BUSTED

= No, not me ...

But tell you what, Sport ... if you've been around the block more than once, sit down and count how many times you've been 'this close' to being busted. You're gonna be surprised.

~

I did just that not long ago ... sat down swappin stories with another Olde Head, but new to the ways of the Cannabinista. Thought I had a couple or three scrapes to retell, but by time the Review was in, number had risen to ten. Ten! Ten times to the brink ... and back again ?!

O man, somebody is watchin' over me.

Let me count the ways ~

(this is an incremental recreation ~ don't expect everything at once)

1. Observing but not Seeing (c.1967)

Straight outta high school and into pot, this was first cannabis-related brush with The Law, of which Sherlock Holmes has a salient observation.

There must have been a dozen of us Idiots hanging out one evening at Timmy D's downtown apartment. A year or two out of high school, we weren't doing anything other than talk & laugh & maybe pass a couple or three joints around. We smoked 'joints' then, Bongheads, and Timmy was one of those who kept a Roach Jar on the book shelf ~twas a quart Mason jar pretty near full of pretty good-sized nubs, quite a hedge in those days against Times of No Pot. In the refrigerator was another quart jar of an LSD solution ~ Timmy was going to spend the weekend making blotter acid, as I dimly recall.

Comes the Knock and we're 'inviting' an older plainclothes city cop who had been riding Timmy for whatever reason to join us and give him some more shit ... damn. Must have been too many of us, too much coming & going for him to just line us all up against the wall and do the routines, inevitably leading the lot of us to go Downtown overnight ~ he just yammered at us about how he was keeping his eyes open, watching us, then left. The whole time I'm staring at him, trying hard to not see the Roach Jar on the shelf at Cop's guy's left ear for fear I'd bust out laughing and get us all sent downtown.

"You see, but you do not observe," Holmes chided Watson. You'd think a Cop would know how to pay attention, eh?

All I can say is ... phew!

*

2. Paddy Wagon (c.1968)

Although not resulting in a drug bust, and ultimately resolving in favor of Truth & Justice, such as they were, if not the 'Merikan Way, this one was a MoFo Miracle and subsequently became something of a Yokel Legend. Could have been a really, really bad scene ...

Confirmed a lot of suspicions, too.

3. FBI !? (c.1968)

Only thing that saved me here was that I was more trouble than it seemed ... fellow had No Idea what he was taking a Pass on. This one would have been an FBI Water-Cooler Legend, too. College, 60's, get the picture? Lived in 4-unit building adjacent large campus ~ Filbert downstairs was son of a career CIA "population relocation" specialist who seems to have specialized in negating democratic elections (Greece, Vietnam, etc), was in Laos, where he died ... Filbert's enterprising younger brother, who was In Country with rest of family, had presence of mind to stuff an easy chair with a bale of this sinful, almost black Laotian pressed bricks. Pops was coming back Air America sans Customs, you see.

So we were awash in the season's best herb, by far.

4. Bicentennial Revolutionary Road Tour (1976)

Where were you on the Bicentennial 4th of July ? Lemme guess ~ out in your brother-in-law's backyard eating burnt burgers, swilling horsepiss beer in anticipation of fireworks at the park. I was in a city park too ... in heart of West Philadelphia ghetto amongst Black Panthers, AIMsters, Puerto Rican Nationalist and only the FBI knows how many other counter-colonials banded together in the biggest downpour I'd seen in years. I was with Bernie the Attorney and 'Cowboy' the Saginaw Potato Farmer on our way to NYC and the Tall Ships ... Hunter Thompson, the jerk, had nothing on this, and I don't care how good your fireworks were ~ this was a pretty damn good road trip, eh?

Required getting cut a break by a Michigan Trooper or never would have got out of the blocks ...

The Professor - who was then 'just'the Postal Worker, for those of you who like American Sucfcess Stories - dropped Bernie & me off on I-96 and had barely pulled away when the second car stopped. It was Cowboy, not long out of high school. July is not silly season on the potato plantations, apparently, and Pops had kicked the Cowboy out of the house for the weekend, insisting he go somewhere and do something besides tend to his taters. He had no idea where he was going and we didn't much care, so it was off to the East together in search of ... whatever.

All we needed was a couple munchkins, and damned if we didn't come up with a set not far down the road ...


5. Green Cross Delivery (1977)

This one would have been interesting. It was a Green Cross delivery going north, and I had a Kroger shopping bag about half full of cannabis donated for delivery to medical users. Turned right on red, legally. Community College cop switched lanes and came after me, which was strange given he was nowhere near his campus. Dumbass was writing me up for illegal turn, telling me there was a sign prohibiting same (nope ~ this was a Home Town thing and while there was such a sign, it had come down earlier in year). Tried to tell him he was mistaken and that was a mistake, so I shut up and sat still while he went back to squad car to write me my souvenir. Was irritating to know I'd have to go to court to prove this Fool wrong but made sure bag was closed and just sat still. Arrives Galahad in form of a City squad car. "What's the problem?" he asks me. (?!) "College boy thinks you can't turn right on red back there. Says there''s a sign." There's no such thing as Class in America, of course, but I'll take my chaces on it. "I'll take care of this."

College Coplet disappears in a blast of hot air and I am on my way, mentally kicking myself.

Never again ! = Put the Goods in a Container in the Trunk ~ think 'box in a box in a box ...'

*

6.

7. Why I Hate Airports (198x)

Coming back from a NORML Convention in DC, I was, sharply dressed & all fired up, even wearing a pretty high-quality goldleaf pin in my lapel. Sat on plane next to a Service Wife going home from husband's deployment. Three kids, the eldest a toddler ~ I didn't envy this woman.
So I schmoozed with her, and when we deplaned in Cleveburg I carried her bag and one of the kids down the ramp. There at the bottom were a table of LaRouchies and an old uniformed cop rocking on his heels at their side. One of the LaRouchies, a woman who looked a little better than a scarecrow, zeroed in on my lapel pin and rose fro the table, moving toward me like a shark toward its bleeding prey.

I instantly moved quickly toward the cop. Ukranian, by the name on his plate, he was a typical Cleveland ethnic ~ at heart a gentleman, of course - Pops probably belted it into hum by age 6]. It was No Contest ~ I had barely to open my mouth and he slid to intercede himself between me and the onrushing LaRouchie. He literally took my arm and motioned the Harpie away as he escorted me, still holding Service Wife's child. She was moving right along with us, toddler in tow and babe in arms, probably wondering where the police escort came from.

I was tickled pink to get thru Cleveburg without these idiots glomming into me ~ no telling where that could have led, and right under that lapel pin I was packing a tight little load of some of the first really prime, fresh NoCal 'sensimilla' I had ever seen. Got off the plane in Detroit, slid thru the terminal, jacked around a corner near the entrance smack into the rear end of a pair of drug-sniffing German Shepherds.

Executed a perfect 180 and walked right back where I came from, fast and found my way out of the terminal in the middle of a crowd, just going with the flow.

Fuckin airports ... and this was long before 9-11. Not long after I did some work with PATCO (remember them?) and got inside the Tower at Detroit Metro. I ain't been near an airplane ever again, much less fo near one with anything that would get me busted.

*

8.

9.

