#welding trade School in Spring garden

[pttedu]

Forge your future: Comprehensive welding training at PTTI

[fragments-of-a-hologram-dystopia]

Welcome to a new kind of posts, a sci-fi short story written by yours truly every tuesday. I wanted to try something solarpunk, or at least that’s how I see it.. This is a standalone story, but if you wish to read more stories here’s the masterpost. Read it in Italian here. Project: New Seeds Cedar wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand and looked at his little vegetable garden. It was very small, so he mostly devoted the space he had been given to growing two different kind of salads and some broad-leaved garlic, but now he looked at his two tomato plants who he had planted at the very edge of his space. They were growing strong, and he was sure that in summer he would have gotten his tomatoes on the table. And his vegetable garden neighbor wouldn’t have complained, she had a much bigger space in virtue of her bigger apartment, and had told him not to worry. Cedar went back to his one-room apartment and took a shower. He made a chicory coffee and poured some soy milk in it while reading the news on his tablet. The anniversary of the Great Sugar Trials was in less than two weeks, and it was all over the news. Not coincidentally, the great spring festivals were in the same weekend. He had skimmed over his university’s own spring festival programme, and he promised himself to ask about the barter market. His mom had mailed him her canned berries, and he planned to trade them for something interesting. Lucy, a girl working in IT, had enough space to keep bees, and he would have loved to trade for some honey.

He finished his breakfast and left. In the courtyard he waved hi to a lady who lived in his same building, and who was heading to tend to her vegetable garden.

Cedar biked along the large bike road, accompanied by the chirping of birds and the soft humming of the electric cars on the other portion of the road.

“So, how are your tomatoes growing?”

Cedar smiled at professor Welding. “Fine so far, ma’am.”

“If you have any trouble tell me, my wife is great with those things, she could grow a rainforest on a sidewalk.”

Cedar let out a polite laughter.

“So, what are you up to today?”

“I have some things to dig up in the old paper archives for my research project about the old world.”

“Good luck, then. And if you get lost down there, scream.”

Cedar liked his job. Some days he couldn’t believe he was actually being paid to go through old documents. Sure, he had to present a project and complete it, but he didn’t mind that part either, and the money was good. Like many others with a job like his own, he was writing about the old world’s now absurd lifestyles, and he sensed he could have researched for all his life and only touch the surface of such complex times.

He took some folders and headed to one of the tables, his laptop out as he was ready to take notes. Sometimes he’d get lost in the documents and forget the time, and hours passed as he browsed through old projects which were often connected to the university itself. A century ago governments and groups had begged scholars to come up with a solution to avoid the planet’s collapse, and here under his eyes, Cedar could see some of the projects which were presented as potential solutions. Project Neptune involved a 5-years fishing ban in all oceans, Project Thunderstorm called for a wider use of electric cars… many of these beared a “further” stamp that mean they were actually taken into serious consideration. And then he saw it. A stamp he had never seen before, green instead of the blue or red stamps he usually saw. It felt appropriate for a project called “New Seeds.” Ignoring the pangs of hunger he was starting to feel, Cedar took the document out of its protective transparent sheet. The document detailed the huge problems represented by the overpopulation and the use of resources. So far, nothing new.

“In partnership with the major electronic companies which produce the most popular kinds of brainware, we suggest a reduction of the human population by at least 30%. This should also be accompanied by a lifestyle change and…” Cedar’s hands were shaking, and he nearly dropped the piece of paper.

He remembered it in his grandma’s stories and in the recording of the news he had watched in school. The great viruses of 2056 had struck down almost 3 billions of people. A curse from God, a malfunctioning in the brainware productions, a terrorist attack… everyone had found their own reason. But in front of Cedar now lied a nice list which suggested the percentage of people to eliminate according to continent to ensure a future for humanity.

“It’s not much of a secret, really.” said professor Welding while watering her office plants. “Sure, no one likes to talk about it, and many would like to forget. But it’s the past, and we cannot change it now.”

“But it’s terrible!” Cedar’s voice was a weird whisper.

“Of course it is. But you’ve seen how it was. You’ve seen the movies, you’ve seen the documentaries. You’ve even read their documents! Of all people, you should know, you should understand.” she sighed. “If you can live like this…” she enclosed all her office in her gesture, but she meant the world, he understood, “it’s because of the people who worked behind the New Seeds. Your parents were the first generation we effectively managed to raise in a whole different way. Picture a guy who lives an unhealthy lifestyle, gets a heart attack at 30 and has a whole lifestyle change. Now picture the whole world going through it.

“You’re… proud.”

“The world isn’t divided in pride and shame.” she replied. Cedar stared at the sun shining through the green branches.

[clarkfamily]

PNT DIARY 1908

Note: Empty entries have been omitted.

Note: PNT had his own system for recording the weather although he only uses it sporadically in the first month of this diary year. The notations occur after the date in each entry. Please see the post for 1906 to read the key.

1/1 ± I am 5 ft 9 in tall without shoes. I weigh 121 lbs. The ground is bare.

1/2 No snow.

1/3 No snow.

1/4 ->0 a little.

1/5 + Colder. Did chores and read.

