Dear Readers,
It’s a spectacular Midwestern morning. I’m on my porch drinking yerba mate. Many thanks to Julia Sarreal for her great book on the subject, which provided the inspiration.
Mate’s caffeine content lies somewhere between black tea and coffee, depending on how you brew it. I’ve been drinking one cup of mate followed by a cup or two of white tea, which has just a touch of caffeine, and my insomnia has pretty much disappeared.
As a great statesman once said: “A man has got to know his limitations,” and I think I’ve discovered mine—I can’t drink coffee regularly.
Which is fine. I like yerba mate. It’s good.
But I’ve learned that you really do have to follow the somewhat baroque brewing procedures that you read about online, i.e., soak your mate in cold water for at least five minutes before adding the 175°F H2O. Yesterday I tried it without the soaking—“This is kind of a pain in the ass. Is it really necessary?—and the difference was obvious. You’ve got to soak your mate, people.
Wait a second . . . . I’ve got breaking news!!!
My daughter came out to enjoy her breakfast on the porch, and look what we’ve just discovered in our maple tree:
A freaking hummingbird nest! Exactly in line of sight from my normal writing spot!!
I haven’t been out here much for the last couple of weeks as I’ve been either out of town or laid up with a bad back, so I’m not sure when this little bird built that nest, but there it is. Gorgeous.
Ok, shall we get back to business?
How about another draft from my book chapter on Reefer Madness? If you missed last week’s post, I recommend starting there, as this is a continuation of that story. Today’s excerpt pairs beautifully with yerba mate because it includes a sidebar on Jorge Luis Borges.
Borges was of course Argentine, and mate is that country’s national beverage. Borges even enjoyed mate in his youth: “I drank a lot of mate when I was young. Drinking mate was, for me, the way to feel like a creole of old.”
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And, yes, Borges is somehow relevant to the utterly absurd film Reefer Madness. I swear.
I don’t know how a potential publisher will feel about a sidebar, but it seems to me the best way to include the Borges bit. Though maybe I’m wrong about that. I’m not sure. That’s what editors are for. But I’ll include the sidebar here as a block quote roughly where I’d want it to appear in the book. Enjoy.
Reefer Madness and the Political Utility of Conspiracy Theories, Part II
“Reefer madness.”
You’ve surely heard the phrase, which derives from the 1930s film of the same name. Though it’s very unlikely that someone would’ve heard it prior to 1971, which was the year that Keith Stroup, the founder of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML, re-released the film and in the process made both the movie and phrase famous. Indeed, his actions radically transformed the meaning of both in a classic example of the present influencing the past, and vice versa.
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