Merry Christmas, Stoners

I realize I am a day late as far as recognizing the holiest day on the stoner's calendar.  April 20^th (420) is the day all stoners come together to celebrate their love of smoking pot.

In true stoner fashion, I am writing this blog the day after 420 simply because it is the logical thing to do.  Since we know that stoners are unmotivated people, writing a blog the day after 420 makes perfect sense.  Actually working or moving off of my couch on 420 would be considered sacrilegious by stoners.  Therefore, I am writing the blog today.

I haven't smoked pot in 55 months, 2 weeks and 6 days.  I have been clean from pot since I spent a weekend in Portland  I spent about 10 years of my life getting stoned just about every day up until the year 2000. 

Those 10 years have taught me a lot. 

Here are some reasons why pot is the most awesome drug in history and why everyone should be a pot smoker:

1.       It prevents bad driving.  I will never forget the last time I drove stoned on the freeway.  Cars were honking at me, other drivers were flipping me off and everyone was cutting me off.  I did not understand why until I looked at my speedometer and realized I was going 30 mph. 

2.     The paranoia.  Nothing is more sane than believing that the FBI and CIA are following you while you are driving 30 mph on the freeway.  It was truly a healthy experience to spend 10 years of my life living in paranoia.

3.     The Food.  I love to eat.  Getting stoned makes eating even more fun.  I miss the 3 hours I would spend at the all-you-can-eat buffets everyday when I was stoned.  I miss spending $40 a day on food because I was always hungry.

4.     Sex.  Nothing makes sex more satisfying than being so lazy that getting it up becomes exhausting.  Also, since I was stoned so much I don't recall if I ever got laid in those 10 years.  It's possible I had lots of sex but I just don't remember.

5.     Everyone is funny.  Shit, being stoned made me realize the comical genius of Pauley Shore.  In fact, everyone was funny to me during those 10 years.  Even people who weren't trying to be funny made me laugh.  I miss the days of laughing for no reason.

6.     The Mall.  Being stoned makes shopping fun.  Also, spending an hour trying to remember where I parked after shopping was always the best part.  Once I found my car and got home, I could put on the fancy jewelry and stoner T-shirts I bought.  Apparently, pot enhances your taste in clothes and jewelry. 

7.     I always smelled good.  The ladies love a man drenched in Old Spice and Stetson cologne.  Because I was worried that others would smell the pot on me, I would go through a bottle of cologne a week.

8.     Movies and Music:  Every song was awesome and every movie was hilarious.  Schindler's List and Platoon were especially funny.  Despite the fact I was the only one laughing during these movies, I knew that there was a lot of humor in the holocaust and watching people die in war.     

P.S.  It's time pot is legalized.  It's a joke that our government prohibits pot while being in the drug running business.  Marijuana is natural and serves many medicinal purposes such as being a possible cure to cancer.  It's definitely safer than alcohol. 

Truths are told and Lies are sold

"Truths are told and Lies are sold".


As a kid, like most kids, I considered myself an excellent liar. 

"How come you don't have a dad?"
"My dad is an astronaut.  He works for NASA and spends most of his time in outer space."

The bigger the lie, the more believable it is.  Politicians and children know this.

As a child, my lies weren't always this grand. 

I remember an instance when mom asked, "Did you eat all the ice cream in the freezer?"  With chocolate stains formed on my chin, I replied, "No, I swear it wasn't me.  I came into the kitchen and saw Smokey on the counter licking the whole carton".

I was trying to sell my story.  Specific details, unnecessary details that defied logic to sell this lie.

"So, you're telling me that Smokey, our 80 pound dog, jumped onto the kitchen counter, opened the freezer, used his paws to grab the ice cream carton, removed the lid and then proceeded to eat a gallon of ice cream?"

"Yes, mom.  I was doing my homework and watching TV over on the couch."

When people are attempting to be deceptive, they will toss in descriptive details to make the lie sound more believable.   It's a subconscious need to overcompensate for fear that your lie will be recognized.

With children, it's forgivable.  With adults, not so much.

Regardless where one stands in the gun control debate or one's opinion of President Obama, any person with integrity and half a brain, will know this president has been dishonest during this gun control issue. 

How do I know this?  Because he has been busy trying to sell his story.  Truth never needs to be sold.  Using children as props, saying the loss of "innocent" children must be stopped by removing a certain type of weapon is manipulative and disingenuous.

Politicians are very adept at using manipulative adjectives like "innocent" when they want their agenda passed.  So, are the children our government kills in third world countries with drones less "innocent" than our children who are killed by one lunatic?

What's the difference between a serial killer like Ted Bundy who kills 20 women and a politician in a suit that invades a country or uses drones to kill thousands?  There is no difference except, thousands is a bigger number than the serial killer's 20 murders.

Remember when Madeleine Albright, the Secretary of State under President Clinton. stated that the murder of 500,000 Iraqi children was worth it?

