I AM ISBISTER !

== Yes, I have some animus issues.

You got a problem with that?
~
Everyone has seen "Spartacus" I assume. Oh, really ... well, here's the Cliff Notes version in 6:53.

Back already? Good. I have this recurring dream that's a beautiful riff on it that I want to share.

We have won the Revolution. As prophesied by Gil Scott-Heron, the sucker was NOT televised and there will be no highlights at eleven. The Capitol dome is awash in a psychedelic light show and we're rounding the bastards up and herding them down to the Interstate. They're all yowling and terrified and, of course, we're all passing huge spliffs. People are dancing in the streets and wearing Volcanoes on strapped to their heads, and we're all singing chorus after chorus of 'O Freedom' at the top of our lungs. Sounds pretty damn good from people who aren't supposed to have lungs anymore, bouncing down the windswept corridors of semi-beautiful downtown Lansing.

Here and there an assistant principal or a night shift manager is briefly glimpsed running down an alley, eyes wide and mouth agape as a sea of torches swarms after them ... for years they feared that the PTA would light up and descend at the first sign of acquiesence to those drug-crazed hippie perverts ... but in the end it is the Stoners dipping their torches in the hemp oil buckets and going forth to seek Justice.

We've get 'em all, too. Thirty years worth of Cowards and Bigots and Tyrants, the Uncaring and the Hypocrites, the Self-Serving, the Selfish, and the Fools. They're all here. These are the so-called 'public servants' who turned their backs on us, mocked and marginalized us, had us arrested and jailed, sentenced us to lives of pain and struggle and suffering. How many of us have they hunted and jailed? How many have they killed? What kind of god spawned this vermin ...

Isbister is a Quisling, the Iago of the medical cannabis movement in Michigan. A Public Health Department official, he collaborated with NIDA in the 1980 program and attempted to sabotage it by providing substandard federal cannabis that NIDA knew to be "unfit for therapeutic use" to our cancer patients. He was willing to jeopardize their health, their lives, their pain to his false gods, the Administriviators of NIDA who had themselves been chastised from our bordwers and were afraid to return. They simply turned their Quisling ...

In real life, I'm told the bastard dropped dead of a massive heart attack during the life of the program, back in the 1980's. A poolside heart attack, cigar in one hand and a scotch in the other, fitting end for a thoracic surgeon. Probably apocryphal, but too good to pass up telling the story. At least one minister familiar with Isbister and friendly to us interpreted it as Divine Intervention. Who am I to argue with Christians?

But in my dream, we are hunting for him, passing the word that he is to be brought forward. He apparently thinks he's getting the Lasker Prize and staggers to his feet, cigar in one hand, careful not to spill his drunk. "I am Isbister!" he warbles, waving the cigar overhead.

One of his DPH Toadies realizes his Supervisor isn't getting any prize, and hoping for a really strong Performance Review, stumbles to his feet.

"I am Isbister!"

We've always known these jerks to be delusional, and now they prove it. "I am Isbister!" comes a voice from down near the underpass. "I am Isbister" is the cry from the median. The chorus swells. "I am Isbister ... I am Isbister ... "

And we take them all and impale them on the sixteenth poles and snow fences lining Interstate 96 all the way to Detroit, along the same route along which Chuck and Betty Kile pushed their son Curtis in a wheelchair to Lansing during the summer of '79. All the way down to Hart Plaza we impale the pissants, a hundred miles of them on poles with their lives running down their legs ...

I passed this dream on to a young woman coming back to Michigan after college, already an accomplished Grower. She told me she'd be pretty pissed too if she was in the struggle ten times as long as she has.

I sure hope that never happens.


= 10 Jan 09