The View Eighteen Degrees to My Left

Even Though a Majority Favor the Drug Peace in My Own New Mexico (As We Do Nationwide), What I’m Noticing in Interviews Like This Terrifically Thorough Half-hour One With the Land of Enchantment PBS Affiliate’s “Newsmakers” Program, Is That The Most Most Mainstream of U.S. Media Platforms Take My “Ending the Drug War is Inevitable and Good” Premise For Granted

 

I Would Still Love Hawaii Even If It’s Denizens Hadn’t Been So Nice to Me

 

My son just burst into my office (trailing a dripping water balloon in each hand that served the same purpose as a medieval bugle volley) to suggest that it was high time I hung one of our blown glass hummingbird feeders outside this window where I spend so much time. The first wave of the only creatures I’ve met with a faster metabolism than my own had been back from their Costa Rican vacation for nearly three days, was his basic point. Their silky, spider web-cushioned doughnut nests were already starting to rise in the usual cholla cactus cradles.

It was, as anyone serenaded, let alone stared-down, by a hovering hummingbird knows, not a bad suggestion. I explained to my replicant that I hadn’t been rushing the washing, filling and mounting of the violet, conical feeder I favor (itself a magnificent work of art, the second purchased from the artist at Oregon Country Fair), primarily because plenty of hummingbirds had been visiting my windowsill already. Heaving deeply from chests the size of wristwatch faces, they appeared grateful just to get a break from the buzzy feeding frenzy running 18 hours a day at every other corner of the adobe Funky Butte Ranch house.

But I also told him that part of the reason for my patience (one man’s laziness) is that, as the ecosystem currently stood here in the high desert spring, I saw just enough deer, quail and strange cats sipping at the graywater laundry runoff creek that happens to materialize at eye level the moment I look left away from my laptop, to keep me on the good side of distracted. Recent studies, I homeschooled, reveal that we need to empty our thinking mind periodically to allow space for constant neural innovation. For me “periodically” means “pretty dang often.”

In the end, this “Eighteen Degrees to My Screen’s Left” viewshed might be the greatest single influence on my writing during this Land of Enchantment phase of my life. Upon these now five minutes of reflection, I see that there’s almost no way the addition of a few dozen ruby-throated and rufous hummingbirds per hour would be a detriment to the (to put it mildly) inspirational vibe that I enjoy in my work space.

I actually have laundry runoff on my mind at the moment for another reason, long-shot though that statement reasonably seems. In fact I’ve just been writing about how hemp-based Doctor Bronner’s laundry soap recently won a sustainable wash-off. If you’ve already checked out Too High to Fail  you can read about this in my forthcoming hemp ebook for the folks at TED – more on that including release date in the next Dispatch. To be among the first to hear the details, you can follow me on Twitter.

The three months of in-the-field research for that project comprised a journey to places pleasant (Hawaii in January) and (on-paper) less so (Manitoba in February). It resulted in adventures including enjoying a hemp-powered limo ride in Denver, testifying for the Drug peace Era in Hawaii, and discovering farmer who powers his farm and town from a carbon-neutral personal hemp power plant.

I’m extremely excited (OK, as I always am when finishing a project) about how this one turned out, in this case because it’s my first multimedia ebook. When I first started out as an author, I could only dream that I would one day be unleashed to simultaneously tell a single story in word and image. I thought I’d have a book side and a film side. Which is to say, this project is a classic case of one that had me feeling lucky to be a professional question-asker.

OK, off to cook some hummingbird juice. Have you any idea how much it means to me that my not-yet-five-year-old offspring (at the moment watering our blossoming orchard) thinks and cares about my work day aesthetics?

Even With a Mountain Lion Treating My Chickens Like a Take-Out Buffet, I Can Run Up My Canyon Again Thanks to the New Funky Butte Ranch Dog: Meet Golden (Mutual) Rescue Abbie

Six Sense Serenade: The Promotion of Now

Posted on: January 10, 2013 in Doug Fine Live Event, Too High To Fail
The view from the peak of the Funky Butte Ranch arroyo run about which I’m always blogging on and on, including today

 

Why on Earth are we here?

Surely not to live in pain and fear.

–J. Lennon

 

One of the lasting lessons I learned early on my first extended trip into true wilderness (recently and probably soon again to be known as the Planet) — which expedition was a bush plane drop off in a wolf-heavy spot in Western Alaska in 1993 — was that if you are in a mentally and geographically quiet enough place to hear a raven’s wings whooshing, if pretty much means you can only have a good day.

This (in my view) key grounding lesson in any complete education has since been confirmed so many times in the field, across nearly fifty degrees of latitude, that if I had recorded ten percent of the pertinent experiences I could probably have pulled off a Journal of the Hyper Intelligent Bird-sanctioned study. Excluding the odd extreme event which demands a particular parasympathetic nervous system response, you’re in a very desirable space for handling just about anything that comes your way when you’ve not just seen but heard a raven. You’re a conscious member of creation. You’re also probably dozens if not hundreds of miles from the nearest car alarm, law office or pharmaceutical-polluted public water supply.

Here on the Funky Butte Ranch, I’m in danger of taking such days — days featuring low-flying avian-caused audible air — for granted. Days when a hyper-intelligent bird’s wings are not just discernible, are not just loud, if the wind’s right they actually echo off canyon walls. In fact we’re beyond wild wing/wind fugues here. I’m so spoiled in my home and workspace that I’m pretty sure I’ve got one purple-highlighted yearling raven resident of the Ranch ready to perch on my arm. We already have daily extended conversations, usually just after goat milking, when there’s a lot of spilled grain all over the corral, chicken coop, and meadow. I’m trying to teach it, “Howdy neighbor,” and it’s trying to teach me, “Squa-Squawk (throat roll) Squack.” These lessons can go on for some time — it’s the kind of un-rushed chattiness you see at small town deli counters when you’re in a hurry. In fact, being on deadlines short and long, I had to end the last two exchanges.

This is all part of the daily payer that I call my morning arroyo run.

First, a little background about how I came to realize that my gym is also my shrine. The final sprint to that awareness began when I acquired, just last week, Western scientific proof of my long held belief that the main, if not the only error that the human species need correct as of this moment in Gregorian 2013 is giving up hunter/gathering. The moment the first land was fenced off to plant an individual family’s seeds, kings and slaves (and the lawyers, newspapers and priests necessary to keep the insanity in place) were not far behind.

An easy fix, I think. For me, at least. Just do what makes me happy. But I have a finely tuned vibe sensor and I can sense that over the years most folks, if not a super majority, have tended to find my “let’s get back to the wandering” suggestion, which I’ve been making since my early 20s, unrealistic, if not certifiable. Finally I discovered that someone with tenure had long ago signed off on it. The key is for this to happen before the flailing powers make you drink the hemlock. This involves living a life of courageous delicacy. Finding myself still alive, now I have my dinner party (or river raft or green room) back-up! It’s like Idea Insurance.

Comes in the form of a 1965 UC Berkeley doctoral anthropological dissertation in which Richard Lee found that the !Khun people (I think the exclamation point is some kind of click) of the Kalahari average 2,140 calories per day and an astounding 93.1 grams of protein during a – and this is the key stat for this dreamer – 12-19 hour work week. I spend more than that blanching kale.

And this is a non-motorized work week.  A work week sans the freakin’ wheel.

I shudder to think what we’d turn up if we studied our own society in these terms. Imagine the relative caloric intake to energy expended of, say, the financial adviser, the Wal-mart regional manager, the GMO corn farmer, the trucker, or you or me.

I know, I know, there’s no going back once we’re in Netflix instant play territory, but a) We can solar-power it all, and b) we can learn from the past.