10. Beware of Pizza Huts (2008)

You know about cops & Pizza Huts, right? Rolled thru a country berg at 40 in a 25 smack at the dinner bell, got whooped over in front of ... Knew the sucker was gonna write me up soon as he stepped out of the car. A tad over 5', maybe, and no man that short ever cut me an even break. I didn't mind getting written up - relatively speaking - but I had a problem ~ there was a cooler in the back seat, and in the bottom of the cooler was a well-sealed package of high-grade Meds. No problem with them, but Smokestack el Ropo must have goat-roped my brain because sitting at the top of the cooler was an unsealed pack of NoCal goodies I had picked up for recreational purposes. Russell's Finest ~ think it was four 8's, a Kush Sampler for The Professor. it was. Cop opens the cooler and its like walking into a Grow ... what in the fuck could I tell him it is [anyone got a good answer for that?]? Damn !

He was hungry I guess and I rolled on my way with a $60 Lesson Learned.

Never again ! = Use packaging meant for the task and stow gear properly.

*

~ ~ ~

Okay, everybody ~ I'll hum a few bars and y'all can sing along with me ... I have a real no-shit bud of 99 Headband ~ the mothership here, folks, nothing downstream ~ don't see these things laying around every day when wholesale is upwards of $5000# so I figure the Smoke i'm gonna blow to the skies to close this list is Appropriate Offering. gitchi gitchi megwich ...

All the Federales say
They could have had him any day.
They only let him hang around
Out of kindness I suppose

Townes Van Zandt

JOURNEYS

=| The Estonian Roadwraith ...

She just popped up last spring. I was gassing up on the PCH just south of the Pepperdine campus in Malibu after a shopping trip to Green Angel, thinking the $4.50/gallon I was paying was a personal record.

Standing not 15' from where I'm feeding the car is a young woman with a backpack bigger then she is. It's a bad stretch to catch a ride = narrow, hard to stop ...

"Where you heading?"

"Alaska!"

She had me. Motioned her to come stow her gear in the back of the Benz and I'd get her up into Ventura County. I figured her for a college student taking off for The Trip she'll tell her grand-kids about.

"Where you coming from?"

"Estonia."

She wasn't kidding.

Threw the pack on the back seat and as we tooled north she unfolded a world map with her path marked ... east from the Baltics across the old Soviet Union, south across the Gobi and the mountains of western China, across the Korean peninsula, a north-south traverse of Japan, and finally a flight from Tokyo to LA ... good lord, this woman is a friggin' Trooper !

--

She was genuinely surprised that I not only had heard of Estonia, I knew where it was and something of its history. Not twenty-four hours in the country and she thinks we're all dumbasses ... the road is just starting its first serious stretch of Beautiful north of LA and she's awe-struck. Wants to know about Indians ... "Do they all live in tipis?" I kid you not ... I understand this, it is vestige of a social movement stemming from bad fiction she's drawing from, somewhat akin to Trekkie phenomenon (they're everywhere, like Deadheads), not uncommon among euros.

"No, they live just like us. Except they're Indians." Someday she'll understand what she heard.

Took her home where she met met Pinay, African, & Hungarian women ~all of them accomplished, worldly people who could hardly believe what this Traveler was doing (me too, frankly ~ ). She swam in a heated pool, took long hot shower, slept in real bed ~ 'felt like a princess.' Flew in last night from Tokyo, ended up at a Buddhist monastery, and I snagged her soon as she got set up on the PCH. Next day we went up the road a piece and she met the Chumash Ethnobotanist. Welcome to America.

Two people more physically different would be hard to imagine. He's dark-skinned, thick, she's light as day, ethereal. They sat a few feet apart in a darkened room with Rottweilers and small children moving about, telling each of their childhoods a world apart. Carina's family saga is of Stalin and the Gulags. Her entire family was shipped off, and it took years to make their way back, moving among forest communities in the Coldlands ... only her grand-mother made it back.

Ethnobotanist and his brother were among the last wave to be passed through the meatgrinder of the assimilationist boarding school, their hair cut and language washed from their mouths. This after years of foster homes brought on by their presence at the end of the Alcatraz Occupation. Parallel colonialization experiences ~ Gulags or Boarding Schools, purpose was the same. They understood each other perfectly, didn't have to say anything more. I sat silently on the floor between the Rotts, listening, watching ... on the wall behind me were swordfish blades, symbolizing the Ethnobotanist's familials. I could see the arc of both these lives quite clearly, and I knew I was in a gitchi powerful place.

I gave her over to these Chumash and she headed north through the fires to Alaska and beyond.

You gotta see where she is ~ and where she's been ~ for yourself ...

By Believing
in his dreams
a man burns them
into reality.

- Herge

=

PRIOR RESTRAINT

= Just in over the transom ...

Actually I saw this on the MMMA website. Goes close to heart of an issue vexing me for some years. The least sign of Interest or even Comprehension can elicit an endless stream of McLuhanesque 'probes' which I'm sure annoy all but those who hear them as some sort of Celestial Music. This is a Big Fuckin Deal for me ~ has been for many, many years. I Am Not Alone in this i hope

Here's the nibs : In the United States there is a Prior Restraint on scientific research involving cannabis imposed by self-interested federal agencies, principally NIDA and the DEA. That Prior Restraint means many basic questions about cannabinoids can not be asked. DEA and NIDA both must approve research protocols or just forget about ever securing any research cannabis from any source. It's policy right out of the Middle Ages, and the Media has yet to note the reason behind the paucity of usable data. We have lost decades of social progress and medical research to the Great Pirates and their Charlatan camp-followers.

*** Neither NIDA nor the DEA, btw, produces anything but their own beanpiles. Both could be gone in a flash and we'd never miss either. Anyone who cares to make The Case for either agency is welcome to step forth and get shredded. ***

Here's the heart of the matter ~ we do not know the true chemical composition of the sundry cannabis strains. How, exactly, do Blueberry strains differ from, say, White Widow. Until we have reliable 'chemical signatures' we can not begin to match reports of effectiveness from patients with the chemical signatures associated with that relief. That's Usable information for producers, patients, farmacies, evaluators, regulators, breeders, scientists, the Public ... what more could we want?

Within the concentric little rings elicited from my pinging & probing ... I've been promoting the notion that a protocol to assay selected strains in situ in California is legal, doable, and necessary; I've been told that collectives in the Bay have been applying more resources than I have as yet garnered to questions larger than mine, and I'm trying to catch up with them.

So this may be the Season's gift to me ~ it fell under my nose literally moments after sending the Fellow a note about sending him some historical material for his back-fill. This is precisely what we were talking about. Chemical signatures for cannabis Strains ~ what a concept. Once you know what a strain really Is, chemically-speaking, one may start pegging patient effectiveness reports to the chemical indicators within each particular strains. NIDA / RIPS could have been doing this for us for thirty years, had they any concept of real Public Purpose.

# # # VIVA CANNABISTAS ! # # #

Heroes in Service to America = Harborside Health Center on the Embarcadero in Oakland CA. Look at what these people are doing !!

Am so damn happy... doing imaginative cartwheels.



= 26 Dec 08

BEYOND THE SOLSTICE

= Loudest xmas in years.

