Alexander Shulgin (1925-2014)

Sasha Shulgin shows August O'Connor a brand new molecule

Guest post by my friend and fellow explorer, Luc Sala of Amsterdam.

On June 2, 2014, Alexander (Sasha) Shulgin left this world, nearly 89 years old. With him, the era of the great psychedelic revelation and revolution comes to an end. With the likes of Hofmann, McKenna and Leary he was one of the flag bearers of that era, struggling to free psychedelics from the criminal connotation, the projected dangers and the guilt trips of the establishment. I have known these people, they were my friends and mentors and they helped me realize that reality is a very personal interpretation of something much wider and deeper, that truth is only my truth and that tolerance for the truth of others is the highest virtue. A new paradigm of accepting that the psyche is more than the mind and brains is emerging lately, new research in the potential of these substances is happening, a new and more positive appreciation of what these substances can do for us is manifesting. We have to honor people like Sasha who went before us and dared to explore and experiment, at great personal risk both to their body and their status in society, with the powers hidden in the amphetamines, tryptamines and other psychoactive molecules.
Sasha was a true alchemist, and although he would defend his work as rational science and his inspiration as being instrumental in human progress, I believe he was really motivated by the high of exploring new territory, the enchanted realm of beyondedness. The lab behind his house was his playground, the use of his concoctions alone or with friends his excuse for showing love. I know he was aware of other-world relationships of the power of intention and causation much more than would come out in his lectures and books. He wore this mask of being rational, a scientist, not a mystic. But then we discussed the prerogative of the inventor, or discoverer as he would see it, as to set the tone, name and shape a new substance-- the inventor as reality-creator, not a very rational approach. He was a believer, maybe not in God but certainly in love.

What a life, being able to chart new territory, open new vistas and expand the human experience, share this with friends the world over and feel the love. I always felt his presence, his loving energy radiating towards me when driving towards his farmhouse in Lafayette, in the shadow of Monte Diablo. He was in a way a sorcerer, a servant of the devil, for it takes devils to help one see the One, to break the spell of hypnotic reality formation and enter the inner worlds. Psychedelic experiences and especially the ones that help us see inside our selves and help us in letting go of masks and ego are seldom easy -- we must face the traumas and defenses and the devil inside us. Sasha would joke about this, his humor was his way to deal with the gravity, the consequences of his work, his responsibility for releasing powers into the world with more potential impact than weapons of war. His defense against the mountain behind his house was building his own mountain of wine bottles in his garden and maybe his love for music. (Sasha played the violin and was often invited to help provide the sound track for the annual gathering of bigshots at Bohemian Grove.)

His achievements in chemistry are well known, he is called the grandfather of psychedelics and MDMA,  his (and Anne’s) books are classics, but his legacy goes well beyond the ‘dirty pictures’ of chemical formulas. He was a focal point in the movement, always willing to speak and travel, to share his insights in his own personal way of juggling words, concepts and wisdom.

I have met him many times, in various parts of the world, but the Easter parties at his home were where one could meet the inner circle of the psychedelic illuminati, where psychedelic history was alive, where his central role in that community was evident and natural -- he was the arch-bishop rather than the grandfather of psychedelics. He was an outspoken critic of including psychedelics in the war against drugs, which really was and is the war against liberty and freedom.

With Sasha’s death I feel lost. I am a mere foot soldier in the battle for freedom, for the liberty to think for myself, to learn about myself and to escape the deterministic profiling of DNA, cyberspace superpowers and materialistic society. Where to look now for guidance, for support, for the role-models I need, for the overview and mature authority people like Shulgin provided? I will miss him, and wish for strength and courage for Anne and the worldwide circle of family, tribe and friends who will have to do without Sasha.

Luc Sala, June 3, 2014

For more details see erowid.

Mayday Play 2014

The first day of spring in the Celtic calendar is Beltane (May 1) when pagan rituals used to be performed to increase the fertility of the fields, the family and the livestock. In many cultures the maypole is erected and ribbons wound around it by dancing men and women to honor Nature's generative force. In keeping with this fertility theme May also hosts Mother's Day and the Catholic Church dedicates this whole month to the Mother of God, adorning Mary's statues with flowered wreaths and garlands.

Doing our part to celebrate Beltane, Mary-month and Mother's Day, August O' Connor and I took our instruments to "trapezoid park" in Capitola and played a few Irish tunes to the coyote bushes, the California poppies, the hummingbirds, crows, ravens and the occasional passing human being.

