The dope selling expedition

The white ’61 Chevy sailed through the night, as much like a ship at sea as it was a car on the road.  Not only was the front end pretty clapped out by then, the ball joints loose in their sockets and the tie rods tired, but Shifter had fitted it with a foam padded steering wheel that was all of 8” diameter, like a huge fat donut attached to the column.  On a back road like this one somewhere near Elma, with a pronounced crown to the road and the memory of thousands of log truck loads imprinted in the blacktop, driving the car was an exercise in controlled drifting from side to side as the slack shifted from one wheel to the other, requiring correction by the driver.  That’s probably what caught the attention of the cop who was behind them at the time.  Under Lefty’s seat was a pound of the lowest grade of cheap Mexican pot, so when the lights came on it was a special thrill.

Shifter was Lefty’s high school buddy.  He was lean and mean, and could grow a beard years before some of his classmates, the cause of much envy and status among the boys.  They worked together at the smorgasboard restaurant and partied often.  The Chevy was his car, handed down from his big brother.  They had spent all of one night working on it shortly before that trip to Ocean Shores.  They replaced a used clutch disc with a different used clutch disc for some stupid reason.  It didn’t help much that they put it in backwards, either.  They didn’t know any better.  He had to tow it up to the local shop to get it fixed for $20, and for that they stayed up all night and got all dirty.  Good thing they had lots of peed spills.

So the way it started, there was this musician guy, and he had quit his band, but they held on to some of his equipment and promised to pay for it, but never did, and he wanted to repossess it.  A friend of his was an entrepreneurial sort, and he arranged for Shifter and Lefty to accompany him to the band’s house and be the strong-arm goons in case there was any trouble.  There wasn’t, and the payment for their efforts was the bunco Mexican dope, which the musician guy had been burned on during a setup deal in a parking lot on the side of Aurora Avenue North where you pay your money and hope they come back with something and sometimes they do, but it isn’t worth a shit.  They didn’t know any better, so they took it.  It quickly became evident that they were stuck with this stringy bale of raw hemp that smelled bad, and tasted worse than it burned, which it didn’t, much.

Getting rid of this stuff was the problem.  They started in White Center, of course, their home stomping grounds.  In the parking lot of Lou’s or Herfy’s they ran into Pat Goonbart, one of the local potheads, whose claim to fame was that he could roll joints faster than anyone, having practiced to the point where it was one smooth motion, very impressive.  He got stoned a lot for free with that skill of course, which showed he was a pretty sharp guy.  “Hey, Pat”, Lefty yelled out the window. “What’s goin’ on?”  “Not much”, he said, leaning in.  “Hi, Shifter; what are you guys up to?”  “We got a bunch of dope we want to sell”, Lefty replied.  His ears perked up at that.  “Why don’t you climb in the back and take a look?”  “Certainly!”, he said.  “Fuckin’ A!”.  That proved to be a mistake.  Pat was no fool, and he quickly realized what they had.  “This stuff is bunk!” he said.  “Let me outta here.”  So their goose was cooked, since Pat knew everybody and talked to all of them.  They had to get outta town with the dope, find somewhere the local denizens of wouldn’t know them.  Ocean Shores was the place.  Everybody knew it was party central on weekends, even in October.  Yeah, right.  So off they went, figuring to sleep in the car or get a hotel room with all the money they made selling dope to the tourists at $10 a bag.  Sure, Eddie.  They didn’t know any better, and it sounded like a good idea at the time.

