Much can be said about the Grateful Dead, I wont talk about them here, but some of its members were playing music close by when this happened. I was 21 years old, and this story took place on August 1, 1992.

My 22nd year had started well, I had been a hard core born again Christian, having been saved at 19 through a miracle of grace, but on my 21st birthday, which was its own small train wreck, I had decided to drink, and being alcoholic, that threw me into the sewer. Bad company, my own bad behavior, surfing to pass the days, always a gnawing in my gut that I was hiding something, shame.

The Michelle in this story was a cute blonde with a boyish face, everyone knew her as Jason Azevedo’s girlfriend. She was a high school drop out, with a badly done spider web on her shoulder. At the time I met her she was fucking a guy we called Flipper, and then she glommed onto me a few times, and was back to Jason.

Relationship speaking, sex speaking, I am no Dr. Ruth, but neither of us were bad people, she pursued me, I complied, but it sat kind of dirty on me, her being Jason’s girl. Anything involving sex has had an off vibe on some level or another due to all the abuse I suffered as a child, making it very difficult to differentiate between honest guilt, and toxic shame.

That’s the set up, here we go:

I had $10, and a ticket to Jerry Garcia’s 50th birthday concert. I’d bought it when I still had some disposable income, and held onto it. I had this $10, and everyone I was with wanted to do mushrooms, there were 4 of us, and we had it in our minds that if we didn’t each eat a sizeable amount of mushrooms, the show would suck.

In 1992 the only way to turn $10 into mushrooms is to pool your money, and there was only one person we knew who had what we were looking for, Jason Azevedo. By we, I mean I was the only one who knew him well enough to approach him on it. Michelle was there. Awkward.

Things had started feeling good when we arrived, I was used to being broke, it was a perfect August afternoon, enjoyable, hopeful. Had I just brought a six pack of Pete’s Wicked Ale, and drank it in the parking lot I probably would have had a great time, but of course, there is the golden ring.

Jason knew I had fucked his girl, he knew everyone had fucked her, but the angry part of him held that in a separate room, while the business part of him negotiated. I was asking for a break because even together, we just didn’t have the money, we went around in some circles, and eventually made it work. There was a bad vibe, though, and it didn’t help that I kept looking at Michelle’s tits.

My vibe went downhill after working things out with Jason. I do not advise forcing down an eighth of mushrooms that you spent your last dollar on when the shame and blame from the past are ready to well up at any moment. There is also the illegal factor, those things are illegal. Getting them in my belly as soon as possible seemed the best idea. Empty stomach, no water, you get the idea.

Setting myself up for a heavy experience. The golden ring. It takes risk.

We’re there, me and Reese-cakes, and Scot Best, and some guy I still don’t know, and we run into Scott Busby, who sees I’m not feeling well. He offers me some of his beer. Busby’s one of those successful guys, if I could go back I would have been nicer to him, but my own sense of inadequacy made me dislike him, his confidence being a spotlight on my self loathing.

I’d known him since Sophomore year in high school, and since then he’d developed a spot on natural derision for me. It didn’t help that I had talked shit on him more than once, and honest guilt for my own bad behavior was showing up. Feelings. Too much for me. Not enough alcohol, but maybe a few gulps of beer will lead to more beer, if I only could afford my own beer, more feelings of inadequacy.

Busby’s a prankster, after I handed back the cup he say’s, “I just got over Mono. You probably wont catch it.” Mono, the great fear of kissing in the 1980’s, as AIDS was the great fear of fucking. Maybe it was the final seed beginning the spiral, but writing this out I think what was about happen would have happened anyway, the mushrooms had hit an empty stomach, but it might have been that the beer helped the uptake. Thanks Scott, and I mean that.

I started feeling sick, pain in my belly, not down in the gut, though, thank Goddess I didn’t shit myself. That would not have been the golden ring. The pain, the Mono future, and music I didn’t know turned my attention away from the festivities. Being a born again Christian for two years, I’d fallen behind on the psychedelic scene, and without knowing the songs, what might have been an anchor became a wind.

I walked up the stairs to discover an area of low lying bushes formed into an outcrop, a man could crawl under them, a sacred hiding spot. I was not alone, there were about 20 of us spread out under the branches.

