LEGALIZED IT!!! almost

In honor of Washington State's legalization of recreational marijuana use,  I thought I'd re-run this post.

Here, for your edification, is the TRUE and ACCURATE story behind the 'Pot Brownies' myth!  

Alice B. Toklas was a woman who enjoyed a good meal and loved her saturated fats. So legendary became her table that Ms. Toklas was prevailed upon to write up a collection of recipes: The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book.

In this collection are many delicious things. One of the delicious things is a mildly narcotic party nibble she presents to us with the title

'HASCHICH FUDGE (which anyone could whip up on a rainy day)'

NOT BROWNIES. NOT HASH BROWNIES. NOT POT BROWNIES. NO BROWNIES. THERE ARE NO BROWNIES IN THE ALICE B. TOKLAS COOKBOOK. OF ANY KIND. NO NO NO.

And in fact her 'haschich' fudge is not chocolate and has no hash in it, but instead dried fruit and crumbled cannibis sativa (she also suggests indica in areas where obtaining sativa 'may present certain difficulties'.)

Her introduction to the method is priceless:

This is the food of Paradise- of Baudelaire's Artificial Paradises: it might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies' Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR. In Morrocco it is thought to be good for warding off the common cold in damp winter weather and is, indeed, more effective if taken with large quantities of hot mint tea. Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extensions of one's personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better if you can bear to be ravished by 'un evanouissement reveille'.

By fudge she means 'a gooey sweet thing'. I have no doubt that grated chocolate could be added to wonderful effect, particularly if the chocolate were one of the new high-percentage, low-sugar darks. Nevertheless, I present to you the recipe as she puts it down, with my paraphrase.

1 teaspoon black peppercorns,
1 whole nutmeg,
4 cinnamon sticks,
1 tsp. coriander
1/4 oz good bud, well cleaned and very dry
Pulverize all to a fine powder (a coffee grinder would work excellently here.)

One handful each, chopped fine:
stoned dates
dried figs,
shelled almonds,
shelled peanuts

Add all the above together and toss to combine.

Melt 1/3 c butter, and dissolve into this
1 cup sugar
NOTE: do not cook this mixture...simply stir the sugar into the just-melted butter and take off the fire.

Remove from heat. Cool until mixture can be handled, empty into bowl with other ingredients and stir together.
Turn out onto a cool smooth surface and knead to combine thoroughly.
Roll into a log, from which lumps may be cut and rolled into balls about the size of a walnut and dusted with powdered sugar. Try and do your best to let these sit at least overnight so that the flavors blossom.  They will firm up but never quite solidify.

Ms. Toklas advises us that two of these are more than sufficient. Those of more robust or practiced liver may find that the suggested serving size must be adjusted upwards.


Hey, you know. I'm just sayin'. It's certainly not like I'd be making anything like this for Christmas eve or anything.
That would be wrong.

Gimme DRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGS part deaux

I am interested in psychoactive substances.  I grew up in Oregon during the '70s, after all. Plus I have some excellent fun awesome brain abnormalities, come to find out,  that left me recently looking for safe ways to cope in the interval between when one SSRI failed and the next one took effect*.  That's why I go visit Erowid.com frequently.  They have the scoop on that stuff.   You should go there too.  They're doing important work there and they deserve every thoughtful persons' support and encouragement.  Now, do I contribute?  HELL NO, I LIVE ON AN INTERNATIONAL BORDER FOR CRAPSAKES.  Kind of nuts: yes. Stupid: no. Black helicopters: bad.

Part of what happens on Erowid.com is the collection of anecdotes relating to recreational psychoactive use. This is important information, and makes for entertaining reading too.  I think it's nothing less than a new folklore genre:  the folklore of trippin' balls.

A lot of the folks on Erowid style themselves 'psychonauts'...By which most of them mean they are not to be mistaken for simple forest turds getting wasted for fun, but something far nobler: intrepid travellers though innerspace exploring different levels of consciousness for the good of all mankind. Which is charming in a 'lets go to Burning Man and get sand in our asscracks' kind of way.  You want to say 'Get over yourself, kid.  We all do drugs for fun and that's perfectly ok.' That leaves a small but significant percentage that really do believe that 'venture inward and learn cosmic truths' psychonaut stuff. 

