Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me
In no particular order:
STONER MEMORY 1: "FUCK YOU, Z!"
In the absolute depths of stoned bewilderment.
My two friends, laughing with each other, turn to me suddenly and begin telling me, repeatedly, emphatically, to go fuck myself.
"Yeah, you know what? You should go fuck yourself!"
"Yeah, Z, fuck you. Seriously, fuck you."
I don't remember saying anything. In fact, I barely ever manage to say a single word when I'm this far gone. Is that why they're suddenly so hostile?
Does my stoned silence come off as rudeness?
"Seriously, go fuck yourself. I mean it."
"Z. I'm telling you. Fuck you, dude. Seriously. Fuck you."
They are so insistent, and focusing on me so singularly during this time, that the only thing I can think to do is get up and leave.
They pursue me. Is it a joke? In my state, I can't tell. But I struggle to think of what a measured response might be.
"Where are you going? Are you going to go fuck yourself?"
"I hope so. I hope you're going to fuck right off, right now."
Maybe I'm trying to laugh it off, maybe I'm trying to pretend I'm in on the joke, but they don't look like they're joking.
I'm getting up and getting my things. It's hard because I'm really gone.
"Don't forget that, fuck face! Don't forget your shit!"
"Hope you have fun fucking yourself after you're gone."
Eventually, I manage to make my way outside. They are there at the door, watching me through the narrowing crack as I close it behind me on my way.
"Fuck you!"
"Thanks for coming, fuck off!"
And then it's closed. I'm outside. Completely beguiled by why I had suddenly become the target of their tirade.
I feel lost, and miffed. If it was a joke, why didn't it feel like a joke?
I was too stoned to drive home, but I did manage to drive myself to a secluded area a little ways off so I could sit, smoke a cigarette alone, and relax for a bit.
I never asked them about it. We're still friends to this day, though we hardly ever get the chance to catch up anymore.
I guess we all fucked off.
STONER MEMORY 2: "THE REAL NASTY STUFF"
My first serious job was working at a video/book/music retail store, back when those were a thing.
The store was also well known for having a very robust magazine section with literally thousands of magazine titles of all kinds, ranging from the most mainstream to the most obscure.
It also included a prolific pornography section.
I had a myriad of mundane responsibilities at that time, this being my first job ever, and one of them included stocking new magazine issues, pulling old magazine issues, and "stripping" the covers off of old unsold issues to be thrown out.
I became very knowledgeable on the many thousands of magazines we regularly stocked, and could readily help just about anyone asking if we had a specific title—or a publication on a certain topic.
I never made a habit of this, but on one occasion, I had mistakenly gotten unbelievably high before an evening shift at the store.
I'm not a "good stoner," I really don't function well—and back when I would participate in this recreationally—I was only really good for watching movies and staying very well hydrated while under the influence.
Stocking and pulling magazines, under the guidance of my supervisors and having to respond to customers, was going to be tremendously difficult, while the speakers overhead blared some of the biggest music hits of the early 2000s.
And yet, for some reason, I decided that I had to go to work (they pushed back strongly against people calling in sick, and I don't think I could have handled that level of scrutiny and examination over the phone). I risked going in.
It's the only time I ever went to work while inebriated and I hated the experience.
My goal was to say as little as possible, and if anyone asked just complain that I felt ill in hopes that I may get sent home early.
I came in to work and loaded up my magazine cart and, at least at the onset, felt mercifully ignored by my colleagues and customers.
Once on the store floor with the tedious work of pulling and managing hundreds of magazines to pull and restock, I felt as though my attention to detail while stoned might serve me well. Perhaps the time would fly by faster than I thought.
While high, I am a super-cleaner and hyper-organizer, and before long, I entered a flow-state.
Until she came up behind me.
"Young man?" she said. I turned. A sweet little old grandma. Just the most stereotypical grandma type you can possibly conjure in your imagination. Snow white curly hair, fluffy sweater, comfy white sneakers, the entire prototype straight out of the grandma factory assembly line.
"Yes, ma'am?" I respond, trying my absolute best to hold onto what I thought a normal conversation between an old woman and a magazine stock boy should be.
