Trip report

[Nachtschattenreich]

"As to Prohibition, every one knows what a farce it really is. Like all other achievements of Puritanism it, too, has but driven the ´devil´ deeper into the human system. Nowhere else does one meet so many drunkards as in our Prohibition towns. But so long as one can use scented candy to abate the foul breath of hypocrisy, Puritanism is triumphant. Ostensibly Prohibition is opposed to liquor for reasons of health and economy, but the very spirit of Prohibition being itself abnormal, it succeeds but in creating an abnormal life." - Emma Goldman, 1917: The Hypocrisy of Puritanism

One characteristic of the Bavarian region of Germany is that in this place there is no black market that could be easily accessed by anyone familiar with the neighborhood. Black market access requires personal recommendations since current police tactics do not allow for loose business contacts. Even if you do not waste the High for driving your Cannabis puts your driving license at risk. Some force in some of the police is permanently afflicted with parasitic fears, they literally achieve meaning in their lifes from the enforcement of prohibition.* One could nearly forget that this is the same country that produced the consumerist standards of the Hanse.

The lust for sterile gardening of our Northwestern neighbours is just as notorious as the standardised imbiss of the North American revolutionaries, or the fascinating sex industry of the cultures of Asia. Every German kid gets it served with the breakfast. It is horrible for tomatoes, mildly interesting for Cannabis, and perfect for mushrooms. If their great ports did not bring in Natural herbs from the rest of the world as well, it may be too isolated a quality to satisfy an ambitioned mind. It was interesting to see several salespeople literally flower up when I asked them whether their offer had seen the sun. But the Netherlands are the country of the winds. Preferrably headwinds.

I am not certain to which extent the rest of the world is aware that the Netherlands after the murder of Theodor van Gogh at the peak of the United Nations crisis in late 2004 will never be the same again. The wound ripped by this knife is still infected with spiritual fears that have permanently enforced a common ballast of mistrust upon the society. A salesman displaying a wellgrown lasiodora parahybana in a terrarium told me that individual city councils would require businessmen to routinely ask their customers to wave passports, and he saw it as one sign that his society was being encirceled by waves of fear. Still he displayed his prices in U.S. dollars as well. He accepted my driving license instead.

But lets walk through this one step at a time. This is my report of a Cannabis shopping trip to Maastricht, the capital of the nearly Belgian Southern region of the Netherlands where you can walk into a pralines shop and find a personal recommendation from former U.S. President Ronald Reagan for the products during the Byzantine waiting ritual. From central Germany, Maastricht is the closest city with a Coffeeshop market large enough to be not bothered by the 5 gramms per capita and day sales maximum that is prescribed in the legal compromise that makes the Coffeeshop system possbile in the first place. In a shopping afternoon you can safely make an investment that allows to push the additional costs for renting a car and bribing the oil sheiks below a reasonable percentage of the actual Cannabis spending.

Just that you can fly below the radar does not mean that you must necessarily land on Red Square. I contemplated upon the fact that in any possible encounter with prohibitionist agents policing the Autobahn system the first ten seconds of sensoric input to them would be most decivise for their decision whether to dig into my cargo or not. Encounters with agents are 90% psychology 10% acting. Would I have to teach them that my faith is a great help to distinguish the righteous from the lawful where necessary? At the first opportunity the agent stops snapping ask whether you can expect a free road in your basic direction. That would also mean that besides an half-empty welcome pipe to Maastricht I was not to try my cargo in front of the eyes of the salespeople. First the work then the pleasure, as the saying goes. Work in this case means reentry into Germany.

It was also my first opportunity to plug an mp3 player into a car soundsystem. I listened to podcasts about the legal situation of Judaea and Samaria*, homophobia in the Jamaican dancehall culture*, political campaigning on the beaches of San Francisco*, North Korean weapons of mass destruction*, and of the Papal Visit to Bavaria 2006* while I was playing the machinegame with my own life, giving tailgate rowdies the indicator once in a while. From the theological view it may be interesting to note that those kids out there on the internet as the source of the ego problem in Rastafarianism identify the fact that it has Christian roots, and Paulus of Damascus gets a specific mentioning. The Mohammed of the Greeks has long come into contradiction to our ambition to preserve the good of the pre-Christian cultures in the identity of a Christian Europe.

The Rastafarian shop would have a flashy neon light that would make Cannabis and tobacco appear in the same colour. I have never developed much respect of Haile Selassie, but I bet with the assumption that he cannot have been worse than Benito Mussolini. Still, the little Italian car drove well through heavy weather. I urge all of you to contemplate the full implications of the fact that the trip I did was only the upper two third of what an Austrian would have to plan for in an according situation. Austria is home to the United Nations' last responsible mind on issues of Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Elbaradei at one point poignantly explained that all he needed for the job he had learned in kindergarten.* He is not a Rastafarian though. There also are some other Africans who are not as well.

A number of professional salespeople in the Coffeeshops told me in virtual consensus that the introduction of the passport waving ritual was largely seen as a dooropener for bureaucratic restrictions amidst general political pessimism. Severe suspicions whether this may be not really be serious preemption of disorganised encounters with police agents on the Autobahn system remain. So do some profound doubts in the sanity of the Rastafarian minds, specifically on issues of demography. A free society will always produce families of vastly different sizes, while the Chinese experience teaches us that a standard family size will make a society inherently boring. The assumption that a demographically pluralistic society in the overall average could never reproduce above a 2.0 rate does not derive from any reasonable ground.

After I had brought back the rented car within the 24h contract period, I needed a day of recovery to wash off the stress in a bathtub. I have not imagined in detail how I would have dealt with the Autobahn jetlag in the case would some paranoid government officials have robbed me of my cargo. My Intent remained focused on a more realistic outcome. I have put those mushrooms into the fridge. I am certain that when I am going to take them I will very well remember the circumstances of how I achieved them. The lasiodora parahybana also had some mushrooms in its terrarium, and you could easily see that it had taken little noshes of them in a regular fashion. The Cannabis already accompanied me in writing this report.