Archive for January, 2018

Today’s thermonuclear pot pellets will take the top of your head off if you’re not careful. So be careful. Here’s how.

Reefer madness is back in a big and legal way and agribusiness (or the Agri-ceutical Business as I call it) is scrambling to expand their market share by creating more designer strains of weed than you can shake a ganja stick at. In appealing to recreational users in underserved niches growers have formulated some highly customized experiences bordering on the absurd. Accordingly, this sincere satirization of those formulations also borders on the absurd and is in keeping with the general weirdness of marijana experiences to begin with. So even though this is a work of fiction, it’s never too far from reality.

My purported purpose (yes – a purported purpose) in writing this piece is to help the uninitiated select a designer pot that’s right for them. Having said that (I love to say that), my real purpose is to generate the knowing smirk we all exhibit when we become momentarily free from years of accumulated struggles. For some it takes the power of an NDE (Near Death Experience) to convince us that all is not as it seems. But usually this knowing smirk is generated more prosaically.

For example sometimes this kind of liberating interruption visits us when we’re right in the middle of doing something very human – as in this case, optimizing our reefer choices. Perhaps your knowing smirk may appear between sentences, or maybe as you look away from the words and all your pretense vanishes. It may not come at all even though you know it’s there. Sometimes you just can’t get there until you’ve plowed through enough of life’s buffeting experiences and finally surrender into, “Alright. Enough already. I get it.” And then we may get that window on the marvel behind all creation – and this isn’t the pot talking either.

I’m holding out for a lot here, and the medium I’ve chosen (a silly faux review of designer pot) is perhaps not the most direct route to this level of self-awareness, however rest assured, whether you feel it or not, it’s all happening anyway – is this coming through? Alright I’ll get on with it. Read the rest of this entry »

They paid to do this. A mule train of mountaineers searching for their peak experience on Mount Everest.

Mount Everest is 29,000 ft. tall, but assaulting the summit actually begins at Base Camp which is at 18,000 feet. So in reality it’s an 11,000 ft. climb. But please, do not think I’m trying to diminish this redoubtable feat. Far from it. Successfully summiting Everest involves a mighty confluence of endurance, planning, money and oxygen. And let us not forget that even though Base Camp is at a lofty 18,000 ft., airplane oxygen masks drop down at 14,000 ft. – that is, “in the unlikely event of cabin depressurization.”

And not too diminish the majesty of Mount Everest; but due to a geologic quirk in the earth’s Jello-ey innards, Everest is not even the highest point on earth. That distinction belongs to Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador, sticking up at a pedestrian 20,703 ft. So even though Mount Everest has a higher cardinal altitude, Chimborazo has the distinction of being the “highest mountain or point above Earth’s center,” because Earth is not a sphere. It’s an oblate spheroid and bulges in certain areas (like most of us do) rendering Mount Chimborazo “closer” to outer space than Mount Everest.

Read the rest of this entry »