By Henry Coen

Dear Binston Swongo,

I accidentally set my scale to kilograms instead of grams when I was measuring my mushrooms for Alice, and I think I might have broken my brain. People’s faces now look like monsters, all music sounds like farts to me, and the voices in my head have gotten so much louder. What should I do? Is there any way to fix this?

—Oliva Dosa ’26

 

Dear Oliva,

 Glad you’re finally starting to wake up.

Shrooms are cute, but if you really want to see the world as it is, you’re going to have to go a whole lot deeper.

 Do you know what you get when you mix ketamine, shoe polish and pig shit? You get my morning OJ.

 Speaking of OJ, the year was 2003, Woodstock. Me, OJ Simpson, Anne Harris, and Avril Lavigne’s body double were just jamming on stage. We all popped some shrooms, just as a snack, you know, and Anne turned to me and said she was going to go corporate. “Avril” and I laughed in her face and told her she was totally tripping. OJ would sooner kill his girlfriend than Anne became the man.

 God, the times we had. We were the rat pack of our generation, nasty as can be, and Anne was the nastiest of us all. The government was after her cause ‘cause we [Redacted] on the [Redacted] till they [Redacted].

 Anne didn’t care. She was a total badass back then with a heart of gold. You know Brownell’s, the gun manufacturer just outside of town? It used to be El Browns—a bad name to have in rural Iowa. An angry mob with pitchforks came for it in the dead of night. Only Anne stood between them and the destruction they craved.

 “Get out the way, Anne,” one townsperson cried, brandishing a Molotov cocktail.

 “Can’t do that,” Anne said, spinning a custom El Browns gun in her hand. Sometimes, when the town is quiet and the wind is loud, I can still hear the screams. When I see her on Fridays at Nerf at Noyce running through the basement with a gun, grimace on her face, I wonder if she is seeing the zombies chasing her or if she is seeing another time, another place, a standoff, and pools of red.

 Now, the rat pack is all dead, and Anne has gone sober. Sometimes I feel like an old fly with erectile dysfunction, still beating my wings because I don’t know what else to do. God, I don’t know how much longer I can do this, how can I give advice when I’m lost myself. Do you all still enjoy laughing at me? Enjoy making me your clown, skimming my words to see what crazy things Binston will say? So fine, I’ll be your fool, your jester, your straw man. Maybe I do drugs just so I don’t have to face myself sober. 

 Anyways, LOL, shrooms are crazy. Maybe try meditation?

 With love,

Binston