First Contact with the Myco Mind
Friend, This is BIG! Aliens beneath our feet!
Those fungal probes I mentioned the other day are NOT a joke! I talked to Southwick and he said Tommy has been acting very strange lately. Tommy has been keeping several 55 Gallon drums in the basement, and has been real secretive about his bathroom habits.
And Southwick has been getting some really strange messages on his machine in the morning. He says that he gets one or two strange messages per month since he moved into 3 Gunas LP.
Southwick got the weirdest one about the same time as Tommy went “funny” —
You must get the grease from Chinese restaurants. Cantonese. Never Mandarin. Lots. As much as you can get. Dump it at the double toadstool rings west of the Pier Park pool.
This morning he got this one!
Hey, guy! I’m making you type this now so you can read it later when you wake up. You may call me CarlTon. I’m OK, you too. I’m one of the minds under your feet. You call us “fungus,” but we are really a civilization beneath your feet.
Our nightly probes have decoded life for thousands of years. We number in the billions and live in the topsoil. Thousands of us are under your feet at any moment of your day. We co-exist in the same earth, I myself span 6 square miles and my filaments connect directly with a hundred million of my kind.
We can’t move as you above grounders and so some of us are seriously demented. A friend had the other guy here type this on his computer:
"Know my needs, puny human. You must do my bidding. Save all your bodily productions. They must be sorted by color and stored in 55 gal containers. This is a test of your compliance."
Lemme know if he’s doing anything weird like collecting his poop in cans in the basement, OK,Friend?
Southwick said that CarlTon gave him some hair-brained scheme to communicate back to the MycoMind entity called ‘CarlTon’ — sounds like cigarettes to me, but hey, I don’t tell fungus what to call themselves, Do I?
Fungal Probes? Mycological mind(s) beneath our very feet? Strong science suggests that the mycological mats of the Pacific North West have amazing interconnections that have been alive and evolving for as long as humanity — much longer, in fact. Intelligence? Absolutely. How high that intelligence is, or how fast it responds? No idea. Consciousness? Hmmm.
As I contemplate that question, there is only one thing that I know for sure: “As above, so below”