]]>While the moon smoothly shifted the shadows from one side of Edgewood to the other, Daily Alice dreamed that she stood in a flower-starred field where on a hill there grew an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace, their branches intertwined like fingers. Far down the hall, Sophie dreamed that there was a tiny door in her elbow, open a crack, through which the wind blew, blowing on her heart. Dr. Drinkwater dreamed he sat before his typewriter and wrote this: 'There is an aged, aged insect who lives in a hole in the ground. One June he puts on his summer straw, and takes his pipe and his staff and his lamp in half his hands, and follows the worm and the root to the stair that leads up to the door into blue summer.' This seemed immensely significant to him, but when he awoke he wouldn't be able to remember a word of it, try as he might. Mother beside him dreamed her husband wasn't in his study at all, but with her in the kitchen, where she drew tin cookie-sheets endlessly out of the oven; the baked things on them were brown and round, and when he asked her what they were, she said 'Years'.
Earlier I mentioned time as an important aspect of the human context. Technologies such as washing machines, automobiles, and factories give us more time that we need not spend cleaning, walking, raising food, or making clothes and objects. This gift of time is only a benefit to us if we use it for activities that are more fitting to us, not just as individuals, but also as social creatures. For many people, time is not a gift, but a burden, to be filled with alcohol and television and other palliative technologies.
That's not how I view free time, or technologically-assisted fun, but clearly some people do, and I might have more to say on this next week.
]]>]]>Disturbances in sleep patterns can remain for up to five days after use and normal sleep patterns may not return until after one week... Recently abstinent MJ users showed differences in multiple sleep measures compared to a drug-free control group: lower total sleep times, and less slow wave sleep. They also showed worse sleep efficiency, longer sleep onset and shorter REM latency than the control group.
And here's a forum thread with many reports of fatigue during withdrawal: Can quitting weed make you more tired then you felt before hand?
My suspicion was, by using it more than once a week but not all the time, I was in a state of permanent withdrawal. But those reports are from heavy users, and I was only using about a gram a month. So I made three lifestyle changes. First I cut back on sugar: I stopped putting honey on my toast and maple syrup in my morning wheat berries, and following anti-sugar guru Robert Lustig, whenever I eat something sweet, including fruit, I now eat a handful of fiber in the form of Ezekiel cereal. Second, I cut back my video games to one expert Minesweeper win per day, which takes 5-20 minutes depending on luck, and is probably not enough to mess with my reward system. I should also quit browsing AskReddit. Third, I reduced the cannabis to every two weeks, and now I'm ramping it back up to see what I can get away with. Once a week seems to be working.
I also made a batch of cannabutter using this recipe with clarified butter, an infrared thermometer, and no straining because I don't mind chewing toasted buds. I've been alternating between eating and vaping, and don't notice any clear difference. I also couldn't sense a clear difference between the supposedly energizing Sativa strain Cinderella 99, and the supposedly sedating Indica strain Northern Lights. I know that some strains are more potent, but until I see a scientific study to the contrary, I believe that reported differences between the quality of high in different strains is almost all placebo effect.
The goal of permaculture often seems to be less producing food and other usable products and more about re-envisioning the landed gentry of the late middle ages. You know, the full-service estate model, where everything from charcoal to wagon wheels was produced on a single manor farm, and mostly consumed there as well. Obviously there are different forms of social organization that can make that happen, but it has not escaped notice that the set-up most popular among permaculture dreamers (and a few actual landowners) is for the landowner to serve as a benign autocrat, and unpaid laborers to partake in the bounty of the land.
Owen offers a nicer vision, where all humans will be like aristocrats in self-sufficient households, and robots will do most of the work. I like this, and I think it's realistic on the level of technology, but not politics. Even with robots doing all the work, political power has positive feedback: people who make decisions tend to make them in a way that preserves and increases their power to make decisions.
I also want to say, if you aspire to own land, consider my experience: I've tried growing a food forest on remote acreage, and on an urban residential lot, and because the urban lot has a longer growing season, better topsoil, closer access to soil amendments, and a water hose, my urban plants are growing ten times better than my rural plants with a tenth of the work. Just this week my neighbor's landscaper gave me a cubic yard of grass cuttings that I hauled to a compost pile without having to own a truck. Here's a picture of my back yard that I just took today.
Toby Hemenway wrote much more about this subject back in 2004 in Urban vs Rural Sustainability. Of course you don't have the money to get an urban lot just anywhere. But for the price of adequate rural acreage, you can get a good sized lot with a house in a rust belt city like Detroit, St Louis, or Buffalo.