A Pothead's Guide To Meaningful Conversation

I am not a pothead, so don’t let the name of this little essay fool you. I will admit I have smoked marijuana two times in my life: once when I was twelve and once when I was thirty. My rationale for the two trips down High And Stupid lane basically follow the edict that when I was twelve I wasn’t old enough to know any better (even though I did know it was a “bad” thing to do) and when I was thirty I was too old to know any better. My parents are going to kill me when they read this, by the way.

Amazingly, I made my way through several years of high school and college without ever doing the marijuana drug (or any drugs for that matter) again after my indiscretion as a 12-year-old. I also found out something very important about myself when I engaged in the illicit activity of smoking marijuana: It made me a complete fucking idiot. It made me stupid when I was twelve (which is why I didn’t do it again until I was thirty) and it made me EVEN DUMBER when I was thirty because I had 18 more years of experience to pile on to the Dumb Train before driving it off the tracks and into a ravine.

I’m not going to pull any punches here with the weed smoking because I have lived with enough potheads in my lifetime to be able to speak my mind about it. And, let’s face it, anything you smoke that can make a story about a guy with a hotdog in his pocket that he is contemplating throwing at a homeless man the funniest thing you’ve ever heard in your life needs to be called out in a public forum other than an article in High Times.

I take that back, that story is still pretty funny. Just not funny enough to make me or anyone else cry with laughter unless they are high on the ciga-weed. Then, somehow, a man in a tracksuit with a hotdog in his pocket becomes the highest form of comedy ever conceived, leaving things like satire, slapstick and “your mother” jokes choking in the dust. Or the smoke, as it were.

The biggest problem I have had lately with potheads is that they talk about it too fucking much and they like to interject random bullshit factoids to support their use of the drug. You will be engaged in a conversation with a pothead about how the NFL draft went, for example, and they will say something like, “Did you know that Thomas Jefferson smoked a gang of weed all the time? And so did Albert Einstein. Those guys did alright.”

What?

I always want to come back with, “Yeah, and did you know Hitler did amphetamines? Look how much that guy got done in a couple of years. The theory of relativity is for pussies. A real man gets bombed out of his gourd, invades Poland and bitch slaps France before committing suicide in a bunker somewhere after murdering like 8 million people.”

And if you have the audacity to think I’m glorifying Hitler, by the way, you should put down the pipe/apple/bong/gas mask and take a trip into the real world with the rest of us who actually have to deal with reality on a daily basis. I’m just not into the tired rhetoric of potheads. “Dude, George Washington smoked pot and they put his face on the dollar bill.”

Yeah, but, surprisingly, they didn’t put his face on the dollar bill because he smoked pot. I can pretty much guarantee that. Otherwise I’ve had several roommates during my lifetime who belong on currency of some sort. Probably Jamaican, come to think of it. For every one person who did something great with themselves in the 1700’s in spite of smoking pot I can give you at least 30 in the 2000’s who have done nothing but get blazed and play Halo for 16 hours straight.

“Yeah dude, but they play Halo in cooperation mode. That shit’s hard to do when you’re high. Can you order me a pizza? I can’t remember where the phone is.”

You know what else is hard to do? Try putting something in your mouth without lighting it on fire. I can’t tell you how much I struggle with that. Who even thought of that in the first place? If I walked around with a lit candle in my ear would that make me look cooler than I already am? What if I told you it would get you SUPER high and you could see God?

“Dude, it’s herbal. It’s natural. God wants us to smoke it.” Really? Then why do respiratory ailments exist? Is that God’s way of saying, “Gotcha, suckers! Smoke all you want, I’ll still kick your ass.” If you think about it, everything on earth was put here by God (if that’s the route you want to choose in your argument for weed) and we just used our free will to take the periodic table of elements and move some stuff around a little bit here and there and we came up with awesome things like crystal meth, morphine and internet porn (obviously everything isn’t ALL bad about playing with the periodic table). EVERYTHING we use is natural at some point in its existence on earth. Until we start smoking moon rocks or doing lines of Mars at the new Studio 54 I regret to inform all the potheads that the “it’s natural” defense is bullshit.

Do you only eat “organic” food too? That stuff is another huge crock of shit but I will save that for another day, just to save you from having another rant to worry about.

The worst part about the weed smokers is that they all think they are smarter than people who don’t smoke. Let me put this into the proper perspective: People who habitually use a drug that makes their reaction time slower, their conversations more boring and their clothes more smelly actually think they have the ability to pull one over on those who don’t smoke because they think they are smarter than everyone around them.

And they say weed does no harm. I say we already have enough stupid people in the world, what the hell do we need with a drug that makes people dumber than they already are? You are absolutely not fooling anyone when you smoke out and show up in the same room as me. You’re not fooling anyone when you go to your room, close the door and put a towel down on the floor to cover the hole on the bottom. You’re not fooling anyone when you suddenly disappear from a campsite because you “forgot your ice cream” in town (actually, I take that back, you did fool me and I’m still pissed about that). You’re not fooling anyone when you spend days upon days going to your friend’s house to “practice for softball” but come home every night glassy-eyed and still as shitty at softball as you were when you left.

Basically, all I’m saying is that if you want to go smoke weed, go ahead. Smoke away. Get higher than a motha. But don’t try to tell me how awesome it is because you would never use the same tired arguments potheads use for weed in place of ANY other drug or pastime. I won’t try to tell you how awesome playing golf is and have my only argument for playing golf be that President Eisenhower was an avid golfer and the president of the United States and he has his face on the dime. George W. Bush played golf, too, and he smoked weed. And he did cocaine. And he got busted for DUI. When his face gets on some currency we will talk. Until then, SHUT IT!

Thank you.
B!