Fucked Up Again, Naturally

Fucked Up Again, Naturally

I harp on my mental deficiencies a lot but I don’t apologize because one of the principle reasons I started this cyber-journal, was so that I could work some of these matters out on paper. This is an extremely inexpensive form of therapy.

So if having my mood spectrum disorder shoved in your eyeballs is getting monotonous, then you may want to consider shifting to a more conventional site, where never is heard a discouraging word, and the bong never gets dirty. I have found much to appreciate about the process of writing out my thoughts, reviewing them, and then trying to decide if what I am looking at is gibberish or not.

I have no plans to abandon ship on this format.

With that preamble in place, I’ll just say that being bipolar means do not rock the boat. If I make the decision to journey down to the great metropolis of Willits, as Gluten-Free Mama and I did yesterday, rest assured those plans are meticulously outlined, with nothing being left to chance.

Chance has fucked up more of my good intentions, than any other entity.

No, if I am going to Willits, I have my backpack carefully packed with current book, i-phone, headphones, cannabis, lucky stones and a selection of random paraphernalia that would rival an average woman’s overnight suitcase. Oh yeah, there’s Suzy Puente too, my computer.

Additionally, I have written down our intended destinations for the day, I have compiled a store list and when everything is neatly in line, I’m ready for action-ready for danger. What I’m not prepared for, is to be hit up somewhere on my travels and asked to vary from my established theme, because it rocks my mental boat dangerously close to sinking.

Included in my overview for the excursion, and frequently in bold, is the selection of a place to dine, whether it be breakfast or lunch. Yesterday we chose the pizza place in what used to be Ray’s Shopping Center. I will leave the name conspicuously out of the conversation.

I rarely eat pizza because I rarely eat anything that could be construed as bread. Pizza crust is a lot of bread with some cheese and mushrooms on top, which explains why I crave it so much. My sense of anticipation for this meal was right up there with my need to be back home, so you can figure my expectations were great indeed.

When Gluten-Free Mama decided to pop next door and pay our phone bill, while we waited for our lunch, I assured her that I would guard her pizza with my life should it arrive before she returned. So when it actually did show up a few minutes later, while mine lagged behind, I decided the best way to guard at least one piece of the pizza, was to consume it.

She had gone with the gluten-free crust, as her name implies, and I am here to tell you, this pizza was everything I wanted in a pizza, except maybe not the sausage. Whatever. Different strokes for different folks. The crust was crunchy and the overall effect was stellar.

Imagine my chagrin minutes later, when my own regular-crust cheese and mushroom pizza arrived, and it fell far short of the original effort. Succinctly put, it was grossly undercooked, with the “crust” still very much bread.

There is no technology sophisticated enough to register the level of disappointment I experienced. The higher the expectations, the harder the fall. Send it back? Nooooooooooooooooooo, thank you. I am the least assertive person I know. Besides, just the thought of sending it back conjures up all kinds of uncomfortable images, about how a disgruntled employee might possibly respond to being called out on inefficiency.

Again, no thank you.

Being able to recognize all of this objectively, does not help me when it comes right down to the bottom line. I ate two more of the smallest pieces of the medium pizza, before hanging up the towel and calling for a box.

Someone more capable than I, would have either asked for a reheat or a new pizza and not batted an eye. I recognize that; it’s the difference between having a mood spectrum disorder and not. This information, and a lot more than a quarter, will buy you a cup of coffee.

Do I not return to this establishment? After all, the last time I came here, I liked the pizza but had to eat a plain cheese one because when I said cheese and mushrooms, the only part that got written down was the cheese. I can get pizza up in Eureka, I can order Papa Murphy’s and heat it up at home (best idea) or I can buy a frozen pizza. 

Besides, it’s not as though Willits doesn’t have seven Mexican food establishments, from which to choose.

trump Comes to Laytonville

trump Comes to Laytonville

Not literally, thank Buddha, but symbolically the weak-brained, self-aggrandizing oaf is very much present in our community; there can be no mistake about that. Otherwise I would not be taking this summer off from watching the action down at Harwood Park, as the local teams are gearing up for another action-packed season on the baseball diamond.

We are juggling this Saturday’s upcoming family gathering so that SmallBoy can get a practice in down at the yard. Over the past two summers, this information has added a pleasant sense of anticipation to my outlook on life and the ensuing summer months, but not so this year.

I will find it impossible to sit down in the stands, popping up every two minutes to snap a photo, and feel comfortable. Despite being a member of this community for more than 35 years now, I am still very much a stranger in a strange land.

