Just keeping up in Normal entries

I’m not sure if I mentioned this before, it was several months in the making. Back when everybody was fiercely polarizing, instead of the dull roar of us vs them, I made more contact with facebook friends than I normally do/did/will. Through a mutual acquaintance this woman who, up until recently I thought was a midwife in Bangladesh, asked me if I was the Haredawg from East Lansing (that profile has me from Portland, now living in Lansing). Turns out our parents were friends and she named a stuffed bunny after me when I was an infant and she was a toddler.

She comes back into town every so often to check on her parents. She was in town last week, maybe still is, and we arranged to go for a walk. The first thing she said to me live and in person was “I don’t recognize you at all.” Of all the snappy comebacks I can think of now I went with the first thing to enter my mind “yeah, me either.” Early she had texted something like “I need to take my mom to the mosque.” Fifteen minutes later she texted something cryptic about old age, which I narrowed down to three things; 1) Dementia (her mom forgot she wasn’t muslim) 2) Knees to creaky to bend 3) She decided to take a nap instead. I haven’t picked my favorite because I don’t think I’m that interested.

It did lead to a funny dialogue in my head. I mean it was funnier in my head than I could possibly distill into written or spoken humor. It had something to do with secret communication between a mosque in Glasgow and a Mosque in Warsaw being decoded into something like “Hey, where are all the hot chicks at?” Only in a Scottish accent. I’m pretty sure I could come up with a funny response in a Polish accent, but I’m afraid the inherent sexism and racism would interfere with what small dram of humor might be wrought from that particular stone. A mosque in Glasgow or Warsaw doesn’t seem anymore far-fetched than one in Lansing. Just saying. The idea of secret communique’s treating mosque international communications like a sex chat room — well, it’s either funny or it’s not. It was pretty damn funny in my head.

Turns out she’s no longer a midwife but works with health care systems and midwifery in Bangladesh for the U.N. a job she describes as sitting at a desk all day. Our walk was long and, I don’t know, nostalgic. I mean despite whatever nonsense I was chattering she chose a walk through campus to places I haven’t visited since moving back. Our departure was weird, a half a block from her house she said she was tired (legitimate jet lag, to be fair, here in my dotage it would take me a good week to recover from an eight hour time difference — um, it’s a guess, I’m sure I’m within an hour or two). She asked me to text — oh, not the text you or I might do, she doesn’t have a cell , facebook messenger, on one of my accounts I rarely use). No hug, handshake, nod … it wasn’t awkward for me, and, I guess, it wouldn’t have been awkward for me if there were any or all of those. We really are strangers and I didn’t feel overwhelmed with warmth or attraction. My dad was a big hugger, I learned to be comfortable with it in my thirties (not from my dad, I mean, he’s my dad, but with casual acquaintances and close strangers, and certainly with first dates even though the stories would become ‘Worst First Date Ever). This wasn’t any of those.

We did do something I can empirically say I haven’t done in over a year and can guestimate that I haven’t done in five years, with the exception of my trip to pictured rocks a few years back) ; Walked five miles. Empirically my fitness tracker can demonstrate the specific distance of any walk and the the average of all of them. Yeah, no. Plenty of days exceeding five miles, none exceeding five miles in a single straight shot. Of course Every bike ride I took last summer and into the fall was much longer than five miles, but, when biking, unless you are trying to or training to, you coast every few minutes, or, every minute you coast at least a quarter of the time. When I rode a bike to school at PSU I coasted most of the way to school and pedaled almost the whole way back. A Rise of almost a thousand feet in elevation from the river back to my home in the Hawthorne district.

You burn — ahem, I know I burn — more calories on a five mile walk than, say, a twenty mile bike ride — empirically that’s the only real comparison I can make, I kept my rides short and as trying as I can around here which, given my age, is easier to do than when I was a kid and would ride thirteen miles out to find a hill with a little challenge. When training for long rides as a kid I’d make that 26 mile round trip at least twice a day. It would be nostalgic to make that ride today, but the road is much worse, the swamp has taken away the shoulder of the road, and there’s more traffic on it than there used to be. Depending on how much you push a five mile walk burns between 450 and 500 calories, you have to push really hard to get 250 out of a fifteen mile bike ride (my favorite ride last summer was about a 16.5 mile round trip). Easier to get into a cardio zone on bike though. The same amount of time spent doing circuit training is even less then the bike ride. Perhaps that’s a quirk of fit bit I don’t know, fit bits are my only experience with mile to mile minute to minute tracking.

