We ended up using the name "Mazatlan" for laughs - Christina, Ian and I would toss it out alone into conversation as joke-and-punchline all in one to remind us how fortunate we were to be out of that sticky tourist trap - Señor Frogs gift shops and bars on every corner like some Mazatlan version of Starbucks, cops hungry to score green mordida from dope-smoking gringo beachcombers by stopping any white face with a cigarette in it.

Looking back, though, it doesn't seem so bad - great seafood on the beach, too much tequila upstairs in Señor Lopez's house where we were guests in their unfinished vacation house, then downstairs to the concrete boy-guest quarters to smoke grass and play fortune-telling card games. Body surfing and piña coladas at Playa Bruja. Deep sea fishing and the bull fights.

I was playing the part of the gringo who doesn't speak any Spanish, recruited to make Ian look good by comparison in front of Renata's parents ("Are you learning Spanish?" Sr. Lopez asks him. "Yes," he answers. "Good," Sr. Lopez responds, "because that's the only language worth knowing.").

They make me the clown, threatening to raffle me off to the ladies on NYE, taking advantage of my enthusiasm to have me count down the new year (oh, wait, I've never counted backwards in Spanish, what if I forget six? Oh well... Feliz Año everybody!), envious perhaps that I'm blissfully ignorant of and completely uninvested in any of the family or relationship dramas afoot.

Tequila and champagne and it's 2000 and Ian and I are improvising some Quasinian Folk Dance in which we hold each others left ankle high in the air and hop around in circles on the other foot while chanting "Hey" and getting mighty dizzy. Smashed my tailbone so hard it still hurts to sit down. A couple of days later off to find an internet cafe so we can see, to our great disappointment, that computers didn't crash and anniversary-crazed Christians failed to play lemming.^*

A night bus from Mazatlan to Matehuala after the last toro dies. We're on our way into the desert to the east in search of peyote. The bus system in Mexico turns out to be more comfortable, more reliable and friendlier than the airlines on either side of the border, and sure as hell puts Greyhound to shame. Leg room, well-padded seats, in-'flight' movies (the best of the bunch by far, alas, being "The Matrix").

We're going to the area where the Huichol harvest peyote for their mid-January ceremonies. The Huichol have what anthropologists consider the oldest and closest-to-original peyote ceremony (the versions in the South-West United States, by contrast, did not develop until fairly recently, and contain a motley hybrid of ancient, tribe-specific, and Christian ritual elements).

I've done some reading-up ahead of time on the Huichol ceremony and one of the things mentioned is that dreams experienced while on the quest to collect peyote are important. Christina dreamt of the death of her best friend's (nonexistent) sister. Patricia dreamt that I got caught with drugs at customs on the way back into the U.S.

I dreamt that my mother was spitefully spreading rumors about me and sleeping with an ex-girlfriend of mine's boyfriend, that my bookshelf had become disorganized and all of my books were scattered in grocery bags, and that a cat squeezed like a weasel through a small hole in the bottom of a metal cage hanging from a curtain rod to seize and eat the bird inside.

The Huichol say nothing about Freudian psychoanalysis, but they might have made an exception in my case.

We sleep the night through on the bus, and when we get off in Matehuala it's only to catch another bus to a place called Real de Catorce, another eight hours away. Laze away the miles, wake up from a nap to change to another bus in some dusty nowhere in the early hours of the night and then suddenly five minutes of bumpy careen through the middle of a mountain, in awe of the tunneling work and in shock from unwinding out of sleep and into a screen-saver of perpetual descent coming from the front window of the bus.

We emerge into a very different world - I almost expect oddly-dressed midgets to jump out from behind cacti and eroding adobe and start to sing the "Lollypop Gang" theme song en Español.

Real de 14 would have been a silly place to put a town if there hadn't been a whole hell of a lot of silver there. Until 1905 though (when the world market for silver evaporated), Rd14 was The Shit. Beautiful town square, gorgeous cathedral dedicated to St. Francis, every road in patterned cobblestone.

