#illinois #chicago #marijuana #legalization #thc #andersonville #dispensary33 #driedflower #oil #vaping #edibles #concentrates #craftbeersnobs 

Oh, hey, by the way, marijuana is legal now in Chicago! Whaaaaaaaatt??!1! Chalk it up to a new business-friendly liberal Illinois governor and Chicago mayor in the last election, who have been working together this year to get that sweet, sweet 33 percent THC tax finally up and running into the state's coffers. I've been regularly smoking pot for about twenty years, and irregularly for a decade before that, but in middle-age have felt uncomfortable talking about it online because of the illegality of it all; but with that now out of the way, I suppose there isn't much of a reason to hold back with my thoughts anymore.

I decided to go out right on Legalization Day, January 1st, because I've gotten so curious about the various ways to ingest THC besides just “smoking a doobie,” as the kids say. (The kids still say that, right?) Like many, I've recently become entranced by the higher THC concentration and much bigger ease of use that comes with cannabis oil and “vape pens;” I've also never really tried edibles, unless you count New Year's 1999 when an old friend of mine from the poetry scene saturated a bag's worth of pot in butter and then cooked it under low heat for an hour (which he called “voodoo butter”), then we ate all the butter on sandwiches and got so messed up we could barely think straight. In fact, even the “dabbing” of crystalline concentrates is now legal in Chicago and no further than a two-mile walk and 80 bucks in cash, and this is to say nothing of cutting-edge ingestion options like sprays, patches, and plastic strips to put under your tongue. And I'm going to try them all as the year continues, so thought I'd kick things off right on the first day one could do so.

Of the nine medical marijuana stores (or “dispensaries”) that got permission to open to the general public right on January 1st, one of them is actually just a ten-minute walk down the street from my apartment; but that's also the one serving Wrigley Field, Lakeview and Lincoln Park, so I knew in advance that that one would be a bit of a nightmare to navigate. So instead I went northward to the Andersonville neighborhood, famous for the Scandinavian immigrant population who moved in there in the late 1800s, and now one of the main neighborhoods where you find “creative class” people like startup employees, artists, DJs, NGO staff, etc. It's the home of Dispensary 33 (named for the year that Prohibition of alcohol was overturned), which has the honor of having made the first-ever Chicago sale of medical marijuana back a few years ago, and in December loudly declared its intention to do something massive on Legalization Day.

They ended up employing this rather nifty crowd-management software, and I wish I knew what specific app it actually was. (UPDATE: Thanks to Dispensary 33 for tweeting me and letting know that it's TablesReady.com!) Basically, several thousand people showed up to each open dispensary in the city on January 1st; but unlike most of the others, who forced people to stand unmoving in a line outside in 25-degree weather for four or five hours, Dispensary 33 had a heated tent outside the store with eight people constantly in the process of taking people's phone numbers and then dismissing them, which made the outdoor line there move super-fast. Then you could just go home, head to a cafe, or stop in one of the many neighborhood bars that Dispensary 33 convinced to open at nine in the morning (most of whom were doing 420 drink specials and bringing in live bands later that afternoon) and their software would text you when it was time for you to get into the tiny line at the store itself, which I'm assuming was somehow wired to their cash register system, so that every time a customer went out the door it called a new one to come get ready.

I mean, yes, at 10:30 am when I got signed in, I was told that it would be a two-hour wait, when in fact it turned out to be eight hours, which I entirely spent at a Starbucks up the street reading a book, because I didn't want to get all the way home just to suddenly get paged with no notice. But it was hard to get angry on Legalization Day no matter how many headaches, because it just felt like such a magical non-reality fantasyland that we were being allowed to march into a Clark Street storefront and walk out with hospital-grade weed completely legally. In fact, the entire neighborhood had the giddy feel of a block party all day, with people constantly driving up and down the main drag honking their horns while waving pot leaf flags out their windows. I also ended up making several new friends who were all twenty-something southside hiphop artists, because a little community of us was gathering around the #dispensary33 hashtag update page at Twitter all day, seeing what everyone else was having to say about what the current estimated wait time was at any given moment. (This, by the way, I believe marks the very first time in my life I've gathered breaking news updates through tweets. Ah-hah, I knew those Millennials were on to something!)

