True story: in the late seventies, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was a munchkin at Flatline, Comatose, Torpor & Drowse, I was taken backstage as part of a tour of a US Customs international mail facility and shown a tabletop heaped high with seized Thai stick: there must have been at least a thousand, stacked loose. I seized a couple of handfuls and buried my face in these, inhaling deeply. “My god,” I whispered reverently, “I’ve never seen this much Thai stick in”—realizing almost too late that I was drawing funny looks from my supervisor and from the Customs staff; hastily dropping the contraband back onto the pile—“um, in fact, I’ve never seen Thai stick before in my entire life!”

Decades later, in the stately marble corridors of the Flatline Building in downtown San Francisco, I passed the head of our legal division going the other way. “Do you smell that?” she asked me. “Smell what?” for indeed I detected no particular scent. “It’s marijuana. I could swear someone’s been smoking marijuana nearby.” “Martha,” I reproached her (I should note here that by this time FCT&D, now BrainDead Systems, had crawled so far up Homeland Security’s arse that we were all now subject to random drug testing) “not only would I never recognize the odor of marijuana smoke, but I’m astonished that you do!” That drew a sour “yeah, right.”

(Even before the BDS era, Flatline was institutionally kinda stuffy, and during my early years in the International Division, some of my most entertaining undergraduate anecdotes could not be recounted without detailed reference to the immoderate consumption of prohibited recreational intoxicants. I had the happy inspiration to devise “Cousin Ernie,” a scamp of a fellow student who’d recounted all these amusing episodes to sedulous, sober me as I pored over a hot microfiche reader in the university library or strolled to a meeting of the campus Temperance Society. Office discourse was thereby enlivened and decorum preserved.)

cordially,