For over a generation now, states have been breaking down to public sentiment and legalizing that very mild, marginally hallucinogenic plant known as cannabis, weed, Mary Jane, the Devil’s lettuce, ganja, reefer, left-hand cigarettes, and the thousand other names you know it by and love. What was once the target of a hateful propaganda campaign is now meant to be purchased, excessively taxed, and consumed en masse as we obey our greater civic duties to rapacious entrepreneurship and a bustling economy.
In every city where the plant is now legal, little shops of scant decor are quickly thrown together like a slapstick scene torn out of the Golden Age of American animation. A ragtag team of anxious construction workers is seen descending upon a worksite in the most vigorous of intensities while a clamorous noise rises from the hammering, sawing, and banging, almost as if every board, stud, and nail were pounded into place at the very same time. The calamity ends as abruptly as it starts; the store is fully built and open for business.
Never before has cannabis been so available to so many people. People who never thought they would have the chance to smoke a doobie can right now experience it for themselves from just a quick trip to a local boutique for easy-to-consume drinks and edibles that come in a profusion of fruity flavors that even kids would love. It feels like Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory come to life, except instead of Oompa Loompas and Wonka bars, we have weed, which is just as appealing in some respects.
And yet, here you are watching the world from between two slats of a window blind, guarding yourself against anything that’s viewed differently from what you know. Drowning your sorrow in alcohol, sipping nights away on Red wine, or getting blackout drunk on Pabst seems so much more customary, hell, maybe even more American, than partaking in something you’ve only seen in movies or heard about from the rebellious kids at school.
But you know, the most basic property of human intelligence is how it can jump out of its own thought processes to observe itself and to explore the hypothetical. And so you wonder. You say to yourself, “Maybe I shouldn’t try cannabis. Or maybe I should. Or maybe I shouldn’t. But the store is right down the street, and it’s just oh so convenient. And who knows? Maybe it won’t be legal in the future so I might as well try it now. But, ah, I don’t know.”
You pace back and forth and debate whether you should or should not drive, walk, or ride a bicycle down the street to that new shop that just opened and peruse their forbidden delicacies and treats. The deliberation goes on for several days, maybe even weeks, until you grow tired of arguing with yourself and decide to just go on and get it over with.
Upon entering the cozy, little shop you feel immediately feel out of place. The glass display counter holds too many products in too many flavors, brands, and varieties, adorned in too many Cs and Bs and Ns, numbers, and informational symbols that only serve to make your purchase all the more difficult, if not impossible. Why can’t anything ever be easy?
You hold a blank stare for an impossibly long minute, then point at pair of gummy bags and offer a rough, incomprehensible grunt to indicate that’s what you want. Your hand shakes as you tap-to-pay, and on the way out of the building you get stuck trying to push the door open. It was an unmarked “pull”, but your awkward embarrassment is fended off with the fear that a police stakeout is about to come to an end.
You take the long way home and keep a watchful eye on the rearview mirror in case anyone is on your tail. At home, you lock all the doors and peer out through the window blinds again just to be safe. Then you tiptoe over to the portraits of Jesus Christ and Apollo Creed that you have prominently displayed in gilded frames and turn them around.
Finally, you crack open a package and eat a gummy. “Wow, is that a weird taste,” you think. The added sugar and flavors don’t mask the heavy taste of THC all that well. It’s like if flowers were people, and they needed to bathe or shower just like the rest of us. The taste of THC is like licking a sweaty crevice of a flower that hasn’t cleaned itself in a very long time. A few more gummies are eaten, and before you know it the bag is empty. You say to yourself, “Wow, not much in one of these…”
You smack your lips together and wait for the aftertaste to subside. Then you ask the most important question of the day, “Okay, so how am I supposed to enjoy this?”
Things Keep Staying Weird
How best to experience the cannabinoid high is often left to series debate. Do you sit on the couch and watch cartoons? Do you browse the internet for funny videos? Do you draw in coloring books? Do you binge-watch The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross? Do you play video games? Do you—ah, fuck, too many options, brain aneurysm! But then you remember that old gringo, Willie Nelson. He has a PhD in dope and was all into music. So you decide, “Music it is then.”
You load YouTube on your favorite streaming device and start playing songs from your profile’s catalog of likes and subscribed videos. Halfway through the playlist, a big red balloon floats into the room and suddenly it feels like summer. It feels like you’re listening to your favorite songs for the very first time. The rhythm and dance charges through your head, body, and limbs with the force of a thousand galloping horses, all beating their hooves upon the earth to the driving beats.
And it’s not just that, it feels like you’re hearing the music in three dimensions. This is more easily discernible if the music was recorded in stereo and not just a bunch of single tracks laid directly over top of one another. You close your eyes and it feels like you’re in the room where the music is being performed. You hear each instrument or vocal track distinctly in three dimensional space.
