Some have the opinion I'm addicted to the ganja and I disagree with it even when Mexico's economy collapsed in one of the times I stopped smoking for an extended time. Disagreeing with me is not a problem and hopefully that's understood, also that I don't feel defensive.
There is one aspect of some measure of dependence as I've always felt it enhanced creativity and I do believe that but the oddness is in thinking it may be helpful with the Rock City. In fact, the Rock City has slowed because I've been sick as a rat but that thinking does occur anyway. Whether that thinking is an illusion is arguable but I doubt there's any point in arguing it since there's nothing which can be proven.
For the evidence to myself, a period of non-use was when I left Cincinnati for Rhode Island which was probably the worst and most personally destructive move I ever made in my life. It was deeply hurtful in ways you do not need to know and that fact will shame me until I die. There won't be any recounting of what happened since it would only drag someone else back through it and I cannot imagine how she found it in her heart to forgive me. The shame will never leave me but neither will the eternal gratitude for the forgiveness.
That sobriety continued until not so long before I left Rhode Island, about eight years later, with my life completely destroyed: house gone, job gone, retirement gone. That was due to cancelation of my medical insurance by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company via Leon Rosenberg which is one of many reasons I will never support private enterprise insurance companies since they engage in legalized and legitimatized criminality.
Note: that ganja came to Rhode Island on the hands of our friends at the Post Office. I couldn't get much of it but still it was nice to have a taste once in a while. There was no chance I would deal in Rhode Island since a bust would go straight to the newspaper because they loved any opportunity to embarrass Citizens Bank / RBS.
You would likely be amazed how much ganja goes through the mail or UPS / Fed-Ex. Only by shutting down much of the country's infrastructure would there be any impact to shipping it but that still wouldn't stop the growhouses and there are many more of them than you may imagine. Most of the places I have lived since 2008 are or were growhouses. There's no chance of ever wiping it out.
- Insert editorial on Hillary Clinton still standing to keep it illegal. How do you like the sand so far, girlie? -
I'm not whining, I'm pissed, and will burn about it until I die as that kind of callous behavior is anathema to me but it's business as usual at Liberty Mutual. Everything I did throughout my long working career was involved either directly or indirectly with helping programmers and here's one example of a programmer:
Every time a programmer (I won't say where he was) found a bug in his COBOL program, he would blame a problem in the COBOL compiler, the software which converted his source code into object code which becomes machine language once it was been linked. To my knowledge, he was never correct in even a single instance but that didn't stop him from screaming about a buggy compiler the next time.
I put up with that shit for thirty years in various forms and that wasn't even really my job or any systems programmer's job since we built operating systems, really, really big ones. We also designed the mainframe hardware environment and, man, we could seriously build some big stuff. Even so, when programmers had problems, we had to help fix them.
That's what service meant to me and relatively frequently it would take massive work hours to deliver it. I have no idea what it means to Liberty Mutual Insurance but not one hell of a lot apparently. Welcome to the so-called American medical insurance system.
Those massive work hours were why we couldn't even beg women (mostly) to join the systems programmer cadre. There were some major female fireballs in systems but they were rare. Often we were charged with being sexist or some such but it wasn't true since we loved and respected women, they just didn't want anything to do with us (sob).
It was a standing joke with me to tell people, 'oh yeah, I got into mainframe support to meet girls.' The irony is I did and I married her. She wasn't the first woman I ever met but she was definitely the first woman who wasn't barking mad and still wanted anything to do with me.
This missive got a bit off the track but, wtf, I told you I didn't feel defensive (larfs).
Summarizing that (cough) wealth of material, the times when my life went right down the toilet were when I was not smoking the ganja. There's not a strong explanation for that but it's the reality nevertheless. There were highlights in New England and the visit from Lotho's family was a major feature in that.
Note: there's an immutable Ithaka law not to reveal the faces of the chill'uns so this pic covers that. This was nine or ten years ago so they're not chill'uns anymore.
My twin nieces are on each end with the Texas Tallboy and The Raven sitting next to each other. You can't see it from the pic but this was, by far, the best time I had in New England. There were some other times but this was the World Series of goodness. Absence of the ganja didn't preclude a good time but the family knows how reclusive I have been since it was quite rare to see me do that.
