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

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.

This is to say that without expectation, conscious need or preparation (beyond some rudimentary Tree Pose stretching in the creekbed) I enjoy a profound spiritual experience while exercising every morning. It just happens. Today the spiritual spark ignited a few nanoseconds after I scooped up a handful of shaded old snow, blindingly white against the cactus and yucca screen, and rubbed it on my sweaty neck. That was when the woodpecker started up in stereo — in an oak tree on either side of the deer trail where I had paused for a sip of water.

Whatever the day’s catalyst (talk about Must See TV), I often find as I duck under the final fence line and see and smell the juniper smoke rising from my own house, that I can’t say thank you enough. To God, the dang in-the-orchard-again goats, everyone. Sometimes it kicks in earlier than others, and can interfere with my ostensible exercise: I keep thinking of something or someone or some kindness for which to give focused, intentional thanks, so I stop for a minute, pull off my headphone, pray, get caught up in a woodpecker symphony, or the deer hoof reverberations of the herd I’ve just startled, or (this one happens a lot in wintertime) a regrouping quail family yipping from trail-side clusters of Apache plume bushes like Sesame Street aliens as the resident red-tail hawk circles languorously overhead, probably assuming I’ve got to that breakfast take-out counter before she has.

I’m the kind of fellow who doesn’t generally expect instant karma. I try to be patient; make an effort not to forget the many-stepped cure when there’s a lag between medicine and healing. But my morning run straightens me out (a lot or a little, as needed) every time. It matters to me a great deal that it never fails. It somehow informs me that the holy is always discernible, like a focus feature, if I just keep groping for the dial. A sweetheart of mine once said she exercised so she could eat. I exercise so I can feel.

The question I faced upon having this realization was, “Do I write about it?” I have no interest in pushing my particular spiritual path. In the end, I just decided to do what I always do: write what I feel. I know I’m fed on one beautiful thought or act per day.  I return from the morning arroyo run feeling like the funnest decision, the easiest path, is to try to be the best conscious being possible, and then maybe a little better. Beyond a better writer, a better friend, or even a better father, my exercise routine, I believe, makes me a better rancher. Which, granted, isn’t saying much.

Like a crunchy Elmer Fudd, I’ve been known to guard my goats all night from coyotes with a shotgun I hardly know how to use. This kind of love is acutely recognized by the Funky Butte Ranch livestock, and it is returned in the form of real protein production benefits. I think I’ve probably drank more than a ton of my goats’ growth hormone-free milk in the past half decade.

It’s for all of these reasons that I go, go, always go on that run, even on a subzero morning with a headache on no sleep post-deadline when still jet-lagged from a Szechwan-fueled East Coast media trip. My armor as I glide through this sometimes dangerous world is the magnitude of my appreciation. The more appreciative I am (directly correlated to the more raven wings I hear), the stronger I am — anywhere. Some people say they don’t listen to what today are called “the haters.” I see haters — and there thankfully don’t seem to be many, which is just enough — as part of the love. They provide part of life’s essential humility-maintaining Ninja training. Not just in motivation to prove them wrong but to see if there’s anything to learn in what they say.

“Home again,” I realize one more time, panting from the session’s final sprint (marathon runners know this as “interval training”) as I scritch one of my goats between the horns and start thinking about my work day tasks to do and ranch repair tasks to postpone. “Overflowing with, permeated by, active love and a few cactus thorns (“Ouch” in my ecosystem isn’t so much an exclamation as a figure of speech).” Also more than a little ready for the eggs and the other goodies that the non-human branch of the Funky Butte Family provides. I’m pretty good on protein even if Wal-Mart goes away.

So that’s a source outline, a starter in case Dr. Lee wants to tackle my neo-Rugged Individualist lifestyle. And thus, my run is my prayer. In fact, in rereading the previous paragraph I’m thinking that a more accurate title for this Dispatch might be “Six Sense Marinade.” It just doesn’t take much to launch me into blissful appreciation. I’m a spiritual lightweight — one hour outside and I’m high all day. Regardless of the title, what is without question going on is stimulation of every one of my known senses plus some others I can’t quite name. I’m lumping some very disparate flavors of awareness into a “sixth” sense here, which I’d like to acknowledge just in case, the way string theorists says we’re dealing with, ya know, 42 dimensions or something, we might also be just scratching the surface of perception and indeed consciousness itself. I’m referring to receiving signals as “true” in the same manner that the optical nerves receive “oak” signals when you look at an oak.

The activating agent for this relatively straightforward “There is only Love” message, as I’ve already alluded, is often a windsurfing angel of a raven, who seems to get something out of our Walnut Tree Klatches as well. (Park signs advise us to “leave no trace” in the wilderness. I think we need to add the word “physical”, since I believe we exchange valuable psychic treasures with other travelers, no matter the species, every second we’re on the planet.) This is one reason I think my religion has to happen in a wilderness setting. Another is that, for a guy like me, if he consciously keeps in shape, the kind of physical quiet I’m talking about leaves room for real spiritual growth. At least prioritizing.

I live on Goat Milking O’clock. Mine is a datura based calendar with seasons delineated by owl and falcon fledgling, by when each variety of hummingbird arrives. Once I can see or hear human neighbors, everything changes to Digital Age normalcy.  The primate pissing contests over road maintenance and dog etiquette begin. I start caring about cosmically unnecessary things.

Last week one of my neighbors, whose wildfire my ranch sitters rushed to put out while I was researching Too High to Fail, erected an impassable cairn of river stones on the only “road” between “his” property and “mine.” Ostensibly to prevent road creep into his meadow, I would think, but really to stimulate a lot of chimp gesticulating and grunting. I think I’m supposed to move them (a rancher version of the medieval slapping with a glove). I ain’t playing. As yet haven’t even dramatically circled into his Rubicon of a meadow. Just been pushing the Ridiculously Oversized American Truck‘s rear view mirror in and brushing against the poor far side juniper. I have a whole passenger seat full of indigo juniper berries, slowly turning to gin in my rarely vacuumed rig.

Back to prayer mechanics, for a moment, because the whole reason I’m telling all this is that I made a for-me exciting change to one part of it recently that I’d like to share here in a bit. The arroyo run service, as I say, is unscheduled but daily. I say “gotta go pray to stay in shape” in the exact same muscular situation that some would say “gotta go work out to stay in shape.” If it had a printout the service would I think look something like this:

–Run up local Continental Divide canyon with Bob Marley playing in one ear and self-serve woodpecker diner duets in the other.

–Hit imaginary speed bag for one minute, break for one. Repeat until distracted.

–Stop to stretch (Tree Pose and other stretches with Sanskrit names).

–Exclaim something like, “Whoa, listen to that cactus wren call! Thirteen notes! Syncopated quarter notes and triplets in 13/4.”

–Immediately notice a second minor miracle (today it was a hidden, impossibly out-of-season lemoncillo blossom, still redolent of its namesake citrus).

–Notice self feeling, overwhelmingly, bolt-uprightingly, that the Creator of this miracle of life at all, let alone the intense and constant LASER show of conscious being, deserves immediate and intentional appreciation. Specifically, for the gift of the immeasurable love and beauty that surround us at every moment. I mean, this is the giver, to give a recent example, of the din of joyous bee wings half submerged in desert wildflowers. The ancients share the best light show with us: a shooting star, the Northern Lights, the blue tip of a campfire.

Using roughly the above map, I try to ground every element of my life these days in appreciation of the gift of this great, often hysterically-funny adventure of conscious existence in my current body, this puzzle whose goal, rules and every clue seems to me to be “in any situation, a good practice is to try to live closer to heaven”.

That’s it. The above is where my relative sanity resides. That’s the mechanics of it, anyway. Now, for those who believe prayer is the recitation of some kind of hands-folded poem, on to the words. But first, big thanks to Dr. Lee — sending appreciation to you for legitimizing my appreciation. At last I can say with the kind of confidence that only peer-reviewed academic research can provide, that the closer I get to Neolithic lifestyle, the closer to heaven I feel. It might even prove an as-yet unrecognized branch of my faith called “Wildernessism.”

Insofar as I use any consistently articulated human words to express the breadth of my big picture appreciation, for years I have generally uttered, somewhere on my run, this:

“Thank you, God for

Conscious Life,

Love,

Beauty, and

Everything (Note: sometimes I ad lib by tacking on something specific here, like ‘…including the neighbor’s pack of inbred dogs currently menacing me from a few ridges away with their visibly foaming fangs and recent cases of Parvo‘).”

I’ve been gushing forth with that prayer virtually unchanged since at least 1998, when I’d use the break on an icy run with a view of Homer, Alaska’s Kachemak Bay to jam my hands into my armpits. My fingers are just warming back up now. Since last millennium it’d been “Thanks for Life, Love, Beauty and Everything.” Seemed just a bit more rigorous, less lazy, than simply, “Thanks for…it all!” Closest thing to a mantra in my world, at any rate. I could recite it with an empty mind, and mean it. Until last Thursday.