The ability to perceive consciousness is chemical. You screw around with those chemicals, you'll experience a lot of shit that has nothing whatsoever to do with places in the conscious mind and everything to do with clogging the pool filter of your brain with used condoms. What you tend to experience using psychoactive substances, particularly in massive dosage, is 'malfunction'. Malfunction has nothing to teach you, even if you experience things during that interval as profound truths. They aren't. They're artifacts of temporary (you hope) brain damage.  And then there's this: just because you've had what you perceive as an extranormal revelatory experience doesn't mean that what was 'revealed' wasn't bullshit.

I saw a lot of people from the generation right before mine get lost on the way to enlightenment in the exact same way. All those 'LSD ascended masters' are still out there; cleverly disguised as unwashed vegetarians living in Volvos out in the parking lot behind the Food Bank.  Truth doesn't come solely from WITHIN.  It comes from the correctly perceived experience of efficient interaction with the world outside yourself. 

I'll let you in on the one true and useful thing I've learned from having this past year cave in on my like a fucking mining disaster: The chief difference between what you experience as meaning or nothingness is only a matter of the kind of chemicals that happen to be sloshing around in your head at any given moment.

There ya go.  You see what you can learn here at Paul?

I wish like hell I'd realized this years ago.  Of course nobody was talking about this stuff years ago and certainly not in mainstream America, where Jesus is in charge of that shit and your relative sanity is a moral issue, determined by the quality of  your relationship with the Lord.  Sanity, as it turns out,  doesn't spring from faith in God, it cannot be obtained by force of will or right thinking or good health or even happiness.

 I've just been on a grand tour of the malfunctioning human mind, and lemme tell you,  I have a whole new perspective on what it means to be temporarily somewhat almost insane, and judged for it.  I also got several bold lessons on how little chemical imbalance it takes to turn normal into a nightmare, and vice-versa.  The merest hint of a biochemical alteration...just .05mg of medication, made the difference between five nightmare months filled with obsessive thoughts and suicidal depression, and normal function. 

As far as exploring consciousness goes, I've come away from all this with some some terrible, amazing insights as a matter of fact.  Not because I paid 2000.00 to spend two days in a self-imposed state of schizophrenia barfing my guts out in some Vancouver loft so I could tell everyone back at the frat house that I communed with the Ayahuasca Mother, but because I was drug through hell by my eyeballs, and realizing those things came as a result of having had to claw my way toward some kind of sanity. It sucked, too. 

Each time I've gone though this it's been a result of overwhelming stress and a subsequent failure of my SSRI medication. Every time, I've come out of it with everything that was stressing me mysteriously dealt with, which means that on some level I kept on dealing despite the crawling horror ooging around in my head. 
Now here's what I wonder: what's at work there?  What keeps the story going?

Discuss.
__________________________

*Not to mention those spaces in between insurance deductible periods.  Those are a laugh riot.

**A good part of what's happened this year came as a result of having been overdosed on ADHD drugs.  I've got to say, if you have to overdose (amphetamine, dextroamphetamine, methylphenidate), it's best to be overdosed by the medical community. You just cannot beat the quality.




 

Green Fish Playing a Deadly Game

This is also the America I live in.

If you're out garage sale-ing and you're looking for old Star Trek stuff, chances are that you're going to find it in Lynden. You know Lynden, I've written about it before; it's that little slice of Dutch-themed heaven six miles west of Rancho FirstNations where the folks are white, the politics are crimson, and Jesus owns a gun. That Lynden.

That's what makes finding vintage Star Trek stuff there so weird. It's not exactly the kind of place you think of when you think of science fiction fans, it's the kind of place you think of when you think of cult Christianity and teenage pregnancy. But there you go...right there on the same table with the piles of Mommy porn paperbacks and Crossroads magazines you're likely to find stacks of Star Trek novels, every single bad, unreadably bad, embarrassingly, embarrassingly bad one of them ever printed. 

Here's my theory: Lynden is remote. It was even more remote back in the 60's and early 70's. No access to popular culture, everyone up in everyone elses' small-town shit, and little in the way of music or entertainment outside of church.  Maybe back in the day, the only way for a  rebellious kid to sneak one past the parents was to bring home a boring-looking book filled with seditious ideas (heart-stoppers like embracing diversity, the triumph of Science over Superstition and the Nobility of Man), knowing that Mom wouldn't look because she was raised to think science is icky; and Dad wouldn't look because books are for fags; he got where he is today by prayer and hard work not schooling.