"Do you carry any pornographic magazines?"
The question took my breath away.
What—
"I'm looking for some with lots and lots of gay sex in them."
The—
"I mean the real nasty stuff."
Fuck—
"Just the dirtier the better."
Is—
"I'll take as many as you've got if you can just show me where they are."
Happening?!
So, nervously, and having no idea whether I'm just wildly misunderstanding her and hoping I'm responding in a way that isn't giving away how absolutely gone I am, I cautiously start small.
The kinds of magazines, in the early 2000s, that would offer the tamest possible interpretation of what I think this sweet little old granny is looking for.
"Do you mean, something like this?" I offer, holding out a bodybuilding magazine that features shirtless male models on every page. She barely looks at it under her bifocals.
"Oh, no, that won't do. Don't you have anything dirtier than that?"
Okay. I look around cautiously. Does someone know I'm debilitatingly high right now? Am I being deliberately fucked with?
I lead Nana to the actual pornography section. And because it's my job, I happen to know which titles are 'soft,' and which titles are 'hardcore,' of all different kinks. Seriously, this store had it all. Plumpers, Bizarre, Kink, S&M, you name it, we had it, including gay porn.
Problem was, they were always placed high up on the shelves, safely out of children's reach. Poor little Nanny's arthritic arms couldn't reach that high.
"Here we go!" she said excitedly. "What do you recommend, young man?"
What do I recommend?!
"Uh—" I drone, still not entirely sure this is really happening. "There's this one..." I take one down off of a high shelf. A 'softcore' title, but unquestionably homosexual in orientation.
"Ah!" she says, pleased. "That's a good start. OK—how about that one?"
When we receive these titles in the back room, before stocking them on the store floor, I have to 'wrap' the dirty magazines in a rectangular plastic bag that censors the majority of the covers, but so someone can still read the title and barcode.
"Could you please take this out of the wrapper for me? I want to see what they got cookin' in there."
A heavy sigh, my eyes burning and dry, I clumsily unwrap the plastic so Me-Maw can flip through the pages to see if it's dirty enough for her.
"Oh yes," she says. "Hot dog! Okay. One of these... what about that one?"
And because I had made the reckless decision of taking multiple huge bong rips of some sticky shit before coming to work, this scenario of helping a sweet old grandma find her gay porn magazines went on for all of eternity.
I'm convinced, somewhere in time and space, it's still happening. I'm still there, really helping her decide which gay sex magazine is better than the other, weighing every option and judging each title on the merits of how depraved that publication is willing to get.
Finally, it came to an end, and she stepped merrily out of the magazine section to the checkout aisles, her wrinkled hands gripping a small stack of hardcore magazines, thanking me as she went.
And I was so gone that that is where my memory of this incident ends, relieved that it was over.
STONER MEMORY 3: "THE UNFATHOMABLE HUMAN TRAGEDY OF THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST"
The very first time I ever smoked weed I was perhaps sixteen years old.
A friend's father was the camp director of a youth summer camp on the outskirts of town, nestled in the deep forest of the world's largest Ponderosa Pine tree forest.
When there were no campers renting the facilities, the entire vast campground network—including paintball arenas, basketball courts, pools, lakes, hiking trails, climbing walls, archery fields, canoes, and everything else affiliated with summer camp—was his backyard.
Including campers cabins.
And when our friend-group would get together to party on weekends, sometimes we'd be able to camp out in one of the cabins—affording us some space to experiment and push boundaries.
I'm not positive but this experience may have been others' first time smoking as well, though others in our group had already been initiated into weed culture before this incident.
We would all gather around and those with more experience would provide tutelage in proper smoking etiquette and procedure.
The evening proceeded how you might expect. Inane fun, nonsensical giggling, distribution of 'munchies', etc.
Someone else had been in charge of the music which was playing. This was in the era of 'burned CDs', whereby someone could compile a whole mish-mash of tunes across sixteen tracks off their computer in whatever order they wish.
