March 31, 2004

One of the results of the many imbalances in my brain chemicals is that I have an anxiety-spectrum disorder that seems to land somewhere between generalized anxiety disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. My history with medication is long and complicated, so there’s no need to offer me advice unless you are comfortable using terms like tachyphylaxis in conversation.

The thing is, there seems to be credible anecdotal support for the idea that shrooms have significantly helped people with OCD–credible enough, in fact, that the FDA has approved a study testing the effectiveness of sub-hallucinogenic doses of psilocybin as a treatment for OCD. The more I read about this, the more interested I became in trying it, although I have never ingested a substance stronger than alcohol, and the last time I did that was about six years ago (with one recent exception, which I’ll blog about before too long). I approached several friends who seemed like they might know where to get shrooms, but in the end none of them came through.

So I’m growing them myself.

Back in October, I went online and ordered a mushroom grow bag and some psilocybin spores. They arrived along with a slide suitable for examination under a microscope; naturally, the company was selling the spores for research purposes only, as they would never support an illegal activity like growing shrooms from spores. I injected the spores into the grow bag, as instructed, and placed them in a cool, dark place (my closet). I checked on them every few days and the bag looked like what the web site said it ought to (if one were involved in an illegal activity like growing shrooms from spores, which of course no one who bought spores from this web site would be), so I looked forward to a day sooner or later when I might both have my first experience with hallucinogenic drugs and feel like a normal person for the first time in years.

The problem, of course, is that this was all happening during the time my apartment was infested by mice. I could give you an extended buildup.

But the long and the short of it is that the mice gnawed through the bag and ate my shrooms.

And, really, what else is there to say? I imagine the mice had a great time tripping, and perhaps it was this experience that led them finally to abandon my apartment for greener or more fungal pastures. I recently decided to try again; there’s another batch of shrooms growing in my closet, but I’m wondering if I shouldn’t take what happened the first time as a sign that I should just leave well enough alone and continue to live in fear and dread.