This ribbed child’s toy, intended for straddling, is located at Miller Playfield.
Now, I’m not saying kids shouldn’t ever, well, do what most kids do. But they ought to learn not to do it in the middle of the park. This could rub some people the wrong way, as it were. I guess that’s all I’m saying.
So I’m sitting down in front of my computer last week, editing a post for Slog, when my phone rings. It’s one of those automated voices asking me to confirm my name—is this a telemarketer, my phone company, the aliens?—but I comply and spit out my name. “Please state your address at the sound of the beep.” This is getting invasive but, what the hey, my address is no big secret. “No address by that listing can be found; please wait while we connect you with an operator.”
“Hello, this is Donnell, how can I help you?”
“I don’t know. You called me. How can you help me?”
“I’m very sorry, sir, I’m calling on behalf of Prevail Credit Union. We have some unusual activity on you account.”
“I went to Oregon last weekend.”
“Yes, sir, what is this charge on your account last night for $4.95?”
So, of course, for the first time in my life, I had spent five bucks to watch a movie on X-Tube—the most wonderful thing on all the Web—the previous night. Never spent a penny on porn before, despite all the pop-up ads, the blinking GIFs, the automatic reroutes to pay-as-you-blow sites, not once had I put a charge on my card for porn. But the one time I do, I’ve got Donnell on my ass about it. Of course.
“That was gay porn. I was downloading gay porn and watching it, Donnell. I’d never done it before, but, since you called me to ask, that’s what the charge is all about. Gay porn.”
A very uncomfortable silence.
“I like gay porn.”
“That’s all right, sir. And these charges at the Shell station?”
“I was buying gas on the trip to Oregon.”
“Have a good day.”
Seriously, did Donnell really have to ask me what the charges were for? He could have just asked me if I charged $4.95 to my account the previous night and if I’d been using my card in Oregon, right? Of course he could have. I think Prevail wanted to talk about gay porn.
My housemates and I have a symbiotic relationship—I like to cook and they like to eat. When I threw something together yesterday, they swooned and begged and passed the plate and said I should turn my culinary forays into blog posts, so here’s the first in a series:
Tamarind and Cumin Salmon
This is a fillet of coho, rubbed with tamarind concentrate, cumin powder, brown sugar, mustard, kosher salt and a dousing of spicy Tapatio; then it was tossed into a pan (with a few shredded onions) of smoking-hot veggie oil and olive oil. I lowered the temp for a minute then flipped it while the sugary rub crusted brown. It’s served over brown rice, a mix of garlic, oregano, green peas and black beans, finished with the seared onions and shredded Monterey jack cheese. The red stuff is salsa and the white stuff is a drizzle of crema Mexicana to cool it down. The salmon was tart and sweet from the tamarind, with a bitter bite of the carbon from the onion and cumin to give it some muscle.
Don’t look like you’re from the suburbs or from five-to-ten years ago.
The last two things my brother Michael and I did before arriving at the hot springs—populated by new-age folks on personal retreats—was stop at McDonald’s and WalMart.
I had to buy pajamas bottoms. The only kind for sale at WalMart in Woodburn, Oregon were pajamas with logos on them. There were Coca-Cola logos and Pepsi logos and a few others. But I was leaning toward the least offensive: AC/DC pajamas. I’d put them in the basket before another caught my eye. Miller Lite. In addition to the logo, they bore this message:
I did yoga in them. I went to the dining hall for brown rice in them. I stripped naked at the hot springs out of them. And the do-right hippies were mostly silent. Except a few older women, who stopped me on the path by the cabins to tell me that they liked my nice pants.
“They’re my sexist, anorexic, drunken, corporate, made-in-China pajamas,” I told them. “I got them at WalMart.” They smiled placidly and headed off to the lithium sauna, which looked like this.
I headed for the massage yurt, where I was consulted by Angela from Portland. I told her I’m not one of those super woo-woo folks, but I’m in my element at the hippie hot-springs place and was up for whatever. Hot stones? Absolutely. Essential oils? You bet. Not big woo—little woo, little irony.
One of the problems with stoners is that they spend all their time smoking pot and talking about what they’d be doing if they weren’t sitting around smoking pot… Politically like-minded progressives are no better—that is, folks who aren’t interested in getting high but think the drug war is a tragic farce. Those folks are often so resigned to the big federal drug war that they throw up their hands and focus on “real priorities.” Well, you’d have to have your head shoved so far up your pooper to think drug policy reform is a low political priority that you can’t see we’re being robbed blind of wallet and liberties. But browbeating well-wishers helps nothing, either. My apologies.
