I was 26-years-old living in Goa, India, on a research grant to study the international rave culture.

All right, it wasn’t a research grant. I was in school for my masters.
And true what I was doing could only loosely be defined as studying.

All right, fine, I was only thinking about going back to school for my masters.

And in the spirit of full disclosure it wasn’t Goa it was Brooklyn.

But Brooklyn was a hot bed of psychotropic activity at the turn of the millennium. It was also home to one Anna Belvedere, temptress and critical theory major. She liked to tell people we met in a rathskeller drinking absinthe smuggled in from Prague. We actually met while getting high on a fire escape at a house party. This didn’t stop her from insisting that I call her my little green fairy.

At the time I was having a great deal of fun with mushrooms. Not shitakes, though they can be hilarious. These were psychedelic mushrooms. I liked walking down to the water and watching the
Manhattan skyline sway to and fro.

To bring this all together one night Anna Belvedere and I were lying in bed when she turned to me and said, “You don’t love me enough.”

This is a horrible thing to say to a sensitive young man from the east coast. To not give a woman enough love, that’s so 1950s, so devaluing, so patriarchal. It wasn’t until moving out to the west coast that I learned to say, “That’s your bag.” The west coast is all about the art of throwing it back on your partner.

Still on the east coast, I was wracked with guilt. Anna hammered the point home with accusations of hegemony, hermeneutics manipulation, and my mother’s penchant for befriending large bosom women. Anna Belvedere’s breasts could best be described as two eggs, fried.

The next day I ate some psychedelic mushrooms and walked down to New York Harbor. Sitting on a bench on a pier I could see the water from the river being drawn up into the skyscrapers. The skyscrapers bloomed into soft petals, red and yellow and white. People were freed from their offices and lay in communion on the new flowers. There was a sense of oneness to the world.

And in the middle of it sat Anna Belvedere with her big words and little breasts. I felt an opening towards her. It was love and desire. It was a belief that through Anna I could connect to the whole of existence. (It was shortly after this experience that I moved to the west coast.)

When she came home I grabbed her and kissed her and extolled my love to her, even using the word parsimonious to describe my emotional withholding. I looked it up. Anna gazed at me with delight and asked where all this had come from.

I told her about my vision. She gave me a funny look. I told her I had the vision while on mushrooms.

Anna Belvedere erupted. Nothing real ever happens on drugs she screamed. Nothing profound can occur while on drugs. She threw her shoe at me. I had demeaned our relationship by thinking about it while on drugs. I was hit in the face by a very small bra.

Our relationship ended then and there. I had been torn about the experience for years. Until the other day when I came upon this study that just came out of Johns Hopkins.

It seems scientists administered psilocybin to a group of older religious folks. Psilocybin is the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. Johns Hopkins gave psychedelic mushrooms to forty-something churchgoers. Many of them reported intense, deeply felt spiritual experiences, experiences of connection with the divine. You can see the study here:
http://www.csp.org/psilocybin/

And here:
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2006/07_11_06.html

Two years after taking the psilocybin these people were reporting that the experience had deepened their faith, created a more positive attitude ion life, that it had altered the way they see themselves in
the world. Magic mushrooms had helped some of them have primary mystical experiences.

A-HA! Take that Anna Belvedere. I walked down a frightening road to discover my love for you. And what I found was true. It was true I tell you! Johns Hopkins says so. But your narrow little mind was too full of big words to see it.

Very often what is happening on drugs is a glimpse of a something quite honest. It is a veil being lifted. And then the veil comes back down and since it is all we have ever known we assume the veil is real and our drug-induced experience must be the falsehood.

But that’s not so. You couldn’t see that Anna. And thank god, because you, Anna Belvedere, were crazy.

On the basis of this groundbreaking study I’d like to take a moment to right a number of wrongs done me.

Beverly Kozciuzko, remember that time we were high and I said you were the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, well it wasn’t the drugs talking. It was the honesty with which I saw you.

Simone Bouvier, I always knew that wasn’t your real name, but when I told you that was the best sex of my life it wasn’t the GHB talking.
It was my self opening and recognizing how beautiful our experience had been.

And to the 75 women I’ve declared my love to while on ecstasy, that was the E talking.