I see this so often it's become expected.  Someone's putting mom and dad in the Vander Resthome and raising funds by having a garage sale... purging all the Zimmer frames and raised potty stools, and why the heck not; their teenage stash of space opera.  Wouldn't old dad just have a fit if he could see it all lying there next to his copy of 'What The Jews' Plan For America'?

So if you want Trek collectables, particularly full sets of mint Star Trek novels, awful as they are, head North on I-5 until you start to run out of America. About three miles before you hit Canada you'll see a billboard with a picture of a dead fetus lying on an American flag. That'll be Lynden.

And no, I'm not making the thing up about the billboard.

Blue Sea Monkey: Force Of Fist!!!

TOMATO REVIEW!!!!!!

I know you were all waiting with breath of bait for this my review of the tomato plants I selected and how each one performed!!! Yes you were!  Yes you were.

You were.

Winners: 
Earliness
indeterminate, saladette  "Oregon Spring"
I've grown this one before and it does not disappoint.  It hunches down and endures chilly soil and crappy spring weather, all the while pooting out blossoms like a happy bunny. Once it gets a week of sunshine on it's leaves watch out; the thing takes off.  WHAMMO it's covered in fruit.
You don't get much of a plant and it tends to get pretty ratty looking as the season progresses, but then who grows tomatoes to admire the foliage? NOBODY THAT'S WHO.
  The tomato you end up with is about 4' wide and squatty rather than globular. Inside you get a rather higher percentage of seed chambers than you get in most saladettes; it's more like a beefsteak in that regard. It is delicious and sweet, though, really tomatoey, and the flesh is the  most amazing pigeon blood shade of red! 
Oregon Springs'  drawback is that you don't get much yield compared to other varieties.  Make up for that by planting two.

Production
indeterminate, roma type "Roma Golden Wave"
This variety is crazy vigorous and and the fruit production is huge!  It just does not quit.  Rather than pouting and curling when it gets chilly it just slows down.  You get a full day of sun and it instantly celebrates by putting on a daily 3 to seven inches of growth, which is a party in anyones' book.

Let's say you decided to grow a tomato plant just to admire the foliage. THIS would be the one you'd grow.  It's a very pretty potato-leaved variety with straight limbs. The new growth is a gorgeous glowing viridian while the older is pure emerald green, and the habit is kind of Arthur Rackham-esque, if you feel me.

 We've had cold, crappy weather for the past month, and so today was the day that everyone had to go to the guillotine.  This plant was still putting on new growth and blossoms and setting fruit! 

This is the one I'd choose to run longwise on a wire or a fence...I had branches on the thing 7 ft. long before I stopped them. 

The fruit grows in pretty trusses like a cherry tomato.  It is pure chromium yellow, and very sweet.  It doesn't have much standout character flavor-wise...it's just a tomato. But that's not a bad thing!

Weird note: of all the tomato plants I had this year, this one was always and by far covered in pollinating insects, with more waiting stacked three deep like a busy airport.  Bees of every variety, wasps, flies, hornets, even moths in the evening!

Crap that's big
indeterminate, beefsteak "Early Beefsteak"
Plan ahead and use a heavy wire cage for this plant  because you'll need it.  Get the twine ready too.  The branches head straight out from the crown anywhichway and get thick and knobby and woody like apple tree branches, only without the rest of the apple tree to support them; so they tend to split. Untrained branches will meet an obstacle and just force growth against it until they turn into a weird arthritic green knot. You have to help it, like a fat dog that can't climb up onto the sofa.
Once it begins to swell fruit it holds nothing back.  The weight of the fruit combined with the weight of the branches and the general cluelessness of the plant organism itself means that it will cheerfully grow itself to death; just twist itself apart and die without a care in the world. Once it begins to swell fruit, then, make with the twine and stakes.
The fruit is truly fucking HUGE.  Most of it is softball sized and perfectly round, although it will also give you the stereotypical ribby, squatty tomato of old seed catalogue illustrations.  It has a pretty equal meat to seed ratio, and the color is a rather alarming blood crimson.
 This is a tomato that you want to pick just as it colors off to a true tomato red, and not a moment later as it gets mushy and watery real quick.  One slice will cover a hamburger bun.  It has a great vegetable- tasting tomato flavor...not too sugary, not too acid, just strong tomato flavor.  Really nice. And really  huge.

