Yojinbo

I ate a bunch of stems after work today.  Man I am tripping pretty good right now.  Just took a walk around the neighborhood which was awesome!!!

Saw some dogs running around in the park (its about 10:45) and they were running around with a ball with a blinking light in it.  As the were running they left a rooster tail of dust behind them which was cool to see in the orange park light.

Then I walked up Dekalb and checked out the scene there.  Lots of people out on a Friday night.  Madiba, Chez Oskar, Sushi D (only been there once years ago with the ex-girlfriend).  Was going to turn right towards Lafayette at the playground but saw some cute girls talking to each other on the sidewalk so I kept on going that way.  Easy going evening.

My wife is from Japan and she is still learning about America.  Last night I drank some beers and ate a little mushroom.  Then I told her that I am going to wear two pairs of pants tomorrow.

“Two pants? Why?”

“Tomorrow will be very cold”

“Oh.  Really? Why?”

“The cold wind is coming from Canada tomorrow.  You will have to wear your winter jacket.”

“Oh my God!!”

It is August.

(Yes I told her I was joking before we went to sleep)

Holy crap. Gotta download some of that.

Roxy Music - Ladytron

Here is a chat between my friends Antonio and Pepe.  Topics discussed include american vs imported muscle cars, problems with the spanish/english language barrier, and close calls with hate crimes.  Read on for a delightful interlude between amigos.

5:06] pepe: those freakin hondas are aeverywhere
[15:06] pepe: not just a american epidemic
[15:07] tony: lol
[15:07] pepe: yo man
[15:07] pepe: every monday they have that car show by ny house
[15:07] pepe: u have to check it out oneday
[15:07] tony: come on
[15:07] pepe: its been getting bigger and bigger
[15:07] pepe: yeah
[15:07] tony: what kind of cars?
[15:07] pepe: muscle car
[15:07] pepe: with imports starting to be welcomed in the back lol
[15:08] pepe: there’s a huge parking lot for
[15:08] tony: hahaha
[15:08] pepe: yeah
15:08] pepe: but not no more
[15:08] tony: dang ,that is sor of racism going on there
[15:08] pepe: all the same muscke car guys with young guys in hot imports
[15:08] pepe: of course
[15:09] pepe: my town is so diverse and racist
[15:09] pepe: lol
[15:09] pepe: at the same time
[15:09] tony: you can come but you will have to sit in the back row
[15:09] pepe: hahahah
15:09] pepe: nah
[15:09] tony: lol
[15:09] pepe: not anymore
[15:09] pepe: used to be like that
[15:09] pepe: all is good now
[15:09] tony: I like that town
[15:09] pepe: yo man
[15:09] pepe: last year
[15:09] tony: last time I went with my son I saw some areas that were very nice
[15:10] pepe: they stapled flyers saying
[15:10] pepe: no *&^%$ allowed at this years purtuguese feast
[15:10] tony: lol
[15:10] tony: omg
5:10] pepe: did they same with the italian one
[15:10] pepe: oh yeah
[15:10] pepe: u have no idea the uproar
[15:10] pepe: that casued
[15:10] tony: lol
[15:10] pepe: people went ape sh&t
[15:10] tony: lol
[15:10] tony: super
[15:11] pepe: nothg happened tho
[15:11] pepe: now people just do nt go places they are nbot welcomed
[15:11] pepe: and vice versa
[15:11] pepe: but still very diverse
[15:11] pepe: anyways my buddy has been bringing his grand natoional
[15:11] pepe: every week
[15:12] pepe: they have a few funny cars
[15:12] tony: just like when i was living in new brunswick when i first move to USA
[15:12] pepe: and some hot rods
[15:12] tony: they asked me if I wanted to join with them to participate in a Block party
[15:13] pepe: oh oh
[15:13] tony: so i flipped out and told them “What? I am no F—g Black”
[15:14] tony: so they all wanted to camp in front of my place to tell me that I was racist
[15:14] tony: it was all a confussion
[15:15] tony: with language barrier that almost cost me my life
[15:15] pepe: <ding>
[15:15] pepe: omg
[15:15] pepe: lol
[15:16] pepe: only u man
[15:16] pepe: lol
[15:16] tony: I took offense b/4 in my eyes I though that they believe that I was Black
[15:16] pepe: i think i remeber u telling me that
[15:16] tony: ufff and then there was this other time
[15:16] pepe: jeez
[15:16] pepe: man
[15:17] tony: I was skating in this place in Rt 9 Old bridge
[15:17] tony: then I was going fast like a mofo
[15:17] tony: this kid got in front of me on my way
[15:18] tony: so I flattened that poor kid down
[15:18] pepe: ?
[15:19] tony: and by the time I stopped and came around to see him the whole Family was trying to pick him up
[15:19] pepe: did u get junped
[15:19] tony: no listen to this
[15:20] tony: so I went to the crowd to talk to the kid but he was not talking to me so I asked one of the relatives is he ok, look he is not responding to me questions….
[15:20] tony: so they person turn around and told me ‘oh, that’s because he is DEAF”
[15:20] tony: I undestood DEAD
[15:21] tony: so I ran with the skates on in to parking lot tripping all over and falling like a F—–g drunk
[15:22] pepe: lol
25] pepe: hahahahaha
[15:25] pepe: how long did u get away woth that till someone was like yeah freakin right ?
[15:25] tony: lol
[15:25] tony: not to long
[15:26] pepe: hahaha
[15:26] tony: I tried with some cop in Perth Amboy too
[15:26] pepe: my grandma always confused sh*ts with sheets
[15:26] tony: but did not realized he was latino
:26] pepe: always said clean the sh&ts
[15:26] pepe: instead of sheets
[15:26] pepe: lol
[15:26] tony: yup
5:32] tony:
[15:22] pepe: lol
[15:22] pepe: <ding>
[15:22] pepe: satop it
[15:22] pepe: omg