Celebrating the Irises

I don't have much of a green thumb but lots of stuff comes up in my yard anyway including lots of purple irises. The day irises first bloom in Boulder Creek is to me like the cherry blossom festival in Japan -- a movable feast starting in the South. A few days ago I noticed irises in Santa Cruz which meant that soon the bloom zone would move up here. Sure enough, the irises popped out on April 24, the same day as last year. A friend of mine recently gave me a whole case of fine beer--thank you, Dave--so I decided to celebrate both events by playing the irises some Irish tunes.

My Friend Billy

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

Warning: Viewer discretion advised. This post discusses adult themes and content. Oh, not the usual adult themes we get on TV, like D: Suggestive Dialogue or V: Violence. Instead, it is a discussion of the following well-known wanted criminal:

The one with many names … the Pale Rider. The Grim Reaper. The Angel Of Death. Thanatos. Azrael. Cronus.

 I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately. The gorgeous ex-fiancee is a Family Nurse Practitioner, and she and I have been taking care of her 86-year-old father in his final illness. “Billy”, that’s what the rest of the guys in the band always called him, so that’s what I called him when I came to be friends and play music with him over the past four years. He was a jazz drummer his whole life, and a very good one. Having had the honor of playing music with him myself, I can testify that he was a very skillful, fun, and inventive percussionist.  But when he came out of the hospital back in February, he hung up his sticks and said that was it. His time with music was over. I knew then that his days were short. So we’ve been giving him all the love and support possible in the face of his approaching death.

Here in the developed world, we tend to distance ourselves from death. But in the third world, it is ever-present. The first dead man I ever saw who wasn’t rouged, perfumed, and embalmed was on a side street in Trench Town, a dirt-poor, less than fragrant, and more than turbulent suburb of Kingston, Jamaica. It was a strange scene.

Trench Town is not a good place to be at night. Even in the middle of a hot afternoon, it’s a place where you feel a need to take an occasional look over your shoulder. I was walking down the street, the only melanin-deficient guy in sight. (I hear that the new PC term is “melanin-challenged”, by the way, to avoid hurting people’s feelings by making them feel deficient … but then I’ve never been politically correct.)

In any case, halfway down the block, a man was lying in the gutter. At first I thought he was just drunk and sleeping it off, until I got nearer, and I saw he was lying in the proverbial pool of blood. I remember particularly the sound of the flies. I was reminded of when I used to kill and butcher cows and sheep and other animals out in the farmers’ fields for a living, and how fast the flies would appear. Seeing that man lying dead in a cloud of flies, in the middle of just another average city afternoon, was a shock to me. The cities I was accustomed to back then didn’t feature much in the way of dead bodies in the gutter. I was beyond surprise.

But the bigger shock was the reaction of the people in the street. By and large it was ho, hum, another day in the life, step over his corpse and keep going, Many people looked once and didn’t give him a second glance. The public level of concern seemed to be on the order of “It’s the tropics, mon, cover him up ‘fore he stinks”.

I realized then that in such places down at the bottom of the economic ladder, the death of a stranger is no big deal. Oh, I don’t mean that people don’t mourn or grieve their loved ones the way it happens in the industrialized countries. That’s the same everywhere. But in countries where death is more common, countries where most families have lost a child, countries where malaria or some other tropical fever takes away the young and otherwise healthy, everyone lives in much closer proximity and familiarity with death and the dead.

 Continue Reading "My Friend Billy" by Willis Eschenbach

On Scapegoating

ON SCAPEGOATING 
A COMPUTER EXECUTIVE
FOR PUBLICLY OPPOSING 
GAY MARRIAGE


Please pardon me
I was mistaken.
I am a loyal
Slice of bacon.
Apologize
Rip out her eyes
Now we sees
thru her disguise.
We took a poll
and all agree
She is the
worstest enemy
of all that's true and fine and good.
Do you want her in your neighborhood?
I knew you would concur with us
We're proud to have you on the bus.

Posterity will praise what was needful to do
Against monsters as loathsomely evil as YOU!

Open Position

OPEN POSITION

I hear you have an open role
I'm sure that I can play
Making love with Nature
In a purely quantum way.

Yes, I've had plenty of lovers
But I'm still unsullied as dew.
Good sex is a matter of context
And I've never entangled with you.

Yes, I've raised a couple of children:
From my body new creatures emerged.
I've tried all the main psychedelics
And a few that are still on the verge.

I'm known to be a quick learner
In the field or out of a book.
My body moves like a weasel
And I can sew, clean and cook.

