I've been reading about fungi. Not recreationally — well, not only recreationally — but actually reading. And the news is not great, which I know is the news about everything at the moment, but fungi specifically. Psilocybin mushrooms — your liberty caps, your golden teachers, the little brown things that have been quietly rewiring anxious human brains since before anyone thought to write any of this down — are under genuine threat. Habitat loss. Climate disruption to the soil temperature windows they need. The specific kind of grassland they like is vanishing. Not dramatically. Just quietly, field by field.
I find this disproportionately upsetting. More than I'd expected to. There's something about the idea of a medicine that predates medicine, a therapy that predates therapy, simply ceasing to exist in the wild because we couldn't manage a field — it feels like a specific kind of failure. Not the end-of-everything failure. Just the quiet, bureaucratic, no-one-decided-this failure. The kind where it's gone and then it's gone and then everyone acts like it was always just a coincidence.
I mentioned this to someone and they said "well they can grow them indoors." Yes. Cheers. You can also put a whale in a swimming pool. That's not the same whale.
Everything I just said about the mushrooms? That's climate change. Everything I could say about the housing situation that put me in a shipping container in a field? That's climate change, tangled up with everything else. The grief, weirdly, also connects — the way a warming world makes you feel like you're watching things end, the way grief and climate grief have the same shape, the same particular helplessness of loving something you can't save.
I'm not going to do a rundown of the statistics here. You know the statistics. You're tired of the statistics. We're all exhausted. What I keep thinking about — from the shed, with very poor insulation and a single solar panel that works about sixty percent of the time — is that the future is being stolen in a way that is so large it doesn't look like theft. It just looks like weather.
But that bloke up there in the picture? He's fine. He's on a panel somewhere talking about responsible transition pathways and stakeholder-aligned frameworks and he will retire well and probably never eat a magic mushroom in his life because he doesn't need to — his brain chemistry was sorted out long ago by the quiet confidence of being given everything before he had to ask for it.
Anyway. That's the first entry. More to come. The shed is still standing. My mum would be horrified and secretly impressed, which is exactly the energy I'm going for.