During my own analog of what Lee describes as the !Kung’s “extended leisure time” each day, I notice that when I’m in an ecosystem that’s alive to the point of healthy predator/prey balance, I remember not just that the universe seems to want what’s best (for me and everyone), but that it’s always acceptable to be my own friend. This restorative is delivered thus far without fail on every 45-minute run/yoga routine in the wilderness adjacent to my ranch. I feel like I’ve won the psychic lottery every day. I wouldn’t change a thing in a life that yet again got me to this point feeling this way. Well, hardly anything. Continue Reading »

Indigenous Plus Netflix: “It’s Cool Because It’s Old” Also Applies to Plants

Posted on: November 16, 2012 in Doug Fine Live Event, Too High To Fail

Breaking News: My recent Conan O’Brien appearance is airing again on Monday (November 19) – Check it on TBS in your time zone. Helpful and supremely fun but non-mandatory pre-viewing reading: http://amzn.to/SJIs5i

In This Latest Dispatch: Do Washington and Colorado Have You Singing “God Bless America”? You Haven’t Begun to Hear All The Good News: Stanford’s On Board, Tucson’s Mayor’s Chillin’, The Berlin Wall of the Drug War Has Fallen and the Drug Peace Is Nearer Than Even I Realized (And I’m On the Optimistic Side of the Drug Policy Punditsphere).

 

Speaking at the recent Missouri Cannabis Law Reform Conference last week, I learned that the U.S. Heartland is about to end the Drug War along with the rest of the country. It was an honor to appear alongside Drug Policy Alliance founder Ethan Nadelman, and I’m absolutely amazed that the organizers got a presentable photo of me, considering I was wearing not just my previous day’s airplane clothes, but the outfit in which I milked my goats that morning. Had to borrow a toothbrush. Strangely, it kind of makes me nostalgic that airlines can still lose baggage. That’s an analog mode of incompetence. The National Cannabis Coalition’s terrific write-up about the conference is at http://bit.ly/UAufgA

 

This Dispatch is dedicated River, the 13- or 17-year-old Funky Butte Ranch dog, who sleeps now after a lifelong and joyous battle with coyotes, skunks, and other potential threats to the goats she loved and alongside whom she forever rests. This dog was so revered here that Robin, the Ranch cat, sat beside her freshly covered and wildflower-topped grave for nearly a half hour.

 

At the peak of my arroyo run up the Funky Butte this morning, I stopped, panting, to do stretches with Sanskrit names pretty much astride the (seen from the thawing sunrise) right cup of the bikini that forms the climactically-appropriate topography immediately surrounding my solar-powered goat ranch. My gaze sloping down involuntarily into the belly dip — a delicately dried wildflower meadow between my canyon and the next — I was startled mid-Tree Pose by a single five point elk trotting along in an almost exaggerated leisurely fashion.

 

With competition only from my own breathing, each of the thirty or fifty footfalls that made up my soundtrack for maybe half a minute reached me like a tap on the shoulder and then echoed into eternity. In a world where hummingbird wings often provide my alarm clock (these days it’s either that or East Coast media establishments looking for last minute guests on the topic of Drug Peace Astonishment stories), an eight hundred pound quadruped proving that Homo sapien is not the only species enjoying a leisurely jog on a given butte really captures a fellow’s attention at dawn.

 

Thus far without fail over the course of the seven years I’ve seen more goats per week than humans, these morning escapades into backyard Land of Enchantment wilderness, which include an intricate if creamy UV-protection application ritual, fine tune my spirit back to that sweet psychic setting, “Full-On Optimistic.” But the ol’spirit has, blessedly, needed only the finest of tuning of late.

 

For one thing, most readers of these Dispatches will already be aware that the Drug Peace movement whose birth I recently chronicled has just enjoyed its most significant legal advance in 80 years. It came at the polls, when Colorado and Washington voters overwhelmingly declared total Drug Peace (by legalizing cannabis for adult use), defying the feds and prompting César Duarte, governor of Mexico’s Chihuahua state, to tell Reuters, “It seems to me that we should move to authorize [cannabis] exports.”

 

It now looks like at least a half dozen other states will follow suit in the next four years – four (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine and Vermont) are already floating full legalization bills in 2012. America’s worst policy, her longest war, is finally wrapping up. The pundits seizing on the story are discussing what amounts to peace negotiations: will the feds raid? Will they sue? It doesn’t really matter. The American people won. We’re done with 2.3 million Americans in prison, 60,000 Mexicans dead, and losing out on a $40 billion a year agricultural tax base, not to mention a finally viable source of biofuel.

 

So this is what voting for something feels like.

 

I love when modern memes and ancient truth join hands for a while. I can’t really explain why, but continuity turns me on. It’s not just for ephemeral “right way to live if we want the species to continue on this planet for a few more generations” reasons, but because aiming for continuity in practice is nearly always also the funnest decision.

 

I’ve had a number of encounters along these lines lately – witnessing the resurfacing of obvious older truths above the digital age noise as mid-Twentieth-century propaganda fades to the point of reading like satire. A prominent moment occurred as I was blazing West across my home Chihuahuan desert toward the neighboring Sonoran — one of the world’s most stark, beautiful, and abrupt geological transformations — en route to a TOO HIGH TO FAIL Pax Cannabis Tour event in Tucson last week. It was the first day of winter shadows, of “go inside and snuggle by a fire” messages, which, in the name of work commitments, I was forced to ignore.

 

Somewhere past Benson I started nodding (the cackling stove fire was in my mental sights) and was compelled to stop at a particularly touristy gas station (Southwest kistch style). While waiting in line for the caffeine and bombarded with the images we Aztlanders peddle to outsiders, I reflected, “I love that Kokopelli is a brand.” This ancient imp, I felt, conveys an admirable value system. Better’n Katy Perry. Similar, actually. But somehow more genuine because of his consistency. He’s been a combination of playful, spiritual, musical and horny in this desert for at least three thousand years. You find him etched in the caves that line up with astrologically significant dates. He’s like Rabbi, guru and MC all wrapped in one.

 

Another, even more common continuity experience I enjoy, usually on my morning run after a high desert monsoon storm, is the one where I stumble upon a shard of household Mimbreno pottery. To its maker, the dull piece of 500-year-old fired clay was of the mundane, coil-layered and unadorned variety that’s cooked the most tea in my canyon over the past 1,400 years. And yet it thrills me to hold the shard in my palm. Of course, if my current neighbor tossed a Wal-Mart mug into this creek bed last week (even though miraculously, it had made the journey all the way from China unbroken), I wouldn’t give it a second look. I’d consider it a contravening of local littering laws. Yet this ancient broken mug, serving the same purpose, is quite simply, Cool Because It’s Old.

 

This (Cool Because It’s Old) has become something of a mantra to me – but what I’m really saying is something old impresses me, is cool, because it’s enduring.

 

I’m not thinking just about the value of enduring craftsmanship made from readily available local materials (which is cool enough), but about something that for some reason fills me with an even more acute gladness: the indisputable fact, in my very palm, that people were living similar lives to mine here on the Funky Butte Ranch quite a few centuries ago: the Mimbreno branch of the Anasazi people knew how to make a solid mug to drink this same spectacular aquifer water that I do. They planted the same beans. Strolled the same deer trails, their pace moderated by the same baking sun. OK, I’ve added Netflix to and nearly eliminated hand grain-grinding from the daily routine. But the maker of this mug shard in my palm and I watched the same Supernovae sunrises over this same butte, noticing the same too-recent pile of Mountain lion scat before returning home to the same hugs.

