Inevitably, regardless of how mild the strain is, or how little I inhale, I wind up rocking back and forth in a corner, hissing and farting uncontrollably, desperately wondering why everyone I’ve ever met hates me.

Just add that to my résumé under “multitasking”.

I can, however, give my From-a-Real-Doctor meds the ol’ alley-oop with 2.5mg micro doses of thc, cbn, and cbd in tablet form. All that is to say: I avoid most dispensaries. The people are always lovely, but good god the gulag shopping is not pleasant.

So, without further ado, a rant:

Why is almost every dispensary a high-gloss liminal space designed by someone who maybe saw a room once?

Did you know there are COUCHES. WINDOW TREATMENTS. ARTWORK. CLEVER LIGHTING. A BOOKCASE.

AREA RUGS. END TABLES. COFFEE TABLE. MAYBE A FEW PLANTS THAT ✨AREN’T ✨ DRUGS.

I’m an elder millennial raised in the surveillance state of NJ.

If I’m buying drugs from you after all the DARE shit they shoveled on us like so much municipal manure, after then surviving an adolescence peppered with full-body hives at the thought of getting busted by some bored suburban oinker, you better make it feel like I’m popping by your jewel-toned maximalist village duplex that you inherited from your great-auntie Gilda.

She won it in a strip poker tournament.

It’s called CHARACTER, bubbulah.

But, what I’ve seen, based on the six or seven I’ve been to, whether independently-owned and corporate? They mostly bastardized the Apple Store without understanding the basic brutalist roots of a closed-loop system and how that stands in direct conflict with the ethos behind the original cannabis industry.

Zenleaf gets a pass because of their incredible charity work, but they’re on thin ice that smells like bong water.

You can’t slap a Tesla shield on a Subaru and call it good.

These fucking dorks call it “clean” and “minimalist”, but I prefer Fuck You, It’s Not Minimalism - it’s a conveyor belt. It’s a Ford factory production line because the product sells itself, and venture capitalist douchebros - for all their money - can’t buy taste or class.

Son of a BITCH, it’s just so LAZY.

Here’s a lookbook I google image searched and cobbled together in three minutes. Zero AI because fffffffffffuck AI.

I can source, design, import, and deliver a more human experience through a social media kvetch-fest than the vast majority of the entire cannabis industry.

By the way: if cannabis is still illegal in your state, your politicians don’t give fuck one about you or your life. The sheer amount of tax dollars that go to building infrastructure alone is unreal.

Anyway, you look at these pictures and you tell me you wouldn’t be absolutely goddamn delighted to open the dispo door and see any of these interiors.

Rattled by violent ends

and sliding off her

Malibu

cliffside foundations

into the sea

America, lip syncing pageant queen

Liquid lashes running down her cheeks

Legs spread

On the hood of god’s favorite cop car

Vaseline on her teeth

America you are male pronouns

Polio braces and fresh jordans

America you are my cripple

America take my broken fa**otry my d*ke hands and stitched-numb chest

Put them to work like Allen to the wheel

Wrap me in your Betty Crocker pussy America

Kiss me like the Soviet you’re not supposed to love

You killed the beat poets

but the band played on and now America

We are picking up the baton

And we are going to crack you one real good with it

America you are police in tanks

And

tear gas

smoke signals

From Dinner reservations

To Native reservations

Unmasked, naked, unvaccinated children

And parables about headlice

I have reservations, America

I want to taste the hijacked vodka America

The condom-free prom night America

I want to spill my medications on the bathroom floor and just

Lie down America you exhaust me

America, are you even listening to yourself anymore?

America you are steerage class

America the slouched corpse

with a bootstrap around her bicep

And a needle dangling

From her Ethiope Eye

America the butt of jokes and cigarettes

In motel ashtrays

Why won’t you love me, America.

Am I your least-favorite daughter and son.

The anthem is over, we’re just going to hum along.

America you are brutalist architecture wolf Wrapped in capitalist double-breasted lambswool

America why must we keep running into each other at funerals?

All of the slave ships are part of the water supply, America.

You are a statue of a dead man and his horse America and nobody wants to look at you, anymore.

You are a painting in a diner of

white yt hwyte cowboys

In yellow Arizona sunshine

On black highways

Where the litter roams free

And the chain gangs do not

My fragile darling America.

Coyote caught

and screaming at the sun

on a lonesome mile of cattle wire

Pelts and beads

America

You are asleep at the wheel

Of a vast, steel Cadillac - idling and shiny

On concrete blocks

On a soft shoulder

Under a flawless cyan fishbowl July sky.