When the lights came on Lefty went into flashback mode, to the time when after the community meeting at the drop-in center he noticed that someone had left their keys in their car in the parking lot, so Shifter  snatched them out of the ignition and they came back later and stole the car.  They went for a joyful joy ride until they ran a stop sign on Roxbury at high speed in front of a cop just getting off duty, which in retrospect turned out to be a mistake.  The cop peeled out after them and caught up by the old reservoir, which was surrounded by a thick salal patch in a forest of madrona and hemlock that was the hangout of all the kids in the neighborhood.  As the cop pulled up behind the stalled car, Shifter turned to Lefty and said, “Scoot over next to the door and hold the handle open, but don’t open the door till I say run!”.  Then he rolled down the window as the cop approached.  “You got a license and registration?” asked the fat old officer as he reached the driver’s door.  “Sure”, said Shifter, and then pulled down the visor as if looking for the registration, which wasn’t there.  Then he scooted over a bit and pulled down the other visor, likewise empty.  He scooted over a bit more, opened the glove box door and shouted, “Run!”  Lefty threw the door open and they took off like track stars.  That salal patch had to be 40 feet wide and a good 4 feet deep, and they blew through there like two gazelles beating feet from a hyena.  All the old cop could do was stand there and say bad words out loud.  They stopped to catch their breath on the other side of the patch in the woods, and listened for signs of pursuit.  They knew the patrol cars would be out looking for them, so they had to get through the projects, which were between them and the safety of home base, before he could call out the reserves.

That proved to be a good strategy, as the police naturally assumed it was a couple of bad boys from the projects who did it and concentrated their search in that neighborhood.  They only ran into one prowl car on the way home, cruising down the perimeter road shining his spotlight on all the houses and driveways.  They just had to keep the house itself between them and the spotlight for a bit, then slipped out over the fence in the corner lot and got away clean.  It’s interesting that poor people projects are fenced to keep people in, while rich people projects are fenced to keep them out.

But this time they were far from home in unfamiliar territory, and would have to bullshit their way through it.  Fortunately, they didn’t have any beer with them, and had been smoking only cigarettes on the road, so they got off with a lecture about defective equipment when they said they were headed for Shifter’s uncle’s house in Ocean Shores.

When they got to town they realized they had a problem.  They didn’t know anybody, weren’t old enough to get in the taverns, and there didn’t seem to be any local public events happening that Saturday night where they could mix with our potential clientele.  So they resorted to the desperation move of pulling up alongside some likely customers in a grocery store parking lot and asking out the window, “Hey, do you guys know anyone who wants to buy some pot?”

The first time they tried it actually worked.  Three guys climbed into the back seat and asked to see the merchandise.  They bought one bag for $10 and stole three more from them, assisted by Lefty handing over the entire grocery bag and enabling the old switcheroo con.  I’m sure they had a great laugh over it later, until they smoked the first joint and discovered how badly they had been burned.  By then Shifter and Lefty were already out of town, having realized there was no future in selling bunk dope to strangers in parking lots.  As they sailed down the highway toward home, Shifter and Lefty looked at each other, and, by unspoken agreement, Lefty rolled down the window and threw the remaining bags of worthless dope into the night.  Sic transit Gloria mundus, caveat emptor, and carpe diem.

If God came back to Earth

If God came back to Earth

He’d be pretty disgusted with us, I imagine.  He’d wander the globe for a few hundred years and see what we’ve done to ourselves, and each other, and shake his head.  “Why”, he would ask, “are so many of you rich and provided for beyond any needs you might have, and yet so many others are starving and living hand to mouth?  Why are the rich ones, by and large, living peaceful lives, while so many poor ones are fighting and dying every day?  Did you not listen to my Sermon on the Mount?”

“I thought I made it pretty clear”, he’d say, “that Thou Shalt Not Kill, but look at you, some of you, killing each other right and left, and what’s worse, doing it in my name!  You kill your friends, you kill your enemies, you kill strangers, you even kill your children!  Then I see some apologist trying to say I didn’t mean that, I really meant Thou Shall Not Murder!  Explain how that feels different to the one you killed.”

“Thou Shalt Not Steal, I told you, and look at you, some of you, stealing everything you can lay your hands on every chance you get.  You steal other people’s identities, you steal their trust, you steal their time, you steal their property, and you steal their mate.”

“I gave you dominion over the whole earth, and all its forms of life, and what have you done?  You killed off, exterminated, wiped out many of my most precious lives, often for the most vain and stupid reasons.  You’ve spoiled, plundered and strip mined much of the earth, chopped down way too many trees, poisoned the air and the water, first out of ignorance, and then, when it became all too clear what was going on, you pointed the finger everywhere but at yourselves, and lied about who made money creating the mess.  You have caught most of the fish and oiled the waters as the pollution you spew into the atmosphere has brought about severe changes in the weather.”