As to what the ganja does, for me it's a freeing thing and some are dismissive about 'oh, it makes you stupid' and perhaps that's true for some but I wrote some incredibly complex code when I was stoned and, what do you know, it was executed zillions of times since I wrote it to be accessible to the entire programming community (i.e. mainframe). It was not uncommon to write code, sober as Judge Wapner, in the day time and then blow a joint while I went through it later at home at which time I would almost immediately spot the problem in whichever part of the code I was trying to debug.
Maybe that would have happened anyway but my result is if I was not stoned then I would probably screw with the musical kit instead and not even bother with any code.
Writing code isn't typically what systems programmers do as we're supposed to be able to read machine code but the managers didn't really didn't dig any creativity toward writing it. I found assembler programming fascinating and much more so than it warranted but that's the coded version of machine language and the process of the beast was the fascination.
Note: later on, I was the manager of the z/OS crew but, by that time, I wasn't writing code anymore.
Usually the most adventurous systems programmers will get is in modifying the exit for IEFW21SD and that likely won't mean much to you but it's a trigger for some. It will get too complex describing what exits do but the point is ganja didn't impede that work in any way and some of the hottest sysfrogs I knew were stoners, a few anyway ... but they were the best and carried stratospheric intelligence.
My ol' Dad said, 'drugs ruined the best minds of the generation,' but I did not find that to be true. Hard drugs could easily do that but ganja isn't one of them and I do believe it's exceptionally dangerous for management of hard addictive drugs to classify ganja with them, even remotely.
It didn't occur until years later maybe he was talking about me since I never thought he considered me particularly intelligent and definitely not relative to the med students as those ones were so smart they blew flames out of their ears to cool their brains. I'm still not convinced he was talking about me but then it comes, why else would he have said it.
For me, alcohol was the stupefying drug since even a small amount of it would leave me unable to think straight, unable to code ... and I could keep on doing it if I liked but the inevitable result would be to get sick. Yeah, boy, sign me up for more of that (larfs).
For some, alcohol seems to give essentially the effect the ganja gives to me so my interpretation is it's all extremely variable and subjective. I can't really be sure about what alcohol does for people since the effect is horrible with me but that's my general observation.
Where there might be strong disagreement is the medical effect. With me, the medical effect is more psychological since Frasers are not historically too good at holding our tempers whereas it's extremely difficult to even find my goat much less take it anywhere if I'm stoned. Any rage you experience on Ithaka is written but it's not manifested at an emotional level in reality.
Lose the idea of Cheech & Chong since you can abuse any drug if it's your purpose but I saw ganja almost as a tool, possibly to find equilibrium, and, for me, it's helpful in that regard. I haven't been wasted like Cheech & Chong since I was a kid when I was still learning how to use it ... by first learning how to use it wrong (larfs).
Some scoffed at the idea of some level of autism in me but, for my thinking, there's nothing else which reconciles almost pathological shyness, the same as my ol' Mother. Mystery Lady saw that right away since it was kind of an epiphany which came to me some time in the last year. My sibs did not seem so afflicted as they seemed as gregarious as my ol' Dad but that was never true with me and I was never really sure how to deal with people, hence some colossal and painful mistakes at times.
This aspect really is justification but it's more to myself than defensiveness toward anyone else since it's important to me to understand this as well. If you have a diagnosed case of autism then your opinion is welcome as I could get headaches simply from talking to people. It wasn't until cellphones in the nineties when I started getting comfortable talking on telephones. I don't regard my autism, if any, as particularly serious but it's damn sure been debilitating to some extent in my life.
Telephones were required enormously in systems support but I didn't have a problem in the role since that wasn't really me but rather some programmer I made.
As to the actual clinical physical benefit, maybe your question is how can there be cancer when I blow so much ganja but skin cancer is direct cause and effect. If you get too much sun then you will get the skin cancer and that isn't much more than arithmetic. The same is true for lung cancer, if it's really cancer rather than damage from emphysema, since that's direct cause and effect as well. Abuse the lungs and, yep, you will die.
Therefore, I have no testament toward any physical health benefit from the ganja and I would not recommend it for that purpose although there is credible scientific testimony attributing health benefits to ganja so I leave the case to them. My situation is unilateral and that's no basis for science.
Note: the problem with scientific testimony is there still isn't enough research so there still isn't enough testimony to really be sure.