The songs didn't have to have a coherent theme. In fact, part of the joy in those early days of burning CDs was seeing how much audio whiplash you could administer upon a listener, juxtaposing hardcore gangster rap before a nostalgic 90s cartoon TV show theme song, back-to-back.
The contrast was the point.
I don't remember what had been playing just prior to the next song in the queue—but when I heard it, I recognized it immediately.
Just as I was wrapping my head around what I was hearing—and conjuring some of my experiences watching Schindler's List in various contexts (some at home, on PBS when the full film was shown uncensored after it was released; some in history class, though with certain scenes omitted; some on my own, just as a fledgling appreciator of movies)—my friend, Don, suddenly stood up in the middle of the cabin, filled as it was with the smoke of our evening's proceedings.
But Don was changed, now—literally. I know he hadn't begun the evening in this manner, but when Don stood up suddenly, with the swell of Schindler's List's violins behind him, he was almost entirely naked, except for a red satin thong covering his genitals—and a large Mexican sombrero on his head. The sight was shocking and, as our eyes took him in, we all collectively laughed.
But Don did not laugh. Instead, completely baked himself, Don began to speak to us all heartfully about the unfathomable human tragedy of the Jewish Holocaust. His earnestness and sincerity, combined with the painfully saddening strings and the seriousness of the topic he was now addressing in front of us all—set against his staggering, nearly-nude and ridiculous appearance, completely broke my mind.
I don't remember verbatim what he said, but it may very well have been something like:
"In 1939, at the onset of a global conflict that we would all come to learn as World War II—an incident that called some of my ancestors into service—Nazi Germany invaded Poland, bringing millions of Jews under their control. In what can only be described as one of the most evil atrocities the world has ever seen, from that time until 1945, when Allied forces came to liberate these camps after the Nazis had been defeated, somewhere in between two to three million Jews were brutally killed in what we now know as 'concentration camps,' either executed—or worked and starved to death. It's stunning to me, and I know to all of you as well, to think that human beings might be capable of such staggering disregard for human life, whatever the supposed justifications for those actions may have been. Whether it was outright racism and ethnic cleansing levied against an entire group of marginalized people, whether it was considered a brutal but necessary byproduct of a war of attrition that the German people felt that they had to win, or whether there were other even more mysterious or bewildering reasons motivating the Nazi officers who carried out these heinous acts, it should be clear to each and every one of us how startling it really is that we came to discover, through learning history, that human beings are capable of these incredible offenses. It may be comforting for some of us to think that it was another group of people, in another time, who were able to carry out this awful, dehumanizing mass murder of an entire race—but it's a sobering thought for me, and perhaps for you as well, to think that those Nazi officers were men, just like us. They had mothers, and fathers. They had friends, and colleagues. They were brought up in the ethos of Western civilization. And yet, to think that they could oversee this brutal travesty against the Jewish people should give us all a reason to reflect, and consider, what possible demons we might have lurking within ourselves—that under the right, or dare I say the wrong circumstances—we too might somehow be caught up in justifying unfathomable injustices against other human beings, who are ultimately no different than ourselves..."
And I don't know how else to put this other than to just say this plainly:
In that moment, being completely stoned out of my mind for the first time—in a remote wood cabin in the middle of the woods—listening to my friend, wearing a sombrero and red satin thong talking about the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust while listening to the music of John Williams' soundtrack to Schindler's List, contemplating the evil nature of mankind in agonizing detail...
I completely lost my fucking mind.
I was embarrassed about what happened for years among my friends who witnessed it, but it was around this time when I felt like I went completely insane and began screaming in uncontrollable horror.
Someone turned off the music and everyone looked at me, unsure of what was happening or what I was doing. Their attention and the sudden shift in the mood of the party made my experience even worse, and eventually I managed to get up off the floor and leave the cabin, going out into the dark forest night to sit alone for a while and come to grips with what was happening.
Eventually, I did come back inside—and I dimly recall the rest of the evening proceeding more-or-less okay. But my mindfuck meltdown was a primary topic of conversation the next day, when the situation had finally relaxed. It became something of a joke with my friends after that, and one I would bear easily. I understood that my response had clouded what might have otherwise been a fun and endearing night for all of us to look back on, and I couldn't be happier that we could all laugh it off in the days and years ahead, especially whenever we decided to smoke up together again.
