Steve Martin's Dad

I was listening to Steve Martin's Born Standing Up, his memoir about his career in stand-up comedy before he turned to acting.

There is a passage at the end that made me cry. Steve's father was an unhappy, disgruntled and self-centered man. By self-centered, I mean his father was focused only on himself, uncaring and unaware of how his behavior impacted others, especially his son. I don't know if his father was an addict or alcoholic, but he had many of the traits.

Steve told the story of his sitting by his father's deathbed, when his father finally gained some self-awareness. His father was crying, and Steve asked him him the reason for his tears.

"I wish I could have returned some of the love I was given."

I cried when I read this. It was one of the saddest things I've heard. I felt bad this man didn't learn this before he died.

Legal Weed begets Fentanyl Addiction Epidemic, or Dealers Gotta Deal

I was talking to a friend today who told me something that blew my mind. He didn't spell it out, but I connected the dots myself.

As you may know, Seattle has a REALLY big problem on our streets with heavy drugs like fentanyl and meth. Really big. Like we have people in the street -- whom I affectionately call the Zombies Crackheads -- who are wasted out of their minds. Literally, out of their minds. They have no minds. They are catatonic or passed out but in a bizarre barely standing pose. These people are not drunk on Boone's Farm or stoned on weed. These people are not jacked on cocaine. These people are almost anesthetized. These people are drugging themselves to death.

So how did we get here, with this drug addiction ruining the lives of the addicted and making live unpleasant for those nearby?

Legal weed.

Follow the logic here. 

The idea behind legal weed was to decriminalize it, which isn't a bad thing. The goal was to keep people out of jail for something that was not causing a great deal of harm.

When marijuana became legal, it became legal to sell it. So who started selling legal weed? Did the corner drug dealer open a store on the corner?

Nope. 

MBA-venture capital types saw loads of money in making fancy little shops with cute names and lots of products. Average drug dealers probably didn't have the time or skills to make fancy edibles consumed by PTA moms before pick-up. 

So what happened to those pot dealers? The guys who sold weed as a quick and easy way to make a few bucks? Did they get other jobs? Did they get job training to become Tech or Finance Bros or anything else?

No.

They kept dealing and started selling harder stuff to their existing client base because there was much, much less of a  market for weed on the street.

I am guessing here, but not entirely sure, that the client base of a modern pot shop is not the Skid Row type of clientele. My guess that the people to go to pot shops have credit cards and Venmo accounts and day jobs with health insurance. 

So the Skid Row guy who was ten years ago sitting at the U District post office stinking of weed, what happened to him? 

His pot dealer didn't stop dealing. His dealer got a new drug, and these new drugs are very, very bad shit.

So what should we do next? Legalize fentanyl, which is like 50 times worse that heroin and 100 times worse than morphine? Hell no. 

We need to stop making fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. Medical establishments still need anesthesia and pain meds, put do we need them so potent and deadly? 

No.

Too many people are dying. They are dying on the streets, in plain view, making out cities scary and unpleasant for those not addicted.

So the people living in tents all over town are there indirectly due to legal marijuana? Yes. 

Sure, some them grew their addictions during the pandemic, and with most of the downtown shut down due to remote working, they filled the vacuum. Legalizing weed didn't get rid of drug dealers. Dealers gotta deal.

The Isolation Hangover & the Lobster

I was texting a friend the other day about a meeting we both attended. The meetings used to be reasonably well run, but this was one was disorganized. He said things like this are happening more often as we recover from our "isolation hangover."

Yes.

In Seattle especially, we have been loathe to get back to normal after the pandemic, I don't know why. I think many people here still believe the pandemic is still happening. Nevertheless, we are coming back together and the results are kind of ugly, at least in my world of remote workers. People who never fully worked remote (grocery store workers, nurses, doctors, etc.) might not have this problem like the rest of us.

