Inbetweening in The Amalgamated Aggromulator

During the periods when I’m not working, I seem to be in a place where I abstain from taking my ADD medication until such time as I happen to wake up at 4:00 a.m. with something ready to start seriously writing about.

. . . I just deleted a long stretch of my being too analytical about how the stuff I occasionally do in the wee hours of the morning is what makes me feel . . . whole. Still alive. Still in the world.
(This is written during the day, I should say, and unmedicated.)

Right now I am kicking myself for the use of the word “mountainous” in an email. My usual manner of writing is to first crunch through and finish a piece of text, and then add in every possible explanatory figure of speech and modifier, and then find almost all of them unnecessary and root them back out, and cycle back and forth between doing these two things until fatigue drops the cycle at some random point. Weird emphasis phenomena can result. “Mountainous” sounds far more conclusory than I meant to be - and in context it was also I think mistaken in import: the mountainous-looking disproportionality is in a particular reason for incarceration among a particular group of prison inmates, but it is much less pronounced, only noticeable, in the statistics about police arresting members for that group for that sort of reason. Which is a discrepancy of a sort that points to a difference in judicial case handling and sentencing. Which is a different implication than my own paragraph-clump seemed to give.

Other things bother me, and will continue to. One of the official reports - so thorough, or thorough-seeming - contains a statement about a difference between two groups of women that I should have flagged with a special comment . . . because the difference was so astounding that I’d want to check first if it was the artifact of a very small sample size. That may not be the explanation. But if that were the explanation . . . what would that say about the objectivity of the entire report, that did not twig at this incredible result that was in tone similar to everything else in the report? Meanwhile I gave an endorsing comment about that report - it was “worth reading” . . .

-sighs, rubs eyes-

One of the oldest general-theory-thoughts that I can say I synthesized more or less for myself is that, when you look at an “ambiguous situation” - which, I said, was “a situation where it is not automatically clear what part or aspect of the situation should be paid attention to” - you tend to end up with a view of it that is extremely definite and non-tentative. The more ambiguous the situation, the more fixed and definite your summary and conclusion are likely to be. Because the reasons for the ambiguity are too complex to hold well in memory. And because we have confidence in our own insightfulness, or perhaps we convulsively reject doubt about it. A situation being ambiguous thus usually shows, not at all in anyone’s particular description of it, but in the intense and polar controversy around it, because the firm, clear conclusions that people make about it do not match.
It is hard to do better than that.
So, beginnings matter. It’s so easy to cue things wrong.

Man, I’d love to get further into that. I have described and recommended a research project I’m not in.

I am grinding my teeth about something about my aforementioned silly daydreams about my legal four marijuana plants. Because I read something wrong, or something has been changed since I read it. Probably the former.

Apparently, in Oregon, you can only legally have a half-pound of usable pot in your household. Not a pound, as I thought.

. . . Excuse me. I am allowed to grow four pot plants, right?

When grown outside, they can be expected to produce less weight of flowers than they can when grown indoors in boutique conditions. With this variety, if I grow them outside, it appears that 150 grams of pot from each plant is a reasonable guess for what I can expect. From each of my four plants.

A half-pound, the legal limit, is about 227 grams.

. . . Er . . .

Is this game fixed or what?!? What is supposed to happen here?
(And what if I intended to grow my plants indoors with hydroponics and lights, with up to 250 grams to be expected per plant?)

To make things even more amusing: I am certainly allowed to simply give pot to my neighbors. So I could rectify this imbalance that way, although on a larger scale than I expected.
But I have also just refreshed my memory on the fact that, when you’re outside of your home, you are allowed to carry a maximum of one ounce of marijuana with you.

There are about 28 grams in an ounce.
So - if I did end up with 600 grams of usable pot - and therefore did find myself with a 373-gram overage . . . well, 373 grams is a hair over 13 ounces.
My eastern neighbor’s legal limit would of course be a half-pound just like mine, which is eight ounces.
So, if I were going to get rid of as much as possible (eight ounces) of my excess pot by giving it to this one excellent neighbor - and if I wished to be completely compliant with the law in the transfer . . . I would have to walk across to my neighbor’s front door, and then back to my house, eight separate times.
Tromp. Tromp. Tromp.
With my neighbor having to come and answer the door eight separate times.
Which is a bit much to expect, given that just one ounce would undoubtedly more than fully satisfy any desire or curiosity on the neighbor’s part.

Generally speaking, I would say that - when an area of human endeavor has for a long time been an area of outlawry, and when you are setting up a system under which that activity is to be carried on legally henceforth - you should not set up rules which, if dutifully followed, will lead to weird conundrums which are difficult to solve unless you simply ignore those rules in at least some respects!

But this is the result of the particular legalization that took place here in Oregon. An earlier initiative failed to pass, deemed too extreme by some wise old owls because it didn’t put limits on how much marijuana you could own. (I was all in favor of it and thought the wise old owls silly; you don’t have to worry about whether you own too many bottles of beer, after all. Why have this weird little restriction to worry about enforcing somehow? Or why not just do what Colorado did and allow whatever amount of marijuana your allowed number of plants may produce as long as it’s kept at home?) This is the version that passed here, and it does put a limit on how much pot you can own. And, because most of the legislature’s attention is on the system of commercial production and sale, with the matter of casual home ownership and cultivation just an afterthought, I would expect no early revision of the matter.

I’m certainly not going to simply grow fewer than four plants - not just on principle because I’m by gum explicitly legally allowed to grow four, but because sometimes plants fail entirely, and so growing fewer than four would increase my chance of total failure.
And as for the thought of simply throwing excess usable marijuana in the compost bin . . . -a scandalized piteous covetous glint comes into the eyes of this man who smokes maybe a half or a third of a gram per month when he remembers to smoke at all- no, I really don’t think solutions are to be found in that direction. :-)

Last updated April 15, 2016