And this change, coming so soon after and even more than Academic Officialdom backing its obvious meaning up, is what made me realize that my run, or more generally being outside somewhere quiet, is the principle practice of my religion. Even on holy fasting days. What happened was I, in short order, both added and then promoted to the anchor position the noun “Now” to this prayer.

So now the morning Appreciation Benediction is, “Thanks for Life, Love, Beauty, Everything and Now.”

I knew right away that the word was in the picture forever. It’s a good word. A metaphor made for the universality of prayer.  For why it feels like to me that we are here.

I congratulated it, and, a few days later I started ending with it.  When Now debuted (in retrospect, it had been a rising prospect developing in the minors for years), I  was up to the “stop to stretch” stage in the above service and recall that one of the morning’s minor miracles had been that the only other tracks before mine in an overnight snow dusting were clearly some kind of not-small wildcat.

Some scat further up my creekbed confirmed this bit of very amateur tracking. I checked my phone reception in case I survived the initial claw-to-jugular in strong enough shape to call 911, made a note that I had just added “Now” in my longest-running, Cal Ripkin of a prayer, and, momentarily blinded as the first rays of winter sunshine beamed over the Eastern ridges of my canyon like oncoming high beams, bolted in undignified fashion along the deer trail until I was in what felt to me a less exposed position. This is when I acquired most of the day’s desert acupuncture needles. In other words, terrifying wildcat tracks are, particularly after the fact, why I live remote.

Not more than five days later, in nearly the same spot and on cue, I felt the appreciation coming on as I spied the spine of the Continental Divide and nearly wept for joy at its meaning: that I felt that such a wild friggin’ place was home base. Boom. Closed with “Now” and don’t see that changing for a long time. For one thing, being thankful for the Now always applies. Thus it’s much more elegant and way simpler than every time slipping in some wordy if accurate in-the-moment analogue, like, “Thanks for the absolutely distinct quiet of  a snowy high desert canyon morning in January, which sounds like nothing else I can name except maybe a whisper inside some kind of soundproof organic recoding studio: even the echoes of Cambrian rocks sliding down the arroyo under my bootsoles tone it down after a winter Land of Enchantment snowstorm and this is so sublime that I don’t know whether to bust out in giggles or fall to the ground in gratitude that I’m allowed to feel this way. Which feeling I don’t want to stop. Ever. The world as it was given is a spiritual chiropractor. Real quiet is loud. Almost conscious. It allows me to breathe deeply (a very important health maintenance practice) without distraction. “

I patted Now on the shoulder and told it, “You’ve got the job, kid.”

*     *     *     *     *

 A few work (Drug Peace) Postscripts (in writing the joy-filled Afterword to the paperback edition of Too High to Fail last week, I realized with some surprise that I’ve essentially been a full time drug policy journalist for two years now): Thanks to the Melissa Harris-Perry Show (which is staffed with smart and kind producers and host) for the fun recent panel discussion on MSNBC. Here’s a behind-the-scenes tidbit: I and the other panelists got to intensely lobby fellow panelist Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez (D-CA) to introduce legislation to get cannabis out of federal Controlled Substances Act. For the good of the country.

I’m also delighted to send ecstatic props to the Mendocino County, California county government for fighting an unconstitutional and privacy violating federal subpoena surrounding the successful cannabis permitting “Zip-tie” program I followed in Too High to Fail. As much as this is great for America’s freedom, economy, pubic health and community safety, I’m just astounded after two decades of journalism to come across a functional local government. The elected officials in Mendocino’s Board of Supervisors, folks who hold widely disparate views on everything from cannabis to the age of the universe, unified and decided to defend the county’s wise decision to acknowledge and bring above ground the $6 billion-a-year local cannabis industry. We’ll follow progress on the subpoena fight here in these Dispatches. The outcome might well decide whether a sustainable cannabis industry will be born with the dawn of the Dug Peace Era. This is something I wrote about recently on Alternet.

Finally — and from a protein and ice cream perspective most importantly — I’m very pleased to report that the annual Funky Butte Ranch goat breeding adventure is over and I’ve commenced pampering my pregnant, floppy-eared, white-and-brown Nubian Bette. She’s foraging for at least two (and as many as four) now. Of course, the others have noticed. So. Extra treats for all.

I’ll end with a photo from Seattle on what I hope most readers will recognize was an important day in American history: December 6, 2012 (the day the state of Washington’s cannabis legalization went into effect). Though some of the opacity in this photo might be considered atmospheric, the Associated Press reported that there was “nary a police officer in sight” at the massive smoke-out beside the Space Needle that day. America is stronger and safer with the coming of the Drug Peace Era.

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.) 

So with my family a notch further from the needless narco violence that caused me to write TOO HIGH TO FAIL in the first place, I’ve uttered a deep sigh and moved on to inter-species continuity. Which is to say, since returning from Tucson I’ve been actively trying to teach the resident Funky Butte Ranch ravens to say, “Howdy, Neighbor.” I’d like to pass a song down to my descendents here. Here’s why: should the Digital cloud ever give out, multi-generational bird hard drives might prove the most durable. As far as I know, no consumer computer magazine rates products in what I think of as a “will I be able to access this info in 100 years?” category.

Plus, proving again that the continuity-minded choice (often referred to as the sustainable one) is also the aesthetic one, the raven fledglings currently courting and Synchronized Dive Dancing now,  when they catch the canyon sunlight, emit a shimmery purple sheen that I’ve never seen anywhere else.

In the convective afternoon at this time of year, the usually eye-opening whumping of enraptured raven wings (as the birds in question emerge from my compost pile toting avocado pits) has competition from cactus wren soloists and the woodpeckers who seem to be gorging to a very slow metronome in every black walnut tree. While I and both my sons sing in an actually almost avian-sounding trio to impart the linguistics lesson, I bask in the thought of the Drug Peace Dividend.

Beyond the $40 billion tax boon to the above ground economy, there’s the end of the cannabis stigma on the horizon. I’m reflecting that, after I escaped the Kokopelli Factory on the recent Arizona tour leg, Tucson Mayor Jon Rothschild did more than introduce my event at the Botanical Gardens sunset speakers series that night. He stayed the whole time, through the Q & A. Indeed he appeared to have the giggles, and didn’t flinch when I urged him to make sure local and state law enforcement support Tucson’s terrific medical cannabis providers.  Here we are enjoying a smile.

Border mayors usually get it. But what Tuesday’s election showed is that the nation at large (and indeed judging by the above mentioned international reactions, the world) is finally ready end the Drug War. To win it. More Coloradans voted for cannabis November 6 than voted to re-elect President Obama. Unity on the Drug Peace is unprecedented in recent American public opinion, is increasingly strong, and, as I’ve detailed in previous Dispatches, comes from all sides of the political spectrum. Even Arkansans nearly passed medical cannabis last week, the first Southern state in which voters (bravely) put the issue on the ballot (despite almost no money for the campaign and massive efforts to throw up legal obstacles to the will of the people): that one only lost 52-48%. Just wait until next time, Ozarks — you guys are AWESOME! Thanks for showing America that the heartland is ready to bring on the Drug Peace Era for the good of our nation’s economy and her families.

The Tucson event was (in retrospect unsurprisingly) well-catered.  ”We’re not that Arizona,” the terrific operator of a local woman-owned medical cannabis club told me during our interview on her couch-side radio show during that too-short visit. As a New Mexican, crossing into Sheriff Joe’s state is generally like Mrs. Frisby walking past the farm cat. But I’m learning to consider Tucson, once inside city limits, to be an extension of Land of Enchantment home base. Like Rivendell. Terrific sushi, actually, there. It’s a town in which I have a hard time getting out of my sandals. Every time I look down, there are my toes. Interviews, live events. It’s just not a loafers or even a hiking boots town.

What will probably be the long-term take-away for me from this wonderful week of electoral news was hammered home when a producer at CONAN called to let me know that my recent appearance would be airing again in repeats this Monday (November 19). My first reaction, which might have been interpreted by the producer as some sort of raven call, was, “Wow, two months ago I told the host and audience, mid-segment, that I was surprised I was allowed to speak the truth about America’ Longest War without the studio exploding, and now the Drug War’s all but over.” That, in fact, was the moment when I realized that this was the most important week in Drug Policy in 80 years.