This is likely more explanation than you needed but part of this is also seeking understanding of it in myself.
There is one aspect of some measure of dependence as I've always felt it enhanced creativity and I do believe that but the oddness is in thinking it may be helpful with the Rock City. In fact, the Rock City has slowed because I've been sick as a rat but that thinking does occur anyway. Whether that thinking is an illusion is arguable but I doubt there's any point in arguing it since there's nothing which can be proven.
For the evidence to myself, a period of non-use was when I left Cincinnati for Rhode Island which was probably the worst and most personally destructive move I ever made in my life. It was deeply hurtful in ways you do not need to know and that fact will shame me until I die. There won't be any recounting of what happened since it would only drag someone else back through it and I cannot imagine how she found it in her heart to forgive me. The shame will never leave me but neither will the eternal gratitude for the forgiveness.
That sobriety continued until not so long before I left Rhode Island, about eight years later, with my life completely destroyed: house gone, job gone, retirement gone. That was due to cancelation of my medical insurance by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company via Leon Rosenberg which is one of many reasons I will never support private enterprise insurance companies since they engage in legalized and legitimatized criminality.
Note: that ganja came to Rhode Island on the hands of our friends at the Post Office. I couldn't get much of it but still it was nice to have a taste once in a while. There was no chance I would deal in Rhode Island since a bust would go straight to the newspaper because they loved any opportunity to embarrass Citizens Bank / RBS.
You would likely be amazed how much ganja goes through the mail or UPS / Fed-Ex. Only by shutting down much of the country's infrastructure would there be any impact to shipping it but that still wouldn't stop the growhouses and there are many more of them than you may imagine. Most of the places I have lived since 2008 are or were growhouses. There's no chance of ever wiping it out.
- Insert editorial on Hillary Clinton still standing to keep it illegal. How do you like the sand so far, girlie? -
I'm not whining, I'm pissed, and will burn about it until I die as that kind of callous behavior is anathema to me but it's business as usual at Liberty Mutual. Everything I did throughout my long working career was involved either directly or indirectly with helping programmers and here's one example of a programmer:
Every time a programmer (I won't say where he was) found a bug in his COBOL program, he would blame a problem in the COBOL compiler, the software which converted his source code into object code which becomes machine language once it was been linked. To my knowledge, he was never correct in even a single instance but that didn't stop him from screaming about a buggy compiler the next time.
I put up with that shit for thirty years in various forms and that wasn't even really my job or any systems programmer's job since we built operating systems, really, really big ones. We also designed the mainframe hardware environment and, man, we could seriously build some big stuff. Even so, when programmers had problems, we had to help fix them.
That's what service meant to me and relatively frequently it would take massive work hours to deliver it. I have no idea what it means to Liberty Mutual Insurance but not one hell of a lot apparently. Welcome to the so-called American medical insurance system.
Those massive work hours were why we couldn't even beg women (mostly) to join the systems programmer cadre. There were some major female fireballs in systems but they were rare. Often we were charged with being sexist or some such but it wasn't true since we loved and respected women, they just didn't want anything to do with us (sob).
It was a standing joke with me to tell people, 'oh yeah, I got into mainframe support to meet girls.' The irony is I did and I married her. She wasn't the first woman I ever met but she was definitely the first woman who wasn't barking mad and still wanted anything to do with me.
This missive got a bit off the track but, wtf, I told you I didn't feel defensive (larfs).
Summarizing that (cough) wealth of material, the times when my life went right down the toilet were when I was not smoking the ganja. There's not a strong explanation for that but it's the reality nevertheless. There were highlights in New England and the visit from Lotho's family was a major feature in that.
Note: there's an immutable Ithaka law not to reveal the faces of the chill'uns so this pic covers that. This was nine or ten years ago so they're not chill'uns anymore.
My twin nieces are on each end with the Texas Tallboy and The Raven sitting next to each other. You can't see it from the pic but this was, by far, the best time I had in New England. There were some other times but this was the World Series of goodness. Absence of the ganja didn't preclude a good time but the family knows how reclusive I have been since it was quite rare to see me do that.
