Scene 022: pemulis big buddy muscimole

• p. 66: Muscimole specs: Amanita muscaria derivative — emphatically not the kill-you-dead phalloides/verna species — 5-aminomethyl-3-isoxazolol, 10-20 oral mg., two-to-three-times psilocybin's potency.
• pp. 66-67: The Big Buddy frame named and immediately subverted ("Pemulis sometimes treats his group's powwows like a kind of colloquium, sharing personal findings and interests"); the screen's block capitals "might as well be Greek to the Little Buds."
• p. 67: Ethnographic flourish — the 'shroom "more or less revered by the aboriginal tribes of what's now southern Québec and the Great Concavity," loved and hated for effects "not always unless carefully titrated pleasant"; the kids' attention disintegrates (navel-probing, mock collapse).

Backward

• Muscimole already appeared in scene 013's n.8.a: homemade Happy-Patch transdermals are "usually MDMA or Muscimole" — the colloquium's subject is live E.T.A. pharmacopoeia, not abstraction.

Forward

• Pemulis's titration erudition is the seed of the DMZ thread: the incredibly potent organopsychedelic (first flagged in scene 013's drug-taxonomy endnotes) that he sources in YDAU and that hangs over Hal's collapse — note DMZ too is mold/fungus-derived, looping back to baby Hal eating the basement mold (scene 002).
• The Big Buddy system itself is formally explained thirty-one pages later via Hal (scene 034, p. 98) — the book gives the parody before the institution.
• "Aboriginal tribes of what's now southern Québec and the Great Concavity": even Pemulis's drug-lore is Reconfiguration-inflected; Concavity geography saturates these scenes (016, 018, 030).
• Pemulis's careful distinction between the pleasant and the kill-you-dead Amanitas is his whole character: precision as survival — collapsed catastrophically when the DMZ/urine scheme unravels and he's expelled (n.211's expulsion-dread, cf. scene 018's paranoid-king poster).
• The glassy-eyed Little Buddies squeezing tennis balls per Academy mandate: the same mandated squeezing recurs in the locker room (p. 104, scene 034) — conditioning as background reflex at every age.
• The lectured "semi-sleep-like trance with visions" joins these scenes' dream/trance continuum (Troeltsch's fugue-state, scene 018; the nightmares of scenes 019/023) — Pemulis supplies the clinical register for states the surrounding scenes render from inside (continuum per Carlisle).

• p. 66: "by no means, Michael Pemulis emphasizes, to be confused with phalloides or verna or certain other kill-you-dead species" — the comedy of scrupulous psychedelic safety instruction to children.
• p. 67: "Pemulis sometimes treats his group's powwows like a kind of colloquium, sharing personal findings and interests." — deadpan institutional-voice irony; tag for how E.T.A. documents absorb misconduct.
• p. 67: "More or less revered by the aboriginal tribes of what's now southern Québec and the Great Concavity" — Reconfiguration casually rewriting even ethnobotany; "what's now" doing the geopolitical work.