When it is your birthday, America, what do you wish for?

Covet the chandelier
dice of my wrist bones
Shrine them in a paper coffee cup
drop them from the Southern Ship.

Set three boxes of waxed razors
where my tongue
Held ruthless court

And my eyes
Please make sure they are
Gone

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But on December 7th, 2025, my world ended. Every card was a burning tower. That sounds dramatic, but it’s accurate. Alison Maureen Murtaugh was my entire world. I lived for her. And today, August 8th, Day of the Lion’s Gate, is her birthday.

There are so many things I can tell you about that evening. It was a horror movie. I’ll leave it at that, for now. Maybe in the future, I’ll transfer the details from my journals in the few fugue-pocked months following her death. Maybe not. I don’t know, yet.

What I do know is that I want to tell you about her. I just want to talk about her. The baby of the family. The only girl. The sweetest tooth to match the sweetest heart.

God, she loved the worst candy. Mike n’ Ike’s, tootsie rolls, smarties - all of the Halloween dregs left over once the last sacred peanut butter cup and fun-sized snickers bar had departed for another year.

She was fastidious in not allowing clutter to pile up - except when it came to the holidays. Otherwise known as The Time Of The Totes. Down they would come from the attic. The trees, the ornaments, the window candles the ribbons, the wrapping paper, the Easter baskets, the American flag cocktail napkins, the pumpkins. The wreaths. And the house would become her playground to do with as she saw fit to decorate.

her celebration mode was heavily focused on everything being in its right place, and I respected her for that. For the five years we were together, I was on ornament patrol. While she, at 5’10, set up the Christmas tree we bought in 2022, the overload of decision making for ornament placement fell to me. Which I loved every moment of.

She would sit on the sofa, usually with The Good Place or the Yule Log on the television, a small array of snacks - some crunchy and savory, some sweet and, as mentioned before, indigestible - and occasionally I’d get a “perfect” or a “oh yeahhh NICE” like she was watching a particularly weird sport.

And I lived for her approval.

Like so many late-in-life lesbians, she had a lot of built-up trauma and pain surrounding missed time, missed opportunity, and just…missing out. I wish I had said yes more, but I generally agreed to everything she wanted to do, where she wanted to go, and what she needed to get out of her system. Experiencing the world with her, seeing things for the first time through her eyes was one of the greatest joys of my life.

She had an exquisite talent for still photography. I could list all of the things at which she was head and shoulders above the rest, but we’d be here for a year.

Her photographs were one of the things that got me. Not just because they made food look delicious, but because they spoke to a mindfulness and thoughtful nature that is 1. Rare and 2. Rare. Really rare.

She was a teacher in a Catholic school for years before she had Alyssa. She was fearless in the face of pain. One day, after school, she was cleaning the chemistry lab. Of course nothing was stored properly, so she picked up the supposedly sealed box of sulfuric acid, and of course, the glass dropped out of the bottom of the box, hit the floor, and splashed up her calf all the way to her knee, immediately beginning to melt the skin.

Fortunately, a janitor was in the next lab, and he ran in, scooped her up, and threw her under the neutralizer/nozzle thing we all used to see and prayed we never had to see in action.

I used to trace the topographical map of those pinkish scars up her leg with my fingertips while we read in bed. The thought still occurs to me what kind of person she was not to panic or cry out. Not to make sudden movements or splash. Not to use her bare hands to wipe. Immensely intelligent. The best in a crush. A leader.

I’ll tell you about her sword fighting duel with our eldest, our jetskiing kerfuffle, our talks with the owls, our exploding slow cooker, the Great Banana Incident of ‘23, her beautiful friends, like Debbie and Kari, and her penchant for watching horror movies and then commanding me to come up and be a sentient body pillow another time. For now, I think I have wiped this screen clear a few too many times to stay coherent.

I just want you who knew her, to know her better. And I want you who didn’t know her, to know that you would have loved her.

I never wanted to say that about her. That goddamn sentence. “You would have loved her”. And “she would have loved you” is somehow so much more crushing.

I suppose that’s because we, the living, can love other things. There’s still a whole world for us. The dead cannot. They can never change. They can only be carried along by us.

Death is as darkness is, but I see each and every person I’ve lost - especially Alison - as a torch in the Daedalus’s labyrinth. If there is anything after this - which I cannot say - I will follow those lighting up the opposite shore when it’s my time.

I love you, Alison. I love you forever.

Aug 8 2026 9:55 central

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