1/6 Harry went back to U.N.H. A breeding ewe died. They drew straw. I dried some Baldwin apples. -2°

1/7 +-0. Elgar cut my hair. They drew up logs with the steers. Trimmed turnips. [to feed sheep]

1/8 Thawed a little all day. Trimmed turnips at the lower barn. Wednesday.

1/9 0. Made 5 pounds of butter. Papa went to the Grange. We did not feed the sheep tonight.

1/10 Papa and I doctored about 55 lambs and sheep for worms. 2 lambs died.

1/11 Dried apples all day. Ellice came home from Hazens. Saturday.

1/12 Read a little. Began to read "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers."

1/13 Thawing.

1/14 Papa and I doctored 9 ewes (for worms).

1/15 Dried apples all day.

1/16 Hazen called. Trimmed turnips. Papa cleaned out the hog house.

1/17 Went out into the north woods. Found a little spruce tree there.

1/18 Had the gripes last night and today. Stephen and Howard Townsend were here from Woodstock. Saturday.

1/19 Yesterday Mama finished reading Le Contes Geology [Elements of Geology, Joseph LeConte] to me. I stayed in the house all day. Sunday. -6°

1/20 cold last night. Did not go out. Joe began to draw hemlock logs to the mill, from the Fox place.

1/21 Did a few chores. Hugh sawed hemlock logs in the S. woods on Fox place. Joe drew logs. Thawing.

1/22 Thawing. Mr. and Mrs. C. D. Hazen and Annah Hazen came to dinner. Did not go out. Joe drew lumber.

1/23 Did chores again.

1/24 +

1/25 Polly came late tonight. Dried Baldwin apples.

1/26 Walked up Ela's hill. Bea came and stayed overnight.

1/27 Most of the snow melted last night. The road is all ice. Made 5 1/2 pounds of butter.

1/28 Colder. It is icy and poor sleighing. I sold my watch and chain to Joe for $1.10.

1/30 Trimmed turnips in the potato bin in the cellar. It is the coldest day yet. -13°

1/31 Cold and clear. Dried Baldwin apples. The temp. only got up to -5°. Friday. -16°

2/1 Stormy. We stayed in as much as possible. About 6 inches of snow came and drifted. Warmer.

2/2 My cherry log is 35 years old. Finished reading "A Week on the Concord" by Thoreau.

2/3 Hugh began to go to L.H.S. in the '08 class. Joe drew my black cherry log to mill with hemlock logs. -10°

2/4 I feed the sheep twice, the horses at night, the 5 calves at 8 am, and the hens twice. Cold day. -16°

2/5 Did chores about all day. The thermometers did not agree. -20° to -24°

2/6 Snow last night. Trimmed turnips in the cellar. We did nothing but chores. Thursday.

2/7 Edgar drew out his old maple from the S. woods. Joe brought home 6 cherry boards for me.

2/8 Papa and I stuck up my lumber in the cider mill. Saturday. -8°

2/9 Went down into the woods. Mama and I sorted books.

2/10 Hugh took Billy to go to school. He put him up at Dr. Smith's.

2/11 Made a box to feed the birds in. Went down into the woods and saw a large horned owl at 3 P.M.

2/12 Fine day. Trimmed turnips.

2/13 Trimmed turnips. Hugh stayed at home with a cold. Joe was away all day.

2/14 Fog. Papa and I cut a black birch in the S. woods. It was 96' tall, 110 years old 1.5' at butt, and the only one.

2/15 Still thawing. Snow is going fast. We did not do much but chores. Saturday.

2/16 Joe and I walked up to the log cabin out South on Oregon. Had the gripes when I got back.

2/17 Better but lame. Hugh stayed at home. Papa and Joe do all of the chores.

2/18 Hugh went to school. Feel still better.

2/19 - 3/4 [Empty]

3/5 Had appendicitis operation (Dr. Gile, surgeon). ]This appears to be Alma's handwriting and is in pencil. PNT's is in ink.]

3/6-3/24 [No entry; in MHMH hospital]

3/25 I came home from the M.H. Hospital.

3/26 - 3/27 [Empty]

3/28 We three gathered 8 bbl of sat. Saw first flock of robins. The jays made a commotion about it.

3/29 - 4/7 [Empty]

4/8 Jay and Harry Farnam called this evening and we sat up late. [b day turns 18]

4/9 - 4/12 [Empty]

4/13 Edgar boiled sap. Joe gathered sap.

4/14 - 4/15 [Empty]

4/16 Edgar boiled sap. Rlins (Rollins?) Hotel burned last night and I saw the light out east. A cold day.

4/18 They gathered 8 bbl of sap and the buckets. Went down to the south end of the woods. Saturday.

4/19 Edgar finished boiling sap. Dana called.

4/21 A cold chilly day. The snow all melted in the afternoon. Went down to the Fox place. Tuesday.

4/22 They split wood. Went down to the Fox place. The ground froze last night. Mama washed buckets.

4/23 - 4/24 [Empty]

4/25 Warm.

4/26 Very warm. Hugh and I went over to see Harry Farnam.

4/27 Warmest day yet.

