Old School Arizona

[rbt]

Thanks Madjag; I get a periodical update from the AZ leg I didn't see this.
Well there is sure to be legal challenges to this if passed AZ House Bill 2558. IN one swoop they have defined medical or a large part of it.

Plus interstate commerce of medical needs they just don't grow the necessary strain's needed by some. The growers here are using organic compounds that are PGR's and natural found growth hormones used in the Wheat and Alfalfa ok'd by the FDA for human consumption NEEM oil YUCK I don't want to smoke that or ingest it either natural organic compound.

I also see the State spend almost all concerns Tax levy's. That's Arizona license SIN, is my spin on the proposed legislation 5 plants that in itself is ridiculous how about cubic square footage of plants canopy 220 square feet. Really all crop harvest are in yields, not stalks in the ground. this whole thing is a stupid mess and when the federal law changes it will all be in the courts and re-written again

 

[waveguide]

neem is pretty good stuff.

"Sacred Tree," "Heal All," "Nature's Drugstore," "Village Pharmacy" and "Panacea for all diseases"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neem

thinking of the smell as peanuts + garlic helps to get used to it.

 

[rbt]

neem is pretty good stuff.

"Sacred Tree," "Heal All," "Nature's Drugstore," "Village Pharmacy" and "Panacea for all diseases"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neem

thinking of the smell as peanuts + garlic helps to get used to it.

what is neem oil to Flame? pretty good stuff still Encephalopathy & Graves' disease. If consumed in large quantities and it is the seed ground to use a pesticide not the oil read your own WIKI
azdactrin gas great stuff make the kidneys work over time

 

[Sforza]

36-2833. Excise tax; deposit; distribution
A. AN EXCISE TAX IS LEVIED ON THE SALE OR TRANSFER OF MARIJUANA FROM A MARIJUANA CULTIVATION FACILITY TO A RETAIL MARIJUANA STORE OR MARIJUANA PRODUCT MANUFACTURING FACILITY. EACH MARIJUANA CULTIVATION FACILITY SHALL PAY AN EXCISE TAX AT THE RATE OF FIFTY DOLLARS PER OUNCE, OR PROPORTIONATE PART THEREOF, ON MARIJUANA THAT IS SOLD OR TRANSFERRED FROM A MARIJUANA CULTIVATION FACILITY TO A RETAIL MARIJUANA STORE OR MARIJUANA PRODUCT MANUFACTURING FACILITY.

Seems kinda mob like with out the protection part! So now it's gonna be cool to have herb but if I don't have my tribute paid I'm a criminal?

I mean yay free the weed! Just doesn't appear to be pure in its intent

Perhaps if you are just cultivating for yourself and not selling to a ganja retailer there is no excise tax?

 

[Sforza]

Wow, AZ is taking the plunge??? No shit? Moved from there in 2010 to SW Colorado....it is pure freedom up here!!! Anybody in my area?????

My company is sending me to Denver to work next week. I am looking forward to checking out the scene. I have been going to Holland for quite a few years now and it is not even legal there, only tolerated.

 

[Sforza]

Had a visit from melancholy the other day and as usual it showed up out of nowhere and didn’t stay for dinner either. I have a few ideas what gave it some life…..short days, the light is lower in the sky, and all our gardens, herb or otherwise, have been harvested and the winter crops haven’t yet been planted. There’s a distinct feeling of being in between.

I love music and it’s no surprise that I love to dance. 3 days of Sunsplash in Mo Bay, Jamaica, back in the early 1980s tested my metal for sure. The music began pumping up around 10pm and really hit the groove around 2am and beyond. By then many pounds of ganja had been smoked by the lovers of Ragga so the energy was loose and dreamy, mellow with a touch of late night burnout. Each night a different act seemed to rule the night and would swell up and take the crowd to another level. One night it was Burning Spear, another Sugar Minott. The stage had a killer sound system comparable to the giant outdoor spectacles in the US. The speakers were stacked 20 feet tall and 30 feet wide I’d guess. When I left at 5am one of the mornings and drove west across the bay toward Lucea I could hear it at my hotel a good 10 miles away. At that distance it sounded like a small boombox playing in the jungle next door.

[URL=https://www.icmag.com/ic/picture.php?albumid=35034&pictureid=951035&thumb=1]View Image[/url]​

I had seen the Cool Ruler on Negril’s west end in a concert at Bigga’s Central Park, a small outdoor venue stashed behind sturdy 8 foot tall cement walls and an iron entrance gate. Gregory was full swing into his infamous crack-smoking period and would dance across the stage every few songs and hook up with a big bong hit of the devil and then dance across the stage as the next song began. He’d usually spin and do his trademark shuffle as he exhaled a huge cloud of pure white smoke. His high-end coke connections and the quality of the freebase was quickly evident by the brightness of that crack cloud as well as the strong chemical odor that accompanied it…..not to mention the way the Cool Ruler would leap into his song and dance with renewed vigor. He was hooked.

