I STILL HATE THIS

LAUGHING GAS
In the early days of smoking grass, the only available stuff came from the lower reaches of Mexico. Long before our local hippies (& Beatniks) knew you could grow your own, we few hard core (artists, jazz musicians & a few scattered derelict) had to find sources from Michuacan. At that time there were various strains of pot but it was basically what is called "shake", just the leaves, stems & seeds. These days all you can buy is just the bud of the plant, no leaves at all. Well, the gist of my problem is that the old stuff transformed one into a totally hilarious state, rendering everything extremely funny. (& I mean extreme!). My problem is that nowadays all one can get is these powerful BUDS that makes you a total zombie & that may be f ine for some folks, but I would rather retain some sort of ambulatory control. It can be so much fun! Well, forget it, I’m getting too old for this stuff, anyway.
BUMPER STICKERS are such a pathetic method of expressing your views. Do people really think they are changing the world when their only type of voting is sticking clever slogans on the back of their car, so I have to get an insight ot their miseraqble concept of life? Most of these poor, misguided creatures believe the old adage that there can be "Peace on earth & goodwill toward all men". Wouldn't that be just wonderful, except for a couple of reasons; since the recorded history of mankind, say, from 8000 BC, we have been killing, raping, maiming our fellow man for a few reasons, like religion, land or because I wanted you to become my slave. But let's be real. Nowdays it's mostly religion that is responsible for all the mayhem. And not just one religion against another, but the same one (Christianity,(Cathlics vs. Protestant) Islam,(Shiite vs. Sunni) Biddhist’s fighting each other due to some abscure concept of the other's dogma.
Let's try an experiment. Everyone just forget about their religion for a while. Would there be much to kill your neighbor about? Well, sure, his wife, his land, his Porche.
Would the British be able to let the Irish govern their own country? Would Pol Pot have killed off so many millions if their ethnicitiy was not connected to a different religion?
MAGAZINE INSERTS - the very first thing I do when I receive a magazine is go thru it and tear out all the damn HEAVY PAPER INSERTS ADVERTIZING SOME Fabulous deal that I don't give a damn about. Does anyone really send any of these things in? If so, they are contributing to my misery by supporting this insidious form af advertising.
NEWSPAPER HIDE 7 SEEK - My mornings are pretty routine but very special as I dress, complete my toilet (A pretty quick routine) get the cappucino going, pick up the paper in the drivway, when I hit the wall as I struggle to separate the real meat of the paper from the shit I am not interested in. Here's where I meet my nemisis every bloody morning of my life, the cretin who's sole job is to comlicate my life, the miserable person who figures out how to stack the sections of the paper so that I have to handle the adds, separating the wheat from the chaff, sorting this from that. They must stay up nights figuring new ways to frustrate us readers. The worst part of all is the partial overlay of the FUNNIES! Then every once in awhile he/she/it will install a piece on the funnies (I find them funny especial if they're political) that I have to actually try to tear it off but it never quite tears evenly and I lose the punch line of Doonesbury that I ripped off unevenly.
THE LOTTERY - The anti-gambeling Christians (Anti Fun) have been able to keep that horror of morality away from us unknowing souls for so long until the American Indian got his revenge and sidestepped deftly any laws that prohibited having fun. First of all, let me say that I don’t gamble. But, if I was running a lottery, I would only give away minimum amounts of say, 2 million. That would mean you would end up with less than one mil after Uncle Sam got his cut, but hey, that could enhance my life. But in reality, lotteries are run by giving away millions in $5, $10, increments to sucker in all the poor souls, giving them the illusion that they have won something due to the fact that all gamblers automatically forget all the money they've lost beforehand. So the concept is that the dough is saved up until there is 20 or 30 MILLION that someone will win. It makes the bookkeeping easier for Uncle Sam who will reap more that half of that, but it usually demolishes the poor winner who trades in his broom or dishwasher job for being an instant millionaire. Doesn't anyone get it that when the pot gets that high that everyone else buys tickets so that the odds (This is gambling, right?)go up and your chance of winning are even less than when it's a low pot? Probably not. I don't participate in games of chance except trying to make a good living as an architect, which is chancy enough
FOOD & WINE PAIRING;
We've alll been brainwashed all our lives about how you must drink white wine with fish & red with steak. Now I see that the experts are telling me what kind of beer to eat with fish or meat. Give me a break! What's next? Pairing all 20 flavors of vodka with your favorite dish? I find white wine rather insipid unless it's 100 degrees in the shade, and if it's that hot, I'll make sangria. In fact, I relish those days as it forces me to whip up a batch of some real stuff that has rum, Triple Sec as well as the usual suspects of wine & OJ in it. I got this direct from a sidewalk cafe in Barcelona, where Columbus returned from his gutsy journey over the edge of the earth.
But I digress.
Actually, it's about time someone put something in vodka, as up till recently, it was pure ethanol, you could probably burn it in your Formula One race car. I've always wondered how in hell they were able to do vodka tastings, differentiating one ethanol from another & getting blotto in the meantime. Now if they put a flavoring in it at least the graphics on the bottle is improved. But I feel good when I can get a bottle of potato juice from Trader Joe's that has a Russian label on it and has not been manipulated. It still tastes like nothing but has the advantage that my wife can't smell it on my breath.