Back to School

I've got so many books that I've started wearing them on my back. Marie Kondo, mondo and all that jazz. Are ya'll watching that show on Netflix? I plan on checking it out as I've resisted that whole cultural phenomenon that appears to cater primarily to the privileged with me, privileged but rather content in the organized clutter that I call home.  Right now I'm trying to get into Circe, a book that was recommended by a slew of people whose opinions I admire and trust, but it's sort of mythological and sort of fantasy and -- well -- I just can't get into it. I'm at the age where I don't continue reading books that haven't grabbed me by, say, page 50. Bye, bye Circe. Hello Elaine Pagel's Why Religion. I've read Pagel's writing, and it's difficult and fascinating and right up my alley. I guess some of you would argue that religion is fantasy and myth, so then given my aversion to both genres, why would I read it? I don't know what to tell you, other than at one point I looked into getting a Master's degree in Religious Studies/Comparative Religion.

In any case, I STARTED MY NEW JOB TODAY. Yes, Sirree Bob, as they say. I've got this new job teaching English to 11th and 12th grade girls in a very, very strict religious school. It's not a Catholic school by the way, so I'm not dressed as a Flying Nun, but I'm dressed in a way that is not customary for me, and while it's not uncomfortable, I do feel a bit like an embedded journalist in a country far, far away. Taking notes, with deep respect and curiosity and a tiny bit of ambivalence about the culture in which I am thrust, black clad and modest.

I love Los Angeles as it's a place where all these different cultures collide -- under the sun, of course, with a new governor and a whole lot of lefties and a smattering of conservatives (just enough to add some "diversity" but not enough to encroach upon our liberal ways). And what the hey is going on with the POSPOTUS and the government shutdown? I'm sorry if you're a furloughed worker and hope that this is all resolved, and we can quit thinking about walls and spikes and concrete and hordes of terrorists rabidly climbing over and into our lives.

The girls were wonderful today -- bright and sweet and outspoken and even a little outrageous. I had some exchanges, stared into some very warm brown eyes and knew immediately whom I was going to love because love is a serious word (she told me) even as I'll be driven crazy.

It's all good.

Tell me what you're reading. Tell me what you'd like to read if you were an 11th or 12th grade girl and have some strict reading guidelines (no sex, no violence, no molestation, etc.). I'm making up a list of book suggestions and need your help.

Poetry with Senior Citizens

How's that for soothing? The steam from my coffee cup literally swirling up and out and can't you smell those peaches and the pears are buttery and the sun, always the sun. The calm certainly belies the simmering rage I feel, especially tonight after seeing the POSPOTUS give one of his inimitable rally speeches, this time in the great state of Mississippi, where he mocked Dr. Ford. The backdrop was a bunch of hooting and hollering white men and women who, I suppose, are his base and never was there a better word to describe them.

We need to turn this thing around.

Here's something else to soothe our souls. I'm teaching a couple of creative writing classes to senior citizens. They are lovely men and mostly women in a couple of assisted living homes here in Los Angeles, and I got the job by applying through one of those newfangled job search engines. I won't be putting either of my two boys through college or putting in an adapted bathroom for Sophie with my pay, but I already really like doing it. The group that I've seen twice is particularly fragile -- both physically and cognitively -- but they can be inspired to tell the most vivid stories. I am always the first, one woman began, her words unfurling to describe her early childhood days in the cotton fields of Texas, plowing and picking. Another woman opens one eye and glares at me. I've got NOTHING to tell you, she says and closes her eye. She's so hostile that I sort of love her. She also told me at the end of the class (she contributed nothing) that's a pretty dress, and I said thank you. I recited Joy Harjo and played a Native American water song. A man in a Dodgers cap whose chin lay on his chest while he gently snored through the entire first class was lively in the second one. When prompted to write about someone in your life who is important he chose his son and said He always does the right thing and organized this whole thing when there was all this darkness and trouble. 

The stories. Everyone has a story.

Except for that POS that is running ruining our country. I know I'm not supposed to wish harm on any living being but damn. And the people who support him? The word scratch. The word eye. The word out.


#smashthepatriarchy



Here's a poem.

All the Difficult Hours and Minutes

All the difficult hours and minutes 

are like salted plums in a jar. 

Wrinkled, turn steeply into themselves, 

they mutter something the color of  sharkfins to the glass. 

Just so, calamity turns toward calmness. 

First the jar holds the umeboshi, then the rice does.