And it’s not just that, it feels like YOU are the one who is playing the instruments. There is a special kind of discomfort that comes from hearing one’s own voice on tape or from listening to a musical recording of oneself playing an instrument. The notes and tonalities don’t sound as authentic, as smooth, or as golden as they would normally when listening to professional musicians. The phoniness distracts you. You don’t like listening to yourself. It feels weird. So you decide on another activity.
Not wanting to get up, or even move, you take the remote and browse for cartoons. But things keep staying weird. You watch cute and cuddly creatures onscreen but you cannot help but envision the heavyset man in a stained undershirt doing the voice over from a dark room with poor lighting. He’s sweating profusely. The room is humid and uncomfortably warm. The voice actor is speaking excitedly into a dirty microphone as he holds a few pages of script in his clammy hands. You cannot focus on anything else but this greasy, behind-the-scene, image, and you wonder if he’s comfortable like that or if he knows enough to change his shirt or at least turn down the thermostat so he’s not sweating so much. But this isn’t something you want to think about. The phoniness of animation distracts you. It feels weird. So you decide on another activity.
Then you think about watching a nice sitcom. Those are always fun to watch. So you find a good one. But things keep staying weird. Your eyes don’t automatically turn to meet the person presently speaking. You find yourself staring at one actor for the entirety of the show. You watch their mannerisms and behavior, which is simply just their acting. It doesn’t feel like you’re watching TV. It feels like you’re there, on set, watching the actors act in person.
You see them not as cropped versions of themselves, as constrained by a camera lens, but as full-sized people standing in an open studio or space. You watch them preemptively tense before they regurgitate their lines. You notice the fake reactions and the subtle movements that show the actor already knows what’s coming. They’ve read the script. Their responses are clearly planned.
You also notice how everything else in the show is so artificial and fake. The walls, and the floor, and the furniture in each room are unusually clean, as if they were just purchased and slapped together for this one purpose, to film a TV show. This is not real life. Life is dirty, the spaces are cramped, and people don’t always articulate or stand where they’re supposed to stand. You think every thing that a sitcom is composed from and represents is sham.
And it’s not just that, it feels like YOU could be the one acting in each role. Those fake expressions and premeditated responses could just as easily be yours. There’s nothing biologically different from the people on TV and you. The phony facial quirks and false vocal tonalities are just as easily produced by your own mental faculties as anyone else.
This all fascinates you, and you’re reminded of how hallucinogens can cause a person to feel a certain oneness with the world and the people around them, and you wonder if this is partly what they meant—that we’re all the same people, and not so different. You smile at the idea. And then you laugh at the idea. And then you laugh at the fact that you’re laughing, until tears run down your face. And as you’re sitting there, bemused by your own bemusement, you realize, “Hey. I’ve had these feelings before, I know what this is. I’ve felt this before. This is what it feels like to feel young.”
Everything is softer and funnier. There is no hurry. Time is an illusion. There is just this one moment, the here and now, the right now, this one point in time when everything that has happened before this moment happened in a different lifetime, where the outside world dissolves into a faded memory and all you care to give notice to is that you’re staring at your hands and having the realization, Hey! I can feel my ears growing!
Buzzes erupt around your face in a fun and ticklish-kind of way. And you feel like dancing like Mr. Bean. And it feels like you have two inner monologues. And it feels like all your joints are lubricated and can move as easily as if they were brand new. And it feels like your brain is lubricated too, except way too much because it becomes way too slippery to hold on to an idea for any period of time, which bugs the crap out of you because you have these really big thoughts that you’d like to remember.
And Then You Think Big Thoughts
Cannabis, like its more intense cousins, is mind expanding. The plant dissolves the mental barriers and walls that normally keep the mind compartmentalized and catalogued into its own self-devised indexing system. There’s a new found freedom when one is shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception. The mind become lithe and nimble. It runs, jumps, skips, and dives from one thing to the next.
One minute you may find yourself asking if there was a way to absorb all the food you ate so you no longer have to poop, the next minute you’re playing games on FaceBook and wondering if a game studio could create a social media game and what that would look like.
Like, what if there was a casual game on Facebook where you play a character in an open-world game who spends their time sitting in front of a computer or staring at a phone all day thumbing through social media. There wouldn’t be a goal or any real objective to the game apart from growing your own social media profile and presence in the game. You just create an account, add whatever real or fake information to the profile, add virtual friends, and the game will generate random posts and interactions with you based on each non-playable character’s (NPCs) likes or dislikes. It would be just like real life.
And what if that social media game also had games inside it? Like what if there was another casual game inside the social media game where you play a character who spends their time sitting in front of a computer or stares at a phone all day browsing social media. You can add friends to your virtual character’s virtual profile and message them just like in the game you’re already playing. And then BAM!, it hits you.
