i'm glad i checked out what tricky's been up to over the last 20 years before blindly going.

i don't expect that i'd enjoy this concert.

and, that would make crossing the border a non-issue.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2018/04/19/schumer-backs-effort-to-decriminalize-marijuana/?noredirect=on

i think that when these christian groups start organizing more directly and more prominently with muslim groups - and this common judaic front against secular liberalism is coming soon to a jurisdiction near you  - it's going to potentially be a final push factor for a lot of these "cultural christians" that are christians-in-name-only, sort of thing.

it's going to make religion seem more real and more distant at the same time.

if catholics took their religion as seriously as muslims, they'd be just as scary.

and, we're not that historically removed from a time when they did...

...but, right now, they just don't. and it's disingenuous to suggest they do.

evangelicals, on the other hand, are comparably creepy. but, we don't have a lot of those around here.

i'm going to guess it's a sears poncho, for sure.

but, see, this is the difference between catholics and muslims.

there's another example at the halton school board in toronto, where the board had to change it's pro-life policy due to pressure from students and teachers. that's actually encouraging. but, you get the opposite from muslims: they're constantly pushing their bureaucrats to be more fundamentalist.

catholic students protest against bureaucrats trying to restrict access to sex-ed; muslim students protest against the bureaucrats not taking a strong enough stand against it.

i mean, don't misunderstand me: i think we should get rid of the catholic school board. but, the reality is that it's own students seem to agree with me.

there's not a lot of difference, at the pulpit. but, there's huge differences in the congregation - and it's the congregation that's the scary part.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/wayne/2018/05/01/divine-child-prom-modesty-ponchos/570383002/

he hasn't spent much time in michigan bars, clearly.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/2018/05/02/marijuana-spiked-beer-would-banned-under-senate-bill/572957002/

*shrug*.

i'm really expecting you to need a card by the end of this process.

....which is going to be a legal nightmare for everybody.

this is bullshit, it's the treaties. we would have done this fifty years ago, but the treaties exist. and, we're really handcuffed by them.

we're going to need a president to open up the treaties before we can do this rationally.

in the mean time, i'm really more interested in what michigan is doing, anyways.

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2018/05/01/marijuana-legalization-should-be-put-off-until-first-nations-tax-sharing-worked-out-senate-committee.html

on marijuana, it's actually the provincial regulations that i think are lacking. it's usually the other way around...

but, that new lease requirement to force tenants & landlords to come to terms on smoking is arguably a good step forward, even if it leads to a lot of people moving.

it's been very hard to enforce non-smoking policies in ontario. it's ultimately a judicial issue.

i want the stuff legal, i just want to retain control over my own interaction with it.

in my circumstance, my issue is with a "medical" user and recreational laws don't have anything to do with the problem, or anything to do with a solution. this woman should be living in a standalone dwelling, not an apartment complex; there's really no way to accommodate her. but there's no way to throw her out, either.

lol.

blame the indians.

see, if this was harper we'd all understand this as oil politics - divide & conquer. sadly, it doesn't seem like that's so far off the mark here, either.

there is no legal requirement to consult with first nations over marijuana laws, and not much way to make sense of the report; this should be understood as political, rather than legal.

and, we should all be disappointed if trudeau goes along with what is really a smear job, in order to make his pipeline opponents look bad in the eyes of average consumers.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/trudeau-won-t-say-whether-liberals-will-delay-cannabis-legalization-1.3911891

i did a lot of walking in the sun on monday, but i got plenty of sleep monday night and tuesday morning.

that said, i didn't sleep much on the weekend, either.

...and, i actually slept all day.

i clearly needed it; i was exhausted for some reason.

i don't know why.

i still don't smell drugs in here, and i'm happy about the temperature.

i guess it's possible that my cycle just got out of sync. the fact is that i usually sleep in the afternoon.

but, it doesn't explain the red eyes when i got up to urinate this morning.

i should be awake all night, tonight. we'll see what it smells like.

it's weird.

i feel hungover.

i haven't had a drink, a toke or a cigarette since april 13th, at the last concert i went to. it's been second-hand smoke since.

i think i slept through a session, but i can't remember it, so how can i react?

but i'm just dead fucking tired.

i think i should have gotten most of the way through january yesterday, so i'm ok with carrying forward.

i'm going to eat, and then focus on cleaning in the other room, regardless of the situation. hopefully that wakes me up.

we're getting rain tonight and i'm excited about it. this might be my song this summer...

i'm not sure that she's even home.

tonight is weird, and not useful.

the smell is faint; it could be coming from anywhere, very much unlike the nights where it's pluming in from one direction.

i feel stoned. but, i'm also dehydrated and tired, and i'm having difficulty smelling anything at all.

i should be a little tired, but not like this.

so, i can feel the effects of the drug, but i can barely smell it, i can barely smell anything, and i'm not sure where it's coming from.

i might just be tired and dehydrated. which is kind of the same thing as being stoned, right?