What’s an idealistic stoner or practical liberal to do?
This awesome graphic, via NORML, offers a suggestion: support the pie-in-the-sky marijuana decriminalization bill introduced in to Congress by Rep. Barney Frank last week. Whatever. A federal bill to decriminalize pot is nothing more than waving the flag to announce our presence. But that bill would never pass without localized pressure. What would actually nudge America toward better drug laws?
Several things. And they fall into two basic categorizes: The shit you can do and the shit you can’t. The shit you can’t do is litigate cases that will establish better law, draft legislation and lobby, run initiatives, conduct studies on the impact of bad drug laws and the benefits of reform, and make major media buys. The other, which you can do, is essential to the success of all that other stuff.
You need to normalize pot.
Here’s why: In repeated state initiative and opinion surveys, polls show that support for marijuana-law reform caps out at about 45 percent. That remaining 6 percent necessary to change the law—or support their lawmakers—holds back because they are afraid of pot. It’s unfamiliar and scary. So, back up. Who is that 45 percent? Most of them have smoked pot or have known a pot smoker. They’re not afraid of pot because it’s familiar. But looking at the raw numbers, about 100 million Americans have smoked marijuana, according to federal surveys, so nearly every American knows a pot smoker. They just don’t know they know any pot smokers. What’s your job? Fuck calling your representative. More importantly you have to let people know, in the most polite and upstanding way possible, that you smoke pot. And you have a job. You pay taxes. You have a family. You aren’t part of the cultist stoner-culture subset depicted in movies and High Times Magazine. There simply aren’t 100 million of those people in America. Pot smokers are everywhere and they’re ordinary people; the drug isn’t inherently scary and the users don’t deserve to go to jail. If you don’t smoke pot, but you used to—admit it. If you don’t smoke pot and never have and never will—then say you know pot smokers and you think it should be legal. Familiarity creates support at the polls–so we can decriminalize marijuana in your state. For real, dude.
So put down the bong and shoot straight with people about getting high. Or are you ashamed, faggot?
I’m away from my computer and off the grid for a few days in the mountains of Central Oregon. It’s not a ski trip—seeing as how it’s mid-sping—but it could be. Here’s the forecast.
Wish you were here.
So far as I know, there are three of us. There’s a Dominic Holden in the UK who takes pictures, and there’s another in Australia (we exchanged email once). I’m in Seattle. According to an article in the New York Times, we have some sort of bond from sharing the same name. But I’m sure you guys hate me. If you Google “Dominic Holden,” you get pages upon pages of drug fanaticism. Sorry.
Here’s a picture of me wearing a “Monkey Muffin” T-shirt, in case you wanted to know what the asshole who used your name looks like.
I walk past this apartment/condo every week. It comprises two buildings, separated by a sprawling parking lot, and surrounded by a menacing fence. As if it the social phobia wasn’t clear enough, they added this sign…
Gated communities should be banned. They promote isolation in the middle of a city–but the whole point of a city is that you interact, converse, socialize. If you want to live alone, go live in the hills.
As part of the 2008 drug-control strategy, Bush allocated about $500 million to interdiction efforts in Mexico. It’s called Plan Mexico—based off Plan Colombia, which, as we know, hasn’t stopped the drug trade. At all. But it sounds like we’re cracking down on drugs.
In between the multi-billion dollar drug cartels of South America and the noses of Americans with a taste for cocaine are the beat officers in Mexico. And they’re not faring so well.
The poster is the government’s answer to a different sort of sign left in late January at the bottom of a monument honoring fallen police officers: a hand-scrawled list of 22 officers, 5 of whom had already been gunned down in the street. The sign warned that the others would also be killed “unless they learn.” In all, eight police officers have been assassinated here this year and three are missing….
A turf war among drug cartels has claimed more than 210 lives in the first three months of this year. Many of those killed were young gunmen from out of town. The number of homicides this year is more than twice the total number of homicides for the same period last year. Several mass graves hiding 36 bodies in all have been discovered in the backyards of two houses owned by drug dealers.
Realistically, what match is a municipal cop—or even a dozen of them—to the violent drug cartels thriving on the black market. The drug runners are desperate and the king pins are rich. Their survival and continued wealth hinges on getting cocaine to market. As Jodie in the coffee shop told me when I showed her the article, “How many AK-47s do [the cops] have?”
