(this is the second Sativa Claus story. Click here for The first)
December is a grueling month for Santa Claus. The absurdly large task of delivering presents all over the world is, in itself, something no one should envy. But, Christmas Eve is just the end of Santa’s immense work. The 6 months or so leading up to Christmas find Santa and his elves extremely busy not only building toys, but dealing with the complicated logistics of the yearly toy delivery, monitoring trends, and of course, a modicum of monitoring children’s behavior, though he’s not as much of a strict prick as some songs and stories might have you believe. Despite the fact that he’s been at it for years, Santa still encounters daily difficulties, challenges he must solve, and obstacles he must overcome. For over half the year, Santa works extremely hard to ensure that the coming Christmas will be a success, and he does this simply because it’s what he loves to do, and he loves making children happy.
Santa’s workshop is a fantastic and magnificent sight to behold. It is a massive, state of the art toy factory equipped with futuristic 3-D printers, powerful computer systems and precision instruments that can perfectly render any toy that has ever existed in a matter of seconds. The shipping department is even more incredible. Santa himself can not possibly carry all the toys he needs for his immense yearly journey, so he has an entire fleet of specially trained elves who, using their own reindeer-pulled sleighs, form a complicated delivery network where they can continue to restock Santa as he continues to deliver the toys. The whole thing has to be extraordinarily precisely calculated, and year after year, it is pulled off flawlessly. The thought has crossed Santa’s mind to outsource some of the delivery to the elves directly, but he doesn’t want to risk tarnishing his reputation if a child were to wake up and find elves, and not Santa, putting the presents under the tree.
Santa’s workshop also has one of the finest cannabis grow rooms in the entire world. It’s like a giant domed igloo with a network of squared lights where the ice chunks would typically be. The lights are connected directly to nanotechnology monitoring systems that can determine exactly what the plants need, not only in terms of lighting, but in terms of air, water, nutrients… anything really; most processes are fully automated. The buds Santa yields are truly phenomenal and are just what he needs to help him decompress after a long, strenuous Christmas season and all the months of preparation leading up to it.
Who can blame the dude for wanting to kick back and relax with some killer herb once January comes? He’s earned it.
***
Meanwhile, Sativa Claus’s life in Peru is one of constant leisure and relaxation, interrupted occasionally by a trip to some place or another to right some wrong, help some people get high and bring light to a dark place. This doesn’t mean he doesn’t work hard at what he does, but take his grow operation, for example; he lives in the middle of the jungle but above the jungle, on a kind of plateau, and his operation is all outdoor and totally organic, as opposed to Santa’s high-tech operation with chemical fertilizer enhancements. He has the perfect space for an ideal outdoor grow. There are trees, but it’s not too dense, and there are plenty of areas with enough clearance above to allow sunlight in just the perfect amount his plants need to reach their full medicinal potential.
Unlike Santa, whose team of over 50 elves are available to help him with the grow, all Sativa has are his sloths, Tokey and Smokey, and a monkey that comes around once in a while named Bennie, who will gladly help out in exchange for a bag of Sativa’s delectable herbal goodness.
The truth is, Sativa Claus has been growing on this land for quite a long time, and believes it is necessary to be in communication with the natural energy of the land. In addition to cannabis, Sativa is a frequent user of ayahuasca, his own special brew, which, in addition to the standard ingredients also includes a secret psychedelic flower, unknown to science, which Sativa cultivates on his farm. Sativa takes these psychedelic journeys to understand his place in the universe, and to understand the universe itself. This allows him to fully understand the land, the way it moves, the way it breathes. It makes him a better steward of the land; a better farmer.
But life is not all consciousness expansion and getting high for Sativa. He still helps a lot of people out, and soon, his services are going to be needed by a very dear, old friend who lives far, far away; almost as far as you can get.
***
One morning Santa Claus awoke to a great commotion very early. He jumped out of bed, threw on some pants and a shirt and rushed to his security room to see what was going on. Apparently, the goddamned DEA was there to give him shit again. They don’t even have jurisdiction over him; it was an illegal raid. This was the third time they showed up. The first, they came demanding to be let on the premises for inspection, bringing with them some bullshit legal papers about a US claim to the land upon which his headquarters stood. Santa refused, and they said they’d be back. The second time, they came in the middle of the night and were snooping around the outskirts of his property. Santa and his security elves shined lights on them and instructed them to leave. There weren’t many of them, and they complied in the face of a greater adversary. This time, they were well-manned and they had all their toys with them, apparently looking for a fight; snipers with high powered rifles, armored artillery vehicles, cops all dressed in riot gear, some thing that looked like a tank. It was looking pretty ugly.
Santa just wasn’t interested in a fight. He was sure he could easily stand his ground, and his elves are no slouches in the warfare department, but it’s exactly the kind of headache he just doesn’t need a few days after Christmas. It wasn’t even the New Year. It was just too much, too soon.
