This is an exact rendering of us going nuts in the cabin.
SO, when we left our heroes they were heading up to spy on the uncle and the family at their cabin…
We arrived at a suitably camouflaged lookout place and saw his uncle and family playing merrily down below, there was a tree and presents and food.
It was Christmas. We had no idea, lacking watches or a sense of time…
We both felt the tendrils of Christmases past seeking our sooty hearts . . . he suddenly announced ” I’m going down.”
This proclamation that he was going to initiate contact caused me to reflexively scuttle back into the forest.
I made him swear an oath that he would not tell them of my existence on the island or remind any one of my existence nor that we intended to stay there after they had gone, until starvation or fire drove us out- on the chance that the Uncle said “NO you cannot stay in- stink up and possibly destroy my cabin that I have worked very hard to make nice”
The oath was taken and he headed off while I crouched in a bearded ninja-like fashion in the woods.
The day wore on punctuated by high and happy laughter from the hut, I maneuvered into a better position from which to spy.
I could see the family and the friend, out on the porch smiling with his uncle and cousins and there was happiness and beers and he was eating what looked like a whole meal of food.
I shrank back into the shadows and cowered in the undergrowth into a lonely sorrow, wishing death down upon them. I consoled myself with a large stale mold joint and forced the misery deep within.
I spied on him leaving all happy and followed him along the path from in the woods, as he called out “Yooo . . . Yooo . . . come out I stole a few beers for us . . . ” …
Well the lure of stolen beers was too much and cheered me up enough to cause me to burst from my hiding place. I received a full briefing, they were leaving in a few days and we would be able to move in and get some seriously real sloth cranking.
He had told them that it was him alone here and he was staying on the other side of the island with some friends from the Polytechnic that the uncle had encouraged us to go to ! It made him happy to hear that!
They left in the few days.
We found out through our daily ninja recon missions.
We packed, scurried up the mountain, got to the hut, burst in, threw our swag down and blazed up to banish any conservative spirits that may be inhabiting the place.
I got the kettle going to brew up a big pot of EARL, while he put Iron Maiden on the stereo which was hooked to solar panels on the roof. These panels provided power for lights and the stereo. There was one gas element and we found a good iron kettle for boiling potions in.
The PAIL took its place in the center of the breakfast bench where it was to stay for the duration.
We were there for a while how long I cannot recall exactly . . . more than six weeks but no more than twelve . . . every time I set myself to penetrate the green smoky darkness of that part of my memory I am set upon with coughing, the Shakes and small fits of delirium.
Uncontrollably these spells send me forward in time to the nicer meadows of my mind.
Yet some incidents stand out like mist cloaked garbage-strewn islands in the fog. And I will tell of these.
The day we arrived we searched out anything edible and were pleasantly surprised to find that they had stocked the hut with lots of food. We did not know that it was for the brother of the uncle and thus my friends other ( and less terrifying ) uncle and his friends who were going to arrive in a month, not that it would have stopped us eating all of the food anyway.
I did not know that the provisions were trapped, in the form of a large quarter full container of orange juice that had been sitting in the hot sun for days. All I did was pick it up and it exploded with an insane amount of concussive force and a loud sonic boom. Showering me with incredibly hot orange and acidic smelling napalm like liquid and glass shards, the metal lid hitting me in the forehead like a bullet and sending me flying backwards shrieking into the rack of pots and pans. Where I lay screaming and blind for several moments. My face and hands were bleeding from numerous tiny cuts.
Joeb helped me up after he had recovered from his terror and had ceased cowering behind the breakfast bar. He told me later that the orange juice looked like fire in the afternoon sun and his immediate thought was that the gas bottle had exploded and I had been incinerated.
We pushed all the glass to one side of the kitchen, I washed myself as best as I could with a wet tea towel then attended to the splinters with a sharp kitchen knife, while healing the shakes and terror with a large dose of moldy dope.
Comfort and blissful numbness returned and we ate some fruit cake we had found in a tin.
It rained and so we stayed inside listening to our three Iron Maiden tapes, drinking tea, talking of fun times past and crazy things, singing, eating and I read occasionally while he slept.
It was nice and sunny and so we stayed inside listening to our three Iron Maiden tapes, drinking tea, talking of fun times past and crazy possibilities of the now, singing, eating and I read occasionally while he slept.
All the while we sailed further and further onto a sea of madness.
The spore-covered tendrils of moldy dope were taking their toll on our already fragile grip on “reality”.
Our ability to really come to some sort of agreement with anyone but each other as to “they way things are on earth” had been left in a glass house at the Purangi winery along with a large portion of our minds. This was caused by snorting crushed lines of LSD in tablet form.
Just don’t do it.
Don’t do drugs at all.
It’s a dead end.
You will go mad and wind up in a hut trying to escape imaginary demons and the realization that demons are the monkeys on your back and you carried them with you to your sanctuary, will send you shrieking into the void.
The Green House incident at the Winery was the Nadir.
That was the moment we had a dual experience of mental fragmentation.
soo….. in the cabin…
I would wake up from a deep vacancy of consciousness, sitting on the bed with my eyes open, staring and dry to see my friend crawling on all fours about the house like a little baby.
I would find myself in the garden with no memory of how I had got there.
I would sometime catch myself in the middle of a conversation with the friend and as the words were leaving my lips the memory of what I was saying was leaving my wits. Consuming me with a feeling like I was running up a stairway suspended in a starry space, the stairway falling away behind me into the gloom, nowhere to run but upward . . . but soon nowhere to run and nothing to say . . . so I would simply stop and say “I’m going to make some FUCKING EARL.”
