MOCKOB, 30 August 2004

RASTA

A youngster hailed me a couple days ago: "Rasta", and some other term of endearment, which I have forgotten. I was happy to represent and acknowledged. A beard and a red-green-yellow-black tam is really asking to be seen as a Rasta, isn't it.

I've been on the planet so long that, to quote Yankee baseball sage Yogi Berra, it's like deja vu all over again.

I recall, several years ago in Toledo, Spain, a young schoolboy showing me his wristband with the "African" colors, and asking me if I smoked marijuana. Of course, I have, and inhaled so intensely on one occasion, in my mid-teens, that I had to leave the yard where I had been smoking with my girlfriend's brother, and go lie down on her bed. Somebody brought me tea, or soup, I forget.

Of course, the right-wing thinkers are right. I had graduated from smoking newspaper, brown paper, dried fern sticks, and dried susumber stalks, through Craven A and marijuana. Just for the hell of it. Asked why he climbed the mountain, somebody said: "Because it was there." Ditto, my smoking all that stuff. Newspaper lying all around; bound to lead to marijuana.

My knowledge of Spanish did not enable me to have a good conversation with the youngster, who was glad to make the acquaintance of a guy from Bob Marley country.

Starting smoking that young, you are lucky if you get to the point where you cannot even stand to be near a smoker.

Patrick Barry Barr