Further on

The remaining members of the Grateful Dead are playing at the Bowl tonight. Fortunately they’re the key members. I can smell ganja from my deck. I grab my hiking poles and head toward Anapamu to watch the revelry. Now I’m part of the revelry. I’m sitting on my neighbor’s lawn with some kids from out of town ..Andy, Emilie, Jeff and Zak. Andy, 25, has shoulder-length hair and a beard. He looks kind of like George Harrison in the day. He's been following the reformed Dead since 2005. He knows a lot more about them than I do ..including their inception-to-date history and current constitution. He tells me who’s playing tonight .. how he first saw them on tour with a guitarist from the Allmann Brothers band ..and who the members were when I was following them in the early seventies. He also knows more about the neuro-active properties of hallucinogens than I do. Something I kinda’ thought was my area of expertise. I tell him I’m looking for marijuana that’s high in cannabidiols (CBD’s). He tells me I’m looking for Cannabis indica. It’s got a higher CBD-to-THC concentration than Cannabis sativa. He asks me what I used to do for a living. I tell him I once worked in the field of regenerative medicine. He tells me how current studies show that psilocybin facilitates neuro-regeneration by flooding the brain with information. Sounds reasonable I say. Then Zak tells me about studies that show how it was probably part of our evolution ..responsible for the development of the neocortex. Our ancestors ingested the ’shrooms they found growing on piles of dung. I’m impressed. I tell them I think kids like them are the future of this planet. Before I leave they hand me a package. At home I open it and I find a pipe packed with hashish. Well, bless their sweet little hearts ..!

Crazy cat peekin through a lace bandanna / Like a one-eyed cheshire, like a diamond-eye jack /  A leaf of all colors plays a golden-string fiddle / To a double-e waterfall over my back.