Luckily, Santa’s buddy in Peru instantly became aware of this gross violation of Santa’s human rights, and he was ready to act. Sativa Claus was coming down from an Ayahuasca journey in which he achieved acute awareness of the destruction being caused to our species by the forces of control – the governments and the corporations of the world, who gleefully trample over people’s rights in the interests of having more power, more wealth, more control. So, not only was Santa’s predicament one that Sativa would have gladly helped out with regardless, he was intellectually primed for this particular fight, and he needed not a moment’s hesitation to spring into action.
Sativa was sharing a joint with Bennie and the sloths when he received the psychic distress signal from Santa. He immediately told them what was going on. The sloths would naturally be coming with him, and they grabbed the magic carpet. Sativa invited Bennie along and Bennie was ready to go. All they needed was a plan, but Sativa had been working on something that he knew would be the perfect solution.
Sativa took a hit of his special strain of weed through his magic vape to alter the fabric of time around them, so they’d be able to help Santa out in time. But, even with Sativa’s magic, it was a long journey, and there was no time to waste. Sativa grabbed a bag from his room, telling the gang he’d explain the plan on the way, and they were off.
The journey was quick and smooth, and as they approached Santa’s property in the North Pole, they could see the lights of the DEA vehicles shining. They went full speed ahead and they began their attack. As Sativa explained to Bennie, Smokey and Tokey on the trip, he had developed a way to turn his special Ayahuasca preparation into a gas, and in his bag, he had 25 pounds of the stuff and a piece of equipment he made to turn it to gas, along with a hose. The purpose of this was to devise a new way to go on an Ayahuasca journey, but it could be utilized perfectly in this instance to drug the DEA into oblivion.
As they made their first circle around the DEA convoy, the gas sprayed heavily and evenly. They made 4 more circles around them and at this point the agents were clearly no longer going to be a problem.
Sativa, being a shamanic teacher, and a man of great wisdome that he enjoyed sharing with all who would listen, took this as a great opportunity to teach the drugged DEA agents to become searchers of the truth instead of purveyors of lies and destruction; to no longer harass common people, and use threats of violence to intimidate the populace in the interests of their wealthy, corporate overlords and the puppet governments they control. Sativa explained to them that we are all faced with a decision each and every day: be a piece of shit, or don’t be a piece of shit. He told them that they had chosen to this point to be pieces of shit, but that is not their essence. At every point in their lives, they can take the responsibility to become a good person, not infected with the thought disease of control and its worldly manifestations; he told them to stop being part of the problem and join the solution.
Santa had some elves quickly build a giant wooden box, wrap it in foil wrapping paper, top it with a bow, and round up the agents and put them inside. They gathered a fleet of reindeer and were instructed to fly the box of agents to the nearest US military base and parachute the box down to get rid of these scoundrels before they come to their nonsenses and become assholes again. Despite Sativa’s brilliant speech, one can not assume they’d all be changed men when they came down from their trip; some may just be rotted at the core.
Obviously, this called for a celebration, and Santa, being thankful, wanted to show his guests a good time. He had the elves whip up a powerful batch of Mrs. Santa’s secret recipe, highly potent canna-brownies, and while they were cooking, he brought Sativa, Bennie and the sloths to his vape room. Mrs Claus was already there preparing the vaporizer tanks.
Santa’s vape room is a room that fills up with vaporized hash oil. You just sit inside and breathe. Every breath is a hit. It is climate controlled, and the oxygen levels are well-monitored, which helps you get higher than you’d typically be able to withstand. The air vapor can even be flavored.
“I just don’t get it, Sativa. Why are these guys bothering me all of a sudden? I’m a good guy. I make children happy. I don’t harm anyone. Why me?”
“Well, dude, these types are products of a society in which people have been conditioned to embrace control, from both ends. Not only do they work for the state, a major control apparatus, but they embrace control over their own lives too. Control works in insidious ways. It corrupts the mind. So, despite your being a great guy, they see you as automatically ‘bad’ because you live your life outside their webs of control. You are dangerous, because you don’t conform. When they’re afforded power over you by those whose control they willingly allow over them, their desire to control manifests itself in ugly ways, because it carries with it the remnants of their own personal desire to be controlled by those above them. They are sick. They are diseased.”
“Yeah, they need to chill the fuck out!” Bennie added.
They vaped until the brownies were done, then they finished the entire tray. The Aurora Borealis was particularly beautiful that night, and Santa, Mrs. Claus, the sloths, Bennie, Sativa and a few elves who joined the party, all fell asleep under Santa’s great dome in his observation room, observing but one example of the beauty our world holds, the Northern Lights, at least temporarily having been reprieved of thinking about all fuckheads the world has to offer.
Sativa Claus would live to fight again another day; for now, it was time to rest.
The End
© Rob Cotton, 2014