The tumbleweeds are not exactly tumbling. More like launching
into low-Earth orbit.
My, but the airborne particulates is fierce around here.
The terra is not too firma lately. It gets up and flits around The Duck! City at 50 or 60 miles per hour, and the pollen goes along for the ride. Together they do drive-bys on everyone’s eyeballs and snotlockers. Snurk, hyyyunk, auuughhhh, honk, gaaack, ptui, etc. I may be compelled to take drugs.
No, not that drug, though I may be alone in that regard. I hear New Mexico’s mota dealers moved a few millions in product the first few days recreational weed was legal here. Makes my youthful adventures in retailing look like a lemonade stand on a dead-end street.
But I’ll stick to my fake beer and Claritin-D, thanks all the same. Get back to me when you legalize microdosing of psilocybin, mescaline, and the ol’ L-S-Dizzy. I don’t know that I want to throw open the doors of perception, as in days of yore, but I wouldn’t mind a little peek through the windows now and then.
Tags: allergies, cannabis, Claritin-D
Mad Blog Media 
April 6, 2022 at 8:16 am |
Last week the pollen count up here was 11 on a scale of 1 to 12. I couldn’t even go outside without developing a massive sinus headache and I was sneezing nonstop. I retreated to the house and shut the doors and windows.
April 6, 2022 at 8:30 am |
Turble bad. We hates it. Faugh.
April 6, 2022 at 9:15 am |
I may have mentioned it in the past but the book ‘Changing Your Mind’ by Michael Pollan is really interesting.
April 6, 2022 at 9:19 am |
Yes, you have, and I need to check it out. It just so happens that I’m short of reading material so now is the time.
April 6, 2022 at 9:45 am |
Claritin-D ties up my urinary track tighter than a gnat’s ass stretched over a rain barrel. So, good ole generic benedryl is the drug of choice when my air looks like yours, which it does this morning. The view across the San Pedro valley looks identical to your pic above. Clever title that snuck up on my aging little grey cells!
April 6, 2022 at 2:39 pm |
Pretty sure it is the pseudoephedrine (aka Sudafed) decongestant that puts the clamp on the old urethra. Happens to me, too. I can’t take anything with Sudafed in it and I hear you now have to sign for the stuff because the druggies use it to make methamphetamine.
April 6, 2022 at 3:01 pm |
Yes sir, that’s the stuff. Didn’t know that’s where the Sudafed name came from. Duh.
April 6, 2022 at 10:49 am |
And to think that in the early 1900’s doctors who couldn’t help allergy suffers back East suggested they move to the southwest which many did. Eventually I’m told they brought all the evil plants and pollen with them. Add in some strong winds and wala…..you’ve got turbo charged allergies. Here in the Mitten State it’s the annual amnesty window with no skeeters, ticks, pollen or other agitators to pin a man’s ears back. Cept of course it’s 47 degrees and raining with little to no chance of seeing old Sol for days on end.
As to again partaking of mind bending options- I admit to being terrified of doing that. I’ve slowly realized over time that all I am is of my own making. A trip to Strawberry Fields would likely go badly. Now and then if I want a taste of hallucinations of yore, I put on The Doors Soft Parade which still trances me out.
April 6, 2022 at 12:01 pm |
Word mi amigo. Tucson went from the best place for allergy sufferers to the worst in about 70 years. The Doors heh? Never got into them. BS&T and CTA were my 1970 music fix, especially this one.
April 6, 2022 at 12:32 pm |
I definitely don’t want to get back into the weed, especially since it’s gotten turbocharged since I was a prolific smoker. My last taste of reefer madness in the mid-Eighties was stupifying. That one joint, given to me by a colleague, wound up lasting me a week. And since I wouldn’t even think of smoking it today, I’d have to eat it, which only gives the THC more oomph.
As for psychedelics, I wouldn’t want to go full bore again. Anyone who ever fucked up and thought, “Shit, this acid isn’t coming on at all, I’ll take another tab,” only to have the first dose kick in just as the second slides down the gullet, knows the feeling of having just begun a couple days’ worth of high-octane, full-throttle, no-brakes racing around the old cerebral Formula 666 circuit. No thank you, please.
But I would like to try just a wee bit of microdosing, see if anything interesting happens. Like dialing a number at random and having Buddha answer. “New phone, who dis?”
Re: The Doors. I was a huge fan in “high” school, and I’d have to go with the first album, with “Light My Fire” and “The End.”
