Amanita Muscaria is the most iconic toadstool, the Orange-with-White-spots-Alice-in-Wonderland -mushroom. The first time I considered consuming Amanita Muscaria was when I was town-crashing Forest Park in Portland, and I was spending a rainy day at a nearby library and I happened to read a mushroom guide book that described Amanita Muscaria  as the "Soma" of ancient times, and also said it wasn't all that toxic, and also said that Amanita Muscaria that bloomed in early summer was far less toxic than Amanita muscaria that bloomed in late summer. So a few weeks later in early July 2002, I was camping at San Antonio Hot spring in Backcountry New Mexico when a teenager hiked through my camp with the biggest Amanita I had ever seen, like the size of a Frisbee. I asked him if he was considering consuming said mushroom, and he informed me that he and his friends were considering it and had already collected numerous specimens and they were drying them on a line back at his camp. He invited me over to check it out. So when i got there they had about a dozen shrooms drying on a line, and I informed them that I thought they really didn't have to dry them first, and so they asked if I had ever tried them and I said no, but I said I would like to try one; "I mean one half of one", which they thought was funny, since I backed off on consuming a whole Amanita. They were happy to have a "guinea pig", so one of the 4 kidz said he would take the other half, and so we gave it a go, with a whole raw Amanita.
It didn't taste bad at all.
So then we waited.
And engaged in small talk.
After a half hour I started feeling very warm and a little queasy, though only a little. The one kid who had taken the other half likewise said he didn't feel so good and threw up, but only once. One of the other kidz asked me how I was feeling and I said "not bad". And he was like "Alright!" And the other three kids downed a whole Amanita each, though not one of the bigger ones. I thought that was real funny, that because the first kid and me were only mildly ill, that was a Big Green Light for them.

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