Today is an underground holiday, of sorts. Nobody knows when it started, or how it started, but, I assure you, more people than you can imagine will partake in it.
“Four Twenty” (or 4:20 or 4/20) is something of an urban legend, (sub)cultural joke, and community-building practice all rolled into one. (Hehehehe, he said “rolled.”) For those of you who don’t know (and, really, if you found this, you do) it refers to a time of day (and, annually, a day of the year) when people are supposed to get high by smoking or otherwise consuming marijuana.
Depending on the generation “observing” the feast, it has been alternately a form of collective political rebellion (thumbing one’s nose at a law prohibiting the very celebration in question); a mark of a distinctive generational status (“we” get high but “they” didn’t); and a form of nurturing an “imagined” community (no matter where you are, if you get high at 4:20 or at 4:20 on 4/20 then you are not getting high alone).
As with any cultural phenomena based more on rumor and humor than on any single historical event, there’s no particular reason for this. Legend has it that 4-20 is the part of the criminal code somewhere which makes smoking pot a crime. It’s not, but that doesn’t stop the story from being told from one generation to the next. Others have (more recently) linked it to urban legends about happenings at high schools (the time detention got out at one; the locker number of where one dealt the contraband at another). I suspect the events at Columbine in 1999 may have had something to do with linking it in the collective memory to some kind of high school rebellion, but those rumors, too, are just that.
The tradition continues, however, as it probably will for the, well, forever. As somebody who works on a college campus, I am never surprised to see the “next” generation’s participation in this version of “pot culture.” Ten years from now, most of those doing what they’re doing, will either be non-smokers remembering their youthful indiscretions, teetotalers trying to get the “drugs away from our children,” or addicts.
Which will you be? Huh? Yeah, I’m talking to you. Imagine that! Me! Talking to you!! And we’ve never even met!!! And you’re just sitting there, at your computer, with all that belly-button lint!! And I’m using so many exclamation marks! Did you ever notice how that word was spelled: e-x-c-l-a-m-a-t-i-o-n. The word “clam” is in there? And “mation”! My god, I have to Google search “mation”!!
But, today, they were people who alter their mental state by imbibing an herb that modern U.S. society has decided to criminalize.
And now, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, Broadway legend CAROL CHANNING!!!!
At first I thought this was a picture of my uncle wandering around because he lost the remote control, again. (Tío Bill! Barney Miller hasn’t been on for years!) But then I looked closer.
I’m telling you, the Cyberdyne Systems 101 models just don’t hold up well over time. I think we should trade in our T-850 for a T-1000, at least, glitches and all.
p.s. Interesting that his name includes the words “war,” “zen,” and “egg.” Coincidence??
My apologies for a post related to nothing but this blog, but…
I took a look at my blog stats today and noticed that two posts I wrote on the fly as “funny” pieces have now registered more hits than almost all of the thoughtful posts I spend lots of time thinking about and composing. Why? Well, about half of the daily visitors to this blog (about 150 or so) find it via the search terms “marijuana” and “smoke marijuana.” A few find it by typing in the words “erik estrada.”
I don’t know what this says about the world, this blog, or me, but so it is. That makes my post on Michael Phelps’ bong incident the most popular post ever on Latino Like Me. Two short but significant (to me, at least) posts are numbers two and three: last summer’s hate crime in Shenandoah (PA) holds on to the number 2 spot, while the question “Hispanic vs. Latino: What’s in a Name?“comes in third. (And that last one was really just a hat tip to the insightful post by Daniel Cubias at the HuffingtonPost.) But this is the weird thing. For some reason, Erik Estrada’s escapades in Muncie, Indiana are starting to propel that post upwards, with a bullet.
I guess I understand the blog traffic due to pot. It’s just funny that, assuming this rate doesn’t change much, in a year or so more people will have visited my blog for the one post about pot than for all the other posts combined. The murder of Luis Ramirez and the “identity question” are also understandable (questions seeking clarification on the terms “Hispanic,” “Latino,” and “Chicano” are my favorite to tackle on Yahoo Answers). But what is up with Ponch?
I’m working on a section of my book-in-progress today, which is a history of Latin American-descent populations in San Francisco and I just came across an account of Oscar Wilde’s 1882 visit to the city.
He stepped off his train on March 26, 1882, wearing “a Spanish sombrero, velvet suit, puce cravat, yellow gloves, and buckled shoes.”
I am rather confident this was not the last time this outfit made a public appearance in the city.
This image–from the March 31, 1882 issue of Wasp–suggests how some in this bohemian paradise saw the figure of Wilde, in all its gloriousness. You can learn a bit more about his visit here.
A long time ago, I gave up lent for lent, and I’ve never looked back. But I realize many of you out there are devout Catholics who are now spending your first day abstaining from something you probably shouldn’t have been eating, doing, or touching anyway. This post is for you.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent most of your life trying to do two things: 1) find a non-gamma ray related way to turn into the Hulk; and 2) find out just what music Mariska Hargitay listens to while working out.
Well, the search is over. No, not that one. Thanks to Self (the magazine made both for women who want to be fit and 12-year-old boys who love B-list stars in their bikinis), we can finally crack that Hargitay mystery. Here is the music “that keeps her moving.”
LATINO LIKE ME 