Mushrooming

Feed your head.

— Grace Slick

Mommies are mushrooming, reports Harper's Bazaar.

"This is a time of psychedelic renaissance, of mushroom mania," the magazine says. 

"It’s a time when people are increasingly turning to psychedelics not for recreation but for healing—and many of them are parents."

Raising kids apparently so stresses millennial mommies they must take shrooms to cope.

Magic mushrooms—in my youth the illicit leading edge of consciousness-expansion—have become a trendy substitute for tranquilizers.

But "getting high is not the point," the magazine says: better parenting is.

Parenting is rough, after all, a "sleep-deprived, tedious, anxiety-riddled road, recently made all the more difficult by the pandemic."

Ingesting magic mushrooms can counteract the "malaise of modern parenting."

"The mushrooms allowed me to feel vulnerable," one angst-crippled mommy told the magazine. 

Shrooms took her to a "place of peace and love and real clarity."

Research scientists of recent have been keen on shrooms, according to Harper's Bazaar.

"A steady thrum of studies has illuminated the potential benefits of psychedelics in helping with myriad mental-health disorders, including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder," the magazine reports.

Two years ago, pharmacologists at Johns Hopkins announced that psilocybin can eliminate depression; while the FDA in 2023 is slated to approve ecstasy for treating PTSD.

So many mommies are turning to shrooms to cope, the magazine says, a nationwide mushroom movement is forming.

Some call the movement "psychedelic parenting;" others, "plant parenthood."

Critics worry that it lacks medical supervision.

But advocates point to the fact that Indigenous healers have used shrooms for thousands of years to heal troubled tribespeople without medical credentials.

Supervised or not, the movement is mushrooming: over 30 million Americans have ingested psychedelics, according to the Johns Hopkins pharmacologists—many of them mommies.

I now understand why I see so many moms in the supermarket talking to the cereal boxes.

Above: Shrooms. Oil on fiberboard. 10 x 8 inches. Score now! 

Hashtags are a Waste of Time (Almost)

Instagram's CEO recently said hashtags are a waste of time, if you use them in the belief that they increase readership.

They don't; they only help Instgram "categorize" your posts.

To verify the CEO's statement, analytics firm Social Insider studied over 75 million posts published between 2021 and 2022.

The firm verified that using a lot of hashtags, indeed, is a time-waster. They don't boost readership. 

At best, the use of a few—six or so—will help make your posts "discoverable."

But piling them on is futile.

Why is that?

Instagram has changed its search engine. 

Users can now enter keywords, instead of hashtags. That means many avoid the hashtags page, preferring to look only at search results.

Should you drop hashtags altogether?

No, says Social Insider.

While readership of your post isn't improved by the use of hashtags, the inclusion of six or fewer hashtags will improve Instagram's ability to categorize your post.

Using more than six penalizes you.

Then He Goes Stage Right

There's an absolute morality? Maybe. And then what? If you think there is, go ahead, be that thing.

— Ricky Roma in "Glengarry Glen Ross"

Perhaps because I've spent so much of my life selling and working with salesmen, I've long thought that David Mamet's 1984 play "Glengarry Glen Ross" is one of the the greatest American plays of the 20th century, surpassed only by Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night."

"Glengarry Glen Ross" depicts the dark side of capitalism, where scrappy salesmen use wile and cunning and ride the backs of hapless suckers.

Though in the minority, I've seen salespeople who are like that. They earn the profession a bad name.

For its realism, “Glengarry Glen Ross" is a masterpiece.

 

But what's up with Mamet?

As reported by The New York Times, the playwright has gone loco, becoming an ardent backer of the conman extraordinaire: Donald Trump.

Now, a playwright backing libertarian causes is questionable enough.

But backing the conman Trump?

It's loathsome.

America's greatest 20th-century playwrights—O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee—were all unequivocally liberal.

Mamet is the odd man out.

And odd he is—or has become.

Appearing on Fox News and HBO recently, Mamet has been mouthing absurd, right-wing theories, the kind you'd expect from an idiot like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

He claims, for example, that all schoolteachers are pedophiles, keen to "groom" young children for sex; that ruthless Democrats "staged" the outbreak of Covid-19; that the media is "statist" and was planning to foment an armed rebellion had Biden had lost the election; and that Broadway has "canceled" him—even though a revival of Mamet's 1975 play "American Buffalo" opened on Broadway a week ago.

Mamet also claims Trump did a "great job" in the White House, and only lost a second term because the election was "questionable."

Mamet first mouthed many of these theories in magazine essays which he's collected under the title Recessional, a book The Wall Street Journal called an exercise in "paranoid didacticism."

The once-liberal Mamet's volte-face isn't new. 

It dates to 2008, when he announced in The Village Voice that he was "no longer a brain-dead liberal." 

In that essay, Mamet defined liberals as "idealists;" conservatives as "tragedians."

Liberals, he said, are "perfectionists" who want to achieve absolute morality; conservatives are realists who just want to "get along with others."

We live in a divided America, Mamet said: "one where everything is magically wrong and must be immediately corrected; and the other made up of people reasonably trying to maximize their comfort."

"I realized," Mamet concluded, "that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace."

Fair enough. Some of us thrive in a marketplace. And none of us likes fussy moralists—unless we're ourselves fussy moralists.

I myself don't prize equitability or diversity over justice and liberty. 

But Mamet's recent rants tell me he has gone off the rails. 

Totally.

And that's a shame.

He's given America many literary gifts.

But in the third act he's ruining his reputation.

April

April is the cruelest month.

— T.S. Eliot

I remember reading "The Waste Land" in college, just so I could say I'd read it.

The poem made little impression on me, despite its reputation as T.S. Eliot's masterpiece and the only 20th-century book to rival James Joyce’s Ulysses, the greatest work of modernist literature.

One line of "The Waste Land" stuck with me, however. 

The first.

That's because I read separately that, indeed, April is the cruelest month: April is the leading month for suicides.

It's hard to understand depression—the clinincal kind—until you have experienced it yourself; and harder still to understand suicide.

Perhaps that's because, in a real sense, no one experiences suicide.

April is the season of blossoms and regeneration, a joyous occasion for most of us.

But blossoms and regeneration can be painful, because they recall fertile and happy days forever gone by, as Eliot makes clear:

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Suicide, on the other hand, is painless.

NOTE: "The Waste Land" turns 100 years old in October. You can read philosopher David Hume's 1755 defense of suicide here. 

Common Sense

It don't make much sense that common sense
don't make no sense no more.

— John Prine

My keyring holds two identical looking keys. 

One unlocks the front door; the other, the back.

Murphy's Law governs my keyring.

No matter which door I'm hoping to unlock, I always choose the wrong key.

That defies common sense.

But common sense is passé, anyway.

Today, we're "structurally stupid."

Or are we?

When I use my housekey, I do so in the firm belief that it will open the lock.

Even though it never does the first time, I believe it will.

I presuppose that turning the key will unlock the door.

Why do I believe so?

Experience. 

Know-how.

Trial and error.

The very same trial and error that underpins science.

I have an inductive means for making judgements about cause and effect in the real world.

Those means aren't perfect, but they're good enough to get me into the house.

They go by the name “common sense.”

No, we're not structurally stupid.

Some of us just prefer to be assholes.