So important, so game changing and irreversible is this victory, that some of us still-lucky-to-live-in-a-democracy Americans find ourselves almost unable to grasp what a giant leap closer we are to enjoying the substantial peace dividend of this war’s hostilities ending (and on our best-case terms). One colleague called me from Colorado a week after the election to say, “It just hasn’t sunk in yet. We’ve won!” When enough of your allies (those actually in the industry, and thus even more connected to these votes than I, who merely write about it) are resigned to be criminals forever for insane and harmful reasons, and you hear “it’ll never happen” enough times, well, you understand why this is Happiest News Story I’ve Seen In Years (excerpted from The Daily Chronic, November 9).

King County, Washington prosecutor Dan Satterberg is treating (the state’s) I-502 (ballot initiative) as if it is already law, dismissing 175 marijuana misdemeanor possession cases on Friday because “it’s the right thing to do.”

 Satterberg said his office is dropping the cases involving people 21 and older and possession of one ounce or less. Although the law doesn’t take effect until December 6, his office has decided to apply I-502 retroactively, saying it is the right thing to do in light of Tuesday’s vote.

“Although the effective date of I-502 is not until December 6, there is no point in continuing to seek criminal penalties for conduct that will be legal next month,” Satterberg said.

The photo alone might be the finest piece of visual journalism I’ve witnessed in my adult life. In the end, I think we won because the Drug War, like all wars and despite the horrors to innocents and combatants alike, is an idea war. It comes to have very clear, very old-school, almost storybook Good Guy and Bad Guy ideologies. We can usually agree after the fact which side was the aggressor. This is because  the truth, unlike a genie, can’t be bottled up, because it seeps out like fragrant terpenes from a pepper plant on a simmering stove pot. Simply because they’re on the side of right, the good guys still pull off these almost unimaginable upset victories. There’s George Washington, Ali, Joe Namath, and the Drug War. And it is, when it comes to the coming Drug Peace Era, and as as Albert Einstein said all truths must be, comprehensible to a four-year-old.

The wisdom of four-year-olds is on my mind, because mine just helped me build a rock wall beneath the goat corral gate this afternoon, ensuring that our chickens and ducks can no longer make it (and the hay and grain therein) their winter home. After he carried and fitted the final mid-size piece of Cambrian sandstone to complete the project, my replicant brushed his hands together. “There,” he said. “If they can still get in now, they deserve it.” Indeed, this is the case with American Drug Policy: if you can work for four decades, as many activists I’ve met in the course of researching TOO HIGH TO FAIL have, against unlimited funding and shameless propaganda, you’re probably on the side of karmic right and deserve to win.

Postscript:  I realize with some delight that 2013 marks the commencement of my Not Sure If I Can Call Myself a Stanford Professor Tour.  I’m doing two seminars for the Stanford School of Continuing Education, and will be on the road on and off for much of the year. Shoot me an email if you’d like to book an event.

Lucy Liu checking out TOO HIGH TO FAIL on CBS’ new hit show Elementary last week. Now I’m waitin’ for the American Express spot offer: “When I’m in Colorado or Washington, I don’t always have cash.”

Just as Borges believes that every moment of past, present and future is mobile and in fact interchangeable, so I recognize the symmetry embedded in the reality that just two months ago I marveled, mid-segment, that ”the studio didn’t explode” as I discussed the Drug Peace Dividend on national TV. Today, with the CONAN segment in question about to appear in reruns, the Drug War is nearly over.

This, for me, is the key TOO HIGH TO FAIL photo that shows that Drug Peace has been declared in northern California: what you’re seeing is Mendocino County law enforcement officer Randy Johnson and sustainable locavore cannabis farmer Tomas Balogh at a farm inspection. It’s also reminder that despite my waltzing into the victory parade behind millions of drum masters, every cannabis farmer who spoke to me with his or her real name in TOO HIGH TO FAIL is still a civil disobedient, as are patients who use credit cards for their medicine. Nearly 800,000 Americans were arrested for cannabis last year. Let’s end this nonsense once and for all: tell your congressperson to remove cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act and let states regulate like alcohol.

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

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.). 

Even the inevitable last second delays in embarking on the tour have been full of loving energy. The fence hackers known as the Funky Butte Ranch goats, for instance, sensing abandonment of our meditation for a period of time that feels unusual, have just followed me up the hill to the gate that for the moment separates them from the RV – and make no mistake: they’d hop right in if they could. And make themselves comfortable.

The moment has come. We’re pulling out. All eight cylinders are rumbling. The bright, swirly window marker forest my kids are muraling is already screaming, if not “Freaks!”, then “Not Romney Snowbirds!” (My own choice for the Tour RV bumper sticker was and is, “Not a Tourist – Really a Traveler.” The final thing the universe apparently wants me to do before kissing non-human ranch animals goodbye is this (starting with some necessary background): while waiting what I thought was patiently as final child seat straps were tightened and ten gallons of home well water loaded, my four-year-old rescued an organic orange marmalade label from the recycling bin.  He observed that it still has some stick to it. So we are now proceeding to leave an Orange Jam Sticker Dog Food Lid Time Capsule. Recording life before I embarked as a Drug Peace ambassador.

Just before rounding the curve that leads to the creekbed (will the three-ton RV make it across, loaded with gear and humans and water?), I heard our goat sitter exclaim “five eggs!” This reached me, miraculously, above the sound of a very outdated and apparently already-over-revving American van engine. This neighbor’d earlier told me he was “happy to be swimming in the Funky Butte vibe for a while.” I was glad to hear this of the person guarding my life for me when I’m away (even though I’m already missing those same eggs and goat cheese). I love it when a situation, particularly a complex one, double particularly a complex one involving goats works for all involved, from micro-organism to planetary arc. Although why should I be surprised? We are all the same material, created by the Big Bang. You wish yourself well when you wish others well. Seems obvious enough to be a more universal realization.

I started wishing the Funky Butte non-humans well in a what I hoped was my own V8-transcending voice. “ ‘Bye goats! ‘Bye owls and ducks, dog, cats, chickens and even undocumented squirrel under the barn with your summer house in the woodpile!” But well-wishes and air kisses from the RV cockpit soon turned into actual hugs and some more hours later I am now beginning the climb through the high ponderosa desert toward the Drug Peace.

*     *     *     *     *

Funky Butte Ranch Four O’clock Blossom

OK, back after, ya know, three-week, life-changing break. So if on the work side I wanted to return to New York Times list and Obama calling, I got Denver Post list (#2!) and Willie Nelson’s people calling. Feels to me like not a bad start 21 days after publication, or any amount of days after publication, when I think about it from posterity’s perspective. It passes the epitaph test: One of his books got compared to Douglas Adams, and another elicited the notice of Willie.

For these and many other reasons, I’m delighted to report that I feel at equal psychic mood and physical and spiritual strength to tour departure (or better). Which is saying a lot. But it’s been a personal and professional time away from goat yogurt of just the right duration. Throughout the 4,000 miles and two dozen Thai restaurants I’ve traversed already on this tour (I’ve thus far practiced a sort of Super Size Me, only with Southwest Asian curries), my phone’s supposedly random V. 1.0 default music shuffler kept coming back to the Ex-Centric Sound System song called “Wildest Dreams.” That’s how I feel. Every day I wake up adding extra-appreciation to my coffee (along with the goat milk and agave syrup) because, my goodness, my dreams are coming true.

What a sigh of relief to be home, though — to enjoy a familiar, very quiet return to Now. I recognize these final few caffeinated paces. My brain waves probably already record knowledge of (if not gradual and increasing participation in) the deep indoor sleep that is coming amidst thunderstorms for as long as my kids will allow. Here’s why I mention “indoor” as opposed to “RV Loft” sleep: in fact there are only a few, all-completely-related elements that feel significant to relate from my introduction to RV culture. My first check in at a Western North American RV Park office carried the aura of an interplanetary meeting. A first contact for all involved. Friendly, to be sure, but of at least initially differing opinion on the value of line drying clothes.

On the operational side, as I burst through the exact gorgeous, pre-fuel injector-engine-eating mountain passes through which I imagined I would be bursting (as opposed to overheating in same), only slightly modified by the now-perpetual southwest American summer fire, I had already noticed this key reality: when an RV keels (say, because of strong just-off-center-crosswinds, or sharp turns), it keels as a two story home keels in an earthquake, including the flinging of the appliances and silverware in a tactile demonstration of centrifugal force (and one heck of a cutlery show). I came to test the boundaries of this unfortunate gravitational equation twice a day amidst Colorado’s most “do not try this at home” passes for miles at a time, seemingly always uphill in a 24-year-old RV recently in receipt of its first oil change since Dan Quayle emerged from some bizarre compromise. Gravitational pull concerns aside, one has no choice in such an ill-designed rig but to implement a perpetual a pedal-to-the-metal-at-all-times itinerary, at 8 MPG and often 8 MPH. “No worries about speeding” become my variation on Top Gun‘s “I feel the need for speed” mantra (which Hollywood sometimes dismisses as a “catch phrase”).

