#whats really strange is how isolating making these substances illegal are

[jynxlovesluck]

Real character growth is thinking weed is the Worst Drug On the Planet as a kid and growing up going "Actually, while weed itself has both negative and positive effects for different people for different reasons, we should talk about how the substance itself is used to demonize and imprison poor people, and you KNOW it's aimed even moreso at people of color, of Black and Latino people ESPECIALLY, all for your local Senator to get the shit shipped to their house and accept the taxes it brings in by the-"

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk, Mr. Fucking Anslinger.

[jswdmb1]

Champagne Supernova

“How many special people change?

How many lives are living strange?

Where were you while we were getting high?”

- Oasis

Let me start by saying I don’t celebrate 4/20 as a holiday, but I get the joke, so I’m in on it today too.  Let me follow that with this is not a post about me being jealous.  If I wanted to smoke some dope, trust me it would be happening, and I couldn’t give a shit who thinks I should or shouldn’t.  And, that’s what really bothers me about this whole push to legalize weed, particularly in Illinois where it is just a cash grab.  It distracts from the fact that our entire oversight of “drugs” in this country is so massively whacked and is completely unfair.  To isolate marijuana as the one drug that needs reform is the most stupid as it is probably the least of our worries.

Before we go further, we need education on the root of the problem which is the bullshit classification system used by the federal government.  Here are their definitions of the five different classes (as per Dr. Tim Sams in his book “ABC’S OF PAIN RELIEF AND TREATMENT”:

SCHEDULE 1 (CLASS I) DRUGS  are illegal because they have high abuse potential, no medical use, and severe safety concerns; for example, narcotics such as Heroin, LSD, and cocaine. Marijuana is also included as a Class 1 drug despite it being legal in some states and it being used as a medicinal drug in some states. SCHEDULE 2 DRUGS (CLASS 2) DRUGS have a high potential for abuse and dependence, an accepted medical use, and the potential for severe addiction. These drugs include opiods based on high dose codeine, Fentanyl, and Oxycodone as well as Methamphetamine and the Barbiturates; also included are such drugs as opium, morphine. Adderall is even included in this category under "mixed amphetamine salts". The main difference between a Schedule, or Class, 1 and 2 is whether or not the drug is deemed to have a valid medical application. SCHEDULE 3 (CLASS 3) DRUGS  have a lower potential for abuse than drugs in the first two categories, accepted medical use, and mild to moderate possible addiction. These drugs include steroids, Low-dose Codeine, and Hydrocodone-based opiods. SCHEDULE 4 (CLASS 4) DRUGS have an even lower abuse potential than Schedule 3 Drugs, accepted medical use, and limited addiction potential. These include most of the anti-anxiety medications like the numerous Benzodiazepines, Sedatives, sleeping agents, and the mildest of the opiod type medications like Darvon and Talwin. SCHEDULE 5 (CLASS 5) DRUGS have a low abuse potential, accepted medical use, and a very limited addiction potential. These consist primarily of preparations containing limited quantities of narcotics or stimulant drugs for cough, diarrhea, or pain.

The first question that comes to mind is where are nicotine, caffeine and alcohol on this list?  The answer is nowhere.  All are considered normally occurring substances that all people consume in small quantities through natural means (for examples, tomatoes have some nicotine in them) therefore they cannot be regulated.  That is the biggest load of government crap to ever come out of the back of the truck.  Based on that logic, all opioids should not be anywhere on the list because I can get some of that by eating a poppy seed muffin.  And, marijuana is as natural of a substance as anything, so why is growing and consuming it illegal but not poison mushrooms.  I’m not arguing here about what should be classified as Schedule 1, 2, 3, etc., I’m arguing that the schedule itself is insane and actually immoral.  

What do I mean by that last part?  If you are poor, you are more likely to gravitate to the drugs that are on Schedule 1.  I know that is a generalization, and that all sorts of people use Schedule 1 drugs, but go look up the stats behind who is in jail for drug offenses (seriously, go look it up, I’m done doing your homework for you), and it is overwhelmingly poor and minorities.  It’s awfully convenient to keep marijuana on Schedule 1 to keep that prison economy going and it is equally convenient to let tobacco roam free killing millions a year to keep that industry awash in cash.  Meanwhile a whole segment of our population is brutally oppressed under laws skewed to serve those in power and money.  It is about as un-American as things get, and that is during a time when just about everything that comes out of that sewer hole that we call Washington is un-American.

