Doug Fine's Blog, page 4

Today’s Busy Shaman’s One-Minute Recipe For Bliss: Allow For Smooth Goat Homespace Reentry Time

 

BBC TV Takes the TOO HIGH TO FAIL Drug Peace Message Across the Pond

 

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 bottle) 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 and my goal upon return (if I ever leave: RV travel departure time with multiple human offspring needs to be scheduled by season rather than date), is for the book to be on the New York Times bestseller list and for me 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 cannabis aficionados and 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.

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 to 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 be able to fill ‘er up with hemp?

Another aging vehicle concern (one bought via Karma off a remote Craislist 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-along-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 – fool the goats into thinking I’m a  happy-go-lucky adventurer insread 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 that happen 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. 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 some time that feels unusual, have just followed me up the hill to the gate that for the momentseparates 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, “Freaks!” 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 organge 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. 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 hours later I begin the climb through the Rockies 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 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 deep indoor sleep is coming midst 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-headwinds, 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 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 concerned, 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 traffic physics 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 just 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 that 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.

Still, 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 exploring cannabis tourism in Mendocino County  with him. The young falcon (now clearly a peregrine from the net up the canyon), I see and hear, is noticeably stouter and presumably a better hunter (better count those chickens). The overall, immensely relieving sensation is that the reentry has been very smooth in this most gorgeous high desert season: the tail end of Monsoon. A broad palette of wildflowers and gramma grasses are 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 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 gently 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 reuinion 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 om home turf. Enshrouded in a perpetual hummingbird om stadium before the local  non-human crowd.

Thus I hope it’s very clear  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’m come 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 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 Rosanaadanna reminds us, it sure seems like it’s always something – though 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 1 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 delighted 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 wants 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 too-close 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 for this Dispatch. While outside fighting with explosive containers of sulfuric acid, I noticed from every spot on which not-truck-related my eyes could rest that so much can grow in a moistened desert in three weeks. That’s how quick forgiveness and peace can come, too. I’m seeing it n 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, I’ve remembered something a stranger told me somewhere in Coloado or Calfornia 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 agee, 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 that’s in fact more valuable to the economy and well-being of the society than cabernet.

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

PSYCHC CROSS-TRAINING: Leaving Rural Ranch Life (At the Peak of Monsoon!) For Book Tour Sushi And a Possible End To the Drug War

DOUG ON CONAN

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 19th 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

Thank You, Zeitgeist Gatekeepers, For Smiling On the Dawn of the Drug Peace Era

[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]

The Electron Kaleidoscope: In Which the Annual Threshold of “Siesta or Die” Is Crossed On A Strong Day of Mutual Multi-Generational Homeschooling

*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*

 

Still Seeking Double Digits In The Land of The Eduringly Free (Or, Transcending Even The ‘Most People Would Rather Be Here’ Fall-back Realization)

 

“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*

 

Appreciation Overlap: Why the Funky Butte Owls Are Family

[*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*]

The Next Book: TOO HIGH TO FAIL

Pre-order Doug’s New Book!

In the usual cloud of Kung Pao chicken exhaust I found myself loading up for a live event last week, which meant I would soon be off the Funky Butte Ranch for more than the couple of hours required for a hay run. Which in turn, I knew from experience, meant that I would be tactically bombarded by whichever motion picture release the most flush entertainment firms wanted the widest number of people to see. I read somewhere that they’re going for seven exposures per putative moviegoer. Across at least three distinct media (what laypeople call senses).

In exchange for my usual absence of TV (and I’m at the tail end of a low public radio phase to boot), someone was about to bend my ear about a new silver screen gem or (in the “news” realm) foreign threat, from highway billboard to plane jetway; heck, a golfing senior couple would soon be pitching me prescription medication on the airport shuttle van. When I talk (as I often do in these Dispatches) about the mental health benefits of quiet, I’m referring to marketing silence as much as car alarm and screaming sirens.

Luckily I didn’t have to worry about my bed and breakfast’s television – I don’t like touching the remotes. Plus, the local news scares me with its missing children, petty political corruption and exposes on hotel room remote control germs. Still, I left home watching the 1967 Dr. Dolittle on Netflix and returned knowing what body part the left side of the punditsphere felt was excessively protruding from Angie Jolie’s Oscar dress.

