Yes, we're serious

As noise’s first marketing campaign, we are illegally shipping free doobies to anyone who replies to this newsletter within seven days.

We don’t care where you live, we will put a joint in an envelope and send it through the nationalized mail distribution system. If America is for anything, it’s for freedom, and what is freedom if you can’t subsidize the shipping of doobies with taxpayer money? Trust us, worse stuff has been transported in one of these bad boys:

Reply to this email with a shipping address. We will not label the envelope except with the address and a stamp.

We take your privacy seriously, so we won't publish your name and address. Even if we did, no one would care because, as we discussed last week, you're not the center of the universe.

Don't worry about the feds you can't get in trouble for this, because noise is sanctioned by the deep state itself.

Let us feed your crippling weed addiction, so you'll think of us next time you're blazin' it up on your balcony with your next door neighbors secretly watching from their living room.

◎[▪‿▪]◎ ◎[▪‿▪]◎

– ƴΐ⍧ի⍲e⌊ ⅋ yӭ𐦤⚇⍕⍑

Home Depot

The fundamental paradox of Home Depot is that it doesn't contain any homes 🤔

Home de Pot

The ancillary paradox of Home Depot is that while it does have pots for plants, it doesn't have pots that are plants. Like, weed.

Do be dubious

of the following quotes:

"To be or not to be?" –Hamlet
“To be is to do” –Socrates
“To do is to be” –Jean-Paul Sartre
“Do be do be do” –Frank Sinatra
"Doobie is doobie" –Richard Nixon

If you are dubious about listening to me about being dubious, you can feed your big brain with way more historical insights than you will ever need:

“To Be Is To Do” “To Do Is To Be” “Do Be Do Be Do” – Quote Investigator®

Quote Investigator® Tracing Quotations About the Website Search & Authors Resources Media Coverage Privacy Policy Cookie Policy Backquoteresearch

Yeah, I’m emotionally available

emotionally available to dissociate and avoid reality 💯

What does it mean to be emotionally available?

No one has ever complimented me that I was emotionally available. People only say someone is emotionally unavailable. I wasn't told that, maybe because I was so emotionally unavailable that my partner didn't even bother to mention it. Or maybe it's because I am emotionally available.

But what does it mean to be emotionally available? Is it like, having some extra emotions of love to share? Or like, having some emotional space to receive and share negative emotions?

On the Social Reinforcement of Chess Addiction

It's not that intellectual!

For about two years, between October 2020 and October 2022, I was hopelessly addicted to online chess. I could play dozens of chess.com and lichess.com games every day, they were a substitute for deliberate thought. It started with 10 minute rapid chess, which lead to 3 minute blitz chess, which lead to 1 minute bullet chess. In bullet chess, players each have one total minute to make all of their moves.

When you’re playing bullet chess, moves are intuitive and deliberate calculation is discarded. I found this to be an effective way to substitute difficult thoughts for mindless distraction. Difficult thoughts can be difficult in many dimensions, such as:

• Problem solving - How do I fix this programming bug?
• Emotional burden - I feel weird about that conversation I had earlier
• Long term planning - What would I like to be doing three months from now

For any of the above challenges, a little bit of reflection and mental exercise is required. When you live in bullet chess hell though, the response to all of these questions is to open up chess.com and play 5 games of bullet chess.

I was in a murky trance marked by overtones of doom, but I learned chess decently well. I improved my bullet chess rating on chess.com from 600 to 1400. Every one of those 800 points could be mapped to a score of things I should have thought through, should have sat down to consider, shouldn’t have left to logical purgatory while I took my bath in captured pawns and queens.

Have you ever found yourself mindlessly scrolling through social media, engaging with content? Swipe up for the next Tik Tok, press the button to see the comments, collapse a thread, expand one, bring back the feed, scroll to the next Tik Tok. These actions are automatic. It’s engaging enough to keep you focused but intuitive enough to allow your subconscious to take the wheel; a curse to mindfulness and reasoning.

Clearly this addiction was harmful in the same zombifying way that social media feels harmful, but there’s a key difference between social media addiction and chess addiction.

When you tell people you have a social media addiction, they don’t say things like, “Hey that’s a great intellectual hobby at least you’re keeping your mind sharp!”

Imagine choking on a piece of gum. In desperation, you run to a friend and plead for help. Elated, your friend pats you on the back and says, “That’s great man! I always wished I picked up choking. How long have you been practicing?”

