Where've You Been? and My Marijuana.com Link-A-Rama

Berkeley, CA

I flew up to the San Francisco area for the weekend and spent some wonderful time with one of my oldest and best friends, Jody. We sat in her kitchen for hours talking and laughing so hard that I now feel positively purged of any bitterness, fatigue, confusion, despair, encroaching old age, neuroticism,  dedicated overthinking, anxiety, sadness and melancholy. What we talked about is entirely private, but Reader: Laughter.

On Sunday night we met Sally and Lisa in Berkeley, ate a delightful dinner (my favorite mussels and fries, along with a cocktail made with bourbon and lemon and jalapeno) and then went to Zellerbach Hall to hear Billy Collins and Aimee Mann do a really interesting and unique performance of music and poetry. It was the first time that I'd ever been to Berkeley and quite thrilling. I've long held fantasies of going to school there and am a bit gobsmacked by its hippie history. I didn't really get a chance to see much of it, but I loved the name of that bookstore and my favorite site was a man sitting on the street, cross-legged with a MacBook on his lap that was plugged into the building behind him. His belongings appeared to be scattered around him, including clothes and toiletries and foil-covered food containers. I have no idea whether he was a student, homeless or just a Berkeley hippie of the twenty-first century.

What else?

The Virgin terminal at the San Francisco airport is exactly what I imagined the future to look like when I was a child. Really. Exactly.




This is my last week at Marijuana.com, so I'm tying things up and will have a new interview posted at some point. Below you'll see a list of the articles, features and interviews that I did while at Marijuana.com -- such a great opportunity while it lasted, and a somewhat devastating and certainly unexpected end. I don't feel free to discuss those details, but it's Big Business, ya'll. Marijuana is officially Big Business, and you know how many of us who frequent a moon, worn as if it had been a shell feel about that:

Better go down upon your marrow-bones   

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones   

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;   

For to articulate sweet sounds together 

Is to work harder than all these, and yet   

Be thought an idler by the noisy set 

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen   

The martyrs call the world.’ 

That's a bit of Adam's Curse by William Butler Yeats, the great Irish poet. It's one of my favorite poems and the reason for the blog's rather cumbersome title. Check it out here if you need diversion, but please come back and read the next line.





I am now officially LOOKING FOR A NEW JOB.

Did you hear that?

I am now officially LOOKING FOR A NEW JOB.

Are you Ten Thousands Minds On Fire? If you send me a lead, I will be of service to you in some significant way.


Cannabis Medicine and Autism: An Interview with Ana Maria Abba
How to Talk to Your Teenager About Marijuana: An Interview with Dr. Bonni Goldstein
Vaccination Injury, Seizures and Cannabis Medicine: An Interview with Georgia Smithson
The Literal Beating Heart
Keeping Monkey Neurons on Their Toes: An Interview with Allison Jackson
Purple Day
The Wisdom in the Room: A Cannabis Community for Women
Cannabis as Totem and Connector: An Interview with Allison Ray Benavides
A Passionate Mother's Reluctant Path to Lobbying
The Beginning - March 8, 1995
Making THCa At Home: An Interview with a Mother

Last night, Sophie, Oliver and I had the great good fortune to spend the eighth day of Hanukkah with some new friends. Henry was playing lacrosse in Santa Monica and The Husband was working, but the three of us were feted with delicious food, including the best latkes I've ever had, an interesting discussion of the Hanukkah story, and much laughing over the shouts and loud voices of three boys. Sophie had a pretty huge seizure at some point in the evening, but our friends had the perfect couch for having a seizure, and their response was calm and caring and a witnessing, which is all our family asks for and which is so often difficult to do. Thank you, dear Jenny and Mark and your adorable boys!

Today is another gray and rainy one in Los Angeles, and it's with a heavy heart that I continue our Christmas traditions of baking and the more mundane Sunday ones of laundry and straightening up. I want to walk down the middle of the street with other mothers and perhaps tear at our hair and wail. I want to scream, loudly, about the terrible storm of mental illness, obscene amounts of guns and ammunition and those who profit from them, the seeming indifference of many to the justified measures for eighteenth century fears that have no place in a twenty-first century world, and a culture so steeped in violence that it justifies the most vile of entertainment as art. Two weeks ago, I argued with someone over the United States Senate not joining the rest of the world in ending discrimination against and ensuring equality for all disabled people. I told her that I was ashamed of our country, and she told me that this was unfortunate as we lived in the greatest country on earth and the freest, and I could only think in the loneliest sort of ways how little I agreed and how I felt more connected to the world in general than to this fellow citizen. This is a time where pride in country has no place and where humility and reckoning and love of humanity supercedes all. But I wonder at the ties that bind us, how differences are becoming more and more stark.

I want to walk down the middle of the street with other mothers and perhaps tear at our hair and wail.

Instead, I'll sigh. I'll wring my hands, tighten my lips and toast coconut. I'll wipe Sophie's drool and wonder whether her weight gain is causing the step-up in seizures and whether I might need to adjust her medication. I'll be grateful again that The Friend Who Loves Jane Austen made it safely to Los Angeles with Sophie's medication in hand. I'll admonish Henry and Oliver to clean up their room and separate their darks from their whites. I'll sit at the dining room table and help Oliver to trace out the rooms in his house, 1 cm = 1 inch, while Aimee Mann sings of snow and Christmas, the twang of guitar merry and bright.