* * * Very peaceful tho * * * Nothing quite like it since leaving NYC many moons ago * * * My Kitchen Sisters had their youngest daughters together with them for first time since they did this here a year ago ~ they're all hived up in the main room, clustered around a laptop and Skyping with Rels halfway around the world. Loudly. Not a quiet bunch to begin with and they're doing some serious hootin, laughin like sailors on leave. Some of the younguns Over There are talking online for the first time ~ Erlinda hasn't been home in six years ... Global Village indeed. Got one cooking right here in front of the fire * * * Way too much food is, apparently, a Pinay tradition of the season. * * * Put on R&R sound all day long ~ Monterey Pop! ~ but have now turned to Herbie Hancock's "Possibilities" ~ been wearing that disk out for months *** Rained sideways for maybe a minute this afternoon, a real California rarity (under 15" annual here) ~ first such pour I've seen, but it lacked Thunders. Hear there are Thundersnows nearing Meesheegan. * * * At-hand is 4-pack of Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout from North Coast Brewing in Ft. Bragg CA, wherever that may be. I'm partial to darks, and this has a sweet cling I don't often find ~ really like this stuff ... "Its got a beat and you can dance to it" * * * Little Kobe has an attention deficit, but he's just a little-bitty. Not like a Lab or a Rott rocketing thru the living room like an F-16, but this dog is Undisciplined and needs to learn a few simple rules starting with 'four feet on the floor.' Think I'll invest in a squirt gun. * * * Online 'card' from the Estonian Roadwraith ~ she's in Costa Rica amongst Mayan potters, probably disappearing for another month or two ... talk about long, strange trips = Genuinely Interesting Blog..
~
Had to make grocery run this afternoon for two of life's Necessities ~ toilet paper and firelogs. Snagged last box of latter and thought I had it made when Fate intervened in form of a Really Fat Woman blasting her cart thru any empty space she had half a chance at, just like Fridays on the Five. I bailed out of her way but wrenched a knee and by 2 PM was gimping, god fucking dammit ... two solid months without incident or significant Pain and I'm dusted by a shopping cart. Only in America ... Back around Labor Day I had a similar incident with a non-Union cowboy on a front-loader. How I managed to roll away from that unscathed & nonplussed is another tale, but this is so fucking stoopid. The pain isn't that bad and I've taken care of it with a Saigon bud I've been working on for six hours ~ maybe .3g total and half gone. ["This'll take you right back" said the countewrman, an earnest 20-something. "Better not! We're all in BFT when that happens ... ]

Keith Richards just turned 65, so I figure I have half a chance to get my knees that far, too.

That's what Surgeon said we're shooting for, and I'd be happy to make it. Wish me luck.
~
Have been 'talking' to The Fellow online about matters ethnobotanic & biochemical ... he's got a 2 year-old with almost same name as my 93 year-old, same birthday ... yeah we're on the same beam about the deficient nature of cannabinoid research and the Ways & Means by which it may be corrected. He's got an nDn pal, an 'apothecary' down in southwestern Michigan, maybe a Bodwadmi, at least likely Anishinaabeg ... if this guy (the nDn) is Authentic, somebody else is getting an xmas present. What an gift, someone to lift the Veil and take you through ...



= 25 Dec 08

RED SKY AT MORNING

= G-13 in the evening !

Got up around two to write (not unusual) and broke around six to get the paper. Reaching for it, butt raised to the east when it registered ~ what a powerful orange glow infused everything! I turned my head to the sunrise and took off sprinting for the back of the house and my camera. Hadn't moved that fast all year, and got back out in time to get off a dozen or so shots before it faded.
~
Navy Wife arrived this morning, altho her dog - a pug/beagle concoction named Kobe after the Famous-Rapist Laker - did not. He sat in a cage at Dulles all night, got to LAX early this afternoon, and arrived here a couple hours after dark freaked out and wearing a plastic collar so he can't lick where his balls used to be. This dog has had a rough week, but we'll try to accommodate. Pinays are all about to head off for yet-another Midnight Mass and the beginning of official 'rounds' ~ gonna be a lot of eating going on tomorrow, I'm afraid. I'm puppy-sitting, and writing a Bud Review.
~
Farmacy visits are almost as much fun as a good afternoon in a used book emporium ~ I really like bookstores, I do ... Planned to head down to Green Angel of Malibu for clones & hash this afternoon. Very high quality shop, broad-ranging menu with better than average staff, well run. Selection is among best in area, and while it isn't cheap, prices aren't unreasonable. This is a Best Practices outfit = Recommended. Sacred Mountain (Santa Barbara) is more oriented toward my community & its Localized economy. I know these folks better and personally like them; some of them are Friends, so Sacred Mountain is my default farmacy. Selection is limited compared to some outlets, prices reasonable, and they'll discount larger purchases. Staff are well-informed, willing to engage patients about appropriate strains, and demonstrates a remarkably patient-oriented work-culture, a reflection of the Values brought by these people to their tasks. Another Best Practices shop = Recommended.

On off chance Sacred Mountain was open, called there ~ they were, and I did head up there. Wasn't a lot in stock - DEA visited earlier in week and they've reduced their Risk ... but o boy ob did they have a couple winners for me ~ a bargain outdoor OG, an interesting southeastern Asian "Saigon" which will "bring me back" I'm told by an earnest 20-something. Heaven forbid it does that, altho the prospect of anything redolent of Thai Stick is a welcome prospect ~ anyone out there willing to teach me how to tie one off properly, btw ?

But the real reward for the trip was the first G-13 I've ever seen ! This isn't the G-13, of course, but a downstream "Mr. Nice" strain which rates a double Hot-damn on several counts. G-13 is a 'Strain with a Story' to begin with, whatever it turns out to be ... the story I got today was that it was diverted from a "government" breed program, which meant the Research Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. It's a miserable four-acre patch surrounded by barbed wire, guard towers, kleig lights and the monopoly on federal pot production ~ it is the sole-source provider, on apparently perpetual contract from the early '70's. Cast in the best possible light it is a total fucking waste of tax resources.

Mahmoud A. ElSohly showed up in the NYT this week. He's a NIDA-owned pharmacist who operates the fed pot franchise at RIPS and he was crowing some about their 'breeding' program which I suspect to be pure PR shill, probably spur of moment. I love the NYT but they understand Sufi politics better than the domestic cannabis industry. This was a lame interview, but the separation between medical quality cannabis Grown American compared to their ditchweed is -- help me, Mikey -- Chateau Beapdecoop to Mike's Hard Lemonade. I think he was embarrassed and was winging it when asked about genetically modified cannabis:

"That actually has been the trend over the years in the cultivation in the illicit market, and also in the legal market, where we are doing genetic selection, where we select specific materials that have the genes that produce higher levels of THC or some of the other ingredients."

They may select from random outcomes, but I've FOIA'd these guys bigtime and don't see them as being anywhere near able to do any controlled genetic breeding. Hell, they have trouble coming up with 3% pot. They're good at converting their crop to tars with which rhesus monkeys may be tortured for NIDA's amusement. These guys can pick daisies ~ they can't breed pot.

May just have to drop another FOIA bomb on this boondoggle just to see what's tucked in their filing cabinets. Always fun to establish the Truth of a Matter, and last time was such grand good fun ... rolled down the PCH with prospect of once again hanging the RIPS-NIDA Gang up with its own rope danced thru my head, an 8th of Carlton Turner's ex-pat finest ~ the D B Cooper of Fed-Pot ~ packed into the cooler in the trunk. G-13 ... I can hardly wait to try this on.