I was chatting with my old friend Antonio this afternoon and he told me a great story from his childhood in Puerto Rico.  Here is a transcript of our chat:

me: yo
me: lets do some shrooms this weekend and go to the racetrack

Antonio: not in to that kind of rap

me: how about we do some shrooms and go to a nude beach
me: dude
me: i am in a great mood today

Antonio: lol
Antonio: then you should try brake fluid

me: hahahah

me: damn your dad drank that shit?

Antonio: is like fruit punch or Sangria
Antonio: yeah man

me: why>?

Antonio: i though I told you\

me: no

Antonio: he had this old car with a leaky brakes master cylinder
Antonio: so every 5 days or so, he needed to replenish the fluid
Antonio: so he kept a pint ( on a flat Rum bottle) right under the drivers seat all the time

me: he kept the brake fluid in a rum bottle?

Antonio: yes
Antonio: so one day we went with him to another town and someone gave him a pint of Rum
Antonio: and he came and put it right under his seat
Antonio: then while he was driving he decided to take a big gulp of that rum
Antonio: so he reached under his seat and since he was driving, did not realized it was the wrong pint

me: oh man
me: was he pissed?

Antonio: then he lost his memory all the seddent
Antonio: suddent
Antonio: while we were in the car (3 of his kids)
Antonio: so could not remember where he was
Antonio: or how to get home

me: haha shit

Antonio: lol
Antonio: so we were shitting bricks b/c I was yet too small to drive on the highway
Antonio: so he stopped like 2 towns before getting to our town in PR
Antonio: and we figure to lie to him

me: lie to him?
me: how?

Antonio: we told him(since he had no memory of where to go) that Mom was sick in the hopstital and he forgot that we needed to go and see her but she was in a hospital that was 2 towns over.

me: wtf

Antonio: and luckly or as a miracle he still knew how to put the car on drive and steer and stop and all that shit

Antonio: so when we finally and slowly made t to our house then my mom called the ambulance
Antonio: so they took him away to the ER
Antonio: but we were fine, Thnx God
Antonio: I never forget this

me: what about him?

Antonio: he was in the hospital for like 2 days
Antonio: then they sent him home
Antonio: so all we did from that moment on was to make fun of him because the stupid shit that he pulled

I have only done shrooms once.  A few years ago on a camping trip a friend of a friend made some ’shroom tea.  It wasn’t very strong but it was a pretty cool experience.