But most of the buildings are unoccupied now - though you have to be up close before you can guess whether a family of people or of cacti inhabits any given room. Now tourism is business #1 - people coming to see the cathedral, or the picturesque ghost town, or to trek down to the desert to find peyote. Judging from the looks of the folks we run into in the inns and the marketplace, it's peyote season these days.

There's one main road lined with stands selling sweets and trinkets and religious icons. I'm building a mojo bag to protect me as I go out into the peyote-enchanted world of brujas and naguals and I find the salesforce at Rd14 helpful. My mojo is based on a magic spell taught me by Willie Dixon - it includes a black cat bone, some John the Conqueror root, a hemp seed, carved stone hands in red (love) and green (courage), and a few secret ingredients.

The mojo protects me from evil - acting like an ozone-generating air freshener of the karmic realm, and drawing out evil from my body through a stigmata that is developing on my chest directly below where the mojo hangs. All this dime store magic is getting under my skin all psychosomatic-like. I know it happens to the wackatholics like that but I never expected it to happen to me. I'd tell you the Rosicrucian angle but you'd never believe me...

Renata buys each of us a charm consisting of two cloth icons, one each of the Virgin Mary and of St. Francis - San Francisco. We wear these around our necks to remind us of our group affinity and of our peyotista "safe word" - if we get in a bind whilst tripping we need merely mutter "San Francisco" to one of our companions to be smothered in love and hugs.

Myself, I'm being yet more superstitious, picking up the Alleged Rattle Viper Sperm Incense, and some contra embruja perfume to sprinkle around. Brujas (witches) seem to be attracted to me the way cats are attracted to the felergic, and our stop at playa bruja earlier in the week, along with Renata's university thesis about virgins and witches in early English literature that she's been procrastinating about, have me a bit spooked.

But that ought to just about do it in the juju department. A couple of days in Rd14 and then we hire a jeep to take us down a steep mountain road to the edge of the desert, where a second jeep takes us on a slow, bumpy ride into scrub-brush and cactus dotted with the occasional dry tree.

We pitch camp and split up to search for peyote. Jose, Renata & Patricia have done this before; Ian & I at least have pictures to go by; but fifteen minutes later it's Christina, who's never tripped before and isn't even sure what she's looking for, who finds the first little family of peyote.

From then on, they're found easily - the following day, Ian & Renata find a family of more than 40 growing under a single bush. I build a shrine around the first ones that Christina found and that we don't cut - placing a red and a yellow candle to the east, surrounding these with corn and adding a small plastic deer totem (deer, corn and peyote are often-interchangable tokens in Huichol symbology), then offering up tobacco smoke in the form of a tasty cigar at the cardinal points of the compass and sprinkling contra embruja perfume around liberally.

I add a few white tufts of peyote fur to the mojo and seal it up with wax from the candles.

The last thing I expected was company, but a man comes by with a burro and cart collecting firewood and we purchase some from him to add to our late-gathered collection; night falls, and the peyote begins to take hold. Nausea and vomiting hit most of us, although my mojo protects me even better than expected - I'm not even feeling queasy.

Ian develops some sort of native fixation, imagining himself having been a prophet warning of danger in these lands over many incarnations. A train in the distance takes the better part of an hour to cross the horizon. Kangaroo rats boldly snatch food away from behind our backs and threaten to invade our tents. We share cigarettes.

Patricia starts to choke on some food or some cactus or something, and at the sound of our concern, the formerly silent neighborhood animals erupt into cacophony - rats chirp and scatter, a burro honks and brays, some sort of bird that isn't but sounds like a duck makes duck sounds, coyotes howl. "The humans are making danger sounds... must be one hell of a predator out there somewhere; heads-up."

Patricia's okay. I come back to the fire after collecting more wood and smile at the firelight reflected in faces wrapped in ponchos and scarves and woolen hats, friends sitting in the dust smoking and talking. Christina with her red mittens and red knit hat with pom-poms looking like a wicked elf.

Christina & Ian & I wander off into the dark. Ian's trying to hook C and myself up, but she's having none of it, with a boyfriend back in the old country she's faithful to for no reason anyone else can fathom. Ian feeds me straight lines about meme theory in the hopes that I'll wax intriguing on one of my odd obsessions and impress the panties off of her.

