathy he got was Bjorn punching his knee and asking what's wrong with him.

Without opening his eyes, William shook his head and said, 'This isn't who I want to be.'

To help clarify matters, Ty asked, 'Yeah but are you fucking sad or what?'

William just kept shaking his head and repeating, 'This isn't who I want to be.'

Bjorn started strumming again, and William opened his eyes. He started rambling about how we've all gone down the wrong path, and that none of us wanted to end up like this.

Real or imagined, I could feel the tension building toward certain horror. At that point, I was perched on the arm of the couch William was sitting on, with a silent Ryan between us. Impulsively and very much out of character, I said, 'William, you were told this on your first shroom trip, and I'm telling you again: Shut the fuck up.'

William looked at me with shiny eyes and nodded in acknowledgement. He later told me that I saved his life with that comment, though I'm still not sure exactly what he meant by that. Seems like a good thing.

Bjorn and Ty moved past the discomfort pretty quickly and got into an argument about whether or not shrooms stop you from getting a boner. I distracted myself by returning to my drawing. Ryan and William sat silently, until, abruptly, William got up and left.

The rest of us hung out in the basement for a little while after that, until Bjorn and Ty decided they were ready to sleep - Bjorn was passing out on weed and benzos, and Ty was bored and had a weird ability to sleep when he felt like it no matter what drug he'd taken. I was still restless, so I walked back to Ryan's with him. Away from Bjorn and Ty, I asked Ryan what he thought we should do about William. Ryan laughed and said that William was probably at home ashamed that we'd seen him cry. I remember looking at Ryan under the streetlights after he said that and seeing a different version of him than the one I knew. It was like the shadows of his face changed, turning his comical, slightly clownish features into a sinister grin.

A few days later, we found out that William committed himself to the psyche ward that night. This became that shroom season's contribution to the mushroom folklore of the town: William took shrooms and got sent to the psych ward. In reality, as I later found out, he'd been experiencing psychosis ever since our datura trip, and his mental health had continued to deteriorate through excessive mescaline, LSA, and alcohol intake. That shroom trip just made him realise he was unwell.

For Ty, Bjorn, Ryan, and I, this became routine. We took shrooms two or three times a week. At first, we would usually have one or two of our other friends tripping with us; over time, the crew dwindled down to us four. Sometimes we hung out in the basement all night; other times, we'd go out into the night, stomping around in the rain in gumboots, vandalising stuff, occasionally robbing cars and garages or getting into fights.

William got out of the psych ward after about a week, and his unsettling presence haunted us - me in particular. He would turn up at Ty's house uninvited and try to tell us to stop taking drugs, be better people, and basically act as an irritating cliche of the junky who has found Christ. Eventually Ty stopped letting him in. He messaged me constantly, telling me I needed to check myself into the psyche ward, that I'm not supposed to know the answers to the questions I asked, and that I was worrying my parents. On the rare occasion I went to the skatepark, I often found him there, picking up rubbish and preaching good morals to the kids - who clearly saw him as an annoying drug-casualty and paid him very little attention - and berating me and my friends for smoking or drinking in front of them. He sometimes turned up at Ty's to give us his old clothes, and not leave until we took them. During one of my shifts at work, he turned up at my checkout, buying a bucket and some balloons, staring at me knowingly as if he expected me to divine some kind of message or insight from those items. Another time, Ryan and I went to Ty's place to take shrooms. We found Ty stewing in rage, telling us he was going to beat the fuck out of William. Apparently William had messaged Ty that day, asking, 'Where's Satan?' (Satan being Ty's cat) Ty later found Satan scratched up and bleeding, as well as a blank envelope in his letterbox containing a white feather. From this, he concluded that William had beaten up his cat. William turned up when we were tripping in the basement that night, and Ty greeted him with a punch in the face. William denied any knowledge of the white feather, or what happened to Satan, and lingered around for a while, leaving just as Ty got ready to beat the shit out of him.

Everything got blurry for me after about a month of that lifestyle. I smoked weed with Ryan and Darren in between shroom nights, which turned everything into one prolonged trip. I lost sight of the shamanic mysteries I once pursued, and just kept floating aimlessly through a psychedelic void, remembering vaguely that I had been looking for something, and hoping that if I drifted far enough and for long enough, then some kind of direction would reveal itself to me. My workmates got concerned about my behaviour. I had turned from a spaced-out and weird but basically okay skater-stoner kid to a drugged fucked phantom. A few too many times, I got told off for misjudging the size of objects, trying to put big items into small bags or getting out a ludicrously large bag for one or two small objects. My perception had become severely skewed.