You want to know why passing RV pilots always wave genuinely to one another? It’s group therapy following shared terror. We’ve learned that only occasionally is momentum on our side. Most of the time we’re working her as hard as she’ll work.  The 440 of whatever she is. This in reduced oxygen elevations and under a triple digit atmosphere. For me, the scariest are the rare moments when the gravitational tables are turned, and with much more momentum than has ever before been at my fingertips, I have no choice but to take a curve at whatever speed the laws of terrestrial highway momentum demand, regardless of centrifugal force. One can’t consider every branch of physics at once. Thankfully, I nearly always merely feel the manageable peer pressure that comes from slowing a train of mountain traffic despite my own pedal being glued, as usual, to the aforementioned metal.

So that’s the moving object gravitational report. Why I brought the whole topic of RV physics up was to explain why sleeping inside again will be different than my (don’t get me wrong) delightful eagle’s nest of the past month: inside the parked monolith, the reality of touring in a double decker RV is constant head injury. Daily bonking above and below the loft that houses my king sized mattress directly above the cockpit. I preferred the second story collisions, as the were usually more gentle and came about for very good reasons.

I am, I realize, astonished  to have made it back at all. In fact, for the final thousand miles (and this was just one tour leg) I found myself gently and appreciatively patting the RV’s molded beige dash in a sort of “That’ll do, Babe” motion every time a Pacific highway switchback or  Rocky Mountain pass pushed the temperature gauge toward the lower edges of “core meltdown”.  When a just-in-time downhill would aircool the senior citizen engine and lower the status reading to “Def Con 3,” I’d spontaneously break out in a version of the childhood soda jingle, “Me and My RC,” changing it to “Me and My RV.”

So you see why I welcome the sensation of “homespace” back into my daily alchemy for the first time in what feels like a very long time. Eons. I’ve forgotten the muscle motion of chicken egg gathering. I mean, heck, in one neighborhood I parked in San Francisco last week, the corner store was a sushi joint. The Funky Butte Ranch horizon is stunningly green/purpler than it was before I debated a Drug Warrior on a national business television station  and Conan O’Brien invited Andy Richter and me to explore cannabis tourism in Mendocino County with him. The young falcon (now clearly a peregrine from the nest up the canyon), I see and hear, is noticeably stouter and presumably a better hunter (better count those chickens) than he was those 21 long bird days ago. The overall, immensely relieving sensation is that reentry has been very smooth, and without question assisted by the multi-sensory symphony performed at all hours during this most gorgeous high desert season: the tail end of Monsoon. A broad palette of wildflowers and gramma grasses is already up, which is a surprise, as are the clouds, which would not be if it weren’t for climate change’s “shuffle” mode.

For this easy return I again thank the Universe. The moment I bumped with one final near-concussion down the Funky Butte Ranch driveway, a force whose name depends on the explicitness of your spirituality told me gently but with great clarity to pace my move back home after the summer leg of the TOO HIGH TO FAIL Pax Cannabis Tour.  As I transition from RV fumes back to Kung Pao fumes. From shaking a hundred hands per day to trimming twelve goat hooves.

How did the universe convey this message (what I came to feel was) smoothly but firmly? Let me count the ways. For one, the Veg oil-powered truck wouldn’t turn over. Drained battery. Sigh. This was a “Surpa-Dura never fail intended for Antarctic use” battery that had failed due to a faulty dome light-to-door connection, necessitating a several hour charge from the RV. So that delay felt important and a little stressful for a few angles of the day’s sun, especially considering that I needed the R.O.A.T. (before the day’s Monsoon storms began) to rescue the RV ballast (AKA most of my non-electronic gear) that I’d stashed on the far side of the creek, in hopes of creating a massive automotive unit nonetheless light enough to make it over the Funky Butte Ranch Creek.

Then there was the fairly significant engineering project required to get even the cargo-emptied RV across the Monsoon-rearranged Funky Butte Ranch creek. Even my cat seemed to get it: she spent a day meowing from the hills before feeling we were sufficiently prepared to dwell in the Now for the hugs and circlings she expected in a family reunion after extended separation.

So. What choice did I have but to listen, for once? It was a wise decision. I did other things. I ran up the canyon.  I milked goats. I wrote this Dispatch in spurts. I romped with toddlers in the wildflowers, gathering centerpieces, and then I sauteed Asian eggplant in peanut sauce dinners. Sort of an Ode to Thai. An end to that part of the documentary. I was back on home turf. Enshrouded in a perpetual hummingbird om stadium before the local non-human crowd.

Thus I hope it’s very clear that and why I am so thankful to have had to charge a vegetable oil-powered truck battery today. “May that be,” my grandmother used to say when I’d hobble inside with a scraped knee, “The worst thing that every happens to you.”

It’s better, Nana. It’s actually an unquestionable blessing.  My repeated outdoor presence, spent largely swearing at long-ago golden-parachuted Ford executives, allowed my kids to tuck sunflower garlands into my hair before enticing me into a basketball game. They were today for some reason wearing white duck feathers unevenly in theirs. Possibly their hoops uniform. In short, as usual, they were the vibe setters – vast majority good vibe.

And I thought again of balance, my mantra, known as equilibrio here in Aztlan. Sure, maybe in some places a Ranch Sitter would think to start your truck, the keys to which you’ve left in his possession, once a week or so. I’ve met people whose Ranch Minder would’ve not just started the host vehicle but seen it as a time to take it for an oil change and save the receipt. The difference between these two returns seemed at first a vast and fairly important gulf. My thinking being, “If I’m going to be relaxed when off the homestead, I have to have full faith in the human minding it.”

In life, though, as Roseanne Roseannadanna reminds us, it sure seems like it’s always something – and yet I’m starting to think that what really matters is how gentle your current something is. Like a forgotten itch, when the mundane is taken care of you can take care of some other items, preferably on the joyful adventure list. So this morning I had the basic, easy, family-oriented and falcon-proximal job of being outside at the tail end of bursting, ultra violet monsoon season (I particularly love the cornet-shaped 4:00 o’clock blossoms, blindingly signifying the coming of our high desert spring like a white-and-purple party favor). It’s so bright between 10 a.m. and afternoon rain that it’s like living in a black light solar system.

In this diffused, hyper-trippy spectrum, full of very real darting foxes at the outer edge of my peripheral vision (it’s a family with kits) I pondered what a friend calls the Big Human Nature Dilemma: when does satisfaction kick in? If I came home after 4,000 spine-jostling if joyous miles, instead of to an immobile mission critical truck, rather to an already-bubbling Jacuzzi, some freshly-prepared sushi or elk salad and copy of the Onion on a silver tray along with my mail, would I quickly or eventually invent problems? Or would I be satisfied and exude excess love forever? I dunno. At this moment, despite the strong messages I’m getting that everything is what the Eskimos call “Aarigaa” (all good), I’ll try to travel through the eternal Now with a kernal of aware caution largely because of the poetry of the late Mr. Christopher George Latore Wallace (AKA Notorious B.I.G.), who reminded us, “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems.” Robert Hunter phrased it this way: “When life looks like easy street, there is danger at your door.” Every heroin abuser starts off thinking he’s the one who can handle it. I’m saying that about success.

What is success, to me? Partly the supportive energy of an all-ages crowd like the one pictured below, the at the TOO HIGH TO FAIL Pax Cannabis Tour stop event at the superlatively excellent Collected Works in Santa Fe (all the tour stops so far in three time zones were an absolute pleasure, and I’ve also included a shot a friend sent me from the Booksmith event in San Francisco).

But mostly for me success (that satisfaction that eluded M. Jagger when he could first afford sushi) is relaxation in the Now and faith in the rest, the bridge posts between the two states being love, humor and poor memory.

*     *     *     *     *

Postscript: Monsoon clay puddles here in the Land of Enchantment — the building block of our adobe homes for getting on 8,000 years — remind me of old National Geographic specials wherein 300,000 parched and unpaid wildebeest cross a crocodile-clogged stream. Which in turn reminds me that on the recent tour leg, I reconnected with many of the heroes of TOO HIGH TO FAIL (those who did avoid the crocodiles and those who did not) and got the scuttlebutt on Mendo this year: the good news for Californians is that it’s a great season agriculturally, the best in half a decade, say the farmers.

Lest anyone question whether federal meddling in current state cannabis programs does anything but help criminals, one farmer, a permittee in the landmark Drug Peace program I examined in TOO HIGH TO FAIL, said that, buried under a mortgage and other family expenses, she’s actually “a little grateful that the feds just jacked up prices again, at least until Obama’s second term.” Yikes! Remember this, any time you hear a Drug Warrior screech about “the children” as an excuse for keeping this war going through another trillion tax dollars: on the ground, in the real economy, Prohibition doesn’t work. Not a new realization, of course, merely an accurate one. Here’s Al Einstein in 1921, taking one look at the U.S. early in his first visit:

The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law . . . for nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law . . . than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this.

