by Travis Mateer

Since I’m not a very patient person, the idea of having to wait for the thinning of the veil in order to interact with the living sounds obnoxious. Even worse for the dead, Missoula decided to stop its collective honoring of the departed NOT because of the pandemic, so the last few years must have been pretty boring for any spirits who recall the vibrant years of Missoula’s decades-old tradition.

While it wasn’t anywhere close to the long processional of years past, it was great to see the Festival of the Dead return last night, so a BIG thank you to the organizers for getting this going again and fielding those antagonistic phone calls.

One of the benefits of not being dead is that no one needs a ouija board to communicate with me. These amazing phone devices we carry around with us everywhere are AMAZING for having conversations. In fact, I’ve had several conversations just in the last few days, so I know my phone is operational and ready to facilitate MORE great conversations.

Though I myself am not dead, many of my conversations are about dead people, and that’s because dead people don’t have phones, or even mouths, so conversations are much more difficult for them to have (though not impossible). And where should one go to talk to a live person about dead people? The Montana Crime Lab, of course!

The man standing by all those things known for turning alive people into dead people was very generous with his time yesterday as I inquired about death data and whether or not the State of Montana has any good death data on indigent deaths, or overdose deaths, or Guy Baker investigated deaths. No on all three, darn!

I haven’t chatted with Travis Spinder since his very competent crime lab handled the corpse of Rebekah Barsotti, so after getting no insights into death data, I gave Mr. Spinder ALL KINDS of insights into the very fascinating work I’m doing on SO MANY dead people. How many dead people? At this point, I don’t even know, but Crime Lab Travis sure seemed entertained by what Journalist Travis was saying. I think it’s because I’m so damn hilarious.

My communication device connected me to even more interesting alive people yesterday, like the Council candidate who produced this:

I gave this candidate a crash course in ME, then told her about a famous Guy I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. No, not in a gay way, but more like a firm grip on those coattails kind of way, since I’m famous enough to be a limited purpose public figure, but not famous enough to sit at the cool kids podcast table.

Can dead people smoke weed? No, maybe play with wafting tendrils of smoke, but without lungs, taking monster hits of a nice Sativa is definitely not dead people behavior.

One of the benefits of not being dead is alive people get to engage in commerce. Or is that a curse? Regardless, we supposedly have an economic system called “Capitalism”, and how this Capitalism is working within the Montana Cannabis industry is fascinating and hilarious.

As the Cannabis industry regulator, the state of Montana has been a veritable shit-show of tea-leaf interpretation when it comes to applying policy. When you consider the wide spectrum of business acumen of former black-market weed dealers, the challenges are obvious.

Now that enough businesses have been given enough rope to end their entrepreneurial dreams, who is capitalizing on snatching up FOR SALE storefronts? From what I’m learning, the big mover and shaker in the industry IS Bloom, and the moves being made have created a potential marketing problem. Let me explain.

To avoid a possible backlash of being SEEN proliferating the Bloom brand too quickly across the state, some curious moves are being made to occlude Bloom ownership of dispensaries, but a kind person demonstrated how, with the state database, Bloom-owned dispensaries can be identified. Too funny.

Yes, there are many benefits to not being dead, and maybe one day I’ll experience one of the most fun not dead experiences we humans get to have down here, because you can’t have death without the act of making life, know what I mean?

If you appreciate my tenacity amidst incredible stress and mounting disappointment, money is the best way to currently show me that appreciation, so direct monetary love at Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF), or you can finger my button at the about page.

Thanks for reading!