4/28 Saw 2 bald eagles here. Had a hard thunder storm last night.

4/29 Cobb and Harrington began to shear our sheep. Edgar and I went over to the Jones farm.

4/30 - 5/22 [Empty]

5/23 Bob came.

5/24 Hugh and I went down to Sintres. Dana and Richard called. Sunday.

5/26 Went to town and traded a little. Julia Cummings came. Awful hot.

5/27 Helped decorate the lawn. Harry came home late. Papa has set a lot of hitching posts. [Preparations for Ellice's wedding the following day]

5/28 Ellice and Dana had a wedding on the lawn. About 100 guests. There was a reception at the Hazens'.

5/29 Harry, Bob, and Polly left.

5/31 Edgar took me to W.R. Junction to see a camera. Went to walk with Mama.

6/1 Uncle Bert and Aunt Mary went home.

6/2 Chilly day. Saw the first American Goldfinch.

6/3 - 8/17 [Empty]

8/18 Heard first green crickets.

9/15 Dug potatoes.

9/17 Papa and Joe finished getting in the corn a week from today.

9/19 My fountain pen came. We dug potatoes and finished the gold coins. Got a swarm of bees to robbing Sept. 20.

9/20 The bees began to rob.

9/21 My Italians [bees] brought live black bees late last night and early this morning. Sunday.

9/22 Dug potatoes. Went across to the grange.

9/23 We finished digging potatoes. Helped get corn.

9/24 Took Punch down town. Sent an order to W. W. Cary & Son for bee supplies. $15.16 cents in all. Came home with Papa.

9/25 Tried to keep the bees from robbing. Began to feed out in the open. They husked corn.

9/29 Husked corn. Went after [illegible] after supper.

9/30 Peabody came and threshed buckwheat, barley, and oats. He showed me how to weld and some other things.

10/1 They finished threshing. Mr. Ober bought the black mare Dolly which Papa has boughten.

10/2 Cold. We picked the squashes in the garden. Papa and I weighed the bees. Put cases on them without packing.

10/3 Joe and I finished  picking corn.

10/4 Warmer.

10/5 We began to pick apples on a tree here and there. We are going to pick any good apples, even natives.

10/7 Fine day. We three finished up 4 1/2 bbls of butternuts on Fox place, also some apples. Packed up bees Wed.

10/8 Divided the queenless bees. Half in no. 3 and half in no 6.

10/9 Found 1 bus. of nuts which we missed (5 now). Those bees got cast out and killed in each swarm.

10/10 Finished packing up the bees. They jacked up the old cow shed. Joe finished drawing sweet corn fodder.

10/11 Papa, Grammie and Mama took the span and went to Brookside. Joe and I kept house. Milked 1.9(?) cows.

10/12 We three gathered cider apples in the sheep pasture. (to cook and eat). Lugged them up across.

10/13 Recreation [magazine] came out this week. The fog does not clear until 10 A.M. Joe and I went onto the Jones and Driscoll places.

10/14 Fine day. Painted all day on the handy wagon wheels. Joe and Papa fixed the barnyard fence. Wed.

10/15 - 10/23 [Empty]

10/24 Went down town. My bee supplies came. 5 hives, supers, etc. Papa had 2 bus. of buck(wheat?) ground.

10/25 - 10/27 [Empty]

10/28 We dug on the ditch and got wet. Began a winter case for my two swarms of bees.

10/29 Tinkered and helped David on the well. Papa went downtown. Joe plowed.

10/30 Papa and I dug in the ditch and Joe plowed in the south field.

10/31 Papa and I finished the ditch and tapped the spring out north. Joe began to plow in the barn field. Sat. Cold.

11/1 Colder. Milked 2 cows. Harry came home last night to vote Tuesday.

11/2 - 11/8 [Empty]

11/9 Warm. The bees came out a little. Moved 3 swarms to one side. The spring runs 1 quart a minute.

11/10 Warm. We turned up stones in the N. pasture and drew them to the new well.

11/11 Rain last night. Made 9 storm doors for bee hives, and a holding frame. Papa stoned more in the well.

11/12 Colder. Papa finished stoning the spring and we grounded up etc. Yesterday Papa got Edgar's cow.

12/13 Took the small cases off my two bee hives and put on my new big ones with 5" of straw packing. Ellice came.

11/14 - 11/17 [Empty]

11/18 The pump in the kitchen gave up for lack of water. It will still furnish a little.

11/19 We get water enough to drink and cook from the well in the kitchen. Tinkered. Two inches of snow in all.

11/20 Joe finished plowing the Garden field. I made a hot bed frame, placed it S. of barn and filled with straw, etc.

11/21 Snow is melting. Ellice and I went hunting out S.

11/22 Our new spring runs 3/4 quarts per minute. Milked two cows.

11/23 Helped saw up skidway on Fox place. I weigh 164 pounds without dooring(clothing?). Warm and misty.

11/24 The bees came out in fine shape. Warm. Edgar got after and wounded a deer.

11/25 Joe and I went to Coles'.

11/26 Papa, Mama, and I had dinner at Brookside. Got home after dark. Warm and Misty. 54° after dark.