Nice write up, Madjag. My favorite Gregory Isaacs tune is Turn me on.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xavxhb_gregory-isaacs-turn-me-on-hq-snoope_music

 

[Sforza]

I have enjoyed reading your stories. They ring true. We are about the same age; you are a couple years older than I am. I spent a lot of time in Negril, starting in 1972, so I was there before your time. I had a tin roofed shack in Red Ground. The beach was nearly empty back then, with no hotels down at the west end, by the island, except for the small original one, whose name I forget now. I was there before Steve married Erica. I imagine that you ran across Steve at some point during your stays in Negril.

I recently caught up with a buddy of mine who went in with me to pay for the tin roofed shack that we had built. He sent me a copy of a picture of me in the door of the place when our shack was half built.

That is Jason, Steve Sharp's son, who I am holding while I toke on a nice little spliff of ganja.

 

[Sforza]

View Image

That looks like a sporterized Lee Enfield British .303. I have one of them. Tough gun.

 

[Sforza]

Speaking of Jamaica. A long time ago, I had a little board shack in the Red Ground section of Negril with my buddy, my fraternity little brother from college.

I had my skimpy little speedo bathing suit (we are talking 70's here), since I sometimes wore it as underwear, when I did not go commando. I rolled up a nice fat joint, not a spliff, and tucked it into the suit, along with a couple of small strike anywhere matches that I had brought from Colombia since they were so handy, and a folded up Jamaican twenty dollar bill, back when they were worth something.

Hey, my old buddy also had a photo of my little blue speedo. When you see how skinny I was you can understand why I was surprised when that old Jamaican cop nearly ran me down.

 

[Madjag]

Dude, you look like John Mayall on the album covers from his Laurel Canyon days!

 

[Sforza]

Dude, you look like John Mayall on the album covers from his Laurel Canyon days!

I saw John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers in 1969 at a smallish venue. He could sure wail on the blues harp!

Looking at that suit reminds me of the time that I had some product for sale in Negril and a couple Jamaican guys woke me up in the middle of the night at the little shack with the tin roof to buy a small quantity, the price for which was a hundred dollars American.

The next morning, I noticed that the bill they used to pay me was counterfeit. So my pal and I went looking for them. Negril is not that large, especially back in those days.

I had on only my bathing suit and I was covered in coconut oil when my buddy and I ran into the two guys who had ripped me off the previous night. We did a lot of talking and arguing but we were not getting anywhere with getting our money back. The two Jamaican guys were no slouches and they were not going to be easy to roll for the money.

Then my buddy whispered to me that the main man had a wad of real hundreds in his top shirt pocket. So while we were talking, I snatched the wad out of his pocket, peeled one bill off the wad, shoved it down my bathing suit and handed the wad back and dared him to come get his bill.

At that point we reached a truce and they ended up buying some more product with real money.

 

[bushweed]

Bravo! This is the best storytelling on Icmag. Thank you Madjag and Sforza. You guys must be among the coolest pair of Gringos as have ever sparked a spliff. But what an obscure place to find such a gem. I would never have found this thread if I hadn't known you from Persephone's Lab, Mj... wish more people could read your stories. Big crops desert canyons, Colombian Black, original Skunk#1, Jamaica in the 70s, Reggae, dark skinned girls, wild cats, peyote, Paul McCartney. This thread has it all, such a pleasure to read gents. My contribution a postcard from the other side of the planet...

 

[Sforza]

Thanks for the kind words and the great picture, bushweed. I love the shots of the thai weed on your profile.

This is Madjag's world, but I appreciate his inspiration and allowing me to riff off his memories. I figure I better get them in writing before the memory goes or they will be gone forever.

 

[Sforza]

Madjag, reading your post in this thread about Gregory Isaacs dancing and singing on the stage down in Jamaica got me thinking about the night I saw Peter Tosh in a little club in Santa Cruz, CA. I say Santa Cruz, CA because I spent a considerable amount of time in Santa Cruz, Bolivia too. But it is too late to start that story, because I have an early flight tomorrow morning.

I will also have to recount my first night and day in Barranquilla, Colombia. That was a wild time, but all's well that ends well and that trip ended well.

This is a little story about nearly losing a honey to the sea. While it was not quite as epic as The Old Man and the Sea, at least I got her back to the shore in one piece.

I was hanging out on the beach in Negril one day, as was my wont, when I spotted three new girls setting up on some beach chairs. One of them in particular was quite cute, so naturally I lavished most of my attention on her. I came to find out that they were Canadians and had only been on the Island for a day or two. I chatted them up and eventually made a date to pick them up that evening to go out drinking and dancing to some reggae.

