No white rabbits

Now I am not one to really go full tilt boogie with "the drugs". Growing up around parents that did lines of coke off of a mirror/picture of a panther while listening to Boston through their record player that sat on our wooden plank/cinder block entertainment center, kinda soured me on whole thing. Perhaps that, and the fact that it made my dad crazy. So crazy that he put up tin foil on the windows to stop himself from invading the minds of the neighbors. A useful trade when there was a block party. You don't like the guacamole? Kill the people who made it with your mind. He was the professor X of Pamela Jane St. So I stayed pretty scared straight. But eventually you enter your twenties and are grossly behind everyone in your generation when it comes to being a fucked up mess. So I started spending more time with my resident fag hag, Natalie. They can always be trusted to show you the way around taking things that make you forget. If you wandered in around 7:30 p.m, Natalie and I would be passed out, with golden girls on loop, and surrounded by a shanty town of pizza hut boxes. Sometimes we made a fort. So I entered the valley of the dolls. Except our "dolls" were cheap mec. So it seemed the next natural step was to plan a trip to the coast with Natalie and my friend Maurice with the main objective being to eat shrooms on the beach. I should say that I was a tried and true stoner at that point and had dabbled in somethings a bit more "enlightening". Such as ecstasy. My account with ecstasy before that ended with me curled up in the fetal position swiping away the faces that were flying at me. So it seemed a good idea to go to a strange place and eat poison fungus.  We arrive at the beach at about 10:00 am. Its a bit overcast and looks to be a pleasant day to enter gates of hell. Balmy. We divide the shrooms between the 3 of us. Natalie and Maurice eat their portion quickly, like chicken tenders. I eye my share with a look of fear (not unlike I normally do with chicken fingers).

"I think I will eat half now and half later, just to maintain" I say

I have to state that both of them easily weighed twice as much as me or more. Not only did I need to look after my figure, I needed to not flip the fuck out and run screaming into the ocean.

"just eat it you pussy" they say

I am swayed by this argument, decide its for the best, and eat it all. 

We find a small cave like indent in the cliffside to settle ourselves for our trip.  We'll fast forward about an hour. Maurice is laying on his back looking at the walls of the "cave". He has made friends with the moss that is hanging on the wall and has given each of them names. Instead of responding to us when we say anything, he responds to the moss that bares our namesake. Natalie seems fairly normal. Then there's me. 

"Im losing myself, Im losing myself" I say over and over again.

Needless to say I am not stoked. Whenever I open my eyes and look out at the surrounding cliffs, I can see that they are breathing. Breathing and slowly crawling towards me. They will reach me if they can get across that beach made of graph paper. This seems unlikely though because those families of wandering space monsters will probably stop it.  I decide its best to leave nature to its mysteries and start convulsing. After Natalie is able to talk me down, let me know that she can get me to the hospital, and that, yes, time does in fact exist, we realize we had not brought food or water. The last time we did shrooms we were smart enough to have brought something to sustain life. Smart enough in fact to pack a lunch in a little cooler with frozen turkey sausage because we had no ice. We found ourselves clever for solving this logistical obstacle, not unlike Macgyver. Only stoners have tubes of frozen turkey sausage, but no ice. By the time we decided to eat we had a cooler full of turkey juice, so Maurice decided to eat wildflowers instead. This time we didn't even have rotting turkey meat. But after a vigorous search through my bag they did find something that was deemed edible, Lube. They ate every packet I had. From peach to pina colada. You can't top that (at least not as comfortably)  so it was time to go. I had come back from the brink and was ready to live, and Maurice had been arguing with the moss and was not putting up with their shit anymore. Needless to say there will be no "white rabbits" in my future. And if you ever think that I might consider chasing the dragon, then you better mean the ones in the chinese parades... because I would like to chase those... they're colorful!