THIS YEARS' LOSER:
saladette "Bush Early Girl"
Lousy plant that generally does not want to live where you've planted it. It wants to live over theeeeeere. Why can't it live over theeeeeere. It's too hot here. It's too windy. There's no air circulaaaaation. The view suuuucks. It's too wet. It's too dryyyyyy. Why can't it watch Nightmare on Elm Street. All the other tomatoes get to watch Nightmare on Elm Street. It is the only tomato it knows that hasn't seen Nightmare on Elm Street. It's not faaaaaaaaaaaaair.
The fruit, what there is of it, sets... and that's it. It sets, then it sulks for weeks, green and hard.  Then it grudgingly turns red, maybe, on one side, if it feels like it, and even if it does feel like it, what you end up with has a hide like a rhinoceros and is woody and corky and generally a waste of plant tissue. Mostly it just cranks out leaves and turns itself into a tight little wad of unhappy greenery covered in hard green tumors. Never again.

This years' volunteers were:
1. The same mutt saladette I always get
It's a nice tomato, very firm flesh, just a good serviceable saladette that holds up under slicing and chopping and can be fried by the slice without losing structural integrity.  The plant is absolutely average in every respect but very hardy. Think of this tomato as having a UPC code instead of a variety name.

2. determinate roma type  "San Marzano"
Last fall I bought a slew of these, sauced them and threw the seeds in the kitchen compost barrel outside, where they alternately festered in rot and froze solid all winter long.  Early this April I dug a hole in my newest raised bed, emptied the now- horrifying compost into it, covered it with an old tin washtub and forgot about it, until the San Marzano plants  lifted the tub off the hole and crawled out from underneath like C'thulhu emerging from seaweed-garlanded R'lyeh, only loaded with delicious fruit instead of evil.  Unfortunately, this variety is very, very late, so I only got a few before the weather turned shitty. But oh, what a few they were!

Now then: would anyone like some tomato seeds?  Because hell YES I save them.  You know where the comments lounge is.  Comment in the comment lounge. Say 'yes oh yes I would dearly love some authentic Rancho FirstNations tomato seeds saved on authentic Kirkland Brand two-ply unscented white toilet paper!' And then we'll do the thing where you give me your email address in code so the Nigerian scam 'bots don't figure it out and then we'll email and I'll get your address and then soon if I remember lovely tomato seeds will be winging their way to your locale and you'll plant them and find out they're an invasive species in your part of the world and cause a huge environmental disaster and everyone will have to live in damp malfunctioning habitat enclosures on the ocean floor because the land was taken over by tomatoes and they figured out how to operate our technology and became sentient and started playing the banjo.

Swiftly Dragon Gold Win The Prize!

TRAGEDY STRIKES THE RANCHO 

...no, I am not lying just out of shot in a pool of vomit.  This was an ACT OF NATURE, which hates me, and obviously hated my Official, Licensed Edition Star Trek Star Fleet Shot Glass. 

I had it sitting on the windowsill above my kitchen sink, where I could admire it while I did the dishes.  The window was open, and the wind - yes, THE WIND - blew it off the sill.  That, and several other things I had up there, but nothing as important or valuable as my Official, Licensed Edition Star Trek Star Fleet Shot Glass. 

Yeah, well, shit on you, Nature, is what I say. If this is how it's going to be then HA HA on you, Nature...

 I cancel Burning Man! 

  

BOOMYEAH!  It's done been broughten. That shit is CANCELLED. I apologize ahead of time for the crop failures and catastrophic weather but dammit a bitch gets MIFFY about her Star Fleet tchotkes.

Steve 'Booger' Bailey (this post needed a name.)