That much became more than evident last fall and winter, as political events unfolded that have shocked and saddened me beyond comprehension. In my initial disbelief, I lashed out passionately at what I saw as a brutal attack on the most basic of my beliefs: that people are created equally. To attack one race or culture, is to attack me and mine.

To support a fraudulently elected man, an individual who has made it clear that he is a racist, is to stand alongside him as he plunders the Constitution. I cannot and will not do that. I can’t stop him but I can put up a strong defense against his machinations.

Not only that, I have absolutely no influence over anyone who does support this tyrant, a self-serving billionaire, who gets his jollies out of squeezing the last drop of blood from the weak and elderly in this country.

I’m done with the dialogue-over it a long time ago. That doesn’t mean there is not still much to say; it simply means I do not have the temperament to do the saying.

If I weren’t already bipolar, I sure would have gotten to that point on my own, after watching the wealthy lawmakers of our nation, align with their leader in efficiently going about the business of stripping every beneficial measure that exists, right off the backs of the weak and ill. It is enough to piss off the pope.

Oh come on, I can hear you saying, leave that shit behind and enjoy the game.

Easy for you to say but impossible for me to do. If

the folks around me think I’m a dick for being opposed to racism, and disdaining the president, how am I supposed to ignore that feeling, and concentrate on a baseball game? Besides, I personally have a hard time watching players, that I know do stand firmly in their support of a billionaire, who gouges the American public and sets his kids up in positions of authority.

I can’t cheer for a player who has made a good play, when I know I am cheering for a person who is furthering the pain and misery that exists in this world, instead of doing something about it. It goes against the grain so I will just do myself a favor and skip a summer.

Any thought that this is the coward’s way out, is balanced by the thought that my own peace of mind is more important to me than proving anything to anyone. Whereas my presence might be a distraction, my absence will never be noticed.

A year from now, after his criminal behavior has brought an end to his tyranny and the billionaire boor is gone, I will come back. As it stands, I ain’t skeered but I ain’t stupid either. 

My bipolarism is all on paper as far as anyone knows and I’d like to keep it that way.

Tip-Toe Through the Mustard Greens

Hey there JT,

As you might imagine, you are featured in those three spiral notebooks that Mama kept on me, something that fascinates me because she fills in a lot of the missing pieces. I have written on multiple occasions about the time when we were bosom buddies, with no academic worries because we had not yet started school.

We spent long afternoons exploring the tall mustard greens in the vacant lot next door, building forts both outdoors and in and playing store with “groceries” provided by Mama, in the form of empty cereal cartons, metal saltine cracker boxes and a wealth of other durable goods.

What the spiral notebooks do is present the foundation of our friendship, from the omniscient perspective, a recounting of information that lets me know that the ties that bind us together, even after we went a couple of decades with almost no communication, go deep.

The first entry that Mama made that contained your name was May 28th, 1954, when you would have been eight months old: “He likes Jean, will 'talk' to her, push her swing, pick up her toys, but when I feed her, he comes along to the kitchen and stands next to my chair waiting for spoonfuls of food to go into his mouth.”

While the iron is hot, how about the next entry, maybe seven weeks later on July 17th, 1954? “He likes Jean enormously, at least he is very friendly to her, smiles and talks to her, picks up her toys for her and performs other like services.”

Conversely, three weeks later on August 6th, Mama wrote, “Mark has a little streak of meanness-I guess it’s normal for his age. He thinks it’s fun to throw handfuls of dirt at the kittens, and one day I caught him throwing dirt all over Jean.”

By the time November rolls around, I am becoming a real dirtbag. I like Mama’s tongue-in-cheek reference in this next passage from November 17th: “He and Jean get along but only when they are not together. [Right? lol] That is, they will talk to each other while each is in the crib, but I can’t put them on the floor together. He is jealous of her or maybe he has learned what is his and what is hers. He won’t let her lay even a finger on what is his, and since he regards both rocking chairs, all footstools, and end tables as his private property, things can get difficult. And she doesn’t take it lying down-she hits back and we have lots of tears. But he is scrupulous about giving her what he considers her property, mostly the old rattles and such that bore her now.”

January 2, 1955: They don’t get along at all right now; he picks on her and she fights back.

February 6th, 1955: He is talking more and more now and takes it upon himself to snitch on her when she gets into something. Or he’ll come to me and say, “Jean crying.” She gets into his toys a lot and he doesn’t like it. He plays with her doll-that is, he abuses it, throws it on the floor and steps on it to make it cry.

March 2nd: He has such an idea about what should be and shouldn’t be. He argues with Jean about the words she uses-“toast” for bread and the like…He watches Jean with an eagle eye, and often I hear him say, "No no, Jean!" Or he runs to tell me of some mischief Jean has got into.

