First Encounter (A.K.A. Tale of the Shelf)

I'd heard about Jim, obviously. I'd been living on his land for a good month. I don't know how the man managed to be elusive - his 14 acre property, densely populated by a parade grungy hippies and ex-crust punks who all decided it was a good idea to pitch a tent at the end of the line probably helped to camoflage him (even though nobody else here could hide out for more than a few hours without being bombarded by beer-wielding comrades in need of a drunken conversation) -  but regardless, he certainly wasn't what I expected.

Jim Sink, the man who had, for 40 years, been eking a spot in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest for folk who had decided that the trials and tribulations of 9-5 life were too much to deal with. Jim Sink, the man who had beat cancer by drinking his own urine. Jim Sink, the man who had been dancing with the bears since the Dancing Bears first decided that LSD would be a good method of communicating with their disciples.

Jim stood up and faced me, unhinging his hips as if his joints were freshly oiled. He looked old, but he moved young. His eyes settled on me like sunbeams settling on an introverted boulder that had been hiding beneath the foliage for two decades. I almost winced.

He looked at me first. Despite the fact that he'd been bent over, facing away and picking up garbage, and despite the fact I'd laid eyes on him first, he looked at me first.

"Oh fuck," I thought to myself, "this guy's woke."

His eyes were inscrutable opals, and buried within their depths was something timeless. Every glimmering facet of those dangerously bright orbs reflected back to me bits of myself that I hadn't considered (or had tried to desperately avoid) for several years.

"That's terrible," I bumbled, motioning towards the garbage, aggresively aware of how unprepared I was for this first engagement, "all this garbage. Who left it there?"

The look he gave me had me wondering who I was to ever place myself in such high esteem as to judge those who may or may not have had the compulsion to turn back after a gust of wind stole their chocolate bar wrappers from their pockets. I hesitated, even though I wasn't planning to say anything.

His voice was more flat than the a lake's surface beneath the solitude of a full moon in mid-May, but his eyes were still as bright as the sun on a hungover Sunday. "Very nice people," he said softly.

Silence waned for a long second, then he smiled. His smile crashed over me like a warm tsunami, and I felt my own hips beginning to unhinge. Unconsciously, I found myself picking up trash and bantering with Jim.

The trail of neglected wrappers led us to an old bookshelf. Jim paused.

"Let's move this."

"Sure," I blithely agreed, not knowing why we were moving it or to where it would go.

He knelt by one side. I knelt by the other, and we tried to lift it. It wasn't that heavy, but the shelf was resilient.

"No," it seemed to mumble. "Get some more of your people. Only then shall I move."

Jim squinted into the distance. Almost as if the rest of us staying on the land were bound to his will, an armful of people crested the bend that led into the thick of moist Pacific overgrowth. He eyed up two of them and motioned them over.

"It would be great if you could give us a hand," he chirped. His voice sang with a type of enthusiasm that I couldn't identify but made a point of remembering. I felt that if he ever asked me a favor, a thousand years worth of scrying into his mind wouldn't be enough to deduce his motives.

It seemed like everyone else was already well aware of that and had come to terms with it. Riff, a Quebecois native whose dark hair unfurled over a hoodie that may or may not have always been brown, and Tim, a four-eyed helicopter pilot with a clean shave and a well-maintained mop of crimson curls, emerged from the smattering of tired wanderers.

"Eh, Jim. What you need help with?" Riff's accent settled over the four of us like a low note drawn on a cello.

"We're moving a shelf," I contributed.

Everyone besides Jim exchanged a glance, then knelt down to grab the shelf, two on either side. The shelf, satisfied, relinquished its grip on the earth.

Holding the shelf, I imagined Jim would lead us somewhere. We stood there for a few moments as the shelf savored the sensation of being detached from the dirt. After another few moments, I looked up at Jim.

He was staring at the sky with a wide smile carved into his face.

"Isn't this great?" he asked, staring upward as if reconciling with an angel that he hadn't had tea with in a decade. Nobody said anything, and he lowered his gaze from the firmament so it could linger on his more corporeal accomplices.

"Isn't this great," he repeated, "to be standing here, holding this shelf?"

He wasn't wrong.

"Yeah, Jim," I replied enthusiastically, glad to finally be able to relate to him on a deeper level, "this is pretty sweet!"

"There's so much connection," he mused, looking at the chipped paint and wood that connected our hands, "so much spirit."

He gave a deep sigh as we all held the shelf above the ground. Riff was straight-faced. Tim was looking toward the woods, an expression of practiced patience on his face. The shelf seemed quite satisfied.

"I'm glad you're here to help me with this," Jim said, making a point to lock eyes with all of his assistants.

Another pause. "Now, where the fuck do we put it?"

