BASKETBALL KNEES

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"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

CHUMASH COUNTRY

=| You leave the classic SoCal Culture Zone

When you leave LA on the Pacific Coast Highway [US-1]. You see this right away. The highway spreads out a little and become more accommodating as traffic falls away. Beaches to your left, the Santa Monica hills coming down on your right; the Light seems to brighten, the Air freshens. Before you know it you're in Malibu; whether you know it or not, you're also in Chumash Country.

Find a California map. Cover the coastline from Malibu out to Lompoc, where the Coast turns north at Pt. Argeullo. Chumash are the aboriginal, the First People of the Lands from the coastal range watersheds on down to the coast and out beyond the Channel Islands. I've been told they've been here 10,000 years, of which I Know Nothing, save that they're still here, and have been here a long, long time.

They say they are a sea-going people, and they make planked boats that allow them to orient themselves to the water rather than the dry inland hills. They use double-bladed paddles, as do only far Northern peoples; their tomols are shockingly akin to constructions of Polynesians, who I am also told are Kin.

My primary Farmacists are Chumash. One trained as a youth in traditional Chumash ethnobotany, and the Family now practices traditional healing arts. They pay their taxes, get on fine with their neighbors,and provide me with classic old sativas from local collectives, classic old strains which are effective for my pain and are the least expensive in the array. Hot damn !

But not today. The DEA ran them back into the hills not long ago. They weren't doing anything against local or state law, but the DEA is a Law unto itself, engaged in a long-term campaign against California's medical cannabis system. Had to go the Other Way. Got up early (as always) and took loverly drive down PCH into LA County to one of the 'dispensaries' you've already read about in David Samuel's NEW YORKER article "Dr. Kush". The menu was up online, prices & photos posted; have been there before, too, and knew them to be running a tight shop, offering quality product at competetive (if not bargain-basement) prices. Pleasant, straight-forward transaction; declined use of the lounge and headed back north, retracing the route from the southern edge of Chumash Country back into Ventura toward Santa Barbara.

Tis a little cool by California standards, and the waves aren't much, but there are surfers in the water and bicyclists on the wide, well-demarcated shoulders. I'm in a mid-80's Benz, just hangin' my arm out the window listening to Faure. Topanga Canyon, Mulholland Drive, and US-23 rising in quick order into the mountains and i can't help but grin in anticipation of an early '09 rendezvous with a Great Old Pal of Decades, a truly rare beast who I have finally managed to 'make the case' to elude a high-pressure and very public job for a few daze. J~ is a biker; I'm a hiker (if/when i have knees at my disposal) and we split the difference by renting an appropriately sporting vehicle or two and taking off into the hills along drives such as these.


US-23 has a perfect pair of 180's turns stacked almost immediately above the PCH, but to savor US-23's descent from Thousand Oaks, take it from the top. Please. In daylight, and stone-cold sober, too ~ take exceptional care for the cyclists & bikers. Trust me, its an infinitely-better first-time drive heading toward the shore.

"Life is Suffering" my Buddhist friends explain. "Life is good ... "



= 26 Oct 08

PAIUTE COUNTRY

=| Spent weekend relaxing in Vegas

... if one can imagine such a thing. Las Vegas is not a relaxing city.

Vegas is in Paiute Country, high and dry. Mark Twain said something to effect that men fought over whiskey, but went to war over water. Vegas has no water beyond what it pipes in from Lake Meade, the Colorado River water backed up behind the Hoover Dam whose construction crews were the beginning of the growth of the desert city.

And it sure has grown = far too many people in this basin. Traffic really sucks. Not only is there too much of it, traffic engineers are obviously addled meth-heads ... not to mention the place is full of California drivers who never tire of demonstrating how the IQ / Horsepower Ratio diminishes as one moves westward. Worse, Vega is awash in cell phones and Really Bad Drugs ~ people still smoke tobacco, alcohol is an essential food group, and crack, fer crissake, still stalks us. Condos & Beamers are still disappearing up people's noses, as if the rebirth of the Robber Barons weren't doing well enough already.

Coming down from Utah on I-15, a vast bowl filled with lights suddenly opens below you. I rolled thru the slot-car roadways into the city and out Tropicana away from the Strip. UNLV and its residential neighborhoods appeared, and soon there are signs of 'normal' people here. I tend to pass among professional & university folk, many involved with film in some form, and the only reasons they go to Casinos are to meet, eat, or shake a few underwriting dollars down from the offices in the neon skies.

