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May sat at her kitchen counter stuffing bits of shroom into do-it-yourself gelcaps from the health food store. Dani and I were living between the middle of nowhere and its cousin at the time, but were too afraid of the crotchety old farmers to pick our own. We begged a few caps off of her and went home.

We should have waited until a more convenient time to take them, but the first rule of tripping seems to be that you always have something important to do the next day. So we took them at 1 am and promptly fell asleep.

We woke up an hour later. Everything was funny and we couldn't keep our legs still in the bed. As I write this I can feel the sheets under my feet as I slid them around. Dani started talking about how when we got old, someone would put us in the local nursing home, Quiet Oaks. I said, "Baby, you have to have children first and then they put you in the nursing home." And she asked, "Can't Slater (the cat) put us in Quiet Oaks?" We laughed at the image of the cat first living to be over sixty in human years, then rolling us into Quiet Oaks. In my mind he was walking on his hind legs pushing an old fashioned wooden wheelchair like FDR rode in. He was looking sideways and meowing his bitchy meow.

That cat had stripes down his left side that said "LSD". It was really there. It had been documented by non-tripping people. I didn't know then that my boyfriend David would kill that cat with a kick to the ribs three years later.

I didn't know that two years later, after Dani and I had left our home and each other and Albert had moved into our home, he and I would lie in his bed in the same room in the same place in the room and sing Beatles songs and Monty Python songs at the top of our voices after making love for hours. We always stayed up way too late talking about who we'd rather be with and I was always tired at work the next day. The problem, he said, was that I didn't make him sick to his stomach. I had a calming effect on him and therefore wasn't "the one".

In the morning of Valentines Day, or actually at 4pm, I had to massage Luke and his new wife as a Valentines present from him to her. I can't remember her name. She told me all about her weird cult religion she'd joined on the UGA campus. We listened to Ella Fitzgerald and Satchmo. I was so hungover from the shrooms I prayed for death.

I didn't know that Luke and his wife would divorce a year later. I didn't know that after Dani and I had left each other I would occupy Luke's old bedroom at Will's house.

Dani's band had a show that night in the upstairs of that Planet Snob bar that didn't serve domestic beer, on the corner of Bumpkin and Dirt streets. I had to work the door and there was a door prize. This was my first and only experience dealing with drunks professionally. I hated each and every one of them. The deal with that venue was that we had to bus it after the show. The loadout always took forever. I still wanted to die. Sean's wife Bella and I were cleaning up. Sean, band member, next-door neighbor and landlord extraordiaire suddenly stopped what he was doing and said to me, "Holly, can I give you a foot massage?" It was the best thing that had ever happened to me at that point. We sat down right there and he gave me a foot massage while everyone else went on working around us.

I didn't know that two years later there would be a meeting of the local massage therapist association in that room and again there would be door prizes. Albert and I were there, acting as if we were daytime friends. A room full of vegetarians took their chances to win the door prizes of gift certificates to a steakhouse. I won and took Dani to lunch.

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