Neanderpundit

No, actually, I don’t, but i do get a huge kick out of the song

I like most the “I smoke two joints before I smoke two joints, and then I smoke two more”

When I was taking my apprenticeship at Inland in the stone age, part of the deal was to spend x number of days with every qualified mechanic. And while a few were actually “qualified”, I spent some time with some real winners.

One such guy had made a career out of a: finding temperate hiding spaces, and b: using them to their full advantage, and C: using his inordinately large Union income to buy heroin, which I would watch him shoot.

At the time of my apprenticeship, the mill had gone through a massive de-asbestosing campaign, and most of the asbestos insulation had been replaced by a substance called Ceramic Wool. it looked like fiberglass but without the itchy prickly effect. Anyway, the guy, who we’ll call russel, would take a roll of compacted ceramic wool wiht him, we’d go off in search of one of his hiding places, and he’d roll out the wool. He’d take off his shirt, roll up a sleeve, tie off, and shoot up. he’d lay there for about six hours, sometimes never bothering to take the needle out of his arm.

I would usually bring a book or a magazine to read, or do a crossword. You learn to be patient around heroin addicts, who have no sense of time until the junk runs out.

I also worked with a lot of alcoholics, and the mill promoted this behavior by using food grade alcohol to freeze-proof water lines, and there were 55 gallon drums of everclear all over the damned place. You couldn’t denature it because it was mixed with drinking water sometimes, to keep lines exposed to the murderous lakefront cold from freezing.These guys had figured out how to flavor the crap with the oils used to make hard candy- they made some damned interesting concoctions.

The dopers were the most amusing- and the most likely to receive minor injury on the job. Minor because they were never motivated to do much, and the injuries they received were mostly due to poor judgement.

Very few of them actually rolled joints. Most were good about conserving their stash, and a dugout and bat combo was the preferred method

In fact, I made dozens of dugouts and bats for guys, even once designing and making a “puzzle box” dugout so complex that a cop could hold it in his hands (and often did) and never be able to get in to discover the stash. One of the advantages to having a machine shop at your disposal.

me, I never touched the stuff. I saw the guys who did, and for the most part, they were dumbasses. Now, in retrospect, they were dumbasses before they started smoking, but i also had no interest in scrapes with the law. And at that age, I was… prone to encounters with the law.

Anyway, I never judged anyone for anything they wanted to do- hell, I.. sort of enabled the behavior, I guess. But I never liked not being in control. And these days, I am glad I stayed clean. I might still be in that mill.

Four days, threats of rain, and no delivery. C’mon, Al, stop by Chicago so we can have us a monsoon and the grass can be all green again and not the color of scorch. Plus, I sleeps fine during a rain. The wife all subbed up agin me in her shorty summer PJs, the warm dog belly against the back of my head. I needs me some downpourage.

Read and be enraged.

I wish the hell we could have a collective effort to “buy back” those firearms from private citizens. I bet there’s a lot of damned $1500 guns that get “bought” for $100, and make it into the hands of people who have no business.