Dear Caroline,
I got really good and ripped last night. I'm about to administer a little hair of the dog, so I thought I'd recount the things I did before I lose track of them.
I took the first few hits at a friend's house. Loosened me up pretty good and, as usual, I got in the mood to play some music. My brother was there as well. He set up the studio and my buddy whipped out his Ovation. We decided to do a little on-the-spot recording. Threw out a song I wrote several years ago but never polished. A thing called "She's So Vain". It came together pretty well, but I wasn't happy enough with the finished product to want to use it for anything. Maybe next time.
I also showed them a new song I wrote a few days ago. "Run" is about as country as you can get. I thought maybe they might want to work it up in their band. It might go over pretty well to the audiences they generally play for.
It was a couple of hours before I decided it was safe to drive home. If there's one thing I will not do anymore, it's drive stoned. Didn't used to be a problem. Scares the shit out of me now, though. I must have gotten it all out of my system, though, because the trip went just fine. I listened to a few songs from the most recent Sigur Ros album, then a few from Black Sabbath.
I had determined to take a shower as soon as I got home so I wouldn't have to mess with it after the next round. I'd purposefully not bathed until then because my friend smokes like a chimney and my clothes stink like fuckin' tobacco every time I come from there. God, I hate that stench.
Got out of the tub and admired myself in the mirror for a little while. Not really so much "admiring" as "inspecting". I was trying to decide if the person in the mirror was the "real me" and not the person looking into the mirror. Then I returned to the realization that my body was just a temporary wrap for the Self that experiences this paradigm through it's nerves, muscles, tendons, senses...
A few moments lost in such contemplation put me in the mood to watch a little porn on the Internet. I skipped through a couple that were pretty goddamn hot. Then my curiosity got the better of me and I wound up watching some 70 year old grandma giving head to a willing man who was considerably younger than she was. At times I thought, well, this old biddy has been around long enough, she has enough experience, she knows what she's doing, right? Maybe she wanted to make sure she got one more pop before the Reaper stepped in. But then, when I saw the look on her face as the guy pushed her head into his crotch, thought it just as well might be some drugged-up geriatric borrowed from a local nursing home. Start-up porn producers making a 100% profit from an old woman who doesn't even know what's going on around her. Fuck, she might even have had Alzheimer's. She very well could have honestly believed she was on some roller coaster ride at Disneyland. Either way you look at it, the whole situation was unsavory and I assure you that I didn't stick around long enough to hear her yell Rudolph Valentino's name when she came. From the looks of her even that orgasm could have been a figment of her Alzheimer's wrecked imagination.
That put me out of the porn mood, so I never got around to watching the clip of the pretty young lady kneeling naked in a bathtub while two guys piss all over her. Which would not be too bad, actually, but she drinks the stuff. That's right! She opens up her mouth and lets these reprobates fill it with urine, which she gargles and promptly swallows. It's really quite disgusting and I'm glad I didn't choose to watch it.
The THC was kicking in pretty good by now (despite the granny flick and the prospect of seeing someone drink pee-pee). I went into the living room and put "The Magnificent Seven" on the television. But the sound wasn't coming through my home theatre speakers...in fact, I was hearing no sound at all. Well, something's fucked up, I thought. Maybe it was the disc? No, probably I'd had the settings fixed so that I was not getting audio. As the night went on I eventually discovered that this was the correct assessment, but not before giving up a couple of times, confused at how I was utterly incapable of figuring out how to work a remote control that I'm reasonably familiar with.
Putting that off for later I did some channel surfing. As is the norm, I found absolutely nothing that I really wanted to watch. So I went to the old stand-bys...the religious networks. It is a strange aspect of my tastes that brings me to these weird shows. I don't put much stock in what the preachers and teachers are saying, but I think it's fascinating to watch how they say it. Very entertaining, at times.
I think it was the Inspiration Network that I eventually chose to watch (at least until my mind cleared up long enough to figure out what was wrong with the DVD/Home Theater shit). There was this really passionate gathering of people milking the praise and worship thing for all it's worth. The choir actually sounded very good. The leader was a goofy motherfucker but he was as sincere as a man can be in his concern for souls and his love for Him who would take them into His bosom. It was so cool to look at all the people wrapped up in the moment, praying, shouting, tears flowing from some eyes, a few of them firing off some unintelligible gibberish, "praying in the Spirit" or "speaking in tongues" as they would call it. I personally define it as "creepy" and "bizarre". It threw a monkey wrench of weirdness into the proceedings and kept my drug-addled mind entertained for about an hour.
Then I took my mp3 player into the bedroom, laid down and put Black Sabbath into Random mode. I've been in a hard rock mood lately, so you know I was diggin' me some Sabbath. It seemed like the right thing to do after my visit to the Holy Ghost Pot Party. I've got all the Ozzy Sabbath albums on the player. Even "Technical Ecstasy" and "Never Say Die" (though I tend to skip songs from those records).
I've also got all of Led Zeppelin's discs loaded, perhaps subconsciously waiting for this "high moment" when I ripped and synced them. At any rate, I took in a nice session of Zep before being consumed by a serious case of the munchies.
