I like to smoke. Occasionally I write about it.
That time of year has arrived when Her Majesty dons her royal bubblewrap and retires to her royal storage quarters until she is summoned to open the next session of Sunshine Parliament in March. Behold, her final public appearance of 2020, presented in spectacular GIF-o-Vision™.
Most of the books I read during the (first?) COVID-19 lockdown were textbooks. As in, non-fiction. Try not to hate me for that; I have always consumed a wide gamut of literature. Figured I should make the best of a bad situation, using the downtime to learn a few new skills. For the inevitable moments when I felt like banging my head against a brick wall, be it from writer’s block, the fate of nations or a particularly troublesome bug in some app I was building, it was Netflix to the rescue.
The other night I happened across some animated series from India (presented in the original Hindi with no dubbing whatsoever, which I appreciated) depicting the hypothetical wacky adventures of Ganesha as a boy. A kids’ show, obviously. But kids’ shows are (more often than not) the shit after a couple of bong rips, so I decided to check it out. At first I found Bal Ganesh endlessly fascinating. I was being offered a glimpse into what kind of Saturday morning cartoons I would’ve been watching had the Fates decreed I be born on a different continent. Subsequent episodes impressed upon me that this was exactly like one of those gawd-awful religious shows my cousins used to watch when they were kids (if you have never heard of Psalty the Singing Songbook, consider yourself blessed), only with a Hindu angle to it. Once it dawned on me that every episode of this series basically has the same plot, the fatal flaw in its premise became abundantly clear to me; a flash of insight which I immediately tweeted…
the hero has to have weaknesses in order to make for a compelling story. hence any cartoon where the main character is a god tends to lose its lustre after three episodes #amwriting #writerslife #netflixandchill #SaturdayThoughts #420blazeit #staylifted #Mmemberville
— X. Jupiter Hart (@x_jupiterhart) July 11, 2020
This is actually not the first blog I’ve ever started. I’ve created about half a dozen of them in my lifetime, but none of my former blogs presently exist. Most of them were shut down voluntarily by me a few months after launching. Usually out of boredom. Or maybe because I just couldn’t be arsed to do the work involved in creating and maintaining a blog. It was one of those reasons. This current blog has already outlasted every blog I’ve done before, so it’s got that going for it at least.
I archive most of what I create, and remnants of former blogs still exist in my personal digital vaults. Here’s a titular wordmark I created for the header of one of my old attempts…
…and here’s a banner I created for somebody else’s blog (which also no longer exists)…
There’s also this skull banner I did once, although I can’t for the life of me remember what blog I did this for…
Lastly, I give you this collection of photographic evidence from that time five years ago when I created a (working!) ganja pipe from a jalapeño pepper. One that had just the right shape to be used for such a purpose. All it needed were exactly two incisions…
Despite being refrigerated at all times when not in use, the jalepeño pipe only lasted for a few days before it started rotting and I had to retire it. But it was an interesting experiment while it lasted. This pipe imparted a zesty Tex-Mex flavour to the smoke. At least it did while it was still fresh. Then decomposition set in and it started tasting more like Taco Bell…