You realize, “Woah, dude! How do we know there isn’t someone playing us in their video game?” What if this whole Universe is composed of one person, whose finger controls another person, whose finger controls another person, whose finger controls another, and another, and another, and so on down the line?
You marvel at the possibility—that we’re just pawns in a representation of a real world, our thoughts and actions are not chosen by us but by the person playing us? And what if there was another higher level world above them? And what if there was another higher level world above them? And another world above them? And another world above them? And so on up the line.
You convince yourself that this structure of nested worlds inside nested worlds the rationalization of the subconscious mind and its origins—the conscious mind of the person playing us. But how far up do these counterfeit worlds reach?
You stretch your cognition up and down this mental hierarchy of worlds and the infrastructure resembles that of a mirror looking into another mirror, where each reflection is like its own plane of existence, each mirroring is a world of selves, of time, of moral judgement, of cocksureness, of misguided values, and of worshipped idols. Each plane is attached to the one above and below it through the player playing the game and the character living it.
The understanding that forms in your mind is that time wouldn’t appear to stop for these characters, or for us. On the outside world, the person will play the game for a while, take a break, then resume, then take a break, then resume, but to the characters inside the game, time never pauses. There is no halt in perception, no crack in the cosmic egg from one session to the next. Time just picks up from where it left off, forming an endless flow of existence.
Every time a player participates in a game it’s like a new plane or a new slice of existence is being extended outward. Every time a player logs off the game, the plane is pulled inward, recoiling back into other existing planes. You sense a constant motion to-and-fro as all these planes of being yo-yo back and forth like a card shark performing a card spring from one hand to the other. Except there is no other hand. There’s just the flicking of a deck of cards, the extending of planes of reality outward and inward, outward and inward, endlessly, like an unrelenting slinky oscillating forever.
Your perception tries to follow the motion upwards, back to the source of these oscillations, but it’s hard to make out any solid objects. The slinky seems boundless. But after some effort, you catch a quick glimpse of those slices being compressed to form a solid whole, where everything becomes one, where it all feels as one infinite potentiality from which all else originates. When the slinky falls into itself, it feels like a state of pure being, a self-evident paradox seen in the divine source of all existence. You refer to this ideal form as God, for that highest self is also you, the creator of all the slices and from which all the social media games being played within social media games begin.
Without warning, your attention snaps back to your own slice of reality and the societal norms that weigh you down and defines your place in time. The self-awareness makes you feel disappointed. You don’t want to be here. You want to go back up through the slinkying to find your true and authentic self. You try to force your perception back up through the interconnected planes but it feels like the slinky is caught on something. It’s hanging mid-flight and won’t budge. The slinky is stuck in the air, and you can’t sense anything other than this one plane of existence that you reside in.
Suddenly the slinky breaks free, and you can feel your perception running across the hierarchy as the oscillations resume, but soon the slinky gets caught in the air again, pulling you back to your own slice of reality. Dammit! Why can’t anything ever be easy? You want to stop getting stuck. Your strongest desire right now is to stop the yo-yoing effect and just return to your original self, your ideal self, and just stay there.
You send your cognition out across your mind and through the depths of understanding in order to solve the slinky problem, but the only thing that makes sense is that the aether is dirty and that is why the slinky gets stuck. The slinky gets stuck on that unseen dirt in the aether and it has to be pulled or jerked free, like how a fisherman tries to get his bait unhooked from the weeds.
Of course, you know the aether shouldn’t exist. It was just an unproven idea conceived in medieval science. The idea was that aether is the fifth element, the element that fills the region of empty space in-between stuff, allowing for the propagation of light and gravity waves. But how can the aether not exist when our slinky gets stuck in it? So the either must exist! It’s the only thing that makes sense. And if the aether was clean, like how you assume it’s supposed to be, then the slinky would oscillate freely, and maybe recoil back into the ultimate form of your higher self and stay that way, forever.
With the slinky problem figured out, it feels like you’ve just made the greatest discovery about the true nature of reality. And you even know how to fix it and make it better. You can’t stop thinking, “The aether is dirty, man! The aether is dirty!” But you not only think it, you say it out loud. Actually, it’s more of a shout as the joyous excitement rolls over your body like the electric volts of a stun gun.
You feel compelled to tell someone about this magnificent discovery. You run outside and up the street, carrying your words of wisdom. But these people you run into on the sidewalk or getting out of cars in parking lots have not heard your whole inner dialogue or the supporting structure of thoughts surrounding social media games inside social media games, the planes of existence, or the oscillating slinky. They only see a raving lunatic, who’s grabbing them by the shoulders, having an hysterical fit, shouting incoherently, “The aether is dirty, man! The aether is dirty!”