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marijuana tea and movies
Saturday, February 3 2018
It had been a cold night, and Neville (who, unlike Ramona, has been good about not waking me up at night) needed to go out at about 2:00am when I was at my groggiest. Weather was warmer today, and we didn't burn as much firewood as expected. We did our late-morning Saturday cofee ritual. Even though I've been mostly just drinking caffeine on Saturdays (I didn't have any at all this past week), I'm not noticing the speedlike effects that are the result of drinking caffeine rarely. Evidently one has to drink it less often than once a week to get that. I seem to recall this discovery being the reason I fell off the caffeine-abstinence wagon last time, which may have been as long ago as 2011. If I have to abstain from caffeine for two weeks for it to be a great drug, maybe it's better to drink caffeine any time I damn well please.
At some point one of Gretchen's friends who had been working at a local farm sanctuary arrived and went for a long walk in the woods with Gretchen and Ramona while I stayed back in the recuperation fort with Neville. The woman had recently been fired, and (like many people we know going through traumatic times in their lives) was turning to Gretchen for moral support. Gretchen is a great listener and highly empathic, and she doesn't charge for her "sessions."
Meanwhile, I'd drunk some tea made from the ground-up leaves of the female marijuana plant, and after an hour or two, I was definitely feeling it. It made my heart beat almost most frighteningly fast, and it was a bad idea reading scary headlines, such as one where Carl Bernstein said that the release of the Nunes Memo (a cherry-picked document drafted by House Republicans in an effort, apparently, to give Donald Trump just enough political cover to fire special prosecutor Robert Mueller or perhaps Rod Rosenstein, the man he reports to) is the darkest hour of American democracy "since Watergate."
In that state, is was better to watch a movie. So I tucked into a downloaded copy of the 1993 film Dazed and Confused, which I had somehow never seen. (I'd downloaded it after hearing it referred to by some of my workplace colleagues.) It depicted high school life in the jaded post-hippie 1970s. Hair is long but not particularly styled, making the characters look more timeless than they do in a properly-executed film set in the 1980s. Because 1976 as understood by a filmmaker in 1993 wasn't all that different from 1986 (the year I graduated from high school), Dazed and Confused was a delightfully nostalgic romp. True, I ran the good-student crowd and never really saw marijuana in high school. But I saw plenty of the stoner archetypes once I got to college. Also, though I was never a high school athelete, I also remember the authoritarian tendencies of football cultre, with its fascist pep rallies, and hypermasculine coaches. The weirdness at the heart of Dazed and Confused was the tradition of outgoing seniors hazing incoming freshmen in a town where this is apparently tolerated. There was nothing like that in my high school, though it had its own oddities and perversities around matters of gender, race, and religion.
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This evening Gretchen slaved for what seemed like hours in the kitchen to prepare a fancy Indian feast that included a chickpea-and-cauliflower curry with a side of exotic rice cooked with lentils and spices. I usually want flat bread with my Indian food, but since there was none in the house, I thawed out a huge package of injera, the Ethiopian flat bread. As we ate it, we watched Late Night with Stephen Colbert, an episode of Jeopardy, a DVR-recorded copy of the Melissa McCarthy comedy Tammy (which seemed to find most of its humor in the always-put-upon expression on the face of McCarthy's character as well as Suzy Fauberian levels of stupidity). It wasn't a great movie, but it had an all-star cast and kept Gretchen and me laughing. Whem the DVR caught up with the present, we watched parts of an episode of Shark Tank, the one where two entrepreneurs wanted to set up grab-and-go shops selling packaged "healthy" (though not usually vegan) food in urban food deserts. By now, Gretchen was drinking Sherry and I was drinking Irish whiskey.
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