PSILO PSYCHOSIS MITOSIS

“What, I just eat them?” I asked the dark-haired girl who dropped a bunch of dried up things in my hand.
“Mmm hmm,” she replied. I could barely see her in the dark of the warehouse. “Just pop them in and swallow them. Don’t chew very much, they taste gross.”
“Not that gross,” Art said, “More like roasted peanuts.”
The girl shook her head and made a face which said

no, nothing like roasted peanuts! Yuck!

So, I ate them quickly and I followed it quickly with a lot of water. I didn’t really taste much of anything, but I did think my mouth tasted sort of like hay. I settled down on the floor of the dimly lit warehouse with my back against the wall and just listened to the thrumming of the music. I looked over at my friends, Jen & Mira, occasionally. They were giggling and talking to each other, acting silly. They looked like they were having a good time. I wondered how long it would take to work. I wondered how many hours of my life I had spent waiting for drugs to start working… it was an amusing thought. I thought to myself that the only time I ever really noticed trees on the side of the freeway was when I was waiting for hallucinogens to work. (Not driving of course).
I picked up a flier off the ground and studied it. There was a bunch of little, drawn people, very dark, holding spears and dressed in tribal gear. They formed a circle. As I was looking at them, they started to dance. Hmmmm. That couldn’t be part of the flier, I thought, I flipped it over to see if there was like a sort of microchip or anything in it that would make it programmed to have the graphics move, but there wasn’t. I flipped it back over and watched the people dance some more. I smiled. A girl with real long, blonde hair sidled up to me. She looked super-way-hippie. She smiled. “Can I look at that too?” she asked.
“Do you see them dance?” I asked her, surprised. Okay, maybe it wasn’t the mushrooms.
She leaned in closer and looked with black, irisless eyes. “I do,” she said. Then she turned and looked into my face and it was holding two phones on speakerphone close together. Feedback frequency, hurt my ears for a second, but then she smiled, and the feedback turned to something fuzzy that felt cuddly. “That’s how you know it’s happening,” she said.
I looked at her quizzically, but with a small smile on my face. “How did you know what I was waiting for?”
“Because, girl,” he said, putting her hand on the knee of my Kikwears. “I know the face. Like, I can tell you I was looking at rice boil one time, thinking when will it happen, and how will I know it’s happening? And then, these white like worm things grew out of the pot,” she demonstrated with her hands, like a flower opening, or a thought forming, “And I knew. So I just knew you were waiting. You looked the same as I did when I was looking at that boiling rice.”
I laughed and smiled. She rubbed her hand on my knee and squeezed. “See?” she says. “So now, we can look at this. Actually,” she said, “I will go get something else to look at, I will be right back.”
I closed my eyes and leaned against the wall. Blue and purple and green shifting blobs were moseying around behind my eyelids, and then all of a sudden, everything was pink I was in a pink forest, with pink trees, and a pink brook that looked like Cherry 7 Up. And little lights were around me, different colors, flying around and winking on and off. They were whispering, but I couldn’t quite hear them. I felt very happy and safe, and I wondered where I was and how I was going to get back to the warehouse. I bent down and picked up a blade of pink grass, examined it. One of the lights came by. “Touch everything,” it said. And right then, I felt someone cuddle up to me, and I opened my eyes. That blonde hippie girl was back. She was proudly displaying several colorful fliers. “I found all these,” she said.
“Oh cool,” I said.
“But you know what, I lost my boyfriend.”
“You did too? So did I,” I replied. Indeed, I had no idea where he was.
“Maybe they’re together somewhere,” she said.
“Maybe.”
And then we turned our attention to the fliers. We looked at them for probably about ten minutes each, some different people came by and looked at them too, boys, girls. Someone offered me a starburst, but I didn’t want it. The hippie girl took one and said thank you.
“There are so pretty,” the girl said.
I agreed with her that they were.
A man sat down with a toy that grew and shrunk in his hands, plastic, all interconnected like a ball. He let us play with it. He smiled. He looked nice. He looked like superhandsome, but only if I glanced at his face. I couldn’t look at his face for too long.
Art came back, and sat down. Of course he comes and sits down right when I sitting there thinking how handsome this other dude is. He is psychic. Doh!
“What’s going on?” he said, and he smiled. His face looked like illuminated clay. I could look at it and it did not change, it did not melt, it did not flow. I was convinced he was not exactly human. I had thought this before sometimes, and now it was confirmed. Maybe one of the Nephilim, the children of the angels when they mated with the humans way back in the Old Testament, before God was even a burning bush. Or maybe after. It was all running together, as it always does, especially now.
“She was showing me some things to look at,” I said.
“Oh yeah?” he said, like he had discovered something interesting and arousing. “Like what?”
“Like these,” I showed him the fliers. “And like this dude with this toy,” I pointed. The boy smiled and he had a handsome smile. Art offered his hand and introduced himself. The boy shook his hand and said, “Aaron.”
I closed my eyes again and went back into that pink world. I wandered around a bit and found a very large tree. Like a really REALLY large tree, so big around the trunk it could be like a house, people could live in it and have plenty of room. The winking lights came back again, they told me to greet the tree, so I did. I bowed and the tree seemed pleased. I went and leaned against the tree and looked out at the pink world, at the brook and listened to the sound of the rhythms.
“Katie,” Art was shaking me. “Man, did you know you’ve been leaning against that wall with your eyes closed and the biggest smile on your face for like five hours?”
“What?” I said. I opened my eyes. I was back in the warehouse. My giggling girlfriends were standing up, looking ready to go. “What time is it?”
“It’s like five,” Art said.
“No, it isn’t, “ I said.
“It is,” he too off his pager and showed it to me so I could indeed verify that it was 5:03am. I was confused, and amazed. It had just been 11:00pm. What had happened? Did they do time tricks in that pink world? It seemed like the DJ had only played a few songs.
“Come on,” he said, “Let’s go.” He offered his hand, and I took it. It felt like he was pulling me up out of a position I had been sitting in for a million years. The ground felt weird, like bouncy or springy, like walking on layers and layers of moss.
“Am I walking okay?” I asked.
“You’re walking great,” he said.
I took his hand and followed him, hoping he knew where he was going because I had no idea. I saw faces go past, some I recognized, some I didn’t. Some said hi, I said hi back. Some gave me a hug, so I hugged back. Then I saw one face I knew for sure who it was. Miss Beth, the painter from Antelope Valley. Hair was different. Hair was always different every time I saw her. She was wearing a baby blue tank top and jeans. “Hey girl!” she said, “You look like you’re having a good time,” and smiled.
“It’s true,” I said, and smiled back and continued walking with Art.
We got out to his car, it seemed like a spaceship, real crazy.
“Are you sure this is your car?” I asked.
“I am,” he said.
“Why does it look different?”
“Because you took mushrooms,” he said. “You dork. Get in.”
When he opened the door, I heard the most beautiful music I had ever heard. It was like a real airy, ambient, trancey-type song, and this woman was singing, echoey and melodic, only three words over and over “Be for real. Be for real. Be for real.”
“How did you do that?” I asked Art.
“How did I do what?”
I climbed in the car and the music was louder.
“How can you make the music play when the key isn’t in.”
“There’s no music,” he said.
“What?” I did not believe him. “No, no, dude,” I said, “The radio’s on. Or some CD is on. Or something,”
Art smiled and shook his head. “There’s nothing on. I hear nothing.”
I sat up very straight. “Come on,” I said.
He smiled incredulously and rolled his eyes. “Look, baby, watch,” and he put the key in and a CD did come on, interrupting the Be for Real lady with the Crystal Method. “See? Now,” he turned off the CD player, and I could hear my music again, “Nothing.”
“I can hear music,” I said. “I guess you can’t.”
He smiled. “What does it sound like?”
I told him, and he said, “That sounds nice. I wish I could hear it.”
We drove home with no music on, or at least, no music that Art could hear. And the woman’s voice was swirling into my blood, into my nerves, into my veins and arteries and it was making me think of another story that became very important and it went a little something like this:

