In 1970, new strains of fungi were isolated from soil samples taken from Norway and from Wisconsin…components that had antifungal activity were isolated from extracts from these fungi. The Norwegian strain, Tolypocladium inflatum Gams, was later used for the large-scale fermentation of cyclosporin.

Oh so we talkin…shroomies?

You know I fuck with my shroomies, bro.

And you know what else I fuck with?

Fkn cycles.

Aw man.

OK.

Time to ride that shroom-cycle.

•

I couldn’t work and I couldn’t write.

I mean I could, technically.

In theory.

But the confusion was real.

The roid withdrawals.

Feeling these manic spurts, followed by deep dips.

Moments of illumination that faded into disorientation before I could even identify, let alone capture them.

Reading anything beyond the quickest hitter impossible.

Turning to song; gravitating towards brevity.

One-minute, single-verse, no-chorus tracks; single-taken, long-shot music vids.

Them Florida rappers were popping recently, specifically bc of this. Lil Pump, Ski Mask. XXXTENTACION, before he got merked last June.

How X popped off outta nowhere like he did, on SoundCloud, bc of this.

He started his verses the second the song started. No dillydallying doing eight bars of Woah and Yuh ad libs to gear up. No hooks. Just ripping it off the rip, then cutting the verse/song off before the listener knew what hit em. And even when he did ad-lib-stall, like on “RIP Roach,” the beat/verse came in so hard when it did it slapped you. Like it started its own song.

The immediacy.

There was no time.

And then Valee. Chi-town-based, ’Ye understudy.

Initially feeling his bars to be lackluster, low-energy.

Confusingly simple.

Rudimentary, almost.

It took some listens to figure out their nuance.

What was esoterically next-level about em.

His feature verse on “Two 16s” by Z Money—the second 16 of the song’s two. He doesn’t take a single breath between bars, just keeps flowing in this eerie triplet flow that’s syncopated in a way that he doesn’t stop when a bar ends. He rides right over it.

No call-and-response between establishing and echoed rhyme.

The entire verse a single, uninterrupted stream.

And visually.

Young M.A’s “Petty Wap” video. She starts out with six quick cuts—of her inhaling blunt smoke; of her exhaling; of a girl twerking; of a dude getting thrown into a pool; of a pool queue shooting a pool ball; of another girl twerking—almost just to show she was capable of cuts, it seemed. But then, subsequently, holding the camera on her for the rest of the song—also a single verse, no choruses—as she moves gradually towards the camera, poolside at a pool party.

A single, unbroken shot.

Like relying fully on her swag, her charisma, to hold your attention.

And once she’d gotten it, not letting go.

These became the daily mode-setters.

Became more important than reading, writing.

Or, became the only art forms I was able to ingest, how scattered I was.