What If Chihuly Signs It?

Let's talk about bongs and insane drug-paraphernalia convictions!

I have never used a bong. I'm not even sure I know what a bong is exactly. But I love saying the word bong, and I know I'm not alone in that.

It often surprises people to look at me and hear me say that I have never used a bong. But there are two good reasons. One, all my hippy friends in the sixties and seventies had plenty of rolling papers. And two, I've never liked marijuana anyway. It makes me cough my lungs up and by the time it gets me high I'm too sick to enjoy it.

Still, I'm of the age to have had all those hippy friends, and yes, my children, I did inhale. Just not from a bong.

But I've looked at a lot of them. Some are very artistic. I've learned a little from looking at them. As best as I can tell, they are pot-smoke delivery systems. That, I believe, is a principal defining characteristic of a bong.

The other thing that I have learned from looking at bongs is that you don't need to buy one to smoke pot. Let's say worse comes to worse and you are desperate for a toke from a bong. I have learned that all you need to do is procure an ordinary legal pipe for smoking tobacco and make minor adjustments to it, and that will do just as well.

Because of all that, and the ready availability of the afore-mentioned rolling papers, I am absolutely certain that no-one has ever failed to smoke pot due to an inability to buy artfully crafted bongs on the Internet.

Can you imagine someone saying, "Oh golly, now that Tommy Chong has gone to federal prison for making and selling glass bongs on the Internet, I can't buy his wonderful glass bongs, and therefore I won't smoke any of this evil grass that I have purchased on the black market through other sources?"

Let me be clear on this. I don't know what Chong's bongs look like. I don't know that they are as artistic as they've been made out to be. I don't know that Chong himself ever had anything to do with making them either. All I know is he lent his name to the selling of bongs and the feds busted him for it and he's gone to prison for what could be nine months, barring an appeal, and that's totally insane.

Let's suppose the public service ads are true and that smoking marijuana kills people like flies in a zapper. It would still be the marijuana that did it, not the bongs.

So why do we have a law against selling bongs? Because this whole country has gone freaking bat-spit nuts, that's why.

It's gotten so that I don't even have to look for absurdity anymore, it finds me.

For the last two years the administration has been telling me that the most important thing in the world for Americans to worry about is this country's security. Because of the need for security we had to go to war against two other countries. We had to pass a law making it legal to wiretap anybody and never tell them we did it or why.

We've always been told, at least since the Truman administration, that one of our needs for security is the need for good intelligence as specifically provided by the CIA and its undercover agents. And by the way, if they're undercover, it's for our blessed safety as a nation, right?

But when a right-wing columnist outs a CIA agent the Justice Department looks the other way for months, even though our security has presumably been harmed by it.

Meanwhile an old comedian gets nine months for capitalizing on a stale joke. I wouldn't mind so much if they'd just stop lying and telling me it's for my own good.

Nuke Daddy Was Jerk

Last week Edward Teller died, and I was reminded what a truly monumentally shallow guy I am.

You should all know who Edward Teller was. In case you've forgotten, he was the so-called father of the H-bomb who may also end up being called the father of the forthcoming anti-missile system. Either of those two facts would make him an extremely important figure in modern history, but what do I think about him? I'll tell you what I think about him. I think he didn't have good manners. That's what I think about him.

It's all because I'm so incredibly shallow and the fact that I only care about what happens to me.

OK, that's not entirely true. I am interested in the events in Liberia, even though I have never been there and have no personal connection to the place. But, on the other hand, would I be so interested if the new president there wasn't named President Blah? I think not. So that example only proves again how shallow I am.

I am so shallow, I am more interested in how shallow I am than I am in whether Seattle gets an espresso tax or not, or whether the police will make marijuana use a higher or lower priority than unlicensed flag pole sitting, for example.

I am so shallow that yesterday when I was talking to someone about Issaquah I got wrapped up in trying to guess what people from Issaquah should call themselves and it ended up being the high point of my day. You know, if you're from Seattle you're a Seattleite, if you're from New York you're a New Yorker, if you're from San Francisco you're a San Franciscan, if you're from North Bend, you're a Bender. What are you if you're from Issaquah? An Issaquant? An Issaquator? I didn't really want to know, I just wanted to make up answers for an hour or two, but the guy I was talking to got annoyed and shut me up after a minute.

That sort of thing happens a lot when you're as shallow as I am.

One time in college I was required to take a physics lab course. They gave me things like Bunsen burners and oscilloscopes and expected me to perform serious physics experiments with them and prove that I could be the next Edward Teller. Instead I set fire to stuff and tried to make cool designs on the oscilloscope screens. Later they let me at an air table, one of those tables where you can slide things around almost without friction. I took the hockey pucks they provided and crashed them repeatedly into each other. It was great until one of them flew off the table and nearly beaned the lab instructor. Boy, what a snoot he turned out to be. You'd think I had nuked a city or something.

Speaking of nuking cities, did I mention that Edward Teller also had a hand in getting Roosevelt to set up the Manhattan Project? So he wasn't just the H-bomb daddy, but he was also kind of at least a godparent to the regular A-bomb. Talk about your weapons of mass destruction.

But I'm so shallow I won't even try to judge Teller for that. Nor would I try to judge him for any of his other well-known traits, such as that he was a good piano player, or that he kicked ass at table tennis, or that he was a great teacher.

One night years ago, at a time when Teller was in Seattle promoting his anti-missile ideas, I was homeless and happened to be walking dejectedly along a path on the UW campus when a group of five or six men in suits came charging straight toward me shoulder to shoulder. I was in danger of being run over. I had no time to get out of the way. But the guy in the middle of the pack, the one with the bushy eyebrows, looked me right in the eye and yelled, "GET OUT OF MY WAY!!"

It was Teller. Fortunately the reporter following next to him separated from Teller at the last minute so they could pass around me.

Now, finally, Teller himself is stepping aside for all the rest of us, too late.