Psilocybin Santa (Part 3)

Fiction, NSP Meditations , , ,

Santa sat in front of a crackling fire, sipping a single malt, and tapped out an email to Heat Miser on his tablet. The subject line read: More Mushrooms Stat!

The email read:

Heat:

I get it. I was chopping wood and got it. I’m climbing the ladder out of the hole!

Santa

Heat Miser replied in seconds:

You can have you all you want but you have to come to Oregon get them. Get in the sleigh and spend Christmas with us.

An hour later, the reindeer were flying Santa and a sleigh to Yaquina Bay. Before he departed, he told the elves to make as many yo yos and pogo sticks as their tiny hearts desired. He unlocked the liquor cabinet and said have at it. He’d return….when he returned.

The next morning he landed in a green pasture on the Misers’ farm. Heat and Snow were waiting and flagged him in safely.

An hour later the brothers were touring him around a massive fungi production facility called Mother Nature Mycology. The facility produced one product—psilocybin mushrooms that were shipped out to confectioners across the region to transform into delicious and mind-expanding treats and sold under the table at hippie craft fairs, music festivals, mushroom events and via a tight-lipped internet network.

Santa was awestruck by the operation but remarked that it was totally illegal.

“It won’t be in a few years,” said Snow Miser. “There is a movement afoot and its got deep pockets. We’re stocking up, and when it becomes legal, we’ll be ready to dominate the West Coast market.”

In the afternoon, Santa made his way across the pastures and down to the bay. It was low tide and he followed a trail along the shore that passed hundreds of rotting pilings listing in the mud flats. Before leaving, he’d eaten half a psilocybin cupcake (stuffed with lemon pudding!) and waited for its clarifying elixir to kick in. Heat Miser had recommended a small dose two or three times a week to invigorate Santa’s mental health. After a month or so, they’d reevaluate his dosage, depending on his state of mind.

The sky was gray, the water on the bay slate, and the trees on the hills black. Rain threatened and Santa wore his trusty pea coat.

An hour into his hike, he felt a lightening well up inside him. He picked up his pace. He breathed in the heavy scent of salt. He drank it like drinking a milkshake without a straw. He heard the ocean rumbling in haiku somewhere in the distance. It was happening again…everything around me is luminous, scintillating, coruscating. Jesus, even my vocabulary is improving!

Santa heard movement. He looked down into a slough and saw an otter gliding through the water on its back. The otter threw up a peace sign to Santa and disappeared.

He heard more moment. He’d spooked a blue heron plucking frogs from the mud. It lifted off and Santa watched its weird, undulating, prehistoric fight with incredible focus. He imagined the sleigh flying like a blue heron, loaded not with toys for the good little boys and girls but with something useful for depressed adults, something revolutionary to lead a revolt against the crisis of Western culture and its soulless, destructive consumerism. What might that load be?

He heard a tree fall in the forest. He laughed and answered the famous koan aloud, which of course is unanswerable.

And then a powerful idea struck Santa like a giant gong vibrating in a temple of a majestic palace. Santa had smashed the gong with his imagination and it had rung with a resounding noise that announced something important was coming soon.

I’m going to dose the world with magic mushrooms on Christmas Eve!

Psilocybin Santa (Part 2)

Fiction, NSP Meditations , , ,

Santa eyed the candy bar. He brought it to his nose like a fine cigar.

Magic mushrooms?

Santa considered them. He’d read somewhere of psilocybin’s apocryphal and documented medicinal and magical qualities to ease depression and trauma and elicit special insights. Christ, the lore was older than the Bible! He’d also read Carlos Castaneda. He’d listened to the Doors. But for some reason or other, Santa had never tried them.

Years ago, Heat Miser had turned him onto cannabis for pain relief and relaxation, and the results were astonishing. Somehow the word had leaked in cannabis circles and from then on, Santa received care packages from all over the world. Some of the groovy parents even left him cookies spiked with pot to ease the effort of delivering toys around the globe in one night.

Yes, cannabis had worked well for pain and as an occasional sleep aide, but it did nothing for his depression.

Santa sniffed the candy bar again. He considered his recent treatments for depression from three therapists, one a farce, one a dud, one a charlatan. They spoke in jargon. They handed him ungrammatical worksheets to fill out. They wanted him to pop pills and swallow agendas. They charged an arm and a leg and other body parts. They didn’t listen. Why listen when you already know the answers?

What the hell? Why not? There was nothing to lose but sadness itself. That’s what a real President would say at a fireside chat.

Santa ate half the candy bar. Was he supposed to eat the whole thing? What the hell? Why not? He ate the rest.

