July 23, 2008
In the most recent edition of the New Yorker, David Samuels seamlessly writes about his travels through the California circle of marijuana in the article, “Dr. Kush.”
Despite foggy legislation and varying enforcement measures throughout the state, the “gray-zone” pot economy is legal. Samuels provides the rest of the country with his observations on not only how this new system of previously-taboo drugs works, but also how the legalization is changing the scene.
“The statewide legalization of medical marijuana has allowed for the illusion that farming pot can provide opportunities for travel and cool art projects and personal growth without any corresponding commitment to the perils of a life of crime.”
The weed community is an eclectic community–the recovering hippies, the farmers in Humboldt, the teenagers, the urban hipsters, the businessmen and women looking to relax, and those who actually are in need of medication.
Regardless who you are, or where you come from, finally, the state of California has chosen to look at the positives, rather than the negative side-effects which can be found in everything.
From the artistic creativity, to a less anxious lifestyle, to a more community-oriented, generous mentality, the mainstreaming of weed has proved that marijuana is anything but a weed. While the counterculture, nugget enthusiasts are able to take endless bong rips, the growing legality is offering the mainstream culture at least a little puff, bringing our culture together, and higher.
Read David Samuel’s “Dr. Kush”
July 22, 2008
STS9
This Is Not East Lansing
Carl Is In Here
July 22, 2008
The Unexplicable Monkeys By Day
Monkey Music By Night
The Blur of Tripolee Domes
July 22, 2008
Herman Hesse displayed some of the wisest words I have ever read in his introduction to his novel Demian.
This exceptional book is considered to be Gnostic, possessing that mystic aura of self-realization and introspection. Appropriately, the introduction emphasizes this, encouraging us to understand the significance of each of our stories.
We each do have a story, “worthy of every consideration.” This blog is the beginning of my telling of my story. What is yours?
I cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back. If it were possible I would reach back farther still—into the very first years of my childhood, and beyond them into distant ancestral past.
Novelists when they write novels tend to take an almost godlike attitude toward their subject, pretending to a total comprehension of the story, a man’s life, which they can therefore recount as God Himself might, nothing standing between them and the naked truth, the entire story meaningful in every detail. I am little able to do this as the novelist is, even though my story is more important to me than any novelist’s is to him—for this is my story; it is the story of a man, not of an invented, or possible, or idealized, or otherwise absent figure, but of a unique being of flesh and blood. Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and men—each one of whom represent a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature—are therefore shot wholesale nowadays. If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one us of could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storytelling would lose all purpose. But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. That is why every man’s story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.
Few people nowadays know what man is. Many sense this ignorance and die the more easily because of it, the same way that I will die more easily once I have completed this story.
I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me. My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams—like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.
Each man’s life represents a road towards himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself. Yet each one strives to become that—one in an awkward, the other in a more intelligent way, each as best he can. Each man carries the vestiges of his birth—the slime and eggshells of his primeval past—with him to the end of his days. Some never become human, remaining frog, lizard, ant. Some are human above the waist, fish below. Each represents a gamble on the part of nature in creation of the human. We all share the same origin, our mothers; all of us come in at the same door. But each of us—experiments of the depths—strives towards his own destiny. We can understand one another; but each of us is able to interpret himself to himself alone.
July 22, 2008
Sound Tribe Crowd
Sound Tribe Crowd (2)
Sound Tribe Crowd (3)
July 22, 2008
Primus
Biscuits and Trees
July 16, 2008
Trippy Forest Art
Smoke Weed, Get Drunk, and Fuck
Lotus Christening the Techno Rave Stage
July 16, 2008
I invite you to read one of Hunter S. Thompson’s essays online entitled “Security”
He concludes by asking the question, “Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?”
Because our pursuit of happiness is one of the basic tenets of our existence, his question is important to ponder. In agreement with Thompson, I see the “real” life (as opposed to a mere existence) as comprised of constant newness, experience, and unknowns
The most exhilarating thrills, alongside the most devastating lows, are encountered only when one leaves the security of conformity, of norms, and ventures out into what one really has a burning passion for, that youthful idealism that is unfortunately swallowed by maturity.
He reminds us, “It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must he laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death.”
For those of us who are much more than bystanders, life (with all of its ups and downs) is worthy of all praise.
(read his short essay here: http://www.ram.org/contrib/security.html
July 16, 2008
Sunrise After The Fourth
Cirque de Bassnectar
Sound Tribe Peaceblasting
