Category Archives: The Drug War

Loved one in Shoal Creek

Our loved one, who shall remain anonymous, was booked into Austin’s private psychiatric hospital at Shoal Creek last night. They’re on suicide watch, after having attempted it twice with overdoses of pills. More to come.

Pelosi’s bizarre dance

Observers can’t figure out her bizarre little dance behind Lyin’ Biden as he delivered his cynical, hypocritical stump speech called the SOTU address. I think interpretation is easy: She’s on drugs. The only questions are what kind and whether they are illegal.

Illegal weed still sells

“Potheads who thought government legalization of pot would lead to heaven on earth forgot about one tiny detail: getting the government involved in anything either makes it more expensive or ruins it completely.”

Via PJMedia

Mum, the police!

We used to call these “brights” in the new biz. A parrot warning Brazilian drug dealers of a raid. Then, after its arrest, clamming up and refusing to talk to the police.

Via Breitbart

C is for Colorado

When we were in Colorado going to the dispensaries, we kept seeing flags with C’s on them. Cute, I thought, the pot sellers have themselves a cannabis flag.

When I admired their ingenuity to a native, though, he stared, then laughed. The C is for Colorado, he said. It’s the state flag. Oops.

Via Fox News

Smoke stops

Amtrak is government railroad, so it gets the full nanny state treatment. Red and white warning signs abound, even on the spendy private bedroom windows to mar the view. But the No Smoking rule has taken some hits from the staff as well as the passengers.

Such that there are “smoke stops” of about five minutes between major stations. I mingled with two conductors smoking in black-dark rural Kansas on the Southwest Chief’s route to Trinidad and a sleeping car attendant on the Sunset Limited run to San Antonio. San Antone being a two-hour layover while cars and engines are rearranged. Some go to Austin, some to El Paso, New Orleans, and Chicago.

Some passengers don’t wait but light up in their private rooms and the cooling/heating system spreads the smoke throughout the sleeping car. If they can catch you, as we were all reminded every so often on the public address system, they’ve threatened to put you off at the next stop wherever it may be. But when they’re already understaffed…

There and back again

Sort of a Hobbit adventure, our just over two thousand mile Amtrak trek through five states in seven days: Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico. At a cost of about a dollar a mile for a private room with meals.

No dragons encountered, however. Just occasional problems, some more annoying than others, like the empty soda bottle that rolled out from under our bench seat, and worse the delay in trying to get the lowered upper berth put back because Bar was feeling claustrophobic and breathless in the lower double one.

Or the broken WiFi and broken electrical outlets on the Amtrak-subsidized Greyhound bus (which advertises leg room but doesn’t provide it for six-footers) from Albuquerque to El Paso (nevertheless with an excellant 50ish black male driver) to spend the night and catch the Sunset Limited the next day back to Austin. No WiFi on our trains but convenient working electrical outlets. And Bar said Albuquerque’s spectacular Andaluz Hotel had a soothing vibe.

Basically, the trip was a lot of fun, though we might next time stretch out the 566-mile Austin to Newton, KS, portion. Spending the night in Oklahoma City, for instance, but with the problem of where to go/what to do (a good public library perchance?) after checkout at noon—with fourteen hours to go four hours to Newton for a 2 a.m. departure west.

As it was we were exhausted by the time we got to Newton but enjoyed the 424-mile Newton to Trinidad stretch in our bedroom (a four-hour nap) and  breakfast in the dining car. Scrambled eggs and orange juice (and fellow Amish passengers with blond triplet boys) approaching destination Trinidad, Colorado, with snow-capped twin peaks of the Rocky Mountains in the distance. Trinidad was a surprise as there was no station to admire, no covered shelter at all, just dumped on the paved siding. The city’s negotiations with Amtrak for a station not going well they say. Fortunately, it wasn’t precipitating. We drew a blank on a call for a taxi, to the number on the Amtrak sign, and finally decided to walk the two blocks to McDonalds where the manager knew who to call: Monica!

The lovely Monica became our taxi, in between taking care of her three children and husband, in her family’s white mini-SUV. Otherwise there are no taxis in Trinidad. None. It’s a tiny, antique tourist town built in the 1850s. There are however numerous motels to choose from (a few welcoming potheads but most not) and more than twenty “dispensaries” of marijuana. So I guess it evens out for those with what the heads call “couch-lock” (where “you actually become the couch” and don’t feel like moving). We enjoyed some of that, chewing watermelon-flavored gummies from Freedom Road.

Take an ounce of good bud home with you, someone suggested. Oh no, I don’t want to go to prison. Locals said the cops of New Mexico watch for cars with out-of-state plates leaving Trinidad, and find reasons to stop them. And the DEA has been known to search bedrooms on trains not leaving Colorado. So we just enjoyed it while we were there and took peace-of-mind home with us.

Trinidad gets lots of pot tourists, the locals told us, mostly from Texas. But its monopoly will be gone when the New Mexico legislature gets around to also legalizing weed. Texas may take a lot longer, I think.

For now the Austin to Trinidad trek is worth it. The stations are clean (some, like El Paso’s Union Depot (circa 1904) and Oklahoma City’s old Santa Fe station are spectacular marbled monuments to rail) and all have conspicuous security guards to keep the peace.

The Texas Eagle, Southwest Chief, and Sunset Limited trains were clean but a bit shabby from all the deferred maintenance imposed by Congress. And the freight-dinged tracks are very bumpy in spots. The federal pols spend money on the Northeast coast trains and rails for themselves while imposing cuts, and otherwise neglecting passengers in flyover country. The bedroom attendants (mostly black women for us) and dining car waiters (mostly black men for us) were overworked.

Could be, however, we’re on the cusp of a passenger train renaissance, judging from all the passengers who packed the Sunset Limited’s cheaper coach seats from L.A. to New Orleans. Our private room segment (that dollar-a-miler) was 576 miles of Texas, mostly in the dark—seeing the sunset over the Davis Mountains (old Apache country) but missing the views on the 300-foot trestle over the Pecos River.

But we’ll do it all again.  Of course we will. It was fun.