the parsley.blog.landscape.life

a friend pinged me and said, “So, how’s your holiday weekend going?’ and I replied, “it’s always a holiday weekend here at the House of Lying Down.”

nevertheless, a holiday weekend still feels different to me.  I don’t show up to an office on Mondays these days; but there are some things I’m putting off that can only be done during business hours, and so the realization that Monday would be a holiday gave me a nice feeling of reprieve on Sunday, that pillowy snow-day feeling, one extra day in which not getting around to those unpleasant tasks need not be on my conscience.

procrastination, like work, tends to expand to fill the time available.  but it has been difficult for me to adjust to life here in Opposite Land, where my accustomed strategies for coping with the world no longer apply.  instead of rushing out to meet the world in the frantic expectation that I’ll miss something important if I don’t get moving - now, I have to hesistate.  I’m supposed to.  my physical therapist talks about the “energy envelope.”  here in my particular invisible city, the capital of opposite land, I have to doubt some of my own instincts, resist the message my brain sends out every morning that tells me a day passes too fast, that I’m going to miss something if I don’t get cranking, that I must fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.  instead, I have to tune into a different signal.  it’s not enough to wake up and realize “I feel bad,” because this is no longer news; I have to inquire more closely, interrogate myself – how bad, today?  where are the boundaries of the envelope?  what can I get away with today?

and I have to ask advice, something I am not accustomed to doing.  I have to ask my physical therapist, what can I do?  because I’m dying to do something, but afraid I’m going to hurt myself.  I ask my shrink, what am I ready to do now?  because I’m dying to do something, but I’m really afraid.  of course, neither of them is actually going to make a final ruling; they’re just going to reflect my questions back at me. but I still have to ask.

a friend stopped by to drop something off, and when I went out to meet him I had acetone on my hands, from my attempts to clean up some shellacky stuff that had spilled in my bathroom.  he must have smelled something funny, because he gave me a sharp look and said “I smell pot.”  I denied it, strenuously, repeatedly, said it must be the neighbor.  why I should have fallen all over myself to deny that I was whiffy in that way, I only wondered later.  certainly not because I was talking to someone who would disapprove – although I think he knows me well enough that he would be surprised, and probably very amused, to catch me in such an act.

there’s probably a lot of reasons why I’ve never been a drug user, and not all of them just because I’m such an upright and law-abiding citizen, whose worst legal transgressions have mostly consisted of parking incorrectly and trespassing now and again.  and even though I have probably more justification than most to seek a prescription for medical marijuana – prescriptions that I understand are not at all difficult to get, since the process takes advantage of the universal truth that everyone’s got something the matter with them – I haven’t tried.  I am both uninterested and too tempted, both afraid and unconcerned.  I have chronic pain and all kinds of heebie-jeebies and maybe this is something that could help me; but because I have a weird and poorly understood illness, I could just as easily flip the coin to the other side and say the illness is the reason I shouldn’t do it. nobody really knows – there’s no data.  and I have limits to how much experimenting I care to do on myself.

I have only a detached kind of interest in medical marijuana, but I am endlessly fascinated by the phenomenon of the DISPENSARIES.  all these businesses sprouted up so quickly, when my attention was elsewhere; it just seemed like one day, I looked around and they were everywhere, very much like mushrooms after an excess of rain.  without knowing anything at all about the legal conditions that enabled them to sprout up so fast and display themselves so publically, you could make careful field observations and try to draw conclusions from them.

family members came to visit me when my illness got very bad, and I played safari guide when we drove around town.  look, I said, there’s one – and another one.  keep a sharp eye out for the identifying marks – the green cross or caduceus, the green color in general (extra points for green neon), the words “dispensary,” “collective,” “caregivers,” “compassionate.”  I exhibited the dispensary ads in the alternative newsweeklies, as an illustration of the dynamic tension between images evoking stoned grooviness and strained attempts to assume an appearance of medical respectability.

at some of them, there is an armed guard stationed out front.  (there’s a non-dispensary business in my neighborhood, some kind of “medical spa,” that tacked a very cranky sign on their door:  a reaction to nuisance knocks, or to something worse?)

we see ruderal plant species in nature, like fire followers or agricultural weeds, that quickly move into an ecological niche when it opens up, grow aggressively and blossom quickly, and die just as quickly.  and I understand that the dispensaries are also an ephemeral phenomenon.  the City has been ponderously clomping forward with its plans to shut down a number of the dispensaries.  I understand the day of doom is very close.

so I feel a sense of urgency, that if I want to get out and see these things and take some shots, I’d better hurry.  but of course I cannot hurry, so I have to content myself with the few shots I can get here and there, instead of the grand scheme that my mind invents, to photograph every last one of them, and plot their locations on a map.

many of my shots are not so good.  I had wanted to illustrate the phenomenon whereby the dispensaries go from shabby and disreputable to chi-chi stylish as you drive north on Robertson Boulevard, from National to Beverly, but those shots didn’t turn out so well. a bunch of them turned out overexposed because I had been fiddling with my new camera and left a setting wrong somewhere.  I could have gotten home and wept with frustration; these days I don’t always deal so well with disappointments.  but instead I laughed at myself. and said: look!  I screwed up in a new way! couldn’t have done that with my old camera! I must be learning something.

and, like a good naturalist, I had to work quickly and unobtrusively so as not to disturb my subjects; I was warned that the dispensary people would get antsy if someone was standing around taking pictures of their establishments, and that it would be especially not cool to take pictures of the customers coming and going. so I have been careful.  ”run and gun” doesn’t work so well when you can’t run, and fighting traffic, it turns out, is hard work for the body as well as aggravating for the psyche, so I have had to pick my moments.

sunday was a good day for dispensary-hunting.  light traffic,  and it finally started getting warm again, and I found I felt not so bad.  I drove from west to east and from north to south and got a few, from hippie-hempy …

…to grimly noncommittal.

the grand project I have in my mind, to get shots of them all before they disappear, will never happen.  I know if I weren’t sick there would be some other reason I couldn’t do it – too busy with work, too preoccupied with some personal matter.  I’ve never been inside a dispensary, but I am fully willing to believe that it is always 4:20 at the green oasis.

my green oasis, however, is different. I go to the park, some afternoons, to lie on the grass.  I read about two pages of a book, and then lie about and watch the tops of the trees, watch the little planes take off from the local airport, watch the world turning. when I do this, I feel not so bad.  sometimes I even feel good. I forget about my unproductivity, my burdensomeness, the burning question of my worth.  I should never, ever admit this out loud, but amid all the pain and grief, sometimes being disabled can feel like a holiday weekend.  for a moment or two.