Profound Thoughts On Pot

Two times in my life I’ve had a world changing profound thought. Both times I was high on pot. The first time I was 16 and had the good fortune to have a friend with a hippy mom. Her mom thought any drug was harmless if it was natural. Her kids toked up on a regular basis without fear. Just as long as they left Mom’s stash alone.

For Christmas one year she decided to give the kids a present. She made certain that Santa left them a kilo of weed under the tree. Yeah, an entire two point two pound brick of good Acapulco. We dived headfirst into that brick like it was a swimming pool filled with chocolate.

By this time in history I was seeing my friend’s brother. It wasn’t just convenience, it was love. Or a strange lust after a night of beer binging, pot smoking and puking in the driveway. Yeah, those were the good old days. But I digress.

After smoking as much pot as we could inhale off that brick, I suddenly had a profound thought. This thought was going to change the world. It was going to reorder the universe. I had to write it down. I found a way to get upright and ambulatory. I went to the most logical place to get pen and paper, the kitchen. There I found my boyfriend leaning over the sink.

“No two drips are the same,” he said, not looking up.

I thought that was pretty good, but not profound. I abandoned him for pen and paper, which I found on the dryer on the back porch. I wrote down my profound thought and left it under the salt-shaker on the kitchen table. It was time for bed. Which ended up being the recliner. I went to sleep communing with the whales, who were in an ocean that was a good twenty miles away. (Turned out it was just Pink Floyd over and over. But again I digress. Pot does that to you.)

Next morning everyone started drifting in from wherever they had collapsed. The mom was probably at her boyfriend’s place. I remembered my profound thought and went looking for it. I remembered it had something to do with the sink. Somehow that translated to salt-shaker after a wake up toke. My note was where I left it on the kitchen table.

My world changing, universe-reordering thought was:

“There’s a funny smell in the room.”

Flash forward from the god awful seventies to the late irritating nineties. I was camping with a bunch of pagans and things were pretty interesting, but not as weird as the world would like to think. One of the guys had a teenage son with him who happened to have a few joints on hand. It had been over a decade since I had smoked my way up the AlCan Highway in the dead of winter, crossing two international borders with a cat, a dog, a rat, a husband and a big stash of weed in the car, and I figured I was about due for a hit. I partook of the pagan’s weed and settled in to enjoy the campfire.

At some point after the weed took hold of my brain I had another of those profound thoughts. This time I did not write it down. No, this time I announced it to the world straight away, or actually, leaned over to my friend and said:

“I just smoked a joint and ruined a perfectly good party. I’m going to bed.”