Were those children less "innocent" than the 20 plus children that may have been killed in Sandy Hook? 

No.

Now, I'm not really out to attack Obama because the last few presidents we've had, all have been disturbingly big liars.

Just last week, V.P. Joe Biden stated, "“Nothing we are going to do is going to fundamentally alter or eliminate another mass shooting." 

Finally, someone is telling the truth.  He didn't start talking about "innocent" children or tell horrific details about crime victims being shot to death.  He simply stated what any person with integrity and half a brain knows.... gun laws only hurt law abiding citizens.

Of course, Biden didn't mean to tell the truth but this freudian slip truth reveals that stricter gun laws have absolutely nothing to do with stopping crime or saving "innocent" children.  

You can do the math why "they" want to do away with guns at this specific moment in time.  I'll give some clues:  Go look at what the Dept. of Homeland Security is spending their budget on.  Go ask any non-partisan economist about the upcoming dollar collapse.  Go read the words of all the politicians that are saying a new world order or world government is on the way.

Here I will help.... Joe Biden, April 10th, "“The affirmative task we have now is to actually create a new world order."


These aren't conspiracy theories.  These are facts.  When the dollar collapses, gas prices will literally be inflated to 3000% in one day.  No gas means no food in stores.  Our bank accounts will literally contain nothing but worthless paper and thin air.  There will be riots everywhere.  The expenditures on weapons and military vehicles purchased by the DHS will be in full force.  Our guns are the only thing standing in "their" way.

That is a fact. 

This isn't an attempt to scare anyone or attack the current president.  This has been in the works for decades.  We are just now finally reaching the end game.

But "truthfully", this is about all the lies we are being fed daily and the conditioning they've prepared us for over the last few decades.

If you want to know if your politician is lying to you, listen carefully.  He or she will sound just like you did when you were a child.

Roger Ebert: truth and beauty

It's always a little disconcerting when someone you grew up with, dies.

I am not referring to a childhood best friend or a next door neighbor or that family friend that took you fishing at 5:00 a.m. on a cool October morning because your own dad didn't even care about your own existence.

No, I am not even referring to the gentle eyed Home Room teacher from 6th grade that laughed at your jokes, tolerated your need to act out in class and somehow reached deep into her pockets to pay for your trip to Washington D.C. because she knew that this little church excursion would mold you into the man you are today.

It's a whole different feeling when someone you grew up with from the belly of your television set, dies.



They're dropping like flies, them TV and music stars, said a friend to me after Whitney Houston left.

I think we just tend to notice more when it's someone we grew up with regardless if we admired that person.  Death is a part of life.  We blindly accept that fact UNTIL it's someone we know or think we know.

Today, Roger Ebert died. 

A man who infamously revolutionalized this genre of TV shows called "Film Critiquing".   His brilliance lied in his writing but in this microwaving minute rice, always in a rush, information age of sound bites and photo ops, Mr. Ebert's legacy will be his thumbs up/thumbs down movie reviews on his 30 minute TV show.

A piece of Americana died today.  Thoughts of nostalgic moments flood my mind as I recall those instances his reviews caused a reaction from me; like that time, I found him to be an uptight snob because he failed to see the humor I saw in Joe Dirt. 

The brilliance of this man is evidenced by my reactions and others like me as he stated his own opinions of movies.  If someone can elicit anger from us just by the mere elegance of their well written prose, we are in the presence of a great communicator and an unappreciated talent.

I believe Roger Ebert is and was an unappreciated talent. 

You don't have to be writing about historical events with some regional dialect to be considered a modern day Mark Twain.  The beauty of excellence is it can be found in the most mundane pages of one's own diary or as in the case of Mr. Ebert, on the pages of the Chicago Sun Times where he for 46 years, courageously wrote about what he knew best, movies.

Today, an icon left us.  He will never be duplicated because his style, his talent and his thoughts were completely his own and expressed with such Twain-ian ease that regardless if you loved him or hated him, leaves an illustrious legacy behind him. 

I grew to appreciate this man as I began to regularly read his movie reviews regardless if it was a cinematic masterpiece or some buried in crap movie (as he called it), Joe Dirt.

The moment for me when I fully recognized Mr. Ebert's sagacity was after I read his review of my favorite movie, (500) Days of Summer:

One thing men love is to instruct women. If a woman wants to enchant a man, she is wise to play his pupil. Men fall for this. Tom set out in life to be an architect, not a poet of greeting cards. He and Summer share the same favorite view of Los Angeles (one you may not have seen before), and he conducts for her an architectural tour. This is fun not because we get to see wonderful buildings, but because so rarely in the movies do we find characters arguing for their aesthetic values. What does your average character played by an A-list star believe about truth and beauty?

Truth and beauty.

Those two words, in my mind, will be Roger Ebert's gift to those of us left behind.


It feels like I lost a friend today.