Oh, and I apologize in advance for this next one, dated May 22nd, 1955: “He is by turns easy to manage and independent and contrary. He teases Jean and delights in making her cry. It’s not unusual for him to push her down and grab her hair with both hands.”

But I wonder sometimes about what Mama didn’t see, that caused me to be such an obstreperous little snot. Take this entry, for instance, from July 10th, 1955: “Last night I heard a commotion in the kitchen and when I went out there, Jean was standing in front of the counter shouting, ‘Sucker! Sucker!’ and Mark was on a stool trying to get her a sucker (and one for himself) from the top shelf.”

Here is a telling entry from October 13th, 1955: “He is crazy about playing with blankets and pillows and will make a bed on the living room floor, or a tent on the porch. In this way he and Jean will play for hours.” The start of our golden era?

From November of 1955 comes this entry, “I am enormously amused by the way that he and Jean play with their teddy bears and other stuffed toys. They treat the toys just as if they were real children.”

Skip ahead to April 2nd, 1956 for this entry: He is a dreadful tease-seems to delight in aggravating the other boys-not Jean so much. He and Jean get along pretty well right now.”

From May 10th: He plays with Jean and Becky, especially to Jean he adopts a protective and patronizing attitude. “No Jean, not that way!” As an example yesterday, Jean said to Mark, “He (meaning Mama) wants you!” and Mark answered, “Not he-her!” 

Good Buddha, I was already a grammar Nazi.

January 1957: “He teases the older boys and he and Noel scrap all the time. But he plays with Jean nicely and by himself is very pleasant.” Interestingly enough, JT, this would have been about nine months before I started kindergarten, so it makes sense.

May 5th, 1957: He and Jean have a sort of private language-they have watched T V commercials and heard about Alka Seltzer and how “speedy” it acts. So now when they mean something real fast, they call it “speedy Alka Seltzer.” “Let’s run speedy Alka Seltzer!”

Since this is the last entry that mentions you prior to my entering kindergarten, I am going to snip this off, because it was the end of a golden era, even though I only went to school half-day all the way through the end of first grade, so I'm sure our hanging out together was extended.

Mama’s notes clearly indicate that we had our ups and downs early on, but that we got it together in the time period before we entered school, when we had our own thing happening. Our own language? How cool is that? 

Of course those were sweet times, simpler times, and we made the most of it. Our preschool days would seem to have been a microcosm of our lives: We got along early, had a rocky spell (high school) in there somewhere, and then finished out cool.

BTW I am abjectly sorry for pushing you down that time and pulling your hair, so I walked to Sav-on Drugs Store yesterday and bought you a package of M&M’s and a nickel package of Laura Scudders potato chips. 

Will you please forgive me?

"Laugh, Clown, Laugh!"

I cannot escape the allure of those three spiral notebooks, so bear with me as I draw a conclusion or two from the notes Mama kept on me, as I made life miserable for those around me. So cute, you know? 

"Laugh, Clown, Laugh!"

June 5th, 1955: He has suddenly changed from his good-natured little self to a very ornery and contrary little Mark. He wants to do just exactly what he wants and pays little attention to discipline so I have my hands full.

October 13th, 1955: He can be awfully ornery-right at the minute he is acting like a three-year-old. [I was three years, five weeks old.] When I tell him to do something he will ignore me, or just quietly sneak off and hide in a corner, or in the closet.

December 7th, 1955: He has become very difficult to handle, being stubborn and contrary. He wants to do what he wants to do and no more.  He teases Jean and the other boys, stands in front of the TV set so nobody else can see and pulls such other ornery stunts.

February 23rd, 1956: He is right now very difficult and rebellious. If I tell him not to do something, it’s as good as a guarantee that the minute I turn around he’ll do it.

May 19th, 1963: I can see I haven’t written about Mark for a long time. I don’t know why-he is a character and causes me lots of headaches. For one thing he is a clown. He goes around making remarks and cracks to the other boys with the result that they-one or all-are always angry at him.

February 26th, 1964: Personality wise he is enough to drive a poor mother into the nut house. He is a clown from the word go…

July 1st, 1964: Mark is quite a problem at times-he is very contradictory in character…He has this peculiarity of personality that clashes with a lot of people. He is annoying because he is noisy. He chatters about nothing; he is persistent to the point of driving a person stark, raving mad.

April 26, 1965: He is absolutely the most stubborn, persistent, one-way character I’ve ever seen. Once he gets an idea in his head, he never lets it go.

