The point is to get woke-up, not fucked-up

I’ve written several times about the effects of marijuana, but for each piece that I posted, there were five that I didn’t because I know that many of you have little patience for the subject. This means that when I do write, I need to make it good, yet there’s nothing harder to convey than an experience that is completely alien to others, especially when they might judge it harshly, as is often the case with my posts about drugs and atheism. 

As you go through an ordinary day, how many new thoughts or insights do you have? I have few to none when I’m straight, but I’m awash in them when I’m high. I become so adrift within myself that I never know what new shore I’m going to land upon. I find myself visiting several per hour, and the rapid-fire intensity of my visions leaves me exhausted.

One person speculated—probably whimsically—that pot might lead me to God. I actually do have experiences that are akin to mysticism, and I enjoy them, but because I don’t believe in spirits, I don't interpret them spiritually. I’m open to seeing God, but so far I’ve only seen a succession of demons. That was 30 years ago, and I didn't believe they were real even as I was looking at them, although they still scared the hell out of me (ha). More recently, I all but see music, and I do sometimes see my surroundings pulse and shimmer. Often the drug starts by enveloping me within a heavy cloak of fear and anguish, which usually gives way to such an absorption in my thoughts that I completely lose contact with the external world. To better convey the profundity of the drug, I'm going to share what a friend wrote about her experience as she was nearing the end of a bad marriage.

“I was really losing it because I didn’t know what came next; I only knew I was, by necessity, going to be losing everything and walking away from it all. My son offered me some weed…. I smoked my first bowl in 30 years…and suddenly my life looked completely different. Suddenly, I could see inside. I understood. I am not talking about the delusions we consider that seem profound at the time, but that in reality are just that—delusions. These were very real revelations about myself, and along with those revelations came the emotions, the insights, the tears, the rants, the guilt, the anxiety, and finally and essentially…the very real ME I had been keeping hidden away for years….”

Unfortunately, marijuana increases right-brain depth and self-honesty at the expense of left-brain learning, memory, and problem solving, so I mostly use it when my left brain isn't too busy. I also need to be able to stop whatever else I'm doing to write because writing becomes my obsession when I'm high. Unfortunately, very little of what I put down is ever read by anyone, including myself, and this leaves me feeling more lonely and discouraged than I might otherwise feel, but it can't be helped. As Schopenhauer wrote:

“There is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one's efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire.”

In my fantasy, all of you are here with me, and we're high. Only what do we do next--go to our separate computers and blog? Well, why the hell not? I would argue that in most cases, writing is superior to speaking, if only because it gives a person time to reflect and, hopefully, to go deeper.

About the photo. The film canister contains unground flower buds (the most desirable part of the plant); the jar contains ground flower buds that are ready to smoke; and the silver thingy is a grinder. The open-top container holds matches. The pipe was made decades ago by a friend and is about as basic as it gets, but I don't smoke a lot. I mostly simmer marijuana in butter (the odor is so strong that it spills into the yard even with the windows closed) and then use the butter to make small sugar cookies that I cut into quarters, one quarter of a cookie being as much as I would ever want. Two quarters are pictured.

About blogging

I have 262 followers. Some are dead; some have deleted their blogs; some haven’t posted in years; many if not most never left a comment on my blog. Here’s the thing about blogging. You could post nothing but underexposed and out of focus pictures of driftwood, yet you could still have 800 followers and sixty laudatory comments per post if you did nothing all day but leave flattering comments on other people’s blogs. I used to receive 25-40 comments per post, but I became overwhelmed by guilt because I felt obligated to visit everyone who left a comment, and I couldn’t do it, at least not without spending my days on the Internet, so I all but stopped, and, no surprise, most people stopped visiting me.

The most recent person I know who gave up blogging was Jane Gaston. She hadn’t posted in nearly a year when she returned for two months. Last week, out of the blue, she deleted her blog. Back when awards were popular, Jane gave me several, and she often told me what a great writer I am. Now, she’s gone, and I have no way to contact her and no reason to think she wants to be contacted. I took our friendship personally, but it ended impersonally with a post that basically said: It’s been fun, but I’m outta here; bye. That was her right, of course, but it sure hurts when someone up and disappears. Just so you’ll know, I plan to be here, as the saying goes: " 'Til death does us part."

About the picture. Yep, that's where I write, and, nope, I didn't straighten things up before I took the picture (which is why the mouse is off-center on its pad, and the file cabinet isn't closed all the way). I bought the little rabbit for a friend, but liked it so much that I kept it. The paint-by-number painting was in my family when I was born; no one remembered who did it or when it was done. As a boy, I often lay in bed pretending that I lived in that painting. The small photo is of Peggy, and the gold-rimmed plague above it reads:


I love Snow 100 million, billion, trillion, times over. I love him sooooooooooooooooo much. He is the best man, and I love him. 


