Me and Mrs. Faustroll originally moved to the left coast from North Carolina when she was accepted by the Museum Art School in Po'land, Oregasm — aka Stumptown, Slabtown, Skid Road — whereupon the school changed its name even before we arrived to the College of Specific Northwest Art, or something like that, while the people owned it and the museum tried to figure out how to make money from a non-profit entity.
That was shortly after Mount St. Helens committed geothermal suicide and inspired the down-trodden of the world to consider harnessing the awesome power of the earth to fight against the Great Satan, in whose belly I have prospered for more than six decades.
Do I hate the downtrodden for treading on my turf as a lifelong proponent of bringing on the bomb? Fuck no. I welcome their commitment to truth, justice, and mocking the American Way.
But this is a post about mushrooms. The great thing about being in the specific northwest is the variety of mushrooms you can forage for and the long season where you can find them, particularly within 15 minutes (and sometimes less) of the Portland Pataphysical Outpatient Clinic, Lounge, and Laundromat. Even the ones you can't eat are often wonderful to find and look at. They are like intelligent people discovered in the noise of thousands of angry idiots. You can find even them in the snow.
When I was a kid back on the east coast, I recall going out into the woods in Bohemia, on Long Island, with other kids who had been given basic instructions by a bohunk named Big Bill Brynda, a heavy-drinking one-armed member of the greatest generation who used to live up the street from us in Astoria before he decided there were too many niggers and spics and greeks and other immigrant scumbags moving into the neighborhood so he bought into the rural lifestyle, which was really suburban, when you think about it, which I don't really think about often.
We scavenged the woods, picking the kinds of things he told us to and avoiding the amanitas and toadstools and other poisonous fungi that he said could kill you if you even handled them, so we were totally fucking careful and conservative in what we brought back to Big Bill.
He was the final arbiter of mushroom safety, and I remember more than once getting cuffed on the head for having brought back poison, despite Big Bill's best efforts to keep me from doing so. I realize now that some of those poison fungi were psychotropic. I suspect Big Bill knew that.
Most of the mushrooms I remember were meadow mushrooms and forest agarics. Out here, I concentrate on chanterelles, matsusake, chicken and hen of the woods, cauliflower mushroom, shaggy manes, and morels (in the spring).
In Clemson, during the 70s, there were occasional forays to Clark Hill reservoir in the late spring and early summer after storms to gather pillow cases full of natural psychedelics that were stir-fried with squash and onions and green beans, and everyone would drink beer and flop on the mowable grass out back and talk about the celestial stars.
Mushrooms are good for that, and you can find your own and eat them and think about God or Satan or whatever without having to worry about whether the place you got them is a fucking Repugnicant narc. There should be a season where liberals who own guns can hunt narcs.
That's my idea of why we need the second amendment, for narc hunting.