Shrooms!

Over the Labor Day weekend we have a shrimp boil and one of the things that I like to add to my shrimp boil is mushrooms. During the course of the day there was some conversation over mushrooms and of course it reminded me of a story or two.

While living in Virginia I went to see Pink Floyd in concert (F’ING AWESOME show, RFK stadium in D.C. sold out for three nights in a row, yeah, it was killer). While we are tailgating and prepping for the show this guy walks by the group of us who were going to the show together and says to this one guy in our group, “Hey big man… shroooooooommms”. My friend looks at me and gives me this WTF look. I said to him, “You can eat them and trip and some people make tea out of them to drink and trip”. He turns to the door-to-door fungus salesman and says, “You better get the fuck away from me man” to which the toadstool trader replied with his hands out in front of him, “it’s cool man, it’s cool!” and walked away.

So my friend asked me, people really eat mushrooms and hallucinate? I told him yeah and that they have to be special one’s which grow out of cow manure. The look on his face and the response was classic. And I quote “You mean to tell me people eat mushrooms out of cow patties?!” After I wiped up the beer that I shot out of my nose I told him yeah, those are the ones. I went on to tell him about how you can make tea with them and get the same effect and so on.

After talking about this people usually ask me the same question, “How do you know about this?” To which I tell them that I am a junkie. Of course I’m not, I am a saint! My halo should be here in 6 to 8 weeks :). Back to how do I know, which is another story.

Back home, while in high school I was at some party that God only know who was throwing out in some double-wide in the middle of nowhere. How I got there, why I was there and what possessed me to go to said function are irrelevant to the story. But I am there and as fate would have it there are chicks there, chicks who I have not met yet so they have no idea how big of an asshole I am yet, sweeeet!

So I see this guy that I know sitting on this washer (or dryer, not sure which one and didn’t really care) in this hallway of sorts in the middle of this double-wide doing what appears to be talking to two girls. Upon site of this I knew that I must put a stop to this right away. Oh yeah, the intentional cock-block, the very worst kind.

But as I got closer I realized that he wasn’t talking to them and it looked like his head was looking back and forth down the hallway, but just once. He would look to his left and then to his right and then mumble something.

Just in case he was about to strike up a conversation with these girls, I decided to nip it. So I stroll over and start to chit-chat with these girls, purposely putting myself between the Maytag man and the girls. After a few minutes I look over and see this dude sweating like he wrote bad checks and looking down the hallway to his right and then down to his left and ask him what he is saying, to which he mumbles something about not talking to me. Oookay. Back to talking to these chicks. A few minutes later I notice his head turn to the left and then to the right which was followed by something that was in inaudible. So I ask this guy what he said again and again I get some form of an answer stating that he is not talking to me. Ok, and again back to talking to these girls. The third time that I notice this slow head turn one direction and then the other followed by some mumbling, I look over and say “what?” and he says “I am not talking to you!” So I had to ask “Who the F are you talking to then?!”.

You know, in all of my years on this planet, I have only heard this response one time. And if I gave you 1,000 guesses, you probably wouldn’t guess what his response was.

His response was “Kermit the Frog”. Which was followed up with, “the S.O.B. walked by me three times before he ever said anything to me”.

All I could muster was “Ho…Wha... HUH?” “What do you mean Kermit the Frog, are you a fucking idiot?!” Now these girls don’t know to be scared or laugh and I am embarrassed that I know this fool. He then continues by pointing at a spot of the floor which is where he assumed Kermit was and then I guess he snapped out of it because he looked puzzled and couldn’t find Kermit, or Miss Piggy or Gonzo or even Animal for that matter. So this tool has my full attention now. I mean you got to right. How do you pass up something like that? And I asked him out right, “Are you retarded or something?” And he gets pissed at me, like I am the one who is talking to puppets that aren’t there. PUPPETS!! Not a dog or a fictional character from a movie or a dead person, no he thought he was having a conversation with cloth and foam! But I am the a-hole for questioning him on this.

After talking to him for a bit we find out that he has sucked down almost a half gallon of mushroom tea. This is when I found out all that is shroom tea and of its magical powers.

Of course the rest of the night we told him that Snuffaluffagus was looking for him and that he was going to kick the crap out of him. Why not pick a puppet that only Bigbird could see right?

Don’t get dead