                                                                         Peggy


    Love 
                     Love 
                                       Love 
                                                         Love
                                                                          Love


Given that she hates to write, I think you'll agree that Peggy does pretty well when she has the urge.

Peggy: sixty years worth, ten years at a time

1952. That's Peggy's sister on the right. Dianne was (and is) timid, whereas Peggy was (and is) tomboyish. You might have guessed this from their body language.
















1962. As I was looking at this photo trying to think of what to say about it, I had the thought: "I could just eat this little girl," but I realized it might be interpreted sexually when what I meant was that that I want to use my body to build a fort that would protect her from all the sad things that have since happened in her life, many of them caused by me. Even that doesn't capture what I feel when I look at this picture, but it's the best I can do. The sweetness, alertness, kindness, shyness, playfulness, innocence, tomboyishness, and femininity in her face is, well, when we talk about the sacred, I feel like saying, "But I feel the sacred all the time. Looking at this picture is one of those times."





1972. By now, we had been married six months, but hadn't known one another a year. This photo was taken on a canoe trip on the Pearl River near Jackson, Mississippi. I'm sure I put Peggy up to the pose because she was too shy to do such things naturally, and our relationship was still new, after all, despite the fact that we were married.











1982. We were building a shed at our home in Mississippi, and Peggy appears to be having an amiable interlude with a nail--either that or she's asking it not to bend when she drives it into the oak lathing. She insisted on the un-carpenter-like apparel and wouldn't wear anything on her feet but sandals. One day, we were splitting wood, and she dropped a large piece of post oak on her foot and broke it--the foot, of course. Silly me, I thought this meant a speedy trip to the hospital, but Peggy said, "I'm not going with my hair dirty," so I held her erect while she showered.


1992. Peggy was on figure skating teams in Oregon and in Minnesota. She then got into downhill skiing, and it and mountain climbing became her passions. I tried skating. skiing, and mountain climbing, but didn't care for them.












2002. Even I have summited the mountain in the photo, but it's a little one that you can scramble up. You've got to be willing to work hard and risk death to get up the ones that are technically challenging and prone to bad weather. Peggy couldn't get enough of them, so I became her support person, going on training hikes with her and keeping camp at trailheads. Mostly, though, she and a half dozen men (few women climb) would go off and leave me home, and that was fine with me. The red thing in her hands is an ice axe. It's good for probing for crevasses, climbing steep snow or ice, and self-arresting when you fall (you will fall).

2002. Those are cross country skis. Peggy and I did this together a fair amount, and we also snowshoed a little, but she found them boring compared to the excitement of downhill skiing, so she was forever going off with another carload of men to Hoodoo Ski Area or Willamette Pass. I don't like snow, so I don't miss cross country skiing much, but I would still like to go occasionally. Mostly, when we were going, we would simply drive to where the road was closed by snow and take a day trip from there. We have snow camped, and we have also skied to fire towers and spent the night in them. This photo was taken on a day trip, You can tell because the pad is too short for lying down (it's for sitting on), and the pack is too small for carrying everything we would need to camp. Bonnie was five in the photo. She's now 14 1/2 and blind. She still likes to play fetch.

2002. If the slope below her was as steep as she's making out, I doubt that Peggy would be holding her cap in her hand, yet she did go on rope climbs that people have been dying on for decades. Like many of Oregon's Cascades, this particular mountain has a bad reputation for "rotten rock," meaning rock that either comes off when you pull or push on it, or else falls on your head for no reason other than that your luck was bad. People have climbed Everest only to die in Oregon because mountain climbers aren't interested in safe mountains. I didn't like for Peggy to climb dangerous mountains, but it was in her blood, and I've never imagined that I had the right to tell her what she could or couldn't do (I subscribed to Ms Magazine for her when it appeared in the early '70s, but I was the only one who read it). I would be at a loss how to handle a subservient woman. On the one hand, it sounds sexy, but I don't know if I could respect her. I want influence, not control.

2012. Sad to say, but Peggy no longer engages in any strenuous activity, probably because of arthritis more than anything. She just took up drinking coffee, so in the photo she is having her daily brew of 3 parts vanilla soy milk to one part strong coffee. We try to find campsites with a good view and that (except for the road we drove in on) are so closed in by terrain or vegetation that we can let Bonnie roam freely. The thought of losing a 14 year old blind dog in the wilderness is simply too horrible to contemplate. You can see that we camped directly on the road, confident in the improbability of anyone coming.