Jane Hirshfield

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

Going Back to Sleep with Stevie Wonder

You're up at five because you might still be on east coast time. You meditate and feel a wash of gratitude for the day you spent with friends from the east coast, for Sophie's dry palms (you'd felt them earlier), for something new in your life, for the beautiful morning. You do some work for The Job That Might Be No More. You make an egg and toast for Henry and refrain from telling him that last night you looked through his school papers and read on his leadership application that you were his mentor and most admired person because you take care of my sister and never give up and  she is always there even immediately after she's mad at me. You also refrain from telling him that your eyes dripped tears on the copy machine. After he leaves, you begin the process of getting Sophie ready for school. You're out of coffee (significant for what follows). Sophie has actually been up for hours, making your east coast time wake-up slightly less painful because you'd be up with her anyway, but you refrain from giving her CBD because you believe that she has reached saturation and that might be the reason for her inexplicable turn for the worse over the weekend. You have been stifling distress about this, but this morning her palms are dry and warm as opposed to clammy and cold, so you feel relief and wonder whether you'd better start yet another strain of the CBD or keep to this one at a lower dose. The only trouble is that the new one costs about five times more than the old one, and now that you have The Job That Might Be No More, you're definitely not going to be able to afford the new one. You'll think about that later and all the implications of Cannabis Capitalism as you've had no coffee and you forgot to buy some more for the third day in a row. You make Sophie's lunch and pack it in her backpack, then toast some bread and spread peanut butter on it for her, slice some strawberries and prepare her meds. You bring her into the kitchen and feed her. She seems much better, but by the fourth bite or so, she goes into a slow-motion dance, her arms bent at a weird angle, her fingers fluttering and her head turns to the left instead of right which is strange. You call her name and try to get her attention but she is elsewhere. You dissociate. In a couple of minutes she begins chewing whatever was in her mouth, and you finish feeding her. You bring her into her bedroom to change her for school, and she lays back on her bed and falls asleep. You turn on her iPad and curl up beside her listening to Stevie Wonder. Don't you worry bout a thing. You fall asleep because you've had no coffee and in your dream you are young and someone you loved is in the dream, but it's ok to wake up. It feels delicious today to have gone back to sleep, to then wake up.

They say your style of life's a drag
And that you must go other places
Just don't you feel too bad
When you get fooled by smiling faces.

I'm in the mood for

more Jack Gilbert:

to C

In the Beginning

In the morning when Eve and Adam
woke to snow and their minds,
they set out in marvelous clothes
hand in hand under the trees.

Endlessly precision met them,
until they went grinning in time
with no word for their close
escape from that warm monotony.

Jack Gilbert
via Collected Poems













Also, please read and share, if you'd like, my most recent article on marijuana.com. It's about women and what happens when they gather together in a room:

The Wisdom in the Room

The Brothers' NYC

Oliver's NYC from the Empire State Building

The Brothers are back, bubbling over with stories of New York City, filled with cousins and old friends, M&Ms and taxi-cab fights. They loved the city and are glad that they live in Los Angeles. They had a wonderful time and missed Sophie and me. They are at least a foot taller, their hair is too long, and this morning, when I was given a raspberry M&M, I agreed that it was delicious and then closed my eyes and breathed in the electric air.

I'm off to Washington, D.C. this afternoon to give another presentation to a group of health care professionals, so I probably won't update the old blog for a day or so. Carry on!

Central Park, NYC

The world is not ugly, and the people are not sad**

Fog lay thick over most of Los Angeles this morning and is something of an event, strange enough that both boys jumped out of bed easily when I said, You should come quick and see the fog! It's so weird! The rainy season in our part of the world has set in, there are tiny black mushrooms clustered around the base of trees, and yesterday I practically tripped over a white one that looked more like it should be called a toadstool than fungi. I have so much to do these days, so many telephone calls to make and people to think of and meetings to attend. I'm juggling my son Oliver's anxiety and mild depression, Sophie's seizures and Henry's applications for high school. The new job has me attending healthcare round-tables where harrowing stories of children removed from their homes due to neglect are presented and professionals from seemingly every profession one can imagine put their heads together to discuss and help. Someone asked me whether it's depressing, and so far, it's not. It's uplifting, rather, to participate in something positive. I'm grateful to not only have the work but to do it. I crashed into another car today, a tiny fender bender, while stopped at a traffic light. I jumped out of my car and exclaimed my apologies to the burly guy in his. He fingered the scratches in his car, a shiny, red convertible and sighed. I thought he'd be angry. I thought he'd accuse me of something. I thought of the insurance premiums rising as my adrenaline did. He sighed, though, and he didn't get angry. We exchanged information and went on our way. I got an email a couple of hours later. He included a copy of a bill from a hardware store for some paint. He said that he would touch up the scratches himself and bang out the dents. The bill was for $8.13, and he wondered whether I would reimburse him for it.

The world is not ugly, and the people are not sad.

**one of my favorite Wallace Stevens' poems:

Gubbinal

That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

A New Start

I forgot to tell you that I started a new job today. I'm working with a non-profit foundation that provides services to children in foster care. I'll be helping them to build a core of medical and mental health providers to do assessments to support their advocacy. It's a part time job, but I'll be busy, and I'm thankful to have it. There'll be no more bonbon eating or lounging around -- I'm thankful to have a head tightly screwed to my neck; otherwise, it might have flown off by now.

It seems like a fresh start, doesn't it today?

I'm on the phone

all day, doing federal grant reviews.

We'll talk later!