As a stoner, I have probably smoked more unnecessary dust, leaves, pubic hairs and tiny pieces of carpet fabric as a result of crawling around on the floor trying to pick up one's stash after opening the bag the wrong end up, or tipping over the open jar from rolling around on the bed too much.
As a San Franciscan (urbanite, not monk), I have seen more crack heads crouched down on the ground literally fingering the cracks of the sidewalks... for crack. I'd imagine they've smoked a lot worse things than excessive pubic hairs with such habits.
My dear friend Christopia and I once spent a stoned hour looking around my room for a suitable photo of me so he could take a picture of it on his cell phone so he could use it as my caller-ID pic. It never dawned on us that I was right there and he could just snap a picture of the real life RD.
While busking in downtown San Francisco, a cracked out sunbeam became my biggest fan, and started doing the “I just smoked all my crack” dance, for which I turned on the “space effect” on my amp. He then took his shoes off, left them in front of me, and walked into a pay-for-potty stall on the sidewalk, and never walked out.
In March of 1997 in San Diego, the bodies of all members of the Heaven's Gate UFO-religion were found after everyone had taken an ample supply of phenobarbital and vodka. Their goal was to meet up with the spaceship following the Hale-Bopp comet. In all the media reports, the focus was solely on the concept of “cult suicides.” No one bothered to ask, what if they made it? What if upon further inspection, we find a spaceship in the tail-lands of Hale-Bopp with a bunch of Marshal Applewhites having a grand old time?
The laws of physics which govern our minds and text books says that when a fellow by the name of Isaac Newton observed an apple falling from a tree, he realized all matter attracts matter, and by nature, it tries to get together. Yet that couldn't account for how the atoms that make up everything in our universe stay in orbit around each other, and don't come violently crashing into one another. Since the days of Einstein, scientists have been working hard to figure out what laws are governing the atoms, and what they are discovering is that matter may not even be here at all.
My mom, an avid meditator, once told me about a meditation she had recently gone through, where she felt her entire body levitate, her limbs expanded like rubber bands, and every sensation in every part of her body became extremely amplified. She blissed out on the gorgeous colors and sounds for hours. I quickly went to my journals and found the account I wrote of my first stoner experience, in which I had described the exact same trip.
Syd Barrett was the flamboyant founding member of Pink Floyd, who was forced out of the band before they became “Pink Floyd,” the mega-stars, mostly due to his mental incapacitation. During the recording the band's epic masterpiece, Wish You Were Here, which in fact was in reference to the long departed Barrett, Barrett actually showed up at the studio completely unannounced. No one had seen him for years, and at first, people didn't recognize the balding chubby character that had wondered in. According to legend, he just kept getting up to go brush his teeth.
In the Syd Barrett-movie in my head, when he “burnt out,” somewhere on their first American tour, supporting Jimi Hendrix, he actually joined a different Pink Floyd, one that existed on the plains of his acid trips, and not a record label. In that plain, he continued to write, record and perform with the band. After their break-through hit, Bright Side of the Sun, they went to Abbey Road to work on Glad That We're Here. During the sessions, Barrett became extremely disoriented, having walked into the studios to find a slightly different band recording songs that sounded similar but completely different to what he thought they had been working on. Unable to resolve the mis-placed characters, he gets up to go brush his teeth, thinking the practical-joke will be over upon his return.
I was helping a disabled friend cross the street in downtown San Francisco. Now, if neither of your legs work very well, it's going to take longer than the fifteen allotted seconds to cross the road. But taxi drivers have somewhere to go. “Stop j-walking, asshole!” yells one cab driver the second his light turns green, and we're still in the middle of getting across, my friend Jon hunched over, wabbly legged, clearly giving it his all to even have climbed down the three flights of stairs from his apartment. To complete the scene, the cabby wailed on the horn, and screeched around us.
“Oh, you learn to not take it personally after fifty nine years,” he shrugs.
I saw the Smashing Pumpkins do a two-week residency at the Fillmore last year. They performed all kinds of new songs that were written special for the gigs. One was called, “I'm Doing The Best I Can.” In it, Billy Corgan sings “I'm doing the best I can, so FUCK OFF.”
My favorite moment in stoner-ville, is the moment when you inevitably have to ask, “Where the hell did I park the car?” This is especially cumbersome in any environment where it snows a lot, leading to many stories of “false stolen car reports” by my friends. Once the thaw comes, which could be anywhere from a day to a month later, they eventually see the car and realize, “oh, THAT'S where I parked!”
One day, we'll all leave our Nike's at the altar, and get in the pay-for-potty, and rocket out of here to sights unknown, at speeds faster than 299,792,458 metres per second.