Despite the fact that Peggy is the breadwinner in our family and has enjoyed a lot of traditionally male activities; she is all woman. And despite the fact that my bedroom is pink, I cry more easily than she, and my father was a transexual; I am all man. We have always given one another the freedom, and even the encouragement, to transcend traditional gender roles. Perhaps, this was made easier by the fact that we have always known who we are.

Brother Stewart and the unpardonable sin

I was delivering newspapers on my bike one afternoon while throwing a hissy fit at God. I was twelve years old, and my first doubt had occurred a year earlier. A hundred more had joined it, but my focus at the moment was God’s inexplicable failure—inexplicable if he existed—to keep his Biblical promises; for example, “whatsoever you shall ask in my name, that will I do.” It was the first time I used profanity during a prayer, and I was laying it on thick as I railed at God for his interminable silence in the face of my desperate entreaties for a reason to believe. I still remember the very spot upon which I felt the horrific fear that I had probably, not more than a minute past, committed the unpardonable sin—a sin that, oddly enough, the Bible mentions but doesn’t define. I was so burdened with fear for the next three years that I was sometimes on the verge of panic, which was why I finally drove out to talk with Brother Stewart. When he seemed sleepy and distracted and made no attempt to draw me out, I let pass my one shame-laden attempt to share my angst. I never blamed him for this because he was too good a man to blame for anything.

Why would a preacher become an atheist?

The usual scenario is that a Biblically naive young person goes away to seminary with an interest in religion and a devotion to God. For the first time, he (usually) studies the Bible from a critical perspective. Doubts are born, but he prays for faith and does his best to push them away. Two decades later, he has been a minister for 18 years, and his doubts have multiplied. At long last he is forced to admit, at least to himself, that he has become that vilest of filth, that most loathsome of vermin, that veritable dung of Satan: an atheist.

Unfortunately, his job requires him to worship a specific triune deity, and the same church that endorses his paycheck owns his house. His parents, his wife, and his children, are probably religious. He has no training in anything but religion, and his every friend is committed to religion. If you were that person, what would you do? I think I would leave, and/or shoot myself, and/or go crazy. I might even build a new and deeply rewarding life based on rationality. Some do.

The men in the 1967 photo are Church of Christ preachers who had come together for a county-wide revival in Brookhaven, Mississippi. Three of the six were from the area, and I knew them well. I was 18 at the time, and had been struggling to keep my faith since I was eleven, yet I still envisioned preachers as residing in that rarefied realm referred to as "Men of God." I was so enamored by the group shown that if someone at the revival had dropped dead, I was certain that the combined prayers of these six men could bring him back.

Buford Stewart is second from right. When his little country church offered him a raise, he turned it down because he wanted to embrace God's ideal of voluntary poverty. I slept with him--platonically--when he took me along on a revival to Kentucky. The man on the far right is Norman Miller who took me to Indiana on another revival. They loved me, but if they were still alive and ran into me today, their version of the "God of love" would command that they turn me over to him for the everlasting agony that, in their view, I would so richly deserve.*


*"And whoever shall not...hear your words, when you depart out of that house...shake off the dust of your feet. Verily I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment..." Matthew 10:14-15. 

Superbly designed functionality

The steel “sanitary tee” shown to your left carried the waste from my house's kitchen sink and clothes washer for 57 years. I am so struck by its beauty and its importance to the history of this house that I’m going to keep it somewhere, if only in the crawlspace. There is simply nothing more gorgeous than superbly designed functionality, especially in an object that has been on the job for generations. As I sit gazing at my tee, I think of the plumber who installed it, what a different world he inhabited in 1955, and what a different trade he practiced.

There were no plastic plumbing pipes back then, only steel and copper for water; steel, cast iron, and concrete for waste. Much of the steel pipe had to be cut and threaded at the jobsite. I sometimes helped my father do this. The cast iron fittings weren’t threaded, and had to be sealed with oakum that was first driven into the joint and then covered with molten lead poured from a dipper. I sometimes helped my father do this as well. I didn't realize that I was seeing the end of an era.

Today, I laboriously removed lead and oakum from where a steel pipe entered such a fitting. I then put a rubber seal onto the end of a new ABS plastic pipe, inserted the new pipe into the fitting, drove the seal snug with a hammer, and voilà, I was done.  The old ways and old materials are sometimes beautiful, but the new ones are usually better, and so it is that I cast my vote for the new even while remembering the old with respect and affection. After all, the fitting in the photo served the people who lived in this house for a lot of years.

“…superbly designed functionality...” One argument against the existence of a divine creator is that we ourselves are so poorly designed that we start falling apart as soon as we reach physical maturity. If the eye—as many claim—is so superbly engineered that only a super smart deity could have created it, why are we all wearing glasses?