Charas and Charleston, Cannabis and South Carolina . . .

Let loose a little lately, found some sacred zakrazana otherwise known as mAlyapuSpa, plant sacrament to millions of nagababa and others of tantric yoga and other means devoted to Destroyer and Destroyerette. Met some local hippie kids at the Mellow Mushroom (yes, name of a regional chain restaurant/bar/pizza place in the Southeast, and yes the psychedelic theme's quite intentional) and shared smoke and drink on a dock on the Stono River, one of the ubiquitous flows round these luscious alluvial lowlands. Must note, I suppose, and express gratitude for the continued presence of said subcultural milieu did not at all disappear after the sixties and seventies. Tour kids and Rainbow Tribesfolk, especially, have always shown the sort of hospitality and kindness, friendliness and familiarity to indeed warrant the term "family." Couches and loaded bongs, good tunes and connectedness manifest beautifully through such characters, a perennial sort, a bit too wild to be kept locked in offices or classrooms or other normative and normalizing institutions (at least not all the time) and whose secret signs or handshakes are well known peace signs, tie dies, herbs (not just Cannabis, mind you) and organics, drum circles and often particular musical tastes include long jams or riddim', psychedelics and such things.

I am given to wonder what precisely happened to get rid of the malaria hereabouts, as I recall from a class covering colonial U.S. history even s'far north as D.C. were once malarial swamps. Not complaining, mind you, just curious, as they's still plenty o' swampland hereabouts, yet purportedly no malaria. I bet before expansive pavement, canoes were the best way to see and wander about these lowlands, despite the malaria . . .

Sitting at my seeming post here, corner of the courtyard at Kudu Coffeehouse, fountain to the fore and an ivy wall gots my back covered. Seems somehow "sultry" is the keyword, descriptive if not an imperative. Some breeze blows, time to time, sometimes comin' in off the ocean cool, or accompanying thunderstorms roll in. Haze and lazy days, summertime and the livin' is easy, that sorta thing . . . though still gotta wonder of certain anomalies, despite a seeming ease in the vibratory manifestation of sense experience, a more mellow flow fo' su're.

Perhaps of note, smokin' grass in a state where not medicalized, clinicalized and commodified in a taxable state:  seems more like the buzz I first knew when becoming (re-)acquainted with said sacramental smoke, more like than the highs in Colorado and California now that those states enacted medical use laws. Please don't mistake, don't want Cannabis to be "criminal" by their statutes, nor kept from people needs specific cures said certain medicine doth provide.  Just sayin' by being somehow incorporated into the sphere of legislative as well as already general social acceptability (with certain caveats), the weed thereabouts, though often higher in THC, has perhaps lost some of its potency and urgency as no longer upholding the status of a significant separate economy.   I'm sayin' that part of the point of puffin' down and the kind-trade is indeed to maintain the largest cash crop economy in the country as something separate from government legitimacy and official sanction, and as common means of exchange sits squarely outside the authority da' man, see?! Think of perhaps as an unacknowledged part of this nation's system of checks and balances, a potent "third party" already in power to a significant degree (though no substitute for what could be were Green Party in the Presidency and majority in Senate and House).  The autonomized economy of not quite legal marijuana serves to solidify a significant arrayal of groups and peoples who question the status quo of law and order and oft as not dislike the war machine, have a distaste for economic hording, and almost by consensus despise arbitrary and unnecessary rule of federal authorities and wrongful restraints on just and good and due liberty.

Indeed, as I sit in this Old South city, soaking in the sultry (not disagreeably, despite my preference for high country summertime) and contemplating how Cannabis has proven a much better way to be a rebel in the modern day than to identify with past wrongfully reasoned secessions, South versus North and such less than healthy anachronisms.  Indeed, to maintain resistance to the official seems quite necessary still when our Obama hopes fall rather flat, and war goes on despite what we told them in the early part da' hippie era when their war was Vietnam, and been repeated over and over again with intermittent volume before and since. 

Viva la Revolution !!!! 

Victory 420 !!!! 

TAKE A FRICKIN' HIT OF THIS BONG AND GIVE PEACE A FRICKIN' CHANCE, MAN!!!!

namaste from the Old South, Charleston, South Carolina !!!!