By the end of my two year stint with chess, my mind was as dull as it had ever been. A mushy puddle of its former self, starved for gratification and lacking any semblance of an attention span. People who are good at chess are respected intellectually and I felt this when I played my friends and family. They looked at me in reverence when I displayed my awesome skills. Being good at chess was like being good at opening bottles in fun ways; impressive to many yet probably a symptom of a harmful habit.

For two years, I sacrificed my attention span to battle other semi-conscious humans logged in from somewhere on Earth. Chess was a way for me to forget about my little tasks, chores, and problems, then revel in the meandering light that passed through the shimmering veil that separated me from a clear perception of the world around me.

On the Origins of Doobie

Shrouded in dubiety

Doobie is a fun-sounding word. Try muttering it now and savor the delectable movement of your pouting lips and round sounds.

But why did it come to refer to a joint? Sure, it's fun-sounding as the experience of smoking a joint, but there's plenty of other fun things that could claim this fun-sounding word. For examples, just by flipping the first letter, boobies could easily been called doobies. So how did it become to mean a joint?

OED thinks:

doobie: a marijuana cigarette
Origin unknown. A relationship with dobby has been suggested.
dobby/dobbie: A silly old man, a dotard, a booby. Dialectal.

First citations:
1967 J. B. Williams Narcotics & Hallucinogenics. Dubbe, Negro slang for a marijuana roach.
1982 A. Maupin Further Tales of City 95, I smoke a doobie at lunch.

A commenter on Merriam-Webster (who comments on dictionaries?) thinks:

...The inspiration came, yes, from a TV show but one called Romper Room. The show went on air from 1953 to 1994 and one of its stars was a bee who taught good manners to very young children. His name was Mr. Doo-Bee.

A recurring character was Mr. Do-Bee, an oversized bumblebee who came to teach the children proper deportment; he was noted for always starting his sentence with "Do Bee", as in the imperative "Do be"; for example, "Do Bee good boys and girls for your parents!" There was also a "Mr. Don't Bee" to show children exactly what they should not do...

What kind of bee would talk to children, let alone begin their sentences with their last name? Regardless, the bullshit theorizing continues:

From Do-Bee to doobie the path leading to the spelling variation was brief; the temptation to ridicule, trivialise and rebel against those very ideals which the US show represented must have been overwhelming for those American teenagers and youngsters. It's therefore quite possible that the slang for marijuana, doobie, was meant as an ironic and sardonic comment on how they, hippies and stoners, were behaving themselves.

Whenever anyone says "it's quite possible," you know that they're bullshitting. The origins are so doobieous, that at this point, why not take the words of e-juice maker spending his spare time on Quora?

As with most vernaculars, we basically will never know the truth. Maybe it was the silly dobbie, who happened to be black and smoking a dubbe, revolting against Mr. Do-Bee, dancing to the Doobie Brothers tune.

All of this doesn't help, but at least you learned that dubiety is a word – and perhaps a word that's more fun to say that doobie. Go ahead, say it.

Regardless of the dubious origins of doobies, you can get one by replying to this email.

sound.wav

R.L. Burnside never got the recognition he deserved during his prime. The soul, the skill, the raw culture, everything about this video is wonderful. Get yer blues on.

Frank Sinatra got ever more attention than he deserved during his lifetime. He smoked all the time and he honestly wasn't that good of a singer. In this following track, he famously scats, "do be do be do". That's a very basic sound to make. Why does he get all the credit?

prompts.bib

• 𝕮𝖔𝖛𝖊𝖗: A Stoner and His Mail /imagine a stoner mailman picking up a weathered envelope from a rusty mailbox:: photorealistic hippie stoner mailman picking up an envelope:: dslr 8k 4k lens::0.3 --v 5.2
• 𝖆𝖗𝐭𝖎𝖋𝖆𝐜𝐭 1: Chess, by Dali
  /imagine chess pieces flying around a depressed person in a sweatshirt:: a dali like depiction of an abstract chess landscape:: oil painting dali chess man in sweatshirt surrounded by flying pieces --v 5.2
• 𝖆𝖗𝐭𝖎𝖋𝖆𝐜𝐭 2: Your Brain on Chess
  /imagine Brain plugged into a chess machine:: photorealistic futuristic rendering 4k::0.3 a person who is plugged into a chess machine through their brain:: mind control::0.1 --v 5.2
• 𝖆𝖗𝐭𝖎𝖋𝖆𝐜𝐭 3: Mr. Doo-be
  /imagine Mr. Do-bee, a jazz bee from 1960s that teaches manners:: Mr. Doo-bee is shrouded in smoky mystery --remix Covered in smoke, jazz bee smoking a joint

Doobie so kind and email me, eh, kiddo?