Fuckin A. I'm laughin' my ass off all the way home.

@ Hey, Carlton, remember me ? I'm baaaaccccckkkkk !!!! @

24 Dec 08

MY SON THE TEAMSTER

=| We all worry about our kids.

If you don't, I'm worried about YOU.

~

That's mine, right, with a slip of the dog that is now Regal Cerberus of Fairview, Mofo or somesuch, about 110# of the smoothest moving Rottie you'll ever see ~ wind over the wheat, he is. And such a serious young dog ...

Not that I have much to worry about anymore - the 'kid' is near 40 and been on his own since he escaped the educational system which truncated every opportunity he had with just one Magic Word ~ dyslexia! Handicaps are indeed externally-imposed, and dyslexia is Exhibit A. It is a Teaching Disorder, not one of Learning except insofar as public institutions seem incapable of Learning that dyslexia is not related to one's so-called Intelligence. Dyslexics are not Disabled except to the extent the Systems they find themselves within are Unable.

He ran a 'Party Store' as they're invariably called in Michigan, selling alcohol to the swills near the Enormous State University ~ say there, young Master Criminals reading this, forget about doing a Bank - the Real Money is in liquor stores.

[Shhh - don't tell 'em every liquor store clerk in America is packing and would love to blast some punk though the potato chip rack]

Got out of there on to UPS docks before he drilled anybody - the 9mm. on his fannypacker was a poor substitute for a real security system, but served in a pinch. Did five full years there to get in line to bid a truck route, which he got and has held for another dozen or so years. "Never called from jail, have a Real Job ~ what more can you possible want?" he asks.

Got a point there.

Teamster is not a small person. Close to 6'6, maybe 220, strong as two ox with a cho dan in a particularly efficient Korean karate, he's not to be trifled with. Also has a mean streak, like he needs one. When you say you don't want to "cross him" you better be thinking in terms of picket lines too. He hadn't been driving long when Teamsters went out on strike. Concerned about job security if replacements were called in, he went around to all the part-timers on the docks who would be offered those jobs as strikebreakers. "You cross my line, I break your ..." 'Pencils.' Let's call 'em pencils. He was gonna break their pencils (plural). On his locker today is a picture of him with his arm around Hoffa Junior, his International Prez, both beaming.

This of course he told me some time thereafter, thank the gods. He has an official "Don't Ask / Won't Tell" policy about his wayward past, whatever there is of it, and I'm greatly relieved. I don't want him asking me too many questions either. Looks like he turned out okay. These days he's got a live-in, a bubbly PhD candidate ... The Doctor & the Truckdriver. They're landscaping the yard, raising 'Gus' (as i insist on calling my grandpuppy) and apparently enjoy each other's company a great deal. I'm happy for him. He's a Good Kid.

Wanted to give him something Significant to mark this year in his mind ~ both of us going through some Changes, and I think I'm on pretty rocky ground with him. I think I was a Good Enough parent, albeit not by a lot ~ his standards are apparently higher. We don't do xmas, generally just exchange simple gifts, but this year I decided to give Art. Soon as I saw this piece I knew it was something that would hang well on him. Seemed a little pricey at first but I'm regular customer and purchase is generally just the act of handing Vendor the piece, sometimes months after conversation first began of it. I'm happy with the price on the tag ~ and he never fails to take a pretty good chunk off after I've bought the piece. No quibbling ~ I prefer to reach Understandings. This was pretty painless. Pendant is about 4" silver w/ mark, shaped around an 'antique' walrus ivory harvested by Inuit, a controlled trade. Piece is hand-carved stack of four Wolf Heads by an aging Cherokee/Choctaw who has somehow found his way to this form. Have to find out who he is, and more about him. Saw a similar stack of Bears by same hand ...

Teamster will have to find out for himself what the the Pack can teach him.



= 23 Dec 08

CALIFORNIA DREAMIN'

=|

Weather & Events still conspire to keep me In California. I shouldn't complain ~ it IS California, after all, where I am safe, warm, legal, relatively pain-free, surrounded by Good & Interesting People ["the only kind worth knowing," if anybody asks] ... what am I bitching about ?!

My birthday is the Winter Solstice, and every year I have a wonderful artist-friend who is just as godless as me and thus does not celebrate xmas ... but he does send a Solstice card, always the hit of the season, always a Keeper. He just went in for a surgery back in Michigan not terribly unlike those that I face and he's right near the top of my visitation list, if I ever get outta here ...

~

Erlinda's daughter is still in Virginia, her flight socked in and pushed back. She's the Navy Wife (age 22!), and hubby Mark is no longer on the deck USS Theodore Roosevelt [CVN-71] in Dubai. Again (age 23). He's down below now, in Aircraft Launch & Recovery reloading the cable that catches those little bugs when they bounce on the deck overhead, keeps 'em from running right off the other end. Talk about Heavy Equipment Operator ... yipes. One of the most dangerous jobs on that ship.

Thanks Mr. Bush ~ how many more daze ? You take care, Mark ...

~

I've got a mid-80's Benz up Goleta waiting for part, that Pacific storm socking the Northwest so hard looks like its gonna dump a foot in the high country of Colorado, and the goddam DEA is "walking thru" my farmacy this afternoon, peremptory to their so-called "compliance" visit at the end of the month ... want to know why ? Real simple bottom line, and it's clearly stated right here ~ there are still cretins out here masquarading as police / public servants who just Do Not Get the concept of 'Rule of Law.' Was going to be up there today but called Owner-Ops to wish them best for what follows this Solstice (they don't do xmas either) ... they were home in bed, feeling poorly, altho not about the DEA nuisance, however much a threat it is to their livelihood, and their own medical needs. The DEA is chock full of Numbnuts, but my Farmacists have Brass Balls.

My communicating with them has long since been via other media. I'm not a 'phone" guy in the first place, and to all the people who tell me I 'need' a cellphone all I can say is that I don't need a trail of gumdrops trailing me wherever I am ... yes everyone assumes the Farmacy is wired, now that DEA has been through a dozen times. They don't wear "cop shoes" all the time anymore, but they're really not nearly so clever as they think.

~

'So, Girls, I was feeling just SO really down, I went & did what most 'Merikans think they're spozed to do at Xmas ~ i shopped and am gonna drop! Drove down the PCH into LA County and loaded up with a nice load of hash, 1.5 oz of mixed 1/8ths, and a box of the sweetest little Cheese clones.

Got a camera just coming off the charger, pix to follow and maybe even a Bud Review.

I mean, if I'm Californicated, may as well lay back and enjoy it, eh ?



ah-oooommmmmmmm .........



= 21 Dec 08

CRAZY WEATHER

=| Snow in Malibu

Said the papers. "First time in memory of residents" as the Snooze was sure to report, semi-truthfully. Don't ask me when but I remember when it snowed in Malibu within the past five years; pipes froze out in the desert at Lancaster, and the lawns (such as they are ~ Water is scarce) looked like an ice carnival. Some of that likely going on as we speak ~ I-15 is closed by snow right at Victorville, where the Pearblossom Highway meets it.