 

I mention the stimulating and satisfying effects of seeing Cool Old Truths because in such a manner is the oldest human relationship with a plant and the modern one beginning to mesh once again. It’s only been 80 years since official humankind, in one of its least sane decisions, decided to break its relationship off with cannabis, but it’s been a long 80 years. In fact we’re as a species recognizing that it was one of modern society’s biggest mistakes. But like all big mistakes, as Jimmy Cliff reminds us in The Harder They Come, it generally gets redeemed in a big way. Which is to say, the Berlin Wall of the Drug War fell last week.

 

This is the paragraph where, in noting the 10,000-year human relationship with the cannabis plant, which Michael Pollan calls a co-evolution, and which includes multiple cannabis remedies in the oldest surviving medical handbook (from China 3,000 years ago) and, famously, the paper of choice for Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence, I’m supposed to also be the cynical seasoned journalist. It’s hip to hype the fact that cannabis, like aspirin and wine, can be health-maintaining if used in moderation, and dangerous if abused. So noted, if not hyped. Writing only about abuse would be like covering the history of baseball and only covering the 1919 Black Sox scandal.

 

Bigger picture, because I think a lot about what I call The Indigenous Gene and what kind of air, water and overall public safety situation I might be bestowing on my mini-mes, I’m elated by recent Drug Peace progress at the societal level: my family is safer thanks to the voters of Colorado and Washington. TOO HIGH TO FAIL details the massive, aerial federal raid on my closest neighbor, a retiree who self-medicated with cannabis for anxiety before New Mexico’s medical cannabis program started up, that inspired me seek out an alternative to the Drug War and write a book about it. Instead of my usual hummingbird wing alarm clock, I awoke one morning to the climactic scene in Goodfellas: automatic weapons in my creek bed, helicopters close overhead. It genuinely put my kids at risk. Plus it cost you and me easily a million bucks (my neighbor never spent a second in jail for his eleven plants). The whole morning was terrorizing. At first I thought I was in trouble for a petition I had signed against fracking. Meanwhile, the mayor of a nearly town operated unmolested for another two years as a full-fledged cartel member, dispatched to transport American guns south of the nearby border. America’s longest war is her worst social policy since segregation, and it’s embarrassingly ineffective. It’d be one thing if it was a bad policy that worked. The good news is that America’s #1 crop will bring in $40 billion a year when federal cannabis prohibition ends.

 

Inter-generational Continuity is always on my mind, and no more so than after Tuesday’s election. I knew it was big, world-reverberatingly big, when a reporter from a weekly in Portugal called asking if I was aware that the American election had just ended the international Drug War. This a drug beat reporter in a country which has famously and successfully decriminalized all drugs, even the dangerous ones. (The Australian government is subsidizing its industrial cannabis farmers, by the way, which is important, as readers of TOO HIGH TO FAIL will be aware, since cannabis as a biofuel can play a strong role in ending human dependance on petroleum.)  Continue Reading »

America Adapts: The Drug Peace Transition Looks to Be a Smooth One

Posted on: October 16, 2012 in Doug Fine Live Event, Too High To Fail

 

Well, We Can Add C-Span’s BookTV To the Vast and Growing List of Mainstream Media Venues Whose Deciders Seem Fine With An Hour-long, Nationally Broadcast Invocation For the Drug Peace

 

Conan’s on Board (along with Pat Robertson and Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz)

 

Best of all, well, there’s nothing like a 30 minute television interview conducted by the people about whom you’ve just written a major book. From the heart of the Emerald Triangle, I actually had Mendocino sand in my toes during this fun and revealing interview conducted by quite the knowledgeable host.

Enhanced, I’m sure, by my suffusion this morning in a color I call “high desert purple at 5,700 feet as refracted off the crystals of billion-year-old Cambrian sandstone when confronted with the first rays of an October sunrise” (when I want to be humbled I talk to a geologist), I notice again that even (especially?) the most harried departure sequences from the Funky Butte Ranch invariably prove to be such profoundly sacred experiences. And not just because I was out of organic roiboos tea.

An inveterate questioner, a seeker of source, I somehow every time accept these staggeringly sublime morning services, these special effects-driven atmospheric panoramas, without surprise or question, perhaps because I’ve given myself four hours and five minutes to make a flight at an airport four hours away. Per ritual, I stop the Ridiculously Oversized American Truck thirty feet from where I’ve started it to issue some good-bye scritches to the foreheads of the goats that provide my protein in fact my road food menu this morning is a very civilized one:

DESAYUNO de FUNKY BUTTE

–Funky Butte Ranch chevre

–Organic stoned wheat crackers

–Grapes

–Last of the roiboos

–Jugo de naranjo con aceite de hemp

–Possibly a few Green and Black’s 80% cacao organic chocolate squares in the center console (gotta remember to check before the sun gets too high and melts the dash, let along anything stored in it).

I know the mechanical requirements of this putative repast are going to be causing some grand parabolic swerving as I traverse the first of my two mountain ranges in about twenty minutes (texting-while-driving has been banned before assembling-muti-layered-locavore-snacks-while-driving, possibly because the only witnesses to the latter are generally fox and elk).

For now, though, I hear myself saying “Good bad goat” to caprine grandmother Natalie as her front hooves, on cue, curl up and over my truck bed in her abortive but paint-scratching attempt to come along as tour road manager. A bipedal goat meeting my circular pupils with her horizontal slits always makes me laugh. Ah, I see the ducks and chickens have layed their eggs in a lotus-like star this morning, all within a single nest.

My last vista before I hit pavement in a cloud of kung pao-chicken scented vegetable oil exhaust includes two courting ravens dive-bombing (and by the narrowest of last second updraft margins avoiding) my rooftop solar panels. Now I must transition once again from chicken egg gathering to sushi order picking-up. I feel prepared.

With fourteen hours before my next event in San Francisco, I find myself reflecting with immense gratitude on my role as broadcaster to mainstream tipping point audiences (albeit in my particular, ya know, comedic investigative voice) of a message that others have been preaching for four decades.

What I’ve come to realize palpably is that when you speak for a genuine slice of change matters. When you thrown down and join the battle. Do it too early and your role might be rhetorically powerful, even a valuable and commemorated skirmish in the larger war, but it might cost you little things like your freedom, your livelihood, your home, your family or your life.

The world took notice and took a step toward justice when 12-year-old Pakistani child labor activist Iqbal Masih was murdered in 1995. But a lot of good that did Iqbal Masih. With attending my kids’ retirement parties as a goal, let me tell you I’m thankful the universe has set things up so that I am writing about the coming Drug Peace era when support for ending the intervening Drug War is at 56% in the U.S. and climbing, and Pat Robertson, for crying out loud, is on board. We might even see three states (Washington, Oregon and Colorado) unilaterally end the war on cannabis in a few weeks (most pundits predict one or two of these initiatives will pass, which is a great start, as 17 or 23 more will force Congress to wake up and remove cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act entirely, allowing states to regulate cannabis for adult use like alcohol, thus crippling the cartels and effectively ending the domestic war).

So what I’ve been reflecting on is this: you can be asked to enter at the martyr phase, or you can be part of the procession in the final jubilant parade — in the case of this smashing Drug Peace victory right alongside Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani (and worldwide) child slave labor market continues to make our underwear. Will it ever stop? Maybe. Not not without the courage of people like Iqbal Masih. I think of that kid whenever someone tells me they think I’m brave for having written TOO HIGH TO FAIL in 2012. I’m just waltzing in to the capital to celebrate the peace dividend (which is about $40 billion per year). In my New Mexico food co-op the other day, near the bulk quinoa, a friendly lady told me that again: that my book was courageous. “Maybe in 1985 it’d be brave,” I thought.  “A few million Drug War arrests ago.”  But all I told her was “Thanks! Let’s end this mistake once and for all.” And I say the same to you. With thanks — as a father and a patriot.

