420, dude

If the excessive crowd of motor-mouthed simpletons with the Beavis and Butthead vocabularies and the rings of mother earth caked on their fleshy bodies don't convince you that marijuana should be legalised, then perhaps nothing will.

Certainly not thousands of them, streaming toward Golden Gate Park, gathering on Hippy Hill, waiting for the magic hour and minute when they all tilt their enormously high faces to the sun and say "whoa" or "dude" or "awesome."

What was I doing there? I've used marijuana to fight nausea and might need to do it again, and I have no bad feelings about the use of marijuana in many ways to make life better. I accept that some people abuse it, I accept that some people can't handle it, but the same has been said about alcohol a billion times more and we're fairly happy to keep vending it.

They say that stoners don't kill people by driving their cars--which may be true, but they certainly careen all over sidewalks and lay all over grass in questionably safe positions. I don't think mary jane is harmless; I simply don't think it's harm full.

Last year, Scott went running in Golden Gate Park on 4/20--and as he made a point of telling me what a spectacular gathering happens there, I really did want to see it. We were there early, and already the village was up, and the vendors were out, and the boxes of joints were carried through the crowd, and the sellers were screaming "edibles" at the top of their lungs. There were food vendors, a bit, but mostly brownie and rice krispie cakes, some advertised as high-makers, some advertised as double-dipped in hash oil. Such discernment I've never had with drug food--which would be better?

I can't say as I have no ambition to hold a joint to my trach tube, no desire to ever smoke anything again, and I can't eat. So, I'm an observer of this event, not the kind of tourist they really want to wander through. And painfully, Scott and I stuck out--we looked nothing like the kids around us, or the people our age, in vests without shirts, pins, vulgar mardi-gras looking necklackes of weed leaves in bright metallic green. There were families, too--pot daddy, pot mommy, pot kiddies--things I'd never thought existed. And to get there, we walked through little league play of soccer kids, a bare thousand feet from the thickest cloud of second hand smoke I've walked through in my life.

It's interesting to think that something that would halt civilization in its tracks where I'm from is treated with aplomb here--a shrug, a situation that is managed instead of raided. I admire that, even as part of me is a bit revolted by the overtness of it all. My generation has snuck through the drainage sewers and hidden behind locked doors and used code to achieve what these folks were doing flat out in a grove of the park--gathering in thousands to celebrate the one thing they found worthy to celebrate, and worship at the temple of their making.

One person who would never have condoned nor understood this was my sister--and today, this is the day she finally lost her battle with cancer. Having seen how she was suffering, my feelings of relief and gratitude that her suffering is over may be more understandable--not hold-overs of a contact high from my park experience.

I remember when my mother was going through chemo, I offered to make here a batch of pot brownies--she acted amused but I think she was shocked. I was rather shocked that I offered, but it was all I could think of to help her manage the nausea--and it's rather a good management, I understand. Please know that if the 5 anti-nausea medications that they've prescribed don't work for me wtih Cisplatin (and nausea is a virtually guaranteed side effect), I'll be at the local dispensary faster than you can say bake that goo.

I doubt my sister would have done the same, but I can't help wondering if--at some point--it would have helped. There's no guarantee it would--with her cancer--and mine--the appetitie is a beside the point situation--we satisfy with liquids what should be satisfied thusly. But I will gain weight, and I will get better, and I will do so however it works to do it--for Barb, and for myself, and for the fact that no more Prices need to die of cancer, on 4/20, or ever.