I’m going to keep this short, because there is not much to say.  Get rid of the fucking schedule of drugs and take a completely different look at how we manage this problem in the U.S.  Stop putting people in jail and get them real help for their problems whether it be pain, addiction, or poverty.  Immediately commute the sentences of anyone in jail for non-violent drug-related offenses and expunge their records.  Then reset how you are going to regulate everything that needs to be regulated.  From my perspective, prohibition of anything seems counterproductive as long as it is not hurting other people, but that also doesn’t mean certain things shouldn’t be controlled.  What should be controlled and not controlled should be decided by people who actually know what they are talking about.  Real doctors who are specialized in such matters should be helping to craft policy.  I know that excludes me, and it certainly includes any politician most of whom I wouldn’t trust to make a cup of coffee never mind handle something as important and technical as this.

So, get a blue ribbon panel together and let’s end the “War on Drugs” and direct our efforts to reengineering this entire process.  And, let’s look at how we can really help the segment of our society that needs it the most instead of shunning them and locking them up.  How will this be funded?  Not a new tax on individuals, but just start siphoning profits from the companies selling cigarettes and prescriptions that are really killing people.  Until that happens, leave me out of the 4/20 celebrations.  Not because I’m bitter that I’m sober now, but because there is nothing to celebrate.  Not while millions suffer with addiction, some in prison, while the power brokers get rich off their misery.  So feel free to light up today, just ponder while you eat your post-smoke box of Twinkies why you really can’t enjoy weed freely and even more puzzlingly why Twinkies are not Schedule 1?  I mean is there anything else that exists that lacks value or is as highly addictive as those little bastards?  That should blow your mind whether you are high or not right now.

Cheers,

Jim

[diablesses]

From Quarantine Beach, with Love: A .GIF Story

I’m embarrassed, to say the least. My body has outrun my spirit and I am not the child I remember, a child feigning patience with their sandcastle. I’m embarrassed when I go to the beach to build sandcastles because they stare

                                                  yet

they can’t see me for what I feel, for whom I feel to be. I go there when I can because it keeps me sane; putting my mind to it, shelving the isolation and its demons—

I’m not ready to name them here;

that would award them a substance better dedicated to the sand, the tide and its many gifts of debris.

The practice of building sandcastles is a precarious one, in that you can only really count on its precarity. Don’t build a sandcastle if you want things to last. Don’t build a sandcastle if you can’t afford to lose, if you can’t afford to grieve.

When the night comes, so does the tide. And when the night comes, so do the crabs.

They outnumber the tourists and they don’t complain when the shore gets eaten up. I don’t know if sandcastles left ashore are built on crab tunnels. I don’t know if crabs hop the fence, trespassing these delicate remains. I don’t know if crabs live in the ruins. I don’t know if crabs mate in the ruins. I don’t know if crabs die in the ruins. I don’t know because the sea doesn’t tell me and, out of respect, I would never dare to ask. I don’t question the sea’s behaviour because it is unconditionally generous. Its capability is known, from splash to storm. I know the crabs come with the night because I’ve seen them and they’ve seen me. The sea tries to hide this fact just as it hides the spoils of the day. 

When day returns to the beach, I try too. I try because I’m curious of the remains. I try because there’s something to be said about visiting the remains of things that were never meant to survive. I try because it helps me to figure loss and grief into my life in ways that are both nurturing and reparative.

A helpless commitment to memory, my archive of sandcastles boasts a material inventory of casuarina castoffs, sea-glass, shell fragments, urchin spikes, driftwood, palm husk, twigs of nameless varieties, Shak-Shak, coconut shell crescents, sea-grape leaves, mahogany pods, seaweed, wet and dry sands, grit from the shoreline, dead corals, concrete refuse and—I can’t remember the rest.

                                None survive in the ways I leave them.

But don’t worry. This is the game we play; I build with the day, the sea builds with the night. The night and sea enjoy an elegance with sand I can neither know nor envy. To see what the night and sea have left behind, to see what they have made, I return with the day. The silhouette of each castle is melted to a soft bump of sand. The heavier concrete and corals protrude from the surface like ancient ruins while all the foliage and shells are nowhere to be seen. I can’t ever know what I am inheriting with the day; I can only know that it takes the shape of loss while leaving something else in its place. If melancholia means to grieve what I can’t know I have lost, then what does it mean to grieve an unknowable inheritance? If I can indeed mourn the known loss of a sandcastle, what is to be done with the unknowable inheritance of its remains?

You cannot bury or entomb a sandcastle; you can only destroy it further. Or, to put it differently, you cannot restore a sandcastle; you can only build, from its remains, anew.

                                I’m embarrassed to say I am grieving.

When the responsibilities and policies of social distancing came to be, I awoke with the day to a practice in shambles. And I keep reawakening to that day, trying to make sense of dead corals, disappearing leaves and soft melts of sand. The story I kept telling myself of my practice—a practice of complicated comings-together, joys and intimacies—had already come undone in front of me and I didn’t—I still don’t really—know what to do. Josh Gabert-Doyon reads me with a mirror when speaking of this particular rupture, “the old world before the disease becomes irretrievable […] it seems hard to believe we’ll be able to make it through without abandoning some of our old selves.” It’s difficult not to take offence when a well-said, too real and too relatable truth clocks you so viscerally; perhaps being read to filth still also means being seen.

