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Ten Times Better Or Worse
Where you start from is important. I was in a bar for dinner last night and four of us were positioned such that we could have been friends if in fact we were not complete strangers. Three men, one woman. The woman was drinking beer and an occasional novelty drink that disparaged the nationality responsible for most of my favorite alcohol drinks.
The man on my right soon bowed out after the man on my left started making nice with the woman across from me.
The man on my left was the alpha-male and down about the bottom of stout number one I become the fly on the wall instead of a human being. He and she exchanged enthusiasms about the mundane and I thought but for the grace of self-consciousness go I.
After the man and woman came down from the initial exhilaration of "hey, look at us talking like old friends" the man went into an apparently non-exhaustive litany of have you been to this bar or that bar and the woman for the most part, hadn't.
The bartender brought my burger and with apparent sincerity said doesn't that look good, and it did look good, in fact it looked much better than it tasted.
The bartender says Ricky Williams quit football to smoke pot and I said oh give the guy a break, that's too much an over-simplification. I have never been a huge RW fan but I like him for being a quitter, laying on beaches around the world, being nice to his kids, contributing to communities and saying FU to a sport that given its own natural order would have chewed him up and spit him out.
The woman across from me I knew from listening had a kid and when she said don't you think he has a responsibility to sports-loving children not to promote pot-smoking I realized a chance to make points by saying yes but I said no, I don't think he has that responsibility.
The alpha-male was acting all dumb like he didn't know what was going on and I could only suppose he did not follow football so I queried him on this and he got a little snippy, like of course I follow football, I'm a beer drinking alpha-male. I filled him in on the specifics. He got rolling and a little steamy and red in the face and said don't you think maybe he's just looking for press coverage so he can promote his lifestyle and make more money...and I'm like, no I don't think that, and he gets a little more steamed and I say hey chill mane, and he says all Mr. America now, that he doesn't know anything about pot and I say well it ain't nothin, I can school ya if you like. This got a chuckle from the woman and a hand-waving, head-shaking, no, no, no, from the alpha-male.
So Ricky Williams has personality disorders. So he likes pot. So he has personal experience which allows him to compare the prescription anti-depression drug, Paxil, to marijuana, and proclaim that the weed is tens times better for him. Your kids will get over this.
The bartender also thought Ricky had responsiblity to the kids, not to be a pot-smoking drop-out. It's not that every once in awhile you should consider that everything you know is wrong, you should consider it every morning.