In which I run the table

On November 7, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

For the first time, I think, in my entire voting life, every single person I voted for in this admittedly not terribly important election won. James Mueller has been re-elected as Mayor, defeating his opponent by 75-25 or so, Bianca Tirado won as city clerk, and all of my City Council candidates won as well, including my former co-worker Sherry Bolden-Simpson, who unseated the sole Republican on the City Council by a mere 37 votes. So, yay! I don’t have a Republican representing me on City Council any longer!

Turnout was fucking garbage, of course, as it always is. South Bend’s population has hovered right around 100,000 for most of my life and just barely over ten thousand people bothered to take the ten minutes it would have required to cast a ballot. I have no idea how many voters are in my actual Council district, but there were only about 2700 votes cast. Just fucking sad.

Keeping an eye on all the other races, of course, especially the ones with any sort of national importance to them, and so far– at 8:32 PM– things seem to be mostly going our way? I could use some good news, so hopefully all of that holds up.

I wonder what it would take to get a marijuana legalization bill on Indiana’s ballot? I’m not about to volunteer to do the work– I genuinely don’t think I’d partake even if it were legal, honestly– but it looks like three of our four neighbors will have legal weed by the end of the night, and I’m only saying “three out of four” because I’m too lazy to look up whether it’s legal in Kentucky or not, and I’m gonna guess it isn’t. I live close enough to Michigan that if I wanted to get my hands on some gummies or some shit it wouldn’t be difficult. Shit, my 83-year-old aunt offers me edibles every time she sees me lately.

Some more thoughts on the trip

On March 25, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Work3 Comments

553d0f_80d94846fdff426f85ed2a6551229b72~mv2.png_256.png I promise I’ll stop talking about this soon, if only so that I can start griping about how bad Iron Fist is, but since the last couple of days have been one-sentence posts and at least part of the reason for this blog is so that I can remember my own life I’m gonna write about it a bit more.

There may or may not be a post coming about institutional sexism in the furniture business, mostly depending on what kind of a mood I’m in tomorrow. Because… man. Wow.
I got horrifyingly sick Thursday morning and had to be carted back to the hotel from the vendor meetings; I threw up a few times as well as a few other digestive horrors and spent the rest of the day in bed. A few hours later, my roommate was also brought back to the room sick as hell, but with entirely different symptoms. Trying to navigate around eating enough that I wasn’t passing out with the mix of diarrhea and painful gas that I was experiencing on Friday while navigating through airports and riding on planes is not an experience I care to ever repeat.
About 10% of the people on the trip went down on Thursday; my roommate and I were far from the only ones. Curiously, fully half of the ones I know about were also from Indiana. Which is weird.
But back to the plane thing: I didn’t mind finding out that my last flight of the trip was delayed by half an hour, because we had a 40-minute layover and that seemed a bit tight. An hour and ten minutes, I figured, gave me enough time to grab something to eat so that I had a meal between noon and getting back home at eleven. So you can imagine how pissed and horrified I was when I checked my phone while I was eating and discovered that my flight wasn’t fucking delayed any more. As in they moved the departure time back and then moved it back forward again. I was in the B terminal when I discovered this. My gate was C24. They counted up. I was sweaty, completely out of breath, and violently pissed off by the time I got to my gate, and they were paging me over the intercom.
The fact that a sweaty, pissed-off fat man who didn’t have time to go to the bathroom after a meal and has been fighting digestive problems all day is literally the last person on earth you want to be sitting next to on a plane is not going to stop me from bitching about my seatmate tomorrow.
In general I didn’t like Denver very much– no one should live in a place where the air gives you diarrhea– but at this time I’m going to do the reasonable thing and not blame the city for it. I was on the north side and pretty much confined to the hotel, the store, and the highway between. That part of town is full of factories, warehouses and weed dispensaries with varying degrees of unclever names and it’s filthy and brown. I’m sure there are parts of Denver that are cool and fun. I didn’t see any of them. But I’m sure they’re there somewhere.
For the record, I support marijuana legalization but generally marijuana culture annoys the piss out of me.
The conference itself was well worth the time, though. As a teacher I’m not used to that, which I’ve said before– professional development is supposed to be either insulting or worthless or both. This was a good use of both my time and the company’s money, which I find amazing. I didn’t like the crippling illness part or being away from my family for a week but other than that it was all good. I even met some nice people! That doesn’t happen often.

