Woe is me!

Being on sabbatical is certainly wonderful. My health has improved, I sleep through the night, my weight is down and heartburn a thing of the past. The cash flow problem I faced only a week ago has vanished thanks to unemployment coming in. My partner is happy with my new outlook on life, my summer has become an endless weekend and lunchtime is anytime I damn well want it to be.

My only great sadness is that I am back to living a life that is very much 1990's, "Just Say No",prohibition-style. How can this be, for a man who vowed when he left library land that the only way forward was into the work world of cannabis? Well, let me tell you, just because you live in a mota friendly state doesn’t mean your future employers want marijuana in your bloodstream. I am finding out the hard way that applying for jobs outside of the cannabis industry means reading the fine print.

I have worked in the government sector for years. The last time I had to have my pee monitored was 1992. Back then I was tentatively offered a job up in Everett, Washington, the condition for work being that I had to pass a pee test. Living in Southern Oregon at that time meant running with a wide variety of types, including ex-loggers, environmentalists, river rafters, artists, storytellers, puppeteers, magicians, rockers and, natch, dope smokers. And while I thought the world of the local brews and happily went far afield to drink their nifty pinot noirs it was the weed that kept me jumping around from place to place, pal to pal. It was somewhere out there but man, you had to be from someplace else other than California to make the case that you were a friend in need, not just a friend, indeed.

I took that long drive back up to the Puget Sound to pee in their cup, but the strain was in not remembering when I had smoked last. Came home wondering about the job, wondering where I was going to come up with the cash to replace the muffler that fell of the Bug back up near Tacoma. In the end all was well and I got the job, got the job that put me in direct contact with shrooms from another world and, once again, put me in a state where mota was still hard to find.

Jet forward twenty-five years and now almost everywhere I go on the West Coast is mota legal or can be gotten with a medical card. Those days of worrying about marijuana being a concern for work in the information sector were just plain old gone. I moved to Colorado and had a grand old time while I worked here, as it was a tincture paradise during the week and a full buffet of cannabis treats each and every weekend.

Except for now. Who would have known that time off from work would equate to time away from weed? I had this idea that, after my daily search for employment on the net at the library, after my daily round of housecleaning, after a bit of lunch, I could find my way down to the complex pool, sit under the sun, be cool in the pool, lit on some strain or another that I was just dying to try, to write up about, to sample, scientific style, just to let you know the safety and efficacy of it all. I was going to do it all for YOU, and now, selfishly, the minions of Sessions are nipping at my heels, telling me NO, NO, NO, no mota for you! Go find a job, go get stressed and have a real reason to get lit!

Sigh.

Yep, I love my sabbatical. I feel rested, I watch movies less that I did when I was working, I am taking all sort of field trips with my loving partner and I am truly beginning to see the virtues of having moved here to CO. And I am buying dope like a fiend. My stash trunk runneth over. Never had a wanted to secure a job as badly as I do right now. My mota awaits and so does my extended servitude in the land of work.

Ah, hell, worker bees and smokers unite!

Salud!