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* French Market Buffet at Orleans is a good place for serious Chow Down, and the Pho Kim Long on Spring Mountain is the best Vietnamese Pho joint in city, hands down.
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My host is an ex-stripper turned film-maker, an AfrAm Choctaw who is sure Race will rear its ugly head and bite the Obama campaign on the ass.

Another friend is a cannabis entrepreneur, and I visit him for some Recreational.

'Russell' generally enjoyed a steady flow of very high quality bud from NoCal growers, at least until he was stuck up twice on consecutive nights at opposite ends of his orbit. He's since moved, tightened his customer list, working with new grower, and is more circumspect in avoiding meth-heads with guns. Looking to move up, we had nice chat on socio-political aspects of the Industry. He's seriously considering it as a Career and I wish to encourage him to pursue his interests within the laws of whatever state abides ~ he has the whole West Coast from which to choose, after all. Russell has a qualifying condition and would have no trouble certifying his medical status in Nevada ~ I am urging him to do so that he might engage himself within the Producer communities and forget about this extra-legal retailing operation.

Came off with some undistinguished but perfectly serviceable sativa. A tad past prime and dry, price was nevertheless nice and this was more of a social call than anything else. I'll spare you the Bud details, other than to warn against the dangers of heat, light, and ambient airflow. THC degradation rate at 'room temperature' is about 7% per month, and greater as temperature and airflow rise. Keep your buds in glass (not plastic) in the refrigerator (not freezer). It doesn't much matter with the ditchweed we see so much of in the Great Lakes, the stuff that comes in bales from abroad ~ but it does matter if you're paying for or producing Quality Bud.

Treat it right. That's your Better Budkeeping hint of the day.

Interesting Times, indeed.


21:55 10/16/2008

GO FIGURE ...

=| Cannabis is a wonderfully refreshing recreational drug ...

Imagine a freshly prepared bud of a favorite Kush, or the first of a new sativa from the California foothills. You're struck by the form of the bud itself, amazed at its colors, taken aback by the wonderfully sweet bouquet. It's a treat far superior to the best Cuban cigars

For some of us it is also the best thing one can do to augment medical treatment for a variety of afflictions, including my own issue of chronic pain.

For all of my lifetime ~ and for yours, too, unless you're a really Old Fart ~ cannabis and its users have been criminalized, demonized, and pushed to the precarious edges of Citizenship by ideologues and other fools deployed by the forces of Fear and Ignorance. Make no mistake, it is no more than that, and no better exemplified than by the cowering reluctance of Congress, state legislatures, and local governments to consider seriously & studiously just why we make war on ourselves to save ourselves from ourselves.

Much less what it costs us in wasted money, shattered lives, and squandered opportunity.

But they have had their Day. It is ending. Not quite as abruptly as Prohibition, which according to one of our Senate elders would not be repealed until someone had "strapped the Washington Monument to the tail-feathers of a hummingbird and flown to Mars," but just as surely, just as permanently, their Day is ending.

In our lives we all come to times which require us to Reformat, individually and (sometimes) collectively, to learn to Trust our own judgments, and to expand the envelope of Freedom so that we may Act accordingly. I've seen enough Changes of Season to have lived through non-violent revolutions which have restored what we consider 'natural' rights to women, to people of color, to those whose sexual nature or choices offend ...

I want to live long enough to be able to cultivate on my own property unencumbered by external coercion, to see all non-violent drug 'criminals' restored to their citizenship, and to enjoy the fruits of an unfettered social and scientific (re)examination of the world's most interesting plant.

By direct vote of the People in 1996, California unshackled our Right to be "free of Fear and Ignorance," we have since dragged ourselves into the sacred realm of Citizenship ~ Praise to the many Heroes who have rolled this rock up the hill for the benefit of all ! I live and work in California part of the year, near the coast somewhere north of Malibu and south of Big Sur.

I am certified as a medical cannabis patient; I am also a care-giver and cultivator, and politically engaged in support of a very effective public-interest group speaking on behalf of all involved in the medical cannabis industry.

Therefore, I am a Citizen.

The rest of the year I live and work in the Upper Great Lakes, in a state I dearly love but which does not, as yet, recognize cannabis as having any medical value.

Therefore, I am an Outlaw.

And I'm mad as hell about it, you better believe.

18:42 10/1/2008