But.
Every time I smoked, some part of me always felt a little mad—a little insane—and I believe that first experience really left an indelible mark on me, subtly or not-so-subtly tinging every high I ever got with that kind of existential-panic energy.
And while one of my favorite pastimes to enjoy while smoking was to watch deep, engrossing, "epic" films—
To this day I have never smoked weed and watched Schindler's List.
STONER MEMORY 4: DIGGING A HOLE
Some guys, about four of us, are getting together to go out to the desert and smoke some weed. I'll go along for the ride.
It was a whole ordeal and felt like an endless night. We pile into one of the guys' 88' Ford Bronco, light up, pass it around, pull around to the back of the Walmart and throw some wooden pallets into the back, and then off-road into the desert.
It was a bumpy ride, and I remember the intense jostling in the back seat made my entire body seem to bounce and thrash around in perfect rhythm to the intense cadence of the Linkin Park song that was playing loudly over the speakers:
We arrived, driving directly into a deep desert river wash. It's dark, desolate, and utterly remote. We throw the wood pallets out onto the sand, pour a little gasoline over them, and light them up, starting a nice big warm bonfire.
One of the guys is just made of marijuana and is the sort who takes it upon himself to make sure everybody in attendance is completely smoked out the entire time. It's pretty much non-stop as soon as the Bronco is parked and the fire is blazing.
After everyone is good and blazed, there's some business given to playing with fire. Some additional gasoline is poured out onto the sandy bed of the dried up river basin and lit. Little blue flames dance around, and Mr. Marijuana uses the sole of his shoe to gently spread it around into low glowing patterns and shapes in the sand.
We gather around the bonfire and pass bowl, joint and bong around in a night that goes on eternally. I'm happy to be in their company because they don't comment on how quiet I am, or how little I say. When I get like this I just love hearing other people talk. If the conversation ever does come my way, I can just put my hand up and say nothing and everybody is totally cool about it, so I have no anxiety whatsoever.
Until he shows up.
I look around the fire and everyone seems to be accounted for. One, two, three, and me.
So who was this?
Behind Mr. Marijuana, in the shadows beyond the light from our bonfire, I see a shirtless man wearing a red cape digging a hole in the sandy river bed.
I look around the group. Do they notice? Did this person come with us? Why didn't I recognize them?
I keep looking back at the figure, who barely regards us. He's perhaps five or six feet behind Mr. Marijuana's camping chair, digging with his hands in the soft sand, the hole getting deeper, and deeper, and deeper.
I monitor the situation in silence. The figure notices me noticing him, but neither of us say a word.
I watch him as he's scooping huge handfuls of sand out from the deep hole he's digging. So deep, eventually, that he's reaching his entire arm down into the chasm to pull out more sand—so deep, at this point, that the sand is dark with moisture.
All the while, the bowl, joint and bong go 'round and 'round, where she stops, nobody knows—and hours of night drag by. Some discussion eventually distracts me, and I lose track of the figure. I look back behind us and he's gone.
We sit around the fire all night smoking. As the sun comes up, and the world around us gets dimly brighter, we hear the sounds of mourning doves and try to imitate them. Even though I haven't said much all night, this is something I try my hand at and enjoy.
Eventually, we stand up and stretch. The sun is hitting us now, and it's time.
"Whoah," one of the guys says, going to take a leak beyond the circle. He nearly steps into a hole. "Fucking hole right here, dude."
"Shit. Look at this," Mr. Marijuana says. "That's a deep fucking hole. Which one of you assholes dug this?"
STONER MEMORY 5: BROKEN CHAIR
In the later stages of my 'heavy-smoking' era, when I was getting high daily, it was predominantly while alone.
I loved the feeling of being stoned, but the ambiguities and fluctuating energies of smoking with someone else—even a friend—gave me too much anxiety.
I'd still do it, but I preferred to be alone.
Alone and watching movies.
