Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

This post includes a soundtrack. Press play and read on:

Sometimes I worry about my esteemed co-blogger and travesty fiancé. In attacking entire groups of people - an admirable pursuit I in no way intend to disparage - he sometimes overreaches. When he should be focusing his considerable energies towards hating the player, he sometimes slips over into hating the game.

Take his latest post. Hippies deserve to be verbally destroyed, yea, unto the tenth generation, but I detect a note of animosity directed not merely at their inexplicable affection for hand instruments louder, cheaper and more African than a Ladysmith Black Mambazo bootleg or life on the streets of Kinshasa, but at their drug of choice. I feel this is unfair. Weed didn’t make hippies, Vietnam made hippies, and the statute of limitations for revenge has not yet expired - I recommend burying Hanoi with an airdrop of those Vietnamese-origin disposable chopsticks with absolutely inscrutable English instructions on the sleeve. (”What’s that, Mr. Nguyen? You’re stuck under a collapsed statue of Ho Chi Minh? Save yourself! Taking chopstick and hold to as you were a pencil! Now you can pick-up any thing!”) Every society has its Lotophagi - and of course, the real reason we hate hippies is that they’re lazy even about being lazy, whereas we have whittled malingering into a fine art - and if hippies didn’t have weed and Phish tours, they’d have Miller and Smokey and the Bandit.

But the Goy and I have always had a certain difference of opinion regarding the hierarchy of drugs. We are of course both devotees of the sauce, but while Chris ranks it as his third-favorite rush (right under getting a blowjob from someone you don’t respect and the violent death of Communists), alcohol for me occupies a place somewhat below uppers and far, far above any drug whose effects include falling into something that can apparently be termed only “the K-hole.” This led to a difference of priorities in recreational activities. Occasionally we would “share” a drug experience, such as the time we did coke in the company of our friendly dormitory cocaine dealer and that ubiquitous cocaine-session archetype, the nameless blond chick who leaves no impression on you beyond her surprisingly deep well of knowledge concerning blow - but generally, if the day’s program called for smoking, snorting, or ebullient declarations of love for people that didn’t truly deserve it (weddings notwithstanding), we parted ways.

Thus, while young Cortés was off repeatedly invading his nationalist Mexican paramour’s Tenochtitlan in an elevator maintenance shack on the roof of the engineering building, and collecting hickeys which made Montezuma’s revenge look downright Christian, I was usually to be found engaged in my traditional pastime of putting anything I could find with the suffix “-drine” up my nose and really effusively describing the merits of Charles Mingus albums. He would spend an evening in the drinking martinis in a Garden District hotel bar in the company of a buxom young Jewess, I would spend an evening smoking ganja that reportedly “tasted like blueberry” (it didn’t) in a shed behind some dude’s house in the company of a semi-catatonic Azeri and a backwards hatted Atlantan Jew who kept trying to convince me Neil Peart was God (he didn’t).

I don’t regret it.

But that brings me, in a roundabout way, to my main point. I love weed. Not in a hippie way; I don’t love weed because I love Jerry, blacklights, African liberation colors, incense sticks or Day-Glo tapestries, I love weed because it gets me fucked up. I feel this is somehow purer - drugs should be taken because drugs are fun to take, not because the man with dreadlocks told you to.

But honestly. I loved it the first time I hacked and wheezed through a lungful of smoke, which had been delivered unto me by a small glass pipe named, as I recall, Frodo Baggins - any committed ganja smoker will confirm that stoners have an eerily universal tendency to name their smoking implements after Lord of the Rings characters, which I assume is because there exists a certain class of stoner who, bedecked in afro, erratic chin fuzz, khaki shorts and (more often than not) a Star of David on a twisted hemp rope, looks more Hobbity than Frodo-under-Merry-under-Pippin-under-Sam’s-just-a-little-too-loving-gaze in Return of the King. This also may be why you’ll meet a million pipes named after Hobbits but never one named after Elves - stoners have many qualities, but ethereal beauty is rarely among them. But that first encounter was downright magical. I had been warned that “nobody ever gets stoned the first time they smoke,” and about ten minutes after I had smoked I was complaining that nothing had happened and weed was vastly overrated, which was precisely the moment when my field of vision suddenly tilted 45 degrees to the right and the giggles set in. That started a series of cannabinoidal misadventures over the years which have included both the closest I’ve ever come to a profound religious experience (lying in bed awestruck by the depth of Lee Perry’s production on Heart of the Congos) and at least three times when I’ve smoked so much I woke up the next morning high, which always strikes me as a victory of cosmic import (probably because I’m high).

But I admit that weed can lead to serious problems. Not of the anti-drug PSA variety, because frankly those are about as effective and about as likely as Gallic valor, but of marijuana-induced idiocy. I’d like to think I avoid this treacherous pitfall, but its effects can be devastating. Observe this quotation, gleaned from the Wikipedia entry on Half Baked, which I was reading for a perfectly legitimate reason:

There is a humorous feature on the “Fully Baked Edition” DVD called “Five Minutes With The Guy On The Couch”. This feature allows you to literally smoke with the guy on the couch. The five minute clip depicts a stationary camera filming him as he sleeps on the couch, and as clouds of smoke waft in and out of the scene, the guy turns over several times, farts, scratches his head, removes his socks, and at the end of the scene, he rolls over and falls off of the couch. This feature is reminiscent of the old videos in which a stationary camera films a burning log in a fireplace, which is intended for people who do not have a fireplace, to put on their television sets, giving the impression that there is a fireplace in the room. The effect of this bonus feature is that as you smoke with your friends, you can look over and see the guy on the couch, as if he were really at your house.

And how many rips from your little friend Samwise Gamgee did it take you to arrive at such a lofty plateau of overexplanation, nameless Wikipedia stoner? The idea that somewhere out there exists a group of people who actually sat down and smoked weed with a televised representation of a minor and unresponsive fictional character from an unassuming stoner movie - the idea that there exists a group of people who would want the Guy on the Couch “really at their house” - terrifies me almost enough to make me cast my Rizzlas and my Trojan Ganja Reggae Box Set to the curb.

But I stay strong. And I stay high.

And if Goyeleh isn’t willing to accept that about me, then I just don’t see how this sham marriage is going to work.