(SAVED)
When I was 12 years old, I went to a Christian music at an amusement park up in the Bay Area of California called Great America. My Mom thought it would be a good idea for me to go and have a wholesome time. But I had other things in mind. It was my mission to make out with somebody, especially to be able to do it on Christian music night, I thought I would be a real badass. So, greared up in a wifebeater and some daisy dukes, an outfit designed to give even Jesus himself an erection, I ventured forth and found these two dudes that were way too old for me to be talking to at the time, and they, being good and proper Christian gentlemen, acted like they didn’t even notice my super-slutty-sexy get-up and they invited me to their church. So, of course, I went, because I wanted to see these dudes again. I wore a Led Zeppelin shirt and some jeans to the church, trying to be at least a little bit appropriate (I did not wear the microshorts).
The church was one of those “cool” churches, where everyone there listens to groups like The Crucified and Circle of Dust and the pastor had long hair and a super-cute rocker-lookin’ wife, and it was a small church, you know one that takes place in one room in like a strip mall and the chairs are all folded seats, etc. And good old cool Pastor Jeff gave a big speech, I mean sermon, about heaven and hell and how hell was for those who had not been saved and the way to get out of it was to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, today, TODAY brothers and sisters, who among us can hear Jesus knocking on their door of their heart today? And of course, I was twelve years old and not quite so great at critical thinking at that time (of course now, I would recognize the old fear-hope technique) and so I thought

