I usually obsess about something in my backyard when I take the dogs out. And the unfortunate objects of my obsession changes, usually according to the season change. This last winter, I was obsessing about rabbit poo, this early spring about dandelions, and up until 2 days ago about bird poo and the poo of another mystery animal which seems to drop by just to go potty; can’t blame the creature, really, cause everybody else does, but is it too much to ask to at least introduce him/herself and go in certain area and stand there a little apologetically for a while until I identify the spot instead of sneaking in only when I’m not there and defiantly leave the poo in different places that I need to search for?

These days, I’m obsessing about mushrooms. With all these animals, including my dogs, feeding shit to these mushrooms, they tend to flourish in my yard during the season. I remember obsessing about them last year and the year before. When I noticed mushrooms in my backyard for the first time, I started picking them because I didn’t want my dogs accidentally eating them (if you didn’t know, mushrooms are toxic to dogs in varying degrees from vomiting and diarrhea to death). So as with everything else, I started obsessing about ridding my yard of those mushrooms, annihilating all colonies, and I comb through the entire yard every chance I get. This year, I started noticing mushrooms just the day before yesterday. I have picked more than 1,000 mushrooms from my backyard in three days. Since yesterday was sunny and dry, I only picked a little over hundred mushrooms this morning.

There are quite a variety of mushrooms in my yard and I realized that I kinda consider them as something more than fungi. For instance, when I see a little colony of brownish mushrooms with pointy heads, I feel like I’m looking at a family with wee little kids. When I see a mushroom with a very thin head that looks like a cocktail umbrella, I pick it very cautiously imagining it viciously attacking me because it reminds me of the frills that belonged to the dinosaur called Dilophosaurus I saw in Jurassic Park.

Yeah, sometimes I think to myself, yur crazy. Maybe some of these mushrooms are psychedelic and they affect my brain with their smell? Are there such shrooms? Cause these mushrooms smell weird like gasoline or something.