The actual purchasing process is very technical and regimented, because another thing that's come with legalization is a new high-tech requirement to follow every cannabis leaf from growing field to store to customer, so that no tax-free black market is allowed to thrive. (Make no mistake — politicians aren't even pretending this is a social issue, but rather exclusively a financial one, so commandment number one to never be broken is, “Thou Shalt Not Horndog The Government Out Of Their Cut.”) So first you go into a closed-off front lobby, where they scan your ID and issue you your own printed in-house barcode; then you go through a door into the store itself, tastefully minimalist like IKEA, with cellphone-like table displays showing all the various things you can buy. About five minutes later an Apple-Store-like roving staffer with iPad remote cash register connects with you to do your order; then you take your barcode to a separate person behind a counter who does nothing but handle cash, the only payment currently allowed. Behind them, then, is a window into a lab-looking room where all the actual merchandise is stored, full of white-jacketed slackers looking at order screens and assembling tote bags, with one person acting as a go-between who runs the assembled tote bags out to the sales floor and collects your barcode as final confirmation. A thirty-minute walk later to make up for the eight hours I spent sitting that day, and I'm home with my stuff and Bob's your uncle!

Another thing to get used to is that weed has now officially landed in the sphere of wine snobs and craft brewery nerds; and so that means that all these products have ridiculously detailed and jargon-heavy descriptions at the Dispensary 33 website, when the most detail I would ever get from a dealer in the last twenty years would be, “Oh, it's primo, man.” Since I have no relative idea of what the numbers mean at this point, I thought I would just start with the most potent stuff they even sell, then work my way down if need be to get to a level of THC that sits comfortably with me. So for my very first visit, that resulted in 500 milligrams of cannabis oil with a THC count of 86 percent, a free rechargeable battery pen for it with the dispensary's logo, and a four-piece chocolate bar with a grand total of 100 mg THC, or 25 mg in each small piece. Those have since proven to be...um, excessive, so I'm only having to take two or maybe three inhales of the pen to get to a nicely happy level, versus a half-hour previously of grinding dried flower, rolling three joints, then smoking all three of them.

The irony right now, or at least I see it as an irony, is that for opening week when prices are just starting to get sorted out, dried flower (what you think of when you think of “weed”) is cartoonishly more expensive than anything else in terms of actual THC you're receiving, which I think says a lot about sociology and about economics. With most dried flower strains logging in at 20 to 30 percent THC, you can roughly think of one 500 mg oil canister as being able to get you as high as a quarter-ounce of dried flower (I know, weed nerds, it's more complicated than this, I know); and the oil I bought was $60, right on par with what I was paying for the same amount of THC illegally, which was $65; but dried flower on opening day was $120 to $140, which is not just a natural amount of expensive because of its popularity but is almost like the weed version of Uber surge pricing. And edibles are even a cheaper high than all this; if you think of most casual users eating around 10 to 15 mg at a time, the $30 candy bar I bought would get you good and high eight or nine times for a “high per capita” of around $3.50.

The only explanation I could think of is that weed is what's overwhelming expected right now, so weed must grossly dominate the purchasing of casual new users right now, which is why they're jacked up in price way more in proportion than what's expected from oil, edibles, concentrates, etc. Weed is the only option that's fun to do with other people; the ritualized details are like the Millennial tea ceremony, the smell and the smoke and the intimacy and the live flames all being an integral part of the experience, which is why so many people opt for it, which is why the price is cranked way up. That's Capitalism 101, which is an interesting thing to have the opportunity to explore, being on the ground floor when the rules of a new industry get invented for the very first time. 

So I'll continue my adventures, including sometime soon finally going over to Sunnyside Dispensary in my neighborhood, and will occasionally check in with you again about all this. Bon chance! 

*When you contribute as little as $1 a month at my Patreon account, you receive a centralized email every Friday with the latest announcements of new blog entries, new photos at Flickr and Instagram, new book and movie reviews at Goodreads and Letterboxd, new rare books at eBay, new handmade notebooks at Etsy, and the most interesting Twitter news links of the week. Get it all at patreon.com/jasonpettus.

#2019 #yearinreview #eldercare #assistedliving #transition #americansignlanguage #ASL #signlanguage #patreon #developmentaleditor #selfpublishing #smallpress #rarebooks #dealer #thc #legalmarijuana #certification #topten #movies #books #recommendations 

Greetings, my long lost friends! And my apologies for not getting any new blog entries posted during the entire second half of 2019. There's a simple reason I wasn't able to do so, which is that my life suddenly got a whole lot busier starting last August, when my elderly parents officially began the transition that has eventually led to them moving into an assisted living facility, a move which is coming right after Christmas. It's been an event-filled six months, ones with lots of highs, lows, new knowledge about subjects I never knew anything about before, and weekly train trips between Chicago and St. Louis. The problem, though, is that the first thing all these eldercare guides say about eldercare is not to talk about eldercare online, because of there being just such an overwhelming amount of predators who are scouring the internet precisely to find out information about medications to steal, empty houses to break into, elderly people with diminished capacities to take advantage of, etc.

