Sinking
The Taxonomist asked me to fill in for him today — presumably to deal with some sort of taxonomic emergency. Said he wanted me to “entertain and educate you” — guess that’s what he thinks he’s doing here…
I figure I’m usually only fit for one of those two, so I guess I’ll pull out another story from the old memory banks. But unlike the others I’ve told so far, a story with a clear moral and broad applicability to everyday life.
Are you sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin.
Sometime in the middle of the second decade of the twenty first century, a friend of mine — we’ll call him the Source, for more than one reason — called me up out of the blue on a random Thursday with an unusual, but rather perfectly targeted, question.
“Hey, Degenerate, any chance you can take the day off and help me out with a project?”
Intrigued, I told him I would clear my schedule.
“A friend of mine managed to get some mushroom tablets, and before I bought a bunch, I thought I should test them out on someone and make sure they work as advertised,” he continued.
Ah. Guinea pig. Lab rat. Now I see why he called me. But wait, “mushroom tablets?” I asked. He proceeded to explain that it was supposedly psilocybin, but pressed into a pill. I asked where we should meet.
An hour later we sat sipping a cocktail and waiting for our food outside the much-missed Coffee Shop Bar. It was a bright spring day and Union Square West was alive with beautiful young people keen on proving that winter was over.
The Source held up a tablet, a little bigger than an aspirin. Bigger, blue, different, one of us quipped, playing on the Nuprin commercials of our youth and proving we were older than the beautiful people.
After several mortifyingly conspicuous attempts with a fork, a knife, and the edge of a metal credit card, he finally managed to break it in half and we swallowed them down with a “cheers!”
We finished our meal, argued about which one of us the waitress was flirting with, and paid. Heading out, we joined the bustle of the sidewalk, strolling as we waited for it to kick in. Thirty minutes or so later, after circling Union Square for a while and starting to feel good, we decided we should head into the park, to enjoy the weather and the vibe.
We sat on green metal park chairs that we dragged out onto some hard packed dirt in the dappled shade of a big tree. We bantered a while and I laughed till I couldn’t breathe at everything we said. The Source is a funny, funny guy, but the euphoria from the shrooms also made everything hilarious.
We fell silent for a bit, taking in the small patch of nature we had found surrounded by all the metal and concrete. I looked up at the overlapping leaves, swaying in the wind at the ends of the branches, moving in and out of the sunlight and shadow, and was captivated by the shimmering visuals I was getting. I leaned back in the chair, rocking back and forth, exaggerating the effect. I looked at the bark on the tree next to me and saw it snaking slightly with the same shimmer.
I began to have the barely registered impression that I was sinking slowly. It was pleasant, pulling me down into myself, settling in to a more relaxed state.
I looked down at the hard-packed dirt beneath my chair leg, rocking still, and it began to move too, shifting like dunes. I felt myself sinking further, inward and downward, and the chair seemed to actually be lowering into the now-yielding dirt.
I stared, transfixed, as I continued to slowly, inexorably sink, the earth swallowing inch after inch of the chair. Any alarm at the situation was muted by curiosity and wonder, and the awareness that I was on hallucinogens. But I had never had hallucinations like this, and I stared and stared, marveling at how real it seemed and wondering if there had been something else in the pill. What would it be like to be swallowed up by the earth? Would it be a cool embrace, peaceful? Should I be scared? Was the universe trying to tell me something?
The chair, accelerating, got a little over six inches in, and I had to shift forward to keep my balance and stay upright. As I did, I looked up and saw the Source looking at me from his chair a dozen or so feet away, a perplexed but supremely amused look on his face. I looked down quickly as I continued sinking and then back to his face.
“Are you just gonna keep sinking and let yourself get swallowed up?” he suddenly asked. I froze, confused. Stunned.
“You can see that…?” I asked, hesitantly.
Before he could answer, the chair sank a bit more and I had to spring to my feet to avoid toppling over backwards. I turned and walked back, not understanding what had happened. I lifted the chair away and knelt to touch the ground where it had been sinking.
A small circle of dirt where the leg had been, about five inches across, felt like fine powder. I pushed my hand in and it sank more than halfway to my elbow. I pulled it out and looked around at the ground around the circle, completely solid and flat like it had been steamrolled.
We eventually worked it out, surmising that my steady rocking had liquified the packed earth under the chair leg, like an earthquake can. And, my weight concentrated on that oscillating spot had made me sink.
“I almost let myself get swallowed up because I thought I was hallucinating it,” I said.
“That has to be a metaphor for something,” he replied, and we both started laughing uncontrollably, the absurdity of it and the drugs suddenly making it all hilarious. I think it took us ten minutes to regain our composure, and only after several concerned looks were directed at us by nearby strangers.
“Well”, I said, “looks like the pills work.”
And so, doing my pedantic best to live up to the Taxonomist’s instructions and Aesop’s example, I think the moral of this story is clear and needs little explanation:
Don’t allow yourself to get swallowed up by something just because you think you’re imagining it.