The Omniblog: Weed, Whites and Whine* edition

Let’s play a little catch-up. There’s a reason I haven’t been blogging lately.

It’s because almost everything sucks right now, and I’ve been throwing a lot of time and effort at keeping depression at bay. And I haven’t wanted to write about it because, well, it’s all too depressing. Oh yeah, and boring to read about.

But the way I see it, some day I’ll be glad I took the time today to enumerate the various and sundry ways things are sucking at this point in my life. Because memory-loss has been knocking at my door for years.

I had a good week of mental-health time between Christmas and the new year, which is fortunate because the shit started raining down hot and heavy less than a week into 2011 when I was cut back to half-time by my main source of income. And I can’t even blame them. Page count has been shrinking all last year.

It’s not like I didn’t see it coming, anyway. I’m in the newspaper business, for Christ’s sake. There’s an anvil swinging by a thread over my entire industry. I’m lucky I only got my hours cut back.

It never occurred to me, 25 years ago, that I was getting into a centuries’-old industry that was going to die in my lifetime.

Nobody I knew saw the Internet coming. Maybe one of the Jeffs, but I didn’t know them at the time.

So now I’m having to get up to speed—and quick—on the skills of my alternative industry, website building. Fortunately, The Missus is a certifiable genius at this Wordpress shit.

I’m just afraid that the stuff I’m learning now won’t be worth a damn in five years. Five years is forever in Internet time.

Just the same, I’ve been working my ass off on it. Also creating and formatting and uploading the content for my self-promotional site, which is a full-time job in itself.

Then my poor sister lost her job, that she’d been training for it seems like forever, after only a couple weeks. Another loved-one’s marriage went down the crapper at about the same time—he was cuckolded  then literally robbed of their entire joint assets by his missus, a couple days before all that lovely money was going to be gone, invested in a down payment on a house.

Because I am trying to subscribe to the New Civility, I will not discuss the character of the wanton involved in this matter any further.

There’s more shit going down that I am enjoined from going into here, but suffice it to be said, nobody gets out of here with their ass intact. Everywhere I turn is heartache and despair. It’s like we’re living a country/western song. “I was drunk the day my Mom got out of prison…”**

Then just this week, this assknuckle legislator in our adopted state proposes eliminating Kindergarten (except for three weeks—WTF?) for all kids not deemed “at-risk” by the state. That would definitely describe our kid. So because we’ve been good parents, this bill, if it becomes law, will penalize our son for that.  At a time when his educational and social engines are supposed to be firing on all cylinders.

You know, we fled Christmas Island because that state, too, was hemorrhaging money and The Missus found a great gig here. But I honestly don’t think California would put childhood education on the chopping block like this. This guy is quoted in the article as saying that canceling Kindergarten would be actually be good for kids because it would give parents “more time to work with them.”

Which parents are those, the ones who are wealthy enough to afford one-income households and job-out the child-rearing to foreign domestics, or the working-poor parents who need both full-time incomes to make ends meet? In what fantasy world does the nonsense this lawmaker is saying make a bit of sense?

Every once in a while, the fact that we’ve moved to a blood-red state comes back to kick us in the ass and this could be one of those times. I’m gonna write a letter to my Congressman.

That’s another thing. I’ve been missing California, especially its progressive marijuana laws.

I used to do a lot of shit when I was younger. Unless it involved a needle, I was willing to give it a try. From Bubble Yum bubble gum, to Pepsi to speed to booze and pills, I’ve tried it and probably liked it. And a lot of the stuff I “gave a try” became unwelcome, long-term fixtures in my life.

As I got older, I shrugged off the worst of them. First the speed, then ten years later the booze, then later that same year, the pills. And every time I shook one of the big monkeys off my back, my life improved. Hugely.

Except those times I’ve tried to quit smoking weed. It turns out I’m a A+ type personality. If I was wildly successful in my field—like a rocket scientist or a movie director—I could get away with being my full, unmedicated self. Shit, I’d be celebrated for how big an asshole I am.

But back here in the real world, the unfiltered me is no fun to live with.

Plus, my last year in California, I had a legitimate prescription for chronic back pain. I was so elated that in my dotage, I had become a completely law-abiding citizen. A far cry from my misspent youth. And being crime-free felt better than you can imagine, unless you’ve been a petty thug with aspirations to a better life yourself at some point.

I was always tell people I believe in redemption because, baby, I have been to the mountaintop and I know it exists.

Except now here I am, back in the trenches again, a would-be criminal who can’t find a crime to commit. I’ve exhausted virtually every avenue of approach in my new home town, and I’m on a countdown clock to zero, against my will, for the first time in more than 30 years. I’m grateful to everyone who has helped along the way, but I’ve never had this much trouble in my life finding an ongoing, reliable connection. I guarantee I could have found meth in this town by now—I’ve met guys clerking at corner stores who could definitely hook me up—but pot? Nada. I might as well be in search of the Holy Grail.

What makes it even more frustrating is that the little bit of weed I’ve managed to score since moving here has been of outstanding quality. So I know it’s out there, there’s just an invisible, insurmountable barrier between me and it. I tell ya, not since I was in high school… in Arizona, where of all places, they now have civilized pot laws.

Life never runs short of crazy.

As I alluded to earlier, the last time I tried to quit smoking was at the beginning of my cohabitation with The Missus-to-be. It turns out, I am an intolerable prick in my pure state. She eventually begged me to get back on the stuff, and she came from a strict Just Say No background.

And back then, everything else was coming up roses.

Anyway, I’m sure it will be fine in the long run. I’ve joined NORML, which I cannot conceive will not eventually lead me to the like-minded individual I seek, but I’m close enough to the edge right now that I’ve already started pre-withdrawals—where a junkie thinks obsessively about the crutch that’s about to be yanked out from under him. (Thus this post...)

And I admit to being a junkie. I’m strung out on it and I need it to get by on a day-to-day basis. Of course, I could be talking about love. Or water. I’m addicted to both of them too, and my life would be worse off if my access to either was cut off.

My point isn’t that weed is as important as either water or love, but that my need for the three, shorn of all context, each could be a description of either addiction or healthy avocation. Another common denominator is that in the past, in the absence of any of the three examples, my life has taken a steep plunge for the OHMYGOD, NO!

What’s different this time is, I can’t afford to have that happen now. This time, I have to keep it together whether I have my crutches or not. It promises to be interesting, at least to me and my immediate family members. (I also find it ironic that I can best handle the thought of going cold turkey when I’m ‘medicated,’ and the more I medicate myself to reduce my impending stress, the closer I bring myself to its full realization.)

I promise not to write about it any more until after its resolution, if then. As I stated at the onset, this post is strictly for posterity. I didn’t expect to learn a lesson by the end of it, or put my arms around my family and laugh heartily till we cut to commercial.

What I do expect is two things: One, it will continue to be a tough slog personally for a while and two, as a working American, this jobless recovery will continue to be a bitch and the unemployment numbers will keep coughing up blood because the jobs that are going away are going away for good.

Because it’s not about outsourcing, it’s about obsolescence. Whole industries are being rendered obsolete by the Internet and it’s only just begun; the Internet has nowhere to go but more ominiverous. When was the last time you used a travel agent, for instance? Paid for porn? Opened a dictionary? A fold-up map?

A newspaper?


*Apologies to Lowell George
**Tip o’ the hat to Steve Goodman