Postscript mid-tour, six days later: I guess I should stop being surprised by this (admittedly, accepting such a promising reality as I’m about to relate for the fourth Dispatch running in times I’m told are troubled is making me increasingly unselfconsciously optimistic in a whole spectrum of societal, spiritual, personal and athletic spheres). But the response I continue to get to TOO HIGH TO FAIL and its “The Drug Peace Is Good for America” message (now from mainstream audiences at literary festivals, high schools, colleges and private/corporate events  in addition to the bookstore tour stops and cannabis activist organization events that kicked things off a month ago, and the magnanimous and almost loving response from all media platforms) reminds me again that America Adapts.

That’s what she does. God bless her — this is why we’re so innovative and strong, why I busted out in “God Bless America” in the shower in Portland this morning, despite my decision to sample the locavore restaurant-and-microbrew scene until a few short hours ago. I realize that we as a nation, as a cultural entity, have wisely welcomed cannabis into the fold. Into the 300-year-old bundle containing all the Acceptable Parts of a Successful, Safe, Strong and Family-Friendly America.

Which is to say that I think the Drug Peace tipping point is coming sooner than even many cannabis activists realize (and even in the heartland — go Arkansas voters, and hang tough, Missouri: the National Cannabis Coalition is on the way). Please help bring forth this tipping point whether or not cannabis is in your life at the moment (hopefully in ten years it will at least, in industrially fermented form, provide your fuel — talk about a peace dividend).  Call your congressperson and senators and tell them, “For the good of the country’s economy and to cripple the drug cartels, please remove cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act and allow states to regulate the plant like alcohol.”

Telling the TOO HIGH TO FAIL Story at the Drug Peace’s Literary Headquarters: Mendocino County’s Gallery Books

Today’s Busy Shaman’s One-Minute Recipe For Bliss: Allow For Smooth Goat Homespace Reentry Time

Posted on: September 10, 2012 in Doug Fine Live Event, Too High To Fail

 

BBC TV Takes the TOO HIGH TO FAIL Drug Peace Message Across the Pond

 

The TOO HIGH TO FAIL Pax Cannabis Tour Bus

 

ReasonTV’s TOO HIGH TO FAIL Interview, as Shouted Out By the Angels at bOING bOING

“Let it rain. Let it rain. Let your love rain down on me.” –Eric Clapton

“Sometimes literally.” –Me

I’m stuffing a brand-new homemade hemp shirt into an ancient North Face duffel bag on the Funky Butte Ranch driveway, ducking from hummingbird dive bombers while a just-fledged falcon chick, not yet an expert hunter, is darting madly — like a hockey player on a breakaway but unsure of which goal is the opposing one — at the ground squirrels who have eaten most of the Funky Butte Ranch tomatoes and chile peppers. His frustrated attack squawk is like a Loony Tunes metronome.

I’m smiling, in other words. Which is huge. According to my worldview, being able to have even a moderately good time while packing for a big trip (AKA snapping out of your comfort zone three times before breakfast) is a strong indication of a solid mental attitude. Add two kids in the awkward zone where corporate transport firms charge them for a full ticket but they’re still too small to pack for themselves (except their chimp-shaped backpack full of sock walruses and animal-centric stories and crayons and water bottles) and, well, if you’re still smiling, I say keep doing what you’re doing. These are my mental health markers. My Extreme Triathalons. If equilibrium in the Now feels OK, don’t force a risky change. At most put some Shpongle on the music player.

The reason for this nearly-always-healthy jostling out of  routine (never mind that recent routine has been intensely sweet) is that it’s time for the dozen-date TOO HIGH TO FAIL Pax Cannabis Book Tour. My goals upon return (if I ever leave: RV travel departure time with multiple human offspring needs to be scheduled by season rather than date), are for the book to be on the New York Times bestseller list and for my unlisted cell phone to have been called by President Obama for appointment as Drug Czar, or at least for advice on what to say to America’s 100 million pissed-off Drug Peace advocates and cannabis patients by way of second term promises. I have reason to hope that my expectations aren’t certifiably delusional, in that Bill Maher has already penned the TOO HIGH TO FAIL review in the Times. And Pat Robertson is pleading for a Drug Peace alongside George Shultz. We’ve got Reaganites and evangelicals teaming with American cannabis farmers for a policy that will be great for America and the planet.

Both the personal and professional indicators feel like auspicious pre-departure occurrences. And so I’m less worried about my tour coveyance. Earlier concerns about the Reagan-era rig you see pictured at the top of this Dispatch included, for one thing, the fact that a 1987 Class B V8 Recreational Vehicle is no vegetable oil-powered R.O.A.T, my normal conveyance since bidding farewell to the Subaru.  Ugh, I kept thinking, at the very least I’m facing a return, if only for a few weeks, to gas pumps.  When, oh when, will I be able to fill ‘er up with hemp?

Another aging vehicle concern (one bought via Karma off a remote Craigslist posting from Georgia O’Keefe’s old home town) is that “aging” is too polite a word: my career rests on a dang 25-year-old, duct-taped-together, very-questionable-up-hills-let-alone-the-Funky-Butte-Ranch’s-Black-Diamond-Driveway behemoth I’m loading. Perhaps I can sum up my superstructural concerns about even making it alive and same-day to the fourteen or so events and countless media appearances I have scheduled nearly every day for three weeks this way: I’ve already had to re-attach the exhaust pipe. Zip-ties were involved. Hooray for the diligent Land of Enchantment mechanics, who in my RV’s case must also be automotive archaeologists and skilled welders.

Still, in addition to the spiritual indicators and chorus of what feels like broad-spectrum cosmic support radiating around me, I likewise feel prepared for a rare foray out of extreme rural living from what you might call the geek/groove angle: I’ve got the digital Music system rigged before I ascend the into the fabric captain’s chair: I often find a deliriously-upbeat soundtrack is called for when leaving the Funky Butte Ranch – useful for fooling the goats into thinking I’m a happy-go-lucky adventurer instead of a slightly scared, sniffling homesteader.  So I’m starting with World Party’s “Delirious” and suspect I’ll quickly get into some serious mid-career B. Marley as my kids drift into road-massage nap. Even during their gestation they handled these canyons and they still seem to prefer ruts to pavement.

A few hours ago I remembered some final solar adjustments to inverters and drip lines, which permits me to feel (however delusionally) that I have “shut off the oven” or whatever in satisfies the “we must turn back and check!” part of the brain. This, in turn, allows me to joyously put my fate into the hands of the universe. I don’t feel like I’m asking much: to keep my family safe and happy, and to meet my professional obligations on this tour. These are the sum total of my hopes for the vehicle I’m calling “The RV.” I admit that the interplay of cosmic variables that would allow these goals to be met seem to argue for longshot odds. They range from the transportational (I mean, even getting across the Rockies in summertime, in any vehicle, is an accomplishment), to the inspirational (“will folks get and like the book, from a literary standpoint?” The politics of it, I realize without surprise, are secondary to me. I just wanted to write a strong book. To improve with each project. No matter the topic.).  Continue Reading »

PSYCHC CROSS-TRAINING: Leaving Rural Ranch Life (At the Peak of Monsoon!) For Book Tour Sushi And a Possible End To the Drug War

Posted on: August 2, 2012 in Doug Fine Live Event, Too High To Fail

DOUG ON CONAN (Above)

*BREAKING NEWS: CLICK FOR BILL MAHER’S REVIEW OF TOO HIGH TO FAIL IN THE NEW YORK TIMES*

 

While I was packing for the above television appearance last week (despite not owning a television, though Netflix and Hulu make rapid familiarization a lot easier), I was reflecting somewhat wistfully that I can’t bring much unpasteurized Funky Butte Ranch goat cheese on the extensive TOO HIGH TO FAIL Pax Cannabis book tour that’s about to kick off with the book’s publication today.