Some favorites from that time were Gettysburg, Dances With Wolves, Braveheart, Gandhi, Once Upon a Time in the West, Lawrence of Arabia...
The longer and more ambitious, the better.
I also got really involved with Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.
And, alone, wiling away my youth in purposeless solitude, I'd spend my time in my room setting little 'traps' for my sober self to combat against.
Some 'traps' were miscalculated attempts at being helpful, but were really just half-baked ideas that only served to confuse me later, when I was sober and (probably) in a hurry to leave the house.
Like turning all of my socks inside out so that all I would need to do when putting on socks the next morning is place my toes against the bottom of the sock and pull them up, turning them back right-side-out over my foot. This, I suppose, was preferable to the "ordinary" method of pulling the sock over and around your foot.
Again, the rationale didn't have to make sense; I felt as though I was being helpful to future-me.
Other high-minded shenanigans were purposefully designed with a more 'prankish' intent. For instance, I'd place a small stack of quarters on top of an open closet door jamb, so that—the next morning, when moving to my closet to gather my clothes for the day, forgetting what my past high-self had done—I'd swing the door open and have quarters rain down on my sleepy, confused head, first-thing.
After all, who doesn't like money?
Sometimes, these THC-induced fits of fancy gravitated around a particular object. In my stoned state of mind, I might see some hidden potential in the item, and 'tinker' with it to see if I couldn't get it to work the way I thought it should.
A rough example would be the cockamamie idea I had for an old umbrella that wasn't worth it's salt any longer. I cut a circular hole at the top of it, and hanged it over my laundry basket so that I could toss my balled-up dirty socks (that I had to manually pull right-side-in) into its upturned canopy. The vision was that, at that point, they would be funneled elegantly into my basket for a future load of laundry.
Sounds good, in theory, but making an object with a clear function work in a tangential capacity offers some unexpected engineering challenges. How was I to address the small metal rods that extended out from the center of the umbrella, like spokes around the center of a wheel? They allowed the umbrella to be 'opened', but they also impeded the funneling of my socks through the center hole I cut (crudely) in the vinyl canopy.
Scratching my head, feeling confounded, I'd stow the now broken and maimed umbrella aside—prophesying that on some future day, I would identify the perfect use for a crippled umbrella with a hole in the middle.
That brings me to the broken chair I had in my room which had been the focus of many contemplative nights, wondering what purpose I could render onto it, determined as I was not to throw it away.
The 'back' of the chair used to have a wooden arch that connected all four wooden 'ribs' at the top, but some long-forgotten accident broke the top portion of the chair off from the back, leaving the seat-portion with only a partial back to lean against.
This chair remained in my room for the better part of a year as my stoned-mind circled around it, wondering if there was some upcycle potential hidden somewhere in it that I could unlock.
The near-fatal irony was that while I was twisting my imagination in circles trying to see its concealed potential, I was blind to seeing its real danger.
One night, having just smoked up in 'solitudinal' sanctuary, I was standing on the small step leading to-and-from my room's entry, but leaned back a little too far and lost my balance.
I fell backward into the middle of my room.
Right on top of the upturned, 'broken' wooden spokes of the back of this chair.
My back struck the chair, and fortunately for me, I landed at such an angle that only gave me a glancing blow against the spokes—I turned and fell on my side on the floor beside the chair.
But, realizing what had happened and considering how things might have gone...
I was struck with an unshakeable vision of me lying dead, impaled on the back of the broken chair in the middle of my room, my pale face staring up at the ceiling above.
I got to my feet and promptly sat back down again, facing the chair for a long time, seeing what might have been if I had fallen just a little bit more to the left.
I threw the chair away that night. And while it wasn't immediate, this was probably the 'beginning of the end' for me, with regard to my regular and at that point habitual use of cannabis.
STONER MEMORY 6: BEING A GOOD CITIZEN
There's a reason I didn't like smoking with other people.
Things could be the absolute best conditions for a good smoke session leading up to the moment you and a friend or friends decide to imbibe.
But as soon as you smoke up and the energy shifts...
Suddenly, the good vibes that were omnipresent just minutes ago have diffused into something else.
