The Mayor of Weed and the Space Cookie
A tale from the indeterminate land of Too Far.
Dear readers,
The past few weeks have been a lot, am I right? Just stunning. But we all know this age of crisis will ask us to hold its beer again when it decides to up the stakes. Tightropes and cliffhangers define our times. I know I’m often the Bringer of the Bummers but I make room for joy. Perhaps concerning and disturbing joy, but it’s still joy.
So have a laugh at my expense. You deserve it.
—C
We're not hitchhiking anymore...We're RIDING! —a raving Ren Höek from The Ren & Stimpy Show Season 1, episode 5a, Space Madness
So.
It was the night before Easter 2016 and all through the house many creatures were stirring because my friends were hosting a party.
I’ve known these dear and wedded friends for a long, long time. The one I met first was because he and I lived on parallel and mirrored cul-de-sacs in some newly-built 1980’s suburban cookie cutter sprawl. We had the same house number, the same lot position, the same house layout. He even had the same bedroom as I. We got each other’s mail regularly and our moms would send us to deliver it to the correct address.
One day he invited me into his house and then the backyard to do “karate”.
I wasn’t so sure about him. But he had a Commodore 64 computer just like me so I gave him some wiggle room. The rest is, as they say, history. Sometimes I fancifully wonder if there was some kind of cosmic postal conspiracy to make sure we met.
I am the Felix to his Oscar. And by this I mean the diametrically opposed characters from the 1970’s television series The Odd Couple. Where I am an avatar of order, he is a custodian of chaos. We were never roommates because we’d be at each other’s throats in seconds. It’s weird. And wonderful. A baffling contradiction. Such is life.
On this particular night, I was pondering whether or not to experience for the first time a THC edible. I’d smoked pot, mostly during my self-destruct phase as a young adult, but I’ve always had a strong revulsion to smoking thanks to growing up in a household of smokers. It was never going to be my “thing”.
A commercially produced edible sounded far more appealing than puff puff pass.
My friend on the other hand has long been the Mayor of Weed. I was in the right company to explore such things. At the time marijuana wasn’t legal to possess without a medical card and guess who had a medical card?
He’d mentioned that he recently bought a cookie from the dispensary. The stars had aligned.
The cookie (yes, a singular cookie) was about four inches in diameter, so it was a little bigger than an average cookie. Since my friend is the “professional”, I didn’t ask questions beyond “how much should I eat?” He chose half. My only other question as I gobbled it down was “how long before I feel it?” He said about a half hour.
A half hour passed. Nothing.
Another half hour passed. Nothing.
By then I had a couple drinks in me and was busy mingling. I stopped paying attention to how much time was passing.
It was probably another hour and a half later when my friend checked in.
“You feel it yet?” “Nope. Nothing.” “HOW CAN YOU BE FEELING NOTHING! IT’S BEEN OVER TWO HOURS!” [Shrugs] “HERE. TAKE ANOTHER QUARTER.”
I’m more than two drinks in at this point, and the alcohol has predictably blunted the judgment part of my brain. I eat the piece of cookie he frustratedly thrusts in my face.
You know where this is going. All folly, no jolly.
Within minutes of eating the next quarter of the cookie, I feel the creep of the previous half. It’s coming. Fast. A looming freight train.
I know I’m in deep trouble. Soon I won’t be able to deal with people, or with…anything. I need sanctuary. I think I have a brief window to get home before the worst of it. I leave without saying goodbye. When I get in my car I suddenly don’t know where I am. Shit. Shit shit shit. What are streets? How do I go places?
Panic is tapping me on the shoulder but I keep a grip. I need the freeway. Where is it? Brain whispers that it’s close.
I can do it. Just drive. I am a murmuring starling. I am a monarch butterfly. Navigate, dammit!
After the eternity of driving a quarter mile, I find the freeway. Hallelujah. I pick the second lane from the right and I ineffably set the cruise control to 65mph. An impossible feat! Call the Vatican! Chaos magic! Nevertheless, the walls are still closing in.
Yeah, I shouldn’t have been driving but I don’t have a time machine so keep reading.
I need to get home, man. You hear? Home! This stupid man has inadvertently bought a cursed ticket to ride. I’m snared in a nonstop choo choo trap. The train and my brain are leaving the station. Escape velocity is nigh.
