A pound and a half? Really? Why?

The Column: 04.21.23

It’s weird for a guy from the Sixties to read about my beloved Minnesota on the verge of legalizing marijuana, allowing possession of a pound and a half for people 21 and over, opening an agency to license shops, setting an 8% sales tax, erasing the convictions of old dopers. When I was in college, I went to parties where people sat in dim apartments, doors locked, an eye out for the cops, the Grateful Dead on the turntable, and illegality was a big part of the appeal. We were rebels in the cause of higher consciousness. But Minnesota lacked the reliable criminal element to supply quality reefer and our stuff was like mulch and the euphoria was mostly the stupefaction you get from holding your breath; we would’ve gotten more euphoria by riding a good roller coaster. The big thrill was looking around the room and wondering who might be an undercover cop.

I’m not opposed to legalization; I think it’s crazy to lock people up for wanting to be stupid, and if your doctor prescribes marijuana, goody-gumdrops for you, but when I smell marijuana smoke, I get away from it as quickly as possible before some pothead on a skateboard and wearing headphones comes crashing into me. Getting high lowers alertness.

Go back and read Beat poetry written in dim smoke-filled rooms and most of it is less interesting than the average computer manual. Allen Ginsberg was a very sweet man and I went to a couple of his readings and learned that it was good to sit near the exit, that 15 minutes of Allen chanting was sufficient. I preferred beer parties, which often led to hilarity and camaraderie and guys singing surfer songs and “The Sloop John B” and “I Saw Her Standing There,” whereas marijuana led to pretentious inwardness and contemplation of oneself as a rainbow or a rubber duck or rhubarb.

This is an old man talking and my experience tells me that introspection is shortsighted and that the great thing is to make yourself useful to other people. I saw an ophthalmologist last week whose waiting room was full of rambunctious kids and who does surgery to repair crossed-eyes and it was clear how much she loved kids and their noise and it was the happiest waiting room I ever was in.

I went to see her about my double vision, which caused me to take a bad fall and bang up my knee and have to walk around with a cane. When I walked into the waiting room of laughing children, I felt a sort of blessedness, and then she put me through the eye-chart drills and I looked at a light (which I saw as double) and she experimented with strips of lenses to make two lights one, and pasted a plastic prism on my right lens that made the world clearer, and now I can walk down the street and see the world whole.

The world is as beautiful as ever though we live in a strange time of outrageous political fevers, a dysfunctional Congress intent on partisan thwacking while basic governmental obligations go unaddressed because they don’t make lights flash and bells ding. House Republicans seem focused on paranoid conspiracies, compared to which, Richard M. Nixon was an honest and upright public servant worthy of having a statue of him in a public square.

If I thought ahead ten or twenty years, I could easily despair for the country, but at my age one lives in the present and so the encounter with the ophthalmologist looms large in my experience. She is smart and funny and kind and she accomplishes good in this world and I doubt that she got there by having out-of-body experiences. She paid attention in school and somehow became fascinated by the human eye and attained skills to make a huge difference in the lives of little kids.

Clarity. I am grateful for it. I don’t need head trips or expansion of consciousness. The best minds of my generation were not destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked angelheaded hipsters looking for a fix, some of them became heart surgeons and ophthalmologists and thanks to them I walk in the park and look at the beautiful people and love America for the goodness and fascinating varieties of individualism all around. Thank you, Dr. Science.

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