Meanwhile, some Mendonesian farmers are a bit bedraggled politically this year, because, ya know, recent unwanted, unprecedented and outrageously immoral federal actions have smacked their permitting efforts down for the crime of trying to be aboveground taxpaying farmers of America’s far and away number one crop. I was therefore very pleased to report to they on the frontlines of the late Drug War that the homefront has their backs – Americans of all ages and political stripes know the Drug Peace is upon us and want its dividend: $35 billion a year, conservatively, while crippling the cartels.

In one hour long radio show I did for Maryland NPR, the terrific and knowledgeable host, Dan Rodricks, had to beg, unsuccessfully, for a Drug War supportor to call in. Same thing happened in Wisconsin.  Left wing, right wing, old young: America knows. I’ve not seen anything like it in my twenty years of journalism. We’re united on this one. In my remote New Mexico valley, the average Octogenerian I meet in the post office is wearing a cowboy hat and believes Barack Obamam was born in Libya, because Rush Limbaugh told her so. And when she asks me, the writer whose truck looks right but smells wrong, what my next book is about, and I reply, “It’s an economic argument for ending the War on Drugs by removing cannabis fom the Controlled Substances Act entirely and letting states regulate it like alcohol,” she without fail or pause comes back with some version of, “’Bout time. Pills-n-booz’re the problem. It’ll hurt the dang cartels, too.”

This lady missed Woodstock, people. And I have to say it’s a relief and empowering to have her and Pat Robertson aboard the Drug Peace train. Maybe that’s because I’m still a little surprised how to close to winning this war we, the majority of Americans, are. Proof of this for me came when I blurted out to Conan, mid-segment, “I can’t believe we’ve gotten this far and that the studio hasn’t exploded.” Reality is in fact a lot better that my fears, it turns out. “We won the war,” is how longtime Santa Cruz, CA Drug Peace activist Valerie Coral put it ten years after her non-profit cannabis collective was unsuccessfully raided. “It’s just what are the terms of surrender going to be?’”

As for my own Big Picture continuing education program known as “A Semester on the Road in an Old RV,” the main lessons I come home with are:

Lesson One–Always stop for waterfalls and (whether or not you have kids), at park swings. And make time for sniffing flowers. And for picking blackberries. And for playing Frisbee, roasting marshmallows and watching the sunset over the Pacific.

Lesson Two–Except in case of medical emergency or severe Act of God, always make time for Lesson One. Even when late for and two states away from your next event.

Back on the high desert home front, of course, when I followed the universe’s clock and let the truck battery charge without resentment, the hummingbird feeder got filled (returning me to my equilibrium soundtrack and siesta alarm clock), the yogurt got made, and the final boxes and bikes got brought in moments before the first lighting bolt (again with the violet) struck the next canyon. All, as I hope is clear, at what felt like the perfect pace. At the only absolutely perfect moment. And such, I’ve come to believe, has the universe been operating since the moment of the Big Bang. If we just realize it. No need to turn bad into good. It is all only good.

To whit and of course, The R.O.A.T. was charged and spewing Chinese food-exhaust  by lunch time. While so thankful even mid-charge to have an easy, fixable, tangible problem with which to fill the problem section of the brain, upon completion of the task, I again wasted some chi feeling a bit off-schedule vis-a-vis what I had preconceived as my my “real” work for the day.  Nonetheless, after retrieving my stranded gear from the far side of the creekbed, I paused for sustenance, possessing not so much end-of-tour-fatigue as a genuine hunger, in at least three ways that immediately come to mind.

Even the battery charging itself had proven inspiring — including in the crafting of this Dispatch. While outside fighting with explosive containers of sulfuric acid, I noticed from every not-truck-related spot on which my eyes could rest that so much can grow in a moistened desert in three weeks. It’s not not just falcons. That’s how quick forgiveness and peace can come, too. I’m seeing it in the final moments of the Drug War and I’m seeing it in my heart.

So on this brief Break before more events, I’m grateful that I’ve stopped rustling parking spots and have resumed rustling goats (even though they’ve gotten into the house once already today).  To bring y’all completely up to date, I’m playing last second toad hopscotch on the porch and the world has grown suddenly purply-dark, a less ultra shade of violet, as the afternoon’s first raindrops begin to fall. I’m delighted to do a lot of things in a hammock, but watching a lightning storm is not one of them.

Before I head inside, though, to a house already smelling heavily of sizzling crepes, my nostrils for the moment filled with the faint citrus of the season’s first limoncillo blossoms (“Rubbing this blossom makes my fingers smell like lemon!” is a statement that makes people very happy on my social circle), I’ve remembered something a stranger told me somewhere in Colorado or California a couple of weeks ago. No, wait, it was at a gas station in Wyoming. A caravan of law enforcers had noisily come to clog the nearby freeway entrance, it turns out because of an accident ahead. Though I’m sure most people at pumps were, like I am, supporters of law enforcement, the colorful show of force in a moments-earlier bucolic rural setting frightened everyone at first, like we were in the midst of some kind of civic emergency. The advice the fellow gave me was unsolicited. He might have been talking to himself. What he said was, “Don’t fear Babylon.”

I think he is as right as right can be in a very relative universe. By making it to here and now, we’ve already won. We’re in the Promised Land. Seeming to agree, the organic orange jam food label on the Funky Butte Ranch porch waves its corner at me as I head into my hummingbird-proximal office to write all this down. And when it comes to the coming Drug Peace, I feel the same way as the Wyoming gas station prophet and the activist Valerie Coral: we’ve won. The way Matt Cohen, a Mendonesian farmer I followed in TOO HIGH TO FAIL puts it is, “We don’t fear the man. We are the man.” There are cannabis collectives next to ranches in the heartland. Farmers are getting to harvest America’s favorite crop the way they always do, regardless of federally-inspired subsidies. Nothing will ever change that. I’d just like to see the cannabis industry not just come aboveboard, but be appreciated. Like a fine wine (and fuel) that’s in fact more valuable to the economy and well-being of society than cabernet (and unleaded).

Thank you, Daily Beast — who says the media aren’t ready for the the Drug Peace?

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.

I am consciously hopeful that the demographic cross-training will bestow on my constitution the endurance for healthy completion of what looks to be at least six weeks of Constant Discussion About the End of the Drug War. In addition to the live performance and slide show about the plant’s journey from farm to patient, as documented in TOO HIGH TO FAIL, I on some days have five media appearances between morning yoga and bedtime. In truth, the Drug War topic is so timely (with key legalization elections this November in three U.S. states, decriminalization discussions in many more, and worldwide Drug War withdrawals from Uruguay to Portugal, not to mention an American public, even in the heartland, more than ready for a Drug Peace) the tour will probably go on much longer. But that’s when the initial hardcover tour dates and media appearances at least break, ensuring that I can once again be awakened by hummingbird wings for a while.

And I’m happy to hit the road. More even than the fact that I believe in the book’s message, and think it’s imperative that America end the Drug War immediately, for the good of our economy and health, I’m excited because I feel happy with the book from a literary and journalistic perspective. From a strictly craft outlook, my goal is to improve with every project (heaven knows there’s plenty of room), and I feel I have with this one.

Strategy-wise, possibly as a result of the lessons from its Wildlife Special-and-peaches start, and in sync with my general desire for sanity maintenance in life, I’ve been invariably takin’ the scenic route as the TOO HIGH TO FAIL tour starts. And, near-flight connection misses aside, lovin’ it. Take last week: the tiny 19^th Century adobe village nearest my Ranch  was typically inspiring before sunrise en route to Conan. Dodging dewy rabbits who felt they owned the cobblestone, I witnessed the liquid lemon shine radiating from new corn emerging from back forty meadows in long sunrise light. You think a Higgs boson particle has a short visible life? Try young corn coronas in July. The magic had washed into glaring summer sunlight by the time I reached pavement. The rabbits were already dreaming of the cool dew days. And now I get a chance to experience it again (or something equally ancient and inspiring) in a few days when I’m off to the East Coast for a CBS Morning Show appearance and live event at a great indie bookstore called Book Revue.

The momentum I derive from in-between moments like these (think camel stockpiling water) is one reason I so love tour time: I enjoy overflowing with wilderness energy in cities, before returning for a Monsoon massage recharge. And I get a huge kick out of the evens themselves. Perform. Laugh. Meet people. End the Drug War in a few minds. Move on through the heartland to the next gig.

But most readers of these Dispatches are not surprised to hear this. Hummingbird alarm clock life obviously charges my batteries, or I wouldn’t live 41 minutes from the grocery store. In fact, living 41 minutes from the grocery store but snuggling the nation’s oldest wilderness area is the price you pay If you want hummingbirds to be your alarm clock. That and lovably pain-in-the-ass goats.