I'm not laying blame. I'm perfectly willing to assume that it was my vibe that had changed, because I can definitely be withdrawn once the first hit sets in.
But sometimes there's a noticeable shift in the other.
Around this time I had moved to a new town, and weed had largely been a thing of my past. Everyone I had previously known who would sell to me wasn't around anymore, and I was still waiting for people and circumstances to come to me, rather than seeking them out myself.
I was waiting tables at a creekside bistro in a posh, touristy part of town. The owner was an elderly Italian gentleman who fancied himself as a stately Tony Bennett.
He would sit and have dinner at the restaurant every night, and when he was feeling good—he'd stand up and begin introducing himself to some of the tables surrounding him—and he wasn't the least bit shy of crooning out a lounge ballad. Sometimes it was endearing. Sometimes, if he began coughing, it was less so.
There was a new chef who took over the menu at this place. I'd worked with some cantankerous chefs at different places, some of whom were downright mean to the front of house staff for reasons dimly to be perceived.
But this chef and I had a good rapport, so when he confidentially asked if I smoked and suggested we hang out after work, I thought—cool.
We closed up, the other servers and kitchen staff took off—and chef and I went to the kitchen and shared a bowl.
Feeling good, we even went and sat at the bar and poured ourselves a beer.
Time dilation is a thing, but I no sooner sat down on the bar stool, riding the high that had come over me and was just about to enjoy a pilsner—feeling uncharacteristically okay with the company under the inebriated circumstances—when I looked at him and saw his face fall.
In a way it was almost like seeing myself, and how I felt I sometimes was when I got high in the company of others.
Abruptly, he said, "We gotta go."
Okay...
"We gotta go," he repeated, more urgently, not looking at me. "Can you finish that?" He pointed to my beer.
"Uh, yeah..."
So, now high, and now thrown through a spiral that was liable to get my paranoia cranking at a full clip, I now proceeded to chug the beer I had just poured for myself, which was going to make me tipsy on top of everything else.
"Let's go. Let's get out of here."
"Alright," I said, finishing up and grabbing my things.
He shepherded us both out of the restaurant, we locked up, and he got in his car and left.
I always referred to myself as a 'one hit wonder' when it comes to smoking weed. Some friends I smoked with in the past had these Herculean tolerances, and they'd smoke accordingly (and me along with them). But when I smoked on my own, I only took it one hit at a time. This helped me keep things as manageable as possible, and really, it didn't ever take me much—even with bud that was only modestly potent.
But this also meant that I did not feel fit to drive after a single hit, even without the chugged beer still lingering heavily on my breath.
So, with a sigh, looking around—it looked to me as though I was going to be here for a while.
I took a walk.
I walked around and looked around. One of my talents.
It was a tourist town—known for its awe-inspiring scenic beauty. In daylight.
Otherwise, it was a small enclave without much of a night life. As I walked around, I was the only person on the street, aside from the odd police vehicle that would cruise around looking for, well, me, probably, even if they didn't know it.
I found myself gravitating to the only grocery store in town's parking lot. It was dead. The buzz of street lamps overhead droning like gigantic fireflies, casting the scene in a deep amber glow.
The shopping cart theory posits that someone's ethics can be summarily reduced to how they handle the low-stakes question of whether or not to return shopping carts into their cart corrals before driving away.
I don't know about that. But full disclosure, I always return my shopping cart.
And I always thought my uncle was hilarious when I would pick him up and take him shopping. Not only would he never return his shopping carts, but he'd roll the cart up to my car, open the passenger door, throw all his bagged groceries into his seat, sit down, pull the shopping cart he was using back, and push it as hard as he could off into the parking lot, to roll and careen wherever the winds blew it.
That night, unexpectedly stoned and tipsy, left to walk the town alone and waiting for the high to wear off, hoping to look as innocent as possible to the police cruisers left to patrol a fully gentrified and largely crime-free city late into the night, I decided I was going to return every single shopping cart I could find.
So, that's what I did. Even though the large parking lot appeared deceptively empty, I was surprised at how many errant shopping carts I ended up finding, off in the shadows, tucked around the side of the building, or on the fringes of the lot—scattered all over.