Every time I dance through this psychic ring of fire (to grasp how jolting it is, keep in mind I generally see more goats than people on any given day), I first have to transcend an initial shock of the “Holy Gazoley, someone with money thinks that people will still, eventually, believe that one of the McCandidates really might know what to do about the Whole Mess” school.

Once this wave passes, I’m cleansed, and I almost always return from travel with what feels like some kind of big societal revelation. For reasons that I suspect are by now obvious, the most common revelatory theme is: “Get back to the Ranch with maximum dispatch, young man. Stockpile at least a year of food and water. And generally stick to movies in which the actors’ behavior, if displayed in a real human, would allow them within a mile of your three-year-old.”

This trip (amazingly hosted by the hospitable and sustainably-determined folks at the University of Montevallo), possibly because of its proximity to the Oscars (and the Special Oscars Edition of Vanity Fair I found and read in the Bed and Breakfast — it included articles on Brigitte Bardot and the making of the film Diner), my at least perceived epiphany surrounded the identity-creating magic of film publicity.

The revelation was almost certainly an unintended result of my seven advertising bombardments, since the ostensible goal of movie advertising is to sell movie tickets. At least I think that’s still the goal. Maybe there’s a subservience algorithm embedded in the frequency of the advertisements themselves.

Either way, what occurred to me, when the face on a Dallas C-terminal flatscreen tried to assure me that, although Syrian civilians were dying by the thousands, Rush Limbaugh had apologized for saying what he gets paid to say, and it was vitally important to that I see a film called either Act of Valor or Battle of Valor (something to do with brave kinds of killing), was this: one effect of mainstream film promotion in the early 21st Century is to make omnipresent superheroes of our most professionally marketed performers.



By this I mean that when a movie comes out, I sometimes wonder if the lead actress has been cloned. Specifically, I think, “Huh, I just read in the Times, in an article given slightly more space than the peace negotiations in Sudan, that Ms. Jolie (or whomever) is now in Zambia (for tax reasons) shooting the film version of The Oxford English Dictionary (or whatever). I wonder when the heck she could have found time to beam up to the International Space Station to shoot this just-released Ms. Pac Man Marries a Cosmonaut (or whatever) about whose Friday opening (and on-location shoot) a film distributor so badly wants travelers passing through Texas to be aware.”

What we’re talking about, of course, is the delay between the creation of a piece of entertainment and its release. Because of the long and (to me) surprisingly formalized production pipeline in all of our mass entertainment branches, projects just seem to magically appear, whenever publicity departments, those latter day Copperfields, decide it’s time to conjure awareness of them in what I call with a rebelling straight face the cultural zeitgeist.

Then, as usually happens when I am casting some kind of ethical stones (because really wasn’t this revelation a form of judgment; a condemnation of Hollywood’s crime of temporal artificiality or at least manipulation?), I took a look at myself. Or in this case, at my new Web site (gorgeous design work by Ms. Amanda McPherson). I even surprised myself: I was so used to that Funky Butte Ranch-scape banner at the top of the page every time I posted a Dispatch that I said to myself of myself, “I wonder what he’s been up to.” Then I thought excitedly, “Maybe he’ll reveal it in his first Dispatch with the re-design.”

So that’s this. Those familiar with these Dispatches know that I usually have a point (Holy Gazoley, I hope that’s the consensus), even if it takes a good portion of your lunch hour to get to it – so if you want to hear about TOO HIGH TO FAIL, my new book, but don’t have time for the explanation of how it came to be, the short film and pre-order links are at the top and bottom of this Dispatch.

Essentially I followed one sustainably-grown cannabis plant from seed to patient and explained — with the usual harrowing misadventure — how many billions of dollars the overall industry will be worth to the economy when the War on Drugs is finally called off.

For those without a supervisor, rival, too-looming-of-a-deadline, or crying infant in danger of intruding, I’ll get to more of that “what” after explaining the “why.” Because I’m a real person, and I recognize that even without a marketing department, even without intending to, I have a long history of facing such “wait, when did that happen?” questions about my own projects.

Although not in the case of the above films: I turned down both the coveted role of the verb “expostulate” in the Dictionary epic (I couldn’t get a contractual guarantee that my ad-libs would make the final cut) and that of the lovable Space Station stowaway in Ms. Pac Man — the mundane sticking point on that one was simple money: Carrot Top was pulling in fourteen mil as a biosphere vegetable (not even a speaking role! All he had to do was grow, spiritually), and my agent was asking less than half that for a role with three nude scenes and a simultaneous crying/vomit/space walk breakdown that was pre-slated for supporting actor Oscar buzz.

