If there’s one thing I’ve learned from going to regionals, it’s that when you’re out in the woods partying your ass off with hundreds of like-minded heathens, NOTHING is better than someone giving you a fresh, free, no strings attached, grilled cheese sandwich.
On the topic of drugs: This will come as a shock to most of my readership, especially those who are LONG-time readers, but… I don’t smoke pot. Not much anyway. I’ve had a toke here and there, but the amount of times per year I even take a hit at a party is usually less than 1. Don’t get me wrong – I am 100% in favor of legalizing it for recreational use, and taxing the shit out of it. Colorado has the right idea. Yeah, I smoked more than my share of pot when I was in my early 20s, and I’ve done most of the drugs that are illegal and fun out there. But it’s been ages for most of those. I’m too damned grown up now. I have responsibilities, and can’t just dive into a sack of shrooms or a button of peyote.
Even at a burn, my drugs of choice are legal things, predominantly beer and vodka. I have allegedly *cough* partaken of a few things that are in grey markets, legally, but for the most part I just like getting drunk and stomping around in a kilt, making new friends.
Because at a burn, you don’t have to do drugs or even get drunk to have a damned good time.
Ah, Bill, we hardly knew ye.
Well, he’d probably been better off it the sandwich had arrived AFTER the weed rather than before. 😉
By the way—how is the refusal of a gift usually taken at these things?
“Ok, no prob — Hey, would YOU (next person to come along) like…?”
Take what you need, use what you take. Decline politely when you don’t have a need.
Altered reality is a drug in its own right. And a Burn will definitely alter your reality.
So…advice for a middle aged tight ass at her first burn? I’m seriously thinking about Alchemy for my birthday this year.
I must confess that I haven’t been to Alchemy, but I have recently lived in Atlanta and knew some guys who went. They did speak highly of it. If you get in touch with the Freeside Atlanta hacker space (kinda tech and art oriented), they might have some pointers. They used to have open house on Tuesday night and still might. myinventorclub (industrial/metal oriented) is right next door to FSA, there’s a guy there that usually goes to Burning Man too.
GeekspaceGwinnett, also in the ATL area is partnered with FSA.
It’s been a little over a year since I moved away from the ATL, but I hope this helps.
I have attended every Alchemy except the first one. I’m 100% boring and sober. I’m ‘square’. I’m 37, married, and my wife doesn’t burn. I *love* regional burns. I get to run around and help artists who have GREAT ideas but sometimes lack engineering skills make their stuff happen. I can show up, listen to the issue, often solve it and get them working w/ some spare parts or tools or supplies from my trailer, then wander off to do it again. Since I fix stuff, and have a trailer full of parts, my playa name has been Tinker forever. I can promise you: even a boring, sober, tight-ass like me can have a great time, so long as you’re open minded about remembering that other peoples’ kinks are probably OK, so long as they’re all consenting. I’ve never had an issue with anyone when I’ve turned down chili (bad stomach), booze (I don’t drink) any other material (I’ll just assume they’re all legal, and that everything over offered to me to smoke was tobacco – since I’ve declined it all politely, I have no way of knowing!), etc. I also always bring my own food and drink, and until/unless I know a camp well, I don’t tend to partake of their snack-type foods. Ribs? Chicken wing? I’m right in on it. Brownies? I’ll probably pass, just in case.
Alchemy is a very welcoming group, with everything from pure old school hippies to modern-era electrotrancers and of course, some shitheads sneak in. The *ratio* is still very good 🙂 Feel free to pink me w/ any questions, and I’ll be happy to answer them.
Forgot to add: I’ve attended Interfuse in MO, Transformus in NC, Scorched Nuts in OH, plus Alchemy in GA. I’m already booked w/ travel arrangements for The Burn on the desert this year, so I *may* miss alchemy depending on how many days off I have left by then, but if I can make it, I fully expect to. And I drive all the way from Indiana to get there.
I’ve never done any ‘illegal’ drug and am a tea totaller but am 100% in favor of legalization. That one makes people’s heads hurt.
Same here, I don’t drink, smoke or partake of “illegal” drugs, but I believe pot should be legalized.