~

My Kitchen Sisters - aka the Pinays who ought to be running the federal Bailouts - went out for cookies & wine tonight. What's this about Midnight Mass five hours early, what's with that ? Early tee-time for the Priests tomorrow, I guess ... you know, i always wanted to ask about the Communion wine ~ "What is this, the House Wine ? No ! Really ? Can I see the label, please ?" but Opportunity just hasn't presented itself as yet. This sort of behavior is no doubt artifact of my association with Mikey the Oenophile ~ can't say it, can't even spell it, and he wants me to Be One ?!

Sounds like someone with a social disease, or maybe a really weird sexual disorder, doesn't it. Turtle used to tell a joke about "cunning linguists" which must have had em rolling in the aisles at his linguistic conventions [that's his Other PhD, btw. Linguistics. In his 60's. For fun. I'll spare you] ... Oenophiliac has a nice ring. Must try it on Mikey, himself an Encyclopedia of Good Cheap Wines and Chief Doofus behind a Genuinely Interesting Blog. He's the guy who got me into this, too. The blog, I mean, not the Cannabis Wars; blame for that lies elsewhere ...

It was Mikey, though, who noodled me this summer into putzing around with a "Best Buds" blog after we had done the Dozens on each other's favorite recreational Manna. He's definetely a Wine Guy who appreciates Bud. I'm a Bud Guy who can't tell the difference between Chateau Muckety '84 and a glass of Tipple on ice "that classic blend of Ripple and Thunderbird, redolent of Sterno with undertones of kitty litter, it brings me back to crisp autumn daze spent under the Overpass ..."

Come on, Mikey, give it up. Ain't gonna happen. Ain't got it ~ no palate for it. I will, however, be writing Bud Reviews in such Spirit ...

Events have, however, dictated they be set aside. Stay tuned.

Trying to beam myself back to Michigan where Winter awaits, but Bad Winds blowing out there.

Not going anywhere for moment.



= 18 Dec 08

IDENTITY CARDS

=| Went to register today

Gotta have another California state ID card ~ not the one you get from DMV, the one my County just started issuing for medical cannabis patients. Its a strange situation.

Let me 'splain ...

California counties are required by law to issue state ID cards to enroll medical cannabis patients, but compliance is far from perfect, both among counties and by patients. My home county just opened up this week, in part due to political sea changes becoming more apparent, and in part due to the perpetual efforts of Mike Meyer of 420Ventura,

Here's the process in Ventura County.

And here's what you get for your $191 ... no, not the bud (its "Mr. Nice").

Is it necessary? Not really ~ matter of convenience, personally. My Jensen Clinic card serves adequately, but I've never been subject to a LEO stop which required it and I'm sure there are farmacies which are so accustomed to seeing State cards that Patients best have one.

And its going to make great for Show & Tell in Meesheegan ...



= 16 Dec 2008

COURAGE

=| The Great Fears of Life ...

... are Blindness and Death, or so I'm told.

Bob certainly thought so, I know.

In 1976 he became the first American to legally use cannabis for medicine and intuitively resolved not to be "the only one in the lifeboat." With partner and soul-mate Alice O'Leary, for twenty-plus years toiled ceaselessly to share the gifts of Knowledge and Power and Medicine bestowed upon Bob by virtue of his own perseverance. Alice occupied a closet at NORML's Washington headquarters, devoting herself to working the medical issues from any & every angle possible, and Bob spent many a week popping from airport to airport, working with lawyers and legislatures and cancer patients living in trailer parks ...

It was Bob & Alice ~ still 'one-word' to me ~ who established the original Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics and ran it from their Washington DC apartment, paying its bills before their own. Bob was a great conversationalist, and we'd jabber the night away when I visited. He'd settle into his easy chair, open a can of those miserable federal joints, and we'd pound down Amstels for hours, swapping snappy stories until the sun came up. Alternately we rollicked with laughter, and froze into private, sorrowful reflection over those left by the trail as we moved on.

He'd work those damn fed-joints down to the nub like he was chain-smoking Pall Malls, twenty a day sometimes, he said, because they were so weak. Nominally around 2% THC, that value was derived from an assay long ago and far away, and I doubt they were half that by time he finished a can. But it was the cannabis that allowed him to keep what remained of his sight, to continue working. Cannabis preserved his sight from glaucoma, scientifically observed and measured. Three times. Bob's interocular pressure was studied with and without cannabis at Johns Hopkins, at UCLA, and at North Carolina. Case closed before the bar of science, if not exactly in what passes for Law down here, south of the St. Mary's & the Pigeon. In 1994 he was diagnosed with HIV, and in 1995 basically died of AIDS ... but came back, surviving his dip in the River Styx, as he phrased it.

"The story of medical marijuana in America," he wrote in MARIJUANA RX, "is about the brutality of the system and banality of bureaucrats who are charged with managing it. Medical marijuana reveals the failure of elites and the success of common citizens intent on righting a wrong. It is the story of a remarkable public consensus which was ignored, denigrated, and trampled on in order to maintain a deeply entrenched policy. It is about the failure of government to trust its citizens and the casualties of that failure."

---

My #1 Farmacy caught another DEA visit this week; second in three months. Not sure, waiting to hear, but the Chumash Ethnobotanists may be up in the hills, off-grid again, goddammit.

I'm just marking time, waiting for January 20 and the subsequent ~ inevitable, I hope ~ Executive Order cutting the balls of these Keystone Kocksuckers.

Muzzle your dogs, Barack.

** Let's get this crystal fucking clear ** My total lack of respect for the DEA and their ilk is not indicative of how I feel about cops in general. I don't give a shit what you think you heard, you heard nothing like that from me, nor will you. Someone in my family did forty years in that trench and I really don't need any uninformed opinion about what anyone might think I think about him and his brethren.

Here's the Real Message : most cannabis Law is bad; some cops are too, and one federal agency in particular has run amok in California in a manner not much unlike Blackwater in Iraq.

Tell me how I'm wrong.


= 11 Dec 2008

SEND LAWYERS, GUNS & MONEY

=| the shit has hit the fan.

The Legislature didn't have to do a thing; neither did the Governor.

What comes next? We know we have hearings coming up early in January which state Community Mental Health (of all people) will propose rules regarding their administriviation duties, and probably more. Michigan co-conspirators are concerned with privacy, of course, and with unwarranted restrictions on cultivation and horizontal transfer between producers. Unreasonable or unenforceable rules invite mock- and scoff-law responses, drive producers off-grid and out of the tax base, and will retard development of a supply system based on local production which is necessary to provide safe, effective, cost-efficient medical cannabis. Period.

The Initiative's victory was correctly rubber-stamped somewhere in the bowels of the Secretary of State's office and a clock somewhere started counting down toward the effective date, which came at 21:00 PST on the 3rd. It was duly noted in the relevant Michigan exchanges between co-conspirators, but no fireworks. By now it has settled in on most of the Cannabista that we're nowhere near done with this thing.

Michigan's Proposal 1 was a Marijuana Policy Project initiative ~ they paid to fund an infrastructure, file appropriate language, the massive task of gathering signatures, then assuring the ballot form was acceptable, and for the nominal campaign effort made by the Michigan Compassionate Care Coalition. Thanks to them all, they all got what they set out to accomplish, and they did it really, really well. The validity rate of the signatures was astoundingly good, their campaign filings were all spic & span & on-time, too, and if the Bottom Line is indeed what matters, well ... 63%, Bay-bee! Three Million Votes ! Every County and Legislative District in the state ... like Patton thru the Grand Duchy of Fenwick, it was.

