"A Unicorn and An Echo"

Incantation

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.

Berkeley, 1968

Czelsaw Milosz











#thankyouPresidentObama
#resist

Threads

Mirtha cutting Sophie's hair this weekend

I woke this morning at 5:15, anticipating the drive to Henry's school where he "conditions" three times a week for baseball tryouts in January. I lay on my back in the cold darkness, enumerating worries. Anxious about money. Anxious about Sophie and our ability to pay for, even continue to get, the medical marijuana that is, after nineteen years, the first treatment to help her. I glanced at my phone, at a thread on the pediatric cannabis therapy group on Facebook, a thread hijacked by a woman who insists on conspiracy. Something about seeds and growing it yourself and letting the seeds out. More about mold and pesticides, rumors that it will be another year before Charlotte's Web is spun in California. I felt the thread of worry. These people are all nuts, I thought, even as I get it. Get the nuts, that is. I've climbed into bed with people who believe that 9/11 is a conspiracy, who post about Obamacare in apocalyptic terms, who don't bat an eye at yellow journalism. But I get it. People thrown together, tied by threads, spinning. We do what we have to for our children. Who am I to judge? I will only accept another drug if Jesus himself offers it to me. I lie down, fully clothed, next to men who call Obama The Anointed One -- as an epithet. Mary Magdalene would do no less.

I forgot, though, of gratitude, that groping impulse toward it.

Gratitude is so close to the bone of life, pure and true,
that it instantly stops the rational mind, and all its planning
and plotting.  -- Regina Sara Ryan

Medical Marijuana Update: IN TAH RESTING

With cannabis, it’s probably best to expect the unexpected. That said, legalization should be an important priority given the pernicious side effects—or main effects—of marijuana prohibition. Marijuana prohibition is a venal and dishonest policy that has fostered crime, social discord, racial injustice, police corruption, and drug abuse itself, while shredding the Constitution and impeding medical advances. The science strongly suggests that ending cannabis prohibition would be a net positive in terms of public health.

Martin Lee, from AlterNet's "The Potential Miracle Element in Cannabis that Changed Sonjay Gupta's Mind About the Power of Pot"

You can read the rest of the interview here. 

I have nothing new to report on our own medical marijuana front as we are patiently waiting for the stuff to materialize here in California. Why we're in this position is  (perhaps arguably) very much the result of drug policy in this country, beginning with the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in the 1930s, exacerbated by the Nixon administration in the 1960s and 1970s, further escalated and metastasized by the Reagan administration and currently perpetuated by the Obama administration. Kevin Sabet, Obama's former drug policy advisor, is a diehard marijuana prohibitionist, and according to Lee, Sabet maintains that anyone who might benefit from CBD must wait until Big Pharma figures out how to monetize marijuana’s components.

Whether Lee's statements are incendiary or not, we have to wait. In the meantime, Sophie's seizures have ratcheted up so much that I suppose I'll have to shake myself out of the dissociative lethargy and hopelessness that I currently feel and call The Neurologist.

My only nod to politics, this late in the game, or why I'm voting for "the retard."

Last night, Ann Coulter, one of the Republicans' top spokespeople tweeted the following:

I highly approve of Romney's decision to be kind and gentle to the retard.

Yeah, plenty of people who support Obama use the word retard, and I'd call each of them on it, if I heard it, but if someone's measuring the despicable shit that's been flung around on this election cycle, I feel certain the Republicans' vile combination of jingoism, family values, outright racism and condemnation of entire groups of people certainly tips the scale.

I don't want to live in an America that is populated by a majority of people who have voted for Romney, because I think their viewpoints on most social issues are repellent and not worthy of respect or tolerance.

I'm voting for Obama, or as the witty, patriotic, conservative Republican Ann Coulter said, the retard.

Enough said.