As to what the ganja does, for me it's a freeing thing and some are dismissive about 'oh, it makes you stupid' and perhaps that's true for some but I wrote some incredibly complex code when I was stoned and, what do you know, it was executed zillions of times since I wrote it to be accessible to the entire programming community (i.e. mainframe). It was not uncommon to write code, sober as Judge Wapner, in the day time and then blow a joint while I went through it later at home at which time I would almost immediately spot the problem in whichever part of the code I was trying to debug.
Maybe that would have happened anyway but my result is if I was not stoned then I would probably screw with the musical kit instead and not even bother with any code.
Writing code isn't typically what systems programmers do as we're supposed to be able to read machine code but the managers didn't really didn't dig any creativity toward writing it. I found assembler programming fascinating and much more so than it warranted but that's the coded version of machine language and the process of the beast was the fascination.
Note: later on, I was the manager of the z/OS crew but, by that time, I wasn't writing code anymore.
Usually the most adventurous systems programmers will get is in modifying the exit for IEFW21SD and that likely won't mean much to you but it's a trigger for some. It will get too complex describing what exits do but the point is ganja didn't impede that work in any way and some of the hottest sysfrogs I knew were stoners, a few anyway ... but they were the best and carried stratospheric intelligence.
My ol' Dad said, 'drugs ruined the best minds of the generation,' but I did not find that to be true. Hard drugs could easily do that but ganja isn't one of them and I do believe it's exceptionally dangerous for management of hard addictive drugs to classify ganja with them, even remotely.
It didn't occur until years later maybe he was talking about me since I never thought he considered me particularly intelligent and definitely not relative to the med students as those ones were so smart they blew flames out of their ears to cool their brains. I'm still not convinced he was talking about me but then it comes, why else would he have said it.
For me, alcohol was the stupefying drug since even a small amount of it would leave me unable to think straight, unable to code ... and I could keep on doing it if I liked but the inevitable result would be to get sick. Yeah, boy, sign me up for more of that (larfs).
For some, alcohol seems to give essentially the effect the ganja gives to me so my interpretation is it's all extremely variable and subjective. I can't really be sure about what alcohol does for people since the effect is horrible with me but that's my general observation.
Where there might be strong disagreement is the medical effect. With me, the medical effect is more psychological since Frasers are not historically too good at holding our tempers whereas it's extremely difficult to even find my goat much less take it anywhere if I'm stoned. Any rage you experience on Ithaka is written but it's not manifested at an emotional level in reality.
Lose the idea of Cheech & Chong since you can abuse any drug if it's your purpose but I saw ganja almost as a tool, possibly to find equilibrium, and, for me, it's helpful in that regard. I haven't been wasted like Cheech & Chong since I was a kid when I was still learning how to use it ... by first learning how to use it wrong (larfs).
Some scoffed at the idea of some level of autism in me but, for my thinking, there's nothing else which reconciles almost pathological shyness, the same as my ol' Mother. Mystery Lady saw that right away since it was kind of an epiphany which came to me some time in the last year. My sibs did not seem so afflicted as they seemed as gregarious as my ol' Dad but that was never true with me and I was never really sure how to deal with people, hence some colossal and painful mistakes at times.
This aspect really is justification but it's more to myself than defensiveness toward anyone else since it's important to me to understand this as well. If you have a diagnosed case of autism then your opinion is welcome as I could get headaches simply from talking to people. It wasn't until cellphones in the nineties when I started getting comfortable talking on telephones. I don't regard my autism, if any, as particularly serious but it's damn sure been debilitating to some extent in my life.
Telephones were required enormously in systems support but I didn't have a problem in the role since that wasn't really me but rather some programmer I made.
As to the actual clinical physical benefit, maybe your question is how can there be cancer when I blow so much ganja but skin cancer is direct cause and effect. If you get too much sun then you will get the skin cancer and that isn't much more than arithmetic. The same is true for lung cancer, if it's really cancer rather than damage from emphysema, since that's direct cause and effect as well. Abuse the lungs and, yep, you will die.
Therefore, I have no testament toward any physical health benefit from the ganja and I would not recommend it for that purpose although there is credible scientific testimony attributing health benefits to ganja so I leave the case to them. My situation is unilateral and that's no basis for science.
Note: the problem with scientific testimony is there still isn't enough research so there still isn't enough testimony to really be sure.
This is likely more explanation than you needed but part of this is also seeking understanding of it in myself.
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