He remembered Heat Miser’s instruction to go outside to experience the mushrooms. He donned his parka, pulled on galoshes, and opened the door to discover a clear, bright day. He decided to walk around the complex on a trail hacked out by the elves during one of their periodic fitness kicks. It had somewhat gone to seed, kind of like Santa.

Santa walked and walked, trying to get out of his head, and failing. Nothing was happening. Shouldn’t I be high by now? What is exactly is being high on mushrooms? Dammit I should have reread Castaneda and listened to “The End” again!

He had almost finished the two-mile loop when he came to his firewood storage area. It was disorderly and in disuse. Chopping wood had once been his favorite pastime. When Mrs. Claus passed away, he’d given it up and ordered space heaters from Amazon. High winds had blown over his meticulously stacked rows and and now the wood was uncovered, scattered, rotting.

Santa surveyed the landscape around him. It seemed to becoming whiter, crystalline. He saw a fat round of fir on its side. He placed his right foot on it and nudged it upright. He saw his prized splitting maul on the ground and picked it up. What a fine tool, crafted with perfection by the hearty Finns. This was a tool that Thor should wield! Santa raised the maul above his head. He spied the wavy convergence of tree rings on the round, the sweet spot that all master woodcutters recognize if they want to execute an exact and effortless cut.

He brought the maul down on the round. Craaaaaaack! It came completely apart into three equal wedges. Santa smelled the sharp scent of split fir. He saw sap and resin secreting from the wedges. He was feeling something wonderful, unprecedented. He looked around. He was seeing everything.

The magic mushrooms had hit, but Santa was unaware of it.

Santa tossed the parka aside and went to work. He went to work with body and mind. He heard every craaaaaaack and split every round apart with one elegant swing. He was fathoming the grooves in the wood, their words of wisdom. He was acknowledging the brilliant whiteness around him by nodding his head.

As Santa worked, he absorbed his surroundings with an acuity heretofore unknown to him. The white was both shimmering and solid. It was all a painting, a masterpiece of landscape, and he was the painter, the subject, the paint and the canvas. Everything was merged, one.

Shit! The mushrooms!

It was not manic speed, but purposeful, measured motion. It was noticing beauty that you had taken for granted, always a great notion in life. Santa was feeling lighter, elevated, energized. This was no hallucination. It was pacific.

Then across a field of ice, Santa saw something emerge from the ground, something white with speckles of black on its chest. It began to move toward him. Something was flying. A bird came into clearer view. It was majestic white owl, and it was the first one Santa had ever seen at the North Pole and he’d lived there for 200 years or whenever Charles Dickens, Thomas Nast and Clement Clarke Moore invented modern Christmas.

The owl flew right over Santa’s head, blinked twice, and Santa watched it disappear flapping silently into the ice.

Ninety minutes later, the woodpile was organized and safeguarded and Santa was wheelbarrowing a load of firewood to the lodge. He was happy and whistling “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” which he was not!

Psilocybin Santa (Part 1)

Fiction, NSP Meditations

(This tale appears as a bonus story in Oregon Coast Christmas Tales if you buy direct from Nestucca Spit Press. Please consider making a purchase of the book here or on Amazon and supporting an independent Oregon publisher.)

It was a month before Christmas. Santa sat at a table in his North Pole lodge and read a card from Heat Miser. It had been enclosed inside a small package with a post mark from Yaquina Bay, Oregon.

Dear Santa:

I know you’ve suffered from severe depression in recent months and I think this magic mushroom candy bar might help you with that. Let me know.

Heat

PS: Be sure to eat it when you’re outside doing something in nature. That’s the key.

PS 2: Come visit me and Snow anytime you want. The Oregon Coast and the ocean will treat you right. We’ve got something wild cookin’ here.

Santa set the card down on a table. He picked up the candy bar for closer inspection. It was wrapped in cellophane. He tore off the plastic and sniffed the bar. It smelled vaguely of chocolate and coconut, a damn homemade Mounds bar! He loved Mounds, especially dipped in fine scotch.

What good mischief was the Heat Miser up to? Magic mushrooms? Was this candy bar intended as some kind of temporary escape and short-term remedy from the debilitating sadness that had gripped him the past year and gradually drove him to total disillusion and stasis?

Santa knew he damn well needed something. Indeed, he was plunged into a deep, deep, black depression and it was getting dangerous for him. Mrs. Claus had died from pancreatic cancer almost a year ago; the polar ice was melting all around him; Trump was still frothing in office; and the elves were threatening a revolt if they couldn’t continue to make yo yos and pogo sticks despite the fact that kids didn’t know what the hell they were and craved nothing but digital gadgets made by child slaves.