That's essentially kept me on a media blackout for the last six months, since all this has taken up so much of my time that I literally haven't had the space or energy to write about anything else; and this is not to mention that nothing else has really been going on with me anyway, in that I had to shut down my American Sign Language (ASL) classes and meetups during this process, barely got any freelance work done, acquired almost no new rare books, etc. But the process is nearly over, which means that I'm finally putting some ambitious plans together again for 2020, including turning this blog back into a more general one (as opposed to one specifically devoted to sign language, like it was during the first half of 2019), and with any luck getting a new blog entry posted every Monday throughout next year. I thought I'd do a little bulletpoint rundown of everything else I'm hoping to accomplish next year, but with fuller explanations being saved for further blog entries next month...

• To begin with, after years of friends encouraging me to do so, I have finally started a Patreon account, although with a twist; that since I don't want to go to the trouble of a bunch of new activities for high donation amounts, I'm only asking people for $1 a month, in return for a centralized newsletter each Friday that will share the links to all my latest book reviews, movie reviews, blog entries, Flickr photos, Instagram photos, and interesting news items at Twitter. Or, well, technically there's a $2 level as well, which gets you access to a second newsletter with original content not shared with the general public online; but I'll get into that a lot more with my next blog entry here, right after the new year.

• Again based on encouragement from friends, I've decided to once again pivot my freelancing goals for 2020 as well, and really dive heavily into the attempt at getting jobs being a “developmental editor” for self-publishing and basement-press authors. This is basically the job I did when I was running my own small press — I help authors take a big-picture look at their manuscript, identify general sections that need to be majorly reworked, then go in with them and edit the actual writing on a micro scale until it's finally ready to be published — which I've come to learn is a much sought-after skill among self-publishing writers these days, and in theory could earn me enough money that I could stop doing all other forms of freelancing, which would be great. Again, a lot more on this in a separate blog entry next month.

• And then when it comes to the other major way I make money in my life, by selling rare books at eBay, after upping my game in 2019 by starting to attend estate sales here in the Chicago area every Saturday (which literally kicked up my monthly revenue around 500 percent from what it was), in 2020 I'm leveling up again by finally joining the Midwest Antiquarian Booksellers Association, which will let me put together a traveling table setup and start selling books at actual physical events, like the annual Printers Row Book Fest here in Chicago and more. I have no idea what will come of this, whether it will be a highly profitable endeavor or a complete waste of my time, but I thought it'd be worth at least trying it out and seeing what happens.

• Oh, and the ASL lessons are back on, by the way, with the goal in 2020 being to finally get to a knowledge of 5,000 terms, a nice basic goal since this is typically the amount of terms a child learns through cultural osmosis by the time they're five and are ready to enter school and learn how to read and write. That should make me truly conversational in sign language for the first time; although with me only currently knowing around 1,500 terms, that means a schedule of ten new words a day, every single day for an entire year. Can I do it? Well, helping me out is the fact that I now run Meetup.com's one and only group dedicated to Chicago social meetups for ASL students and the larger Deaf community; and we'll be doing weekly practice nights all through 2020, in a variety of neighborhoods all over the city, so that should go a long way towards helping me stay active. If you're in Chicago and learning ASL yourself, please come out and join us!

• Let's see, and what else? Well, after three years of mediocre results, I've decided to finally get serious about getting good at home breadmaking; I'm planning on buying my first-ever electric bicycle; after a fascinating year of owning a Fitbit, I've decided it would be interesting to start doing a more comprehensive record of health stats, and am planning on acquiring home testing machines for blood pressure, glucose and cholesterol; and with marijuana becoming legal in Illinois on January 1st, I've decided to start exploring the wide world of non-weed THC consumption more, including edibles and dabbing, plus thought it would be fun to try growing my own plants for the first time simply because I can, plus am planning on obtaining the Illinois Dispensary Agent Certification, just in case I find myself with an opportunity to work part-time at one of the city's growing amount of THC stores. (Hint, hint — if you hire me, you can advertise a repeating day each week when Deaf customers are welcome.)