I don't know a lot of mathematics
But I've experienced a number of blisses.
I appreciate new ways to wallow and squirm--
Am fond of drug-enhanced kisses.

We could make history together
You and I could win a Nobel Prize.
You with your big cerebral cortex
And me with my ... big brown eyes.

Take me, teach me, train me
To be Earth's first quantum acrobat.
Please use me
For your science, Nick.
Use me
As your new lab rat.

Ellen Bass, Poet Laureate

Ellen Bass: poet laureate, Santa Cruz (2014-2015)

Ellen Bass was recently named the new Santa Cruz County Poet Laureate. Her poetry includes “Like a Beggar” (Copper Canyon, 2014), “The Human Line” (Copper Canyon, 2007), and “Mules of Love” (BOA, 2002), and she coedited “No More Masks!” (Doubleday, 1973), the first major anthology of poetry by women. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review. She teaches in the MFA program at Pacific University. (From Santa Cruz Good Times) Visit Ellen's website.

When my wife Betsy and I first moved to Boulder Creek, Ellen Bass was one of our neighbors. She lived right across Highway 9 from us in a cottage along the San Lorenzo River. In those days (early '70s) we visited Ellen often for tea and talk. And Betsy for some time took writing lessons from Ellen.

Now Ellen is (locally) famous.

Congratulations, Ellen Bass. Since we first met I have visualized you wearing the poet's laurels. Now you wear that poet's wreath for all to see. May you not "rest on your laurels", and continue to be blessed with fresh insights into this odd homo sapiens incarnation.

Red-Light Bardo

Kelly Evans: Bold bard of the trance dimensions

RED-LIGHT BARDO

After slipping from peace in the field of Love
From the non-dual space often called White Light
The refreshed soul stripping its higher bodies
Through a series of dream-like events like life
Encounters experiences evoked by personality
The waves woven in Aether called Habit-in-Life
The sex bardo is one of the grand central lines
A fork in many roads leads to the erotic red light
And many pass through this place within places
Lovers scientists entrepreneurs athletes and sloths
Bums mechanics servants politicians mothers fathers
Deviants artists cats dogs flowers bees atoms and trees
Not everyone but not just good or bad sinners or saints
Many are drawn to union communion passion and bliss
And so among the erotic hallucinations of real feel porn
Angels and demons yogic avatars slip into dream bodies
The fantasies formed in response to each individual
Through sympathetic communicative properties of nature
Phenomena and events resonant with personality threads
Warm bodies and sex appear from vacuum flux
Complete with histories and futures attuned to the soul
So that some couplings are autoerotic and some real
Some of the soul-on-soul action are crude astral affairs
Some soar into more refined realm of mind and spirit

And good and bad spirits pluck the self streams
The schizophrenic weave more or less individuated
From self-to-self from rope-to-cable to solid core
From frazzle and disintegrate to cloud and moons
The elements of the Person are related in many ways
Making their own music then harmonizing and jamming
Sometimes with other ghosts and then with emissaries
The many realms intersect the flesh feel in the soft red
And through the caress of the climax and force of the fuck
Can transport the soul instantly through a quantum leap
To Heaven or Hell or one of infinite births and lives
To a myriad of planets dimensions or types of reality
Down the road to a million more lives or free right now
The working girls of the Bardo Red-Light District come
In all shapes and sizes every species and order of being
Scintillating in this infinite space of passionate pullulation
Where everyone can be a sex star and feed life or go nova

Arnold Böcklin: Pan Whistling at a Blackbird

Spring 2014

E. E. Cummings (1894-1962)

you shall above all things be glad and young
For if you're young, whatever life you wear

It will become you;and if you are glad
whatever's living will yourself become.
Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:
i can entirely her only love

whose any mystery makes every man's
flesh put space on;and his mind take off time

that you should ever think,may god forbid
and (in his mercy) your true lover spare:
for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave
called progress,and negation's dead undoom.

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance 

========================= 

Now I a fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision is given to me:
'Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah's night
And twofold always, may God us keep
From single vision and Newton's sleep! 
---William Blake 


===========================

The Guinness Made Me Do It

Continuing to pursue his project to discover new ways of connecting with Nature, Nick Herbert invokes his inner Irish tenor at a St. Paddy's Day party in Aptos. Accompanied by Kim Fulton Bennett on wooden flute, Nick renders the traditional Irish folk song "Carrickfergus" while other members of the band "Blarney" look on. In addition to Kim and Nick, "Blarney" consists of August O'Connor on guitar and bodhran and Matt Johnson on banjo and Irish whistle.

Matt Johnson & August O'Connor