420: A Few Anecdotes About My Favorite Artists and Cannabis

I'll try to make this short, 'cuz I've been taking up too much of your time lately and I don't want ya to feel I ripped you off. Besides, I reward myself for doing a blog post by getting a tad baked. But then again I reward myself with weed after peeing, too...

George Carlin
"Carlin had been smoking 'shit' habitually since he was thirteen years old. 'I'd wake up in the morning and if I couldn't decide whether I wanted to smoke a joint or not, I'd smoke a joint to figure it out,' he once admitted. 'And I stayed high all day long. When people asked me, 'Do you get high to go onstage?' I could never understand the question. I mean, I'd been high since eight that morning. Going onstage had nothing to do with it'"
7 Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin, James Sullivan, p.107

David Bowie
"According to an interview David Bowie gave to Playboy in the mid-seventies, he only got stoned on pot once, when he was turned on by Ronnie Wood and he spent hours staring at the sidewalk having visions. A couple of years later, Bowie was busted, along with Iggy Pop, in Rochester, New York, for possessing several ounces of marijuana...blame it on Iggy."
Everybody Must Get Stoned: Rock Stars On Drugs, R.U. Sirius, p.91

Steve Almond
"I was pushing forty and had smoked the equivalent of a large marijuana tree the previous decade."
Not That You Asked, Almond, p.252

                                      Allen Ginsberg, 1963, 64, or 65. Photo by Benedict 
                                       J. Fernandez

Ezra Pound and Allen Ginsberg
Ginsberg visited Pound in Rapallo, Italy, in the late 1960s. Pound had been profoundly depressed, realizing he'd been an idiot with his antisemitism, and that he'd hurt everyone he loved. Ginsberg told Pound, basically, So you fucked up...you influenced everyone with your aesthetic ideas. At one point Ginsberg talked to Pound about "modern use of drugs as distinct from Twenties opium romanticism." Pound replied, "You know a great deal about the subject."
What Thou Lovest Well Remains: 100 Years of Ezra Pound, ed. Richard Ardinger, p.37

Robert Anton Wilson
"The 'funniest' experiences I've ever had with drugs all involved pot, and none of them seem comic when I try to write them down. Apparently words, which cannot convey 'mystical' experiences, also fail to communicate hilarious drug experiences.

"For instance, a friend and I took a little too much hash one night and both got lost in stoned space. We knew who we were and where we were, but we couldn't remember the last 30 seconds. We spent what seemed like an hour saying things like:

"Jesus, I can't remember what we were talking about."
"What did you just say?"
(Interlude of spasmodic laughter by both of us.)
"I think I'm having a...what? What did you say?"
"I can't remember...What were we trying to remember?"
(More spasms of laughter)
"We're trying to...What are we trying to do?"
As the effect modified with time, we understood what was happening, and one of us described it as "a visit to the islands of micro-amnesia."
Pot Stories For The Soul, edited by Paul Krassner, p.68

Aleister Crowley
"The action of Hashish is as varied as life itself, and seems to be determined almost entirely by the will or the mood of the 'assassin' and that within the hedges of his mental and moral form."
-originally in The Equinox, 1909, found in Orgies of the Hemp Eaters, Hakim Bey and Abel Zug, editors, p.444

William S. Burroughs
"Hashish affects the sense of time so that events, instead of appearing in an orderly structure of past, present and future, take on a simultaneous quality, the past and future contained in the present the moment."
-found in Writing on Drugs, by Sadie Plant, p.152

"Mezz" Mezzrow
"It's a funny thing about marihuana - when you first begin smoking it you see things in a wonderful soothing, easygoing new light. All of a sudden the world is stripped bare of its dirty gray shrouds and becomes one big bellyful of giggles, a spherical laugh, bathed in brilliant, sparkling colours that hit you like a heatwave. Nothing leaves you cold any more; there's a humorous tickle and great meaning in the least little thing, the twitch of somebody's little finger or the click of a beer glass. All your pores open like funnels, your nerve ends stretch their mouths wide, hungry and thirsty for new sights and sounds and sensations; and every sensation, when it comes, is the most exciting one you've ever had. You can't get enough of anything - you want to gobble up the whole goddamned universe just for an appetizer. Them first kicks are a killer, Jim."
-from Really The Blues, 1946, found in Artificial Paradises, ed. by Mike Jay, p.152

