Been there, Done that

'Twas the summer of 1974. Spokane was experiencing a much-needed make-over in the guise of a back-yard sort of "World's Fair," called in Spokane, and nowhere else, 'Expo 74,' from which the youngish and indigent locals, like myself and my friends (due to the corruption and nepotism, among local politicos and New York based service corporations, by whose agency such shindigs  as world's fairs are organized), greatly, unfairly, even somewhat nefariously, profited. Many of us worked in concessions at the fair, but those of us who made the really big bucks, worked as parking lot attendants, selling (and re-selling) tickets, at five dollars a pop, to people for parking their cars in open-ended parking lots in which it was impossible to ascertain how many, or if ever, cars were being parked. My work schedule, ideal as I still think it, was a 4-day week, with alternate 3-day and 4-day weekends--I worked it out with my boss.

It was a prosperous and a fun time, overflowing with crank (speed) and pot, which in my opinion are naturally complementary drugs. My friend Kirsten, at whose little house (sleeping on the couch) I was staying, however, alas, about six weeks into the summer, fell ill of pleurisy.  It was then, actually, my pleasure to "cure" her with copious drafts of medical-marijuana tea--approximately a lid (roughly, an ounce), boiled up, at a time.  After a week or so of which regimen, she was much improved, while I had come down with a wretched flu/cold (probably from meeting all those people in my "parking lot"). So I boiled up and ate a lid of marijuana for myself--and a couple of hours later I found myself trying to turn myself in at Deaconess Hospital Emergency. I remember a nurse asking me my name, and several other rather invasive questions--and my replying:

"I would tell you, Mademoiselle, but it would be dangerous for you to know. Would you, please, lend me your rouge-pot?  I seem to have misplaced mine."

I was scared, and I thought I might be looking pale--and I had never before, in my life, heard of a Panic Attack.

After a few minutes of my politely but sadly evading their questions, the nurses still somehow dug out of me that I had just eaten much, much too much marijuana, and I was summarily given a large injection of Thorazene (anti-psychotic, in the butt--it hurt) and sent home, where I slept for two days. I awoke feeling marvelously refreshed and completely cured of my cold.

The casual, vulgar way everyone permits himself to euphemize Death and Dying as 'Passing' is probably the worst feature of the New Language--

worse even than the loss of the imperfect subjunctive, or the utter hash that everyone makes of the transitive verb 'lay' and the intransitive verb 'lie.'

¿Epstein?

Weed strains: Marijuana marketing - spin or science?

Here to note, right at the end, the scholarly looking Chinese guy earnestly proposing to grow stacks of marijuana plants--that's one of the ways, Sirs, that Interstellar Space Travel can happen (or begin to happen): Making Surrogate Planets. Not saying that that would solve our logistics problems--but  it is an essential part of our getting back and forth across immense distances, conveniently and well within the lifetimes (or Bio-zones of the lifetimes) of the Travelers. Odd that a notion so Germinal should emerge so  early (as if it were eager to be born) in Weed History. ¿Was the demon dick nixon right about the psycho-active power and the physical significance of Weed? No wonder he feared it.

I have just discovered that the somewhat impossibly expensive Darjeeling tea that I've been drinking,

prodigally throwing away the used tea-leaves after each infusion, can be economically re-infused, with but little (if any) loss of flavor or, ahem, potency. It (the re-infusion) even still grips the tongue with tannic stypsis.

To Begin

We ought, perhaps, instead of positing the Best and Worthiest, first to establish what is of no concern to us: ugly-shit. Ca-ca. Ayn-Rand. 

Then, having established what we're not talking about....

Can we step back from the Brink of the Abyss that lies beneath our Feet?

Probably not. When you think of the number of things which might have been averted with just a modicum of circumspection--like, say, World War I--and which weren't averted, the possibilities of our not succumbing to Global Warming seem slight.

Need I even have said so? But still--Suppose that there is a Galactic Authority, a Voting Democracy which has governed everything in the Milky Way Galaxy for the past  4,000,000,0000 years, which, when its constituent assembly gets to hear of conditions on Sol III (Earth), will order the Emperor to impose Climate Cooling on us and prevent Venice's being submerged. They will if they value art and music as much as constituent assemblies sometimes do--and most times don't. That leaves the August but somewhat Hypothetical Emperor (End Run around Natural Processes), at least a possible, if implausible, Court of Appeal.