The badass blackberries of Chehalis

The idea of a wine tour fills me with images and emotions that make me feel high falootin. So when approached with the idea of staying in a cabin in Washington an getting a wine tour to boot, I was very much down. I like to think that I am the kind of person that knows nothing about wine, but when in the setting of a sophisticated winery that once the owners/wine people saw me, they would know that I was one of them. We would exchange looks of "I like the nose on this one but this 92 syrah is a bit too capricious, wouldn't you agree?". We would then spit our wine into a ceramic urn and cleanse our pallets with 100 dollar bills. Maybe I aim a bit high? Maybe I should think that Chili is the best thing to accompany a nice chardonnay, but I won't get ahead of myself. Our delightful friend Andrew was so nice to set this up for us. I am so grateful and must state that because it was so sweet. He too had other ideas of a wine tour that perhaps did not line up with what occurred, but I doubt he would have traded it in for a "real" wine tour with actual "wine", and neither would I. This my friends was the annual Chehallis wine valley tour. A six stop wine romp. We decided to start the furthest away and work closest to the cabin so that maximum drunkenness could be achieved with minimal drunk driving. We pull up to the address of destination one. In place of a sprawling vineyard was a manicured field. Instead of a chateau, there was a model home. Granted it was the first model home in a growing community of model homes, so in that way it was the best float in the parade. It had a tent in front. You knew this was straight class, alls the ways. The woman who took our I.d and gave us our souvenir glasses was a lovely lady I will name Sherry. She had a beautiful scalp I must say. the way it glistened through her eiffel tower of teased hair was like it had been kissed by angels. Glitter kisses. This was the moment that set the bar for the tour. What this "winery" lacked in taste, sophistication, and sanitation, It gained in punny wines. Who wants a Chianti when you can have a "Key Auntie"?  Apricot breeze would have made any arbor mist fan sell their black hills gold for a mere sip. What's that? Tamale pie dip chili thing? I hear they got the same stuff over there in that France.  On to destination two. Same house, with same tent in new town. The key to consumers being comfortable is uniformity and berry wines a plenty. Cranberry wine? Sign me up! But this one was the edgy winery-like-thing. It was a "Whinery" except you need to cross out the H cause there's no whining apparently. It served Chili straight outta the crock pot an it hired a band. A band that had writes up like, "They take words and turn them into songs"-chehallis examaner. "One of them has a guitar"-hoboken press. That last one may not be that accurate, they had two guitars. They were called....RAVINWOLF! They channeled their spirit animals, hung up their tye-dye back drops, and "Stevie nick'd" their mic stands. Destination three: Carols place.  We drove down a muddy dirt road and made a left into a drive way with a hand carved wood sign on a pine tree that read "Carols place". Carols place should probably become a rehab. Standing in line for our wine, you could see/hear that Carol has already tied one on. She tied it on and then made it drink its Elizabeth Taylors "white diamonds" once it ran out of wine to stay drunk. She is the messiest thing in Washington, and no amount of time spent in the mirror trying to look like Sarah Palin could hide that fact. Her attempt to check our I.Ds (we had stamps by the way) was comical. "So uh...eh....what's the date thats ok?"she says.

"oh...uh....I don't know.....88?" her helper says.

"So...uh....before or uh.....after 88?".

This woman MAKES wine? It was a hard to choose which of these fine wines to imbibe. Do I take the "badass blackberry wine" or the "super spectacular strawberry". Its like asking yourself "do I have caviar or pate?" I chose "Perfectly pleasurable plum", a sound decision, no? It tasted like spiked pedialyte. And when I say spiked I mean someone added food coloring. Someone named Carol. After a stomach-ache we leave and head to destination number 4. This place was alright. No berry wines, and no Carols. Destination 6. We decided to skip 5 because ones mouth can only taste so much splendor/glorified hot fruit in one day. The last stop was the perfect finish. A house that owned 100 acres of christmas trees and a stranded tug boat in the backyard. And Kay. Kay Warner was our wine hero and Cords future sugarmomma. We try their wines and they are good enough to warrant me paying 6 dollars at fred meyer. So Cord asks the old woman standing behind us sneering, why there are so many berry wines around. "Lack of sophistication" she says.

Kay is now our favorite. Our anti-Carol.

then proceeds to tell us that she could have medals and all that shit but she doesn't have the time to ship her wines around, ya know, being in Asia half of the year. "most of those people just add fruit extract and call it wine". You know she was talkin bout Carol. Kay was rich, mean, and didn't give a fuck. But she did give Cord her card. So with luck, he can land a sweet 65 year old woman that can get us into the 3rd annual Chehallis valley wine tour. Fuck Napa.