Which isn't to say they didn't leave behind a bit of a mess. Years of local infrastructure building was put on hold or marginalized all around the MPP/MCCC effort. All the Cannabanista behaved like good little boys and girls who should Not Be Heard. I saw the nice pat on the head received by Michigan NORML, which took it in total silence without so much as a blink or any sort of acknowledgment. A state Administrative Rules procedure awaits early in January, and the Future beyond that is Tabula Rosa regarding the construction of a Production and Supply infrastructure. MPP is apparently terrified by the spectre of bad public relations coming along with any positive association or notice for California's system. The Initiative language avoided California's successful structure and is modeled on prior MPP actions in other states which are not so successful as California's citizen action, which was hoped to serve as a Model ... but what do the Fruits & Nuts know, eh ?

Anybody has a rational explanation not based on some level of the great Fear & Loathing, I'm ready for it. When asked why it was "silent" on supply, MCCC's primary spokesperson shrugged her shoulders, went palms up, and waxed rhetorically "Well, they get it, don't they?" referring, apparently, to cancer patients copping their Meds on street corners the requisite distance from a church or school. I was not surprised to hear this, given the source.

California has more or less learned the Value of proper regulation. One estimate of just the sales tax value from dispensary sales alone for FY '07 was $175m ... Most of that is up in the smoke of the DEA's fun & games campaign ~ you remember the spring fires in the historic Golden Triangle, more than 1000 fires springing up in a single weekend? Ask me how many people in the Industry have told me the DEA was up there buzzing around setting those fires ... I don't think that's so, but sure tells you where things stand in some parts.

Thus economically motivated (don't think for a moment it has anything with the enormous level of support the law enjoys here, despite what that poor man Bill Schuette wants you to 'think,' California has more or less arrived at a fairly stable basis for doing the Public's Business the Right Way, sans DEA meddling by the cadres of idiots running around like they're a collective Freddy Krueger, bent on terrorizing the Producer community. Got a note from friend under their gun for what is clearly lawful activity under state law. Piss me off ...

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"If you could hear the Special Agents approach to the dichotomy between state and federal laws and the resulting harassment of Caregivers, you would have been jaw-dropped by the Bushonian level of intelligence - of course they're only 'enforcement officers' but apparently the Fed Atty was cast of the same stone."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This summer Attorney General Brown's office released Guidelines [PDF] which provide usable knowledge about regulatory parameters, and make clear that co-op and collective business forms are quite acceptable so long as they conform to the scope of state law.

Pretty simple, eh ?

Yes, but ... stay tuned.

Back at the Michigan ranch, the first evaluation clinic opened today in Southfield, not far north of 8-Mile.



= 04 Dec 2008

HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW ?

=| Barren red sandstone hills

... of the Flaming Mountains mark the edge of the greater Tian Shan Mountain range near the northern rim of the Taklamakan Desert in Xinjiang, the Uighar Autonomous Region of western China. Two decades ago, east of the city of Turpan indigenous farmers unearthed an ancient boneyard. It has since revealed more than 2500 Gushi-culture tombs, among them one of a Shaman. It contained medicine bundles, including a leather bag within which was a wooden bowl holding a 789-gram pack of vegetative matter assumed to be coriander. It subsequently proved to be cannabis, and a chemical profile clearly established that it had been psychoactive. Radiocarbon dating placed its age at 2700bp. Alas, the seed material did not germinate.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Russo, et al. "Phytochemical and Genetic Analyses of Ancient Cannabis from Central Asia." 59 Journal of Experimental Botany 15 (2008) at 4171-4182.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The age of such herbal cannabis, and its apparent use as a psychoactive / medicinal agent does not surprise the Chumash Ethnobotanist. "Uh huh," he nods. "Yup." The Silence is his. He can steer the discourse Upstream through his own People's ethnobotanic traditions or the Lakota, among who he has also lived, or Downstream through the mechanics of birthing his own native Farmacy and shepherding it through a DEA siege.

Instead he launches on the Value of creating Social Capital, exemplified by what has happened in California over the last decade. "These people are Heroes!" He's talking about Dennis Peron and Ed Rosenthal, among others. Many others. "They're moral exemplars, inspired by and functionally equivalent to Dr. King. What Dennis did with his motor scooters and Ed is doing with his refusal to take the path of Least Resistance .... " I'm thinking of Bob Randall and Mae Nutt.

On the low table beside where I sleep is a wood tray for preparing my medications, and upon it several small engraved glass disks. words like RISK and COURAGE and CREATE ...

Ethnobotanist's riff expands on Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone" argument that Social Networks have Value, and that Social Contacts can improve Productivity of both individuals and groups. Seamlessly stitching this to Richard Florida's 'creative classes' & 'cool cities' formulations, followed by a furious upstream digression thru Pierre Bourdieu and obligatory offerings of Vine DeLoria, both coming & going, before settling into a carefully composed plea for Localized, Green economies of Scale and Purpose and for the appropriate roles of Bands and Individuals within their own socio-political nets, it's quite a presentation for a backyard BBQ. This isn't the kind of stuff you hear from a buncha guys wearing Bears shirts ...

He is wearing an AIM shirt, and a floppy black hat with discrete banding. His dark hair flows, and the tattoo on his chin indicates his Chumash nationality, if not his Doctorate. I tap some 'shake' from a Zuni ceremonial flask and roll a tight little offering, wondering about the concentric circles of my life, of any life, well led ... how Old Truth & New Understanding are so often the same. This man is a Friend. We share similar professional backgrounds and political engagements. I know his wife, his sons (some of them), his dogs, his history (some of it).

Tis a Long Strange Trip indeed, and I suspect entering the most interesting of its Time.

Of his Chumash Ways (and of the Paiute and Dine whose Lands I also find myself moving), I Know Nothing. What I do know is that the more familiar Anishinaabeg of the Upper Great Lakes seem less constrained, more 'open-source' in their exchanges with Others. those like me from outside their cultural mainstream. Yes, there are things which are not Spoken, certain sorts of Names remain unvoiced, there is Knowledge not to be shared ... sometimes the hematite turtle I wear at my throat to honor another Friend almost burns sometimes, it seems so infused with his Mystery ... But Western aboriginals seem have more Sacred things not to be spoken of to Others, or to be dealt with only in appropriate, private contexts.

"We Know Nothing !" my 'Great Good Friend & Teacher,' an Odawa of the Turtle dodem, would shout at me, scowling, finger wagging. He didn't mean we were airheads, just that we rational scientific types ~ and as a pharmaceutical chemist, he did mean "we" ~ just weren't very good at understanding anybody else's cultural footing, much less at formulating anything approaching a Universal Truth. There is so much going on around us of which we are unaware. "We Know Nothing!" In many respects the most learned man I have ever known, the Turtle never gave me a straight answer to any question I ever asked. Never led me astray or told me anything I now know to be Not True, either. Nothing. He had a Dream Name he never revealed to anyone, far as I know; he certainly had Medicine.