“I tell you what”, he’d say, “I’m half tempted to wipe the slate clean and try again, like last time, not that this batch of humans has done any better than the last batch.  Better yet, I’ll just sit back and watch you exterminate yourselves and see who comes up next, the cockroaches or the rats and mice.  My bet is on the cockroaches”.

Fortunately for us, God is not coming back.  That’s because he never was there in the first place; we made him up.  Unfortunately for us, that means we really have nobody to blame but ourselves for the shape we’re in, and nobody is going to step in at the last minute and call us all to judgment, let alone fix all our mistakes.  We have to do that.

We have to do it, and we have to get started now, or it will be too late.  It may already be.

Now, for all you true believers who find this idea offensive, I’m sorry, but you have to accept certain things whether you like it or not.  One is that, absent the coordinates of Heaven or Hell, there is no way to prove their existence, so it must be taken on faith.  The second is that, when you look at your beliefs logically, you must realize that, in every case, you have decided to believe a given tenet because someone you respected and trusted told you to do so.  Very few of us have done the research and read the Bible or the Koran or the Bagvad Ghita in its original versions and languages and made up our own minds.  We always take it from someone, ultimately a priest or minister of some sort.  That makes it easy to point out the obvious, that the person who told you what to believe is making a living on that belief, and counting on you for part of his or her income.  They have a direct conflict of interest.

As far as I’m concerned, the only true Christians I have met are bikers, like Wings of Faith.  They have elders, but no church, no tithing, and no expenses.  Everyone else is posturing to one degree or another, or making a living at it.  The televised criminal hucksters are the worst.  True Believers, however, are all over the place, and most of them are dangerous.

And the Bible itself is full of nonsense.  I’ve had Christians tell me, with a straight face, when I asked where all the wives came from to help make all those people named in Genesis, that they were all descended from Eve’s daughters mating with her sons, and it was ok, because “the bloodline was pure back then”, six words that toss everything we’ve learned about genetics out the window.  I guess, since God wiped out that gene pool anyway during the flood, leaving only Noah’s family to repopulate the earth, they must have still been pretty pure, too.  Yeah, right.  I don’t remember hearing about any yellow, brown or black people on the ark, either.

And all of Revelations is nonsense, bullshit dreamed up by old men on hashish to help keep the masses in line, and tithing.  And the Koran is nothing more than a plagiarized copy of the Bible twisted to the Imam’s or the Ayatollah’s best interests, as well.  Oh, oh, someone is now going to call for my execution because I said that.

What makes sense to me is that all religions, all of them, being fabricated from scratch by primitive bronze age tribes and improved on ever since by professionals making a living at it, contain a grain of truth.  That is the concept of the Soul, as an expression of a complex mind having original thoughts becoming something other than the physical body in which the mind lives.  When that body dies, the Soul changes form and substance and becomes a Spirit, which does whatever the mind of the person wanted to do.  If you have led a good life, and you know it, you will self-assign your Spirit to the heaven of your choice, just as you will send yourself to a Hell of your own creation if you have been a bad person in life, because you can’t hide your inner thoughts from yourself without suffering severe mental illness.

So if you’ve been born a Christian or a Muslim, in all their various sects and branches, and accepted all the baggage that comes with it, you will send yourself to Heaven or Hell when you die, and you don’t need Saint Peter to decide.  You already know.  And that Heaven and that Hell exist only because you believe they do, not the other way around.  That’s why in my Heaven, there’s beer, and God rides an old Harley.

In the meantime, why don’t we all start listening to folks like John Lennon, when he said, “Imagine, all the people living for today, and sharing all the world.”?

It doesn’t take a genius or a saint to realize that we’re all in this together, everybody all over the world, and that, until the poorest members of the least of all the tribes in Africa or Bangladesh or the favelas of South America have realized a sense of security brought about by the knowledge that they will always have a place to live, food on the table, and education for their children so the next generation can live better, none of us in our carefully segregated and overly protected enclaves are truly safe.  We are the ones with the means to bring them up to a minimum level of existence, and if we continue to ignore that responsibility it is inevitable that they will drag us down to theirs.  And cockroaches are everywhere. :-{)}