Has the world always been this strange or is it getting stranger as I get older and become more estranged?

IT’S RAINING AGAIN and I can hear the water cascading off the roof and splashing down onto the walkway. I don’t care to walk in the driving rain so I hole up in this cramped motel room, wait for the rain to pass, switch the T.V. back on and watch another UFC cage fighting match.

The fighters collide, go down onto the blood-streaked canvas like some sick and sanguinary painting by Jackson Pollock. The defending champion has the contender in a choke-hold with his legs wrapped around his waist like a python squeezing the life out of him until he gives up and the referee calls the match. The rain finally eases up too and I leave the motel room to go walking out in the drizzle into downtown.

Yesterday I went skiing up on the mountain where there was only a 14” base. Most of the ski runs were grassy and closed; others had mocha-colored snow with shrubs pushing up toward the sky like tiny frozen fingers clawing their way to the sun.

Today, I’ve opted to find a warm place to steep myself in caffeine, sink into a book, forget about the outside world and give some attention to the inner one.

I end up at The Stage Door Cafe where I become distracted by the local publications I picked up while waiting for my latte. The Mountain Spirit Chronicles is a new-age publication with a front page story entitled “Miracles of Light” that gives it away: “Welcome Home! To the Light that we are, the Light that we shine and the Light that beats our very hearts. It seems that sometimes we forget who we really are. I assume that since we have been down here for countless lifetimes, so engaged in our human experiences of drama and limitations, this seems to add to our temporary forgetfulness.”

On and on like that until all that fluffy bullshit about the Light becomes an unbearable darkness.

In 1873 when Joaquin Miller first viewed Mount Shasta, he wrote, “Lonely as God and white as a winter moon, Mount Shasta starts up sudden and solitary from the heart of the great black forests of Northern California.”

Naturalist John Muir expressed his awe too: “When I caught sight of it, I was fifty miles away and afoot, alone and weary. Yet all my blood turned to wine, and I have not been weary since.”

On to another magazine, After Five, which touts itself as “The North State Magazine”, where I learn that there’s a 30-person bestiality ring operating on a farm in southern Sweden where the 45-year-old male leader claims they are practicing “humane” bestiality. “Any of the times I did anything with the dog,” he said, “she was the one who backed into me and provoked it.”

I also read that a man in Spokane was arrested for smashing a liquor store window and stealing a $9 bottle of wine. He tried to smash the window with a rock and when that didn’t work, he went down the street to the hardware store where he purchased an $11 hammer that did the trick.

Also I learn that there’s more reptiles than dogs being kept as pets in the UK. The streak for the longest continuous chant is still active at the Shri Bala Hanuman temple in Ahmedabad, India where dedicated chanters have been chanting “Shri Ram Jay Ram Jay Jay Ram” since August 1, 1964. An English man has been celebrating Christmas every day since 1994. “People do think I’m nuts,” he says. The Madonna of Orgasm Church in Sweden registered as a legitimate religious organization, claiming, “the orgasm is God.”

Has the world always been this strange I wonder or is it getting stranger as I get older and become more estranged?

Meanwhile, it’s begun raining again. I finish my latte and leave the dryness and warmth of The Stage Door Cafe, happy to be out walking in the simple and familiar rain. I walk through town then beyond town until the clouds break, the rain finally stops and I can see Mount Shasta in all its permanence and glory and feel my blood turning into wine, drunk with existence and the sight of a mountain.

©Scott Dewing