Life at Ty's got darker. Above the basement, the house was inhabited by a constantly changing combination of various members of Ty's family - they were mostly skinheads and criminals, and a few of them used the place as a halfway house after prison or rehab or whatever. Ty took after them, shaving off his thick dreadlocks and adopting a juvenile version of the skinhead mentality without really understanding what it meant outside of being a violent delinquent. Ty was a kind of de facto leader of the group, and Ryan and Bjorn ended up shaving their heads too; as well as some of the peripheral members of our group such as Stu, Gareth, and Darren. I kept my long hair. But my friends often tried to convince me to shave it off, threatening to do so themselves if I ever passed out. William shaved his head a month or so earlier, after Tommy. He later told me that by giving all of us his clothes and convincing us to shave our heads, he was creating decoys to throw off whoever it was he thought was after him. I was amused and then deeply disturbed by the thought of trying to spot William in a crowd of almost Williams.

As shroom season stretched on, we left the basement and associated with our other friends less and less. Ryan was the one I was closest to, as he was, like me, new to this world of chaos and darkness. Bjorn had graduated into using needles, and the basement - which was also his bedroom - gradually took on the appearance of the stereotypical crack-den. Ty was also a fisherman, and sometimes sold lobsters from the house, which he kept alive in the bathtub upstairs; if any of us had the misfortune of having to take a shit on one of our mushroom trips, we'd have to do so next to a tub overflowing with lobsters. Sometimes, one or two of the lobsters found their way out of the tub and would be creeping around on the floor. All the while, I just kept on drawing on Ty's walls.

I stopped taking Citalopram and Zopiclone out of apathy; I stopped taking Ritalin for other reasons. My half-sister, Mara, had tracked me down. I never knew her very well - she's about ten years older than me, and had mostly vanished into a netherworld of drugs and insanity by the time I was forming my first long-term memories. My only childhood memories of her are of a stranger who would periodically turn up in our lives and fuck up whatever semblance of normality and routine my parents had managed to create around the rhythms of my brother's illness. That winter, she somehow found out that I had a Ritalin prescription, and was present in my life once more. She was heavily addicted to meth and opiates at that point, and introduced me to a few of her junky friends, who started buying my Ritalin off me. Like William, the junkies started to haunt my increasingly dark life. They learnt my work roster, when I picked up my prescription, and where I was likely to be found on my days off, and harassed me for Ritalin constantly. Eventually, I started selling them my whole script, or trading it for weed, just because I didn't care enough not to.

In hindsight, my life had all the signs of a depressive episode. For the most part, I'd stopped skating or socialising with anyone besides Ryan, Ty, and Bjorn. When I wasn't at work or on shrooms, I'd zone out in bed, getting lost in endless mazes of thoughts that led nowhere. Outside of my shrooms trips, I lived a largely passive existence, drifting along the path of least resistance, just staying alive between trips. It was almost like a particularly obscure addiction, a psychedelic limbo, like there was an answer waiting for me that would make everything make sense and give my life meaning, and it always felt like it was just one shroom trip away.

For the first month or so - in accordance with the small town folklore - my shroom trips were small breaks from this emptiness. They made me feel human: I was energetic, creative, and curious, covering every corner of Ty's basement with intricate scenes of landscapes and creatures; I also embraced the positive reinforcement my friends gave to my problematic character traits, and enjoyed releasing the anger and frustration I didn't know I had toward society in the form of destruction and chaos. At the start, Ty, Bjorn, and Ryan liked to playfight and box when we tripped; I sometimes joined them; but, being physically weak and frail, I usually happy to draw and grope around my mind for some kind of coherent thought. When we went out freaking in the world, we constantly seemed to be on the verge of getting into a fight or getting arrested. Though it made me anxious, I also enjoyed the adrenaline, as well as the strange and pathetic sense of freedom I felt being a part of the kind of group I'd usually be worried about coming across. Walking the streets on rainy nights, we'd check every car door to see if it's unlocked, stealing shit that we'd often end up throwing away. By the second month of the season, this lifestyle had started to take its toll on me and Ryan, though Bjorn and Ty were relatively unaffected. Bjorn had started shooting up opiates and taking benzos, so was less alien; Ty was just a crazy fucker with no fear.

On one tripped-out night, we got into a fight with another group of wasted people wandering the streets. Me and some dude from the other group ended up sitting down and talking while we watched our friends fight it out. Ryan and Bjorn weren't really scrappers, but they both had this sense of abandon that made anyone who tried to fuck with us uneasy. But Ty was terrifying in a fight. He feared no one, and would go from playful taunting to full animal in seconds; the constant shrooming also gave him a psychological edge, wily and unpredictable. He had weapons made from shark's teeth, seahorse skeletons, and other unlikely objects. That night, the cops turned up to break up the fight. A couple of the guys from the other group started yelling at the cops, telling them to arrest us, that we were a pack of psychos, all that kind of thing. The cops clearly didn't give a fuck, and just told us all to walk home away from each other. While the cops were distracted, Ty slapped one of the other dudes in the face, less than a foot away from the cops. The guy started screaming at the cops, saying, 'Did you see that!? He just slapped me!' Ty just shrugged and we walked off laughing while the cops dealt to our belligerent opponents, shouting as we walked away.