More tomorrow. Can’t bitch about Iron Fist if I haven’t watched it.

On the marihuana

On June 5, 2014June 5, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Politics9 Comments

hqdefault Because that’s totally the more fun spelling.

Actually, personal health note first: got my bloodwork(*) back today. Everything was normal. So I’m… fine? I suspect the doctor is gonna fall back on stress as the cause, but I haven’t talked to her yet and, again, there’s nothing anyone can do about it because fuckit there’s only four days of school left.

So. That’s out of the way, let’s talk about weed. You have homework first. I’ve been involved in a minor Twitter kerfluffle about this article, which is itself about this article, which is made fun of even more in this blog post. Actually, “kerfluffle” overstates the point; it’s maybe eight posts back and forth between me and two other dudes and right now is entirely civil, but “kerfluffle” is fun to say.

You didn’t click on any of those links, so lemme sum up. Maureen Dowd, who writes for the New York Times and is therefore not very important, went to Colorado and bought herself, on purpose, a THC-infused chocolate bar. She ate a piece of it. Nothing happened, so she ate the whole thing. She then spent somewhere between eight and ninety-two hours begging for Jesus to save her from the flavor monkeys that were trying to share the couch with her. Turns out she was only supposed to eat a square of the candy bar, and she just hadn’t waited long enough for it to kick in. The candy bar had sixteen squares.

(WAIT. No, that’s not quite right. The candy bar was supposed to “be cut into” sixteen squares; I was picturing something pre-scored, like a Hershey bar. Not the case.)

Everybody else is making fun of Dowd. Whose name sounds like “Dowdy,” which means “fat and boring,” basically, so it’s like she got named just to get mocked for writing something inflammatory about weed. Basically Dowd thinks that, well, if we’re selling this shit, maybe we ought to put some labels on it or something.

“You dumbass,” everyone else is saying. “You should have done your own research on this before cramming sixteen times the safe dose of the marihuana into your mouth and brain-parts! Who doesn’t know to drink a lot of water to come down from a weed high, anyway?”

Here’s the thing, y’all. As much as I don’t like defending people who write for the New York Times, and especially as much as I don’t like defending people who are named Dowd… she’s kinda right on this one.

Weed is legal in Colorado.

Motherfuckers do not do research before they eat legal shit.

And a candy bar is a goddamn single-serving snack, and I will punch anyone who claims otherwise. If you serve me a candy bar and say “eat this to make things happen!” I am going to eat the whole thing. If I am expected to go to the entirely counterintuitive trouble of cutting my single candy bar into sixteen squares so that the weed won’t turn me into Ralphie May after a cup of Cuban coffee…

…well, then I’m not gonna have a good time, am I?

What’s going to happen now (what is already happening now) that Colorado has legalized weed is that a lot of people who might have otherwise never tried weed are going to try it, in some form or another. Candy bars are safe. I don’t smoke; I don’t know how. I know how to eat a goddamn brownie, though. Here’s how: eat the brownie.

Non Drug People are going to start making this mistake a whole hell of a lot if the dispensaries don’t start being very careful with how they package and dispense this stuff, especially comestibles. If it isn’t being sold as a single-use (I’m picturing, like, a Halloween candy sized piece; if I find out MoDo ate two pounds of THC chocolate I’ll retract this whole thing) then it needs to be really prominently labeled.

THIS IS ENOUGH WEED CHOCOLATE TO GET YOU HIGH FROM THE MARIHUANA FOR LIKE A WEEK IF YOU’RE A LIGHTWEIGHT. SNOOP DOGG CAN HANDLE THREE DOZEN OF THEM.

Just saying.

(Note: I am not a Weed Person; my experiences with weed are minimal and with other drugs nonexistent. I can totally imagine myself doing exactly what MoDo did here. I’m not going to do research before I eat a candy bar. Because that’s dumb.)

(*) Really, WordPress? You autocorrected “bloodwork” to bloodworm?