Bonus Tracks
1 Minute excerpt from Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, DFA, "Cheating Death": sun overexposure and pot

"Weed Snobs"

Nancy Grace saying the most idiotic Reefer Madness-level crap about pot

weed porn

                  from Sean Tejaratchi's LiarTown USA site, which always makes me laff 
                  until I have a side-ache

23 Quotes, Strategically Arranged, From The Files (Perspective From Incongruity?)

1. "Before judging any proposition as true or false, you should not only ask if it might better be called indeterminate or meaningless or self-reflexive of a 'local' Game Rule, but also if it is part of a Strange Loop that may make you appear crazy if you try to live with it." - Robert Anton Wilson, found in The Fringes of Reason, p.173


2. "How we organize our world reflects not only the world but also our interests, our passions, our needs, our dreams." - David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous, p.40


3. "It must be recognized that here we are dealing with a purely symbolic procedure...Hence our whole space-time view of physical phenomena depends ultimately upon these abstractions." - Niels Bohr, articulating part of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, in his Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature, p.77


4. "The more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn't matter if the things are true. What counts, remember, is to possess a secret." - Umberto Eco (I forget where I found this.)


5. "Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes." - Ezra Pound, Guide To Kulchur, p.100


6. "I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people - and the West in general - into an unbearable hell and a choking life." - Osama bin Laden, CNN, February 5, 2002


7. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair (source?)


8. "Nor is the guilt entirely with the warmongers, plutocrats and demagogues. If people permit exploitation and regimentation in any name, they deserve their slavery. A tyrant does not make his tyranny possible. It is made by the people and not otherwise." - John Whiteside Parsons, Freedom Is A Two-Edged Sword


9. "Whoever has known himself has known God." - Hajji Bektash, Sufi

10. "Every minute, every second, the pattern of genes being expressed in your brain changes, often in direct or indirect response to events outside the body. Genes are the mechanisms of experience." - Matt Ridley

11. "I believe with Schopenhauer that one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely-tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought." - Albert Einstein

12. "Our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear." - not Noam Chomsky, but Gen. Douglas MacArthur

13. "Einstein pronounced the doom of continuous or 'rational' space, and the way was made clear for Picasso and the Marx Brothers and Mad magazine." - McLuhan

14. "Someone will always want to mobilize
       Death on a massive scale for economic
       Domination or revenge. And the task, taken
       As a task, appeals to the imagination.
       The military is an engineering profession." - Robert Hass, "Bush's War,"
       Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005


15. "We have certain preconceived notions about location in space and which have come down to us from ape-like ancestors." - Sir Arthur Eddington, Space, Time and Gravitation


16. "One of the reasons that politics lets us down is that we keep comparing it to our ideal narratives, to politics on TV or in the movies, which is tidier and better fits such structures." - George Lakoff, The Political Mind, p. 27


17. "Hitler repeatedly stressed that one could not get at the masses with arguments, proofs, and knowledge, but only with feelings and beliefs." - Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p.83


18. "for want of correspondence/with the imagination/the rich have become richer/the poor poorer/from an unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty." - P.B. Shelley, repeated by W.B. Yeats, found p.196 of Peter Dale Scott's Minding The Darkness


19. "It seems evident that everything which exists in nature, is natural, no matter how simple or complicated a phenomenon it is; and on no occasion can the so-called 'supernatural' be anything else than a completely natural law, though it may, at the moment, be above and beyond the present understanding." - Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity, pp.228-229


20. "Another bad effect of commerce is that the minds of men are contracted and rendered incapable of elevation. Education is despised, or at least neglected." - Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations


21. "Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity." - George Bernard Shaw

22. "A magician is only an actor - an actor pretending to be a magician." - Houdini

23. "The fact that something is quoted from someone else or somewhere else gives it a magical gloss, the portentous found-object." - William S. Burroughs, Last Words, p.224