What would a 71-year old singer-songwriter, cannabis activist and dedicated anti-authoritarian, be doing on a platform like this?

Well, my son’s (@vandigital) on here, and he’s a superb Hip-Hop writer, rapper and crypto guy, with a fine grasp of all things blockchain. Together, we decided I might be able to ‘stand out’, as I’m told you must to nudge the community into noticing you, by claiming to be the oldest regular Steemit user. That certainly looks from my browsing as if it could be true. But I’ll stop just short of pulling a Full Trump by claiming I definitely am the oldest, and let the community tell me if it’s true or not.

As even the stars of the genre will tell you, making a decent living writing and performing roots music is unlikely be a smart career choice. So, while that’s the work I most enjoy, I have often had to make my living writing advertising and feature film scripts, writing and producing documentary films for broadcast TV, and for the past 14 years, working in, and militating on behalf of, the so-called ‘emerging Canadian cannabis industry’. From the apostrophes, you’ll likely guess, correctly, that I don’t much like that industry. After 51 years of pretty much daily cannabis consumption, I’ve come to the conclusion that all the cannabis industry will ever do is put the plant in prison, rather than putting the people who use it in there. Although if patients and users don’t buy from the oligarchs who now control the industry, they will still end up in prison along with the plant.

Besides writing, performing and recording roots music, while also getting well and truly stuck right into cannabis activism, I’m interested in radical liberation politics, the gender wars, defeating authoritarians around the globe, painting and sculpture, Tottenham Hotspur, the Toronto Maple Leafs, travel, cooking and philosophy – in which subject I hold a handful of utterly useless degrees. Well, they’re useless unless you like to think. So I find myself here with the intention of staying as close as I can to being fully in touch with the world around me as it changes, and changes again. I hope that in some small way I can contribute to building this particular community of thinking, feeling, idealistic people who don’t take shit from anyone, and who support and promote independence from all authority except what they personally agree to honour. That’s my story.

Want to hear more? Visit: http://www.hallamhighwater.com

Still learning how to use this site. Comments very welcome, unless they're, um, ageist. Thanks for reading if you got this far.