Build Date: Sun Sep 7 00:00:10 2025 UTC
I spent about three hours tonight reading the journals of the Donner Party for no real good reason, except to think, "Hey, wouldn't it suck to be in the Donner Party?"
-- Tjames Madison
McKenna, 1990s Dying Real Bad
1999-08-15 17:32:18
Damn. Well, sure, of course it was going to happen sometime, but I wasn't really sure that the 1990s were really going to end until I heard that Terence McKenna was super dead sick.
Like, I dunno if anyone else remembers this stuff, but the 90s came on REAL STRONG here in San Francisco, around 1989 or so. It was this really weird, optimistic yet cynical, bad crazy time. There were basically 4 planks to the 90s platform: electronic music, computers, green politics, and Terence McKenna.
Terence is the world's foremost expert in ethnobiology -- in other words, he knows all the best plants to get you fucking HIGH. But unlike a lot of cynical drug advocates, Terence BELIEVES in drugs. He thinks they're IMPORTANT -- that they're a gateway to the IMMORTAL and INEFFABLE world. He thinks that the Shadow People that you meet in Mushroom Land have something to say to you. That all those guys in loincloths with blood coming out of their ears in remote Amazon villages are doing something right.
Anyways, he was the spectacular godchild of early 1990s SF. Like, people would quote him all the time and stuff. Even long after all that THING that made the 90s cool and interesting and important kinda got dashed on the rocks by venture capitalists and W I R E D and whoever, even after that, Super Terence was still making the rounds, telling people about s. divinorum or whatever. He's been putting in the time to make the Dreamtime happen.
Well, now, he's dying. Check out the info at the site below, and take an extra cap tonight in honor of the Mushroom Man, eh? Tell them the Shadow People sent you.
T O P S T O R I E S
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