Musik, du holde Kunst

I suppose, having listened to a lot of music very attentively, that Schubert's 'Trout Quintet' is the finest long piece of music in the world--'finest' in the sense of 'should please everyone,' and, despite its repetitiveness (Pace, Schoenberg), 'should fatigue no-one.' Actually, while there's lots of music (Haydn, Bach, Mozart, Handel, Locatelli) that I like (or love) even more, there is nothing in this world, that I can think of, with more absolute, utter Charm.

Personal Beauty

is something that, to the dismay of women and other minorities, is mostly bestowed on young, white males. I well recall the evening, sometime late in my twelfth year, when, having just showered, and, reaching for the first clean clothes that lay to hand, I skinned on a pair of jeans shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt--and joined my family in the living room to watch television. As I hoisted myself into the oaken rocking chair that my mother usually sat in, I noticed that she was oddly solemn when she looked at me: "You look..," she started to say, then stopped, and started again to say, "You should wear T-shirts like that more often. You look good in them." And it dawned on me, with a faint sense of irony, that my mother was telling me I was beautiful.

Not being a girl, I thought being beautiful was something funny, but not important or especially significant, that had just happened to me. It made me delay the proper development and exercise of my body through late adolescence--but then, when in my twenties, I began to work at jobs of hard labor, I did rather bloom spectacularly. And, coincidentally, while I blossomed  physically (and not to mention the prodigious amount of reading that I was doing in French, English and American literature, and other arcana), the all-male sex-steambaths roared into dominance in the cities where I then lived, in Portland (Oregon), Seattle and San Francisco. And, as I say, I had, probably, for me, enough sex; while stepping blindly through the mine-field of AIDS (without contracting the HIV virus). The reason for which is mostly Luck, and partly Attitude.

Chrismas Came

a couple of hours ago, early on Christmas Eve as it ought to, when a kilogram of Ruby Darjeeling Tea, second flush, (all the way from Darjeeling) was deposited, after a discreet knock, on my doorstep...And now, drinking it, with the (smoked) help of our Local Pot Dealer's Christmas Flower Surprise, I am rediscovering what it means to become completely "woke," e'en without a trace of amphetamines in my bloodstream.  Though, truth to tell, old hippie that I am, I do regret those amphetamines. Nonetheless, in a half hour or so, I'll play the E Major prelude from the Second Book (aus dem wohltemperierte Klavier)--perfectly, as I have learned in this life to do--and God will be back in His Heaven. Or on His Throne. Atheist that I am, I do not distinguish between God and the Goodness of God.  I well remember, Lark of a seven-year-old that I was, caroling "the Little Lord Jesus asleep in the Hay."

Lightfoot blocks effort to delay recreational marijuana sales in Chicago

Not to be invidious, but I had to check this lady's gender on Wikipedia to make sure she was a stompin' black lady Lesbian (I think): This is it, that America symbolized by the Projects--and the spectacularly beautiful downtown; hog butcher to the world, and Jazz, and Negroes. That I, be it said, know scarcely anything of. America of instinctually corrupt--at every level--politics: Fallen now to the Conqueror Weed.  And so, strangely, where--believe me--I would never, ever, otherwise have been so, I am bound in the tight, fraternal embrace of similar-minded mutual recognition of fellow flower-addicts: "Brother-Ganja-Eaters," as foretold by the Great Avatar Ramakrishna Himself. Damn.  I did so want to be a white supremacist.

I almost forgot--There was an agenda.

~272~ Entire Afghanistan War A Fraud, Rich People Scrubbing History

Ah. This has not been news (in the sense of something we didn't already know--War has a long history of being a fraud in Afghanistan) for a couple of decades now. But ¿are they rich people, who scrub history--or ¿people who maybe, as part of their richness, are paid to scrub it? By someone? Or some thing/s?

Stormy Daniels' Attorney Slams Rudy Giuliani's 'Piggish' Comments About ...

Edifying? Well, informative. ¿Whom does an utter scuzz esteem more? When the said scuzz is handling blackmail payments to acknowledged sluts? If you said "Businesswomen," you must have heard this  dialog somewhere else before. But then ¿what do bottom-of-the-pile Porn Stars most resent? Imputations that they are not respectable businesswomen. This would be funny, if it were not real.