11/27 Joe began to plow in the west field. Very warm. Boiled and hulled corn.

11/28 - 11/30 [Empty]

12/1 Warm. Papa and I trimmed trees in the Baker lane. The bees had a fight.

12/2 - 12/30 [Empty]

12/31 We cut wood up the road. We three visited Harry Farnam in the evening.

[trustafarian-theserialfiction]

“trustafarian” part 14:  you meet girl, you move in, she go March 22, 2016 1:17 pm

Just under four months: that was the safe decompression time in his mother’s head?  Four months and it was the incoming call alert he’d been dreading.  He’d accidentally gone online on skype when he’d restarted his laptop and it had automatically detected the hidden wifi network before he could close the auto-starting messenger. "Why don’t you ever call, I know your service provider does free long distance within Canada, now.” Looked that up did you?  “Well that’s all right, you’ve probably been busy looking for a job out there—have you tried applying for a job at a bank?  There are so many banks and you can really climb the corporate ladder starting in a bank.  You know Sharon Mitchell?” Dan did, his parents drank wine every new year at Sharon Mitchell’s house.  They never saw her except at these parties.  He and his sisters had had to go to their grandparents place for new year’s, to be kept out of trouble (right until he’d moved out), because it wasn’t really a everyone-bring-your-kids kind of soiree and Sharon Mitchell’s kids didn’t attend either. “Her daughter just graduated highschool and she’s been promoted at her after-school teller job to a desk job talking people through their insurance.  She could end up as a bank manager or…oh I don’t know, it’s just something to think about.” It’s just something you think about. “You know, I’m glad you’re not…I’m glad you made this change in your life,” I didn’t make this change. “I know you’re not planning on going back to school but you should really consider it, you could pay off a student loan in a few years.  You’re so smart, Daniel,” no, I’m not “you could do anything you want,” as long as it’s something-to-say at new year’s, about your perfect year and perfect family and life and how well everything is going for everyone close to you because of your own phony perfection, “and I just think you’d do better in the academic stream than you think.” She was starting to slip, her Betty Crocker buoyancy was turning into irritation.  He guessed he was making a sour face at her that translated despite the video quality.  He was sitting in the empty kitchen, his laptop next to the bowl of crumble he’d found left for him on top of it when he’d come upstairs a few minutes ago.  He really wanted to eat it and wished he hadn’t opened the laptop to watch youtube while he did.  “Look at your sisters, they’ve both been published, even though they’re in the private sector now,” sure, published, whatever the hell that means. Blog posts were a kind of publishing, who cared.  “Don’t get me wrong! I never wanted to be a trail-blazer either, I know exactly how you feel.” Fuck you. “The pressure is—well. But I’m so worried about you,” all in her glazed-ham blissed-out Martha-Stewart-doing-a-séance voice, the one she'd learned to say all her phoniest passive aggressive shit in, "you don’t have any savings, Daniel, and you're getting on towards 30.  It’s time to grow up."  It’s time to hang up, he yelled silently at her and himself.  But he laughed and told her he loved her and asked her not to worry so much and told her about how Jean-Paul was doing, although not much about what Jean-Paul was doing, because she thought the little rich boy she’d met ten years ago had been so refined and polite and upwardly-mobile and so obviously socially desirable for both her and her son—except that Jean-Paul’s mother had never had the time (or interest, probably) in responding to his mother’s “our sons are friends and I was thinking we might meet for coffee sometime and get to know one another” (because I hear you’re a respected legal expert and that’s so distinguished sounding and I don’t have one of those for floating  the canapé tray to at my occasional dinner parties yet) emails.  It was a pleasure, in a way, that he and Jean-Paul were in exactly the same place these days, from her point of view.  Neither of them worked at a bank, quelle tragédie.  They both lived somewhere she would never get a slow, panning view of.  His mother had never liked his ex’s mother, either, for similar reasons.

