I pace the yard, tired and wired from the night’s labor, casting about for something to do. Three varieties of sedative have failed to induce slumber, and I have long since passed that delirious point of sleep deprivation and mental fatigue where anything coherent might be expected to appear on my iMac’s text window. Leave well enough alone.

No point in generating gibberish which will only need rewriting later. The poppies are popping, morning glory vines virulent, roses radiant, a dank spectrum of horny flowers living luxuriously; I wonder how they’ll fare in the dry desert when their human slave is no longer there to overwater and underfertilize them. Maybe Llewellyn can look after the garden when I’m gone.

Gone! Such an abstract idea, a world without Victor. Will it be a better world? Less contentious, surely. Probably my passing will be a great relief for protectors of paradigms past; yet even my enemies should miss me, as I would miss them. Without our opposites to contrast against, we are nothing but bland monochrome.

I certainly don’t feel like I’m dying. My skin is tingling, my head a whirl of exhilaration. I feel like dancing. The chorus of birds and rustling of leaves juxtapose a skein of subtle beats, and my arms rotate cautiously in the “figure-eight” configuration taught to me in a more innocent time to the din of booming hard house by a kid with purple hair and Adidas visor and dozens of chains of homemade plastic strung jewelry hung over a blue Rugrats T-shirt. Back in the day.

With Nature as my DJ, my feet join the party, the resonating rhythm overtaking me. Like riding a bicycle. Why did I ever give this up? I have no audience but Goddess, and Her smile shines on me along with the butterflies, birds, bees and every other being at one with itself. We all are engaged in a cosmic hoedown. I feel hugged. I can practically see the ball of energy bouncing around my body, the chi, focused essence. And I’m not even tripping.

Where, I wonder, will this force go when “Victor” gives up the ghost? It is inconceivable that it might disappear. The law of conservation of energy, which must surely apply to the spiritual as well as the mechanical variety, forbids it. I may not always obey the unjust statutes of men, but I recognize the authority of the Universe. I am not permitted to fade into oblivion.

Consignment to eternal paradise or damnation seems unlikely as well; unnatural. The two cannot exist apart. What nonmaterial joy could Heaven offer that won’t become passe over the Millennia, what spiritual torture could be featured in Hell that would not ease by acclimatization over the eons? The saved would be increasingly bored with their salvation, with yawning ages of monotony before them, which sounds horrifying; the damned could contrast their horrors to the earlier time when they were fresh and new, looking forward to steady improvement, and thereby eke out an increasing claim on hope. Hope in Hades, but none in the Kingdom of God?

Besides, who really deserves either? What possible point could there be to such an unforgiving pass/fail standard, on such a skewed and unfair examination? If God is really such a sadist, who keeps hugging me?

While literally absurd, the dualism may contain a useful metaphor. Something Christian fundamentalists have never understood about the Bible is that it’s mostly allegory, the painstaking symbolically-charged craft of antediluvian Jonathan Swifts with axes to grind and points to make. Only an idiot, the authors surely felt, would take stuff like talking snakes and all of humanity being descended from a single (genetically identical?) couple literally.

Actually, on further reflection, the snake talking I could buy. Like most acidheads, I score pretty high on the Buster-Idaho Gullibility Scale. I also engage in protracted conversations with inanimate objects and fervently believe in the efficacy of magic.

Unfortunately for me, this man’s day job was as a high- level narcotics agent, humiliated by his inability to control the drug problem in his own home. My photograph was pinned to his dartboard, and it was only a matter of time before my greenhouse was surrounded. I was caught green-thumbed and carted off to the stockade to await my Inquisition.

Like several of my heroes, I found myself in a courtroom, trying to transmit the truth to a jury most definitely not composed of my peers: that it is bizarre, immoral, and unconstitutional for a government to legislate against a plant.

I flash effortlessly between the present and past tense, being there and here, now and then, getting the whole picture. Back to where it all began.

It’s not just about the right to get high, I explained to the panel of baffled straights. It’s about freedom of thought.

It’s not a war on drugs. It’s a war on people who use certain drugs. And lives are being lost. Youthful lives. Promising lives.

Wasted. In moldy cells all over this great land. For no reason.

What is the purpose of the law under which I am charged? Is it to curb a dangerous substance, as the prosecutor claims? This can’t be, for the constitutional right to own projectile weapons has been repeatedly upheld. Remember, these are devices, which, when used as directed, cause death. Ask any gun instructor. They will invariably advise you to never produce a firearm, unless you plan to shoot to kill. Mercy will cost you your life. Winging an assailant will just piss them off. Yet instruments of instant, distant death remain revealingly sanctioned, on sale in every Wal-Mart and pawn shop.

Cannabis, on the other hand, is only fatal as fifty-ton bales dropped from high altitudes.

So, safety cannot be the real rationale. Not with strychnine and alcohol for sale in every pharmacy and hardware store. People are considered intelligent enough to use those lethal products safely enough, in spite of the many fatalities attributable to misuse of each. But not, apparently, a mild nonaddictive medicinal herb, whose use is a part of every history.

These oppressive laws seek to fix the state of mind within arbitrary parameters, to bar those interested in doing so from experiencing planes of existence that may be accessible only in this fashion.

They have been enacted to control our minds, in blatant disregard of the Constitution. They do this so as to make martyrs of malcontents. To surreptitiously criminalize ideas. A classic witchhunt, with no more justice in it than the Puritan Inquisition which created that hateful compound word in the first place.

The victims of that purge were not very different from myself. I feel very akin to those midwifes and healers who were torched alive because they healed or did magic with strange herbs that reactionaries, fearing any power they could not control, claimed were of the devil. I’m in much the same fix.

I’m not necessarily what you’d call a believer in the Bible. But I’ve certainly read it and damned if can remember any stories about Satan creating plants. My Christian theology might be rusty, but I’m pretty sure only God is supposed to be able to do that; although, I understand Dow Chemical is making considerable progress in genetic engineering.

If you’re any sort of environmentalist, you may wonder why our government, with its voluminous regulations to protect wildlife, entertains this fanatical, though hopeless, effort to eradicate-to make extinct-one of the most useful, ecologically friendly species the Earth has yet yielded.

I could go on for hours about the virtues of this repressed crop. The valuable products to be derived from hemp fibers can save the forests by replacing trees for paper. Hemp seeds are second only to soybean in plant protein content, and could feed the planet’s starving.

Not to mention hemp flowers, which could calm the overamped nerves of the neurotic masses. It is the paleface’s buffalo for the New Age, a gracious offering from the Mother with no extra parts. Typical of Western ingratitude to reject it.

One of the gifts of the cannabis plant is the Declaration of Independence, that radical manifesto of sedition that marks the founding of these United States. As you may know, the historic document was drafted on hemp paper, made from fibers of the very same plant I was enjoying on the night half a dozen officers threatened my life with guns, deprived me of my liberty, and charged me with the pursuit of happiness.

If you happen to be politically conservative, you ought to resent the intrusion of privacy implicit in the “war on drugs.” The Bill of Rights has been rendered meaningless by the abuses of the anti-drug Gestapos.

If you’re politically liberal-well, to be honest, I’m not sure what liberals believe these days. You should probably be against anything Ronald Reagan was for.

Speaking of our esteemed former President, do you suppose it’s any coincidence that the hand caught in the cookie jar using cocaine revenues to finance black ops was the very same one that signed the declaration of “war” to begin with?

I smell a conspiracy.

~ )))0((( ~