I plugged in some of the early events’ GPS coordinates and, if I want to be absolutely sure that I’ll arrive alive at all two dozen or so events, I probably shouldn’t eat any of the nutritively priceless garlic/peppercorn chevre beyond, say, Denver. As I stuffed my running belt into my duffel bag, I reflected that adjustments in diet, especially from home-milked to wider-world, can be some of the hardest to make. I briefly considered bringing my goats along on the tour. But then I remembered sushi. This was my staple when I lived along a sockeye salmon river in Alaska and to say I miss it is like saying Kumar likes medicinal herbs.

A distant tingling, born out at the spicier frontiers of my taste buds, rode a speeding hand-pumped railroad cart along a wasabi third rail to the tip of my tongue and on to the station way at the back of my palate. I remember the exact moment of this culinary/olfactory hallucination (usually portrayed in cartoons with the uncomplaining victim floating toward the source of the fumes), because, before stuffing the running belt between the hemp ballcap and the Carhartts, I had just hung up the phone and found myself one rung higher in my belief in humanity.

See, I had been on the horn with a practitioner of the automotive supply and repair profession. For many, this will provide sufficient surprise at my elevated state of mind. Too many folks don’t associate “interaction with my mechanic” with “higher belief in humanity.” Perhaps my expectations were low.

In fact, for a few weeks, having atypically dealt with every traditionally difficult demographic from solar electrical contractors to entertainment lawyers to airline industry frequent flier arbiters to an extended family of well-nourished squirrels claiming squatters rights under my barn, I had been telling friends and family that I had all but come to the conclusion that the days when business could be carried out by verbal agreement were numbered. (The squirrels, in particular, seemed averse to any kind of civilized negotiation, especially if it involved their not eating my expensive organic chicken feed.)

My overall (and rare) business world cynicism had started even before the barrage of real world phone calls and invoices intruded into my usual hummingbird-quiet world, as a protest my heart was staging against the to-me-distasteful social media era characteristic whereby “friends” are really people eventually interested in selling  stuff to us (and vice versa). Life as used car salesmanship.  This is not what I want at the base of any of my relationships.

In a few pointed arroyo-side rants, I had emphasized, perhaps over-emphasized, a few recent experiences by which I could mix the concrete for the foundation of my truth on this. And so confident was I about my almost-conclusion (admittedly much better, in a very relative universe, than an actual conclusion) that we were now not a society but a giant social corporation, that I bet a friend ten bucks that the manager at the nearest Big O tires (forty five minutes from the Funky Butte Ranch), Fred, even here in the aptly-named Land of Enchantment and despite my three-sets-of-tires loyalty over the years, would not let my mechanic pick up my new book tour RV for a break check, until he had obtained certain key credit digits from me.

“He’s not handing those keys to anyone until paperwork has been signed,” I told my hiking buddies. One grunted as though a yucca branch had stabbed him in the pancreas, which it had. “I bet they learn that as trainees,” he groaned or agreed. Another took the bet (tellingly, comfortingly, without either of us writing it down).

I was wrong. About Fred. His was the call that came before my sushi fantasy, asking that I stop by, ya know, sometime, to pay him for the tires. And that, people, is just one chord in the solid vibe chorus under which I begin this tour. In fact, as TOO HIGH TO FAIL hits shelves and I cruise out to meet many of you (in person or in literature), I want to send props to the crew of rural New Mexico craftspeople who made it possible, from the strictly mechanical standpoint: part of the tour will unfold in a cozy 1987 RV. And those who have operated such a collection of obsolete (and often superior) parts and functions know that a 27-year-old vehicle is a 27-year-old vehicle. So this one goes out to Nacho, Ed and the crew at Speedy Wrench, and Fred at Big O Tire. Plus Donny Z, a true jack-of-all-trades.  These fellows know about the nascent book. They are part of its mission. The pit crew.

They found and repaired everything from vacuum leaks to rusted tail pipes. On the subject of fluids alone, this old Tioga (pre-microwave and plasma TV, thank heavens!) is now one of the best hydrated organisms I’ve come across in my desert ecosystem in quite some time.

And that, as I say, was just the automotive section of the Auspiciousness Orchestra that’s been serenading me here on the Funky Butte Ranch these past weeks. Or maybe it’s been years now. My calendar is more seasonal than weekly. What feels like another key part of the Big Picture Syncopation that I find it hard not to interpret as metaphorically encouraging is the fact that earlier today my four-year-old burst into my office clutching what appeared to be the world’s most perfect peach and announced (what you might call the dictionary definition of joyfully), “look what I found in the orchard!”

‘Twas not just the first peach of the year, but in fact the first Funky Butte fruit of any kind. Ah, seven years from planting to payoff, and totally worth it. Juicy, is what I’m trying to say. I haven’t cleaned the drip stains off my mouse pad yet.

And so under that kind of emotion (and nutrition!) now the fun begins. Has begun, I should say. Although by that I could mean a week, 42 years or 5 billion Millennia, star stuff that we are. But the specific immediate tour fun has already included several excellent moments on the very first leg, a short run to L.A. for the Conan O’Brien show. Before I even reached the airport, I enjoy a brief yoga retreat from a pass overlooking the nation’s oldest designated wilderness. The stretching session included a brief and mutually supportive eye-to-eye with a young bobcat still sporting tufts of kitten fur.  I came very close to petting it before remembering that this would violate proper cruising-to-the-Warner-Brothers-lot-through-ancient-ponderosa-pine-forest etiquette.

This is my life for the next month and a half or so (I hope to return just in time for post-Monsoon river rafting season): ping pong with Andy Richter one day and goat milking the next. Or as I think of it, Psychic Cross-training. One wants to broaden the areas in which one is n shape. And I hope the video that starts this Dispatch bears out my feeling that the book that spurred the Conan visit could hardly have enjoyed a more auspicious launch than last Wednesday’s show. Certainly I could hardly have had more fun. Continue Reading »

Thank You, Zeitgeist Gatekeepers, For Smiling On the Dawn of the Drug Peace Era

Posted on: July 9, 2012 in Doug Fine Live Event, Too High To Fail

[Pre-order the new book: TOO HIGH TO FAIL]

Timing is on my mind as the first Monsoon drizzles fall like a massage on my incontrovertibly red neck here in the high desert of the Funky Butte Ranch. In particular, I’m noticing something in the final lunar cycle before this book I’ve written about the last days of the North American Drug War hits bookstores and e-readers. What keeps popping up, especially now that I’ve started giving advance interviews for the publications that have longer “lead times,” is that one of my projections about the situation at publication time, like all expectations, was almost totally wrong. I mean, I could hardly have made a less accurate prediction.

And this, people, is a very good state of affairs, in my view, if you’re a sustainably-minded patriotic parent. I imagined that once I’d finished my work (and the work would be the same regardless of my perception of response: research and report as I see it from the front lines of the Drug War, not omitting the ubiquitous and considerable humor always to be found in the trenches of any war) I’d be exuding, in my interviews, a sort of semi-apologetic, “Listen, before you say anything, let me tell you why I’ve just dedicated upwards of two years of my professional life to researching, ya know, what the coming Drug Peace might look like.”

