What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been

“WHAT A LONG, STRANGE TRIP IT’S BEEN” By Justin Quinn He had been looking all morning, and wasn’t about to stop. There had to be a lighter here somewhere… Last year, if you had asked him, he would have said it was ludicrous; not just the fact that he would pick up such an awful habit so late in life, but the whole damned thing. Who would have thought? As he skulked through the ruins of the town he once called home, he couldn’t help but remember all the times he had squinted, red-eyed and irritated, trying to tolerate the miasma his friends insisted on foisting upon him every time they went out for a beer, just down the road. Not even three hundred days later, he’d run as if his life depended on it if he happened across anyone, never mind his friends. Because it did. And then there was the smoking… What does a man do when his world ends? Whatever he damn well pleases-especially when the world is literally ending; forget about that “my wife left me and my career is over because I got caught embezzling from the company and now I’m going to jail for a long, long time” sort of world ending… What does a man do when the world-for humans at least-is really ending? Whatever he damn well pleases. On the odd chance he actually did bump into someone, someone who minded if he smoked, the last thing on his mind would be there opinion. More likely than not, it’d be a quick mental inventory of how many breaths he had taken since seeing said person, which way the wind was blowing, and how many things he might have made contact with in the immediate vicinity that might also have come into contact with the hypothetical post-apocalyptical anti-smoker. Strange days, indeed. A year ago, if someone had asked him (and that certainly wasn’t what usually happened, at least on this topic) if he’d be devolving into some sort of hedonistic, pleasure seeking refugee from society, he’d laugh have laughed hysterically at the notion. Except he’d had little choice in the matter-at least in the refugee matter..

When the whole world begins to die, but not some throat-clutching, sore-scratching, pestilence-born death of the typically envisaged variety, or even the fiery cataclysm of the Reagan or Lahaye permutations, how should one behave? Especially if one has spent most of their lives eschewing the sensual aspects of life in favor of rigorous academic pursuits and vehement championing of a life of personal responsibility and chemical independence? These were the things he thought about now that, as on of his favorite authors put it, “the world had moved on”. Who’d have thought the world would literally end, in his lifetime, and in this way, of all ways? The classmates, friends and family who’d elected to dabble in such escapist behavior-as he had always viewed it-had ended up being the vanguard of the apocalypse, and he the unwilling refugee from whatever strange solace that was to be found in these pursuits.. Ironically, he had grown up just around the corner from what was effectively “ground zero”, (he despised this term-it made him think of countless instances of people putting some spin or another on the forgotten agony of nameless masses for the political gain of a small, uncaring elite) bearing a lifelong reminder of their first mistake-if it was a mistakewith the rheumatoid arthritis he’d developed as a result of the Lyme disease he’d contracted as a baby. In retrospect, he wondered how they’d they missed it. Quite conceivable that Lyme disease had slipped by-diseases of all sorts popped up, having existed for eons undiagnosed-but then the West Nile thing, and more importantly, the Anthrax/fungal chimaera that appeared in 2011… How could they have seriously believed terrorists armed with that kind of monstrous technology would attack-of all places-Westerly, Rhode Island? Perhaps we had been wrong- it wasn’t our freedom they hated, it was whole-belly clams. He smiled at this, and then scowled again, thinking of the thousands who choked to death slowly, families covered in purple-black lesions, oozing blood from every orifice. We were the terrorists, and we were the enemy, all at once. We had paid ourselves to kill ourselves in new and creative ways, just in case anyone else might think of an equally awful way to off us first. Had to keep up with the times, you know, and gene modification was the new style. The Joneses- who ever that was- likely had their own chimaeras, and we had to make sure ours were just as nasty. And in a free country like ours, we could never, ever, test such a thing.

…but we had accidents all time. He’d spent quite a good amount of time thinking about Murphy’s law, and how they laughed about what they had done-the “accident”, about all of the “accidents” that seemed to happen around Long Island sound, and about how funny the joke must have turned out when it went wrong by becoming a real accident-or rather a runaway success, depending on your perspective. He asked himself what the purpose of Lyme disease and West Nile had been, and couldn’t come up with much beyond fairly common conspiracy-theory explanations he’d read about in detail in the last year. It was obvious what the first chimaera had been designed to do-kill, slowly, painfully, and monstrously. Effectively, and bounded in time-the anthrax genes were carried in the spores of the fungus, and mercilessly murdered the host while preparing the victim to be a Gulliverian buffet for the next generation of fungi. Any population thus infected would be easy to subdue, as the survivors would be as shocked as anyone who had lived through a nuclear onslaught, with the added bonus of no mess to clean up, and heaps of perfectly usable real estate. The chimaera was programmed with a “kill switch”, reproducing once, then going sterile and dying, having done its job. …but the last “mistake”? What the hell could possibly have been going through their heads with that one? It had been so wildly virulent, there hadn’t been much time to understand it. In fact, there had been nothing like it-ever. No, really…ever! The opinion of the last great minds available to proffer their opinion on the subject determined it was some sort of chimaera that called a fungus known as cordyceps papa and psilocybe cubensis papa. Cordyceps is known for controlling the behavior of the host it infects, encouraging the host to place itself as close as possible to other, future hosts so as to ensure the survival of the eventual bouncing baby cordyceps of the next generation. Psilocybe cubensis was infamous for being the sort of mushroom of the non-pizza variety his college classmates had preferred, and he had so loathed. What the hell had they been thinking? He was pretty sure it was some half-assed attempt by the C.I.A. (or whomever was up to such shenanigans these days) to whip up some sort of mind-control drug that spread itself.. Kind of an MK ULTRA experiment that conducted itself.. except this baby was much more cordyceps then cubensis, and invariably ended up killing the host as the fruiting body burst forth from their forehead like a malevolent, hallucinogenic Athena.

That was very far from all there was to say about this thing, however. It was very strange, indeed. When people were infected, it started very quietly. A mild headache, a slight fever, a cold sweat in the night. The next day, queasiness that rapidly descended into nausea, and mild paranoia. By evening, full-on hallucination, descriptions of beings who were not there, encouraging them to evangelize the gospel truth of this infection, which they happily, fanatically even, did. Within four days, one infection could turn an entire city into a rabid commune of involuntary hippies, spreading their message of trippy oblivion to everyone who would hear it, and everyone who would not, as well. Timothy Leary would have been amused, mortified, or maybe a bit of both if he had realized that “tune in, turn on, and drop out” had more or less become the epitaph of humanity.. Nowadays, one just did not associate with others, or risk seeing the best mind of their own generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked… He had begun to think of Ginsburg, Burroughs, Cassidy, and Kerouac as the four horseman of Revelation fame, and could not resist ad-libbing his own book of a nowdefunct faith from their perspective, as pathetically kitschy as it was. “and the lord spake unto them…Saint Mckenna and Saint Leary will show thee thy path, and Saint Doblin and Saint Strassman will prepare thee for my return. My judgment shall pass on all, but whomever partakes of my Word shall be forgiven, and shall dwell with me forever and ever, Amen.” He had grown quite strange these days, melding Christianity and entheogenic subculture into one mess of an amalgamation, for reasons he didn’t understand entirely. Amusing, and slightly disturbing, yet strangely comforting to him. He didn’t know what to think these days. Not about Jesus, not about God, and especially not about Daniel Pinchbeck or Carlos Casteneda. It all was more or less irrelevant these days, anyhow. Right? To be continued…