In the morning, I like to sit out on our little deck. There’s a flower garden, a birdbath, a seed feeder, and a steady stream of feathery friends zipping in and out from the surrounding trees. I enjoy watching them while figuring out the daily Wordle and sipping a Nespresso. And yes, I realize that this is probably the nerdiest possible way to begin a day.
Or so you thought. Now let me crank the nerd-level knob up to 11: I also turn on a Bird Song app on my iPhone that lets me know which birds are within earshot. A couple days ago, the app alerted me to the presence of three birds I’d never seen before: a golden-crowned kinglet, a Kentucky warbler, and the fantastically named yellow-rumped warbler. Maybe there’s a migration happening, I thought, while staring through my binoculars at a golden-headed little bird in the magnolia. Colorful birds were flitting about everywhere. Hummingbirds were buzzing in the salvia. It was like the bird-nerd Super Bowl.
On the Flyer Slack channel a half-hour later, I couldn’t resist letting my co-workers know my exciting news. I even sent a screenshot of my bird app. One of them responded with a meme that read: “One minute you are young and cool, maybe even a little dangerous, and the next minute you are reading Amazon reviews for birdseed.”
Ouch! Why you young whippersnapper! You have no idea how cool and dangerous I used to be. I was once hauled to a cop car wearing zip-tie cuffs and tossed in the back seat. The officer didn’t even do the “watch-your-head” move as he shoved me in. Before that, the police had literally broken down my front door and searched my house room to room, even tossing dresser drawers. Then they hauled me and my roommates off to jail — for the horrendous crime of possessing marijuana.
This was back in the early 1970s, when I was busy cramming four years of college into seven — dropping out to work or travel for a few months, then returning to classes for a semester. I lived with four other guys in a big old dump of a house in Columbia, Missouri. In those days, mere possession of pot could send you to jail, and one of the neighbors had ratted us out. Maybe it was the pungent plumes of ditch-weed pouring off our front porch every night that set her off. I dunno. Either that or the repetitive playing of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” off that Iron Butterfly album. We really dug the eight-minute drum solo. (In retrospect, we should have gone to jail for that.)
Anyway, the cops found some pot in the kitchen, but by the next morning they apparently realized they had no way of determining whose it was — and we weren’t admitting anything, because we were cool, almost dangerously so. Since they really couldn’t charge five of us for possession of a half-bag of weed, the police let us go with a stern warning to lay off the devil’s lettuce. Which we all ignored, even after doing that hard time in the Boone County slammer.
Now, pot is legal or legal-ish in 19 states, with more coming on every year. Everybody from college kids to your great-grandma is gobbling “edibles” and discussing the merits of sativa versus indica. Last week, President Joe “Cheech” Biden issued a blanket pardon for everyone who’d been convicted of marijuana possession under federal charges, which according to The New York Times, is around 6,500 people. That’s a lot of bird-watching geezers, though not enough to swing a national election, as the Foxers are claiming.
The more important part of President Doobie’s statement was his announced intention to get marijuana removed as a Schedule 1 drug. That’s long overdue. Putting pot in the same class with such drugs as fentanyl and heroin has never made any sense.
But I digress. Bottom line: The possession of pot is no longer “dangerous.” It’s not even cool, if everyone is doing it, right? So please, spare me your judgment, kidz. I’ve got some birdseed to order.
