Post #420

When I saw on my blogger dashboard that this Menopausal Stoners installment would make 420 posts, all the little things that typically swirl around in my head on their way to becoming blog fodder froze in an instant.  420 is an important stoner number.

When you consider that 42 is the answer to the ultimate question of Life, The Universe and Everything, as every good student of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy knows, and if you multiply 42 times 10, you get 420 -- 420 takes on a philosophical significance. In my mind, that means that everyone who can smoke weed should be smoking weed, at least for a little while, so we can shift the energetic vibration of the global population and finally enter into the New Age, or the Age of Aquarius, if you will.

I'm pretty sure Ronald Reagan & Co., which must include the dastardly Koch family, have worked ceaselessly to ensure the New Age never dawns - no matter what the Mayans, New Agers and miscellaneous Hippies have to say about it.  But then, I have been in utter despair over the state of the nation.  I would say the "state of the world," but as an American, I don't know much about the world.  I only know about the shit trickling down before my very eyes.

For me personally, however, things are pretty good.  The very existence of Post Number 420 is a thing of beauty (#31-101 on the Explore Beauty Challenge), for one thing.  That I love my job is another (#32-101).  I mention my job because last week all the teachers at my school came back to work, and life is good there in the big church that shines like a beacon of peace, hope and justice on the hill in Harlem.  The Beacon of Whatever statement was part of the PR we put out about ourselves at some point during the history of the congregation - very likely about the time some Rockefeller grandkids or cousins felt so guilty about the Robber Baron thing that they donated the money for the building a little over 80 years ago, back in the days of the original Progressive movement in America.  Although it may be marketing bullshit, I still like working at a Beacon of Peace, Hope and Justice on a hill in Harlem.

I like doing the Explore Beauty Challenge because it helps to prevent me from being thoroughly  overwhelmed by the ways of the world - such as Obama's record on the environment, especially the latest episode where a man whose own children have asthma blew off the idea of cleaner air in favor of business interests as if there is some correlation between jobs and air.  There's a fundamental correlation between rich fucks destroying the planet and keeping all the money for themselves and No Jobs, but in the Corporate Fascists State of America, that's heresy.  I figure that the state of the nation/world is such that the kind of country Martin Luther King, Jr dreamed about (and for the record, MLK delivered the famous "time to break the silence" speech from the pulpit of the very same Beacon on the Hill where I work) is so far down the road that even Velvet will be pushing up daisies before anybody sees a glimmer of Peace and Justice.

Since we'll all be dead before anything political changes enough to trickle down to peons like you and me - I have determined that it's infinitely more productive for me to focus on personal creativity (aka my own writing) and interpersonal, human connections so that no matter what those bastards do, I'll be okay.  I'll still do Worldwide Hippies stuff since I like being part of a larger project with a focus on telling stories that never make the mainstream media, and of course, I like having press credentials that say Worldwide Hippies.

Actually, I don't have those credentials yet because there was a hold up on account of my name.  The name on a person's press credentials needs to match the name on his/her drivers license or another equally as official photo identification, and my drivers license is still in my married name.  When I went to the DMV to change the name on my drivers license, they wouldn't do it because I didn't have all 100 pages of my original divorce with me.  I had copied the relevant material - but that would not satisfy the DMV.  Fortunately, I learned from that experienced, and all my documents were in order on Friday when I went to the Social Security Administration up on 183rd Street and changed my name from Patricia Sxxxxxxxx back to my original, God Given Name - which is still a secret in blogland due to various problems that could arise - like work and/or stalkers.  Be that as it may, I have my own name back, and that's thing of beauty number #33-101.

Here's the photo from the last surviving photo id with my real name.

Most observers will note that I knew all about 420 before I'd even heard the term 420.  Maybe that's because I already knew all about 42, too, even though we're all still learning about Life, The Universe and Everything.