NoJoMo 5/Election Day in Those Public Entries

What’s your favourite little-known fact?

No one hanged themselves on the set of The Wizard of Oz.

That’s it, that’s the tweet.

I turned in my ballot yesterday. I requested an absentee ballot back in July, because I was originally going to be at CPE this week. (CPE = federal job training.) But someone realized that having CPE that week meant a lot of people unable to vote, so they changed both the dates and the location: Originally, it was this week in Dallas, now it’s December 9th through the 13th just outside DC.

For myself, I am incredibly glad the Powers That Be decided to reschedule my group’s CPE dates. Why? Because I never anticipated myself getting through this Election Day sober. And by that, I mean I went and bought a pre-roll. Blueberry Ice Cream Cake. Not strong enough to get me stoned, but strong enough to take some of the edge off. I already took a few puffs, just to try it out. So far, it’s pretty nice. I haven’t toked in almost fifteen years, though, so I’m taking it slow.

…Don’t worry, I live in Vermont. It’s legal up here. And we have dispensaries; all you need to do is show them your ID (you have to be 21 or older) and have cash. At least, at the place I went to. And for myself, I’m glad my days of buying pot from stoned college students behind the Dairy Queen are over; god only knows what some people cut it with anymore.

This is one of the few points I’ve always agreed with libertarians on: All drugs should be legal, regulated, and taxed. Think of how many fewer people we’d have dying from fentanyl overdoses -shit, think of how many fewer ODs in general there would be- and how far the rates of new HIV infections would drop, if we weren’t forcing people to get their drugs on the street. (I’m not naïve; I know there would still be addicts, I know there would still be people so desperate for a fix that they’d turn to dealers, and I know there would still be ODs and new HIV infections. I’m talking about harm reduction, here, not harm elimination. You can’t eliminate harm, but you can reduce it, so you should try to reduce the harm that these drugs do at every turn.)

Anyway. Go out and vote; for Kamala Harris, please (don’t give me lip about it, I got a nice mellow going here), and then remember that, as John Oliver put it on Sunday, “the most American thing is to have an adversarial relationship with the government.”

And also, remember not to bully people; it might make them cum.