I’ve known this for decades and have been living it nearly as long. I’ll never forget the first night I slept in a city (San Francisco) after nearly two straight years in rural Alaska, where Live Entertainment meant a dude with a banjo in the stern of the salmon skiff. Falling asleep after a sushi gorge was no struggle. But the screaming ambulance that rousted me that early Millennium morning in San Francisco was so unfamiliar and unsettling that I guess I screamed for explanation from the guest room.  “Go back to bed,” my host shouted from across the apartment. “It’s just someone dying.”

After the Conan  show last week, I had drinks with an entertainment executive who had expressed some interest in a television version of the astounding events recounted in the book. He was planning. he told me, a weekend getaway with his family at a campground in California’s gorgeous Sierra Nevada mountains – the dude was genuinely psyched about the “quiet” he was about to inhale like medicine. And in this, of course, I recognized a kindred spirit. I also recognized that our lives were structured to be almost complete opposites in this area: this next month and half will be the first consistent exposure to noise; indeed to much non-goat contact, that I have encountered since the publication of FAREWELL, MY SUBARU four years ago. I’m pretty confident that I’m prepared, care of the Psychic Cross-training recounted in this Dispatch. Let’s just say I’ve listened to every woodpecker and hawk message on my canyon runs since the book’s editorial process wrapped up in the late spring.  I feel prepped.

In fact, I realize that as I prepare to set the vegetable oil-powered Ridiculously Oversized American Truck for points East (then West in the RV), the only issue now is what I’m going to do when the Funky Butte Ranch goat cheese runs out.  Goat farmers, if you come and see me on the tour, please bring some. I need to fuel up, physically, on actual Rugged Individualist food, as much as I do, psychically, on the good energy the universe seems to be raining over us of late.

DOUG ON CONAN

[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.

And I ain’t complainin’. There’s going to be so much less background to explain at live events! In fact I’m just sending out big thanks to you, Zeitgeist Gatekeepers, for smiling on a release date for this book (and its offshoots in other media) about which I had almost no control. I’m not sure where you dwell, Mainstream Mindset Minders, but you somehow manage to do your job even now that there’s more than one Walter Cronkite broadcasting your decision. I don’t know how you do it. Maybe it’s in the Wi-Fi frequencies. But whatever you’re doing, it’s working.  Keep up the good work. Collect your bonus.

Meanwhile, this literary zeitgeist appreciation is, if not getting lost in, seamlessly blending in with the forty two other flavors of appreciation I experience every day here in the remote canyon wherein lies the Funky Butte Ranch. A prominent one from before breakfast (in fact before sunrise) today came when my four-year-old joyfully announced the discovery of the year’s first ripe walnut. Woke me the heck up, in fact. Hooray local living. The message for me was about Climate Change in this high desert ecosystem: Drought? Sure. Still bountifully and generously giving land? You bet. Eminently survivable. Even for a greenhorn of a neo-Rugged Individualist like me.

But I’ve even had cause to wonder of late just how green my horns in fact are. Indeed bigger picture on the appreciation scale, I had an important moment in my solar-powered Organic Goat Herder career last week. Round about dusk, I had occasion to feel a feeling, while unloading several tons of organic alfalfa hay at a neighbor’s so unfamiliar that I didn’t exactly have a name for it at first. Now, upon a few days’ reflections, I think of it as “growing into my (hemp) cowboy hat.”

Which is to say, I think I might actually have kind of learned to live here in this gorgeous valley. I mean, ya know, if box stores go away. The first clue was my decidedly atypical lack of profound injury at the end of unloading day: evidently hay stacking is a matter of ergonomics and vertebrae feng shui.

The second hint was that I noticed I now think nothing of stashing my water bottle in a pile of oldish goat poop nuggets, if that’s where the shade is. And really hammering home this fun new “fitting in with the locals and maybe even being one” sensation were the terse words of grumpy old rancher Pat as she passed around beers to the bunch of sweat-soaked cowboy hat-wearers once the last bale was stashed next to a brand new litter of kittens: “Nice working’ with ya today,” she said to me. I’m pretty darn sure she was looking at me. Fairly sure.

This was a woman who, three short hay harvests prior, had abruptly ejected me from conveyer belt duty (this frightening device carries the bales from the truck up into her barn) like a Trump apprentice when I (admittedly) seemed to throw half the bales too far up the rubbery, rickety belt, and a good portion of the other half in the dirt in front of the finicky machine.

With those few words of kindness, accompanied by distant lightning emerging from a part of the violet spectrum never before visible to me, a month of triple digit tension, in fact three quarters of a decade’s suspicion that I’d always be a greenhorn, were gone. Evaporated into the suddenly moist atmosphere. I felt as though I were being baptized. Or, more culturally accurately, I felt like Jacob, finally outsmarting Laban and talking ownership of his goats. I was being dubbed a rural New Mexican – after only seven years study. I knew this lifestyle was a better decision than medical school.

Quite literally the next moment I nearly caught a mis-tossed grapple hook in the jugular, and then my work glove got embarrassingly stuck in a piece of bailing wire I was bringing to the recycle bin, briefly tipping over my beer.  But that’s just part of my four decade-long reminder that if I lose physical contact with acute humility for even a second I generally get smacked down immediately by a universe with little tolerance for excess ego. Luckily I was distracted from too much of the requisite (and who’s to say whether accurate?) self-doubt by two emails that buzzed impatiently out of my phone before I was half done with my beverage.  “Excuse me,” I said to Pat and the rest of the group, few of whom had smart phones.

I blew hay dust off the expensive device and checked the messages. One was a neighbor, asking if I wanted in on an elk hunt he was planning. “Yes,” I typed. “Thanks!” The other was a note from my colleague, a producer at the Conan show, asking if I was available to appear as a guest a week before publication time.  I plonked my up an adjoining hay bale, examined the nursing, shut-eyed kittens, took a sip of ale, and sighed with satisfaction. “Yes,” I replied. “Thanks!”

I like Digital Age Neo-Rugged Individualism. I think Tommy Jefferson would, too. Thunderstorm lullabies one day, joking around with Andy Richter the next. Goat milking the next. I’m into it. I just hope the broad palette of wildflowers soon to emerge in the Funky Butte Ranch meadows, the offspring of this nascent Monsoon season, will arrive before I’m off to the coasts and then the heartland, to speak to you folks about why America will be stronger, safer, healthier, wealthier and even more creative in the coming Drug Peace era.

[See the short film about and pre-order the new book: 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.

Groking and implementing are ideally closely paired, which is why I find myself musing this Continental Divide-discovering week on what comprises a successful lesson learned. I see my kid gets what a vowel is, for instance, but I’m still wondering, is a lesson imparted if it’s only partly applied? Because, seriously, the weather lately has been meltingly weird. That’s not counting said 200,000 wildfire I wave at every morning when the nest-bound owls return from hunting at dawn.

Maybe intention is the rub when it comes to what I think of as Deep Level Retention. As I watch my offspring, like all kids genius learners compared to me, what I notice that seems to make all the difference is their absolute concentration until an idea is absorbed, no matter what the distraction. Short of “cookies are ready!” Let’s not go overboard here. In a way, I’m thankful for this, because it means Deep Level Retention is perhaps not a strictly chemical matter; not exclusively the domain of the preschooler. It can be relearned.

In practical terms, I’ve gleaned from recent mutual homeschooling what feels like a lesson within a lesson (or however many layers I choose to peel off and examine within the mind’s electron kaleidoscope from the cosmic Lesson Onion this morning): be thankful that mandatory Siesta time is now approaching 18 hours per day. Learn what’s lovely about that kind of biorhythmic cycle. And, ya know, just go for the morning run a little earlier. If possible. If you get held up as late as skin-melting 8 a.m., bring extra water. Slather the shea butter on.

A pre-dawn start, while a little bit higher risk when it comes to providing mountain lion breakfast, is better for bird life encounters anyway. In fact, I think I have a kind of a system (schedule?!?!) down. This is how I’ve been explaining it every morning to the goats at this time of year as I jog past them, the heel of my latest expensive running show flopping in rhythm with my stride: “Morning run through the canyon first, then feed the animals and do the milking and the rest of the morning chores. Simply because, given the coming heat we all know is 20 minutes away, I want to make use of Nico’s belly fridge as long as possible.”