Last night I was buying some weed, and I’ve been in a weird mood lately so I asked the guy if he had any shrooms.  He did.  He had to rumage around his room for about 10 minutes but finally pulled them out and I bought a bag with a few mushrooms in it for $40.  Pretty sweet.

So today I’m sitting at work thinking about when I’m going to eat these things.  Maybe this weekend at the beach, or in the mountains.  What is the best place to do shrooms?  I googled “fun things to do on shrooms” and the first thing that came up was a thread on a drug message board where stoners harness the power of the internet to share their thoughts and experiences.

Here is what one user had to say about tripping on shrooms in the bathroom:

yea dude i’ve been caught in time/space vortices in bathrooms and stuff, this one time i tranced out on a quarter of boomers in this girl’s bathroom, i started trancing out and a mandala started coming out of the wall and tribal drums started beating wildly, then another mandala of the opposite color started to emerge from where the other one camer out of the wall… then as that one got closer, a separate color came out and I started just like going into the “zone” really hard when I realized I might not be able to make it back if I kept trying so hard to get there… so I tried mad hard to break out and oculdn’t for a second (which felt like eternity), then I just shook my head, everything went white out for a second, then slowly the room faded back into my vision. During this, all I could see was the mandalas, they obscured the whole room.

Great.

So this morning I went down to the basement and brought up the jug of that’s been fermenting for the past 10 days.

I poured a little out through the strainer that came in the kit.  It looked like nigori sake which is the white, unfiltered kind.  It had a little bit of a yellow tint to it.

I was eager to try it so I poured a little in to a cup and tasted it.  Not a great taste.

I noticed that the jug was still bubbling a bit when I put the stopper back on and that means that the yeast is still doing it’s thing.

Back to the basement for a few more days.  I’ll give it another taste on Thursday.

Last night I got my sake kit in the mail.  It has:

• 64 ounce brown glass bottle
• 400g bag of rice, koji, yeast, and lactic acid
• A bubbler that lets CO2 out of the bottle but nothing else can get in

The kit was about $35.  It was pretty easy to get going.  I took 1.5 liters of hot tap water and put it in the glass jar with the rice/koji/yeast mixture.  Then I put the bottle in the sink filled with hot water for 5 hours to get the fermentation process started.  I let the water cool down naturally over night and this morning I put the bottle down in the basement where it will stay for the next 2 weeks while the yeast does it’s thing.

After High School I went off to Brooklyn College.  Brooklyn College has a nice campus but there’s no dorms or anywhere to stay.  Most of the people that go there live at home.  My family didn’t live near Brooklyn College so I had to find a place to stay.

The place I found was in Midwood, an Jewish Orthodox neighborhood close to the campus.  It was pretty much a flop house on the top floor of house.  There were a few different rooms and 1 bathroom.  During the couple years that I spent there I shared the place with a guy named Arnie who had a room down the hall.  We shared the bathroom.  The place was pretty nasty.

Arnie was living there because he had just gotten out of jail.  He was somehow related to the people that owned the house and they let him stay there for $80 a week.  He was an OK guy I guess.  He told me a lot of crazy stories about how he used to trip out on acid and drive his IROC up and down Coney Island.  He was a pretty big alcoholic and I remember doing shots of warm absolute with him chased by Mountain Dew.  That was disgusting.

His room was also disgusting because he had a cat in there and it smelled like he never changed the litterbox.  He had a girlfriend that would come by and they would sometimes invite me to watch the Yankees with them.  I enjoyed it because I was young and didn’t have many friends around there at the time.

Anyway, one time Arnie and I were talking and he asked me “Would you ever piss on a chick?”.

“What the hell? No man that is nasty” I replied.

“Yeah it’s pretty gross right?” he said.  “I would never do it either. Unless she really wanted me too.  I mean, she would really have to beg”.

“Actually,” he continued “there was this chick over here the other night.  Man she was crazy!  She kept begging and begging for me to piss on her!”