Boy I hope everyone realizes I’m kidding about the film stuff. As anyone who reads the trades knows, my man Carrot (we call him The Follicle) never leaves his decompression chamber for less than twenty large.

No but really, my own moves seem, to the few billion who don’t follow them on a daily basis, to be evidence of levitation, if not teleportation or outright time travel. When Not Really An Alaskan Mountain Man came out, for example, people scratched their heads. “Huh,” the multitudes (or dozens) wondered, “I thought he was that guy who reported from Burma and Rwanda for the Washington Post and Salon and, well, whomever would pay his airfare.”

When Farewell, My Subaru hit shelves (books used to be printed on physical atoms and appear stacked according to an indecipherable system on “shelves” in places called “stores”), folks ruminated, “I thought he was the guy who kept nearly drowning and getting eaten in those last Frontier NPR dispatches where he hung out with whales, bears and libertarians.”

Well, now is the time to wonder when the Goat and Solar Guy who Gets the Munchies from his truck’s Vegetable Oil Exhaust researched and wrote a book about the Drug War. Or as I think of it, The Coming Drug Peace.

Let me assure you I’m still that guy. The marginally-competent, often-outsmarted Goat Fellow and would-be neo-Rugged Individualist Organic Cowboy. In fact I’m just in from the morning milking as I type.

And I don’t see that ever stopping. Especially when the courting owls hoot to each other from opposite sides of the canyon every night and soaks in the local hot springs evaporate every iota of stress into effervescent steam. I still live to get petroleum out of my life, and as I alluded to above, I returned yesterday from, film commercials aside, what turned out to be a wonderful speaking event in Alabama about my latest Carbon-neutral Misadventures (summary: the goats are still getting into the rose buses).

I’m trying to say that I never plan to cease writing and speaking about sustainability. I’m fairly sure I won’t be able to stop myself. There’s something about having a place to live that allows humans to breathe and drink that feels important. Guess it takes all kinds.

All that said, I did disappear again. Largely to protect some brave sources, I quietly spent most of 2011 in the solar-powered cannabis fields of northern California researching this now forthcoming book. And this is a project which, back in the relative safety (if you don’t count coyotes and Climate Change) of the Funky Butte Ranch, I’m thrilled to announce today.

While the Middle East dictators kept toppling (they always topple, don’t they? They’re like Weebles) and the bankers kept devising new kinds of financial instruments to circumvent whatever “regulation” they and their former colleagues (now in government) concocted, I was sleuthing in one of the first places in the United States to declare a Drug Peace. Why?

Bottom line: the War on Drugs had just celebrated its dubious fortieth anniversary, during which time it has cost you and me a trillion dollars without making a dent in supply or demand (actually both have increased). I wanted to know: is there a sustainable solution that can put billions back into the economy every year while decimating the murderous drug cartels?

That’s what I’ve been looking into for the past year and that’s the topic of my new book, TOO HIGH TO FAIL: Cannabis and the New Green Economic Revolution (Penguin/Gotham, August 2, 2012).

I essentially spent a growing season in domestic medical cannabis fields following a single flower from planting to patient. I shadowed a cadre of American farmers (some new, some third generation) looking at what a cannabis economy would be worth to the U.S. balance sheet if (perhaps we should say “when”) the Drug War ends.

The folks who invited me in to learn the details of their once-secret industry sported tastefully framed permits from local law enforcement and were Chamber of Commerce members. Sustainability standards were written into local regulations. Crime in the region decreased. Quite the brain teaser for a fellow raised during Just Say No.

Only no one told the feds. From my perspective as a writer, the usual carnage, misadventure, and investigative revelation ensued. When confronted with Drug Warriors (funded by my own taxes), I often had to dig deep into my belief in the U.S. Constitution, since I saw an enforcement and incarceration bureaucracy (on the federal level) whose operators were behaving not too differently (that is, extra-judicially) from the way the current batch of deciders in, say, Burma or Guatemala do. And I say that as someone who is generally a vociferous defender of law enforcement. In fact former Seattle Police chief Norm Stamper puts it this way: “…besides causing thousands of deaths worldwide and costing billions of taxpayer dollars, the drug war’s most serious collateral damage has been to undermine the role of civilian law enforcement in our free society.”