I won't even attempt to remember just how much I ate (it kinda makes me sick when I think about how much my stomach must have stretched to accommodate it all). Bear in mind that I didn't eat any lunch, so that may be how I pulled it off. Rice Krispies, Butter Pecan ice cream, Wavy Lays potato chips, Borden French Onion sour cream dip, pickles, three Little Debbie chocolate chip whatchamacallits and at least 15 Jolly Rancher hard candies (which I didn't count as "food items"). Now I didn't knock all this stuff back in one go...it was spread out through the night, but I might as well have. A couple cups of coffee this morning for my constitutional and I shit a good lot of it out. Even though I may have gained a pound or two, that defecation catharsis experience made it all worth it.
Back to last night. After listening to the music I was inspired to make one more go at the DVD player. I was in the mood to watch "Koyaanisqatsi" (if you don't know, it is a film of landscapes and other trippy stuff set music by Philip Glass...I highly recommend it to any stoner looking for something different, yet qualifying as a Grade A 100% Good To Go Head Trip if your ever saw one).
Still no luck with the remote control so I said, "Fuck it! I'm watching this movie even if I have to listen to it through the TV speakers" (which are pretty good, but not 5.1 Surround Sound, if you get my drift). I got 'er going. It was kicking my ass for about 10 minutes. Then I got to thinking...man, I NEED to be listening to this on the stereo. So I broke down and retrieved the owner's manual (which is not an easy tome to comprehend, but I've got a slight grasp of it). It showed me what I was doing wrong. I smacked my noggin, incredulous at how I could have been so dumb. Amused by how I could have been so high as to not be able to figure it out on my own.
When I did get the movie going I turned that mother fucking home theater up louder than it's ever been before. My next door neighbor to the east has been gone for several days and the guy on my right (a good friend from my youth) surely wouldn't mind, as he had been wailing on a guitar earlier in the day, seemingly unconcerned with what I thought about the volume.
I have to reiterate...this son-of-a-bitch was LOUD!!!!!! It was to the point where I thought the glass in my windows might break. It had to have been louder than the orchestra would have actually been in a concert setting. It was GREAT!!!!! Unfortunately I've got some new eyeglasses, which I'm not used to yet, so after 30 minutes all the images began to distort. I closed my eyes and basked in the pure volume. And one point I failed to mention...this was like at midnight! It's nice to live in an area where I can do that...but now that I think about it, it's entirely possible that the distant neighbors to the east may have heard it. Surely not, but then again...
I was just about worn out so I retired to the bedroom. I fired up the computer, navigated my browser to Wolfgang's Vault and found an old Grateful Dead concert that looked good. It was from 1971, recorded not too much earlier than the material that made it to one of my all-time favorite Dead records, "Europe 72". Unfortunately it wasn't all that great, so I dialed up some Blue Oyster Cult. It didn't take very long before I decided I wasn't in the mood for that either. Maybe a different Grateful Dead concert would do the trick. I found another from 1971 (there wasn't anything there from 72). The track listing looked better (though I did have to skip over the opener "Truckin"...I can't abide that one or "Sugar Magnolia").
But even now my mind is leaving behind the memories. I remember now that I listend to Henryk Gorecki's 3rd Symphony before the Wolfgang's Vault stuff. The Gorecki piece is incredibly intense even without the cannabis boost. To hear it stoned really takes it to another level of awesomeness. I kinda zoned out somewhere in the middle of is, only recovering when the last note was played. It was then that I got in the mood for some Grateful Dead.
To the strains of Jerry trading guitar parts with Weir I floated into the surface sleep the pothead knows only too well. Like straddling sleep and consciousness just enough to still dig the music. I was following the loping basslines of Phil Lesh, not concerned with how his style would be considered "over playing" in any other band but the Dead. I don't think Mickey Hart was on board for this concert. It sounded like Kreutzman was on his own. The show was from the Godcheaux era, so that annoying Donna Godcheaux's voice weas mixed into the harmony stew. No doubt they thought it beefed up the sonic texture. What they didn't understand was that the fragility of the sparse harmony they were only slightly capable of is one of their endearing traits...one of the things that set them apart from all the other rock groups of the time.
The end of the night was exactly as one would expect. I dropped out of the concert and fell into full-on sleep. I never dream when I go to bed high, and this has always been a bane of my existence. Back in the days when I got high just about every day I might as well have forgotten what it was even like to dream. I mean, shit! Dreaming is one of my all-time favorite things to do. How was I getting by without it? Surely it can't be good for a man's psyche to go too long without dreaming? Now that I only smoke weed every other weekend my dream life has returned.
This morning I woke up, much too early because I didn't take my Ambien last night. I need that Ambien to knock me out and keep me under or else I'll wake before I want/need to and then I won't be able to go back to sleep. As is my usual practice, I didn't take it last night because I wanted to enjoy every last minute of the ride before knocking off. Which I did...but I feel like shit now. The thought of food repulses me. My throat feels ragged from the pot smoke that passed through it. I've got a little bit of a weeze going. The ringing in my ears is somewhat more pronounced. My head feels consumed with what the Meat Puppets used to call "Confusion Fog". I don't know why I've waited this long to whip out the pipe again. I think it's because I'm not looking forward to the harshness of the particular marijuana I scored yesterday. As the above missive should make clear, it is some fairly potent weed (nothing like the Wheeler weed, the stuff that makes me feel like I'm about to die...good nevertheless). But it's all sticky and there are too many seeds. I'm so lazy that I don't even prepare the stuff before smoking it, I just cram a nice chunk into the pipe and hope that the ratio between bud and seeds/stems comes out in favor of the former.
Now I'm off to see if what I've got left is capable of doing as much or more than what I had last night. So long.
love,
Orenthio
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