I took them up to a little club that was open in the shopping center near the roundabout. At that time, almost all of the people who frequented that club were native Jamaicans, which I loved, because the music and dancing were sensual. I had spent a lot of time on the Island and it seemed like home to me, but the girls were put off by the admittedly rather strong body odor emanating from the crowd and all the black faces in a dark club. So I took them to the touristy, all inclusive resort called Hedonism instead.

We had some fun but I didn't make much progress on the scoring front and in fact, despite a lot of trying, I never did make it with the girl who I was working on, although she kept me thinking I might at any minute, so I did not shift my attention to either of her two friends who were both more than willing to get up close and personal with me. Sort of like a cock blocker, only different. I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind. You could have done better but I don’t mind. You just kinda wasted my precious time. But don’t think twice, it’s all right.

In any case, after that first night of dancing, I went around the next day to see what I could see and the girls were again hanging out at the beach getting some sun. I noticed that up the beach a way there were some little catamarans for rent. I think there were called Sunfish, or something like that. So I asked the cutie if she wanted to go for a ride on the Sunfish with me and it turned out she did.

I had never done any sailing at all, but the fellow who rented the boat gave me some tips and it did not take long to get the feel for the use of the rudder and trimming the sail to get the little boat moving along at a pretty good clip in more or less the direction that I wanted it to go in.

We had a fine time, with the sun glinting off the chop, salty tang in the air, and a fresh breeze through our hair. She sure looked mighty fine smiling and laughing as we swept further and further out to sea. The further out we got, the bigger the waves we encountered. But the little cat was steady and stable and we were in seemingly in no danger of capsizing.

What did happen, however, was that a large wave hit the rudder at just the right angle and knocked it out of its attachment points. The rudder was attached to boat by two pins in the rudder being inserted through two metal hoops on the stern.

When we rented the boat the boatman had inserted the rudder pins into the hoops while standing a couple feet of water. The pins were retained in the hoops by two spring loaded balls that one compressed in order to insert or remove the rudder. I think the Sunfish was designed to be used on lakes, not out in the open ocean, because it did not take that much force for a wave to knock the pins right out of the hoops. The spring loaded locking devices were not very strong.

Somehow in the process of getting knocked out of the pins, perhaps it happened while we were shifting our positions while tacking, and ducking under the swinging boom, the rudder ended up floating in the water a few feet from the boat. I dove in and swam to it and retrieved it. But when I turned around and started swimming back to the boat, I was horrified to see that with the rudder out and the sail still up, the girl and the boat were drifting away from me at about the same rate at which I could swim, but I was going to get tired long before the boat stopped drifting out into the open ocean.

Terrified that babe and boat were going to be carried out to sea, never to be seen again, I put my head down and swam as fast as I could, shoving the rudder ahead of me while doing so because I did not want to be on the boat without the rudder to steer it. I knew that even though we were several miles off shore that I would be able to swim back with little trouble, but I knew that I was responsible for the situation she was in and I needed to fix it.

Once I managed to get myself and the rudder to the boat, things were still hairy. Due to a design failure, it was almost impossible to put the rudder back into the hoops while in the water. I needed one hand to hang onto the boat, so I needed to put the rudder in place with only one hand. It could not be done from the boat itself, but had to be done while in the water. The major problem was that both pins were the same length, so both the top and bottom pin had to be inserted into each hoop at exactly the same time. This proved to be very difficult using only one hand in a rough sea. I could get one or the other pins in, but I could never get both in at the same time. The longer I worked on the problem, the more tired I became. The boat also kept drifting further out into the ocean. Finally, just when I was at the point of exhaustion and ready to wish Sweetie good luck and strike out towards the shore on my own, the pins shot home and the rudder was secured.

With the rudder in and taking care to not submit it to any sudden forces that could potentially dislodge it again, we steadily made our way back to the beach and returned the catamaran. I told the rental man what happened and suggested that instead of just having the spring loaded balls to hold the pins in place that they should drill the shafts and use cotter pins. Also, that one shaft needed to be longer than the other so that you could get one pin started and then line up the second one. By his reaction I don’t think he paid any attention to my hard won advice.

 

[Madjag]

 

[wolfhoundaddy]

Nothing like shaking me out of my daily complacency!