Today I went to work in the office -- and there were people there! I thought I'd be overjoyed, excited to have co-workers, but it was odd, it was different. Now I am coming back to work in a place where I never knew the people before the pandemic, so I am getting to know them now. I am not talking about my immediate team, but the teams that are adjacent to mine. My sense was there was a lot of negativity, and then a decent amount of fear. It was like being in a cage with a bunch of grumpy bears that did not want to be in the cage. I just tried to hide and blend in so they wouldn't notice me.

I also joined an Improv class which is fun and hard and interesting and takes a lot of courage to go on stage and act things out by the seat of your pants. It requires thinking and not thinking and feeling and flow.

Afterwards, the class went out for a beer. It was fun, but I think it was one of the first times many of the people there had been out in public with a new group of people since the pandemic. 

I feel like I have been on a boat for the past three years, and I am finally getting back on shore. Everyone else has been on their own boat, and we are coming back to shore together, and we don't know how to act or behave.

Or another analogy -- I feel like a lobster that has shed her shell, waiting for the new one to grow back. In the meantime, I feel a little raw, unprotected in social interactions.

Ireland

Yes, Guinness is better in Ireland. 

Way better. 

Man that beer is so smooth and easy to drink. It is the easiest beer I’ve ever drank. No wonder there are so many alcoholics here. As I’ve been waking around, I’ve been trying to find good restaurants. The drinking culture here is so prevalent. From what I’ve seen, there isn’t really a great separate food culture. Sure, I’ve had some nice meals, but in mostly empty restaurants with people drinking their dinner and smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk patios. 

I know so many “Irish” people in the “U.S.,” people who strongly identify with being Irish whose grandparents or great-grandparents who were Irish, even if they themselves have never been to the motherland. I don’t think any other nationality is quite that in touch with a place they have never been to or have no living relatives there. 

And yet, I saw so many people here who look like people I know in the US. The Irish woman I sat next to on the plane looked like the sister of two of my friends. I’ve seen at least three people who looked like my high school boyfriend. This morning, I thought I saw one of Jack’s cousins in a coffee shop in Kilkenny.

The Irish are still a little sore after being colonized by the English for a thousand years and finally got “Home Rule” about one hundred years ago. (Ireland was the only colony within Europe, which has got to sting.) I’ve been reading about the Great Potato Famine in the 1860’s which drove half of the country to move to the US  so they wouldn’t starve. And the reason for the famine? There was a natural cause of bad weather, but then the British really screwed the pooch by exporting food instead of letting people in Ireland have it. Like they could make more money exporting the gain than they could get from the Irish. Or something like that. Disclaimer: Hey kids, don’t use this info for your school paper. Look it up yourself and don’t trust everything you read on the internet.

Anyway, when India was colonized by the British, Gandhi lead them out of it through being peaceful and “offering wicked no resistance.” The Irish took more of a “Fuck You” violent approach, which gave the British the rationale to respond back with more violence. Oy. It was a shit show. Everyone acted poorly, though the British were more wrong because they started it.

I love traveling because I learn so much history. Instead of reading it in a book—which is useful, don’t get me wrong—I absorb the history through my skin when I’m in a place. Last night, I went to a comedy show and two of the people brought up the IRA. One guy thought his dad might have been a terrorist  How do you sort that out? My dad blew up cars so we could vote on our leaders. Yay?!

I am still suffering from jet lag and I need to go to bed. Today I took a bus tour of the countryside. I was so looking forward to looking out the window and seeing the countryside. Instead, the gentle bouncing of the bus was like Rock-a-Bye-Baby and I zonked out. That and too much Guinness the night before.

We saw a sheep herding demonstration. It was cool. 

The biggest mountain on this side of Ireland. Sigh. This place isn’t Idaho, Montana or Washington. It is still beautiful, but it’s not Glacier.

The Cross of Ireland. The Irish Crown Jewels were stolen in 1907. 

We got to hold lambs. Sooo cute. Holding a lamb is exactly like holding a toddler. You have to relax and let the lamb know it is safe and then it stops squirming. 

Celtic cross. Made with a circle to appeal to pagans who liked the moon and the orbit of Jupiter and whatnot. #marketing