i passed out a few hours ago. i'm just going to drink water and get some rest.

well...

i'm not certain it's coming from downstairs.

ugh.

she appears to be smoking inside tonight.

i'm going to have to start looking for something tomorrow.

i mean, i guess i didn't...

i was calling her, trying to tell her i didn't want to have sex with her. i guess that's not the most exciting thing to hear from an ex you still have feelings for, is it? and, i guess you wouldn't want other people thinking that either, would you?

it might have been kind of painful.

i didn't grasp that at all; i was just trying to win a friend back.

but, there was some kind of breaking point, because the girl i dated would have shrugged that off. that breaking point must have been more along the lines of a realization that i wasn't going to be the dude she imagined i would, after all. faced with that resignation, whatever mutual stringing along that was happening had to end...

what i started to figure out as the saga unfolded was that the reason she was angry with me was that i just wanted to be friends.

she didn't like being friendzoned, basically, and rejected me, instead - if i wasn't going to be a man, she didn't have time for me.

meaning, the whole rejecting me thing was some kind of reverse psychology, because she herself felt rejected by my decision to go back on hormones.

and, what that exposed was that she was holding on to feelings for me the whole time, when i thought we were just friends.

again: i'm not going to pretend that this was totally unrealized, or even completely unreciprocated. i had some idea. but, i'm still kind of surprised by the fact that she wouldn't let it blow over.

i'm weird in a different way; i've never been sexually rejected, because i've never asked anybody for sex.

really.

never.

well, i guess i was rejected once, but that's even weirder, because i got rejected without asking. see, she thought i was calling her for sex, when i actually wasn't - and that's an exceedingly awkward argument, because you have to win it. you can't let her walk away thinking you're trying to have sex with her. you have to convince her you're not. so, i kept calling her over and over trying to convince her i wasn't interested in sex, and she just kept thinking i was more and more interested in it because i kept calling.

the frustration on my end of this was really complicated by the fact that this wasn't a casual ex; we dated for several years and lived together for most of those years, and then remained friends for years after. we hung out as friends after we broke up, so the call wasn't really weird at all. she shouldn't have thought this; she should have known better. so, i wasn't just trying to convince an ex i wasn't trying to sleep with her, i was trying to convince a friend that i valued her.

and, i did.

but, you know - somebody gets their mind made up and it doesn't matter what you tell them.

kind of heartbreaking.

the weirdest thing is that she spent years convinced i was gay, then all of a sudden totally flipped on it, and flipped on it right when i went back on hormones. see, the reason i started calling right at that point was that i was going back on hormones. like, i wanted to go shopping. that's what we did when we met, and what i missed and wanted back: a female-female friendship, not a sexual relationship. and, she randomly accuses me of trying to sleep with her and then makes a big deal out of turning me down, when i never asked her in the first place.

but, other than that weird misunderstanding (which was being driven by something else that i never quite figured out...), i've actually honestly never been sexually rejected - and it's because i've never made any sexual advances.

like, ever.

i'm the one doing all the rejecting...

there was one time i showed up at this ex' place on a dinner request (she called me and asked me over for dinner), and walked into a request for a threesome, which i turned down. i can barely handle monogamy, i'm way too shy for casual sex with a stranger and an ex like that. she's not, though; she never understood that about me, or she never understood why i seemed so shy. in hindsight, i think that was probably at the heart of it.

but, i guess i was naive about it; i thought she was really getting the wrong message. well, i kind of knew that the actual truth was the other way around. but, if you're naive and you think she really thinks that, you have to keep trying to smooth it over. and, what rule are you breaking by calling a friend to try and convince them that you don't want to have sex with them?

it didn't work out in the end. but, in hindsight, she can't have still thought i was trying to sleep with her by the end, after i'd explained to her a dozen times that i wasn't.

that's my one story of sexual rejection.

because i've honestly never felt the urge to even try.

i don't really know anything about this, and it's not something i'm much interested in, but i just want to point out that the idea that this is some kind of consequence of the internet is ridiculous.

history is full of episodes of mass rape, and some of these episodes have dramatically altered the genetic make-up in very large regions of the world. the mongol expansion was particularly brutal. roman civilization traced it's founding to one such event, and while it may have been somewhat mythological, the broad pattern is observed through virtually all mass migration events from the steppes to the coasts and it's hard to believe that the roman invasion of italy would have been any different.

the reason that rape is so hard to defeat is precisely because it is so embedded within who we are.

to an extent, men have one task of procreation; women have the resulting task of finding the right sperm and rejecting insufficient mates. it is imperative, for the health of the genome, that women be allowed to discriminate. and, yes, this is crude; as a voluntary celibate, i don't live in this world and am the perfect example of how it's possible to get past it. but, the base genetic reality is a brutal arms race.

i have to wonder what extent that the cultural rejection of homosexuality plays into this. i suspect it's substantive, as nurturing relationships between these 'incels' is probably the best way out of this problem.