It seems to be working. The intentional mindshift. The New Mexico version of not worrying about the tides. I discern this because I had occasion this morning while milking and watching the owl night shift return home to the Butte to experience a sensation so odd I didn’t at first have a name for it. I realized it was, after six years, one best described as “kind of finally learning how to live here with fewer than a dozen ‘ouches’ a day.”  Some recent examples that come to mind: hay bale stacking ergonomics are becoming second nature (true, I nearly caught a grapple hook in the jugular during unloading at my neighbor’s last week, but I actually had very little to do with that other than a last millisecond duck). Efforts at elderly rancher drawn-out conversation truncating are progressing with delicacy and near-tact. And perhaps most tellingly, I can competently execute the one finger steering wheel wave to fellow passing Ridiculously Oversized American Trucks in my valley.

I don’t know if you sensed a pause here, lyrical or literal, but I just sighed the sigh of a man about to relax in the middle of the day. That is to say, I’m safely Siesta-ing now after this morning’s Continental Divide-accompanied meditation (or starting to: I can feel my brain wavelengths increasing, my thoughts broadening). It was a workout featuring beauty in every direction, including internal.

Early on, just after dawn, the temperature not yet above a brisk 98 or 99, I experienced a moment of simultaneous sunrise/moonset warmth during which I did a sort of Wonder Twin Form of Solar Panel. The resulting convection, which to me explains a basking turtle’s smile, conveyed an inspirational joy jolt throughout my body that ended only when I noticed it consciously. At which moment an odd thought jumped into (and immediately out of) my head, which was this (it was subsequently recalled hours later while re-Krazy Gluing my brand new running shoes): my tone of voice, the timber, is a fairly spot-on reflection of the true me of now. Maybe nearly as much as the much older body language (like furry Apalachian wisdom compared to the youngster Rockies’ go-get-’em attitude. Combine this with balance and you’re on your way to that Chill Outlook’s up elevator, is my take these days.).

As I drift off for a few hours mandatory nap in both view and scent-range of the year’s first magenta cholla blossoms, I admit to harboring a lingering curiosity about whether thunderclouds will put the “soon” in Monsoon anytime soon. Well, let me wonder, universe. This is June — the season of anticipation. The hummingbirds know it. The desert hares know it. We’re all waiting for the same thing.

I must’ve just commented that I can’t recall time moving so fast, especially in the mornings, during Siesta Season, because my Sweetheart has asked me why I think that is.

“I dunno,” I just said, then typed, as my sleepy son handed me a sprig of rosemary to sniff. “Happiness?”

Today the clouds are wispy and dendritic (the smoke waves come and go), reminding me that whether or not the Earth’s oceans, clouds and mountains as factored over climate change are going to allow physical moisture to come on schedule this year (one on-the-record meteorologist essentially told the Associated Press the other day in an article about the historically unprecedented wildfires encircling me, “Um, either yes or no, we believe,”) I remain ever and increasingly appreciative for the non-endangered wetlands in my mind. Springsteen, I believe, was a little off. That’s where the fun is.

*See the short film about and pre-order the new book: 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.

Now, most of us recognize that almost the entire organism of government is about providing a bureaucratic economy (and not just in the most popularly known corrupt places like New Mexico, old Mexico, New York and Illinois). But over the years I’ve come to feel that it’s all for the cause of American Strength and Freedom.  I hold on to this belief with as firm a grasp as I do my hat in a New Mexico thunderstorm. In retrospect, the national-level trend toward forgetting this raison d’etre seemed to begin in earnest (in the modern phase of the continuous-until-we-learn-genetically wrangle between good and evil) with former Merrill Lynch chairman and then-current White House Chief of Staff Don Regan ordering Ronald Reagan to “speed it up” during a 1981 speech (as Michael Moore points out in Capitalism: A Love Story). That’s when the thieves really took over this time (at least chunky polyester ties went away for a while, too). But maybe because I was too young to notice at the time of Regan’s information coup, early in my journalism career I pretty much always returned from work travel abroad extremely grateful for American’s general lack of poison water and death squads.

But the ying counterbalance to the yang of banditry-as-government, of one-quarter-tunnel-vision (wherein executives earn a golden parachute regardless of company performance), usually represented by slightly less thieving-friendly Wall Street rules for a while, has been slow in coming this time. Probably because technology allows the thieves to develop loopholes more quickly than Congress or executive branch regulators can act even during brief sunlight periods of national outrage (the way, say, Watergate changed a few ethics rules until, um, Reagan). This integrity-rotting, self-destructive, and hypocritical phase has simply gone on for too long — the computer tricks during the Facebook IPO just the latest example.

In what will no doubt go down as the least surprising sentence in this Dispatch, folks are losing faith in the integrity of the Republic. Support for Congress among members of “both” major parties is in the teens. The main reason for this, I believe, is that we all like to see a cleansing rain now and then. It’s like when I first heard about the Hundred Years War, my reaction was, “Man, can’t you just get past it?” Likewise, I think it’s high time for America to regain her strength through the forces of good. Which, I’m sorry to have to tell my left-of-me friends, she has more-than-periodically represented, and probably more often than any other nation in history (though the Scandinavians are catching up).

As a result of this sad, nearly yin-less phase (on official levels, at least), manifest in the new Millennium with the very Supreme Court unable to abide by (let alone provide role models for adherence to) the most basic first year legal ethics (hey Arch Criminal Scalia, don’t fly on Air Force Two at taxpayer expense with the Vice President whose case you’re about to hear, unless you plan on recusing yourself, hey apparently rotten-to-the-core Thomas, if you used to be a corporation’s staff attorney, you must recuse yourself from their alfalfa GMO case), I’ve had some moments where I had to remind myself that on five continents doing my reporting, probably 99% of humans I met would drop everything and get on a plane empty handed and alone if it was headed to the U.S.  If their boarding pass was to be accompanied by a green card, they’d do it in a Kathy Griffin costume. That’s even now, would-be-doomsayers.

The fact is, I didn’t know what to expect about the response to writing a book about the War on Drugs while it was still going on. Truth, even more so than your average New Mexican (being a denizen of a place which doesn’t count minutes; where “same day” is considered synonymous with “on time”), is a chronic late arriver. Most of the Vietnam War’s lies, for example, got broad mainstream exposure only very, very close to the end. And so amidst this blessedly, overwhelmingly supportive reception to news of the coming TOO HIGH TO FAIL, I find myself re-energized to give this amazing country of ours another chance: if the People end The Drug War, there is hope. The Republic still works.

It means I am raising a family in the Land of the Still Free. It means a multi-billion dollar game benefiting only incarceration bureaucracy, pharmaceutical executives, and drug cartels is being called off. Simply ended. No more border corruption. No more Mexican chaos. And a $20 billion a year economy (grounded in a revived cadre of small American farmers) added to domestic coffers.  Sure, it’ll mean new, younger, more ecologically minded bosses in the financial world, but that seems to me likely to be good for America, too. I mean, what with yet another JP Morgan scandal breaking.

On a somehow to be shown to be related note, I was engaged in what passes in rocky, piercingly-sharp canyons for “on a morning run” in sandals the other day (less demolished trail running shows are on order, the older pair having slightly out-performed their usual three-month desert lifespan before the kind of total implosion that would have Scotty on the Engineering Deck hailing the bridge in order to suffer a public breakdown) on a cattle road only marginally less reclaimed than the adjacent arroyo. And by “reclaimed” I mean by the only reclaimer, physics, sometimes called (all, I believe, are correct) nature, the universe. The Divine.

Or perhaps “recycled” is the more appropriate term. What’s happening to the rocks underneath my feet (some of them are billion-year-old Cambrian pebbles) and, I believe simultaneously, to my conscious existence, is, for me, something like the spin cycle of a washing machine as viewed in extreme slow motion. Makes it like a dance. Or surfing. Or river rafting. True, I had several only-subsequently-appreciated desert “ouch” moments on that inappropriately-clad run. Particularly (but not only) in the foot region. Don’t know how those Kenyans do it barefoot. Rarumari too.

I noticed only on that same jog (after passing the spot dozens of times) that a successful desert oak has rerouted twenty yards and years of deer trail (AKA my running route) just as a flood or a beaver dam fine tunes a river. And folks say plants can’t move. They sure can relative to the rest of us. They can rearrange the chessboard. Hereabouts ‘specially with sharpness and roots. This high desert presents plenty of both. The chessboard here, being the aforementioned billion-years-old at the surface, is among the moat durable available terrestrially. Makes a fellow feel young. Like a newborn sprite.

Nature, strictly as a landscaper, is a genius. At this time of year wild mint is interspersed fragrantly every morning in a garden of half germinated ponderosa cones and a flowering yucca. That’s smell and sight. Moving to sounds, when I rounded the next bend on my run I stopped and realized that no orchestra will ever match the steadily crescendoing symphony performance of planetary noise on a sunrise skedaddle before the goat milking in spring. Doves were on the bottom end, closest to timpanies, with cicada viola whole notes layered below staccato hummingbirds, who provided the zipping high end strings. The storyline. It was riveting. And relaxing.

