A Friend With Weed Is A Friend Indeed

"Hey, Mister. What time is it?"
"Time for you to buy a watch."

Have you heard (or perhaps noticed first-hand) the price of gas? I was up in San Francisco years ago when gas hit $1.99 a gallon on Van Ness Avenue, and it was such a big deal I went and bought a disposable camera to take a picture of the gas station sign. Ha, huh? I've heard since back in the Sixties that whenever anybody would come up with a vehicle that ran on anything other than gasoline, the oil companies would buy the patent and bury the idea. True or false, it sounds like what any multinational corporation would do. Any unscrupulous, sleazy practice or event is simply justified by saying, "It's BUSINESS." Can't argue with that, by golly. That means there's MONEY involved. Amen.

That new TV show premiered last night. Swingtown I think it's called. I didn't need to watch it, I was there, I lived it. Without commercials. Like That '70s Show, which I've never watched either. I'm glad they're on, but it's like the difference between watching a western movie and riding a horse. And besides, it really brings me down seeing movies and shows from back in the Sixties and Seventies, back when folks in large numbers were standing up for their right to have some fun in their lives. Until Ron and Nancy and "Just Say No" somehow came into fashion. And look where we are now. We're loved around the world, have a thriving, happy citizenry, an educational system that's the envy of the world, and we're standing tall on the front lines when it comes to saving future life on the planet. Okay, I'm being facetious. But the U.S. DOES have the #1 prison population per capita in the world. We're got SOMETHING to brag about.

You've heard that a famous sidekick is facing foreclosure on his gigantic house, and actors, singers, and sports stars are more and more doing hard time or paying huge fines for tax evasion. And then there are folks living happily for a year on what these guys can't get by on A Day. Just maybe big over-the-top living isn't success after all, unAmerican as that thought might be. If a CEO is making $200,000,000.oo a year, but doesn't remember what a vacation is and hasn't had sex in years, and then some other guy with a small business or trade, an apartment, a car and a motorcycle, and there's a nearby bar where he's on the pool team and there's dancing to live music Friday and Saturday nights, which one is the richest? ("The less it takes to make you happy, the more fun you have." Me.) In 1973, when asked about weathering the great depression back in the 1930s, an old fisherman on the coast of British Columbia told my friend, "Hell, we ate fish and potatoes during the '20s, during the '30s, through The War in the '40s. We'd go hunting, had our gardens and chickens, our blackberry wine and whiskey stills, everything we needed."

Talking about all the people we have incarcerated, they just now had a piece on the national news about the U.S. Prison Population. They said it's costing 60-billion dollars a year to keep all those folks locked up. Twenty- to thirty-five-thousand dollars a year for each prisoner. There are 800,000 Americans arrested each year just for marijuana, a plant. Tens of thousands of U.S. citizens are behind bars for consensual sex. Yet make big bucks representing invisible people in the sky to the public and you don't have to pay any taxes. (I'm shaking my head.)

Planet Earth, love it or leave it.