Ethnobotanist has at Dream Name as well, which I do know, but remains His to divulge. The fact he told me his Dream Name at all was something of a shock. I was in the Coastals among his friends & family that afternoon, moving about with a camera as we ate and talked and made music in his walled yard. Late in the day we drove a short distance to a stable around the other side of a citrus grove. There, moving comfortably among almost thirty fine Arabians in corrals he had helped build, we talked earnestly, privately, about business matters. I mentioned something ethnic, quite esoteric, regarding a small piece of remote nDn Country far from California, not even near a road. He knew the place I described; it was where he had been given his Dream Name, which he then revealed and explained to me. It makes perfect sense of the context of his Life, as I know it.


Convergences of the sort suggest what Turtle called the "Great Mystery." Such things - Revelations, Crossings, the Obvious Becoming Evident, the Relevance of Lessons brought to us ~ are done for Purposes however imperfectly understood. There really is no such 'thing' as Coincidence, Really, there isn't, except in the most literal of meanings ~ certainly not in the idiomatic sense, the way we bandy the word about.

Fellow humanists and others of the modern, euro-centric worldview can say what they want about such things, about what Turtle introduced to me as 'thinking in Indian.' Rationalists might translate aboriginal sacred-privacy norms as equivalent to a modern hybrid of our so-called "medical ethics" and a traditional church (pick one) liturgy. Close enough, clearly, to be honored ... and I'm really tired of fucking up. Forgive me, my Dine friends especially.

To explain as best I can, Ethnobotanist's Dream Name indicates that his life's Mission ought best be to expressed as service as the 'vessel' through which Spirit may be expressed. I hear this sort of credo expressed by a lot of people from the Arts, or from spiritually-motivated christians to whom it means and entirely different sort of thing, far more metaphoric.

I have no reason to doubt this is so. Why would anyone?

He is Singing his Song.

I gotta go for it.


= 22 Nov 08

O-BA-MA !

=| Yes !

Verrry interesting evening, I must admit, although it entails letting a cat out of my bag, so to speak. Not that it matters much ...

I'm a Labor guy and a Yellow-Dog Democrat from way back. Deep down, I am a small-s socialist ~ some of my (human) Best Buds even call me a "godless communist" ~ a real 'Power to the People' guy. Always have been. Do you mind ? Do I care !

There never was much doubt what candidate I preferred. Got on Obama wagon after Iowa ~ yes, he can! ~ and did my part in organized Labor's canvasses to reel in Joe & Josie Sixpax who had insufficiently transmitted their intention to stand square for the Endorsee of their Brothers & Sisterhood ... twas not at all a "vote for Obama or we break your legs" sort of thing, just a simple love-tap in the name of Solidarity with a message that we cared.

Hey, you can laugh, but the return of Human Contact to presidential politix is one of the blessings of this election cycle. When Howard Dean went to the Democratic National Committee he was the guy who caught nothing but crap about (re)building party infrastructure in all fifty states, which had a lot to do with winning, didn't it ? The political infrastructure is shifting, and its new forms are going to have a lot to do with governing. Getting out & about and engaging people about your candidate and your issues, well ... better get with it.

Which is what we did last night. Small group, all Democrats, mostly female, mostly dark-skinned ... we watched the Democratic tide roll westward as the clock rolled around to 8:00-PM PST. When the West Coast polls closed and the inevitable was confirmed, such dancing & screaming ! The cackle of cell phones going out all over the world ... "You watching?" "We did it!" There was an AfrAm woman here old enough to Remember the signs of segregation in Petersburg, Virginia. She called home. "Can you believe ... "

I was pretty calm about it. This Old Boy can't dance anyway, doctors orders. No jumping around or any of that stuff for me, thanks. Am an Observer by temperament, tend to sit still while world is bouncing around about me. Useful trait for historians, ethnologists, sports officials ... had also been watching polls closely all month, especially at Pollster.com where the Man Behind the URL is MB, a Running Dawg colleague from Meesh-ee-gan. He was half the Brain Trust behind the Gary Hart insurgency not quite 25 years ago. It was crystal clear from Pollster that Obama wasn't just going to win, he was going to win Big in terms of electoral votes. Thus I was just watching the clock, doing the math, computing time & distance until the Big Hand pointed up enough times.

There was another vote that had started to come in about the time McCain started to dust off the Concession Speech, in local issue in Michigan that didn't attract as much attention as it might. I had every reason to expect it to win, but it represented the Political Hope of my adult lifetime and I was extraordinarily nervous about it. The Marijuana Policy Project underwrote a ballot initiative to allow medical use of cannabis in Michigan, dropping about $1.3m into paying the costs of qualifying properly and perhaps $300,000 more when the Loyal Opposition made a belated, lunatic appearance in the last month.

September polls had been in the mid 60% range in support, but Proposal One may have slipped a few points in October ~ hard to tell compare results where questions are phrased differently, and variance in results hovering near the margin of error. Last poll I heard had started to trend up again, but there was no telling what might/could happen with a Marijuana Question at the end of a long ballot in a year such as this. In an election year of real economic calamity, I heard nothing of the economics of cannabis in the mainstream press, electronic or otherwise. Watching CNN has become like reading a comic book.

Vox populi indeed. It was just up to Us, for better or worse.

~

First numbers were 63% Yes with just 18% of precincts reporting. I kept wandering back to one of the computers to refresh. The Buddhist offered a bowl of Maui Wowie and I watched slack-jawed as precincts came rolling in ... the percentage remained unchanged. Raw votes rose in tandem, and when I get gbetter numbers from another source I could see what was in was from the more rural and conservative parts of the state ~ holy shit, campus and urban zones hadn't as yet been tabulated !?! Good lord ... this thing wasn't just going to pass, it was going to blow the fuckin' doors in.

The percentage never changed.The numbers rose in lockstep until Yes had 3,008,980 of 4,801,850 votes cast. Carried every county in the state, every legislative district. There were more votes cast in the Presidential selection [5,006,550], of course, but Obama's 2,875,308 was less than the number cast for medpot. Nothing, not No Body, ever got 3,000,000 votes in a Michigan election before. The Marginalized Minority, my beloved Lunatic Fringe, is now the Michigan Majority.

Vox populi !

I've since picked myself up, dusted off, and still having trouble letting the Reality sink in. Now I've lived long enough to see us elect Obama on his own merit, and to anticipate the date I will no longer be an Outlaw in my state ~ somewhere around 4 December, by crude calculation. New law takes effect ten days after certification of result later this month. Will be checking in with physician shortly about getting in line even before I return to Michigan, in the heart of the Upper Great Lakes.

Far Out, indeed.



= 05 Nov 08

HOW'S YOUR TAGALOG ?

=| Not a 'real Californian.'

Not yet. I only live here part of the year, and that hasn't been going on all that long. I wasn't native to the Upper Great Lakes either, but have been there long enough to have learned of the Land and its Peoples, and the stories people spin about their long relationship.

There are pictographs in rock shelters near Ventura venerated by the Chumash. Are they two thousand years old? Five thousand? Does it matter ... it was not 500 years ago that the Europeans first arrived in the form of Cabrillo, a Spaniard. He sailed the Santa Barbara Channel, enjoyed Chumash hospitality, stayed among them and died here. This seems to have established a Pattern still in play.