Apparently I have been blogging for six years.   I have no idea what to think of this, so I'll move along to more important issues, like, what is it when your potatoes have a metallic sheen on them?  Because that's what happened to some of mine.  They were those little blue potatoes.  I grew them in a nice raised bed, heavy clay soil amended with lagoonage, they had a nice potatoey life, then I dug them up and let them cure.  Go to scrub them and I find a metallic-looking goldish sheen in patches on the skins, which were otherwise blue. It wouldn't clean off. 
So I cooked them and ate them. 
They were good. 
I feel OK so far.  I'm not marching around stiffly with a blank expression on my face attending mysterious neighborhood meetings late at night either. You should still probably keep an eye on me though.
_________________________

Here's what I 've been diggin' the mostest lately:  Mack Sennett silent comedies.  Every now and then Turner Classics will play a big slew of them and I am right there.  Those things are hilarious!  And I love imagining a whole theatre full of people, innocent of television and political correctness, all cracking up together at this stuff.  You see immediately where the gang at Warner Brothers cribbed all Bugs Bunny's best gags from. 

I love silent films.  Seeing the years gone seem to live is incredibly fascinating to me.  In the case of the Mack Sennett comedies, the vibrance and immediacy of the people is so hyperreal against the dated backdrops and the age of the medium that it's become something more than itself as time has gone on... a sui generis comedy-surrealism that happens in each moment of vision, 24 times each second. 
   I think what I love best about them is the innocence.  This is not complicated stuff.  It's just silly and sweet and fun.  A little kid and a clever dog having adventures in a farmyard.  A very strange and silly man in a very strange and silly department store.  Foreign airplane spies.  Odd waiters and submarines!    One of the most touching things I've ever seen was in a short called 'Fatty and Mabel Adrift.'  The newlyweds are going to bed for the first time in their honeymoon cabin - in separate rooms!  Fatty gets up, goes to her doorway, and draws the curtain aside to peek in at Mabel, sound asleep. Then you see his shadow on the wall over her bed...just his shadow! and it bends down, and places a sweet kiss on her head.     It was like an old Valentine card falling from between the pages of a book you've just bought.  And it will always be this way.  Every time this film runs.

Death Sauce and Derision

Let's say you wanted to make some Death Sauce:

DEATH SAUCE
...loaded with vitamin C, antioxidants, and Death

1/3 lb by unprocessed weight Harbanero, or Scotch Bonnet, peppers
(wash, stem and halve)
1 tsp. salt
Juice of one large lemon +some of the grated peel
1/2 cup by volume minced red onion
V-8 or plain tomato juice, 1 12oz can (you won't be using all of it so have some vodka ready)

-Run the Harbaneros through a food processor until minced, combine with onion and fry in batches in a little olive oil until slightly browned. 

-Set aside to cool.

-Dump into a blender with the lemon juice, the grated peel, the salt and half the can of V8, and blend until liquefied past all possibility of even the tiniest muon of remaining chunkness.  Why?  Because if you're one of those people who experiences afterburn you'll want to avoid Klingons.  I'm told that even the tiniest remainder can mean hours of agonized squatting over a hand mirror searching for the miscreant particle, which is a story I made up but probably happens.  Me, I wouldn't know.  I have an efficient digestive tract.  Anyway.  

-Pour through a fine strainer into a glass jar with a lid that fits tightly and refrigerate. 

...so anyway you wanted to make this delicious delicious recipe for Death Sauce.  What you should remember is that you should not fry Harbanero peppers in a closed room full of steam.  Harbanero cooking fumes are a lot like the stuff that they spray on people when they won't stop resisting arrest; and lemme tell you it took all the impulse to resist arrest right out of me. 

I have nothing but scorn for people who whine 'ew, I don't liiiiiike spicy, waa, how can you taaaaaste anything, augh' and make their nose all scrunchy like how they do.  I started eating jalapeno peppers when I was 8 years old because it absolutely scandalized the crap out of my parents for whatever goofy reason.  Anyway, I found that not only is a simple jalapeno tolerable, it's delicious.  Face it, it's a fruit.  It tastes like fruit...sweet and nice.  Yeah it has a kick, but here's the second thing I discovered the more I ate them...the more frequently you eat spicy stuff, the more the burn fades.  You get used to it.  The fire simply becomes a delicious, mouth watering sensation, and the heat opens up all the rest of the flavors and releases new ones.  THAT is why people eat spicy food.

Thanks to all the practice over the years, I now have a cool bar trick that's earned me thousands of imaginary dollars over the years - I can literally DRINK an entire bottle of Tabasco Sauce like a shooter.  Right down.  Doesn't phase me a bit.

Wanna blow job?