The car treks through the spacetime molasses and entire lifetimes pass My thoughts wander the cosmic ether... Am I going to make it? STOP THE DEEP SCARY THOUGHTS Will this song never end? This is still the way home, right? Food? Why is the car moving if my foot isn’t on the gas? Oh yeah. The magic thing. Focus or be lost forever, you idiot!
Thankfully, the journey home is a straight shot. No merges, no interchanges, no fancy driving. Traffic is light. The other spaceships play nice. All I have to do is stay on target. A couple more epochs pass and then there it is, my exit. Just in time. I’m swirling the edge of the event horizon. Soon the elder stoner gods will eat what’s left of my clinging mind.
Just a few turns and I’m home. Praised be. The fool shall inherit the bed. And that’s what I do. No hunter-gathering in the kitchen. No bathroom adventure. No fucking around. Bedroom. Door closed. Shades drawn. Clothes off. There is no more Doing or Being, there is only BED.
Deep sleep swallows me quick. Thank the Honky God.
I wake in the morning and I’m still high. Super high. A crucial question sprouts far too late: How much goddamn THC was in that cookie? I struggle out of bed and nausea knocks. I make it to the bathroom and dry heave for a bit. I’m mad at myself and my friend. He’s the one who has a doctorate in weed, not me! Doesn’t matter. We are a dynamic duo of dumb dicks.
I’m supposed to be at my sister’s for Easter brunch in less than a half hour. Nope. There will be people and the doing of things and I’m having none of that. I send her a cryptic text.
I go back to sleep. When I wake up again it’s dusk. I’m still high, but it feels close to a reasonable high now. My sister checks in on me and I confess the true reason for bailing out of Easter. She laughs, makes a metaphor about bus rides. I curse my cavalier ways and go back to sleep.
For the next two days I don’t feel quite right but I’m functional. I call my friend and tell him what happened. He laughs and I tell him it’s not funny. He doesn’t believe that I was high for multiple days. I ask him how much THC was in the cookie. He says he doesn’t know. That motherfucker.
Over the years I’ve grilled and pestered my friend to remember how much THC was in the cookie but it wasn’t until this year that he ventured a guess. “It was a Korova brand cookie. Probably between 150-250 milligrams,” he said with a giggle.
Probably?
If he’s correct, that means on the low end I ingested approximately 112.5mg and on the high end 187.5mg. For anyone but stalwart stoners, 10 milligrams is more than enough. Did I mention my friend is a motherfucker?
I’ve told this story many times to family and friends as an entertaining self-debasing cautionary tale. When one of my sister’s adult children had a similar bad experience, she told them to call me. The call was out of the blue, no prior heads-up from my sister… I did my best to educate them, but I’m not sure how to feel about being the family’s wise Uncle Druggy.
Are there lessons or morals to draw from my tale? Surely a few, but did it make you laugh? I hope so. Humans are a comic tragedy of fallibility. Even the perfectly sober ones, the ones held high as leaders and luminaries, are quite capable of being shortsighted, narrow-goal seeking idiots.
Modernity’s lullaby has us all sleepwalking into traps of hubris and delusion that create serious consequences for all.
Demonizing drug use is just another scapegoat for an inhumane world that is chronically high on the fumes of ecocidal madness.
No one knows how far is Too Far until they arrive.
Feel like it's been forever
Since I had my shit together
I just do what I wanna
In the heat of the summer
If I could roll up another
Baby, I could see in technicolor
I just do what I gotta
In the heat of the summer
In the heat of the summer!
—Young the Giant, In the Heat of the Summer
Reminds me of a personal story. Once upon a time I delivered band equipment to a friend. He was a good chef. It was lunchtime and he offered a cup of soup. Temporarily forgetting he was the insane front man for a rock band I neglected to ask if the mushrooms were button or psilocbin. I made it home safely and he spent a few years apologizing.
Hah. What a great friend to have!
I did this once. My husband found me on the porch looking into a cup of water saying--'there's a space alien in the water.'
I wanted to try it again but I haven't had the guts or the time yet. (I thought when weed was legalized, I would go to town after many years of never but then I forgot! How said is THAT?)