Whaddaya know? Same here! I’m a tea-moster (I don’t drink, though I will taste. If I drink more than a few sips of anything, the alcohol taste becomes overwhelmingly yucky for me.) and don’t do drugs, which in their own right makes many people’s brains dribble out their left ears. But I don’t much mind if others do those things. And then any remaining brains slide out their right ears.
I’ve met more than a few people who think “the only reason people favor legalizing marijuana is because they’re stoners who don’t want to get arrested for smoking.” Mind you, there absolutely are people whose sole reasoning is exactly that, but there are plenty more who look at the cost/benefit analysis and go “we’re losing money on prohibiting marijuana, and with negative benefit to society in the process” and think that just maybe it’s a really stupid idea. (…And then there are those who look at history and realize that we can legalize it because we no longer need to drive DuPont’s nylon sales.)
Of course, sometimes it seems like trying to convince people that there are every-day moderate people who favor marijuana legalization is like trying to convince them that there are every-day moderate people who are against gun control.
Count me as another that does not do illegal drugs but believes that should all be legalized. I’m in my 50’s and have partaken of exactly 1 shared joint when I was 17. It was “ehhh” and definitely not work the legal risks. I’ve never smoked and only drink lightly. A six pack will last me a month and a bottle of rum 6 months or more. That being said it’s none of the government’s business what I do as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. The only laws should be in the realm of doing something stoned like driving or operating machinery that could hurt someone else like we currently have with alcohol.
And another. Never even experimented with weed—my father smoked heavily, I hated it and could not face smoking anything.
I did once have a Vicodin after knee surgery. ONE Vicodin.
The only recreational substances I use are caffeine and theobromine. Even in my using days, I didn’t like weed, because I can’t hold my stuff. Couple of hits, and I’m on the couch, missing the party. I’m also REALLY glad I quit doing coke, before crack was invented. Also, that there wasn’t a good source of MDA / MDMA around.
I’m also REALLY glad that Burning wasn’t a thing during my using days. Well, Burning Man was, but it was a couple hundred people at a beach party on the Left Coast, a couple years before I quit. I can be, and still frequently am, a total asshole. I’m WORSE when I’m mood-altered. Back in the day? Couple drinks, and the Ten Principles go right out the window.
Now? I’m a Burner, and I have a blast (unfortunately not literally, PA doesn’t allow explosives) doing it. I remember everything I did, I don’t get myself in trouble doing asshole things, and I’m free to get as wild n crazy as I want. Of course, I also wind up volunteering every time I go to a Burn. And at the one rave I’ve been to.
In daylight, everything smells cerulean.
There were a few years where I didn’t even bother bringing food to a burn, because I always brought most of it home after gorging on what other people handed out.
Now I bring the smoker and about 100 pounds of meat.
Why is it that every Bill Hicks video is ruined by crappy music and weird, usually unrelated visuals? Drives me nuts…
Believe it or not, that’s what Bill put into the videos that were edited for VHS/DVD.
Allergic to weed. Yes, we do exist, and there are more of us than you think. I got THAT from my dad(thanks dad). BUT I’m still in favor of legalizing and taxing. It doesn’t make sense to make a substance that can grow in literally ANY climate, and that is as robust as marijuana illegal. You might as well try making dandelions illegal. It’s easier to grow pot illegally than to make alcohol illegally, and look how well Prohibition worked.
I tried growing some once, not because I wanted to use it but simply because of the plant’s hardiness. I maintained my perfect track record…it died. Although my worst accomplishment was that I killed an air-cactus. Yup, those little plants that seem to thrive on literally nothing.
It was at my mother-in-laws, living in a magnet on her ‘fridge. I looked at it and said that’s really cool. She called my wife the next day demanding to know what I did to it, because it was dead…
You too, huh? I think I am, but that isn’t really something that you can have checked out by a doc. 🙂
Some days I miss CMA, but then I remember how much I hate hippies.
“Really? The Christians are gonna take over and put us all in their brainwashing camps? And you DON’T want me to own guns to fight back against these fuckers, why?”
Love and light will not change the world. If it did, it already would have.
