A Dreamtime Ode to the Underworld

On Brain Rot and Winter Break

Photo by Pratiksha Mohanty on Unsplash

I dream of a penis with mushroom power. Or was it a mushroom with penis power? Or a was it a stone shaped like a penis mushroom? Penis Envy¹?

I wake, grasping at insight, which vanishes when I realize that I could have sworn I was scrolling through Facebook just then.

Light blends into gray into gray. The miasma of the fog outside has reached inside the dim room, obscuring any sense of daytime. It could be 5 AM. It could be 10 AM. A hush lies over the house.

My daughter pokes her head in. She says "Can I play video games?" Is this the fifth or the first time she's asked? Did I answer? What did I say? I must be consistent. In the “sigh and wheeze of weird this time between Christmas and New Year,”² I have fielded this request like Bill Murray.³

Monsters lumber outside through the fog, advancing slowly down the street, stopping at the entrance to each home to consume the garbage discarded; a weekly offering.

Mirror, mirror, I have reached peak pallor, skin chalky white. My partner and daughter, of Norwegian and Scandinavian heritage, are nearly translucent. We are ghosts wandering through the flatlands of the Underworld.

What day is it? What time is it? Isn't there some sense of urgency anywhere, about anything? I'm certain that somewhere in another time/space there are things I should be working at, worrying over, and yet I cannot locate them here. Everything slumbers.

I wander down the stairs and turn some lights on to dispel the gloom. Put my phone down for a moment, my tether to the outside world. Lights shine through the house but do nothing to lift the pall. I lose my phone.

Tea. I need tea. I stand waiting for the kettle to boil. Fragments of dreams roll through my head. The penis mushroom; my partner's father telling me he doesn't eat chicken; Peruvian tapestries stacked up near my kitchen door; random snatches of imagery tumble through the aperture of my mind.

I rub my face. There are three things I must do today. Time cannot slip through my hands so much that I forget them. What are they again? I cannot sack out on the couch reading fairie smut all day. I cannot sack out on the couch watching movies all day—brain rot to the max. I find the phone on the sea of white that stretches across the horizon of the kitchen.

Pass me the pomegranate seeds, sweet sign of life to soothe the hunger for green. O! but the underworld is inside me. I am a denizen who is destined to stay until the springtime comes and whisks me away.⁴

1. Penis envy is a strain of very potent psychedelic mushroom. I wonder who named them?

2. From

Martin Shaw

’s recent post.

3. In the movie Groundhog Day.

4. In the story of Persephone & Demeter, Persephone eats the pomegranate seeds of the Underworld, which means she cannot leave. Later in the story, she is granted the ability to spend six months in the Upper world (spring and summer) and six months in the Underworld (fall and winter).