Instead, to generally quite educated and up to date interviewers (this week Stanford Magazine and Irish National Radio), I hear myself saying, in reply to the obligatory “Yes, but the people who want to fight on another 40 years, spending a trillion of our dollars for 1% results would say…” question is, “If you don’t recognize that America is about to get stronger, safer, healthier, richer and better educated about the whole realm of intoxicants (especially long utilized and comparatively benign medicinal plants) as the Drug War ends, then you’re behind Kansas and Indiana. You simply aren’t paying attention to economics, health research, or the facts on the ground. But I know a book that may enlighten you.”

Turns out America, and I mean mainstream America, heartland America, God-fearing America, where I raise my children, dodge coyotes and twice a day face a herd of goats very close to my own intelligence level, is not just totally ready but in fact quite eager to end the War on Drugs. For the good of the country. Having heard almost nothing but support in red and purple states, I’m no longer hesitant to discuss the subject of the coming Drug Peace in any company.

Once my preliminary research convinced me that the topic was important enough to move my family adjacent to the cannabis fields of Northern California for a year of study amidst the conflicting sounds of bumblebees and helicopters, my principal concern upon revealing the results to the world was, “Professionally, would I be Woody Harrelsoned (stigmatized for a topic mainstream journalism, politics and religion didn’t yet consider top-tier-important)?” My confidants were mixed on that one, but one, it turns out, particularly astute friend said, “Didn’t hurt Michael Pollan.” Indeed two years of time (and polls, and Pat Robertson) have shown the zeitgeist is there.

So what I’m saying is, where my predictions were off was not in the realm of my own conclusions following research on the front lines of this war. It was in the realm of everybody else’s.  I thought I’d have to explain why the topic of Too High to Fail matters. Instead, every time I tell someone what the new book’s about, I feel, as I put it in an earlier Dispatch, like a marathon running being given water and back pats as he closes in for the lead.

Hence the whole topic of timing, in this case, blessedly fortuitous timing, has been crossing my psyched RADAR screen almost every day this summer. American publishing is, for the moment, one of the last industries that requires a substantial lead time between inspiration and realization. Which is to say, it’s been nearly two years since I wrote the book proposal for Too High to Fail. There was simply no way for me or for my publisher to know Americans would be polling, as I type these words, at a record 56% in support of ending the War on Drugs – and that number is climbing (it’s 80% in support of medical cannabis legalization, and the 56% is up from 49% a year ago).  In other words, I had no idea I’d be preaching (or at least providing what I hope are the humor- and adventure-laden facts) to the converted. Continue Reading »

The Electron Kaleidoscope: In Which the Annual Threshold of “Siesta or Die” Is Crossed On A Strong Day of Mutual Multi-Generational Homeschooling

Posted on: June 13, 2012 in Doug Fine Live Event, Too High To Fail

*See the short film about and pre-order the new book: TOO HIGH TO FAIL*

 

It took six years and one wilderness horseback trip with an Apache guide (that for a magazine assignment: what would I do without flukes delicately placed alongside flukes?) for me to realize it, but I can actually see (and in fact during hundreds of hours of meditation have directly stared at) the Continental Divide ridgeline sketched into the Cambrian cliffs across from the Butte on my morning hike.

It’s a white horizontal line, the Divide. It couldn’t be any more clearly marked in an Earth Science textbook diagram called, “Layers of the Earth’s Crust.” (Not incidentally, my leading theory on why folks have lived in my valley pretty much since folks have lived in the New World and, to me even more startlingly, why more people lived here a Millennium ago than do now, is that we humans somehow recognize places where we’re meant to be. Maybe it has to do with living alongside rock that’s been here since before the first organic cell division. And you thought the Ents had seen it all before.)

Once that most tangible of veils was lifted (that of the immovable Exhibit A of geologic evidence), other related (that is to say, “feeling age-old”) realizations flowed (despite the deafening if inviting 24-hour cicada line dance lately). They (the realizations) flowed like the Monsoon rains I pray soon will in these arroyos I explore daily by way of a workout. (Other than the fact that I hardly have a morning run without a rush hour cicada smacking into my shoulder or chest at high speed, then pausing for a moment to say “Pardon and good day” before pushing off in a great hurry, insect symphony is rarely distracting, rather subtly enhancing like the languid subconscious soundtrack of the didgeridoo. An underneath sound. Too intense to be called ambient. But definitely Of This Place. It makes these canyons vibrate just slightly irregularly, like an LP version reinstating the blessed air and scratches. Now, I know that more neutrinos hit the Earth every second than there are cicadas in New Mexico, but still there are a lot of them. Like most neutrinos I’ve met, the road enraged cicadas do no physical damage either, by the way, provided I’m wearing the triple digit temperature version of a suit of armor. That is, pants and a hat.)

One example of a tributary realization currently on its way to the mental river’s main fork: I can now examine individual approaching afternoon frontal systems — usually monster marshmallow gobs for the Michelin Man’s Jell-o salad, or cauliflower ready to be garam masala’d for a Maharajah’s creation myth benefit lunch. And in examining them from the Funky Butte Luxury Box, I can and do actually root like a vested fan for a particular wind direction: it matters a lot to me, I’m trying to say (beyond even the innertubing ramifications), on which side of that billion-year-old granite ridge line the Monsoon rains land. if they land at all this year. “Used to be like clockwork every afternoon starting in July,” the old-timers say semi-annually with squinting upturned faces in August these days with increasing trepidation. The worried monologues, often accompanied by ball-cap removal and brow wiping, is in fact becoming more regular than the Monsoon itself.

As the frontal horses near the finish line each day, what I’m shouting in the stretch, clutching my betting slips, are invocations like, “Drench my 200,000-acre backyard wildfire (which I know is good for the ecosystem but still, it’s only 20% contained with a month before rainy season used to come), first, if you please, and then bring the moisture slowly, daily, in bursts of electricity to the streams on my side of the Divide (or both’d be even better), and to the Funky Butte Ranch itself, and in such a gentle way that it doesn’t wash out my long and winding black diamond driveway.

I find it hard to deny that the current Era of Extreme Climate Chaos is confusing our internal systems. All ecology-based biorhythmic bets are off. I feel safe here speaking not just for myself, but for most organic life in the ecosystem. Even the lizards, normally a model for the “chill” outlook toward life that I believe might be the “up” button on the elevator to enlightenment, are confused: they, along with their jaggedly oval toad cousins and some kind of usually-nocturnal ring-tailed cat, are flocking to the Funky Butte Ranch for duck pond and child pool water, and for extended licks off of the drip irrigation system. They’re all wearing looks that seem to say, “The farmer’s almanac said this is supposed to be a relatively mild time for us to breed and fatten up before the blessed rains come.”

“Almost makes a fellow wonder if there might be something in this ‘Climate Change’ theory,” I reply with finger quotes. “Or if it’s perhaps some kind of sunscreen/industrial complex scheme.” (Curious if anyone who gets this deep into one of these Dispatches finds it odd that I both speak out loud to and believe I understand the conscious language of local members of other species — my most simpatico neighbors.)

One interesting thing I keep calling to mind in my Monsoon prayer moments this year is what Joe, my recent wilderness guide, pointed out by way of questioning the conventional anthropological assumption that Anasazi people left our area due to extreme drought: “Still a pretty wonderful place to live, seems to me.”

He was pointing to a nearby stream when he said this, and the walnuts were just forming on the leaves above our lunch spot across from an almost napping herd of elk. Hooray local living. Drought? Sure. Still bountifully-giving land? You bet. And to be sure, by now the lizards, toads and I should have gotten the memo: it gets hot in the high desert by late spring. Too hot for organic life to operate in full sunlight. Vitamin D is not an issue in the Funky Butte Ranch ecosystem (water efficiency and wheelbarrow durability? Maybe).