@formerly dfwmtx: Reformers like William Wilberforce, Mohandes Ghandi, and Rev. Martin Luther King, would say it already has. Consider the state of slavery, civil rights, and infanticide (which was legal in the Roman Empire), and world hunger (Norman Borlaug was motivated by love of starving people), to name a few. Sure, sometimes it took people with guns to get the evil people doing these things to stop. But the changes in society that led to outlawing slavery (a practice universal to the human experience from the beginning), legally enforced discrimination, and governments that exist primarily for the self-aggrandizement of the rulers, were largely the result of love.
Regarding Drug Prohibition: I may have gotten a couple of contact buzzes from weed in my life. I do not currently associate, to my knowledge, with anyone who uses weed. I still favor relegalization (weed was as or more legal than tobacco for a while there, as in it was less taxed). Why?
Because people smoking weed, getting drunk, or otherwise intoxicating themselves and making themselves stupid (which intoxication certainly does) does NOT rise to the level of the government’s concern. If they hurt somebody, that does. If intoxication contributed, that makes it worse. But if it hurts nobody but them, it’s none of the government’s business.
G. K. Chesterton said it thusly: “The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.”
Is this where the phrase “Don’t stop until you see the whites of their eyes” came from?
Wait, what….
“Because at a burn, you don’t have to do drugs or even get drunk to have a damned good time.”
But if I get drunk, you’ll have a better time.
What. Pointing and laughing will be fun for you, no?
HAHA love Omar’s eyes. 😀
Smoked pot once, in school. The high was okay. The crash the next day was so bad (I felt fucking depressed – about NOTHING) that I vowed never to touch the stuff again.
My support of legalizing it has nothing to do with my desire to use it.
I get the feeling that the soundtrack in Omar’s head in the last panel is In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.
I wonder if anyone would notice that all my kilts are from 5.11 Tactical. Yes, really.
I own three of those, and one from UTkilts.com. I like the fit of the 5.11s more, but the UT is goddamned hardy and durable and comfy. And REALLY inexpensive.
Feh.
I get my kilts from a nice old Scottish grandmother. With a razor-sharp tongue. Utilikilts and the like are for those as Don’t. Know.
Well, I don’t have a tartan I wear. But I like kilts. So black/olive green/slate grey are fine.
Not being more than about 1/256 Scots, maybe, there’s no justification for me wearing a tartan.
More often than not I’ve had bad or at least discouraging experiences with weed. Breaking my perception of context, so I can’t tell if the noise someone is making is laughing or crying, of if I’m imagining it. Finding myself with words to say, but unable to connect my brain to my mouth and form vocal sounds. The naive expectation of no hangover with weed, only to find the next morning that I literally cannot understand what people are saying. Oh and the time my friend nearly had a heart attack, according to the paramedics. 99% sure all he’d had was the weed, and that it was just weed. He was trying to speak, but only every second word of his sentences came out so we had to kind of extrapolate.
But a lot of people smoke and have no problems, a higher percentage than drinkers in my experience. I see recreational drug use as a personal health choice. If you legalize drugs you’ll end up with safer drug users, users with better information & health care, better equipped to make informed decisions, with safe legal environments for users, and healthier less stigmatized support and rehabilitation for those who become unable to control their habits. The financial arguments convince me too, but to me legalization is about living in a healthy, inclusive, and free society.
Not only that, but also healthier dispute resolution. When somebody breaches a contract to buy weed, they can go to court and sue, instead of shooting at each other and hitting innocent bystanders. Were weed relegalized, sellers would no more shoot up their competitors than do dealers in aspirin, beer, mead, tobacco, and vodka. Shooting up competitors and cheats is one of the costs of the war on drugs, and it is high indeed.
So here are my .02 cents. First, illegal or legal does not make a difference because you should still avoid operating a vehicle while under the influence. My sister is a prescription pill user and that is as dangerous as anything illegal. She loves her illegal drugs too, I swear the woman has yet to find a substance she won’t take.
I do not like it when people smoke anything around me because then I am breathing that crap. I do not live in a city I live in the country so I can breath.
Also, individuals that are parents should refrain from drinking, smoking, or anything else harmful/fun because of their kids. Parents need to understand they must maintain their health. Yip, that means having a healthy well balanced diet. Don’t like the restrictions well then avoid parenthood. Men can chose not to stick it in or at least use a rubber. Remember, no glove no love. The topic of children should be discussed with all sexual partners.
Your mileage my vary, like I said my two cents.