Everything changes. Nothing’s permanent. Even Buddha must die. But Buddha, high on life as the enlightened one is, might first want to fire up a doobie.
I’m even contemplating a kushy return to the weed, a holy pilgrimage to the sacred plant that once fed my head and led me on a path of experimentation and creativity. I never smoked bales of weed but toked enough to understand both the appeal and the paranoia associated with the wired world. Friends always shared during those mostly college years – always willing to tempt and tantalize and send me on my way to the wild blue yonder. Unlike liquor, wine or beer, weed took my tongue, leaving me silently stoned to listen for lost music chords whenever and wherever they might play.
I first smoked marijuana in 1969, copping a taste from the pole vaulter on my high school track team, mixing the herb with cigarette tobacco – which I hear hip Europeans are now doing – and smoking the blend in one of my Irish grandfather’s pipes my dad inherited after his father’s death. Sacrilege, I know. But when you think about it, the pipe served as a divine instrument to engage in a spiritual ritual countless people describe as a religious experience.
I stopped using illegal drugs in 1974 when I graduated from Penn State and took a job as a state prison drug and alcohol counselor. I didn’t stop drinking, though, the difference being pot was illegal. After changing jobs I started getting high again, only hanging up the bong when I started work in the newspaper business in the early 80s and decided I couldn’t very well investigate public officials’ bad behavior if I was engaged in bad behavior of my own.
Credibility meant something and still does.
I haven’t smoked a joint for more than 35 years and don’t expect to start anytime soon. As a recovered Marlboro chain smoker who kicked butts and is clean for more than 25 years, I believe inhaling anything into my lungs is bad. I haven’t eaten beef, pork or poultry in about 25 years, either, but that’s another story. So is daily zazen.
But let’s get back to the weed.
California legalized medical marijuana long before I moved there in 2002. The 2017 Golden State rollout of recreational weed then opened the market for fun and profit. By then, after leaving paradise at the end of 2006, I had been living in legal pot-free Scranton, Pa. for a decade. Now that we, too, have medical herb, I’m wondering when I might jump on the THC train, apply for a card and head down to the pot shop for some CBD cream for my chronic osteoarthritic hip pain.
But what’s this got to do with “Blood Red Syrah?”
The weird, wacko Weed Eaters – a psycho band of Northern California pot farmers – make quite a mark in my novel. What’s left of these outlaws will show up in the sequel I’m currently writing, another chiller thriller called “Dune Wine.” Culled from the magic hoocha weed cannabis plant from which a lovable Central Coast sand dune hermit brews the best, most potent dope wine in the world, the blending of hoocha weed and wine is a marriage made in heaven.
“Dune Wine” also ramps up the drama of cut-throat corporate pot industry executives as well as Mexican cartel gunfighters who want to make as much money cutting as many Cali cannabis corners as possible, come hell or poison pesticides. Marijuana will likely one day rule the world if it already doesn’t. On a perfect planet, the “Dune Wine” publisher would print the whole book from hemp. The grass is always greener where the stoners rock and roll.
So I’m seriously considering spreading thick, legal CBD butter on my hip when we hit Cali for our second book tour in April, a psychedelic trip highlighted by a two-day appearance at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the largest book fair in the country. Maybe not, though. Maybe I should settle for spreading smashed avocado on toast with a dash of salt and a Cabrito blue agave tequila chaser. Maybe I should rub that on my hip.
Maybe all of the above.
Ay caramba!