caecilius-est-pater:darchildre:kindlecoverdisasters:Well, so long as you’re going mushroom picking,
caecilius-est-pater:darchildre:kindlecoverdisasters:Well, so long as you’re going mushroom picking, you might as well dress up for it. And carry a trombone.Buy it HERE.No, for serious, you guys. You need to find a copy of this book. It is amazing. My coworkers and I tell everybody about it.Every picture in the book is like this. They are all inexplicable, full of exactly the kind of people you expect to be in a book with this cover, wearing clothing that is either entirely inappropriate for mushrooming or exactly the clothes you wear mushrooming (which are eccentric), and doing strange and silly things with fungs.It is amazing.Probably it is also informative about mushrooms, as our local mushroomers do check it out a lot, but mostly the pictures are just great.Utterly bizarre but I promise it’s true story time: not only have I met this guy, but when I was 12 I made him afraid of his own house.So in middle school, I became obsessed with mushrooms the way more normal children are with wolves or horses (and, by the way, this book was my Bible, seriously check it out if you’re into mushrooms at all). By complete luck, my friend’s parents moonlighted as professional mushroom hunters (they find chanterelles and other high demand edible mushrooms that can’t be cultivated and sell them to fancy restaurants for a high price) and they were friends with the author of this book, so they once took me with them when they went to visit him.First of all, his house is exactly how you’d picture this guy’s house to look. I won’t post photos because that seems intrusive but I have a ton of them if anyone really wants proof I’m not making this up. His books are pretty much the go-to for anything mushroom related so he’s loaded. Huge, beautiful house in the middle of the forest in the mountains of northern California. An entire room that’s just a terrarium and indoor koi pond. A room with nothing but old Chinese furniture. A room dedicated to African art that he picked up on his travels.A room with tons of wooden sculptures of mushrooms arranged into a staircase leading to a loft bedroom. A room full of those wheels you spin at raffles. Anyway, the adults settled down for wine and small talk and my friend and I were left with a couple hours to kill. We did what any reasonable kid in an enormous house stuffed to the gills with weird, exotic knickknacks would do: played hide and seek. The problem is that I’m built like a magician’s assistant: small, skinny, and fine boned, and even more so when I was prepubescent. In the guy’s bedroom (which was basically a hallway for some reason, so it’s not as weird as it sounds that we were in his bedroom), he had this fancy chest of drawers that was raised maybe half a foot off the ground. I managed to flatten and contort my tiny 12 year old body to fit entirely underneath it.My friend couldn’t find me, not surprisingly, and when she gave up and I came out, she was so amazed that she went running to the adults and had them come over for a demonstration. So I did it again and blew all their minds. It was a pretty good day. Flash forward a few months, and my friend’s parents mention to me that they’ve been talking with the guy and he was so freaked out by the thought that a human could fit underneath the chest of drawers in his bedroom, that he’s been paranoid about it ever since.And that’s how 12 year old me traumatized renowned mycologist David Arora. -- source link