Will Work for Bud
Posted on August 16, 2008
Maurice was a man who could tear apart phonebooks, a big, menacing, mean motherfucker. I could tell this even over the phone. He had one of those booming auditorium voices, grandiose like a professional wrestler’s. But Maurice was young, he couldn’t be much past twenty-five, and while his roar was thick and imposing, his rumble was presently cloaked in despair. For the hundredth time in recent months, Maurice had lost his driver. Now he wanted to discuss delivering medical marijuana, a career with good pay and excellent perks, if I could follow orders. But first, questions, character inquiries, all delivered in the hard-restrained voice of a special forces operative. “You should always answer me truthfully,” he said, the timbre of his words giving them an added urgency. “Because Dann, I’ll know. One way or another, I’ll find out. So save us both the trouble, guy, and give it to me straight.”
“Ask whatever you want,” I said.
My last interview was with Ernst & Young. Their office was in downtown LA, seven blocks from my apartment. They’d had an opening for a writer, something stable, if not fun. I’d taken a hard shot at it: pressed suits, haircut, wind sprints through their company gauntlet—but like every classic losing streak, I was destined to go down. This time I lacked corporate writing experience, and H.R. feared I might get bored with earning a steady paycheck. All of which was true, I guess. I wasn’t a teenaged blushing bride nosing the Ernst & Young bouquet; I was a grifter after their health insurance.
Sickness, like addiction, can lead to places of desperation; settings like Maurice’s chain link fenced driveway. For me this was an unlikely career. I’m in my mid-thirties, feeling my age, and the thrall of fast cars and easy women seem better left to younger men, boys uncertain of who they are and still dependent upon their accessories. Running green wasn’t a plea for acceptance. It was a cold, financial calculation; a finger-in-the-wind of a failing economy; a conviction my health might not improve unless I escaped my HMO.
Fate had brought me to Maurice, impelled that I consider rogue options. I saw two doorways, one heading downward, the other leading out. Which way was I going to go? Read more
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Riding the Aloha Spirit
Posted on August 13, 2008
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Will Barack Obama be President?
Posted on August 11, 2008
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Sharing: David Sedaris
Posted on August 8, 2008
At the age of fourteen I accompanied a classmate to a Raleigh park. There we met with some friends of his and smoked a joint by the light of the moon. I don’t recall being high, but I do recall pretending to be high. My behavior was modeled on the whacked-out hippies I’d seen in movies and on tv, so basically I just laughed a lot, regardless of whether anything was funny. When I got home I woke my sisters and had them sniff my fingers. “Smell that?” I said. “It’s marijuana, or ‘grass’ as we sometimes call it.”
I was proud to be the first in my family to smoke a joint, but once I had claimed the title, I became vehemently anti-drug and remained that way until my freshman year in college. Throughout first semester, I railed against my dorm mates: Pot was for losers. It pickled your brain and forced you into crummy state universities like this one.
I’d later think of how satisfying it must have been to them—how biblical, almost—to witness my complete turnaround. The reverent mother becomes the town slut, the prohibitionist a drunkard, and me a total pothead, and so quickly! It was just like you’d see in a made-for-tv movie:
Friendly fellow from down the hall: Oh, come on. One puff’s not going to hurt you.
Me: The heck it won’t! I’ve got some studying to do.
Handsome roommate of friendly fellow: Let me give you a shotgun.
Me: A shotgun? What’s that?
Again, the handsome roommate: You lie back while I blow smoke into your mouth.
Me: Where do you want me to lie?
I remember returning to my room that night and covering my lamp with a silk scarf. The desk, the bed, the heavy misshapen pottery projects: nothing was new, but everything was different; fresh somehow and worthy of interest. Grant a blind person the ability to see, and he might have behaved the way I did, slowly advancing across the room and marveling at everything before me: a folded shirt, a stack of books, a piece of corn bread wrapped in foil. “Amazing.” The tour ended with the mirror, and me standing in front of it with a turban on my head. Well, hello there, you, I thought. Read more
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Looking In, Looking Out
Posted on August 6, 2008
Can marijuana save the arts?
Posted on August 4, 2008
This fall Walkabout Jones will take participatory journalism to a new level. With the launch of Artists Collective, a Los Angeles medical marijuana service, we’ll not only take you into the world of medical marijuana, but open a true non-profit corporation with proceeds to support individual artists—thus demonstrating the multi-billion dollar potential cannabis has to bankroll social good. Whether creating opportunity grants for artists, helping the sick, or any number of worthy causes, legalized maryjane has dollars and cents ability to help solve serious social problems where government and big business have failed. There’s a lot of work to do, and for that we need your help. But more than anything, we need your enthusiasm. If you can donate time or money, awesome. If not, we’ll still think you’re fantastic if you just spread the word. Let’s keep marijuana out of the hands of tobacco corporations, and redirect millions to a host of benevolent causes.
To read more about Artists Collective, click here.
Dig our playlist?: How many sites offer a mix of Cab Calloway and Temple of the Dog? Jim Croce and State Radio? Kenny Rogers, Etta James, Sam Cooke and Johnny Cash? Now it’s your turn to play music savant. Send us your top eleven licks, and we’ll start adding your choices to the site. Whether it’s old, new, country, folk, jazz, rock, or straight-up funk, what matters is that it’s musical nirvana from the very first note. So dust off your records, maximize your music files, and send us your picks of legendary licks.
It begins: Ever wonder what it’s like to run drugs near the Mexican border? Walkabout Jones is getting ready to show you. For the past few months, Dann’s been working as a medical marijuana delivery driver in San Diego county. (Did we mention that San Diego has the largest DEA field office in America?) It’s been hard work, exciting and dangerous, sometimes spine-shivering, other times highly satisfying.
The first of these stories, “Will Work For Bud” arrives next week. Keep an eye out for it and others, and let us know what you think.
Making our name, making our fame: Walkabout Jones dreams of becoming a thoughtful media oasis, well-removed from choppy seas besieged by pundits and paparazzi. Art, adventure, politics, and truth stranger than fiction are what get our creative juices flowing, but we’ve learned that spreading the word isn’t easy. Not with millions of websites vying for your precious eyes. To those ends, we’ve launched Myspace, Facebook, Stumbleupon, and Digg pages, with fingers crossed these digital tools will bring more readers into our realm. But we’re always looking for fresh ideas. So if you’re a budding marketeer, and wish to spread word of our mischief, please get in touch. We want you.
Walkabout Jones also welcomes collaboration with artists, writers and adventurous thinkers who want to help create a different kind of website. If interested, contact Dann at walkaboutjones@gmail.com
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