Bees

This is just another of my kookie stories I wrote recently while chatting with one of my online buddies.....

----9:46 am----
Bro, ..... How's it going??
Done any peyote recently?

----9:52 am----
Great brother,
I thought Bullshit Buster was the same slimey weasel I've been seeing in IR.
Is this a new manifistation of the weasel persona?

What do your friends call you?

----9:56 am----
Call me Shankar, thats my real name.. and since you are a friend of mine, feel free dude.

----9:59 am----
No man, no peyote in New Hampshire.
How 'bout for you?
Didn't you take a trip recently to Malaysia?
Did you find any delicacies there?

----10:04 am---

NO, the Malaysia trip got cancelled..

I heard we can get some shrooms there, though...

---10:16 am----
Speaking of shrooms I'll tell you a little story from my hippie days;

Back in the sixties and early seventies when I was a young experimenter like you there were different names for the primo pot delicacies that the people craved;
Acapulco Gold, Thai Stick, Maui Wowie and Mishmican etc. The names reflected their place of origin.

But I never understood the origin of Mishmican.

When I was in college I once took a trip to Mexico during semester break. I was hitchhiking around the country with my cousin, Roberta, who was living in Guadalajara at the time and a friend of hers named Bonnie, a pretty American girl with strawberry blonde hair.

Somewhere out on the highway we met up with a few of a rare species; Mexican hippies.......

----10:27 am----
Those guys invited us to share a trek they were making to the state of Michoacan. We got a ride into Michoacan on the back of a flatbed truck. The scenery was spectacular. We were traveling on a winding road that snaked it's way between the little cindercones of small dormant volcanoes. There were tall trees everywhere and lush green vegetation. At one point as we neared the summit of a high pass we could look down into one of cindercones. The ochre colored cone was sharply contrasted with the lush green of the vegetation that it emerged form. We decided we should try a hike up to one of the volcanos and see if we could see the inside of one of those cones closeup.

First things first. When we got to the zocalo of a small town we scored some of the local delicacy, mota Michoacana. It was on that high that I realized that the name Mishmican was a spanglish mangling of Michoacan.

---10:39 am---
Fascinating stuff, Bro. Go on, I'm all ears. I love hearing stories from the people who were high during the swinging 70s..

Also, Is Acapulco gold for real? I thought it was some sorta myth about some super high potent Weed..

----10:53 am----
Thanks Shankar,
I do my best writing in just this type of interactive chatter when I have someone like you willing to absorb my nostalgia for my younger days.

And yes Acapulco Gold is the real deal at least it once was anyway. And of course it was golden in color and had an aroma so sweet and a high so powerful that it was almost better than sex.

-----10:59 am---
Fascinating stuff, I feel like a child transported to Disneyland!

----11:12 am----
I remember that there were seven of us altogether now because we picked up a kid in the small town to be our guide. We called the kid, El Muchacho. Five guys now and the two girls, Roberta and Bonnie. We hitched a ride out of town in the direction we had originally come in from. We got off when we saw a spectacular volcano that we thought we might be able to hike up to. We found a trail leading through the lush forest and into the hills surrounding the cone that was our target. About a half an hour into our hike a vista opened up that allowed us to see that the trail would indeed make it's way towards the volcano in the distance. We stopped to take in the scenic vista and light a few joints. Then someone in our group saw that there were some men coming back down the trail in our direction. We concealed ourselves in the bush and watched them as they grew nearer; there were three of them. As they got closer we saw that they were carrying rifles......

----11:13 am----
Were those rifle carrying guys poachers or something?

Come on, Bro... that is some cool story!

----11:33 am----
Actually I never thought of them as being poachers but now that you mention it perhaps they were.

Well all of us got pretty paranoid when we saw those rifles. You have to understand, Shankar, that the Mexican hinterland in those days was not an entirly safe place for young people that looked like hippies to be hangin' out. There were some areas in Mexico still controlled by the revolucionarios of the time and also bandidos were rampant in some areas as well. Michoacan had a legacy of revolutionary activity since the early 1900's being the home state of the famous Mexican revolucionario, Emiliano Zapata.

There really wasn't anywhere to run and hide so most of us tried to melt into the bush as they approached. Our guide, El Muchacho, didn't seem too concerned so he and one of the other guys waited on the trail. When the men arrived they didn't look too dangerous and seemed happy to see us so we came out of the bushes to greet them. They had some things concealed under their serapes....

----11:34 am----
I see.. carry on, Bro ... Its gripping!

----11:45 am---

....that they brought out to show us. They had some ducks they had shot and asked us if we wanted to buy them.
Poachers? Good call Shankar!

