Comments on Have a Shroomy Day

I enjoyed the piece, but also have a question: What's with the paragraph-length sentences? On top of which, not only the paragraph-length sentences but the calling attention to and self-consciousness about the paragraph-length sentences? To tell you the truth, I hadn't really noticed until your "how are these long, loopy sentences treating you, by the way?" comment, after which all I could was scan each paragraph for periods, which made it hard to pay attention to the story - which was interesting and mostly well-written, by the way.

Just wondering.

It was a trip, Levislade. Christopher eats the mushrooms and begins the next segment: "Astoria began with a bad trip."

Nothing is more boring than other people's dreams and hallucinations. Christopher's intent, if I may be so bold, was to take us on a trip of our own—we come out the other end, with him, exhausted and thinking about all the strange things we've just seen: knives, otters, deadly waves, explosions.

i have to say, this story brought me back to the halcyon days of six years ago...shrooms were legal in japan while i was in high school, and it wasn't uncommon for kids to trip from homeroom through PE, glazed eyes and bad gas and all. (you didn't mention the bad gas, if i recall correctly.)

i didn't try them again until I moved back to the Southwest, and the trip consisted of chasing a black cat through some creosote and stabbing lindsay lohan's eyes out of a Mean Girls poster. la dee da. life goes on.

isn't being an idiot the sum total of the stranger's marketing plan?

oh so cool, idiot

idiot clique

idiot freaks from elsewhere

frizzy made it

Christopher,

You also described The Goonies as a “failure,” promote reading in bars and supported the war against Iraq.

Egad man, redeem yourself.

Yeah, the war-endorsing thing is going to follow me to my grave. I was being a freaking idiot. I wrote that before I understood the history of Iraq, and I was buoyed along by The New Yorker's articulate endorsement of the war (I thought it was articulate at the time), and by the inarticulate arguments of war protesters and their condescension toward troops (I'm from a military family whose idea of being "supported" is not synonymous with being "brought home"), and the idea that liberating oppressed people is the right and good thing to do (this was about as complex as my thinking got—see above about not knowing Iraq's history). I was 22 when I wrote that. I regret it to this day.

As for The Goonies, I don't know what to tell you. It's a mound of shit.

Frizzie...

I’m a freaking idiot? Agreed. Although in my defense, I knew I was being a freaking idiot the whole time.

it's called "fallacy of imitative form" ... check it out.

I am shocked, shocked I say, that someone in their 20s would take their lives in their hands and trust someone else with life or death decisions.

Hmmm. Good thing you don't know I joined the Army when I was 22 ...

Seriously, cut her a break! Want foolish? How about the guys climbing up Mount Hood with like subpar levels of gear ...

@6 - Frizzie, seriously, dude, two goose eggs on the Iraq and Goonies decisions. Reading in bars - heck, I did that when I was 22, and if people wanted to fight me over it, I tried not to, but if they persisted, I'd fight.

It's my decision what I do in a bar. So long as I'm buying beverages every so often, everyone else should chill.

So, keep reading books in bars. Flaunt it!

frizzy is a great handle

sorry, I and most of the kids i grew up with seem to have decided our positions against the death penalty and anti war in out teens

of course, we were the bright ones in high school

did the words colonialism and imperialism intrude at all while thinking of the Iraq conquest - a bit late now

frizzy, yes, it feels just right

Great. You're an idiot who _knows_ he's an idiot, which puts you in the top .01 percentile of all idiots out there.

It still doesn't make me want to read you, or care about a damn thing you say.

Must agree with Frizzy on The Goonies -- an unbelievably bad movie. However, I have never laughed so hard in a movie theater (I saw a midnight showing in Berkeley a year or two ago) as I did at the scene where the future Sam Gamgee explains how, if we don't seize the day and follow our dreams, "we're all just riding up Troy's bucket" (or something)...then caps this inspirational sentiment by taking a big hit from his asthma inhaler.