Like I said, the good news for all of you is that all this is precipitated on me getting a new blog entry up here once a week next year, so I hope you'll have a chance to come by regularly for the latest. And as an enticement to do so, I thought I'd end today by sharing my 13 favorite books I read and 13 favorite movies I saw in 2019, out of the approximately 150 of each that I made it through this year. I read barely any new books in 2019, so my best-of list for them is a mix of titles from throughout the years and decades; but the movie list I tried to limit to films that have only been released in the last year or two. I hope you enjoy, and here's hoping for a safe, fun and productive 2020 for everyone.

FAVORITE BOOK READS OF 2019

Adjustment Day, Chuck Palahniuk. This often misunderstood criticism of the alt-right gained controversy over being written as an alt-right fantasy; but as usual with the author of Fight Club, the reality of this book is much more complicated and subtle.

The Burning World, J.G. Ballard. As part of “The Great Completist Challenge” I do at Goodreads, I'm reading the entire oeuvre of New Weird author J.G. Ballard in order of publication these days; this is one of his first, on the surface a traditional sci-fi tale but hinting at all the craziness that would come a decade later.

The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett. And along those lines, I've decided to read the entire “Discworld” series in order for the first time too. Here's the very first one; fans claim the series gets better as it goes, but I found this to be really great on its own, Lord of the Rings meets Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Ice, Anna Kavan. The Paris Review's website overview of underappreciated female writers throughout history is what brought me to this forgotten genius of Mid-Century Modernist science-fiction, with a tumultuous life that led to a short career that was intensely loved by a small cult audience, but buried by all the manly men authors and editors of the time who were so threatened by the success of women writers. 

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry. An 800-page, Pulitzer-winning traditional Western saga? Yes please! It's McMurtry, simultaneous author of sentimental titles like Terms of Endearment and hipster stories like The Last Picture Show, so you know he's going to do a surprising, engaging, captivating job.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, Lori Gottlieb. The closest I got to reading a contemporary trendy title this year, it's an Irvin Yalom-type memoir from a psychotherapist who unpacks the therapy process in plain language, plus mixes in her own issues. Illuminating and charming.

Pop. 1280, Jim Thompson. A later-career noir classic from the guy who gave us The Killer Inside Me, which I specifically sought out because it's the next film adaptation from Greek surrealist Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favourite). The darkest story you'll read next year, the fact that it was published in the shiny Mid-Century Modernist early-'60s is even more incredible.

Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds. Huge complicated hard-science space opera done right. A sweeping tale encompassing numerous planets and a head-scratchingly obtuse climax, it's just the start of a sprawling, fan-loved series.

The Revisionaries, A.R. Moxon. This just snuck in under the December 31st wire, the hugely impressive New Weird debut of this “The Wire Meets Haruki Murakami” author. It's super-long and sometimes gets super-abstract, but worth it for the incredibly inventive visuals and '80s-throwback “Illuminati!” conspiracy plot.

The Revolution Was Televised, Alan Sipenwell. I'm late to the game on this one, a historical and critical look at the rise of the “Peak TV” era in the early '00s. I'd already watched about half of these, ranging from The Sopranos to Breaking Bad to Battlestar Galactica; so the fact that the book convinced me to go back and revisit most of them over the last year is impressive.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, John Le Carre. Another author in my Great Completist Challenge, this is the spy author's third novel but the first to become a huge hit, from the same years as the start of James Bond but presenting an MI-6 that's much darker and more incompetent than that more famous franchise.

The Testaments, Margaret Atwood. The much ballyhooed latest novel by the Postmodern master, which just happens to be a sequel to her more famous book, The Handmaid's Tale, which just happens to be going through a cultural renaissance because of the popular “#MeToo” TV adaptation currently being made of it. Surprise — it's funny, inventive, timely, and maybe one of Atwood's best books of her career, despite being written in her eighties.

Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World. 2019 was the year I officially began to learn American Sign Language, because of my increasing deafness in middle-age; I read a ton of Deaf culture and Deaf history books as part of that, but here's one of them that's particular good for a general audience, in which a hearing woman whose father was a Deaf teacher reminiscences about the time she spent as a child and later an adult on the campus of a Deaf school where her father taught.

FAVORITE MOVIE WATCHES OF 2019

The Amazing Johnathan Documentary. The convoluted tale of this documentary, in which a supposedly dying comedy-magician from the '80s may or may not be faking every single thing he's saying to the cameras, is actually much more fascinating as a document of our American Downfall times, the perfect portrait of the exact kind of trainwreck combination of traits has led us to a world of President Trump. 

