4 grams of mushrooms before noon.

There we go, folks. Another year folds into history, and we’re back at the beginning. The passing of time trips me out. I remember the day that this first happened — Monday, January 16, 2006. I had just turned 24, I had a day off from work and school, and a couple of friends hit me up to see if I wanted to go on a little voyage with them. They had some magic mushrooms, and I’d never indulged myself on the psylocibin before, so “Fuck it. New year, new me.”

I ate 4 grams at around 10 in the morning, and then I soared through the galaxy, traversed space and time right there in my apartment with my friends, for the next few hours. We set up shop in the living room, had the music going and a few joints ready to rock. At the peak of my high, I left our tiny group and the basecamp and headed to my bedroom where I spent the rest of my trip lying face down on my bed.

It was wild shit. “Blood On The Motorway” by DJ Shadow was playing on what felt like an infinite loop. It might have played once that day and then reverberated in head as I blew past Ursa Major, shooting into the furthest known galaxy from Earth, billions of light years away.

The experience changed my life; it pulled me out of serious depression; it improved my relationships with people I love; it allowed me to let go of the regret I felt for missed opportunities; it permanently altered my concept of “God” and shifted my perspective on time. It was fun!

“Time”

Time, as we are most familiar with it, is managed to keep our society moving along in some form of order because our global economy relies on order and time. It is rigid because it needs to calculate and measure productivity. Fuck that shit because this interpretation of time has robbed many a good folk of simply enjoying a relaxing moment without feeling any guilt whatsoever about sitting still and shutting up.

Time, as a theoretical physicist is familiar with it, is flexible. It lengthens and shortens depending on the strength of gravitational pull in the given area. In a recent NPR.com article by [name], University of New Hampshire professor of theoretical physics Chanda Prescod-Weinstein said that (in theory) when you travel through a blackhole, you “end up in a region where space has an arrow, and it’s one direction…and time doesn’t have an arrow like it did before. There’s really no sense of time.”

When I was frying balls of those ‘shrooms back in 2006, I went to that place in space, on the other side of a blackhole. Space and time were flipped and irrelevant. This might be why I felt such a connection to the Chris Nolan flick Interstellar. I’d been there before, maaaan!

All of that gets me back to thinking about today, New Year’s Eve, and tomorrow, what is a psychological fresh start for me and perhaps many of you. It trips me out to think about how 20 years can simultaneously feel like an eternity and just yesterday. I think about history and events I’ve witnessed, like “9/11” and all the crazy shit that’s happened in the 20+ years since then around the world. Then I think about growing up in the 80s and 90s, I think about how shit like oh the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War had happened within the last 20 years. It might be the edibles, but that rabbit hole is a mind bender.

Here we are again at the end of one year and the beginning of another. I know what I plan to accomplish this year, and I am looking forward to the unexpected (and hopefully positive) surprises 2023 brings me. May the upcoming year also bring you some positive surprises and good news, good health and good memories. Coming down from that remarkable January day in ’06, my biggest takeaway was that I needed to appreciate what I had in my life, the people I had in my life.

As I traveled through the cosmos that afternoon, I watched the people I loved and cared about live their lives and die. I died, and I floated through space and time kept on marching on. In my ethereal state, I carried those memories with me but oh so far because even my pure atomic essence was being reborn into something else. When I floated back down to Earth, I knew that I only had so much time with those people I loved and cared about.

Ironically, the friends that I shared that magical, mystical day with, two people that I had been friends with for a few years up to that point, are no longer friends. We kicked it many more times after that, but some time just a couple of years later, our lives went in different directions, to never cross paths again…yet.