Ian's convinced I need a girlfriend. We wandered off into the dark at one point to talk about London and heart-centered action and Burning Man and mutual friends and such - I complained about feeling uncentered and far from my heart; he told me I needed to fall in love. Maybe he's right, maybe it's time to body surf the romantic rip tide again. Maybe I can't do this heart work solo.

Or maybe Ian is so goddamned ga-ga over Renata that he can pull a convincing salespitch for romance out of his ass without even trying.

In any case, right now I'm much too distracted by the fireworks to get flirty. There's no moon and for the first time I see Orion fully dressed and he's one Las Vegas Liberace Uncle Fucker. Webs of colored filigree connect the spaces between the stars - Ian compares it to a neural network or the view of traveling through a luminescent, organic net of translucent fibers.

Christina thinks Venus is splitting in two, but when we look at it - bright and radiating a spiked corona - a brilliant shooting star falls across that part of the sky, moving through the spectrum and casting shadows around us before fading to red and breaking into multiple fading meteors.

Speaking of pyrotechnics, they call me "Molotov" here - a holdover from Burning Man. I assume it comes from my rabble-rousing reputation via Ian (who still calls me "Moorlock" as per my character in The Techno-Pagan Octopus Messiah), but it may also have to do with a band of that name that is popular South of the Border. I don't know what they sound like, but on a magazine cover I saw they look like a cross between Blues Traveler and Metallica. Hmmm...

Jose is the son of the head of the National Guard or the Chief of Police of Mexico City or something like that - big time shit anyway. So naturally he's a radical, fond of the Zapatistas and a bit of an anarchist. I sometimes think he calls me Molotov mostly because he enjoys pronouncing the word. He's a good fellow, wise in the ways of peyote, and his poor command of English balances my non-command of Spanish so that our group conversation see-saws between the two.

Jose shows us where the peyote is found underneath the bushes, and pulps the buttons to make tea, and reminds us to pluck off the fuzz before eating the awfully bitter things with honey.

Ian tells us great campfire stories of how Coyote tricked the vulture and how Coyote died again and why the grapefruit tastes like it does and why the avocado has such a big seed, and what ritalin does to kids at summer camp, and shows us how the grouper sits and how to do yoga standing up.

We never form a complete circle around the fire. Each of us expresses that we're expecting some seventh member of the party to return from throwing up or gathering firewood and sit with us. Maybe this is the nagual that Jose was talking about; a shape-shifting trickster spirit animal who joins peyote ceremonies.

On the way to the desert, the jeep driver matter-of-factly told Renata & Patricia about being out in the desert as a boy and passing a couple of Huichol who were out gathering peyote. After he had passed he looked down and noticed that there was only a single set of footprints.

I'm seeing Huichol bead art anywhere there's a dark patch in my field of vision - dots of bright color surrounded by dots of other bright colors, in patterns suggestive of solutions to unstatable math problems.

The frisbee serves as kitchen counter, peyote button presentation plate, fire stoker, coming-on coördination test, something to figit with while looking for the "fucking foco," and cutting board. Renata and Ian make gorditas to die for. While we're eating, the ravenous kangaroo rats blitz the corn shrine at grandfather peyote - even running off with the plastic deer totem in their crazed gluttony.

Two days of dusty desert and two long peyote nights and the embarrassment of Señor Frogs is far behind us. I've got a couple more days to unwind and get to the airport, have my flight canceled ("some they go up, Señor, some they do not go up"), get pulled into a street skit by a couple of clowns in front of a cathedral in San Luis Potosi, and migrate back to the states via the ugly-american factory of Puerto Vallarta.

For the record, I'm changing my will: I want to be buried in a cemetery just outside of Rd14 - Ian knows which one I'm talking about. If you miss me when I get around to dying, go to the funeral - I know y'all and otherwise you'll never get around to going. It's beautiful. Knock back some tequila and shoot a 2 a.m. rooster for me.

See also:

• Searching for Ishmael
• Memetics on-line
• octopusmessiah.com
• Lucky Mojo
• The Lycaeum: Mescaline