I looked across a short expanse to a man deep in the back, he had a beard, longish hair, what the family might call a wharf rat. Our eyes met, and he nodded at me, it felt like he was saying “I know what you’re going through.” I nodded back, and blasted out of my body, past the moon in 30 seconds or so, into empty space.

It wasn’t my first time in space. When I was seventeen my soul had been instantly transplanted onto an asteroid during an earlier mushroom trip. I saw, and thought, and felt through the eyes of another, perhaps a criminal, or a political prisoner who’s soul had been lashed there for eternity. The takeaway there was eternal loneliness. In earth time that experience lasted a minute, due to the combined mushrooms and inhaled air conditioning refrigerant someone had stolen from the high school. That’s another story.

This time I was flying, it wasn’t cold, or hot, and there was no sound. This time moving toward nothing lasted a while, so I wasn’t sure if I had died, it just looked like empty space with stars for a long time, but eventually I realized I was heading for something brighter. It was Mars, and it did actually look reddish, in fact what I saw as I flew looked surprisingly clear for the astral plane, I can’t say that I understand it, only that my various out of bodies on earth have mostly had a silver grey tone, though not always.

I can’t say that I was thinking super clearly, but I was thinking, mainly I was trying to understand what was going on, I remember getting scared as I was flying in empty space, and then thinking, “well there’s nothing I can do about it, try to enjoy it,” and then getting bored. I wondered a couple times if I was dreaming. The observations I made about lack of sensations, etc., were made out of boredom. As I began to worry again that I really was dead, Mars started to grow. From a distance it was sharp, but as I got closer it became blurred here, and there, I swung around to the dark side, and closed in quickly on first the planet, and then a cave.

Inside the cave, I could see. This is an effect of the Astral plane, for some reason I can see even if there is no light, but things can look anything like blurred stencils to Asteroid video game lined shapes to succinct objects to ghostly vapors. This set up was like stencils combined with ghostly vapors. There was no true black, or true white, and the hue was orangish red where thirteen or so beings in a circle surrounded me. They reminded me of the tall super bad ass evil creatures in Beastmaster that could dissolve someone to bones in a second if they got their wings around them, and I was scared, thinking things just got real, but one of them only said, “Time is short, get to work,” and I was immediately ejected out of the cave, and back to earth.

That’s it, no clue on what I was to work on, or exactly what it meant by time is short. That was 28 years ago, and I wonder if I’ve let them down, but what do they expect? Thinking about it I’m a little pissed, that’s a long way to go for a cryptic message. Getting back was a lot of work, so maybe that’s all he meant, and yes, the voice sounded male.

I’m flying back, and I’m approaching earth, I know I’m not dead now, I’m heading away from the asteroid belt where that prisoner might still be today, and I’m feeling good, hopeful, the message was worrisome, but really I’m just glad I’m heading back, I figure I’ll sort it out later. When I first left the red planet I was headed straight to the sun, and a little disoriented, I’m not sur if I righted myself, or if I had help, the sun was impossible to look at and keep my bearings, I had to get the earth to eclipse the sun in order to hold my course, it took a while, but I got it, and was both no longer blinded, but I had a direction.

This I wonder about, because I think I was coming back to my body no matter what, yet I was able to adjust my heading to block the sun. I hadn’t identified earth yet as anything more than an eclipse, and when the sun would creep around it I adjusted it back into darkness, it was work keeping the heading where I wanted it, but somehow I knew how to do it. Getting to Mars was like being on automatic, but getting back took work.

I must have been moving very fast. At a certain point with earth a different dark circle of light, my eye was caught by a growing rim of the moon, and what looked like strange stars inside it. The layout in space didn’t make sense, it was a dark rounded patch of space with stars set in it. As I got closer my soul mind made sense of what my soul’s eyes were seeing, lights stretched across the back side of the moon covering something like 1/6 or 1/7 of it.

This frightened me, because at the time I didn’t know there was a side of the moon we never see from earth. I didn’t realize there was a chance an alien moon base might exist there without the general public knowing. I thought something had gone very wrong, that I had moved forward in time, or that I was dreaming. As I passed by I got a clear look at the extent of a very large installation, not like a country’s lights at night from space, it was more like a very asymmetrical spiders web lit up in yellow, and green.

And then the earth, a sense of foreboding as I approached, and then the bushes, I was awake, everyone was holding up their lighters for an encore, as I came down the stairs to find my seat, Jerry Garcia band ended with “It’s a Wonderful World.”