Oh, that it were just civilian law enforcement: in the 2012 U.S. federal defense appropriations bill, drones have been approved for use in domestic cannabis eradication. And how I loved that fourth amendment to the Constitution!

The very good news is that, as was the case toward the end of alcohol prohibition, many localities, from Sheriff’s office to regional government, are having none of it. Another way of putting this is that, in any war (and make no mistake, the War on Drugs is at least in part an American Civil War, with millions of real casualties known as non-violent inmates), someone has to just decide to end it. To stop fighting. When it’s the losers, we call it “surrender.” This time it’s the winners calling it off. Opting for Drug Peace.

What I discovered amidst the Northern California redwoods is what both a majority of Americans and Pat Robertson already sense (according to a 2011 Gallup poll): taxing cannabis like alcohol will bring a half-trillion dollars into the American economy in the first five years after prohibition ends and will play a significant role in balancing the U.S. budget, while jump-starting an American agricultural and manufacturing revival.

It’s already happening in Canada, where the cannabis industry is growing at 20% a year. That’s where the organic hemp seed oil in my morning shake comes from. It’d be a federal felony to grow it here. But we can buy it from other nations. Or from cartel criminals (to the tune of tens of billions of as yet untaxed dollars every year). At a time of massive national debt. Don’t you love good policy?

And on the sustainability front, I learned during the research of TOO HIGH TO FAIL that the cannabis plant, thanks to its aerating, foot-long taproots that grow in a month, can even help ravaged soil recover from a century of monoculture. As I put it in the book, ‘One tries not to sound like one of those “cannabis can do anything including bring about world peace and an end to Ring Around the Collar” people, but [from my Omega-balanced breakfast shake alone] I felt I deserved some kind of Canadian tax rebate”.’

As the highly decorated (and very popular) local Sheriff in the community where I did my primary research puts it, “The plant isn’t going away. We can tax it, or we can let the drug lords make the profits. If a law enforcement professional or a politician doesn’t realize after forty years [of Drug Warring] that the sun still rises and there’s still an America with cannabis on the convenience store shelf, it might be time for him to retire.”

It was, perhaps needless to say, a fun book to research. Hope it proves that way to read. Click on the cover image to head to the pre-order page or to see the short film about the whole season-long, seed-to-patient adventure.

The pre-order is on now (the book ships August 2), and you’ll see options there (whether your books these days are made from trees or electrons). Please also forward this page’s link far and wide: a large pre-order helps TOO HIGH TO FAIL‘s promotional effort immensely. Thanks as always for your support. I never forget that it’s you who allow me to keep writing about the topics that feel important and amusing to cover.

And this one, believe me, feels important. At least as important as (and sometimes overlapping with) the issues raised in FAREWELL, My SUBARU. As for amusing, well, that’s for you to decide. Now that I’m no longer in constant risk of a helicopter crew’s mishearing the phrase, “I’m just media!,” I sure find myself laughing a lot. As Ed Abbey put it on the sustainability front, ““It is not enough to fight for the land. It is even more important to enjoy it.” Same holds true when it comes to civil liberties, sustainability, and good government.

Note: for those of you blessed humans who ordered my previous books directly from me, this time please use one of the options you’ll see here on this site: it’s part of my agreement with the publisher that we’ll do it through stores this time, whether independent local bookstores or Amazon/Barnes and Noble/Apple.

If you want your copies signed, I’m happy to do it. The best way is probably to come to the live events as they line up in the second half of the year. There you’ll also see the unintentional comedy performance known as my show. Hope to see you on the tour.

Postscript: Meanwhile, these Dispatches continue: sometimes they’ll cover the new topic, sometimes they’ll analyze my trifecta of major issues (sustainability, civil liberties, interstellar communication) and, of course, often they’ll ruminate on my progress toward establishing the new Olympic Event of Wild River Innertubing.

I can’t tell you how excited I’ve been to announce this project — the fun topic aside, it entailed a year of pretty consistently hard work (and a lot of mountainous vegetable oil-powered driving) to get it right. As soon as I hit “post” I’m off to trim the goats’ hooves in a canyon screaming spring: saw the first wildflowers of the season on a hike up an arroyo today (blood oranges were the vital snack), which means the nectar-thirsty hummingbirds can’t be far behind. That annual migration is always cause, as much as anything, for a life phase high in optimism and characterized by a distinct lack of Big Picture worry: justified of not (and I think it is, pretty much always), this, I believe, is the state of mind in which to go through life.