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not a great shroom gummy experience
Sunday, February 1 2026
This morning after I got a fire going and made coffee, I went to load up my version of Spelling Bee but could not get a connection. Initially I assumed that this was because my virtual server was on the fritz, something that happens more than my our household internet being on the fritz. But no, in this case the latter was the problem. I rebooted the cable modem to see if that would help and it did not. Strangely, though, the "landline" that is also provided by the cable modem had a dialtone. Something was wrong specifically with the ability to connect to the internet. I then tried the Safari browser on my MacBook and found I could reach websites without any difficulty. But I don't have many cookies stored in Safari and it also lacks an ad blocker, so it wasn't much fun to use.
Later, though, I was able to get Chrome to load a page, and the page that it loaded said that there had been a DMCA complaint against my IP address and that my internet access had been temporarily suspend. It gave me a link to click on to see how I had offended, but when I went there, it just provided a form for me to type in two numbers that I had not been given. Unlike the last time this had happened over the summer, there was no text or email communication about it. So I went into the Spectrum app (which of course needed to be updated first!) on my phone, logged in, and saw no notice about this DMCA thing.
By this point in the morning, Gretchen was wondering if we should do psychedelic mushrooms today. Ray had given me the rest of a bag of mushroom gummies, and, in addition to that, I had another bag he had given me nearly a year ago on or around my birthday. We knew from experience that mushrooms do not have a great shelf life, so if we didn't eat them, it was as if we had thrown them away. So we agreed to take them. We divided them up into two equal portions, splitting both the old and new gummies so we'd each have a portion of both (in case the old ones weren't any good). This gave us each about 25 gummies, which is a lot to chow down. It didn't help that they were mostly non-vegan, supposedly made of "grass-fed gelatin" (that is, rendered cow protein). The packaging suggested this number of gummies would give us each a "shamanic" experience, which was the most extreme category in a series of them that began with "micro."
I started feeling something in my body within only about fifteen minutes, and in a half hour we both were feeling it. But, as had happened the two other times we'd taken mushrooms together, mostly all we ended up feeling was mildly dysphoric, nauseated, and unmotivated. Unlike a drug as prosaic as pot, it didn't do anything fun to our thinking patterns. I was feeling a little paranoid, but this feeling was normal given the issue with the internet and something else that was bothering me. Things went on like this for two or three hours, and I couldn't do all that much during that time, partly because I was forced to use Safari or my phone to access the internet. For her part, Gretchen was able to continue reading a novel during this time. And when the effects (negative though they were) began to ebb a little, she was able to take Charlotte for a walk up the Farm Road and back. She came back saying being outdoors had made the experience a little better and had even helped with the persistent low-level nausea. So I but on my coat and boots and went outside as well. But I only walked to the Farm Road and back, as the profound silence of the snow felt a little menacing without my family around me.
By this point I'd tried the Spectrum app's chat feature several times in an effort to get someone to unsuspend our internet service. But the "chat" was decidedly pre-artificial intelligence. It provide a tree of pre-canned decisions one could make, none of which ever led to a human (or other intelligence capable of doing something helpful). So at some point I followed the decision tree about "installing equipment" out to where I said I'd rebooted it (I'd done no such thing) and then clicked the option saying it wasn't coming back up. The tree then told me it was finding a real human to help me. That real "human" gushed effusive positivity and kept praising me for everything I did, like an extremely sycophantic large language model trained on a very small corpus of text. I told the "human" I'd received a DMCA notice, and "she" said she could help with that. Without chiding me or anything, she turned my internet back on and asked if there was anything else I needed help with. I explained that how the form the notice had sent me to hadn't given me the particulars of what the DMCA complaint was about. So "she" looked it up and came back with "Nathan for You." "Hmm," I said, "I don't know anything about that." This was interesting, because it marked the first time I'd ever gotten a DMCA complaint for downloading an old television show. Usually the ones right-holders are putting any effort into protecting are brand new ones, such as the latest episode of a show in the Game of Thrones cinematic universe.
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