We Are The World's Illness

            The setting is a camper trailer the day after thanksgiving.  People present are 3 guys: me, "B", and "C"  --  and 2 chicks: "V" and "W".  No one else is on anything except C has had a couple of beers.  I had not eaten much at all that day.  The mushrooms are Cubensis that I grew myself.

           We first got to the camper at about 11:15 p.m.  B and W go straight back to the only bedroom in the camper.  C, V, and I sit outside in the livingroom/kitchen area of the camper with some music playing while I stir in 2.5 grams of my dried cubes into a pudding cup.  C puts in My Name Is Earl in the DVD player, and me and V just groan because we really don’t want to watch it.  We all just sit around for a while staring at the TV, and about 25 minutes later the mushrooms start moving in, and I sortof get alittle nauseous, which normally doesn’t happen to me.

     All of a sudden a bra comes flying out of the bedroom door and they start laughing. V yells at them, "Ok this is war!" and takes her bra off and throws it back in at them.  Then me and V decide to go take the bed from them, which didn't work all that well as we all 4 just end up sharing the bed which is only barely big enough for 2. C is just laying out in the livingroom watching the TV.

     After about an hour, the mushrooms have really started to take hold.  C's phone starts ringing, and after a few minutes we hear him in the other room saying "Are they hurt bad?  Its at my house."  He gets off the phone and starts putting his shoes and jacket on.  We're laying in the bed asking him where he's going.  "I gotta help some people out."  No one ever really takes anything C says seriously, so we were kind of laughing.  B asks "Are you going to kill somebody?"  C only says "I'll see you later."  Now we start getting kinda weirded out and ask where he's going again. "I'm walking to my house to get my truck and then I'm going to help some people out."  We live out in a rural area, and C's house is probably 5 or 6 miles away from the camper we are at.  Its probably about 30-40F outside so we try to tell him to stay here.  He won't listen,  and he opens the door of the camper.  I'm trippin pretty hard and really uneasy about the whole situation, so I get up and follow him out.

"Dude you're not seriously goin to walk all the way to your house are you?" 

"Yeah.  They need my help."

"Who needs your help?"

"Just some friends."

            I give up on trying to get him to stay, and he runs off down the road.  Its probably around 2 o'clock at this point.  I go back in the camper and climb back into the bed (it took me a while because it was pretty dark and I got lost trying to climb across the other 3 people to lay down next to V).  A few minutes later the guilt of letting C go off on his own gets to me, and I decide to go try and catch up with him and walk with him to his house. I call his cell, and he says he's already gotten quite a ways away, and I'm trippin too hard to know where I am or how to get to where he is, and my car is still at the camper and he tells me he's not going back to the camper, so I go back inside and lay back down.

            About 30 minutes later, C calls my phone and says that he called someone else to pick up "Whitney" and they're taking her to "Bo's" house.  None of the rest of us have any idea who Whitney or Bo are, so we just kind of shrug it off.  So C comes back into the camper a little while later and goes to sleep on the couch.  Everyone else is falling asleep too, and since I know I won't be going to sleep any time soon, I get off the bed and step outside to relieve myself.

            On my way back to the camper, I look up at the sky, and the beauty overwhelmed me.  The stars were dancing all over the place, the branches of the trees full of life.  I decided to sit down in a chair and just stare at the sky for a while.  It is very cold outside, and all I am wearing is jeans, socks, and a corduroy hoodie, but I'm so amazed at the moment to even realize how cold it really is.  As I'm staring up at the sky, I see a large plane pass overhead.  As he passes, he leaves a large glowing pyramid trail behind him, and as he proceeded across the sky, the pyramid trail grew larger and larger and the sound of the trail grew louder and louder, sending waves of energy blasting through my body.

            After the plane had gone, I realized how beautiful the world is, how much I loved it.  I began to think about how modern civilization is destroying the earth.  I saw another plane flying across the sky, but this time instead of a beautiful glowing pyramid trail, he had a trail like the body of an ugly black serpent.  This made me even more disgusted at modern "civilization", and I turned my gaze outwards towards the woods.  I kept seeing stripes of glowing white light dart from tree to tree, and I attributed this to the spirit of the forests.  I just watched in wonder as this light continued to dart around, visible for only a fraction of a second before hiding behind another tree.

            I then closed my eyes, and saw hundreds of green leaves turning around on my eyelids, shifting into different shapes yet at the same time still leaves.  I then opened my eyes and looked down at the ground in front of me.  The ground was concrete, and it seemed like the concrete had been broken and lifted up, and that a shadow was crawling out from beneath the concrete, reaching towards me, trying to grab my leg and pull me under.  This did not scare me, it just yet again disgusted me, as I attributed the broken concrete and the shadow as the evils of the modern world, as a sickness of the earth, and I kicked at the shadow until it gave up and crawled back under the concrete.

            This is when I decided to attempt to change the way I lived, to detach myself from modern civilization and return to the natural world.  I felt that I would be completely at peace if I could return to nature.  I began to think how wonderful it would be to be a wild animal, with no government, no corporations, no property, no religion, no wars.  But then I heard some squirrels chattering off in the distance, and I realized that even animals fight, even animals have "territory", and that many animals even have social structures such as in a pack of wolves.  I then decided I would much rather be myself, someone who could choose the way they lived rather than living on instinct or under the influence of another person/group.

            However, I have made decisions similar to this in the past while tripping.  Once I was coming down from an acid trip and I decided that I was going to quit all drugs and become a christian.  That only lasted for a week.  So in order to prove to myself that I could stay with decisions, and as a sort of symbol that I was going to stick with this decision, I decided to sit outside until the sun came up.  It was 3 A.M. at this point, and I was starting to come down from my trip, and realizing just how cold it really was.  My feet were freezing because I was not wearing any shoes, so I tucked one in my knee and the other under my leg.

            After what seemed to be 2 hours of sitting in the cold, staring out into the woods, I looked down at my watch.  3:45.  I had only been sitting there for 45 minutes (much longer than that, but only 45 minutes since I first decided to stay out there).  Another seemingly 2 hours passed, and I looked down at my watch yet again, only to find that it was 4:30.  I was shivering extremely hard, my nose was running, my feet were so cold I could barely move my toes.  I couldn't give up though, I had to do this.  I figured out that if I consciously made myself stop shivering and focused only on not shivering, I did not feel cold.  This only worked in about 1-2 minute intervals before I became cold again.

            The next hour did not seem as long as the past couple of hours, and next thing time I looked at my watch it was 5:30.  Still dark though.  I was kind of expecting the sun to be on its way by now.  Finally by 6:15 the sun had started to rise, and I returned to the camper.  Everyone was still asleep, and the camper was almost as cold as outside.  I did not go back to the bed because I didn't want to wake everyone else. So I just sat in a chair, still pretty cold, until they had all woken up.  They asked me where I had been all night and I told them I had been sitting outside in the cold to prove to myself that I could.  They thought that was pretty weird, but I didn’t care.  They then got dressed and I took the two girls home and then drove myself home and went to sleep in my warm bed.