April 6, 2022 at 12:46 pm |
“The End” takes me places I shouldn’t go.
April 6, 2022 at 2:47 pm |
Have to admit that Apocalypse Now is on my short list of favorite movies. But given the place that you did go (Firebase Buttons) while most of us played pocket pool back in the States, I can understand your comment, Pat.
I was at my first wife in-laws one day and did something that gave her dad a D-Day flashback. My brother in law and I were serving up some newly harvested venison and he saw hair in the meat and went white as a sheet, got up from the table, went to his room, and closed the door. It wasn’t pretty and we were all mortified at what we had unintentionally done after he came back down and explained it. Apparently, his job on D-Day involved picking up the pieces. Of dead GI’s that is.
April 6, 2022 at 6:40 pm |
I’ve seen nearly all the movies about Vietnam (and read a fair share of the books, fiction and non-fiction alike), and one thing that stands out for me is how often Michael Herr’s observations in “Dispatches” found their way into the scripts. Seriously. “Platoon,” “Full Metal Jacket,” “Apocalypse Now,” ol’ Mike is in all of ’em.
He wound up sidelining the typewriter at one point when he “slid over to the wrong end of the story, propped up behind some sandbags at an airstrip in Can Tho with a .30-caliber automatic in my hands, firing cover for a four-man reaction team trying to get back in.” Not bad for an Esquire scribe in ’67.
I think Herr also kept Gustav Hasford, the large and scary author of “The Short-Timers,” which became “Full Metal Jacket,” from pulling off Stanley Kubrick’s head and shitting down his neck. So, bonus.
April 6, 2022 at 1:06 pm |
An excellent musical choice for “Apocalypse Now.” I drifted away from The Doors in college, getting into the Allman Brothers, a bit of early Elton John, J. Geils Band, Leon Russell, Sly and the Family Stone, Bob Seger, Chicago, and like that there.
April 6, 2022 at 1:19 pm |
I live in Pensacola but before I moved here I lived in Melbourne FL. Both places have ties to Jim Morrison. He was born in Melbourne and I think he lived here for a while when his dad was stationed here. Never a big Doors fan but I always liked the song ‘Soft Parade’.
April 6, 2022 at 10:18 pm |
I moved to Indiana from New England 2 years ago. Allergies have been having their way with me this week. I remember having allergy problems 40 years ago when I moved to New England. They faded after a few years, although riding a motorcycle through an eastern aspen tree pollen shed would always have me sneezing in my helmet. I wonder if acclimating to an environment calms allergies down.
April 7, 2022 at 6:51 am |
Different places, different allergies, for sure. I don’t remember having any issues as a kid in Canada, but when we transferred to Randolph AFB outside San Antonio I was instantly miserable for half the year.
I was diagnosed asthmatic and subjected to a couple rounds of allergy tests, then began a series of desensitization shots. We had to take the serum with us on road trips and find some sawbones to stick me. Inhalers and various meds were also part of the program.
When we got transferred to Ent AFB in Bibleburg I had to go through it all over again. Mercifully, there were fewer allergens in Colorado circa 1967, and eventually I discontinued the shots, lost the inhalers, and prescribed my own drug regimen, which had nothing to do with nasal health.
In later years I had to resort to the over-the-counter antihistamines from time to time, and briefly went back on albuterol inhalers. But when we moved down to The Duck! City in 2014 — ¡hijo, madre, puto, cabron! — it was like moving back to Texas. This spring has been particularly bad, with the ongoing drought and winds that seem off the charts even by New Mexican standards.
So, as regards acclimation and allergies, I’d give it a strong maybe. I lived in Colorado for quite a while. But I’ve been in New Mexico for eight years now and the Booger Man still has me by the snotlocker with a downhill pull.
April 7, 2022 at 7:15 am |
At least they are not bike-jacking yet down there. Not yet…
https://www.abqjournal.com/2486398/apd-shoots-at-carjacking-suspect-in-ne-abq.html
April 7, 2022 at 7:28 am |
A couple years back a neighbor had his Surly LHT nicked from him. He was a bus-bike commuter, and had just pulled his bike off the bus and was making a quick call to the wife. When he finished his call the bike was no longer with him.
April 7, 2022 at 7:33 am |
I’ve gotta pick up the wife today at the Sunport. Think anyone would mind if I showed up with an AR over my shoulder?
April 7, 2022 at 7:38 am |
Was dat the LHT you wrote about being lifted from someone when you wrote that Adventure Cycling article reviewing the Disk Trucker? Or yet another one?