March Madness

The Department of Motor Vehicles, Los Angeles. CA 2017

My understanding of what's going on in this country is shrinking, and I find myself opening up articles, reading a few sentences and then sighing in exasperation or grimacing in disgust or taking in breaths to allay anxiety or rolling my eyes heaven-ward in bewilderment.

Are we supposed to understand what's going on?

I hate to say it, but I rely almost exclusively now on acronyms to express myself in this area. WTF?

I remember this quote by the great 18th century satirist, Jonathan Swift:

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

and

I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed. 

We're all Gullivers here, methinks.

Sophie went back to school today for the first time in weeks, other than the day I brought her in for her birthday. I don't feel like going over what's been going on because, frankly, I'm so tired of the whole shebang, and I imagine you are, too. Suffice it to say that she's trending better even as we slowly wean her from the hideous benzodiazepine and supplement more aggressively with THC. I'm trending better right along with her because you know where she stops, I begin or where I stop, she begins and it's a fine, fine line. I also got acupuncture from our beloved Dr. Jin.

Yes. THC, baby. The psychoactive stuff that I myself have not partaken of since the halcyon days of college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. If I'd had any idea that I'd be administering a pale green gold oily version of it to my seizing and drug-addled daughter thirty-plus years later, I would have smoked more and studied less. Hell, I would have joined in with something more than tolerance when my boyfriend and his housemates watched the Tar Heels play basketball with the sound turned down and the bootleg Grateful Dead tapes turned up.

Anywho.

If you hear Old Racist Alabama Elf-Man Sessions or Old Up Big Pharma's Ass Georgia Cracker Price make any cracks about medical marijuana being a joke, tell them I'm going to beat the crap out of them in my mind. My tiny little mother mind™ knows few boundaries, is exasperated, disgusted, anxious and bewildered and would love a good red neck upon which to project its conflicts. Just a little March Madness.

Speaking of conflicts and the Tar Heels, did ya'll watch that game yesterday? It was a nail-biter that I watched with my sons and Sophie. March Madness for sure. This is a picture of when we had fallen behind Arizona after an early 17-point lead. I have quite effectively brainwashed my sons to be ardent Carolina basketball fans, and they were nervous wrecks.

Here's a video of the action when things got really tense at the end, right before I began to fold the boys' clean socks into balls, a task that I turned over to them when they were about five and seven years old. So many boring white socks I thought I'd go mad, wrote Virginia Woolf. I thought I was going to have a stroke or a heart attack watching the last few minutes of the game and even folded The Brother's laundry and smoked a few cigarettes in between bong hits.*

Between the not smoking too much THC in college, giving Sophie enough THC to help her brain today and parenting my boys to cheer ardently for a team that I love despite not knowing a damn thing about the sport -- well -- I'm going to humble brag here about my parenting skills. I am bewildered, to say the least.















* Just kidding. Virginia Woolf did not write that.

Gulliver's Travels

Still Life with CWHO and Frida**

"Absolutely,"  Christie said. "I will crack down and not permit it."

That was the answer Governor Chris Christie gave to a conservative Iowa radio host when asked what he'd do about marijuana if he were to become POTUS. He was referring to the "flaunting of federal law" that is going on in Washington and Colorado. He said a whole bunch of other stuff, too, most of which is not even true.

Sigh.

This whole thing is confusing on so many levels, isn't it? On the one hand, you've got conservatives bemoaning marijuana as the evil weed, a "gateway drug" that leads to debauchery, addiction and moral decline, and on the other hand, you've got conservatives crying out about the evils of government over-reach and grand conspiracies against the people. Then there are conservatives who believe that marijuana is a gift from God thrown up against scientists who believe there isn't enough research. Thrown into all of this are families desperate to try cannabis for their children or themselves as they're suffering from not just epilepsy, but autism and multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's and lupus and cerebral palsy and cancer. You've got Rand Paul supporting the cause, a guy who believes in the supremacy of the individual at any cost, but there's Chris Christie hell-bent on stomping it out. You've got Obama waffling around about the issue, and then you've got -- well -- me. 

I stand for full legalization of marijuana for both recreational and medicinal use. Yeah, and I haven't smoked or ingested the stuff in about thirty years. I went through different gates, too, than the ones referred to by that poor Chris Christie, none of which involved drug or alcohol debauchery.

I was going to tell ya'll about the history of marijuana -- how it was used for thousands of years not only as medicine for a host of diseases, but also for textiles and military uniforms and navy ships. It was one of this country's earliest crops and was used for pain, as a sedative, as an anxiety medicine, as an anti-inflammatory, as an anti-epileptic and so forth right up until the 1930s when the Powers That Be conspired to put it under. Those powers were William Randolph Hearst, Andrew Mellon and Charles DuPont. Hearst owned all the timber in the land, as well as the newspapers that needed wood pulp that needed DuPont's bleach to make newsprint and paper. Mellon was not only the head of the biggest oil company in the land but also, conveniently, the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. Down in Mexico the people were brown and dirty and Less Than, held "up," or down (according to how you see it) as examples of what could go wrong with hemp/marijuana. Hearst's newspapers thus reported the evils of this drug, how it turned people into rapists, thieves, drunken louts, dirty Mexicans. In 1937, The Marihuana Tax Act was passed which destroyed the hemp industry. In 1938, the movie Reefer Madness exploited the image of marijuana as a drug that turned youth into crazy rampaging degenerates. And in 2015 we've got big ole Chris Christie spouting off about the moral dee-cay of our youth.

Well, I did just tell you a bit about the history of one of the world's oldest cultivated crops (12,000 years old, to be exact). 

These are almost Swiftian times, are they not? Gulliver comes to mind and the most clever satire one could imagine. 

Gulliver Travels to the Land of Morons

In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress -- or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress -- a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party's 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed this morning.

Read more: Government Shutdown - The Reign Of Morons Is Here - Esquire 

Culmination Cupcakes, Vile Comments and Pablum

Chocolate and Vanilla Cupcakes with Fondant Checkers

This blog appears to be turning into a superficial baseball and baking fest with a bit of eggsex education thrown in. Where are the grim reports of disability, shitty government and seizures? Where's the poetry? Where's the politics and parenting? Over the last week, I've not only gone to four baseball games, but I've also baked and decorated nearly ten dozen cupcakes and three cakes. I've got four dozen more to go, so anything pithy or angst-driven will have to wait. I'll hope you'll hang around if you're more of the mind for the serious. If you're in to that sort of thing, I was recently baited by a vile commenter who calls himself skunkfeather on a reactionary conservative blog that I visit every week or so to see what the crazies are up to. He uses the word libtard regularly and sort of drives home or confirms my perhaps cynical belief that all the talk of needing more civil discourse and we have more in common as Americans than not is pablum at best and bullshit at worst. I didn't take the bait -- except for here, of course, because I doubt he comes around and seeing my name in his comment made me throw up a little in my mouth (an expression that I usually despise) and want to purge.

OK.

Here's a photo of a cake I made for someone for Father's Day. It's chocolate with dark chocolate ganache filling and white buttercream.

And here's a quote from one of the world's greatest satirists, Jonathan Swift:

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

And this:

I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed. 

Reader, how was your weekend?