dir/new_school/rant: D o p e

With a lot of dealers you can’t trust the product, always getting dirt weed and a bunch of seeds and stems, but I stand behind my product and reputation, lest you be going up the street to the other guy. I want you to get high I know you think I lack imagination and the knowledge that if I wanted to I could become the next president. I’m pretty happy as I am, my mom raised me right, or did the best she could and my dad is the father figure any young man could look up to, serving 15-20 up at the state penitentary, recently he was revoked parole after he killed some Aryan, bad rap, but he had to do his thing, you know.  Besides that just makes him one bad motherfucka 

This is a business though, I have serious competition to contend with, keeping good inventory can be hard, a lot of big corporations and municipalities are also
trying to crush me-the little guy.  It’s hard to compete with the law and then the makers of Prozac and Lithium.  These days you can get some of the best shit, from your doctor.  Shit. The Pharmaceutical companies be going out, looking in the rain forest to get a nigga high. 

I gaze idly at the Quickie Mart guy as he and I both stare out the corner of our eyes at the kid selling dope.  It might be crack for all I know, but I keep thinking this is a weed neighborhood and that it hasn’t gone completely to the dogs.  Give it another year or two though, it’s got potential.  My total is three dollars and four cents, he hands me the penny and I decline the plastic, in five minutes it’ll be in the trash anyway.  I don’t feel quite comfortable walking to my car with a handful of bullshit, but I know with my -mind my business- "face" on the kid will ignore me and I’ll certainly ignore him. 

The first time she noticed him, I left her in the car while I ran into the store.  I returned quickly enough, I don’t like the area and it tears at me that I wonder if she’s  safer in the car or in the store with me.  This stop on the road tour of life is one block from her apartment. 

"That guy is selling dope, I just saw him guide some guy to the side of the store and make the deal and everything!" 

She is so close to enthusiasm that I’m afraid she’ll point at him and make him notice us, mostly cause he seems to keep muscle near his side and the chief of security is keeping the ever present vigil for the cops, I’d prefer if he not lock us or our car in his
memory for future reference. 

When she lived deeper in the suburbs I’d regularly point at a kid who worked the other corner store that we frequented for the regular miscellaneous shit we bought.  He wasn’t to subtle but I never thought the store staff was in on his routine or providing space for him to sell his dope.  He was just young and stupid and if you carry a light enough load of shit on
you, even the cops won’t want to bust you, less then half an ounce and most places will cut you loose, maybe you’ll spend a few nights in jail and then get a misdemeanor, recognition in the penal system is like a badge of courage, you’ve moved from amateur to pro.  The respect is higher amongst the youth when you can say you spent some time, even over some bullshit
pinch. 

The chinese were all about Marijuana, dating back to 2700 BC, when the drug was used as a sedative and analgesic, amongst other things.  Ever since then it has been a greatly enjoyed and lovable kinda drug, in the historical minds of the short attention spanned Pop culture that is our modern society, supposedly the Beats who were trying to "get deep with it" picked up
the habit from the Jazz crowd and the free loving hippies popularized and in some respects legitimized pot.  I’ve always looked at this historical perspective as not only being white washed-pun intended, but also a great example of how the history writers find incredibly interesting ways to skip a few thousand years history to tell us that some brother minding his own business, smoking a joint and doing good music, turned out The Beats, who were sniffing, drinking and snorting any kind chemical which might give them an altered state.    Why does the jazz crowd get the wrap over marijuana, why don’t we find out who turned The Beats on to Ether? 

It is a war on drugs though, which I find curious, cause I thought it was a war to find the lowest bidder to build more prisons to house schmuck after schmuck who got pinched for whatever drug he was pushing, at the tune of forty thousand a year, per person.  A couple of years ago an old man of seventy was put in jail for running a crack house.  The neighborhood
turned a sad head, all the crack heads were back on the street again.  The walking dead. 

We currently have more non-violent drug offenders serving jail time then violent offenders.  Of course my preemptive counterpoint to hardliners is this.  If you are a dope smoking, coke sniffing, heroin injecting or any other drug using kinda person I don’t care.  If you do any of that shit and you end up killing someone in your car or doing something stupid you should go to jail. If you’re chilling out, calling in late to your low aspirations gig and keeping said Quickie Mart in business, I must then ask the naïve question of what is so wrong with that?  I can comfortably say that with the same gullible notion that everyone is saying these days when they call our government a democracy -Think Democratic REPUBLIC folks- and think we should remove the electoral college for a popular vote.  If government was like that, drugs would already be legitimized and you and I could smoke, sniff and inject to our hearts content. Abortion would also probably be illegal.  Popular vote is a double edged sword. The fucking laws would change weekly if mob rule had it’s way. 