So, we chatted for most of the walk, I think I might have taken the lions share of chatting, I don’t know, I didn’t really learn much more about her than what I knew from texting. She’s very liberal, looks much older than I and has piercing blue eyes. I think the age is from too much time in the sun, I mean it looks like that kind of age. We have texted since that walk but not to set up another. Despite the digital ages love of preaching to the choir, I really don’t have much to say to people who agree with me. As some might recall when I was on OD I’d occasionally state opinions in such a way to be offensive to all or, you know, funny as a Glasgow mosque. I’m not saying I prefer arguing with my polar opposite, just that there’s no point in discussing, say, politics unless there’s 1) Some disagreement or 2) You are conspiring to actually do something.

Oh, I don’t know if I mentioned this, but I’m in the middle of a medicinal experiment. Yes, I know, my compulsions are tedious. You’d rather hear something interesting about Bangladesh midwives, but, um, that story is the story, maybe condensed but all the plot twists were included. I’m making a tincture. While gathering supplies I said I was making a homeopathic tincture, nobody batted an eye, but, I’m pretty sure my behavior and intentions are more the rule than the exception. The guy at the liquor store even exchanged “homeopathic” tales and tips with me. Michigan law prohibits the sale of alcohol with a higher content than 151 proof. Tinctures are made with 190 or much more dangerous and toxic solvents which are subsequently burned off or somehow extracted in the second wash (whatever the hell that means). One could do that with the 151 as well, but it involves patience and something else, like being careful or something. The video I watched on it whatever stove top/hot plate the guy was using actually had settings for degrees of Fahrenheit. Mine just goes from lo to hi with dots in-between like relative degrees of hi and lo. Anyhow, you put it on 170 degrees because much lower won’t do anything and much higher … 151 is flammable. Then you stir until it’s the consistency of maple syrup. Easier said than done, I’m sure, with a time lapse YouTube video. Maple syrup doesn’t sound like the consistency I want anyhow.

For some reason just using the tincture as a tincture isn’t a popular practice. Most recipes for it assume you are going to cook with the product, not all, but, like with anything else online, I read several things on the exact same subject and piece together objective things they have in common. With the phrase “fake News” becoming so common it appears that no one has noticed and/or rejected my method, for the last twenty years or so objectivity has not been the goal of journalism. So I’m five days into an experiment that uses a composite recipe plus some gut feeling and common sense. The recipe’s varied in soak time from three minutes to a year. That’s not hyperbole, those are the exact two extremes I found very similar recipes for. I’m shooting for a week or two, a time most widely agreed upon. The advocates of shorter times all came up with the same downside for the longer times; leeching chlorophyll. It can’t be because of the color, hell, the old fashioned and modern name for the tincture (the most popular medicinal vehicle from pre-prohibition era) is ‘Green Dragon’. It’s supposed to be green. Perhaps taste? Imagine what 151 and skunk must taste like and then try to imagine how chlorophyll would ‘ruin’ the flavor. Again, perhaps that has to do with cooking, but, and I’m talking big butt, there are a lot easier ways of making mary jane cooking products, and a strong preference among the healthnut medicinal dope fiend set, is coconut oil (much easier than alcohol, but adding vegetable lard to skunk isn’t any more appealing a gustatory image. It’s not like you could put a drop of oil into a glass of water. Well, you could, but why?).

The science part I didn’t know and would have fucked up if I did it all on my own, is the decarboxylation. That’s a fancy word for; if you don’t heat the shit up you don’t get any effect. I guess the two big cannabinoids in the killer weed are a different composition altogether until you either spark the doobie or heat it in a vaporizer running 400 or so Fahrenheit. You need to bake your homeopathic agent for somewhere between twenty minutes and 3 hours at somewhere between 210 and 250, depending on which recipe you used. Me I eyeballed it as I saw fresh finished decarboxylation in videos and knew what color it was supposed to turn. About 25 minutes at 225. It looks like it’s going to turn out well. If there wasn’t so much red tape I might consider making it commercially because there seems to be a hole in the market. Um, it’s possible there’s a hole because the local market doesn’t like that shit though, and, way too much red tape, including, but not limited to, commercially licensing for a kitchen. I looked into marketing my own salsa in Oregon, a State with fairly simple regulations compared to Michigan, and it would have been easier and probably cheaper to buy a warehouse, outfit it from the ground up and produce a thousand cases than it would have been to make my own kitchen up to code and produce a dozen jars.

At retail prices for raw product the tincture would barely do better than break even, it’s simple beauty is in the vehicle itself; easier to transport, no smell of weed, stealthy and, you know, other stuff. If it lives up to half the claims of the wilder recipie writers, it’ll be a lot stronger, effectively doubling the medicinal value and protecting the lungs. I’ll be happy if it’s closer to that than rendering a bunch of weed unusable.