The Beach Bum. Indie weirdo veteran Harmony Korine continues his recent winning streak, following up his unexpectedly delightful and prescient Spring Breakers with this paen to Jimmy Buffet-like waste cases down in the grimy dark corners of Key West and Miami. Come for a spot-on perfect Matthew McConaughey, stay for the surprisingly astute politics and Snoop Dog cameo.

Brittany Runs a Marathon. A nice simple little character-study, about an overweight and unhealthy party girl who gets all aspirational and decides to run a marathon, then subverts all aspirational movie tropes by being a whiny weak person who constantly self-sabotages her attempts to get better. Cassavettes-style emphasis on complex, emotionally true characters, but funnier and more contemporary.

Good Time. A friend at Letterboxd got me turned on to this indie thriller from the Safdi Brothers, who just this month brought us the likely Oscar contender Uncut Gems. Continuing Robert Pattinson's post Twilight emphasis on challenging roles, it's a gritty noir actioner about two petty criminal brothers facing the most harrowing night of their lives.

The History of Time Travel. A great example of the no-budget super-indies that are nonetheless great that you can sometimes find at Amazon Prime Video if you go wading around in the unfiltered muck there long enough. A supposed documentary in the future about the invention of time travel, the details of the documentary shoot itself (both storyline and even costumes and newspaper headlines) change each time a new development in the time travel adventure continues, a brilliant way to explore sci-fi themes with no special effects at all.

Knives Out. Rian Johnson's ultra-clever followup to making a Star Wars film, a perfect recreation of a 1920s Agatha Christie whodunit but with a very contemporary, race-sensitive #MeToo-like twist. A great example of how you can honor an old, white-dominated story genre but still update it for a more diverse present, without pandering to anyone involved.

The Last Movie Star. Burt Reynolds' last role before dying, a sweet and touching indie dramedy about an elderly Hollywood star who gets invited to be honored at a Nashville film festival, just to get there and realize it's a fan-run underground no-budget fest that triggers an end-of-life crisis for him about his possible legacy. It has its problems, but in general is a tender and lovely way for the often wrongly maligned Reynolds to end his career on a high note.

The Lost City of Z. The best example this year of one of the few drawbacks of our streaming age, that gorgeous, sweeping big-budget extravaganzas can sometimes get totally overlooked if they're being primarily designed to be watched online. A visually haunting callback to '80s anamorphic fever dreams like Out of Africa, concerning the interesting subject of white people slowly mapping South America in the early 20th century.

Marriage Story. The latest by my personal favorite Noah Baumbach is a devastating character study of a couple in crisis, as an increasingly acrimonious divorce brings out the worst in both of them. So emotionally raw that people have been making funny memes of the climax just as a way of processing it, it's a shoo-in for a ton of Oscar nominations coming next week.

Mortal Engines. Glad I got convinced to read this surprisingly entertaining Young Adult novel, about a post-apocalyptic future in which cities have been placed on top of moving platforms to get away from volcanoes and things, but thousands of years later have become battling opponents for the decreasing amount of resources on the badly damaged planet. Doubly glad it convinced me to watch the gloriously batshit, undeservedly maligned adaptation by Peter Jackson, which is way more fun than what you've heard.

Parasite. Another Oscar shoo-in, this is the coming-of-age moment for South Korean horror, a timely look at class warfare as told through a convoluted and violent New Weird tale that will satisfy both Fangoria-loving teens and their NPR-loving parents. Protect yourself from spoilers with this one!

Thunder Road. 2019 was another amazing year for small, devastating character portraits, a growing legacy of our streaming age when not everything has to be a billion-dollar superhero epic to be profitable; and here's another of the best, a super-dark look at the slow mental and emotional breakdown of a young Southern cop who has just had too much real life heaped on top of him at once.

Triple Frontier. And finally, here's another Netflix original movie that got worse notices than I thought it deserved, a tight and lean military thriller set and shot in South America, with the clean look but moral messiness that recalls '70s downbeat actioners at their best. Don't let the Hollywood cast scare you off — it's a dark, intelligent clock-ticker.

*When you contribute as little as $1 a month at my Patreon account, you receive a centralized email every Friday with the latest announcements of new blog entries, new photos at Flickr and Instagram, new book and movie reviews at Goodreads and Letterboxd, new rare books at eBay, new handmade notebooks at Etsy, and the most interesting Twitter news links of the week. Get it all at patreon.com/jasonpettus.