And the more I located, the more I identified carts from different boutiques or stores in the square. Not just those belonging to the one grocery store that dominated the parking lot.
So I began the careful work of separating them, and if the store didn't seem to have its own designated cart corral, I gathered them near the entrance where they might be sufficiently out of the way.
Not only was I surprised at the number of carts I was gathering, but I was also surprised at how long it took to do this errand and to do it with a degree of interest in doing it well.
Then I found it. The cart that must've been rolled there by a transient who had used it to lug his wares across town, because the label on the handle indicated it belonged to another specialty shop a few blocks away.
So, with a sigh, looking around—it looked as though I was going for another walk.
By now, my high had more than worn off. I was sweating from pushing so many carts back and forth around the lot, and my legs were feeling tired—but the entire ordeal left me with a queer thrill.
This night had been a monumental waste of time. I could have been doing absolutely anything else and it would arguably be of more merit than this.
But I was in the flow state. It was a useless endeavor. They'd all be scattered to the winds again the next day, as if each one would be purposefully and chaotically pushed to roll wherever it would by my own uncle.
But I loved this stupid task I had assigned myself.
I grabbed the cart that belonged to the shop up town, and rolled it there myself.
STONER MEMORY 7: DON'T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON ME
It was the four of us.
Me in the 'lived-in' 80s recliner, bought second-hand, with the rough fabric upholstery that felt like burlap and canvas had a baby and had the pattern of a Cliff Huxtable sweater.
Bob was sat at the end of the pleather sofa with the little thrift-store pillow on his lap.
Lance was across from me in a comfortable armchair with the little lion's faces carved into the wooden arms.
John was sitting on the ground between Lance and me, his legs drawn up and his arms draped easily around his knees.
We were all outside on Lance's covered back porch patio, screened in to keep the insects out. Twilight was setting in outside. I had just handed the bowl to Bob, who was about to take another hit—except we were all in thrall to the song we were listening to.
The conversation between the three of them had been flowing only minutes before. As usual, I was there to listen to them talk.
But we had arrived at the portion of the smoke session where each of us were sufficiently faded, and conversation was slowing down as we all stared off into the abyss together, listening to the song playing from Lance's little CD player on the shelf in the corner.
I was always the first to feel too stoned, but somehow convinced myself it would be rude not to keep smoking when it came my way. I didn't want anybody else to feel bad about how much they were smoking alone, so, I kept going too.
Maybe Bob was next. He worked at the guitar shop in town. Lance and John were the closest, and they could be at this for hours.
And the song just went on and on.
But finally, as night fully settles in outside and Lance reaches over to a little lamp and flicks it on, Bob asks:
"How long have we been listening to this song?"
"Um," Lance muses, emerging from his reverie. He looks at the little digital counter on the player's console. "I don't know. Five minutes?"
"Fuck me, if this has only been five minutes then this is some good fucking weed, man."
Everyone laughs.
Everyone falls back into the deep meditative stare into the abyss as we lose ourselves in Elton's plea to his unnamed target not to abandon him at his darkest moment.
The ballad crescendos, fades, and then promptly returns with more gentle piano keys and a steady beat of cymbals.
"I can't light no more of your darkness. All my pictures seem to fade to black and white..."
Bob says, "Holy shit dude, this is the fucking longest song ever."
Everyone laughs.
"I mean, it's fine, I'm not hating on Elton, but holy shit dude, for real..."
"Umm," Lance says, leaning forward again in order to look at the CD player. "Want me to skip it? I'll skip it--"
"It's fine," Bob says, chuckling hazily. "It's just, it feels like it's been fucking playing forever. Am I seriously that high?"
"Oh," Lance says. "Now it says it's only been playing for 52 seconds... what the fuck?"
"Uh, didn't you say it had been playing for—"
Lance laughs. "Fuck. The repeat button was on."
Everyone laughs.
"So how long were we listening to that song for?"
"I have no idea, dude."
"Skip it. Let's listen to something else for a change."
Everyone laughs.
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