Saturday, May 10, 2008
Mushrooms. Today I noticed that a carpet of tiny mushrooms has begun to sprout on what used to be the gravelled area of my back yard. It is so unkempt that plants pretty much obscure the gravel, especially a baby's tears kind of creeper that I have no idea how to weed out. And now the mushrooms.
The bourgie papers have been spruiking a 'mushroom identification' tour you can take down on the Mornington Peninsula. You pay $45 to have some guy tell you if they are edible. We were unclear if he will also tell you if they are hallucinogenic. Anyway, I kind of wished I had the mushroom man's expertise when it comes to these.
They are starting to grow everywhere. It creeped me out, and I thought instantly of Sylvia Plath's poem "Mushrooms", her brilliant juxtaposition of benign and malignant, meek and ruthless. These uncanny moments always remind me of the first act of an invasion movie, when the protagonist notices small things awry but doesn't realise they are harbingers of a much greater horror. Shaun Of The Dead parodied this so well, and the Nicole Kidman movie The Invasion did a good version of it too.
The bourgie papers have been spruiking a 'mushroom identification' tour you can take down on the Mornington Peninsula. You pay $45 to have some guy tell you if they are edible. We were unclear if he will also tell you if they are hallucinogenic. Anyway, I kind of wished I had the mushroom man's expertise when it comes to these.
They are starting to grow everywhere. It creeped me out, and I thought instantly of Sylvia Plath's poem "Mushrooms", her brilliant juxtaposition of benign and malignant, meek and ruthless. These uncanny moments always remind me of the first act of an invasion movie, when the protagonist notices small things awry but doesn't realise they are harbingers of a much greater horror. Shaun Of The Dead parodied this so well, and the Nicole Kidman movie The Invasion did a good version of it too.