So El Muchacho and the other three Mexican dudes got into a conversation with the men that I was trying to follow with my limited fluency in the local dialect. When I heard the word ' hongos ' my ears perked up. It turns out that ducks weren't the only thing these guys were poaching. From under their serapes they now produced several tufts of little white shroom families all covered in an iridescent blue powdery coating.

Jack Pot!

----11:46 am---
Cool! Was that Psilocybe cubensis?

----3:36 pm---
Most definitely Shankar.

So we paid the men for the wondrous looking blue-white tufts with some small pittance of pesos and continued our hike to the volcano. It was about another one hour of hiking that brought us to the base of the cone. From there it was a fairly easy scramble up to the summit. I was totally amazed when I saw the view from the top.

I had done a lot of hiking in the high Sierra Madre mountains of California. I hiked several times up to the summits of dormant volcanoes like Mt. Lassen and Mt. Roundtop, up to the 12,000 foot level. But this part of Mexico was not really mountainous like the High Sierras. It was a lush hilly region of lower altitudes.

What a spectacular vista was now before us. From the rim of this cindercone which was higher than the surrounding hills we could see dozens of similar cindercones down in the distance.

In fact some of the cones were grouped together into.....

---3:58 pm----

into....

into........

Tufts!

Yes! They very much resembled the tufts of turf that held together the precious families of little psychedelic hongos that each of us had stashed away in our pockets.

And then there was the view down into the cindercone itself. It was a magical little world all it's own. I estimated that it was only about 500 ft. in diameter. The floor of the cone was fairly flat with interesting rock formations jutting up here and there. The colors we saw on the floor and the rocks contained different shades of ochre that reminded me of the colors of leaves of Fall. Also there were the bright green colors of algea growing on the rocks and a deeper green of moss growing in places behind rocks that were shaded from the sun. There was little if any vegetation but there was a sweet musty smell wafting up on a warm trickle of breeze blowing up from the floor of the cone.

Could there ever be a more perfect place to begin a new journey through the Doors of Perception?

----4:31 pm----
Nothing was said between us about the appropriateness of the locale. We each began to reach for the treasured tufts stashed away in our pockets. The shrooms were so well embeded into the tufts of turf that it was actually impossible to pry them loose from each other without scattering the precious blue powder coating. All that was left to do was to bite right into the tuft and chew off a chunk of the iridescent blue-white growths. I chewed off a big mouthful and was immediately greeted by a foul bitterness and mixed in with that was the taste and grittiness of the dirt from the bottom of the tuft. Yuuckkk!

But as I chewed up and swallowed my mouthfull I knew the bitter tastes in my mouth would soon give way to the unknowable. Fortunately someone brought a canteen so we each had a little water to wash it down with.

----4:51 pm---
I looked around and saw people struggling to swallow their bitter mass of fungal growth. My cousin's friend, Bonnie, and El Muchaco were having trouble stomaching the evil tasting globs in their mouths. The rest of us all got big smiles on our faces from the pre-euphoria you get when you know what is coming around the bend. We started scurrying around trying to figure out the best place to be when the doors to elsewhere opened. The Mexican dudes all tried to rush down the steep slope to the floor of the cone and literally slid down on their asses. I stayed with my cousin, Roberta, to look out for Bonnie whom had never had a psychedelic experience before. We sat on the rim for a while taking in the spectacular vista. The other guys all ended up down on the floor of the cone running around trying to outdo each other in finding the best place to be. After a while I looked at Roberta and she looked at me; our eyes got wide as we silently acknowledged that the beginning of the rush was upon us.....

-------5:34 pm-----
We decided to call back the guys on the floor so we could all be together on the rim. Lost and without direction they readily agreed and quickly scampered back up the slope. My cousin Roberta was only 17 at that time but she was far more experienced than her years might imply. Roberta took charge of the disorganized rabble ascending to the rim. She found a clearing nearby where we could all sit comfortably. She situated us in a circle from where we could all gaze out in a different direction of the 360 degree view. Then she took some time to get everybody as calmed down as possible. Relaxing was not so easy for some of us considering the potent brew that was simmering in our inner cauldrens. She asked us all to hold hands around the circle and to close our eyes. She took us through some simple relaxation exercises. Closing my eyes took away the spectacular visuals of the reality and replaced them with inner sights even more mezmerizing....

-----5:38 pm -----
Roberta then led us in the chant, Ommmmmmm , as we all held hands, eyes wide shut....

__________________
The sands of time past keep shifting according to how we remember or forget or refashion it in hindsight, which is no sight at all.
Kajal Basu