About Me
I spend way too much thinking about me.
This is the blank space where that paragraph should be. New To Pot
I hadn’t smoked pot for twenty years until recently. The last time I had smoked it the night ended in a dark room with worries of someone spying on us. Whatever pot did to my twenty year old brain wasn’t good. I smoked it as a pre-teen, starting as young as 13. I smoked it on and off with my friends – because what else was there to do in Upper Ojai, where I came from. It always made me feel like I was smarter than everyone else or that I knew them all better than they knew themselves – or I knew the truth that they were running from. It was very isolating. I hated it after a while. I loved and love my brain. I love the way it thinks. I love having it cleared to think. I love nothing more than being inside my own head and have no problem being lost in for hours. But after twenty years I decided to give it a whirl again to see what it would do. Turns out, it isn’t half bad in my old age. In fact, it’s quite good. Maybe too good? While I like my brain it’s occasionally fun to have it tuned to a different station. It feels like brain yoga, being stoned. But the last time I smoked it I felt those familiar paranoid feelings returning. Every time I said something I had an out of body experience and a critical voice that scolded me – as if to say, “how dare you speak?” So I probably won’t be a pot smoker for long, I figure.
On the other hand, I did note a couple of really great benefits. One, no PMS at all. No symptoms, no pain, nothing. I also noticed that it took away my nervous anxiety. Those two things alone make it worthwhile. What I need is a mellow hybrid of some sort that keeps the brain yoga part but doesn’t keep the paranoia/critical voice part.
Anyway, thought you, two readers of my blog, should know this.
Needless to say, it should be legal. What a waste of tax dollars policing something that can be grown in the ground.
Recently…
Rolling out of bed at 12noon
Noisy beach town long since awake
Cries of children let loose on the playground for lunch,
A few moments I linger
Giving pleasure comes easily to you
I am hot and dry as the California coastline,
wrapping its arms around the swollen Pacific
holding it there,
keeping it from spilling over
Lips taste of cinnamon coffee,
as if from Florence,
dizzy with the pleasures of a morning
our fluids washing off our bodies
a shared shower.
It would be routine, maybe,
but who gets used to this?
It is a stolen glimpse
As life-changing and beautiful as a wide-winged pelican
gliding by, then diving under.
Before the end, come here.
Russell Brand and George Carlin
Russell Brand’s political discussion:
…inspired a commenter over at Gawker to post this oldie but goodie by George Carlin:
Swingers
I’m in a dream
Longing my 18 year old self only
remembers
The world outside visits
my half-dreams
but I never really sleep
next to you.
I wait for the hour when your body stirs
awake
Bodies pressed puzzle pieces
Hearts beating
swelling, yearning, arching
I see things that haven’t happened yet
I see the printed outline
of your olive shirt
hugging your torso
Envious Greeks.
Banksy Makes Fun of Everyone, Gets Rich While Doing So
If a famous artist, whose work is worth millions, showed up on a streetcorner unannounced, selling his work for $60 bucks couldn’t make more than a few sales what does that say about the commerce of art? What does that say about Banksy’s work? Does it mean it wasn’t good enough to sell or does it mean people would buy it if they thought it was authentic (valuable)? Banksy selling art like that, under a cloak of relative anonymity was in itself a work of art. He’s making fun of everyone who ever wanted to buy his pieces because they were worth a lot of money. And he’s taunting people who would like to own something of value, more importantly, to get that value for such a lost cost of $60. Sorry, palies, not this time. We all got to read about it the day after the sale ended. He certainly made his point. There is probably no chance that it could ever happen the same way again. Now that we’re onto the game you can bet those works would be snatched up within seconds now.
But it was not an act of kindness. It was a hostile act, meant to expose the worst traits in people. Or maybe it’s simply ironic. Why does it feel like such a slap in the face, though? Is it shame on us? Sure, someone could flip it and say no one cares about Banksy’s work, really, they only care about how much his work is worth. If they cared about the work wouldn’t they have bought those paintings even if they thought they were knock-offs? Wouldn’t you hang one in plain view to look at every day? Of course you wouldn’t. You want the original. Because it’s worth money.
A Frame
Bourbon Street clanged
like a Christmas tree on a train
He never blinked.
I’m going to build you an A-Frame, he said
I built an instant dream on
a stranger’s tweaker stare
wider than the sky
He’d taken enough of something
to wish away convention
I swam in it too.
Marry me tonight, he said.
I’m going to build you an A-Frame
We’ll have lots of babies
in Oklahoma
Be my wife.
His wife, for a few hours
In a cloud of meth, rum and coke, insomnia
Did he mean it?
Let’s get drunk on promises
As I laid him down on sweat-soaked asphalt
hundreds of years of delirium
A city that slouches with lust and magic
Widened eyes that didn’t close
Don’t ever leave me
Somewhere the smell of sweet fried dough
called the morning
Drink me. Cover me.
I can build you an A-Frame
Be my wife?
A cowboy’s girl
Never let me go, he said
Sparkling beads floating
on the Mississippi
until consumed by its timeless churn