I hurt. Man, do I hurt. My back hurts, my legs hurt, my hands and shoulders hurt. I am like a old punch drunk prize fighter that settles down for retirement with a bottle and a small smile at the pain, except I’ve used all my tickets up to the booze carnival. Most of the time I just eat the pain. Sometimes it needs a little sauce to go down, a little gravy on the barbed wire edges and on those days I make it through with cannabis. Everybody and their elderly square uncle is using CBD nowadays, and thc is no longer the big bugbear of society, at least as long as you are not in an unenlightened state, or the UK. For some reason so many Brits are absolutely horrified by marijuana, and hold it in deep suspicion, in a fit of long standing reefer madness fervor. A certain lovely mothering website treats it as just as seriously as cocaine, and calls to boot out young adult aficionados, or weed smoking husbands abound.
It is this pain conundrum which led to me eating around three times the amount of THC and CBD infused pills than I usually eat. Prices have gone up, and I won’t be able to afford to buy more anyway, but at least, so I thought, I could have one night of uninterrupted sleep. They are meant to be fast onset. That is the problem with edibles, the onset is slow and it is hard to judge how much more is needed when you aren’t going to even feel it for potentially an hour or so, more on a full stomach. I grabbed eight little mints out of the tin and chewed them, washing them down with a glass of water, and settled down with a book and a blanket and a bunch of grapes. Nothing. After about an hour I went to sleep. The mints usually peak after about an hour for me, but nothing after an hour and a half, and I went to bed disappointed, waking up a few hours later so immaculately delicately high I was impressed that the tiny little mints could do that. The little mints that could. I stuck some pink floyd on via my headphones and lay back with a smile.
I slept pretty well until I woke up at 7am, stoned out of my mind, to a tsunami alert. I am laughing, but to be frank, right now, everything is funny. Death is funny. Gigantic underwater volcanoes are hilarious: so 2022, darling! Tsunami are akin to a rib tickling stand up routine. The fact my leg is screaming in pain is making me crack up. The street lights are funny. The curtains are amusing me. Ramblin’ Jack Elliot who is sweetly playing in my ear is funnier than Dave Chappelle being uncancellable. I think the bedside table is a hoot. I don’t dare move. I am sure my stupid back and hip that are hurting now, when I move will send electric shocks through my synapses, that will be too funny to bear. I am not so much amused to death (underrated Waters album actually…) as reduced to breath-taking guffaws of laughter that threaten to make me helpless as a kitten.
This always happens to me, I get too high and then things go wrong around me when I can least cope with it, and getting too high on weed is infinitely possible nowadays with the high thc levels of products. I have been informed I am no longer allowed to call it ‘pot’, that this marks me out as ‘a boomer’. I pointed out I am gen X, but was greeted with a blank look. I am old, therefore I boom.
Apparently 420 is the designation de jour, ‘weed’ is acceptable, and ‘grass’ is allowed. I am too scared to talk sometimes, let alone send a cute meme to anyone, just in case I get told that I am outmoded and need to go hang my head in shame at being so out of touch. Last time I truly got way way too high I was sitting in a Minnesota parking lot, outside a Pow Wow, smoking with friends we had met on the road. In Minnesota marijuana is illegal. No 420-ing unless a medical card is obtained and even then it is only pills and tincture from what I understood. Still, people grow in their back yards, on the banks of the Mississippi, and smaller less impressive rivers, and in the wildly remote backwater canoe areas that lead to the land of the best marijuana that ever grew, Canada. I had jars of the stuff, pots of the green, fucking BALES of green in the RV. It was not mine, ossifer. It belonged to Billy. Still, the day was long and bright, people were happy, and the day was glorious. The kids were eating fry bread and grinning running around with new made friends, and I was stoned. All of a sudden a cop car pulls up. My entire camper is a hot box. Another cop car pulls up. Apparently one of the cop cars had broken down. Suddenly the parking lot was flooded with cops, and I found it hilarious. Moving would have drawn suspicion, so we sat there quietly waiting for the pigs to fly. I didn’t know whether to cry laughing, or cry in horror at the thought of going to jail for someone else’s weed and smoking an eighth to myself. I went for stunned ambiguous shoulder shaking. No one would know if it was laughter or tears. Either were appropriate. I made a small joke about there being dogs soon….then the K9 unit pulled up. The dog barked hysterically. Thankfully the dog was shut in the back of the vehicle, and the cop was just there to stare at the broken down cop car with the rest of the gang. After a couple of very long hours, the cops drifted away. After the last one left, Billy and I, by this point absolutely sober, drove off silently. Nothing was funny any more.
You see, it is all funny, really. We are all going to die and it is hilarious. We are all for the chopping block. The world is trying to kill us with viruses, volcanos, tsunami, earthquakes and hatred, and the chances of individual survival are not good by my stoned reckoning. I don’t usually find the end of the world funny, but what else am I meant to do except laugh, and wonder in one of those ‘let the weed do the thinking’ moments of self centered crazy thc philosophy, if the world, realizing that she couldn’t take me out individually, went for a more wholesale approach. Of course that is ridiculous. It is self absorbed. It is ok, it only lasted a moment, I am human after all, and this human being could be forgiven for wondering if the world was out to get me.
I don’t want to die. I don’t want any of us to die. I don’t want anyone to suffer. I read the toilet of the internet comments from places that are not Cali wishing California to fall into the ocean, and crowing that poor Tonga, which has been hit with a huge underwater volcano, quake and tsunami is a ‘rubbish dump’, to quote a sorryass Brit who needs a smacking. I don’t recognize these so called ‘commentators’ as fully human. It makes me get vengeful and angry, and stop laughing…because vengeful laughter is just creepy, and I am not creepy. Inappropriate yes, creepy, no.
Stay safe out there. The world is out for us, revenge for pollution, encroaching on wild lands, and treating mother Earth as if she is capable of taking abuse after abuse without lashing back at us for not living lightly on her soil and water, not that that helps underwater volcano, but heck, it can’t hurt to try and survive! Like Kurt Cobain sang in Territorial Pissings, “got to love one another right now!” We really “have gotta find a way, a better way”. There is no choice.
I have my own problems right now. Mainly that my hands are riddled with arthritis, I won’t be able to afford to pay my rent when the subsidy runs out, and that food prices are so high and rising I am actually worried. I don’t see how I can afford to live in the long term. But today there is rice and cabbage, cauliflower and homemade hummus, I have enough weed to laugh for another night, and I can stay in this apartment a while yet. Who knows the world might end before I have to get out.