Don't Be Hatin'

I thought the difference was negligible after a week with no brownies and scant smoke but the fifteen year old busted me and pointed out that there was something definitely off. The airfare to San Francisco is sky high and I decided it was time to start baking. As a cook, the thought of wasting expensive ingredients mortifies me. At Christmas, Joe was playing around with $100.00 tenderloins for Beef Wellington and I was agitated about what was transpiring, even in a kitchen some 400 miles from mine. Nevertheless, I visited Michael at Cornerstone Research and interrogated him about every nuance of baking pot edibles. A patient and learned man, he finally got so disgusted with me, he shouted,” If stoned drooling hippies have been able to bake with pot for decades, I’m sure someone with your intellect will have no difficulty.” Indeed, I had no difficulty and produced a 30 day supply of medication without a lot of labor. Even without costing-in airfare and shipping, these will be less expensive (a little more than a dollar a day) than the SF items. I used kief (a powdered form of hash) and I while I definitely felt the thc the two mornings I have consumed my nut bars, I have never really had good results with hash and I am afraid the effect of my homemade efforts may be more depressive than the SF brownies and for my next batch I will use leaves and shake rather than a hash derivative. It still chaps my hide that I can’t pick up a month’s supply of capsules for a ten dollar co-payment at the Rite Aid. The house stinks and the sprats know that Momma weren’t bakin’ no gingerbread.


Clinton and Obama are considered to be friends of the medical marijuana movement and also likely to support legislation towards decriminalizing the recreational use of pot. We’ll never be like Amsterdam, but there is a glimmer of hope. McCain has been cagey in avoiding the subject altogether, simply indicating it should be left up to the states. I don’t love any of the three candidates but I think that any of them will be better than Bush. My vote will be for the Democrat but it won’t be true love, like for the first presidential candidate I ever voted for, Jimmy Carter. With regard to specific issues, Obama is perhaps a tiny bit closer to being my man, but the Wright thing really sucks. I’ve listened to portions of Wright’s sermons and parts of them are beautiful and meaningful and uplifting but his tirades about AIDS and 9-11 are friggin’ insane. Even Mein Kampf has long passages which would seem quite sensible if one didn’t know by whom they were writ. If Wright’s outrageous statements are news to Obama (Wright has been going on like this for years and the church even sold tapes of him spouting this delusional paranoid crap) then he hasn’t been as involved in his church as he claims. If, and I really think this is the case, he knew exactly what the good Reverend was spouting and entered a race to be the President of the United States while still affiliated with his church, his judgment is frighteningly suspect.


I admire Hilary. I think she is brave and well meaning and smart but I suspect more beholden than anyone can begin to imagine. This pandering gas tax moratorium really pissed me off though. This is politics at its most cynical and both McCain and Clinton should be really taken to task for trying to buy votes so shamelessly and playing the American voter for such a sucker.


This was posted on Chowhound last week:
#1 rule on vietnamese dining ( ask any old vietnamese person and they'll tell you the same thing ) : Always eat in a vietnamese restaurant that is populated with vietnamese diners. If there are a lot of non vietnamese people ( caucasians ), the food is crap. Reason being, hardcore vietnamese people know what vietnamese food should taste like.


What if I had written, “Always eat in an American restaurant that is populated with American diners. If there are a lot of non-American people (Vietnamese), the food is crap.” Would that have been ok? It certainly would not have gotten past the Chowhound moderators, as this post did with nary a raised eyebrow.


I am in pretty protected groups, except for the Caucasian thing. It’s not cool to publicly dis women or Jews. An admitted pothead, I do get my share of Bob Marley and Grateful Dead jokes but I’m thick skinned and I ain’t gonna get political about it. I hang out with relatively evolved and educated individuals and most of ‘em would always err on the side of political correctness. My Silverlake and adjacent compadres would poke out their own eye with a fried chicken leg before uttering “black” instead of African American. I’m still not sure how to politically correctly refer to a black person who cannot be positively identified as an American. I notice however, that among my hypersensitive-about-hate-speech left coast cohorts that the South, Christianity and particularly Catholicism are fair game. My kids perform in the Silverlake Children’s Theatre and the plays performed reflect, I guess, community mores. There are no references to dancin’ black people eating watermelon or usurious big nosed Jewish folks or women being intellectually inferior to men. Even allusions to Asian driving skills are verboten. But, it’s ok to ridicule the Pope and Christianity and produce a play about stupid southerners called Dumb White Crackers.


The fifteen year old asked me this weekend if his dad is a racist. Why do kids always ask you shit like that when you’re driving? After averting the fatal accident, I marshaled a bit of equanimity and replied that Himself is not a racist, but a misanthrope. He can be a real asshole and this gets on my nerves, but he at least he hates everyone and everything equally. I do wish he liked people more but he’s just not a sunny guy. Sometimes he doesn’t even like me very much, but I’ll take equal opportunity hatred over stupid politically correct lefty hypocrisy any day. I tried to explain this weird dark fairness to the fifteen year old and I think he sort of gets it. I do hope really that a Democrat is the president but I hope that it is a triumph for an individual man or woman and not a success or defeat for a race or gender. I will explain to the fifteen year old that his old man’s contempt for whoever the next president is will not be rooted in race or gender either. And there must be thousands of restaurants in Viet Nam and the preponderance of diners must be Vietnamese. Does that mean that the food is good in all of them? The next time someone directs a Cheech and Chong jibe my way, I may even take umbrage and confront the hate speech. If I’m not too stoned to think up a witty rejoinder.