I’m embarrassed to say I am grieving what felt like a fixed and stable, yet already always momentary, form of practice I didn’t anticipate losing. I felt like the tiniest queer in the world and my practice felt like a sandcastle left overnight. For a moment—and perhaps still even now—this unanticipated inheritance of its remains has stayed illegible, irreparable and unforgivable.

I’m embarrassed to wake to a kanga now too old for this day and these days. Its face bears a since naïve image of two figures kissing in profile, their hurricane eyes, dead in stasis; stares eclipsed in butterflied horror. Its name?

                                “THE WHOLE WORLD IS TURNING”.

Imagining this kanga after Dorian and after the ongoing queering of the climate felt across different trembling frontlines of the world, I had hoped to attend to those strange unlikely pockets of intimacy, kinship, love, warmth, tenderness, empathy, and so on, springing up almost magically after another crisis-oriented queering of our worlds.

An image, like this, of intimate contact harnessed after crisis, seems so tricky and sticky given our present responsibilities and duties of social distancing. I don't know what to make of it in this light. The metaphor collapses and, again, illegible silences find me in new ways.

These conditions of distance remind me of another world; my once world of growing up queer in Barbados, my once world of sandcastles built, of sandcastles left to the mercies of unanticipated presents. Though certainly not the same yet not altogether separate, to be queer in anti-queer spacetime is to be both cautious of and estranged from the joys of social intimacy. Your queer friendship or your love or your sex would have to be quiet and unseen, lest the sight of it mark you for death or exile. So, you kept your love hidden, untouched, unmarked, and you learned to be close in other marooned ways.

With this in mind, to be queered might be to touch and be touched dangerously, to be put out of touch or for touch to be out of the question. I’m surprised—and therefore, embarrassed—to find myself back in this place and time, where intimacy can only be safely harboured through digital screens and windows. My local supermarket has since raised plastic barriers for its checkout staff and so the screen persists in and out of home. For some queered folk, the screen is bittersweet. At times, it is a magic portal, taking you elsewhere and otherwise; the first point of access to your not-so-local community, your distant love, your digital cruise. And at other times, it is a wall that strands you; a mocking horizon that keeps you out of touch and out of time. From intimacy to isolation, it is a pendulum at its cruellest, with queer life dangled at its mercy. At its kindest, it is a way home.

I’m embarrassed to have momentarily forgotten the kindness of screens and the warmth of those faces sat behind them. And I’m embarrassed to have also forgotten where driftwood comes from.

Where does driftwood come from?

                                                              I have no idea but I do know that it ends up on shorelines when building sandcastles. Driftwood and other flotsam have come to feel like unlikely gifts, unlikely tools, unlikely food, offered up or, more accurately, spat out by an indifferent horizon. When I’m embarrassed, forgetting where driftwood comes from, it is to say I’m embarrassed because I’ve also forgotten the generosity of horizons. Whether building sandcastles and staring out to sea, or staring into screens for warmth and company, what is most nurturing and sustaining, it seems, is the generous arrival and reunion of detritus. Finding the right—and that isn’t to say “perfect”—piece of driftwood for a sandcastle always begs the question, “How could you have been thrown away? You’re everything I ever needed.” And I’m again embarrassed to find myself asking that same question about the loveliest of friends; long since queered, long since set adrift on those troubled waters only we could call “home”. Communities of castoffs, castaways, dejected things and people; we have a habit of drifting together and, more than that, we make a habit of keeping each other afloat.

Tiny queers with not-so-tiny love have been teaching me, again and always, how to be close otherwise. And right now, learning to be close otherwise means, as Anne Boyer reminds me, “to see the negative space as clearly as the positive, to know what we don't do is also brilliant and full of love.” Where it had once been a shelter in the isolation of anti-queer spacetime, the screen opens up again with faerie heart circles, digital dance parties and other little gestures to hold many a sad queer from falling apart.

I’m embarrassed to have woken to what looked like a shoreline devastated; stripped of all practice and possibilities for intimacy. I hadn’t even taken the time to properly look, to see that, for the most part, it was still all right there, albeit in tiny, tiny pieces. Even if it’s disoriented, cast out of reach, forgotten its shape or loses its frills to the night, a practice always remains, even if only in remains. For every tiny remnant and speck of sand can build a world of difference. Each livestreamed poetry reading, each smiling webcam, each meal shared with a lover, each phone call with faraway friends or family, each delicate connection and tiny gesture can be, as Audre Lorde assures me, a discreet bit of “ammunition in my arsenal against despair.”