A Streetlevel View of Legal Pot

I'm not David Brooks, but allow me for a moment to extrapolate from two encounters with marijuana users I've had in the past twenty-four hours.

I stopped at a convenience store to pick up a soda pop; I was thirsty, and had been more or less "good" all day about my diet, and it was promising to be a long night ahead. While I was browsing the aisles, two women, one black and one latino, stood aside while a third woman, who was white, negotiated with the store manager for the purchase of what I thought she called "a hunter's scale." I had no idea what that was. The two other women, interested onlookers of some sort, were discussing the merits of slapping their child, especially the different effects it has on boys rather than girls. All three had the rough look, but the racial mix was fascinating; it was the kind of thing you see on a poster for "These are the women your charity helps" sort of thing.

I found the soda I wanted and walked back to the counter. She was still negotiating, but as she stood there, she said, "I can't tell, I think it's just a tenths scale, but I wanted a hundreths scale." Ah, I had mis-heard. "Can you tell?" she asked me.

On the counter was a tiny box about the size of a cell phone. She was weighing her earrings on it. "It's all about where the dot is. Everything left goes up, everything right goes down. Left: Ones, tens, hundreds of grams. Right, tenths. And then hundredths, if there was room for another number, but there's not. That scale only measures tenths."

"Well, that's not what we want," said one of the other women. "That won't tell us if the dispensary is ripping us off or not."

"Oh, I'm sure they are," said the woman at the counter. "You go ahead," she told me. "I'm gonna see if I can find a hundreths scale over there."

The second was a bit of voyeurism. She was one of those people whose overall affect announces, with some curious pride, that she was overfed and undereducated. She spent the entire bus ride on her phone, talking to her beau. "I'm so glad you're out, baby. I'll see you after work. Eight months is way too long to wait, I don't want to see you end up back there again. I don't know why we keep getting into so much trouble. I spent time in there, too, I know how bad it can get. But after work today, I got the rolling papers. I got my dispensary card. Hell, yes. I told some doctor I was all stressed out and had this pain in my neck and shoulder and shit, and he just gave me the note, and the place across the street hooked me up that same day."

I have, I hope, a bit of empathy for people who live on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. I have no illusions that my comfortable upper-middle class existence is anything but contingent on several happy accidents, the first of which involves being born white, male, and to parents who could afford to have me comprehensively educated. (A moral education took a lot longer, frankly.) I understand, to some extent, the way my privileges give me the free time and extra bandwidth necessary to plan my day and look further forward than my next meal or my next bed. Or my next drink, for that matter.

Yet between the conversation about the efficacy of smacking children, the socioeconomic costs of marijuana consumption, and the deception implied by that "... and shit" in the latter's conversation, and it feels to me as if both our culture and marijuana have a long way to go before the needs of real human beings are being met with something other than involuntary ignorance, bread, wine, and circuses from the cradle to the grave.

Another night in Night Vale

Last night, Kouryou-chan and I went out for a night in Night Vale, a twice-monthly podcast of "public radio community updates" for the small town of Night Vale, a place where pleasant people live a life of unpleasant and distinctly creepy surroundings. The local sherrif's station is known as "The Secret Police," on Street Cleaning Day you are advised to run and hide, preferably in your basement, and make no sound or motion at all as street cleaners are drawn to heat and vibration, and where there is a dog park but: "Do not go into the dog park. Don't even look at the dog park. Dogs are not allowed in the dog park. There may sometimes be hooded figures in the dark park. Do not talk to the hooded figures in the dog park."

When we got there, line went down two block and around a building. It was more that ¾ women, mostly in their mid-20s to early 30s, many dressed up. Kouryou-chan and I had to walk from the theater down those two blocks and around the building; she wore a Homestuck Heart hoodie, and every couple of steps someone would shout out "Homestuck!" or "Prince of Heart!" or "Dirk Strider!" A fourteen-year-old enthusiast hearing that much validation from an audience of other women had her walking on air. She was entirely too bubbly.

The line moved quickly. She wanted to get a balcony seat but I argued for the front, and by a miracle we found two seats, not side-by-side, but one in front of the other at the end of their rows in the middle-right aisle. Two women in the row in front of hers recognized her hoodie and there was instant female bonding. Then the woman across from her pulled out her phone, which had a screensaver of Kida from Durarara on it. Kouryou-chan shouted "Kida-chan!" and then those two were off and chatting. She completely opened up in a way I've rarely seen.

The show itself was amazing. Man, that was one angry accordion player, but then Cecil, the narrator, came on and, between the community calendar, the weather report, the sponsor's message, the horoscope (Mine was: "Taurus. Today is the day you change everything. No, sorry, I read that backwards. Today is the day everything changes you.") and the local interest segment, as well as Cecil's concerned call to his boyfriend Carlos, Cecil told a very strange and creepy report. "Listeners, we've just received word that a librarian has broken out of its cage and is loose in the streets!"

In Night Vale, that's a major disaster.

It was just a guy on stage reading a script, but he read it amazingly well. And he worked it into audience participation. When he called his boyfriend and they exchanged "I love yous," the entire audience melted down into a puddle of squee. It was insane.

And when it was over, Kouryou-chan and the six women surrounding her became a chorus of incoherent fangirling, screaming and cheering and just making the craziest of times. It was wonderful to behold. The babbling continued until we were two blocks from the theater, Kouryou-chan trading stories with a blue-haired high schooler whose tired-eyed mother looked like she understood Night Vale even less, now that she'd seen it up close.

I got it, though. And I'm happy to have been allowed to give it to Kouryou-chan. We got home, and Omaha and I had no trouble putting our happy, exhausted fangirl to bed.

Now I have to listen to the rest of the show.