Medical Marijuana, Anyone?
An LA street near Venice Beach
Sunday the 14th I spent in Los Angeles, more specifically at Venice Beach. It was, overall, quite an odd experience, although one that I’m glad I had. As I’ve mentioned, I had never really been to California before, except for in airports, which hardly count. I only had one full day in LA, but wanted to at least see something of the real thing as opposed to just the neighborhood around my hotel.
Venice Beach
Hollywood seemed a bit far and involved to try to get to, but Venice beach was only a 15-minute-or-so bus ride away, and it was someplace I had at least heard the name of before, so I decided to go for it. I had no idea what to expect, really, but I think it’s safe to say that what I encountered was very much a surprise and a new experience. As is the case with some touristy beaches, the walkway that ran along the beach was filled with small shops selling souvenirs and renting bikes.
Some features set Venice Beach apart, however, namely the medical marijuana shops. California is a state in which medical marijuana is legal. (In looking up information to see how many other states have a similar policy, I discovered the Maine actually also allows medical marijuana possession. ) At Venice Beach this has led to the development of shops explicitly in the business of providing “prescriptions.”
Walk in Medical Clinic... hm.
Employees stand on the street with signs advertising that “the doctor is in” and trying to encourage passers by to come in and claim a condition for which medical marijuana could be considered helpful (“sports injuries, auto accidents, stress, anxiety, insomnia, asthma, cancer, aids, or any illness for which marijuana provides relief,” according to the business card I was handed by one guy with a lei made of plastic pot leaves around his neck). It definitely was a world apart.
Further down the beach was a drum circle of people pounding randomly on various instruments and dancing. This group, I took it, had been recent patrons of the “Walk in Medical Clinic,” and several also sported wine and prescription pill bottles.
Muscle Beach, Venice Beach, CA
In another area was Muscle Beach, the famous outdoor gym where Arnold and Gold (of Gold’s Gym) famously trained back in the day. There were few people there actually using the weights when I passed by, but it was funny to see the landmark nonetheless.
There was, of course, also the beach. It was very pretty, but nothing special compared to the places on the Australian coast where I had recently visited. The phenomenon that was the surrounding town was much more captivating to me. I spent some time overlooking the skate park, where kids, some of them still probably only 12 or 13 years old, skateboarded fearlessly over the lips of deep bowls and around the curved edges of the course. This was quite an entertaining spectacle; the local skate park in Portland, Maine, doesn’t really have such a crowd of both skaters and spectators on a given Sunday. Of interest, too, were the roller skaters. A group of men and women, mostly in their middle ages, skated around to loud rhythmic music, doing dance moves and spins on their skates with surprising and impressive grace.
Skaters
The entire scene appeared rather as if the late 70′s had been paused and then suddenly resumed again, forty years later, with few changes except for the ages of the skaters and the pot-heads.
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On the morning of Monday the 15th, I was stressed out about having too much stuff. In general, I dislike having too much stuff, and occasionally I actually have, legitimately, too much stuff for a given situation. At my hotel in LA I received a package from my parents containing some things I needed for Red Rocks, which meant that all together I had way too much, including gear, clothes for every possible occasion, two sleeping bags, books, and miscellaneous other things. I planned to send a package or two of extraneous stuff back, but still hadn’t figured out exactly how I was going to manage that between postal services opening at 8 am and getting to my 10:50 flight.
I ate breakfast at 7 at the lovely diner near my hotel, then hemmed and hawed about whether to send the packages from the post office at the airport (requiring me to deal with all my stuff at once and navigate the airport with it in tow) or try to make it to the UPS store and back in time to catch a shuttle from the hotel to the airport. Looking online again to try to find out exactly where in the airport the post office was, I discovered that there wasn’t actually one inside the airport, just reasonably nearby. I decided to go to UPS but now had only about a half hour to get there, send the stuff, and return. I called my mom, as I am wont to do when I’m freaking out about such things, and she advised me to take a taxi to the store instead of the bus, since I didn’t know how long I would have to wait for a bus or how long it would take me to walk form the closest stop to the store. I realized that I’ve only taken a few taxis in my life, and balked at the price, but the UPS ended up being a less expensive way of sending the parcels anyway. With a decent window of time at my disposal and no desire to call a cab, wait for it to arrive, and then pay $10, I walked along the street toward the intersection where I could catch the bus. As I did so, a bus passed me and prepared to turn left onto the street I was approaching. I quickly realized this was the bus I wanted to catch, and sprinted to the corner, through the intersection, and into the short line of people queuing to get on board. I made it! This small victory of having sent my packages and caught a bus back to my hotel made my day.
The lines for check in, passport-checking, and security screening were long, but the flight itself, from LA to Vegas, was incredibly short.
