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

Rejuvenation

Yesterday I read the most amazing article in the London Review of Books (a somewhat ponderous publication that I get and dutifully flip through) titled A Lazarus Beside Me by a fly-waisted woman (seen above) named Avies Platt. The piece was dated November, 1946 but chronicled events from 1937 and was only discovered recently in a carrier bag full of "diary entries and other bits and bobs." The article was fantastic -- and immensely pleasing to me -- because it's about an encounter between this Avies Platt woman and the great Irish poet, W.B. Yeats.  First of all, did you know that in the early part of the twentieth century, an Austrian physiologist developed an operation for what was known as "rejuvenation?" Meant for aging men, the operation (which was basically a vasectomy) purported to give men a "second puberty," making them virile again. Sigmund Freud had the operation (good Lord), as did Yeats. What is there to say about this and why did I not know about it, even as I read nearly every single poem that Yeats wrote and particularly love some of those crazy ones he wrote in his latter years? I'd throw up my hands and say Men!, but you know I would have been all over Yeats if he'd so much as crooked his finger at me.

A Drinking Song

Wine comes in at the mouth

And love comes in at the eye;

That’s all we shall know for truth

Before we grow old and die.

I lift the glass to my mouth,

I look at you, and I sigh.

W. B. Yeats

Happy 20th Birthday, Sophie!

My heart is full. Twenty years ago, you made me a mother. The years have flown by with bewildering speed, and they've inched forward, too, agonizing for both of us. Always, though, you, with grace. How blessed am I. How blessed are thee. A mermaid swimming out of me and away, a flicker of tail, swish.



The Cloths of Heaven

HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. 

William Butler Yeats

O love is the crooked thing

from Madonna of the Pomegranate by
Sandro Botticelli

I don't ever pick up pennies anymore, when I see them in the street. They're sad bits of forgotten copper carrying none of the possibility they once had when I was a little girl. This morning, while I hung up clothes in my closet, I felt something cold on my toe, felt a shiver of revulsion thinking it was a bug, a bit of something or other, but when I looked down, I saw a penny, a drab penny, and still not convinced, I touched it with my toe and felt, again, its cool. All of this happens all at once, the cold, the frisson, the cold again, the reaching for it and luck to follow.


I WHISPERED, 'I am too young,'
And then, 'I am old enough';
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
'Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair.'
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.
O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon. 

William Butler Yeats


A penny for your thoughts. 

Reuben Casserole and Yeats

Misery doesn't always reign over here at a moon, worn as if it had been a shell. Since I just had to type out that ridiculous title to this blog, I think I should apprise those of you who are new readers why it's so unwieldy. Then I'll tell ya'll about the titular Reuben Casserole. When I started this blog almost exactly six years ago, I thought it was going to be a little poetry, a little parenting, a little of this and a little of that. I didn't know blogs from War and Peace, so I gave it a line from one of my favorite W.B. Yeats poems. The poem is called Adam's Curse, and I'd venture to say that some of the lines are the most beautiful in the English language, particularly when you say them out loud.

Here, try it:

Adam's Curse

We sat together at one summer’s end,

That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,   

And you and I, and talked of poetry.

I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,   

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.   

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.’

                                          And thereupon

That beautiful mild woman for whose sake   

There’s many a one shall find out all heartache   

On finding that her voice is sweet and low   

Replied, ‘To be born woman is to know—

Although they do not talk of it at school—

That we must labour to be beautiful.’

I said, ‘It’s certain there is no fine thing   

Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.

There have been lovers who thought love should be   

So much compounded of high courtesy   

That they would sigh and quote with learned looks   

Precedents out of beautiful old books;   

Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.’

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;   

We saw the last embers of daylight die,   

And in the trembling blue-green of the sky   

A moon, worn as if it had been a shell   

Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell   

About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:   

That you were beautiful, and that I strove   

To love you in the old high way of love;

That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown   

As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

Sigh. 

Did you sigh, particularly after that penultimate verse?

Anywho. This casserole is outrageous, especially if you like a reuben. Vegetarians, vegans and bottled Thousand Island dressing haters need read no further.

Ingredients:

1 32 oz. jar of sauerkraut

2 tsp caraway seeds

1 medium onion, diced

1 pound Swiss/Gruyere cheese, grated

3/4 lb. sliced pastrami (or corned beef), cut up roughly

1 giant bottle of Thousand Island dressing (I got Ken's Steakhouse brand under the illusion/delusion that it's less chemical-y than the standard brand) or 2 cups

6 slices of Rye Bread, cut into 1-inch cubes

1/4 cup butter, melted

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

1. Drain sauerkraut and rinse.

2. In a large bowl, combine sauerkraut, onions, caraway seeds.

3. Spread mixture evenly into the bottom of a casserole dish.

4. Top with half of the cheese, half of the salad dressing and all of the pastrami. Top with the remaining salad dressing and the remaining cheese.

5. In a large bowl toss the bread cubes with the melted butter to coat. Sprinkle bread cubes over casserole.

6. Bake, uncovered, about 35 minutes or until heated through and bread cubes are browned.

Knock yourself out.