About the only good thing going for Santa was the raging pandemic. No toy run this year. He’d canceled it in the summer and took a lot of pounding on conservative talk radio and social media as a result. They screamed and stomped and dubbed him an essential worker who had to stay on the front lines and do his job.

Santa didn’t respond to the firestorm of criticism, but he was secretly relieved he didn’t have to deliver more useless crap to increasingly hostile and dumbed down people, particularly the Americans. What had happened to them? They once established the world’s first national park system, implemented the Marshall Plan, and rescued the bald eagle from extinction by banning DDT. They couldn’t do anything worthwhile anymore. They could fix nothing with themselves or their diseased body politic. Why? Why? Why? Santa didn’t know and he didn’t really give a shit anymore. All the virus meant to him was sitting at home and rereading the titans of Russian literature to ride out the holiday season.

If he could last that long.

The Gift of a Football

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches

I never ask the ocean for anything. It simply delivers what it delivers and often moves in delightful, mysterious ways when it comes to gifts.

Such as couple days ago. I had been hunting thrift and grocery stores for a football, any kind of football, because I wanted to wing it around with a buddy on Thanksgiving.

No luck. No winging the football on Thanksgiving, which seemed as unAmerican as a Presidential candidate refusing to respect the majority will of the voters.

So there I was on the beach on a fine bright and cold morning, a football morning, and there it was! A Nerf football in the foam. I couldn’t believe it! The ocean had delivered a football on the morning high tide.

I picked it up. It was in mint condition, not a bit soggy. I feigned a throw. I cradled it under my armpit with textbook halfback form.

A white wave rolled in and I had to dodge foam and driftwood. I was moving like Gayle Sayers in open field: I stiff armed and dead legged would-be wave tacklers. I high-stepped through the piles of kelp. Jesus, I was a kid again scoring touchdowns for Mt. Pleasant Elementary and Gardner Junior High in Oregon City when I loved playing football with my friends until one day I didn’t when simple-minded adults with immature agendas took over the coaching and made it about themselves and not their players. I never did that when I coached football.

I kept moving down the beach and approached my complex of 16 forts. A great gridiron notion exploded into my mind and I let loose a bomb toward one of the forts and the fort swallowed it up. A perfect catch of a perfect spiral.

It was on. I was scrambling away from deadly defensive ends and ruthless linebackers and rifling the football into the forts. This went on for 10 minutes and I missed one throw

I’d just invented a new quarterback drill! A new competition! I’d take all comers on Oregon’s socialist ocean beaches, even that flashy kid from KC.

Hide and Seek

NSP Meditations

I saw a lad of eight or nine standing up, wedged in between some tightly clustered cedars that landscaped a retail building. It looked like he was taking a piss in the trees, which seemed a bit off because of a bright morning and the kid was in plain view.

Some fifty away, three other kids roughly his age were running away from him.

I didn’t know what to make of it all. I walked behind the pissing kid on my way to enter the retail building and I heard him counting…what?

THEY WERE PLAYING HIDE AND SEEK! It was barely 40 degrees on the Oregon Coast during the middle of a Pandemic and smoke from a nearby slash burn had infiltrated the town and gave everything a spooky ambiance like after a battle.

The kid finished counting and bolted out of the trees. I went into the store smiling. There is hope, you just have to observe it, and cultivate it.

Beach Love Graffiti

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches

In my 23 years of living on the Oregon Coast and walking our socialist ocean beaches approximately 10,000 times (that’s no exaggeration, I did the math) I had never come across such a calculated act of vandalism until a day or so ago. Yes, a few times someone had used a Sharpie on a driftwood fort to declare something or the other, but nothing like the spray painting on a rock pictured here.

I might add that I am not counting the occasional graffiti that appears below the turnarounds at Nye Beach in Newport or in Seaside. Those places are in essentially semi-urban areas heavily trafficked by tourists and miscreants and the vandalism takes place on concrete walls and abutments.

The graffiti I encountered was on a very remote stretch of beach, and when I saw the heart and the initials, it braced me. What it meant is that someone, or perhaps a couple, had brought a can of spray paint down to the beach to leave their mark. I mean, no one just randomly carries spray paint while visiting a beach like this.

I wasn’t angry, just disappointed in the arrogance of it all, even if the “act” was in the name of love. The design wouldn’t last a month in the winter rain, perhaps an unfortunate metaphor for the lovers. I did wonder if they would ever return to see if their mark still stood. Or considering the metaphor, only one returned and laughed or cried when the mark wasn’t there.

Next time, they might try carving a little heart and initials into a hardwood tree. Much more romantic and long lasting. And if the love was meant to be, they might return in 10 years to trace the carving with their fingers and remember the passion.

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