Trinie Dalton

Growing up in a small town in the NE, the only drugs I was ever offered were shrooms. It was in the parking lot of a Dunkin Donuts. I wasn’t interested. Drugs weren’t part of any cool culture for me growing up. I only knew a few kids who smoked pot and I didn’t want to be like them. The cool kids played sports. I didn’t want to be like them either.

The characters in Trinie Dalton’s stories seem like they probably grew up casually doing recreational drugs. They are cool. I can imagine a party that Trinie might have gone to. She seems like she knows that she is cool and her stories want to impress the people at that party.

My brother studied mushrooms in college. There are a lot of different kinds of mushrooms. There are more mushrooms that will kill you than taste delicious or make you hallucinate combined. I think mushroom taste gross, even on a pizza. It’s their slimy fungal texture and they remind me of a penis.

What does the title “Escape Mushroom Style” make you think of? It reminds me of video games and poorly translated karaoke subtitles. I want to play a video game that has pastel color 8-bit mushrooms on different levels and you walk through them and maybe eat them to see whether you go up to the next level (get high) or down to a subterranean level and try to escape (die).

I wonder what the person in this story does for a living. Do you think the dog died because of the irresponsibilty of humans? Are animal lives worth the same as a human life? Should she have bailed her brother out of jail or left him there to save the dog? Is that what this story is even about? What is anything about? Am I dreaming right now?

Next week’s story is “Incarnations of Burned Children” by David Foster Wallace