Things have not been going very well for me…

My mother came home from the hospital Sunday and I’ve been running over there every day this week. My allergies are a hot mess (I pass goldenrod every day, a lot of it), I feel like I’m getting sick and I can’t tell if it’s just the usual ragweed season sinus infection I get every year, possibly COVID or just the metric fuck ton of stress I’ve been under. Maybe it’s all of the above…

All I know is that today I took the day off… I had laid down the law with my mother about sponge. I was absolutely not putting up with his mental, verbal and emotional abuse anymore. I’ve put up with that shit since I was 12 (I’m 48 and still putting up with it) and I couldn’t help her if he was going to be that way. Apparently she ripped him a new asshole because he was okay for the most part, which was good. I’ve been helping my mother do her chores, self care, been bombarded by all the info the visiting nurse and physical therapist have been spewing out, was there when the social worker came to help her fill out a living will… I’ve been so mentally, emotionally and physically exhausted that I come home, sit on the floor and cry. So when he flipped the fuck out on her and bit my head off because he wasn’t happy about how his doctor appointment went, I was ready to walk out right then. I’m just done… So today I’m taking time for me.

My life would be so much easier if I actually had some help taking care of her, too, but… Yeah, that’s not going to happen. And then the next thing you know, you’re flipping shit on the self checkout at CVS because it refuses to register that you put the item in the bag so you start repeatedly and rapidly slamming the item into the bag, yelling at the machine, “Can you fucking register it now?!” And then a nice employee comes to help you before you punch the screen because you’re obviously overly stressed the fuck out and have clearly lost your fucking mind…

So today is a me day, to do whatever I wish…

The thought has crossed my mind to get stoned off my ass, to be honest. And if my throat and lungs felt better, I probably would. But I don’t know that even smoking a bowl would help right now, it’s that bad…

Back in the day, when I was young and surprisingly not dumb, I took up smoking pot for a while. I knew what was wrong with me, but mental illness wasn’t something that people had (“Not my family member…”) because of the stigma surrounding it. So those of us suffering did what we had to do. I smoked dope and did whippets. Like a lot of whippets… Actually, I really enjoyed those… One of my crew, we called him Chicken, and I always heard and saw the same things while stoned. One night while doing whippets, I heard those weird helicopter sounds like you hear in the Pink Floyd song “On The Run” from the Dark Side Of The Moon album (that was fucked up) and when I mentioned it, he heard them as well. We also saw the same weird wavy lines on a TV while watching the movie Dark Side Of The Moon… I always found it amusing that Chicken and I always heard and saw the same weird shit when we were stoned… Shared psychosis!

Speaking of shared psychosis…

I was anxiously awaiting the release of the series Nine Perfect Strangers on Hulu (because the commercials looked really good) and I’ve been binge watching since. I even ordered the book after the second episode. So if you’ve been wanting to see it and haven’t yet, this is your spoiler warning.

On the surface, it seems like a basic and boring plot. Nine people go to an overpriced wellness retreat to better themselves and hopefully cure whatever mentally and physically ails them. But that’s just on the surface… Go in deeper and you find this isn’t exactly your “normal” wellness retreat. I actually didn’t think anything was too odd until the guests had to dig their own graves, were told to lie down in them and think about their lives, what they’d done with them, who would miss them, as the staff threw dirt on top of them. Yeah… see, I don’t get where that’s helpful to people who are feeling bad about themselves, which is when I started thinking that there’s something seriously wrong with this place and, if I were a guest there, I’d leave and ask for a refund because no one told me I’d be traumatized at the prospect of possibly being buried alive.

Inevitably, however, whatever it is that is being done for the guests seems to start helping as their backstories begin to start coming out at you in little dribbles. They all seem to be feeling better, but at a certain point, one of the guests realizes they’re acting out of character and asks if they’re being drugged to which she’s told they are.

What they’re doing at this retreat is called micro-dosing and it’s “perfectly safe”. Several times a day the guests are served smoothies with a small amount of psilocybin, the ingredient in magic mushrooms. As owner Masha claims, it can help with a wide variety of mental illnesses and can help you “eat better, sleep better, fuck better”… Okay, then.

Anyway, I found an interesting article you can read here that explains what the book and show got right and wrong about wellness retreats that offer psychedelics as a treatment. It was rather interesting… Actually, I had heard and read things before that had discussed the use of psychedelics when other treatments had failed for those suffering certain mental illnesses. In fact, there’s a YouTube video a gentleman made when he went into the jungles of South America to a tribe, I believe it was, that treated people with psychedelics and what he had said was that they essentially rebooted your brain like you would reboot a computer. He genuinely seemed to feel better after the experience, though I don’t think I’d go in the middle of the jungle to get it. However, if you’re looking to get said treatment in a more controlled environment, you’re out of luck if you live in the US. Such retreats aren’t legal here (the article does, however, tell you where they are legal) so you’ll be having to make a trip to another country if you’d like to try the benefits of illegal psychedelics in a controlled setting. Bummer, I know…

However, if given the chance, I think I’d try it. What have I got to lose at this point anyway, right? Not a whole helluva lot…

I’m just so fucking tired…

I think my best course of action right now is to curl up, put on a movie and pass the fuck out. I’m just completely exhausted.

The thing is, you never know what will effect you and in what what way it will effect you until it happens. Well, I found out the hard way that this is all a bit much for me.

It’s quite possible that I need one of those wellness retreats myself before I punch out self checkouts…

Anyone want to come along….?