This week was GST Refund Week, as April told me, which explains the nonstop sirens and drama out on the street. Everyone’s got an extra hundred bucks that won’t be deducted from their Welfare, so they’re buying whatever makes them feel good. God, I actually miss the days heroin was the dominant drug, because junkies are way less trouble to deal with than crackies or meth heads. April taught me the word “jib” the other day; I love my young friends, they keep me au courant.
One of my long-running jokes is that I want to make a cleaning service of meth-heads and OCD sufferers. I could probably get a government grant to pay their salary, and they’d be the most meticulous team ever. That was before I read William Vollmann‘s book Poor People in which he interviewed a Thai cleaning woman who really DID use meth to give her the energy to get through particularly difficult jobs.
Who in hell tries heroin thinking they won’t get addicted? I know three people who’ve tried it and not gotten addicted, and at least one who tried it once and had to move to the country where he couldn’t get it as easily, because he quickly recognized he’d do anything for more. And today, walking in the community gardens, I saw a large, healthy harvest of opium poppy pods waiting for their daily scraping (you harvest it kind of like maple sap, scraping off the oozing tar, yum).
Back when I was with Greenpeace one of my co-workers came back from canvassing in Strathcona and said he’d run into a lesbian couple in their 80’s or so who invited him in for tea and offered him jasmine, Earl Grey, or opium. They said they’d been harvesting it from their flowerboxes since the 50’s or so, and nobody had ever bothered them. Well, who would?
What a day for nature lovers!Classic Rock radio 101 has reported the sighting of a rare Aquatic Dragon off the coast of Victoria, BC! Praise Cthulhu, we thought they had been hunted to extinction, along with their distant cousins, the Pacific Tree Octopus. This amazing creature, nearly 100m from its savagely curved beak to its tippiest tentacle, once blotted out the skies in its annual migrations from the Arctic plateaus to a still-undiscovered location somewhere in the South Pacific. Such were its numbers, and its fierce fighting ability, that it seemed unthinkable the species could ever be threatened.
That was, of course, before the advent of aircraft. Their soft, boneless bodies proved no match for slashing propellers and insatiable jet intakes, and for a generation or more the skies were greasy with carnage. You think you know how calamari was invented? Let me tell you, it was the act of a hardscrabble wartime population desperate for protein of any kind. When the planes flew overhead, housewives would run into the streets with buckets to catch the crudely hacked pieces of Aquatic Dragon that fell in a slimy torrent from the skies.
And soon, all too soon, it was all over.
WWII had done irreparable damage to the breeding population, and it is believed that nuclear tests in the South Pacific may have destroyed their traditional wintering grounds, leaving them with an unsustainable, nomadic, and doomed few survivors. This latest discovery is heartening in the extreme, for this juvenile specimen attests to the atavistic survival of at least two healthy Aquatic Dragons somewhere off the coast of Vancouver Island. My old alma mater, Miskatonic University, is gathering specialists in marine biology and herpetology to undertake an expedition in search of the creatures.
Yes, it’s a civic holiday in Vangroover (not really, but yeah) and there’s a distinct likelihood that several, if not even plenty of my readers, yes, we can see you out there, you left the webcam on and your eyeballs look like piss holes in the snow, may be somewhat affected by, shall we say, hyperlocal atmospheric conditions.
So, in the spirit of serviceyness, we present a couple of handy-dandy guides that will help you pretend not to be completely fucked up.
First up, Mowing Your Lawn on PCP:
Great! Don’t you feel productive now? But the night is still young, so don’t stop the buzz now! Grab a bottle of some refreshing liquid and follow along with Jenna Marbles as she shows you how to do makeup drunk.
And now Hannah from My Drunk Kitchen shows you How to Make Poutine, which you will want if you got baked, yourself:
She should definitely NOT have licked up the gravy that dissolved the dust from Burning Man and washed it down with a Caesar. She was only drunk before: now she’s a bad case of All Of The Above.
One thing that should not be attempted under the influence: singing in the car. If you’re the driver, you shouldn’t be messed up, and if you’re not the driver, you’re annoying the driver. Besides, no matter how awesome you think you are, you aren’t as awesome as this guy (yes, more Canadian Content; we’re just that much better at being drunk/stoned than you are):
And, no matter how awesome you think you are, even if you are sober and your audience is completely shitfaced, you will never be as good as Nicki Bluhm and The Gramblers, who use their van as a recording booth while tootling around San Francisco belting out cover tunes.
raincoaster 