On Friday we packed up and headed out to our chum’s cabin on Redacted Creek (she asks me not to name it online) on the American River in the Sierra foothills. Good timing: the Bay Area spent the long weekend reeling under an almost unprecedented heat wave (106° in San Francisco? Fuck me. As an acquaintance put it “but it’s a dry, annihilating heat”), and although we had to traverse the cauldron of the Central Valley, we found the temperature endurable in the mountains, and in any event I spent most of Saturday, Sunday and Monday contemplating nature’s splendor from a folding chair, sternum-deep in the river. Well, truth to tell, Saturday was a little short on peaceful contemplation, as a couple of families of daytrippers with a dozen energetic splashing urchins between them were contending with me for that stretch of riverbank, but for the couple of days after that I was left largely undisturbed. Our friend mmoffitt will perhaps be disappointed to learn that I took advantage of a happy confluence of events—the wild riparian environment, our recent visit to a neighboring state that unlike California has already established retail channels for cannabinoids, and my impending separation from BDS (in the vanishingly unlikely event they demand a sample of tissue or fluid for testing during the next three weeks I will gaily tell ’em to piss up a rope)—to absorb the scenery in an augmented state of mind, pleasantly free-associating in mid-stream as my thoughts scampered nimbly from crag to crag. I haven’t visited these realms much over the past couple of decades, and had forgotten how satisfying I used to find it.

If you’d asked me in, say, 1978 when we could expect to see marijuana legalized, I would have guessed 1983 at the outside. It’s astonishing to think that it took almost forty years for it to happen in California. I wish you all like good fortune in your respective jurisdictions.

cordially,

Rand to spousette: Aren’t we running perilously low on fuel?

Spousette to Rand: Not to worry. There are still another couple of gallons left when it says “E.”

(Vehicle stalls out)

Rand to spousette: Apparently it also says “E” when the tank is empty.

Spousette to Rand: Why are you always criticizing me?

Fortunately the vehicle began to cough and sputter near an onramp, and I only had to trudge half a mile through brutal heat to purchase a container and fuel.

cordially,

I’m not making this up.

cordially,