We held great faith in the healing properties of the EARL and the flavonoid antioxidants, which according to the box, may help protect the body from damage caused by harmful free radicals. I read the box at least three times a day and repeated the words “may help protect the body from damage caused by harmful free radicals” like a magic spell that would weave a shield of light around me keeping the festering tendrils at bay even as I took their long green fingers deep into my blackened lungs. To this day I think it may have been the only thing that saved me.
My cough had got so bad by this time that on the days nearing my eighteenth birthday I could scarcely breathe at all. Sunlight hurt my eyes and I felt weak and feverish.
In sleep I was beset with sweats and fever as well as the feeling that some demon was sitting on my chest. I would wake coughing and would have to go out side and cough and hack to purge my lungs of sooty tasting gunge.
My throat was swollen and sore and I felt as weak as a kitten that had been born dead.
I could not speak in a harsh rasping whisper, I lost the powers of speech within a day of the mold tendrils embracing me in their silage scented coils, and was forced to communicate by mouthing words and hand signals.
My gasps came in long thin whistles in and out followed by deep chuffing coughs and intense hacking splutters, then a wheeze in-out and a harsh bout of deep KA- KA-KA-KA sounds and greeny black sooty mold smelling festaspaste hacked up and spat into a manky old dishrag kept for the purpose of holding the festapaste for inspection.
Inspection and analysis of the festapaste by me in the searing light of day enabled me to diagnose myself.
I was pretty much munted.
my friends mold cough was starting to evolve as well and he had reached the second stage of the mold sickness.
He could not complete a sentence without having to take a little breath to carry him through to the end.
It was decided. We could smoke no more lest we die and our twisted, poisoned and bloated corpses would be found at some time in the future rotting in the hut.
We would have to eat the dope from now on.
Tentative experimentation discovered that directly eating the mold chunks straight up was impossible as it tasted like incredibly rank, flaky and dry moldy dogshit.
I got the iron Kettle and put in three cups of brown sugar and two cups of water. When this was simmering away nicely, I added about two huge double handfuls of finely chopped up mold-dope. I let this boil and bubble for about three hours adding water when needed. It was a simmering sickly sweet-smelling black mass.
I could see a tormented soul within the seething brew and occasional heard snatches of demonic song wisping up to me as the skuz bubbled and boiled.
Eventually, when it was but a one inch thick blackish green paste on the bottom of the kettle I added rolled oats and more water.
Soon it became a dark neon green porridge and I deemed it fit for consumption.
I scooped the steaming creation into two bowls and we sat down in front of it and dug in.
As soon as the first portion hit my mouth I knew to the depths of my black soul that I would not be able to take another spoonful lest I fall dead.
I had created the defecation of the toadstool god.
I swallowed the mouthful and washed it down with tea. As soon as it hit my tummy I could feel it radiating out like a black spore-filled explosion.
I was terrified. I could already feel the death spores growing within me.
I looked over. My friend was almost finished his bowl.
I said nothing but pushed my bowl In his direction.
Inwardly I shook my head in horror and watched him ready for him to explode or at the least say something truly profound, a phrase that would unlock all the secrets I had been searching for and explain the meaning and purpose of my existence.
( For now I had the meaning of my existence figured out as “Don’t Die” and even that I was not entirely sure on.)
He said “this is yum.”
He was half way through my bowl when I actually saw his pupils shrink to pin points before me and he sat there stupefied. The spoon dropped from his numb twitching fingers and he made motion to indicate I should help him to consume the rest. And so I did.
I was a good friend.
He would have done the same for me.
When the last of the bowl was scraped I helped him to his bed. Where he lay, mouthing words I could not hear and seeing visions I could not see.
I went out onto the balcony and into the darkness to quietly reflect on what I had done. I was jealous of quest he was now on. Floating on a sea of dreams. Pondering unanswerable realities.
This would not be the first time I had seriously incapacitated someone with a magic potion of my creation.
This would be the fourth time. I was getting quite good at it actually.
I looked over to him. Green spittle adorned his beard and he was curled into a rigid ball.
I went to bed as I was rapidly falling unconscious also, overpowered as I was by my one spoons worth of monster porridge childe.
I awoke late the next afternoon to a loud roaring noise. He was sitting bolt upright- eyes open and blindly staring ahead. He was making loud burping roars like a dying lion from the depths of his belly. His beard was blackish green with dried drool. He was gunna spew.
I was a creator of potions, a shaman and a wizard of sorts. I knew the signs.
I felt like I was in a nightmare, the hallucinatory effects of the demon porridge were still with me but I got of the bed and willed myself to the kitchen where I grabbed up a porridge bowl.
It came in little burps and tiny torrents, in a base of almost neon green foam.
I reeled from the stench of the partially digested moldy marijuana porridge that my companion in experimentational debauchery burped from his foaming green lips.
Had I been of sound mind I would have thought “What series of decisions led me to this point where I now stand? Holding a small pink Tupperware container to catch the barf of my compatriot. The main constituent of the barf being a concoction so vile, that even my useless bastard self, a scalawag so debased that I had once supped on my own hallucinogenic urine, could not stomach?”
Yet I did not think such thoughts.
Such thoughts I did not think….
Tune into Part 4. ESCAPE back to civilization and safety.
END
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