And back by popular demand, is this gem from May 29th, 1969: Mark seems to be almost a typical teen age boy, if such a thing is possible. His interests are those of most boys and his attitude also. He is loud, rude, rebellious, belligerent, anti-everything, rarely appears to study, and knows every popular singer, group and recording out.

I am sensing a theme here. 

In the earliest of these entries, I had only three older brothers, to be joined down the line by thee more. Talk about caught in the middle. I also have two younger sisters, so for me to get what I considered to be my fair share of parental attention, I had to go into my act on a regular basis.

My older brother Eric christened me Clown, or Clownie, and was often heard to intone, “Laugh, Clown, laugh.” He was not likely to be amused when addressing me thusly. Brian’s moniker for me was The Babe, and we’re not talking baseball here. It’s no wonder Mama makes so many references to having to play referee, in order to keep things down to a roar.

Whether I was doing my patented “Touch me in five seconds, I will fill-in-the-blank,” thereby inciting potential chaos by having kids chasing all around the house, or simply being “loud, rude, rebellious and belligerent,” I was always in Mama’s headlights. It was all about seeking the spotlight.

Shockingly, I was unable to avoid military service the final year of the draft; had I known at the time it was to be the final year, I can guarantee you I would have dug my heels in much deeper, but such is the nature of water under the bridge. Gone and best forgotten. I am the person I am today, in part, because of this time in the Big Green Machine.

And as always, Mama was called upon to referee, this time the opponents being loneliness and depression. Having worn this cap during WWII, while Papa and her brothers were in the service, Mama sported it brilliantly. She kept me supplied with letters, treats, cards sympathy and most importantly, love.

As always, I was her problem child, and as always, she came to my aid. She let me know I was not going crazy, just a little nuts, but that it would pass when I got out, and came home. She guaranteed it in her letters to me, and she was right.

And though she’s gone now, Mama’s words remain with me, and it’s a damn good thing. I still need a referee at times and who better than her? She used to ask Gluten-Free Mama, “Well, is he behaving himself?”

GF Mama always said yes, and as long as my Mama was standing there, I was…

Making the Hurt Go Away

Making the Hurt Go Away

The time I endured in the military was made infinitely more bearable by the support I received from everyone at home. Mama had advised me upon my departure, that if I wanted to get mail, I needed to write letters first, and so I did.

I must have had a particularly rough go of it at one point in time, and spewed it out on paper, because I got this letter from Mama on November 1st, 1972, in response. It was addressed to “Markie Baby,” and in it she was able to articulate exactly what needed to be said; looking over it now, I marvel at her ability to convey the perfect sentiment at just the right time. She wrote,

“But you can always unload the stuff on me; if it makes you feel better to let it all hang out, you can write it to me. I think back a long, long time, fifteen, eighteen years, to when you were a little kid and when you got hurt or somebody pushed you around you’d come in crying. I used to hold you in my lap, or put my arms around you and make “the hurt go away.” But now you’re not a little kid anymore, or even a big kid, you’re a man and doing a man’s job every day, a cruddy, dirty, detestable, job which you abhor and hate with a passion. But you’re doing it and doing it as well as you can and keeping your head on straight while you’re doing it. I can’t take you in my lap like I did when you were a baby. Right now I can’t even put my arms around you like a mother wants to, but I can tell you that I think about you and feel what you’re feeling and know your pain.”

Even now, 45 years later, the words soothe, cascading over me like the aloe vera oil that takes the sting away from a burn, or the cannabis salve that eases the pain from the dirt-caused cracks in my fingers and heels.

The comfort derived from these words is inestimable, simply because the setting was so abysmal. Amidst the triviality of the comings and goings at home, that which made up the bulk of Mama’s letters, might be a passage like the one above.

Mama sure could turn a phrase, and in doing so, she made a lot of “the hurt go away.”

Family

Family

I have been in cruise mode for a week or so, building strength for a series I am writing in my head, while recovering from some physical discomfort, caused by once again overdoing it. Though splitting wood with the big iron merely requires feeding it a steady diet of already cut oak and madrone, there was much back-bending and arm-wrestling with individual rounds too big to pick up and put in the truck.

I would do it again in a nano-second because with this last burst, I may just have enough firewood to get us through until summer. Sometimes you just have to take one for the team. Gluten-Free Mama makes it all worth while by informing me how much she appreciates my efforts, obviously instinctively aware that one will work twice as hard when he knows it is appreciated, than otherwise.

Actions speak louder than words but words can make a pretty powerful impression as well, especially when the words come from 7,000 miles away. I have been regaling you with the words Mama wrote in my “baby books,” the three spiral notebooks recently sent to me by my sister JT, but there is more.