For the most part, the only time I skated that season was while tripping. But they were some of my favourite trips. Most of the extended group skated around a bit, but weren't into doing tricks or anything. One tripped-out night, Ty's friend, Earl, drove Me, Ty, Bjorn, and Ryan around in his van. Earl was a middle-aged sex pest and drug dealer, who was confined to a wheelchair from a motorbike accident in his youth. He'd gotten some kind of payout from the accident, and now lived a hedonistic lifestyle, his van and household decked out with lights and surround sound speakers, which we would sometimes trip out to. That night, he drove us to the top of pretty much every hill in Newmouth to skate down. Toward the end, he towed the four of us down the street, slowly accelerating; the others let go, one by one, but I kept hold until he reached 70K and refused to go faster. The feeling of being towed at 70K on a skateboard while peaking on shrooms is indescribable; the visuals, sensations, and mind spirals vanished, and I felt no sense of danger, just pure focus, like I'd completely merged with my surroundings; a drastic contrast to the apathetic and brain-dead headspace I found myself in during the daytime that season.

By the first breath of spring, these kinds of trips were a thing of the past. Joe, Dane, and a few more of my brother's friends came up from Carrington to find me haunted and withdrawn; and, out of concern for both me and my parents, invited me to move to Carrington with them to become anything other than what I was.

They were right: It was time to go. My shroom trips had lost their magic, and now only magnified the confusion and anxiety they once took me away from. I had covered every inch of Ty's basement walls and now felt aimless and lost tripping down there with no activity to lose myself in. Ryan became increasingly sullen and withdrawn, and eventually committed himself to the psyche ward as his suicidal thoughts took hold. Bjorn's addictions had taken over his life, which now revolved around acquiring and consuming benzos and opiates. He got busted breaking into a pharmacy - apparently because he decided to take the drugs as soon as he got them, and the cops just followed a trail of blood from the broken window to a passed out Bjorn a few blocks away - and now had a curfew, resulting in regular police presence at the house. William started hanging out at Ty's again. He'd stopped taking illegal drugs and was now on powerful antipsychotics and drinking heavily. Ty had little patience for him and ended up beating the shit out of him a few times while me and some form of Bjorn watched. I was seen as an invalid at work, and they rostered me on as little as possible. I had virtually no contact with my family, who felt like strangers to me by then. Except for my extremely unstable sister. Her junky friends still hassled me for Ritalin constantly, and even took it upon themselves to book me a doctor's appointment to up my dose.

So I quit my job, told my flatmates they could sell my shit, and moved to Carrington to live with Joe and my brother's friends.

This is by no means a bad review of shrooms. I must have had at least thirty trips that winter. I was also alienated and lost with no direction, working at a job that made no sense to me, living with strangers who were weirded out by me; and, at the centre of everything was a chaotic and dark world I wasn't ready for, illuminated only by the once radiant lights of psychedelia that had now dimmed to a sterile grey. I'd started to use psychedelics to distract myself from the same personal problems they once helped me address. There was definitely some magic to the early trips. For example, I abruptly stopped taking SSRIs after being on them for almost two years with no withdrawals - something I later found out was almost unheard of. In the end, I think I just had too much of a good thing - as generations of Newmouth's shroom-heads had tried to articulate. Maybe they only grow for a season for our own good.

Nodus Tollens part six

LSD

The move to Carrington - as well as, I guess, the change of season - did a lot of good for my mental health. I avoided employment, living off the sickness benefit, dealing drugs, and shoplifting; but, this time, I lived this way by choice. I got back into skating - occasionally even competitively - and quickly found a new crew to roll with. Bombing the steep Carrington hills was a whole new world to me. I slept on a mattress in Joe's room in a small student apartment with my brother's friends from school, Jakey, Dale, Dane, and Dane's girlfriend, Gemma. Since my brother was in the accelerated learning class, he hung out with a much more intellectual crowd than I was used to. It was nice to feel mentally stimulated after playing dumb to avoid suspicion for so long. Joe, Dane, and Jakey were also musicians, and the evenings usually consisted of getting stoned while they jammed. They were also growing and selling weed. I was relieved to be in somewhat normal company, and realised how deranged my friends in Newmouth really were, and how deranged I had become.

The flat was constantly populated by students and other relatively 'normal' people who would turn up to buy weed and end up getting stoned and hanging out there for hours. My flatmates often went to student parties with them and dragged me along when they could. This was a steep learning curve for me. My social anxiety had gotten much worse over the last few months of constant shroom tripping and social isolation, and it was difficult to shed the confrontational stance towards people I'd developed.