“Oh man that’s nasty.  What did you do?” I asked.

“Yo man… I did it! I pissed on her!” he said.

“What? Wow man you’re crazy! Wow!” I said. “How was it?”

“Well, I just put her in the bathtub and pissed all over her.  It didn’t do much for me but she loved it.  She couldn’t get enough of that piss man, it was something else”

And with that he was off to his room to drink himself in to a stupor.  I shut the door and realized this all went down in the bathroom that we both shared.  Nasty bastard.  Thanks a lot Arnie.

I’m not 100% sure it was PCP but I think it was.

It was High School, the summer between 11th and 12th grade.  My friend Zach and I decided we would spend a couple days down in NYC at his sister’s apartment while she was out of town.  We drove down there in his car on a beautiful summer day with the windows down and sunroof open.

When we got to the city we went record shopping for a while and then got something to eat.  Then we decided we should get some weed.  It was easy to buy over at west 4th street so we went over there and got approached right away by some dude.  I ended up buying some crap wrapped up in one of those brown paper towels that looked like it was from a school bathroom.

The stuff inside the paper didn’t look like weed at all.  It looked kind of like plastic and smelled like gasoline.  There is no way we were going to smoke that shit so we bought another bag of weed from a different guy and went back to the apartment to smoke that stuff.  We got high and listened to music and had a good time.

Fast forward a few weeks and we’re back upstate New York and we’re trying to get high.  Problem is, it’s much harder to find weed in upstate New York than it is in Greenwich Village.  That’s when I remembered the stuff in the paper towel.

“Yo man we should smoke that stuff we got in the city the other week”

“What? That shit doesn’t even look like weed”

“Naaaah man I’m sure it’s weed it’s probably just old”

It was a really nice summer night and we took that crap and rolled a joint out of it and went around the corner to smoke it.  We got so fuckin high, it was crazy.  We were sitting outside this little medical clinic where there was a nice grass lawn and some woods nearby.  My friend Zach couldn’t stop laughing.  I was trying to get him to shut the hell up when I realized how high I was.  I forgot about him and looked at the trees.  I swear to god I thought that there were hundreds of ducks and geese up in the trees.

That night I had really bad nightmares of being in the water and snakes biting me.  When I woke up the next morning I felt like shit and I could hear my heart beating.  I could actually hear my heart beating inside my chest and making squishy sounds like every time it beat.  I thought I was about to die.

I did my best to keep it together and went downstairs and had breakfast with my parents.  I told them I wasn’t feeling well and that I was going to the doctor.  Of course they thought that was strange, especially since I demanded on driving myself there.

I remember walking in the door of the doctors office and telling them I was having chest pains.  I was trying to act casual like it was no big deal.

“I’d like to see a doctor”

“OK, what are your symptoms?

“Chest pains”

“Are you ok?? Is this an emergency?”

“Nah nah, it’s cool.  It’s probably nothing.”

So I waited to see the doctor and he checked me out.  He hooked me up to some machines and told me that I didn’t have a heart attack.  I was so relieved.  Up to this point I figured I was really fucked up and was going to die.  He took some x-rays and when he came back in the room he told me I had a partial pneumothorax. What?  I had collapsed part of my lung.  A small part.  Near my heart.  That’s why I could hear my heart beat, there was air in the moving around every time my heart beat.  He told me I was going to be ok.

I was so damn happy to hear that. OK! Thanks a lot Doc, seeya!  Not so fast.  He brought me in to his office and asked me if I had done any drugs.  He seemed like a cool guy so I admitted that I had smoked some weed the night before.  Ah yes, that must have been it.

He made me tell my parents the whole story and we had to go to the hospital to get checked out more.  My parents weren’t mad at all and the doctors were cracking jokes asking me if it was good stuff.   There was some talk of giving me a chest tube but that wasn’t necessary I guess.  They gave me some painkillers and told me to take it easy for a few weeks and the lung would fix itself.

So that was that!  I was back in action.  In retrospect that probably wasn’t weed at all.  Probably PCP.  Never going to do that shit again.  The lesson of this story:  If you don’t know what it is don’t smoke it.