Is English Really a Germanic Language?

It still likes the sound of itself, the original alliterative, modally ablauted, plunk of word against word, a constant aural/three-dimensional reference of object and representation.

Inside a recreational pot factory in Canada

What's important here is our young interlocutor's use of the word "guy" to mean "hitherto unknown object."

¿Ganesh?

C'mon. I grant you his wuvvableness--I like elephants--but in the order of gods he is Santa Claus. Easter Bunny. Tooth Fairy. I don't have to take him seriously and I won't. Besides, he stinks of what is, in my nostrils, the rankest of the Hindu People's character flaws: their crass material vulgarity. Or vulgar materiality. It stinks. Like peasant shit.

BBC - Mary Beard's Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit - Episode 1

Ye Gods, how wonderful this is! Mrs. Beard is Clio, Muse of History, and she sings spellbindingly, with deep feeling and understanding, our favorite song: the Grandeur that was Rome. I just now realized that "grandeur" is the same in French and English, but pronounced differently--and when I see "grandeur" written without quote marks (even, any more, with quote marks), what I hear is French (and I get flashes on my inner mental screen of  the east façade of the Louvre).

¿Agnostic or Atheist?

It depends on whether I'm talking to a devotee of Krishna or Kali. I think, mostimes, that I wouldn't mind if Krishna were in some sense real; but I'd rather die, always, ever than admit that the bloody nightmare of the Goddess of Death and Destruction were anything but a morbid (ugly and stupid) fiction. And pretty much ditto for the promordial god Shiva, whose cult and whose doctrine is plain bullshit. Or, more kindly, cowshit--which is considered edible, I think, in India.

Mais moi, je donne ma voix aux Trois Langues Secondaires et Meilleures:

Mexican Spanish, Québecois French, and American English, as representing three transplanted languages which were improved, slightly archaïcized, and to some extent more efficiently organized than their parent languages. I don't know if the same may be said of Brazilian over Iberian Portuguese, but I'll damn well bet it is so.

How often have we heard snotty, street-smart Parisians say of Québecois French, with a tone of infinite condescension (and contempt) for its being out of fashion, "C'est le langage de nos arrière-grandpères"? ¡Sapristie, que ça m'agace!

The Curse Of Personally Knowing Donald Trump - SOME MORE NEWS

"...Snuffed harder than a hamster in a kindergarten." That's very funny.

Oregon Cannabis Growers

Expertise verging on Art Sublime. Amazing Candor and Prodigious Knowledgeability. But look at his eyes--wise old eyes--with their rather frightening (in one so young), dead-level objective, penetrating gaze.  A New Era has dawned: One that doesn't understand past participles, or subjunctive modes--and which has already forgotten that pot-prohibition used to be the most essential (inner, key) part of Established (Violent) Power. There's no secret keeps so well as the one you're not aware of.

There ought to be a Department of Things that People Can't Help

Like: Alcoholism. Deafness. Blindness. Sexual Orientation. Think: of the number of people who are  and always have been alcoholics--my guesstimate of their numbers is maybe ten per cent of all Northern Europeans, ever; of their having existed/subsisted so long without their knowing, quite, that they were alcoholics, and without society in general's quite realizing what alcoholics were, although, historically, it made accommodation for them (the after-dinner drunkenness of which Queen Victoria, say, for example, famously disliked).

I give thanks daily that I am not an alcoholic, knowing that, if I were an alcoholic, there would have been nothing I could have done to prevent my being one.

Disbelief, not Doubt,

is, in my opinion, the healthiest and sanest attitude to adopt towards most of the Received Unwisdom floating in the world's thinktank. Do not for one brief second entertain the notion that there might be something to Naturopathy, or Viennese Depth Psychology, or Postmodernism. Have a little smile that you reserve for Christians and Feminists. And don't allow yourself to be insulted: If ever you are told that you sin, or that you cannot, deliberately, be color-blind, hit the fucking ceiling. Demand that the insult be taken back--or smack 'em.