This photo was taken two months
after Mama wrote the letter below.

There are the letters Mama sent me while I was in the Big Green Machine, letters I have kept with me, along with all my correspondence from that period, everywhere I have gone in the ensuing 44 years. Not only does her voice come alive when I read her words, the content of those words leaves me flummoxed.

A couple of weeks ago, in a piece entitled, “That’s My Kool-Aid,” I wrote, “When I reflect that I can never remember being told I was loved, I am almost embarrassed to be thinking that I needed to be so informed: I did not. Love was woven into the fabric of our home in so many ways, that the words themselves would genuinely have seemed superfluous.

Imagine my surprise to encounter the following passage in a letter from Mama, dated April 12th, 1972, just a few days over forty-five years ago. It just goes to show that words on paper are more likely to survive the passage of time, than a questionable memory:

“You don’t have to worry about answering any of the letters I wrote; what I said in there was true, and the main problem we have around here is that we haven’t always been communicating too well. Sometimes I think we worry about how it’s going to sound, or maybe we’re embarrassed about showing our emotions. Enough of that. We have to hang together and get closer to each other, or what good is a family? 

Mama's letter, dated April 2nd, 1972

In any case your letters are just as beautiful; your thoughts come through loud and clear and they mean just as much to us here at home. What can you say? Well, when you or anybody else says, ‘I love you,’ they about cover it pretty well, I would say, and ‘I love you’ doesn’t have to refer to a member of the opposite sex. It’s just as important that we all share that love. So hang in there and remember that we’re thinking about you at all times.”

Mama’s ability to articulate the subtle nuances of what constitutes love, is noteworthy. ‘We have to hang together and get closer to each other, or what good is a family?’ she wrote. And she was right. Family is hanging together, and when I was overseas, I always felt that Mama was at the center of a web of love that encompassed everyone within her range of experience.

So I did not worry about what it sounded like, I skipped the embarrassment, and have tried to do so ever since. I tell Gluten-Free Mama that I love her, and then I empty the trash, the compost and the recycling, before going off to split wood for five hours. Sure, I am embarrassed that I am such a light-weight now, that I can’t even split up a little wood, without injuring myself. 

However, that being said, I am also warm and so is GF Mama.

Who's Your Farmer?

Who's Your Farmer?

The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors approved the Medical Cannabis Cultivation Regulation, Tuesday, thus beginning a new era that will see local and state regulation of an industry that up until this point in time, has always remained outside the box. 

Originally the backbone of American medical practices, cannabis was shunted aside in the 1930’s by the progressively greedy component of Big Pharma, and Reefer Madness was born. It has taken eighty years of recovery time, up to this point, for medical cannabis to officially reestablish itself.

My father, having relocated from SoCal to Bell Springs Road in 1977,  started his first patch the following spring, so my family has been in the game for a minute or two. We have experienced our share of the trials and tribulations, for staying outside the conventional boundaries surrounding this gentle giant of herbs.

I use cannabis in lieu of the chemicals originally prescribed for me by the VA, to contend with my mood spectrum disorder, as do a multitude of folks trying to avoid the tangled net that is Big Pharma. Considering the plethora of maladies that cannabis has proven to be able to successfully treat, the fact that the American pharmaceutical industry excludes it, tells you all you need to know about the motivation of these companies: greed.

This fact alone makes the victory at the Board of Supervisors meeting, that much more impactful. Through countless hours of dialogue across the table, which included exchange of ideologies amongst all of those elements who showed up at the table in the first place, the medical cannabis regulation was formed.

The process was laborious, the number of factors involved limitless, the diverse needs of so many had to be taken into consideration, the environmental damage-both past and potential had to be considered and there was so little time, as to make what resulted a true miracle of determination and grit.

The ordinance is not perfect but it tried to build in contingencies for eventual success, by placing time constraints on some parts of the industry that can be extended or not, depending on compliance issues, and how they are being handled by the applicants for the further growing of medical cannabis. 

I do not pretend to have even the most basic understanding of the ordinance actually in place-I have never spent one minute at one single meeting, working to make this happen. I do not have the temperament for the process.

I do know that many individuals have spent countless hours working on the process, including members of HappyDay Farms, and for their efforts I am profoundly grateful. That I am able to continue to produce not only the medicine that allows me to thrive, but food for my family and community, because of these people’s efforts, I am appreciative.

For me to be able to hold my head up proudly, without fear, and say, “I am a medical cannabis farmer,” is priceless.

Thank you all for your efforts; they will never be forgotten.