After the call—during which he’d asserted that his cell contract didn’t have a clause for “magically update to include new policies in new area codes,” and no, this call hadn’t been free because they were on a fixed-rate low-monthly-data plan with crazy overage and add-on fees (he lied), and could she please stick to emails—Dan returned to his bed and lay there feeling worse than he had in weeks, maybe a month.  He’d been lying about the long-distance, actually—he’d looked into it online about a week prior and found out where to change numbers and contracts with his provider after moving, which he hadn’t done yet and didn’t really want to at this point.  What was the point of paying for it to have call-in or a data plan, he didn’t want calls and he didn’t need data.  He had wifi.  And he couldn’t afford anything else really because he had no income, even though Torontonians seemed to get better plan options and prices than Islanders.  More carriers meant more undercutting prices but it was also an exhausting amount of information with very minor differences to track before figuring out the least screwjobiest option.  He’d given up; by the time he wanted or needed a more functional phone, all the plan details would be different again, half the companies would be rebranded.  There was a lot about Toronto that made it seem like the future.  Futuristic. He was glad he wasn’t in the past, where it was time to be a banker.  Grow up and do what?  Get what job? He was still replaying the conversation with his mom, before complaining that he hadn’t called, and before she’d started bringing up job-hunting more pointedly, she’d been saying "we'd pay for you to go to trade school while you’re out there, there are so many options for you, Zoe's son is getting work using his welding certification out in Alberta right now," the way she talked drove him nuts, like she wanted particular words to stick in his head, like someone telling a kid how not to get lost. Dan remembered his mother's friend Zoe’s son--he’d eaten twelve grams of mushrooms at a grade twelve grad pre-party the night he accidentally met his birth-dad at a rave in Nanaimo.  Dan had been at the pre-party and heard about the rave later via facebook posts; his ex hadn’t wanted to go, she’s said it sounded like it’d be a tent full of juggalos.  Turned out it was true about the guy being Zoe’s kid’s birth-dad.  Zoe was a yogamom who had remarried some insurance lawyer friend of Dan’s dad when her kid was in diapers, and he hadn't been old enough to wonder whether the guy in the pictures was actually dead or just presumed dead, until he'd met him.  So that guy was working on some rig in Alberta now, and Dan was supposed to follow his good example apparently, except that Dan knew via facebook what his mother apparently didn't know or didn’t think was important, which was that Zoe’s son hated it there and regretted the career path he was now committed to by the mortgage he was paying off on his dream home in the Okanagan. He liked kiteboarding and scenery a lot.  Wanted to retire and kiteboard and look at scenery.  Four months was the leeway, Dan thought.  And here we are again in bullshitville. Or at least, it had astralprojected its way east too vividly for him to not be transported fully in turn, back to bullshitville.  He tried to clear his mind for a while until it occurred to him that a change of topic was better than pushing a topic away without a distraction from it.  He started thinking about what he was actually going to do with the spring since he didn’t intend on trying to spit-shine his way into a job he couldn’t stand and wasn’t qualified for.

The days were getting longer, but it didn’t feel like spring to him. Earlier in the month it might as well have been summer already for a few days and now it was winter again—to be fair, the last couple years there’d been an end of March cold snap on the coast, too, with a day or so of snow.   But when it snowed out west it was somehow warmer then than during the usual  winter rain, no matter how low the temperature said. Here, though, it still felt like a sharp bite on the ass from an ice sculpture every snowy evening.  That was why, presumably, Bruce wasn’t sure it wouldn’t snow again this year and hadn’t started gardening; he’d said it always snowed on April Fools now, which he liked, for some inane reason.  It didn’t seem wildly funny to Dad for there to be snow on any day in April.  Today it seemed possible there could be snow in a week; was all weird outside, murky and kind of opaque, unlike the past few days.  Overall the weather this month had been a return to form for Toronto sunshine-wise, in Dan’s eyes, and it had been seriously buoying his spirits. Although, he also suspected that the prematurely summery feeling that had made him mourn not having a patio beer, had contributed to his prematurely summerbreaky approach to working on music for Thuh Dope Show.  Interrupted from his deeply concentrated considerations of the weather, he heard and felt a jumbling thumpriff begin as some someones came in the side entrance by Jean-Paul’s place and started up the stairs.  He planned to ignore it, whoever it was, and thought about the crumble he’d brought down to his room, now sitting on the bowed top of his suitcase waiting for his appetite to not be ruined.  His appetite felt unruined now, in fact.

He got a nasty shock when a curtain of braided hair attached to a pretty face appeared like the face in snow white’s step mom’s mirror in the portal above him.  “Thinger Minge,” Andreah greeted him.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

He was still in bed hours later, thinking about how much he didn’t want to get up.  Andreah had come over with Andre and stuck her head down into his room, and he’d been confronted with an outside eye on his sleeping situation—and his spending-all-day-in-an-ugly-pit-in-bed situation, which had been kind of awful for Dan.  He was thankful it never happened ordinarily, but less thankful for that than he was for Andreah bothering at all.  She and Andre were bringing back the bowls and cutlery from the park, where he guessed Andreah had met up with Andre and Jean-Paul and had crumble.  He’d eaten his own ladling of it after she’d shot the shit with him a few minutes from his ceiling.  She said he looked like a little doll in a shoebox.  She thinks I’m cute, he heard claymated Rudolph nasally cheer in his head, as he lay there reconsidering her description.  He got his phone out and opened facebook messenger, and looked her up using the name she’d told him, a TOS-violating pseudonym, of course.  Her userimage was a black square, of course.  He had no idea what to say.  A witty, sexy, really fun type of thing to start a chat with, was not jumping into his noggin.  He tried “you looked nice today” but deleted it after seeing it typed out.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Andre came back the next day with a thick, queen-sized fleece blanket for him.  There was a starry night scene of wolves on it—coming from Andreah it seemed different than it would have from someone else, like there was more to it than just circumstantial selection, because maybe wolves were a thing for her culturally or something.  That seemed like kind of a woefully uninformed thought, and Dan figured he’d keep it to himself in case it was.  He appreciated the gesture; the blanket was warm and kind of heavenly, and he wished he’d had it all along.  He wished he’d had it when he was sick, or one better, when he was passed out drunk with a low body temperature the night he’d gotten sick in the first place. He felt drowsier under the wolf blanket, like it had a magically charged force-field of cuddliness and security—a scaled-for-size baby-blanket was how it struck him, like he hadn’t felt so truly swaddled by one textile since the crib.  He wiggled slightly in the cocoon he’d made, enjoying having his feet bare and trying to wiggle out of the imaginary second-skin of resentment he’d felt crawling under his flesh ever since being skyped unawares the previous day.  Things were good.  Looking up and up, even.  Here he was in this big room with this big blanket, not a care in the world. Holding on to that feeling of weightless satisfaction as uncrushingly as he could, he felt himself slowly doze off, and had a last conscious sense like it was going to be the most restful sleep he could remember.