Oh no! He’s talking about ME! I need to go up there and be saved. YES, brothers and sisters, Jesus Christ was knocking of the door of my heart today and by God, I was going to let him in!

So, I went up to the front, where everyone cheered and whooped, and I said the Sinner’s Prayer and I asked Jesus to come and save me, and then Pastor Jeff told me I needed to burn my shirt because it was a Led Zeppelin shirt and the picture on it was “Lucifer Rising” and me wearing that shirt was unacceptable now that I was a child of God. So, I took the shirt off (I was wearing yet another wifebeater underneath), and they had a burning ceremony for the shirt, and they told me the new rules since I was not a child of God, and it was pretty basic—no stimulus or input that was not Christian was allowed near me, I was not to read any book that wasn’t Christian in viewpoint, I was not to listen to any music that wasn’t Christian in viewpoint, I was not to have any friends that weren’t saved, certainly wasn’t allowed to date anyone that wasn’t saved, etc. And they told me to go home and destroy all my music that wasn’t Christian, which was all of it, and so, of course I did. Because I didn’t want to go to hell, and I wanted to be a good Christian.
And so, that’s how it went for all of my adolescence. I went to church about three times a week and had no intellectual stimulation that was not entirely Christian in nature. And so, of course, when I graduated from high school, I had to pick a profession, and I decided that I would be a pastor. And I went to a private, really expensive Lutheran college in Irvine, CA called Concordia University. Now, interestingly enough, part of the general education there included a Comparative Religions class and a Philosophy, everyone had to take those classes. And so, I figured that God would be understanding when I took those classes and read those books that weren’t Christian and learned about other ideas because, after all, it was something I HAD to do in order to become a pastor.
And also, part of the pre-requisite for my major in particular (theology), I had to take a class studying both the Old and the New Testament really in-depth, going back to look at earlier translations of the Bible in other languages and so forth.
And as I learned more about the origins of the Bible and what was actually said if you went back to the Aramaic and as I learned about existentialism, humanism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and the like, I began to think that Christianity was seriously for the birds and I was sorry that I had missed out on all these other ideas for so long because it wasn’t allowed. And I started really thinking about changing my major and NOT being a pastor because it was all starting to smell like bullshit to me, and the really interesting thing was when they told me, at the end of my sophomore year, that I could go ahead and get the Theology degree, but no Lutheran seminary would take me because I was a woman, and it was a disgrace for a woman to lead people in church. You needed to have a penis to do that. That is what God preferred.
So…. This was what I was thinking of as I sat in

ART’S CAR
And listened to that woman singing Be For Real, and as we were zooming down the freeway, I understood what she meant. She meant that I knew what was real and what was right, and I knew what was meant to trap and control, and I should just go with what I knew was right.
They say that mushrooms are known as the flesh of the Gods among the Latin American people, and I would say that in that moment, I understood exactly why. In all of the eight years that I had spent immersed in Christianity, I had never felt as holy a moment as I felt that night, because I had finally seen the face of God, and it was everywhere—in was in the eyes of that blonde hippie chick, in the blinking lights of the pink world, in the front seat of Art’s Mazda Miata. The actual real God had nothing to do with anything localized and codified. Even the word God sounded so silly to try and describe it, didn’t capture it. But I didn’t need to find a word, I decided. I knew what it felt like. And it felt damn good. It felt better than good. It felt like I had finally gotten it and my whole body was like “Ahhhh, that’s the ticket,” as it settled into the concept like the world’s most comfortable easychair. And as Janis Joplin would say

You know you got it when it makes you feel good.