I’ve been reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma the past week-and-a-half. I was just reading a chapter about his mushroom-hunting experience in California and felt compelled to share this paragraph, found in the middle of page 383:
Ben and Anthony had a slew of these mushroom-hunting adages and I collected them over the course of the day. “Seeing is boleting” means you never see any mushrooms until someone else has demonstrated their presence by finding one. “Mushroom frustration” is what you feel when everyone around you is seeing them and you’re still blind—until, that is, you find your first, thereby breaking you “mushroom virginity.” Then there’s the “cluster fuck,” when your eyes are on and other hunters crowd you, hoping your good fortune will rub off. Cluster fucking, I was given to understand, was bad manners. And then there was the “screen-saver”—the fact that after several hours interrogating the ground for little brown dunce caps, their images will be burned on your retinas. “You’ll see, when you get into bed tonight,” Ben said, “you’ll shut your eyes and there they’ll be again—wall-to-wall morels.”