He dreamed about Andreah, about the two of them hooking up again.  It’d all been fun and fond, but then they were having a talk about how Dan wasn’t sure exactly where Andreah saw things going, because her old answer wasn’t appealing enough to be sure she’d meant it.  And she was angry at him, she shoved him and he thought she might just vanish out of thin air, which made sense in the dream, although he thought he was awake.  She told him again that she saw things going no deeper, barring some miraculous shift in his whole attitude towards sex and dating and life in general.  She told him it was a problem that he and Andre didn’t get along, which was so confusing and frustrating that he sort of halfway woke up, and feeling it happen, he swam back down into the dream to try to finish it, maybe go back to the sex part.  

Awake again, having jerked off to pleasant effect, he was actually concerned that if he saw Andreah more often, he’d feel like he was performing a relationship, for her, because that was how being around his ex all the time had felt.  He found himself worrying for the first time that he was so habituated to resentfully caving to some projected pressure rather than acting on whim, that he’d feel that way in another relationship even when the reality was there was no pressure, no caving, no resentment.  It sort of had a foresight kind of a feeling, or it was somehow linked in his mind to what she’d been saying in the dream, about his attitude; he could envision that she would start to take on a skewed persona in his mind—more ordinary, less companionable, less fun, more annoying. Schoolmarmish, somehow.  He’d realized several years ago that girls who wanted to be in relationships were people who didn’t appear, to him, to have or feel the need for lives apart from managing their partners behaviour, and in that way  dating them was an inescapable emotional burden, like having really nagging parents or some kind of nanny.  Someone like Andreah, who didn’t need his company, who had her own schedule, friends and life, basically unentangled with his life, seemed more like his ex’s ideal self than her actual self—someone aloof until approached, un-needy of his time or attention.  But willing to spend her time and attention on him, all the same, with the sole aim of improving his mood.  That was desirable company.  And it would stay that way the less of it he tried to monopolize.  The less of it he successfully monopolized, anyway.

The train of thought coupled with some noises above him brought him to thinking about Andre, who might have still been upstairs.  He dug earbuds out of his suitcase and started an episode of Bruce’s show playing on his phone, not really listening but wanting to block out the sort of aggravating vague sounds of people upstairs.

Andre seemed like neither type of girl, not giving or needing, just a person who didn’t want to be around him and didn’t seem to really like being around him, less than an emotional burden or bolster: a minor sink.  He thought about the rest of the household; in highschool and now, Jean-Paul had been someone who didn’t even slightly come across as needing him but was willing and pleased enough to be friends anyway. Dan had never really craved friendship until middle-school had burnt him out on his peer group, and his sister who was second oldest had been willing to attach him to the periphery of her social life because he was just starting highschool and she was finishing and it apparently made her more magnanimous than she’d been about being in the same elementary school; in hindsight he saw himself as an accessory. Little brother, tiny Tim. Charity. So, he’d wanted his own friend who didn’t treat him like an afterthought, or a friend-circle nepotism case, and Jean-Paul was a person who had wanted to be friends with just him, not the people his sister knew, although they all went to see his band play community centre showcases and basement gigs.  Jean-Paul was a person whose company Dan had truly enjoyed, also, which he probably hadn’t encountered before because he didn’t remember a previous time of having that feeling.  Jean-Paul was a person he’d been proud to be friends with, too; he’d actually felt inspired by Jean-Paul as a person, when they’d first met.  He wasn’t sure he felt as drawn to him now as then, or even as he had in January, but the feeling was still there, when he really thought about it.  Why didn’t he ever try to spend any time with his friend who he liked so much?  But that question brought him back to what he’d been thinking about Andreah; it was becoming obvious to Dan that being able to approach people according to his own schedule was important.  People weren’t appealing if they didn’t appear to have an existence strictly independent of him, or if they seemed to need anything from him.  

Bruce, he supposed, also fit the bill of friend-appeal.  Bruce had a peculiar vibe all his own, in Dan’s musings just then—he wasn’t quite someone Dan went out of his way to spend time around or would specifically think to spend time around, but he’d found himself enjoying Bruce’s company each time they saw one another.  Bruce’s relationship with Andre was still something of a mystery; he could easily picture them platonically spooning on nights Andre stayed over, or in a tangle of tantric debauchery halfway-on and halfway-off the couch he’d sat on the first time he’d seen the back rooms. That couch seemed suspiciously easy to clean, now that he thought about it.  Probably a lot of their old furniture was salvaged because it wasn’t textile, ergo easier to delouse, but was curbed because of some event that had wiped off the upholstery fine but also ruined the unit itself somehow.  