Now here’s the promised tie-in of morning run philosophizing to my decision to optimistically use the status of the Drug War in, say, five year’s time, as a litmus test for whether or not our Republic is functioning healthfully – ya know, is in the shape of the exerciser never afraid to push him- or herself.  It was while pulling a particularly savage cockleburr from my left distal phalanx during that Vitamin D inundation that I realized something quite suddenly and as naturally as a whispering stream arcing over a rock.  I realized that no matter what I try lately, everything seems to be working out.

No matter my scheme for or method of trying to mess up. Most of us over the age of three months have seen this phase more than once before, and without question it’s a pleasant one, as welcome as an unexpected UPS package. I find the main trick to enjoying this period of time, usually, is just to be brave enough to try for (or ask for) something. Poof, it’s there. Like avocado/lime goat milk ice cream. But the practice for me this time around the psychic Circle Game  as I dodged baby prickly pear cactus and ran through the exercises I’m doing to fix the minor hernia you’ll see referred to in TOO HIGH TO FAIL, is a smile of amused and humble appreciation.

With so much going right in the goat milk ice cream over-consumption category alone (thank you, Nico) – and not even getting into the giant but immature red-tailed hawk learning to aerial hunt (had to scare it off one of my shaken and somewhat feather-re-coiffed but otherwise OK chickens outside the kitchen window), nor  the wild rose-scented walk from omelette-aromatic house to vegetable oil-powered truck to go to “work” reporting from horseback for New Mexico Magazine about the sustainability efforts of an Apache wilderness guide, I’m nonetheless trying to train myself to receive it all — all phases — with that simple grateful grin.

This feels right, but it’s hard to say why. Could it be that I’m engaged in a practice of doing bad poorly? That I’m simply learning to be better at good? I suppose it’s possible, since it reminds me of what a river guide who has a rapid named after him in the Grand Canyon told me when I asked him in Alaska if I’d ever learn to read currents the way he does with almost no effort, or if it is a born with it thing. “Devil ain’t smart,” Nelbert said. “Just old.”

But, back at the Funky Butte Ranch a few days later, what I found myself wondering was, can one be both young and wise? A sprite and an oak? Is there a sustainable sweet spot?

One of my friends calls it pacing yourself — spiritually. I like to think of it as cosmic fuel economy. Still on any given day, at any given moment, years after learning the pleasure not just of driving slowly, but hiking and boating dreamily I would like to be able to describe my energy, scale of  1 to 10, as  lovingly embracing double digits. I don’t need a “rush” to feel blissful. Just bliss. Or maybe it’s accurate to say bliss moves my belly as much as any Class IV rapid.

My kids provide my most consistent role models in this effort. They are pretty much either double digit hummingbirds or asleep. Yesterday they were in fact engaged in what felt like a long, intentional game of Hummingbirds In Bliss (they were mimicking the ruby-throated specimens devouring the Funky Butte Ranch’s five or six hopping feeders — the Studio 54s of this spring’s bird social scene).  The human imitators sported static-attached balloon wings and were buzzing their lips through these as part of an intricate language. An inflection at my office door during an about-to-be-delayed magazine deadline indicated that a new batch of ice cream (cardamom/honey this time) was ready to be shaken (mostly by me) for 40 minutes.

My replicants, like Faith Hill, all other things being equal, will pretty much advocate dancing in any situation. My oldest, when excited, reveals from whence derived the term “jumping out of your skin.”  Why is this outlook considered sane at age four but somehow questionable at 42? Which chapter in the Psychology handbook defines the moment of transition? I missed it, personally.

Folks talk about the TV being their babysitter. My babysitter is birdsong while my toddlers are on their tire swing — I run to open the goat corral or collect eggs and return just as they’re losing momentum and ready to swing “the fastest ever — really really REALLY fast this time, Pa.”

Wellup, with that energizing tableau and tantalizing question in mind, wish me luck: I’m off for a twelve hour round trip vegetable oil-powered organic goat grain pick-up. Oh, and my emergency brake (and evidently alternator)’s out. Sometimes a mantra is thrust upon one: “Chock the tires every time.” “Chock” being from the Sanskrit meaning, “Piece of crap conveyance made by a company no longer even attempting durability what with three year leases becoming the norm.” I’ll be very pleased, but again, not astoundingly surprised, if I return in the same mindset in which I pull out amidst the usual cloud of Kung Pao Chicken effervescence. That is, a timeless one.

Postscript: Do I sound even more than usually chipper?  It could be because I post this Dispatch as the sun comes up over the cholla-dotted hills where I am not just immersed in a hotspring, but with a cup of java at my elbow and within WiFi range. Because of the neo-Rugged Individualist Organic Goat Herder parts of my life revealed in FAREWELL, MY SUBARU, many humans think that for me the goal is getting away from it all. At dinner parties, they serve me organically-steamed dirt and fairly traded gruel. The goal for me is getting away from it all except nice people, serious sushi and Thai, and Internet.

A blue heron just flew by. I’m not kidding. Small dinosaurs is what they are. I smell honeysuckle! I see toad mammas watching bulbous egg clusters with a hardly necessary wary eye on me.  It occurs to me, as I again become gelatinous (for reasons I can’t yet explain, I somehow believe that approaching enlightenment becomes easier the closer we are to invertebrate status), that to demonstrate time’s relativity, Al Einstein needn’t have devised his famous family-dividing Twins In Space example. He could’ve just suggested the reader plop into thermal waters.

*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.

The larger lesson, what you might call the perfection-of-the-universe-when-we-just-listen lesson, has been the oft-repeated theme this spring. In fact, it was while I was appreciating the Duplex Harmony blessing that a new sense was serenaded (another good sign: appreciation overlap): I smelled the season’s final plum blossoms wafting ineffably through the air. What a heart enriching, heaven-confirming miracle it is to watch a fruit tree fuzzily budding. I realized with (if possible) even further joy that this fall I might start seeing the payoff of six years of orchard work. And with about two weeks to go until last average final frost, the blossoms have come and gone on apricot, peach and plum and I’m fairly delighted to report that all look solid – they look like trees! Hooray, human thinking ahead.

Below the owl’s nest, I nudged the kids quickly through the early spring wildflowers and arrow-ready willow because all this joy and revelation had spurred a number (a growing number) of thoughts in my leaky, outside-aerated mind that I wanted to jot down. Sigh. Tough working life.  In and out I go, to finish a book revision or a magazine article.  Life, as a rancher, father and writer, is really about harnessing the absentminded professor
. Working in both R&D and marketing. Here are some of the thoughts I managed to get down:

–The cottonwoods are leafing out visibly by the day. Like a minutehand.

–This the time of year when I’m still happy the sun’s already up. My lips get just the right amount toasted during milking. The seasons mean a lot here on the Funky Butte Ranch.

–My son, with impressive retention, asks of every tree, plant, herb, and wildflower, “What will it give us?” The next time he sees, say, a globe mallow, he tells the world, “It will give us orange flowers and ear medicine! Thank you globe mallow!”

–Make no mistake: I’m thankful for the advent of the eight-month-long scalding time of year (moderated a bit if climate change allows the traditional July monsoon this year).

–Wow. Just noticed I’ve stopped caring about the breakdown of the back-up electric heater. Sun’s doing the job! Solar breadbox heater‘s totally providing all conceivably needed blazing H20. Must call plumber to at least listen to his estimate one of these days.

–(Note: this is the thought that caused me to rush down from the owl’s nest to jot down thoughts before forgetting them): There are your big picture/long term thinkers alongside your short term/this Saturday night thinkers. But, vitally, there are both kind-hearted spirits and mechanics in both. (Another gift of fruit trees: the comforting awareness that for some, it’s possible to have a rough first 300 years and still turn out all right.)

–Here’s my concern with social media as they exist today, or at least as multiple friends have explained their participation: it is used car salesmanship. It is using people you call friends to sell things. Acting like real friends, but really being salespeople – for a widget or idea of our own, or for the widget or idea of someone you’re trying to help perhaps because they’ve similarly helped you go viral. Is that how we want our relationships? Oh, by the way, here are my Twitter and Facebook fan page links.

–I realize I’m not checkin’ the weather in advance of a coming river trip. No point being lulled. A healthy “expect the best, prepare for other than that” philosophy seems to usually work. Hope the water is high, though. A river trip without getting in the boat is like a honeymoon without intimacy.

And I had one other thought that I forgot. Something about how perfect the universe is. About being conscious in it seeming preferable to not. The whole morning left with me with of my favorite “Everything is Possible, and It Will Be Right” sensations. This can be encapsulated as the “the Big Bang happened, and everything since is not just literally interconnected but up in the air” theory of existence.  It’d be fun to ask for a doctor’s recommendation to access that.

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