“Of course I know how to roll a joint.” – Martha Stewart “That is not a drug, it’s a leaf.” – Arnold Schwarzenegger “When I was a kid I inhaled frequently. That was the point.” – Barack Obama “People say you can abuse marijuana. Well shit, you can abuse cheeseburgers too, you know? You don‘t go around closing Burger King because you can abuse something.” – Joe Rogan “Alcohol and marijuana, if used in moderation, plus loud, usually low-class music, make stress and…
When I lived in Key West in the late ’70s, early ’80s, a well known local contractor, whose name now eludes me (a fraction of a brain cell thinks his first name was Carl, but I have zero-percent confidence in that), was busted at sea in the Gulf of Mexico smuggling some large quantity of marijuana from the Yucatan. When the Coast Guard boarded his boat and arrested him, he had just three words to say, which were quoted in…
That’s the long and the short of it: I’ve moved to Substack with my writing and have given up on Medium. I’ll tell you why. From the time I started my blogs more than four years ago, I co-published most of my posts on Medium. I was attracted by the possibility of a large, pre-existing audience, and the reach offered by Medium. What I didn’t anticipate, and perhaps should have, is the inherent bias that exists within Medium and most…
This piece initially appeared four years ago, on June 21, 2017, the Summer Solstice. Today, June 21, 2021, it is once more the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, and the actual solstice officially occurred at 3:32 a.m. UTC this morning/22:32 p.m. EDT last night. The time and other references and weather comments in the piece are as they were four years ago, when the post first appeared. I’m no longer living on the boat, and there have been…
Earlier this week my good friend Sally confirmed what I had feared for months: Our mutual friend of more than half a century, Anne, had died. I had such dread of the news, which I felt was almost inevitable, that I had held back from finding out that my fears were grounded. I stayed off of Facebook. I avoided writing Anne, and getting no response, and I put off calling Sally. In fact, when I finally did speak with her,…