This week I must take a step back and set the record straight. While my blog may be truth challenged – new readers are referred to my Truth be Told post – I do make every effort to ensure the accuracy of the factsthat you see represented herein. As your diligent reporter I have let you down and not presented the facts as they are but only as they appeared to be. No matter that some of this information didn’t come to light until recently, I should have dug deeper and found the real story to begin with. I now understand the depth of Dan Rather’s pain and of CBS’ embarrassment.
To you, my readers, I offer a sincere and heartfelt apology. I should have done better for you and in the future you should expect nothing less.
My inadvertent misrepresentations may have caused pain to particular groups and individuals so some specific apologies are in order as well.
On December 24, 2010 I wrote about the “Seattle Chill” in my Crossing Over post. In brief, the “Chill” is a local social phenomenon where Seattleites present a very warm, friendly exterior to the world but reserve an icy-cold reception for anyone who tries to get to know them better. This external “niceness” has been described as “… wishing you have a great day, someplace else.” In my blog entry for that week I described the “Seattle Chill” as “… an igloo covered in snow. Dust off the snow and you find a hard icy shell. Chip through the shell and, in Seattle, you find that somebody left the sink running and the whole thing is now completely filled with ice.” I then went on to say “down deep inside these Seattleites there is a furnace burning hot and bright”. These were completely unfair statements backed up by insufficient research on my part. To the people of Seattle I can only say how sorry I feel and I would like to try and make amends by setting the story aright.
The “Seattle Chill” turns out to be a complete misnomer. In actuality it is the “Seattle Freeze”. There is, in fact, no welcoming furnace burning within that could be warmed by stoking the fire. Plutonium couldn’t serve as kindling. Once you get into the ice that’s all there is until you come out the other side. Admittedly, there are other areas famous for excluding non-natives – Maine comes to mind and try being from New York anyplace in the Southeast except Florida. What sets the “Freeze” apart from the other you’re-not-from-around-here exclusionary regions is that the “Freeze” seems to be contagious. No less an outlet than The Seattle Times labeled it as “Our Social Disease”. They tell the story of a young man who relocated to Seattle from a boisterous and gregarious city in the south. He became sullen and depressed in Seattle and could find no friends. Now, however, when he returns home he is put off by all the friendly, happy, jostling crowds and wonders why they just won’t leave him alone. This poor guy had been infected with no expectation of a cure. There is no hope at all. In the words of Star Trek’s Borg Collective: “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.” To all Seattleites, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have underestimated you.
It’s not a completely bleak picture. I have also recently learned that not quite everyone who moves here succumbs to the infection. While the typical scenario for the owners of this hardy genome is two years here and gone there are some who defy the odds and stay. They stay, unscathed by the social microbe, and try to tough it out. They hang in there for years, for decades even, and remain friendless. Now the cynic in me would like to say “and the problem lies…..??????”. Others with more imagination have stepped up to the plate. These industrious souls have created Seattle Freeze Support Groups to help these plucky survivors navigate the social backwater in which they are trapped. I bet these counselors are just raking in the bucks. I do have the question – if those in these groups are so desperate for friendship – why don’t they just make friends with the other members of the group? I may have to table this thought for future consideration. I think there’s a potential story there.
My second gross error can be found in my post from December 3, 2010 titled Hey Man. Do You Have a Match?. In that post I discussed my thoroughly rational theory that psychoactive chemicals are put into Seattle’s water supply and then activated at night by mind-control rays. This is being done to make sure everybody thinks the weather just completely sucks and will stop moving here from Back East. (By the way, today is sunny and clear with not a cloud in the sky.) In that posting I poked fun saying that to finance the mind control program the local government brought on some sponsors one of whom was the Mexican Drug Cartel. To wit, I said that every person who was allowed access to medical marijuana was allowed to possess “up to FOUR ounces of the noble herb and up to FOUR – count ‘em – live plants” at any one time. I blundered on calling this “more dope than the Grateful Dead smoked while on tour in 1973.” Ha, ha, ha… I am such an idiot. I should have checked my numbers.
An article came out in the February 4th edition of the Ballard News-Tribune which has served the neighborhood of Ballard since 1891. The front page piece discussed the efforts of Representative Mary Lou Dickerson – whose district includes my new neighborhood of Queen Anne – and her efforts to get marijuana legalized. She wants the cannabis plant legalized for purchase and for growing to every Washingtonian over the age of 21. Just like alcohol and home beer or wine making. In fact, Mary Lou proposes that the sale of Mary Jane – no relation – would be under the control of the Washington State Liquor Control Board which would tax the living bejeezus out of all the potheads as they queued up for unlimited access. She anticipates that the sale of ganja would generate up to 400 million dollars each “biennium” – could somebody please tell me what could possibly be wrong with “every two years” – in revenue for the State. Her proposal failed last year over the concerns of law enforcement groups. Her latest proposal has addressed those concerns and will basically take control of marijuana use out of the hands of medical professionals and put it back where it belongs – with the Stoners.
The interesting thing about her proposal is that it would maintain the possession limits currently in force under Washington’s medical marijuana law. And this was where I had made my mistake. The article cited the original law – Chapter 69.51A RCW – so I went and had a look. The law states a person could possess the “amount of marijuana that qualifying patients would reasonably be expected to need over a period of sixty days for their personal medical use.” It goes on to state that the sixty-day amount would be specified during the rule-making phase of the legislation.
Here’s what the rule-makers at the Washington State Department of Health came up with for a sixty-day supply. “A qualifying patient and a designated provider may possess a total of no more than twenty-four ounces of useable marijuana, and no more than fifteen plants.” That, dear readers, is one and a half POUNDS of pot and another POUND in the ground. Forget the Grateful Dead, that’s enough weed to fuel a Pink Floyd reunion tour around the world and out to Mars.
I hope you’ll forgive my glaring under-representation of the exact amount of marijuana a suffering patient is expected to consume every two months. I am biased toward my theory and, of course, feel that this completely insane possession limit is the direct result of the mind-control rays. While I feel that this is further evidence for my thesis I can appreciate it if you don’t agree with me. But if you can explain how the rule makers, who expect somebody to go through a kilo of dope every two months all by themselves, came up with this quantity and your explanation is more rational than psychotropic water and brain beams then, my friend, I am all ears. At the very least you’ll have to concede that the guys making rules down in Olympia have got to be smoking something. To those happy bureaucrats floating around the room I can only say I’m sorry. At the time I wrote my original piece I had no idea exactly how strong the mind-control rays were.
Again I offer my sincere apologies for my terrible errors on those two posts. It’s tough for me to know I was wrong and tougher still to admit it. But I can’t expect your trust and confidence unless I do step up and cry mea culpa. This is why I wanted to lay it out for you to see. I’ll do my best to do a better job for you and I promise to make every effort to assure you that these errors will be my last.
At least until next time.