Shaking out the flesh-flower image of Bruce and Andre tying in knots, he reminded himself that his grasp of the sexual identities at play was flimsy at best—he frequently failed to see anything straight about Bruce, but there wasn’t anything particularly gay about him either.  He mostly acted like a six year old.  Mouse, he realized, wouldn’t have caused him to think twice except for his social group and his inherent out-of-step-with-everythingness.   Pete was straight, or at least, dated girls, by popular report, and Mouse and Pete were tight, but what did that mean about Mouse, was that an indication he was or wasn’t gay?  He seemed to have a radar that let him avoid being around at the same time as Andre but if Dan had been in the same scene as her for years he might have moved in the same direction, on that front.  He wondered if Jean-Paul’s sexual identity and line of work were any evidence one way or the other about the house population as a whole; hadn’t Alice come up in that context, when he was high on Bru-brew and Jean-Paul had told him about being an “independent male escort”—he couldn’t really remember that part at the moment.  That whole conversation hadn’t processed entirely, he could feel himself sort of behold the memory of it as a whole and it was hazy, hard to make sense of.  He decided to divert around it and get back to essentially kinsey-scoring everyone he knew in Toronto, since it was pretty diverting.

Andre, who he had a more confirmed read on than the others, wasn’t an outlier to the not-straight trend, though Dan wasn’t willing to bet that she’d ever actually dated another woman since apparently she and Andreah weren’t dating like how she and Bruce weren’t dating. He didn’t think he knew any girls-who-liked-girls who actually had long-term committed relationships with each other.  Maybe Andreah did, or had, but like she’d said, not with girls like Andre. Too white-acting. Even Andreah herself seemed to be too white-acting for Andreah. White-sounding, whatever.  Maybe part of it was that she didn’t like girly-girls; she’d been willing enough to get casual for a night with him.  Maybe she liked being the girl but, with a girl.  A mental image appeared, of Andre styled like one of the obvious butches he’d seen while walking through pride celebrations downtown one summer or the couple times Winks And Grins had showcased at Paparazzi.  His ex had basically only gotten bookings for them by offering to take an hourly off the door cover.  It didn’t seem to get them more shows and it definitely had never made them money.  She seemed to think it would grow them some hype but Dan suspected it did the opposite and made them seem unprofessional and desperate, which, frankly, was close to being exactly what they were.  Unprofessional for sure.  Desperate for exposure, okay.  She had been, at least.  He hadn’t really cared.  They’d never had any income worth declaring from these shows, otherwise they might have wanted to figure out how to legitimize the revenue up, like Jean-Paul had been saying the other night.  Seemed like “legal consulting” ran in the family as well, after all.

He realized he was roaringly hungry, then.  It occurred to him to message Andreah or walk down to Higher Grounds in time for maybe a lunch break, but in the spirit of avoiding over-affiliation that might murky up their relationship waters too soon after the blanket—and the dream—he decided to head upstairs and eat something from the fridge.  There’d been a recent gold medal dive, he knew, at a Portuguese bakery nearer to Andreah and Andre’s place. She had told him the other day when they’d chatted and when Andre had shown up with the blanket she’d said there was a box of custard tarts for them all.  He thought about hanging around to eat upstairs, but the idea of the others and spending time with them was deflating, and he resolved to eat grab food and come right back, possibly to do some more music work.  He pulled out the earbuds, cutting off Toichiro’s fey-sounding line of banter mid-bant.  There were definitely still people upstairs. Dan climbed the ladder into the upstairs hearing a conversation as it came into view—Andre was hanging off Bruce seeming kind of zoned out and dead-eyed the way she'd been the last time he'd seen her but more upset, and Bruce was saying something about feminism, and Mouse was upset already but Bruce was keeping it chill, and he was asking “...so what if you get misconstrued, man, you’ve got feminist values, and one really positive feminist value is to align yourself with something after looking at yourself and looking at it and seeing how you need to side with the non-dominant force to help it survive, otherwise it might not survive and then your reality is a little dimmer!”

By the end he’d gotten an annoying edge to his voice and the whole scene was kind of fucking ugly in its makeup somehow, more singularly than usual—and Dan said “Jesus fucking Christ” out loud, and Bruce looking over at him sticking halfway out of the hole in the floor and laughed and looked kind of sympathetic, which Dan guessed was because Bruce knew Mouse was at the breaking point for whatever deeply tormenting person code he had about people ‘misconstruing’ him, and was about to flip his shit.  Mouse flailed in his direction and flipped the longboard they had used as a table, starting to scream something in Russian at him.  It was actually terrifying, the little guy looked like his head was about to pop off.  Dan slid back down through the hole and went to sleep with his earbuds in, hungry.