My Religion

Is the Rules and Principles that I consciously, from day to day, live by. The fact is, there are such Rules and Principles, peculiar to myself that I know of, that I do, in fact, live by--and I know, methinks, in some ways, suspiciously little about them (and you'd think I'd be going around all the time examining them--perhaps I do). All right then:

Article the First: Never, ever, in anything, be deficient in Compassion. Respect tears. That goes for every creature you encounter, including spiders and octopuses, which is capable of understanding and relying on your intention not to harm it insofar as you are aware of it. Article First and a half: Be faithful to the bonds of affection.

Article 2: Keep clean. Take your meds. Eat right. Exercise. Sweep the floor. Dust.

Article 3: Be aware that, if you are normally constituted, you have, willy-nilly, a conscience. And it will kick you, your whole life through, for your moral and ethical trespasses. There is no forgiving yourself. So try not to trespass.

Apparently, Pete Buttigieg (or the Candidacy for President thereof) has been given to us to help us decide:

1. How, if ever, the military budget might be halved (and halved again).

2. When, if ever, we shall have universal health care.

3. How, if ever, we shall provide free education, from Kindergarten through post-graduate college, for all citizens (and qualified foreigners).

4. Whether we might not have a universal state-guaranteed income.

You know, the Progressive Agenda.

And Here's The Thing--

If your two-year-old does find your next year's stash of THC-infused Gummy Bears--and eats half--It not only won't kill him, it won't hurt him. at all. And he'll be all right tomorrow. Or the next day. And--trust me--his I.Q. will not be diminished by his ingestion, this once, of too much THC. I promise.

Having a glass of Washington State, Château Ste. Michelle Cabernet Sauvignon ($18.00 a bottle):

Very nice, smooth, refined, fragrant. Much subtler than a California cabernet. Pairs perfectly with both red meat and cheese. I'm impressed.

First sales of Michigan recreational marijuana

Of all places! Happy, nice-looking Michiganites. Something very evidently has come unglued. I doubt that the shape-shifting carnivorous lizards, who apparently rule us and conduct our genocidal foreign policy, could have foreseen or provided against the, apparently insuperable, popular revulsion against, and throwing off of, cannabis prohibition (which has been for many decades, after all--as revealed to us by Mike Ruppert--the Cash Cow of the Security Agencies of the Deep State) of the last twenty or thirty years. I confess, it makes me a little uneasy: the DEA,  band of thugs and pirates that we know them to be, may not yet, I fear, prove to be so easily bypassed and got around.

But no, what I mean is: I look at this guy's handsome, honest, character-full face--see his happiness and satisfaction--and I am filled with unappeasable sorrow and rage against the Lizards that Are that this Honorable Wight should fucking ever have been deprived of Weed, much less punished for possessing it.  ¡Never again!

Lisa Page Breaks Silence On Trump's DISGUSTING Behavior

Jesus fucking Christ. Watch our president pretend to be two FBI agents fucking one another. One of them having an orgasm.

I am not making this up.

Ask A Brit | Vol. 2

I like this bloke. He's chosen just the right American words (lollapaloosa, conniption, copacetic) to represent our present best; though he seems somewhat deficient in his understanding of the history of American English: I think he is not aware that Roger Williams was a graduate of Cambridge University, chief clerk to Sir Edward Coke, bosom buddy to John Milton (with whom he exchanged language lessons [Dutch for Hebrew]), and a much sought-after man-about-town in the London of the late 1680's--who may, just, have had as profound an influence on the American English Language (in which he wrote--and spoke--a great deal) as he did on the American Conception of Civil Liberty and Religious Tolerance. Nor does he quite appreciate what brilliant prose stylists were springing up in Massachusetts contemporaneously with Congreve and Dryden in the Mather family. I fear that he, though he be a Doctor of English Letters, may be infected with the modernist fallacy, that spoken language is the only real language. Which point de vue is, when you think about it, as applied to Puritans and Pilgrims, who were, above all, in their own estimation, People of the (printed) Word (specifically in the form of King James' Holy Bible)--let's just say--peculiarly and particularly  inapposite.

Once I sat next to very pretty and chic young (thirty something) Japanese woman on a bus.

She was quite properly ignoring me, reading a book printed in tategami. I couldn't help myself--Despite her somewhat forbidding composure and propriety, I said to her, "Excuse me. You're reading that backwards." It took her a minute, but she started laughing and couldn't stop. "Thank you," she said through her giggles, "I tried reading it the other way, and couldn't make any sense of it."