I live in what you’d call a rural area. For many home essentials, the only available option is a Walmart store in the neighboring town of Yucca Valley (assuming you want to spend locally and not on Amazon).
I dislike Walmart for many reasons, but I have to go there for something a few times a year. It’s usually an annoying task when I have to go, but it was a little different the other day. In fact, my latest trip to Walmart was kind of eye-opening and beautiful.
Because I was high.
Not like, super high, just comfortably high. In that way that being high is usually very comfortable.
Now in my defense, herb is quite legal in California. You can pull out your phone and have an endless variety of herb products delivered to your door with a few clicks. And that’s usually how I buy it (unless I’m in Los Angeles, where I have a connection to a farmer who cultivates a 35-year-old plant line and gives me the friends and family price).
The Rastas call herb “the healing of the nation,” and I subscribe to that belief. Ironically, when I lived with Rastas for several years, I didn’t use herb (I didn’t use any intoxicants for 20 years). I’m a relatively recent convert.
But herb is the healing of the nation. You will never see two people high on herb in a fistfight or throwing plates at their spouse, or engaging in one bit of the destructive behavior that other intoxicants seem to inspire. Herb inspires unity and understanding, reasoning and peaceful coexistence.
And it makes going to Walmart bearable and even enjoyable.
This shouldn’t be a controversial subject, but the system seems to have a vested interest in preventing people from being united, from respecting and loving each other. Quite the opposite, the system thrives when we are at each other’s throats.
And “the system” isn’t an American concept or idea, it’s everywhere, even in the halls of “progressive” governments. But wherever you find it, its goals are always the same. Maintain the status quo (meaning white men run shit, everyone else, please shut up and move immediately to the back of the bus).
Well, I’ve never had much time for that. I know being high while walking around a Walmart isn’t a revolutionary act or an especially inventive thing to do, but it beats watching the news.
(To clarify, I listen to a lot of news, but it comes from NPR, not the exploding-head screaming TV networks.)