[gigglesndimples]

Freedom Leaf’s September-October Cannabis Events Calendar

September

9/1-2: One Love One Heart Reggae Fest, Yolo County Fairgrounds, Woodland, CA; featuring Israel Vibration with Roots Radics, Pato Banton, Mykal Rose, Anthony B and more

9/1-3: Texas Cannafest, Crystal Beach, TX

9/6: The Alchemists Forum: Hijos del Sol, Grandchamps, Brooklyn, NY

9/7-8: Grow Up Cannabis Conference & Expo, Scotiabank Convention Centre, Niagara Falls, ON; featuring Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary

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9/7-8: Cannabis Law Institute Conference, George Washington University Law School, Washington, DC

9/7-9: Montana Hemp & Cannabis Festival, Lolo Hot Springs, Lolo, MT; featuring Pato Banton and more

9/8: Canna-Bash, Mill Hill Park, Trenton, NJ

9/8: The Road to Hempfest, Reed Conference Center, Oklahoma City, OK

9/8-9: Midwest Cannabis Cup, Auto City Speedway, Clio, MI; featuring Nas, Mike Jones, Demrick and more

9/8-9: THC Fair, Jackson County Expo, Central Point, OR

9/13: Cannabis Private Investment Summit, New York, NY

9/14: Green Market Summit, One World Trade Center, New York, NY

9/14-15: Hempfest Cannabis Expo, Exhibition Place, Toronto, ON

9/14-16: Boston Freedom Rally, Boston Common, Boston, MA

9/15-16: That Cannabis Show, MassMutual Center, Springfield, MA

9/15-17: CHAMPS Florida, Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center, Kissimmee, FL

9/17-18: Hall of Flowers, Sonoma County Fairgrounds, Santa Rosa, CA

9/18: CannaGather NY, Galvanize, New York, NY; featuring Terra Tech’s Derek Peterson

9/21-22: CBD Expo West, Anaheim Marriott, Anaheim, CA

9/22: Medical Marijuana Concert, Miami, FL

9/22: Kauai Cannabis Expo & Conference, Hilton Garden Inn, Kapaa, HI

9/22: Farm Aid, XFINITY Theater Center, Hartford, CT; featuring Willie Nelson, Neil Young, Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds, John Cougar Mellancamp, Kacey Musgraves, Chris Stapleton, Sturgill Simpson, Margo Price, Jamie Johnson, Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real, Particle Kid and Ian Mellancamp

9/25-26: The State of Cannabis, Queen Mary, Long Beach, CA

9/26-29: CWCBExpo LA, Los Angeles Convention Center, Los Angeles, CA

9/27-28: ICBC Portland, Downtown Hilton, Portland, OR; featuring DJ Muggs

9/27-29: CanEx Jamaica, Montego Bay Convention Center, Montego Bay, Jamaica

9/28-29: The Southern Hemp Expo, The Fairgrounds, Nashville, TN

9/29-30: Red Rock Hempfest, The Collective Sedona, Sedona, AZ

9/28-30: Cannabis Hemp Conference & Expo, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC

9/29-30, 10/1: Great Midwest Marijuana Harvest Festival, Library Mall, Madison, WI

October

10/4-6: U.S. Cannabis Conference & Expo, Phoenix Convention Center, Phoenix, AZ

10/5-7: Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics, Cooper Union Great Hall, New York, NY

10/6-7: Maine Cannabis Convention, Portland Sports Complex, Portland, ME

10/10-11: RAD Expo, Oregon Convention Center, Portland, OR

10/11-13: New West Summit, Marriott City Center, Oakland, CA; featuring Rikki Lake, Weediquette’s Krishna Andavolu, Berner and more

10/13: Kushstock Fest, NOS Event Center, San Bernardino. CA

10/13-14: Canna Expo Salinas Valley, King City Fairgrounds, King City, CA

10/13-14: Hempfest Jamaica, Catherine Hall, Montego Bay, Jamaica; featuring Luciano and more

10/14-16: CannX International Medical Cannabis Conference, Tel Aviv Convention Center, Tel Aviv, Israel

10/15-16: Native American Cannabis & Hemp Conference, Viejas Casino & Resort, Alpine, CA

10/16-17: CBD Symposium, University of Denver, Denver, CO

10/16-18: CHAMPS Colorado, Colorado Convention Center, Denver, CO

10/17-20: CWCBExpo Boston, Hynes Convention Center, Boston, MA; featuring former Gov. Bill Weld

10/20-21: Rhode Island Cannabis Convention, Rhode Island Convention Center, Providence, RI

10/22-23: California Cannabis Business Conference, Hilton Anaheim, Anaheim, CA

10/22-24: CannMed, UCLA Luskin Conference Center, Los Angeles, CA

10/24: New Jersey Cannabis Summit, Forsgate Country Club, Monroe Township, NJ

10/26: Cannabis Sustainability Symposium, Hyatt Regency, Denver, CO

10/27-28: Cannabis Cup California, Cal Expo Center, Sacramento, CA

10/29-30: CannaTech Innovation Summit, Doltone House, Sydney, Australia

The post Freedom Leaf’s September-October Cannabis Events Calendar appeared first on Freedom Leaf.

Source: https://www.freedomleaf.com/freedom-leafs-september-october-cannabis-events-calendar/

The blog article Freedom Leaf’s September-October Cannabis Events Calendar Find more on: The Giggles N Dimples Blog

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