More Spaniards followed and built a string of missions to save the heathen Chumash souls who welcomed them. Both the missions and the Chumash polity were gone within a century, each the other's victim. In the vacuum emerged the Mexicans, who took over and lived a Good Life as well ~ but not for long. Come the Americans ~ a trickle at first, then a great wave of them, coming for the gold washing down the slopes and back toward the sea from which it had traveled. Steady migrant streams have come ever since for land, fame, fortune, freedom, reformatting ...

It's really not a Happy Story. Kevin Starr's seven-volume "America and the California Dream" series is apparently the the definitive cultural history of the state. I'm slogging my way through his literary pastiche of state significa, trying my best to sop it all up. I'm both Stranger and Minority here, another Newcomer. The voices not-speaking-English that I hear most near my California home are Hispanic. The bottleshop where I get my NYT, the bakery, and the fruteria I visit most days, the people in the grocery, the gas station, and the theater ... they're Mexicans, most of them. Some of their families were were before the Americans. Long-time Japanese population here too, at least until their internment.

It has paled in this election year, but some of the things I've heard here about Immigrants and Immigration are as ugly as some of the things I heard in Mississippi about dark-skinned Peoples. The only people who think 'it' has gone away are those who never saw it in the first place.

In the home, I hear Tagalog. An older relative requires 24/7 care-taking, performed by a team of Filipina nurses. Yes it is expensive but health care isn't cheap, is it. They're also Really Good. C'est la vie. It's an extended family ~ two sisters and an in-law with an extended network of kindred emigre workers sharing rides, food, jobs, money, all kinds of mutual support. The center of the neural net is Erlinda. Not quite five feet tall, she's my #1, and it is she who runs the household. Ah-tay (Elder Sister) and she are from a northern island. They remember riding barefoot on the backs of water buffalo as young girls, and tales of the Japanese occupation. Their grandfather, and mine, built roads.

There's a lot of eating with your hands around here. Rice, crisp mango dipped in patis (fish sauce), whole boiled okra, papaya salad ... these Pinays don't like spicy food, but you better move fast for a fried tilapia fresh from their market which deep-frys their purchase. The heads, especially, go fast. The brain is sweet, and the cheeks lovely little pieces of meat, not a lot different from the crayfish of our southeastern bayous which find themselves spread on newspapers over tabletops crowded with Pearl and Dixie longnecks ... Adobo, however, requires a utensil, either a fork or spoon depending on how you want to serve it. Its a traditional sweet vinegar BBQ-stew that Old Men stand over on Sunday afternoons as their family swirls around. Northerners are among the Philipines earlier residents, I'm told, although not aboriginal. "We're Brown," says Erlinda. "Not Red, Not Black, not Yellow. We're Brown." And she is. Not American either, but certainly Californian.

Had they been born in this country, I suspect Erlinda would be running some kind of ship-shape care facility in some little patch of Good Earth. Ah-tay, on the other hand, would probably be nudging aside Jeffrey Immelt at GE (already told you they were Really Good, remember?). Erlinda came here after 30+ years of hospital work to earn enough to educate her kids because American dollars go a long,long way in the Philipines. "You could have four wives," she teases. "Maybe six." She got here within a week of 9-11. So did the Cambodian couple who run a nearby coffee shop.

Welcome to the real New Age America ~ tis a hell of a cultural exchange program we've got here.

So far Erlinda has chalked up an electrical engineer and a teacher. Her youngest is just starting college, a Navy wife married to Bett's son, Mark ~ he's got a beautiful wife, a nasty moon-walk, and is currently on the flight deck crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt [CVN-71] in the Persian Gulf. He's turns twenty-three today.

Happy Birthday, Mark !
Come home safely ~ ASAP

~

Weekends, especially, the house is awash in cooking aromas and a constant barrage of really crappy cell-phone ringtones. Interspersed with bursts of rapid-fire Tagalog, it sounds like a diner sometimes. English is the 'language of instruction' in the Philippines, and the resulting Philippinglish is certainly Good Enough, but default is Tagalog. Tis a mystery to me ~ I have no linguistic skills beyond my spoken language. I understand a handful of phrases, sort of, and can recognize some Food terms, but beyond that its all just pleasant background noise.

Probably just as well.



00:42 10/27/2008

BASKETBALL KNEES

=

"Strong white legs, losing their strength and form ..."
-- Paula Cole "Hush, Hush, Hush"

For most of my life, given the opportunity I have generally chosen to take stairways in lieu of elevators. I've even run stairways, including the Washington Monument, for fun & fitness - no shit. I'm tall and deep-chested, a hard-core basketballer into my 40's, and thereafter a prep official. No one beat me downcourt, and I took sinful pride in being 'last man standing' during the most excruciating of summer scrimmages.

Long ago knee injuries put me out, but subsequent corrective surgeries allowed me to prolong my days on the courts. Now I'm finally paying the full price of admission. All my life basketball courts provided a Haven, refuge from whatever in the World troubled me. Stepping on to a court always slipped me into a Zone of pure Here & Now. I'm sure athletes of all sorts have had extraordinary experiences such as described by George Leonard in The Ultimate Athlete of sometimes being able to all but stop Time, to Know what was to come before it had come to Be ...

Those daze on the courts are long gone for me. No more jump-shots, no more rebounds, haven't dunked in decades. Can't even run anymore. Spirit is willing but not the Wheels, and I've had to make a lot of downward adjustments to former capabilities. Now each day almost always imposes its own limit on my knees. Used to come fairly deep into evening ~ I'm Night Person, still ~ but now its more like middle of afternoon. Some days I never get ahead , and there are more than a few nights which find me crawling up the stairs in my Great Lakes home.

Let me amend that: Not literally "crawling." More like "knuckling" up the stairs. Picture yourself on your knuckles bearing weight three or four treads ahead of your feet. Better yet, try it yourself. Really. See how it lessens the Load imposed on your knees, and imaging knowing that if you don't they will take it out on you with serious doses of Pain & Fatigue. Nothing I care to do in public, but it is the best way for me to get up my stairs.

I'm surprised by how many medical cannabis users I encountered in Las Vegas. Most were addressing various neural & pain issues and one certainly can learn a lot from Other People's Experience ... "Don't do your surgeries here," one fellow told me at a salad bar. I already knew better ~ one of my host's friends was at home, his leg immobilized as he awaited a replacement part for a pin which broke during his last knee surgery. This after a year battling staph infections which almost killed him, just as the "black box" warning on my Rx for the arthritis eating at the bone in my joints, what's left of them, warns me it might just do to me.

Nevada has 'legalized' medical cannabis but you wouldn't know it; it lacks a supply system, and people "just get it, don't they?" Legal status in Nevada may mean nothing more than a limited immunity from arrest, no small consideration for people who work in any number of environments. But the greater Fear has not been driven from the field, and many medical users simply don't bother to enroll.

Now that I have come into Chumash Country, I can speak more comfortably about the nexus of Cannabis and Medicine, and of its ancillary aesthetics. With the exception of an increasingly petulant Governor who recently vetoed a bill restoring discrimination protection to workers whop are legal medical cannabis users (take note, please), California has effectively committed itself to protecting my right to mitigate Pain with Cannabis.

Unlike Nevada and other medpot states, California actually has a safe, effective, and regulated Supply system in place. Here I can easily legally obtain Cannabis of appropriate strain & potency from licensed, tax-paying farmacies, or my own secured garden.

What a concept ...


= 20 Oct 08