Interspecies Trip

I have this very cool cat. Her name is Isis. (She has given me permission to use her real name) Isis and I have been together for six years now, since she was six weeks old. I really wasn't planning on buying a cat that fateful day, but I had an uncontrollable urge to go into the pet store and visit the kittens while I was at the m-a-u-l to pick up a book I had ordered. So I walk up to the three story cage that was absolutely packed with cats, all kinds of cats, and this positively psychedelic looking runt of the litter bounds over to me and starts hollering her fuzzy little head off, as if to say "At last, you're here to take me home! What took you so long?" All of the other kittens ignored me completely, but this one was right in my face making the cutest sounds, so I asked a salesperson if I could hold it. I thought to myself, "OK, if it's a boy, I'll take it home. But if it's a girl, I won't because Wilma, my evil siamese (who did not give me permission to use her real name, but she's a bitch, so fuck her!) is a girl and female cats don't like me as much as male cats do. So I asked if it was a male or a female and the salesperson held the kitten up for a peek at her posterior and declared it was a male. So I brought it home, and named "him" Mezmer, because of the "M" on "his" forehead and "his" hypnotic animal magnetism. Two days later the vet informed me that Mezmer was a girl, so I changed her name to Isis because of the Egyptian looking "make-up" around her bright green eyes and the gold "necklace" around her neck.

Through the years, Isis has seen me in every concievable state of consciousness know to man, or feline. She has always seemed to take more interest in me during my altered states. And sometimes, it is as if she comes along for the ride, particularly when I shroom. (It is worth mentioning here that when I am not partaking of a sacrament, she is a very normal, aloof, and very quiet cat, and that she also seems drawn to me when I am hypnogogic or dreaming.) Anyway, when I shroom at home it is as if she is shrooming, too. Now, I have tripped around a lot of animals, and none of them ever seemed to notice, but when Isis is around, it is a completely different story entirely. The first few times, and the last time, I triple-checked my tea cup to make sure she hadn't gotten any.

So what does she do? Well, as the trip begins, in that permagrin, half-nauseated, tense onset period, she starts pacing. Then she goes into a turbo version of her usual night-time ape-shit mode where she races around the house with a crazed look in her eye, tries to climb the curtains, etc. But as I ease into the trip, she begins to orbit me like a satellite, bonking me in the head with her skull, and purring so loud it seems to rattle the windows. The last time I had six dried grams and a lot of inner work to do, and everything proceeded as I described. I put Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony on repeat, got out my watercolors and attempted to paint the music. Of course you can guess what happened. Isis decided she wanted to paint the music too. Well, I see a lot of things when I listen to Beethoven, with or without the psychedelics, (I've been synesthetic since birth, lucky me!), but never have I seen pawprints, so I gave it up, and since the "Scherzo - Allegro vivace" was playing ,I got up to dance. I love to dance, particularly on shrooms because I never lose my balance or my breath, which is saying a lot for a chain-smoker with MS! So I was wearing my tripping uniform: an old ripped up tie-dye from my youth, and an enormous gauze skirt that has so much fabric it could probably clothe a family of four, and I'm hopping all over the place like some crazed maenad, and swinging my skirt all around, when Isis decides to join me. Now that really is something, because my cats absolutely hate music, but Isis is jumping in the air and getting tangled in my skirt. So we do that for a while, and then I decide to go upstairs and dig for something , though I couldn't remember what because Isis distracted me by trying to climb ME like I was a curtain! So I scolded her gently and sat on the bed to try and remember what I was looking for, when all of the sudden, the cat that only speaks when she has something really important to say, like "take me home!" or "You're standing on my tail!!!", starts meowing up a storm, and circling me, and chewing on my toes, my nose, my knees, and acting incredibly strange! So I say, "What is up with you, Cootie? (one of her hundred nicknames) Why don't you want me to remember what I came up here for?" And she promptly jumped off the bed and onto the desk and pawed at the drawer. Instinctively, I opened it. She climbed in and started pawing at some papers. I asked her to stop, but she didn't so I removed the papers and there was what I came upstairs for! Under the envelope with Isis' kitten pictures, was my address book. I had gone upstairs to get my address book to call my friend in Georgia that I had been thinking about all day! But instead of calling my friend, I got out the pictures and reminised about when she was a kitten and used to chew on me all of the time! She was acting like she did when she was a kitten to suggest that I look at her kitten pictures so that I would be reminded of what I came upstairs for!

Usually, I trip with my human friends, and communication is always a major issue. A few times I have had telepathic experiences with close friends, but no matter how close I am to whoever I'm tripping with, there always seems to be a profound level of understanding (GROK!), and we all end up having a very bonding experience that brings us closer. But the time that I thought I was gonna shroom alone, I ended up having a most profound bonding experience with my most psychic/psychedelic friend, and she's not even human. Man, what a cool cat!