Ray was not a person who had much patience for drug users. I believe he may have mentioned roving death squads as a solution to the drug problem on more than one occasion. He was not someone who I thought would ever use weed or advocate using weed. Well, cancer changes everything.
“How are ya, mang?”
“I am so fucking high right now. I ate all the gummies.”
“Cannabis ones?”
“The best kind.”
Not the type of conversation I had ever expected to have with Ray, but that was before the pain of bone cancer came along. It was a deep, evil sort of agony that the pain meds themselves barely touched. It’s sad when they can nuke you with morphine to the point where your breathing is depressed, but the pain is not. He compensated with cannabis as it helped some. Not a lot, but some.
Whenever I see a weed shop now, I think of Ray and his horrible struggle with pain management. It’s depressing.
In other news, I have a new (to me) camera. Ray graciously left me his beloved Canon EOS 7D. I will have more to say about it this weekend, but I did take it for a quick stroll in the skeevy neighbourhood (complete with weed shops) around the downtown hotel my wife and I were staying in. It was slim pickings photographically, to be sure.
It was wonderful to hold and use Ray’s camera. It’s nice to have some connection back to him, it’s a good high for me.
Today’s images made using a Canon EOS 7D, circa 2009, and a a Canon 17-85 EF-S IS USM f4-5.6 lens.