I see some big smiles and a peace sign...ah how strong the thread of life

 

[rbt]

I was reading about 20 dollar lids on another site. I had a uncle that had a ranch between Amado and Arivaca. We would buy Kilos from the vaquero's that worked the ranch they traveled back and forth from home to work the ranch on 2 months shifts abouts. The grass and grazing is better in the Altar Valley that went into Sononita Mex and the state of Sonora. We paid $40.00 a kilo back then took them to Salt Lake where we sold them for $125.00 a lb. In 67 & 68. I have family from the interior of Mex to Alaska part of the Mormon pioneer stock and relations. So taking back dirt road through the res was not hard. I still have my picture of the dodge Power Wagon that we had in Bryce Nat'l Monument with my first girl friend spread out under the canyon walls spread out displaying nature at it's best. We made a LOT of MONEY back then. Once we even travel to a field and partied with the Mexican hosts they were the best people I have ever ran into. Sonoran Mexican food is the best too the Tex/Mex crap in some kind of a different colored enchilada sauce. It was so cool watching the old lady make tortillas in the morning cooking with a plow disc over a burning barrel used as a cooking stove. The Uncle that owned the ranch was a flight surgeon in Iwo Jima after it was made into a air base. He would tell us about working with the stucco laborers that came up from Mexico to work on summer jobs they smoked refer(as they called it) all during the day. The Vaqueros would always sit around and roll in old News Paper around the tack room and drink beer at Jimmy Bryants trading post on the res. traveling through Indian Reservations Apache had the Peyote it was a sacrament to them not a escape but an experience and what it took to become ready for that experience was to enlighten the Mescalero & White Water Tribes practiced this. I still remember getting stoned at wedding that the Son's of the Pioneers were singing and George Jones was the hit LOL not quite John Mayhal. I hope my ramblings are not an annoyance the pain is keeping my up so trimming my harvest smoking and rambling. It brings to mind the statement from Frank Sinatra. " YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE AND IF YOU LIVED IT LIKE ME ONCE IS ENOUGH" Salu Frank.

 

[rbt]

I cant help myself there is a lake very small a state park now called Patagonia. It is locate up the canyon from Nogales. Before the civil war if was a army post that housed about 5000 troops and the same amount of Indians sought protection there from Apache raids Hospital and Garrison. It is now the location of the lake and the Fort located their because of the water supply. So as you can imagine it was a major smuggling route and had been for centuries. It was a Highway of people and goods at night we had a friend kid we grew up with that was huge a few time he would pose as a fisherman on top of the earthen Dam and watch for mules after they dropped their packs and got the loaded Denny whom was 6'9" 280 all muscle strong farm kid would walk up looking like Col Henry Blake from Mash caring a fishing pole.
He would walk right up to the unsuspecting person and just hit them HARD once right in the forehead we called this a five finger sedative. While they were loopy he would tell them I am taking your load if you drive up 6th Ave tomorrow you will find your car back and next time you come to my yard you pay ME first LOL. He would sell the whole load for a few hundred and that was hard as not many wanted to get near him. It was known if he had been hurting the college kids that came from back east and was set up on the buy he knew if he hurt them he would be fertilizer for the valley. It was those lying ass Italians that retired here from NY, Detroit, NJ, Cleveland, the Bonanno's Licovolies, Bataglias. It was fair game if you came here to do illegal business and lots of it too not including the drug. However they had a Bonanno family guy and again a Licavoli's guy got out of control my Uncles set them straight on whos land it is! Las Vegas always had gambling the Mormons let the mob build it then had Harry Reid take it back and kick them out he is now the Senator. Or Head of the US Senate you don't come from the City and stake claim to the SouthWest

 

[1TWISTEDTRUCKER]

man I could spend hours reading this stuff.
Thanx 4 this thread Madjag, and thanx rbt, and Sforza 4 sharing Your stories of a much better past.

Only thing better would be to be sitting round a campfire, up one of those canyons listening to These epic tales.
I know they weren't so epic back then, just how Y'all were rolling way back when, in The Wild West.(or maybe it was)

Peace; 1TT

 

[Sforza]

the statement from Frank Sinatra. " YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE AND IF YOU LIVED IT LIKE ME ONCE IS ENOUGH" Salu Frank.

So true.

Thanks for the memories, RBT. I enjoyed reading about your experiences about the good old days in Arizona.

Or as Howlin' Wolf sung:

Man, you know I done enjoyed things
That Kings and Queens will never have
In fact, Kings and Queens can never get
And they don't even know about it and good times?
I have had my fun
If I'd never get well no more
I have had my fun
If I never get well no more
Oh, my health is fadin', oh
Oh yes, I'm goin' down slow
Now looky here, I did not say I was a millionaire
But I said I have spent more money than a millionaire
'Cause if I had kept all of the money I done already spent
I would've been a millionaire, a long time ago
And women? Great googly moogly
Please write, my mama
Tell her the shape I'm in
Please write, my mother
Tell her the shape I'm in
Tell her to pray for me
Forgive me for my sins