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NNadir

(33,368 posts)
10. Why would anyone be interested in me? In the 1970's...
Wed Apr 28, 2021, 09:44 PM
Apr 2021

...I was some times a laborer, at other times a clerk, at still other times a delivery guy, and for a stretch that seemed like forever, and was forever, not in the least, psychologically, caretaker for a dying woman.

I fancied myself to be a folk singer/song writer/poet, a rather silly and common affectation in those times. Sometimes I got paid for it, but never enough to live on.

I was, in short, a dullard, uninteresting in the extreme.

While I am still uninteresting, I'm slightly less so now than I was then.

As for marijuana, I sometimes feel that people who want to report that it's harmless, or even "good for you," have never been stone cold sober in a room full of high people, many of whom liked to confuse themselves with Bob Dylan. I can report that I have done this.

"Everybody must get stoned..." and all of that.

I don't approve of marijuana use. I'm sure that I believe that people should go to jail for possessing or using it, but for me, there is such unfathomably beautiful things associated with reality, that I really can't see why one would like to smear one's senses in the face of it.

While I don't approve of putting people in jail for drug use, I'm not sure I'd like a pot store in my neighborhood. It appears now that there will be two of them as of this writing, both ten minutes or less away by bicycle.

I sometimes get in trouble around here for saying as much, but I don't approve.

People like to carry on with me about how cigarettes and alcohol are worse than pot, and both are legal. These statements are true, and to the extent that these two legal drugs each represent much worse social problems than pot is now, to me is an argument against full legalization.

The most depressing trip to Europe of my life - I only went to Europe on business, never for pleasure - was walking, in an evening during a professional event in Amsterdam, where there were women displayed in windows - some of them not so much women as girls, clearly imported from third world countries - with all kinds of stoners mumbling to one another in the streets around them.

I've actually been moved to weep just thinking of it.

I'm not sure that I have any fascination with Allen Ginsberg, but the most eloquent phrase I ever read of his, was the opening to one of his "poems," such as they were.

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness..."

So be it.

There are plenty of ways to lose one's mind, sometimes by disease, sometimes by trauma, and sometimes by practice and sometimes by deliberate administration of mind altering substances. I don't feel that we need more of them.

These are very dangerous, very hard, even frightening times. They call, in my view, for more sobriety, not less of it.

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