It would be easy to blame the coke-snorting hipsters in the US for the bloodshed they are funding. But I don’t. Altered consciousness has always been a human pursuit, and it always will be. The failure and blame is among doctors and economists, who see this problem at face value and fail to demand the solution of a regulatory system that would save these poor Mexican cops from being set up, just to get knocked down.
This is the most shameful moment since the campaigns began for the Democratic presidential nomination.
I support good-natured campaigning and jockeying for the lead spot. But this sort of fracturing is exactly what makes Rove smile. This ad stoops below the roller-derby elbowing of intra-party politics. Here, Clinton goes so far as to roll in political shit, smear it all over Obama, and send a dump truck of extra manure over to the elephants to fling back at them later. Like a knee-capper to take out the better skater in the Olympics, Clinton shows she is more committed to staying in the race and losing due to her own sullied reputation than to either Democrat actually winning the White House.
It is akin to a political murder/suicide. And as David Schmader says…
Please, never forget the Silver Rule: If you’re planning a murder/suicide, do the suicide part first.
Via Slog.
UPDATE: After I ranted about this to my friend Nicole, she replied, “thank the blogsphere for bringing out the worst in this campaign.” Uh, I guess I am part of the problem. Let he who has not sinned… Damn, I already threw my rocks.
Good thing the officers intervened before this man’s drug use caused him problems.
A Chatham County deputy shot a man Sunday night while trying to search a Siler City house for drugs, authorities said.
The man, whose name hasn’t been released, was shot several times, authorities said. He was in serious condition Monday at UNC Hospitals in Chapel Hill.
The Chatham County Sheriff’s Office Special Incident Response Team and the Narcotics Unit were attempting to search a mobile home at 75 Irene Court for drugs when they encountered a man armed with a handgun inside, authorities said.
Several shots were fired, but it was unclear Monday whether the man had fired upon the deputies during the incident.
No one else was injured during the incident.
A subsequent search of the mobile home turned up several pounds of narcotics, authorities said.
What a goddamned shock—police raided a trailer home in South Carolina and the man inside had a gun.
Here’s the math on that: Police can barge into a house, plus a resident is likely to pull a gun on the intruder (who doesn’t know the intruders are cops). When cops see the gun, they can shoot to kill. This means a warrant for a drug raid can equal a death sentence. Innocent until proven dead.
Why don’t these articles ever raise the question: Was this really the best way to make an arrest?
Check out this book display at Starbucks.
This was the only book for sale at the store. And what’s the book about? The tragic effects of meth addiction on a man’s son. Meth, as we know, is an addictive stimulant that makes people change their habits and spend all their money… and if there’s one thing Starbucks wants its customers to understand, it’s that Starbucks firmly believes, as confirmed by eye-catching displays that include emotion-packed words like “heartbreak” that they most certainly, no-way, no-how approve of stimulant addiction.
But wait one bean-pickin’ minute, Starbucks. Your business is all about selling addictive stimulants. Listening to the fervor in your store from customers who say they “need to get my Starbucks” and then pay five dollars for a cup of coffee removes any plausible deniability that you’re blind to the addictions you’re fostering. And you’re and capitalizing on them.
That said, there’s nothing inherently wrong with selling coffee to consenting adults. And I acknowledge that coffee is less harmful than meth, though I know more people addicted to coffee than meth. (Amphetamines, since we’re talking about prevalent stimulants, are prescribed to millions of adults. People who wish to distinguish those harmful pharmaceuticals from harmful street meth on some moral high ground are deluding themselves.) But regardless of whether it’s a powerful or moderate stimulant, adults deserve honest, accurate information about what they’re taking.
Starbucks provides no information about the harms of drinking a quadruple grande breve with one thousand calories and enough caffeine to jolt a elk. But they should. And Starbucks’ attempt to downplay the addictive properties of their own product by juxtapositioning it next to the dramatized depiction of another, more harmful drug is dishonest. But it’s a beautiful ploy.
I’m trying a new setting for comments. Initially, the restrictions were so loose that the threads looked like a Cialis billboard. That was hard to live with. So, I guess at some point I clicked a box requiring folks to log in to Wordpress; then you started emailing me to say you couldn’t log in to comment. That was also fucked. So now we’re trying an intermediary setting, which requires an email address but doesn’t allow cock-pill hyperlinks.
Will this can the spam and permit the ham?