He shifted his gaze a few degrees to the right, settling on a trailer across the road about ten feet away.

"Ah! Bill. I'm sure Bill can use a shelf. Let's bring it over there."

We dumped the shelf outside of Bill's trailer without so much as checking whether or not he was home (let alone whether or not he needed a shelf).
Riff and Tim looked at me, nonchalant, and strode off to join up with their companions.

"Nice to meet you," Jim said, the lines in the corner of his eyes crinkling as he smiled at me. Without another word, he turned away from me, away from his garbage pile, and strode off into the woods.

That was the last time I saw him for two weeks.

Injecting Blackberries

taking a pee
apples on the ground
unfermented cider waiting to be drank
blackberries abound
crimsons and noir shades awaiting consumption
but what's this?
there's a syringe dangling from the thorns
who's going to get pricked
and by what?

Second Encounter

I hadn’t seen Jim Sink since helping him relocate a seemingly sentient bookshelf across the Highway of Potholes (also known as the Sink Superhighway). I hadn’t particularly looked forward to seeing him again, either. There were things that went on behind those eyes, distracting things of an infuriatingly and curious origin that stole so much of my focus that it was damn near impossible to put together a proper sentence when speaking to him.

Nonetheless, I bumped in to him as he was crawling out of his trailer.

“Ah! Alabaster!” Part of me was surprised that he remembered my name, but another and somewhat more persuasive part of me was convinced that anything and everything that happened within fifty feet of him was committed instantly and eternally to a timeless Hall of Records that one could access only through his irises.

“Where are you off to?”

I was busted. I had my travel sack on and it was glaringly obvious that I was leaving. I also hadn’t paid for the last few nights of my stay on his land.

“I’m hitching to a festival,” I truthed, unable to devise a lie that would bail me out of having to pay the sixty bucks I had in my pocket.

“Fantastic,” he chirped. “I’ll give you a bundle of mushrooms, and some LSD!”

I gaped, unsure as to whether or not he was truthing. Raindrops began to patter on the pooling tarpaulin that rested atop a lichen-covered patchwork of rust and chipped paint that constituted Jim’s trailer. The trailer looked like it had ventured here in search of food and had failed miserably. He beckoned me inside.

The inside was much more palatable than the exterior. Soft blankets cushioned every surface. Cupboards overflowed with jars of herbs and empty vitamin bottles. He sat me on a sofa piled with half a foot of thick, patchwork comforters, and as I sank into their comfort he told me that he trusted me.

“I can tell. You’ve got… that about you.”

You trust me? Our whole relationship consisted of us moving a run-down bookshelf several feet.

Regardless of my thoughts, I was flattered because here was Jim Sink, owner and manager of a property in which thousands ragged spirit-seekers had called home at least some point in the last few decades, a multi-millionaire who was developing similar projects in obscure third-world countries, telling me that he trusted me.

“Thanks?” I asked, still dazed by the disconnect between the icy cogs turning behind his eyes and the way that his soft voice oozed with enough compassion to comfort me more than the bed of blankets beneath me.

“No,” he mused, pulling a bible of LSD and a bucket of mushrooms out from a cupboard, “thank you.”

The bible of LSD, decorated with images of rainbow-colored bears dancing over a black background, and the sack holding a mycological entity rearing itself up to burst forth through the consciousness of deluded hippies seeking Truth in bits of fungi, stared at me as hard as I stared at them.

He grabbed a handful of the mushrooms, shoved them into a huge bottle that once held enough vitamins to correct the nutritional deficiencies of an entire family, and then broke off a hundred hits of LSD. Neither of these actions made the slightest dent in the respective receptacles.

“This should be good,” he grinned, passing me the goods, “for the weekend. If anyone asks, you just like to pack vitamins around to stay healthy. Actually,” he paused, grabbed a bottle marked vitamin C, dumped half the contents into my mushroom bottle so the impressively intelligent interspecies intelligence was covered by capsules of ascorbic acid and finished, “now you don’t even have to lie. Just bring me the money next time I see you.”

I gave him a hug, partly out of thanks and partly because I wanted to embrace this clownlike character who was becoming increasingly divine with our every interaction.

I was now strangely bound to Jim Sink. He didn’t know a dime about me (or, rather, I didn’t know a dime about him, but he seemed to know a lot about me) and he had just handed me more than a thousand dollars worth of psychedelic goodness without asking for so much as a dime in a deposit.

Of course the idea of running off occurred to me. However, being in cahoots with a character like Jim seemed, at the time, to be more valuable than a boatload of good trips and enough cash to pay rent for a couple months.

Armed with a bottle of conscious awakening, I hit the highway.

disclaimer: this particular entry and other ones involving drugs are absolutely fictional