But whenever I get to this point, to the brink of inveighing for cosmological specifics and running for the hammock, I pretty much launch into the involuntary second stage of the prayer — one in a more appreciative mode: in exchange for always slow dancing with dehydration, we have been given a concurrent Divine gift, one that ranks up there, for the desert dwelling neo-Rugged Individualist, with manna: it’s called the Siesta.  And I’d like to state the important fact right at the start of this cultural hagiography that Siesta cultures have the highest workplace productivity of any known modern economic model. I mention this in case a reader is wittingly or otherwise still tangled in a 20th Century corporate model filled with antiquated concepts like personal meetings and commutes and thus in danger of wandering toward the wholly wrong “lazy Mediterranean mindset” place.

Really, the operative takeaway for me is the often recognized but (like obvious resource management conclusions on a small planet) rarely prioritized (when, say, it comes to actual policy or individual purchases of farmed salmon) realization that humans are astounding adapters. It’s one of our most admirable traits, I believe.

Think of all the shit to which we get accustomed! One particularly absurd one I notice has recently gained acceptance in my life is the minor architectural redevelopment project I have to undertake with arms full of alfalfa hay each morning to order to open the poorly-installed gate to the new Funky Butte chicken yard.  This enraged me for a week. Yesterday I caught myself dealing with it, while whistling, as just another part of morning chores. More of life’s perpetual Zen Ninja training.

Another way of stating this is to note that to Roseanne Roseannadanna’s famous adage that “it’s always something,” I add, “Sure, but let’s have fun dealing.” Worst case, under Venusian temperatures, I can wait a few hours and stargaze, or, if it’s still 132 degrees after sunset, jump in the hammock and plug in the solar-powered Netflix (laptop cradled in juniper crook): something with Steve Martin in the 1980s will be available on Instant.

Plus, I’m not generally a “worry about what time of day it is when I start the hike” kind of guy. You’ve got your two seasons every day most of the year in southern New Mexico (Saharan summer and Antarctic winter) and you’re going to hit both of them.

Still, triple digit mercury before 10 a.m. and after 7 p.m. every day for the past week is making for what even to me feel like some very long Siestas. Closer to hibernation. Or more practically, as my Sweetheart observed with a breakfast brow mop the other day, recent conditions “don’t really encourage midday garden weeding.”

It was while basting in this thick campfire atmosphere (which, once I recognize parking outside of shade is not an option until Thanksgiving, I hardly notice because I so enjoy the season’s encouragement to sleep outside so as to avoid cone nosed beetles and scorpions), that I bumped home from a long town day yesterday (comprised largely of vegetable oil mechanic estimates, organic feed pick-up, two tons of hay unloading, and a hotsprings soak, it was the usual tough day Away From the Ranch, for which I was rewarded with a gorgeous, streaked and ashy sunset the color of an oxidizing town hall copper cupola). Entering exhausted and loaded with organic produce from the farmers market, my oldest son greeted me with, “Guess where the toad is now?”

“Um. On my laptop?”

“Close. On the porch. Perched on top of River (the dog)’s water. I think it likes it here.”

“I think one more visit and we can name it. Whew. The whole saga is making me want a glass of ice water of my own.”

This was quickly arranged, following a soar-heated shower.

First, though, I allowed my youngest son to lead the way back outside, where I checked out the toad. The chunky amphibian Buddhist was, as far as a quick Internet search could tell, a red-spotted toad, plump as a ripe plum like at all the animals are this spring.

I can’t figure out why this is, given the scorched earth dryness (could the Funky Butte Ranch itself be feeding the entire desert ecosystem?). But what became clear as we had this fairly long multi-species staring contest with the toad (which conference came to enthusiastically include River the dog, who had sauntered over from coyote lookout duty to see if the hubbub might be scrap-related, but also found the toad very interesting, particularly from an olfactory perspective) is that all is decidedly well in the high desert around the Funky Butte Ranch.

I palpably recall, parched as I was at the moment (but unwilling to leave the scene until both sons had told me everything they had on their minds on the subject of the amphibian life cycle), the heavy fog of worry slipping away, with confidence filling the vacuum. We talked about some of the differences among mammals, amphibians and reptiles, and then I thanked my kids for the multi-generational and multi-directional homeschooling.  If you haven’t guessed already, the role of teacher rotates organically in our scene. My Sweetheart and I as yet do most of the spelling and math instruction. My four-year-old teaches philosophy. My two-year-old is the yoga (formerly “gym”) instructor. The toads teach biology.

Among senior staff, I’m the leading lobbyist for at least the pretense of a regular instructional routine in the Funky Butte Preschool. I think the reason for this is I imagine that it falls under the Zen Ninja training component of the school’s educational philosophy.  That is to say, OK, every hike is a geology lesson, every goat milking is Nutrition and True Home Economics, and every egg-gathering math. But even the Ingalls of Little House fame had a fixed time for “morning lessons.”

Mine is the voice asking, “Doesn’t a certain mental discipline result from imposing a little order on the Ranch School day; from prescribing occasional regularity? If the reader notices the reference to television’s 1980s euphemism for constipation, it’s intentional: when I let things flow, the educational lessons are invariably the most profound. And in truth, at this rate, I fear little for my progeny’s standardized test scores. Still, we’ve ordered homeschool workbooks and old-fashioned wooden desks for the ostensible students.

Scheduling methodology aside, as an educator and an evolving humanoid, a question lingers: when is a lesson learned? What entails “sunk in”? If it’s situational with a positive cosmic result 90% of the time, is that a passing grade?

Take, in my Digital Age Goat-herding life, the important lesson that in the desert, even without a radically changing climate challenging the very life-giving rain cycles, yes it gets inside-a-teapot-warm after dawn for eight months, but (and this is the important part that seemingly only meteorologists grok) the weather is going to do what it does.

As my Alaskan friend Ariana told me when I asked what kind of tide and wind we’d like to phone in to the Weather Service request line for easiest kayaking to that day’s glacier, “Dude, if you’re going to worry about the weather you’re never going to go anywhere.”

OK. It’s hot here in the Land of Enchantment High Desert. But it’s beautiful. What’s more, I have ample supplies of hammocks and rooibos tea. Oh, the many seasons I experience each day in June on the Funky Butte Ranch. At 8 a.m., I find myself tucking an iced water bottle into my running belt holster like a secret flask. Strapping on my just-re-glued “trail” running shoes, I’m grateful for this final shiver of the day. Winter is about to go away for 19 hours. It’s about to get toasty in italics for three quarters of a day.  Like a PH experiment moving from base to acid numbers mid-chemistry class, all my in-play adjectives migrate quickly each day before breakfast from the realm of “brisk” to that of “melting.” And then, in a meteorological phenomenon that seems to be promising-yet-understudied in the realm of sustainable energy harvesting, all the heat dissipates into the atmosphere by about 10 p.m.  Then it’s down comforters and wool socks again.  Every single day.

