WCS 11 Stuck in a weed rut is no place to be
But the news item that most sticks with me concerns the 20 farming families who drained the Colorado River
Early on Friday afternoon I walked into a dispensary in the Temescal part of Oakland’s Telegraph Avenue. A young brown budtender intercepted me before I could point to Big Tree, a budget brand that’s been good to me.
You absolutely must love a good cannabis concierge. In pre-pandemic times I had this fantastic bud-tending situation, at Hollywood Hi-Grade, on the district’s west border. These two magnetic Latinas in their twenties would literally race to serve me, their charming a.m. regular.
Should you ever come across a brown LA stoner named Peaches, tell her Donnell says What’s up.
Jovial, properly-educated budtenders can be elusive; dispensary turnover is so high in the unsettled legal weed sector. That makes what the one who intercepted me said to me so remarkable and… indelible.
I asked for two of Big Tree’s Wagyu hybrid strain.
“Doncha wanna try the Peach Cobbler?” She asked.
“I try to stick to hybrids,” I said.
“Why would anyone smoke the same weed all of the time?” she asked, almost to herself. I thought of this as I walked to downtown Oakland, talking football on the sidewalk with my oldest child. Self-examination bubbled in the back of my brain.
Where’s the fun in your so-called cannabis regimen?
The fun would come back. Not only had I copped the Peach Cobbler, I scored some purportedly stony gummies by Jetty, too. A budtender’s simple question— practically a musing—would shift my weed life, for real.
(Delete your “well, actually” emails that say “indica” and “sativa” are inadequate labels for defining a cannabis high. That’s known. As far as my brain can tell, we have no better shorthand for the directions this incomprehensible gift of a drug takes us.)
I swapped out one of my Wagyu for the Peach Cobbler in the late am part of my football Sunday, took a nap and woke up hungry. With my coffee, I ate two chocolate-covered magic mushrooms. Rut no more. Before halftime of the afternoon game I walked out the door and down the street to buy a pack of black licorice. As I gnawed on the particularly chewy candy, a church bell rang. I walked toward the church, pulled out my phone before sitting on its stairs, and checked on Tight Windows, my fantasy team. My chance of winning the week’s matchup had fallen to 46 percent. Yet, I was having fun again, freed of a wrongheaded weed “plan.”
Here’s the factual action that’s been on my mind over the past seven days. Apologies in advance for being so SoCal this go-round.
10 Why didn’t OnlyFans Happen on this coast?
The video-on-demand service OnlyFans should have happened here, right? If not in a Van Nuys garage, then in a SOMA warehouse or some Portland strip club’s covert room. But OnlyFans wasn’t born out here, was it? The popular-with-adults service comes from London and reminds that we out here being a shadow of our former porno selves in the new, decentralized economy.
A decade past the cam girl threshold, and OnlyFans is looking like home to a new American Dream. Sex just functions differently for humans under 40. Tinder and Revenge porn have helped this be the case.
Washington Post
The Post’s deep dive looks at the professionalization of the platform, including one Florida content factory boss who pulls in $30,000 a day, half of it pure profit.
With 3 million creators and 230 million subscribers, OnlyFans’ total payouts came to $5.5 billion in 2022. If taken as a whole, its creator earnings would rank about 90th on Forbes’ list of biggest private companies.
Lil Hits
Last week we checked in on a debate over whether Jezebel was the font of all emotion-driven identity politics discussion online. This week the beloved site bit the dust.
404 MediaIn no-shit Sherlock news, scientists have discovered that cannabis users have higher than average levels of empathy.
Neuroscience NewsAnd because I thought it might make your day, here are Josephine Baker, Billie Holiday, and Dorothy Dandridge on the Venice boardwalk.
Threads
“[The fire]’s disrupting in every way, whether you are talking about traveling to and from work or your child care plans and the flow of goods and commerce, this will disrupt the lives of Angelenos,” Mayor Karen Bass said.
9 A Kobe poem from that Real World kid
If you’re fortunate enough to hear “Dear Kobe,” Kevin Powell’s description of the physical outpouring felt across LA after Black Mamba died, you’ll feel why it made sense to regard the man as “an African ballet dancer.”
Most of you know this storyteller from the New York season of The Real World, arguably the first reality show. I know him as a writer who was kind to me in New York, when some of the famous scribe types you know were dicks to me.
Grocery Shopping with my Mother
Kevin actually gave me my first live reading opportunity, for my contribution to his anthology Step Into a World.
This audio version of Powell’s 2022 poetry collection earned a Grammy nom last week. Look for Powell to be on the West Coast Sojourn video podcast when I get him committed to a time.
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