Drugs have always been apart of our society and drugs have never needed the mystique of Jazz or The Beat movement, much less the hippie scene to have momentum. We have lived through many times of righteous indignation, we did it with liquor and none of the drugs I’m speaking of-or that you’re doing right now were illegal then.  We have always been comfortably numb, never wanting to look too deep at the truth of anything, it took us years to conceptualize that smoking was bad for us and then we felt betrayed and
lied to by the tobacco companies. 

Middle America, with no geographical reference has always been quiet about such things, until it strikes to close to home.  Then we grow pious to Alcohol, alarmed at reefer madness, no one said much while we deviated our septums with cocaine and heroin has always been such cliquish, self-remedying and final drug, that we rarely have had time to make comment
about it.  We don’t necessarily like drugs and we usually think little of it, until it comes to infect our family, through consequence or relation.  So while America slept and forgot the consequences of Prohibtion, the baby boomers became terrified when something they had little to no exposure to made such a heady impact.  Truth be told, we never had Ozzy and
Harriet, we did have simpler lives and less to worry about.  We worked ate, slept and tried to raise good families. 

Drugs have always been apart of our culture, like booze and guns and freedom and hate and racism, but we choose to ignore anything we can.  We strive for the "simpler times", like it used to be, which to my deductions was some incredibly thin slice of time between Prohibition and late fifities.   And then it was only for good loving white folk, since a brotha
could still expect to get hung by a lynch mob if he didn’t toe the line or looked too hard at a white girl.  And can anyone explain the point of fucking hate crimes legislation to me.  If you drag my black ass down the street behind a pickup truck or paint a swastika in front of my Synagogue is that worse then something else?  Shouldn’t it be a hate crime to be a builder of Double Wide Trailers and selling cheap plots in Hurricane Alley? 

The Shadowlands have always surrounded your towns and sleepy subdivisions, but never since the invention of the Internet has such a universal taint become prevalent.  We actually fear drugs because they are so universal and equal in corruption and addiction. Our children color on sheets of paper, filing in the smiling faces of homogenous kids who bear no
resemblance to them, but they all say no to drugs.  We lay seeds of taboo, in the name of good and wonder why they rebel and try everything they knew not to, that we told them, time and time again was bad for them.  Anything that bad has got to be good.  You strive so
hard to protect them from drugs, they try so hard to figure out why. 

When I was a kid Mike was our neighborhood drug dealer, he was decidedly old-school. Mike was a very nice guy, my grandmother knew his mother, I dated his neice and no one ever thought anything of it, my house was across the street from the school, no one worried
that Mike would sell to their kids at recess.  Kids didn’t do drugs and if they did, it was because they were bad kids and that’s just how it was.  We used to live in a time when we all knew about drugs and no one really talked about it.  There definitely wasn’t a war on drugs.   If you did drugs you did them, no big deal.  Few parents stayed up late wondering if their
kids would somehow, no matter how much good they had done raising them, become victims of drugs.  Back then, if you did drugs you did drugs.  It didn’t matter if you lived in the rough part of town and worked two shitty jobs and lit up a joint every night to unwind or if you partied uptown and kept the glass vial with the silver spoon in the inside pocket of
your Armani.   Middle America slept peacefully.  For some strange reason we think that the drying and smoking of marihuana leaves, or the processing and crystallizing of coca or drinking the fermenting fruits is the downfall of our society. 

While we still sleep… 

Somewhow we think that laws and indoctrination will change or solve the problem.  And though I don’t agree with my local neighborhood drug dealer, but I can wholeheartedly relate with the dreams he has about his future and how he goes about trying to get it.  We
made this creature, some wacky mix between the savvy pop culture mechanics, romanticizing it into the minds and hearts of youth, with music and videos, while you legitimized it with your Parental Advisory stickers and your Moral laws and righteous indignation, that has shown just how much you’re out of the loop with the real world. 

None of it is KungFu, but if you have some smoke you should share it, cause it’s two o’clock in the morning and it’s too cold to go looking for the dope man.