And under such conditions was the Siesta Invented. I can imagine its rapid acceptance: soon after some very successful field testing (productivity up in all areas, from the aforementioned economic to the personal outlook and mood) it was installed as a sacred institution in nearly every culture between 20 degrees N. and 20 degrees S. Latitude, probably while we humanoids were still the hunter/gatherers we’re supposed to be. Continue Reading »

Still Seeking Double Digits In The Land of The Eduringly Free (Or, Transcending Even The ‘Most People Would Rather Be Here’ Fall-back Realization)

Posted on: May 23, 2012 in Doug Fine Live Event, Too High To Fail

 

“I think he makes movies so he doesn’t think about dying.” –Robert Weide, on Woody Allen

 

*See the short film about and pre-order the forthcoming book: TOO HIGH TO FAIL*

 

Over the past five years, I’ve on at least three distinct occasions come to be grateful literally beyond words for a style of music I appreciate even though (and very possibly because) I can’t understand the lyrics. Recently I added Desi-electronica to this – this is a genre largely comprised of eminently danceable and somehow spiritual house beats looped and mingling under languages ranging from Hebrew and Arabic to Hindi and Urdo (check out Eccodek’s “Behind The Mask” or just the whole “Suburbs of Goa” channel at soma.fm)

 

I’m listening to some unintelligible and inspiring chant from the north of the Subcontinent now. Heck, the vocal sample could be deep Rumi-esque poetry, but if it’s like Dance Hall Reggae, Raga, Salsa, and my favorite Latina hip hop artist (talkin’ to you, Mala Rodriguez), I find I’m the bigger fan when focusing on music, not words. The beat. The groove. That’s where I lose time.

 

Which is the goal. I forget death through dancing and (one of the few things I feel pretty safe declaring in a relative Cosmos) won’t stop dancing till I die. I’ve generally got an internal (but sometimes full blown dance party of a) groove going in line at the DMV. What the Allman brothers rhythm section members refer to as a shuffle. I think of it as the circulatory system of the cosmos.

 

Which, I now realize, is why I’ve never been able to dismiss it as cynical crossover pablum when Faith Hill chants, “I hope you DAAAAAANCE.” (That is to say I usually don’t change the station for at least a minute.) Because in the end, I deeply believe that Mrs. McGraw is issuing forth very solidly the right message. The song is a positive educational broadcast, as far as I’m concerned, and as my kids remind me every morning before 7 a.m. And it came to the zeitgeist through the McNetwork. Care of the Music Industrial Complex. It’s almost as though we, (those of us still in possession of an independent spirit) have somehow installed a lyricist spy in Nashville or something. Like the Simpsons airing on The Network That Shall Not Be Named.

 

I recently finished fifteen months of hard but fun work on a book. Since the preliminaries have largely been completed (discussions about the edits, cover design decisions, and color insert captions are down to one or two panicky emails from Manhattan per day), I’m in the phase now of wishing it were August 2 already, so I could at least stop waiting for TOO HIGH TO FAIL to hit shelves and e-readers. But it’s not yet August 2, so my mind wanders.

 

Accordingly, the above lesson about mainstream zeitgeist sometimes being (from my perspective) spot-on has this morning filtered into my grateful astonishment about the nearly blanket support for the thesis of TOO HIGH TO FAIL (namely that America will be stronger, safer, healthier, smarter, wealthier and cleaner if the War on Drugs ends immediately). The encouragement is coming from all ends of the political spectrum: I feel like a second place marathon running getting water and back pats as he closes in for the lead. Even Pat Robertson chimed in against the Drug War last month and Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz is considering writing a cover blurb for me.

 

From the world at large, I appreciate the rah-rahs but am not shocked – just pleased: Gallup and Rasmussen polls, after all, are showing the public is done with the insane, wasteful and ineffective-though-democratically-undermining Drug War. The zeitgeist is clearly in place. But the go-get-‘ems I’m getting from inside the publishing and television industry — that’s got me thinking that maybe the final piece of the puzzle — the as-yet prohibition-friendly federal political world — might actually fall into place in our lifetimes if not in this phase of the Mayan calendar. Continue Reading »

Appreciation Overlap: Why the Funky Butte Owls Are Family

Posted on: April 30, 2012 in Doug Fine Live Event, Too High To Fail

[*See the short film about and pre-order my new book: TOO HIGH TO FAIL*]

 

It was so quiet on my canyon run this morning that the wing thrusts of the resident courting ravens’ wings actually echoed as they dove. I heard each one distinctly twice. Always a good sign when it comes to emotional health — theirs and mine.

 

Watching the ravens and listening now to the also-echoing, also-passionately-in-love doves, I scanned the horizon, and indeed surveying all that I’ll vainly call “mine” from atop the impressive, hundreds-of-miles-across vista provided by the uppermost plateau the Funky Butte Ranch’s black diamond driveway (this is where the chairlift should let off), it was easy to choose, mindset-wise “Another post-Anasazi neo-Rugged Individualist in sync with the Cosmos” over, say, “So much neighbor feud evidence.” Both focal choices were options in every direction.

 

It helps what Bertie Wooster would call The Overall Outlook that this is still, though only just, the time of year in the high Land of Enchantment desert when I’m glad to see the sun is already up. There are still a couple of hours before non-optional siesta. Jogging back down to the morning goat-milking, the first light over the butte didn’t so much end nighttime as reveal land that operates (as every New Mexican knows) according to its own physics.

 

The conclusion I draw after a similar lesson pretty much every day for a thousand days in a row (sublesson: for the nineteenth Millennium in a row, nature once again provides a human the ultimate light show — today’s episode is spring light filtered trough new walnut and peach tree foliage) is that I prefer life not with no one whispering in my ear, just with hummingbirds and child song rather than, say, car alarms and ambulances doing the notifying. Or late night reality reruns.

 

Speaking of late night, the last sound I heard under strong evidence of intergalactic intelligence (lotta stars visible, is what I’m saying) yesterday was the Funky Butte Ranch great horned owls. They were likely nesting here above this ranch before people were. Or at least since the Anasazi honed the chert and obsidian tools whose flakes I’m always finding everywhere. My computer told me that successive generations of the long-lived species will occupy the same nest. This year’s chicks (there are two) are the great-great-great grandchildren of the batch from my first carnage-filled year. In fact, owl nest-clearing is quite the annual rite: I’ve seen terrified-then-soaring fledgling flying lessons every spring since I’ve lived on the Funky Butte Ranch.

 

I love being the interspecies newcomer. You can see the lifestyle sigh in the studiously scanning Strigidae eyes as I and my toddlers march loudly down to milk the goats every morning. In their day there was no singing. Just swooping. ‘Least the two-leggeds draw the squirrels to the front doorstep.

 

“Thank you for keeping the (garden-eating) ground squirrels in check,” we tell them whenever we think of it. Their Funky Butte cliff nest arches over the garden and orchard like the upper deck pub at a modern sports arena. Their hoots echo even on high wind days.  It’s a major component in the rhythm section of the spring Funky Butte soundtrack.

 

Other than choosing to fence the obvious garden spot seven years ago (and thus turning sand to worm-crawling dank soil via goat poop), I don’t feed ‘em. The owls. They could live anywhere. 
But on my annual climb to their nest with my kids to say hi to this year’s family while, for homeschool biology class, collecting squirrel-bone-filled pellets (my oldest carried a magnifying glass), I was palpably appreciating a new facet of the blessing of this other family in what you might call our ground/air duplex. It was a reason beyond even their free, fairly comprehensive anti-rodent patrol (my neighbors have stuffed replicas perched on their garden gates, this being the desert version of the scarecrow). It was the fact that we have without fail got along since the moment of our arrival, when I had one and they six fewer rings on the generational family tree. These birds show that I can actually consistently coexist peacefully and even affectionately with any neighbors at all.

 

It’s thus all the more of a compliment that their home is so physically close to mine because with their vision and hearing (again, thanks Internet) we’re not just sharing a duplex. We’re sharing one with thin walls. I can see them from the porch, from the goat milkstand, from the second floor of my kids’ playhouse. They no doubt know my entire schedule. Even my outdoor clothes chest and bathing habits. Continue Reading »