Higher than the sun

by RAF KATIGBAK

Chances are if you ever went to college, there was always that one person in your circle of friends who was a complete weed demon. Of course there was nothing really wrong with the guy, it was just that he couldn’t function without being high all the time.

I had a friend like that; his name was Dwayne. Dwayne was a trustafarian who was into dub music and had black light posters of fractals on his wall. He wouldn’t be caught out of his house without his red, gold and green rasta cap flopped on his matted poo-dreads, and he always carried a large bottle of water around with him ’cause he was always parched from being always high. When he spoke, even the simplest thing suddenly became all cosmic and hilarious.

I was jealous of Dwayne. Not just because I couldn’t pull off the tri-coloured rasta cap (I tried for a semester and everyone thought I was a weird Japanese exchange student/record dealer), but because in the awkward social maze that is young adulthood, Dwayne had found his place: he was the stoner guy. He had expanded his consciousness and was all like, wow and cosmic and shit, and I was his straight-laced straight-edge dweeby little buddy. I was also jealous because he found something he really loved i.e. smoking weed. I’d even go as far as saying he scheduled his life around the stuff. At the time, I had no idea what I was into, and I had not thrown myself completely into something as far as Dwayne had thrown himself into pot.

Keep in mind, when it comes to getting high, I’m a total lightweight. Sure I’ve dabbled a little, and once came to in a Villeray sub-basement with a sketchy Romanian guy offering me an h-jay for my herbal meal supplement he was convinced was an opium suppository, but who hasn’t?

Even later, when I finally decided to try my hand at expanding my consciousness, I never found a drug that I liked as much as Dwayne loved weed. Weed made me paranoid and mushrooms turned my stomach. Ecstasy was annoying because I always ended the night reeking of Vicks VapoRub with hands that were sore from massaging annoying people in zebra fun-fur cowboy hats, and speed made me really, really, really dance to music that really, really, really sucked. Acid was interesting but I knew I was getting tired of it when I had to direct a photo shoot coming down off a six-hour trip and asked the models if they could “make their faces a little less melty.” Even though the non-committal 40-minute high of coke was tempting, it never appealed to me because I figured if I ever really wanted to get overly agitated to the point where white spit particles were flying onto people from the corner of my mouth, I would just contract rabies. Datura seemed pretty intense, but who has time to spend three days in your bathtub paranoid that lampposts are out to get you and bawling your eyes out because your flying bicycle just convinced you to kill the last unicorn? Of course the catalogue of barbiturates that I had consumed in my past don’t really count, as all they did was make me really boring and getting them didn’t involve the added thrill of interacting with twitchy Queb biker minions in baseball caps and baggy shorts at the back of an afterhours club.

No, I thought I would never be able to find something that would really blow me away and change the way I see and interact with reality. Until now. Ladies and gentleman, I have to confess something. For the past week, I have been doing something that has opened up the windows of perception and awoken my third eye. It’s introduced me to a world I had previously only heard about. A world full of fantastic light and colour where sound is magnified several times over and filled with magical musical twitterings. It makes being on Salvia feel like a sneeze.

What scares me is that I never thought I would do it. Even my hardened veteran friend Dwayne was too scared to do it. In fact, I never thought I could do it. And indeed, when I first tried it, my body tried to fight. My eyes refused to open and as I first did it and walked around confused, I began to see people emerging from their the doorways like zombies, living dead walking slowly through the streets.

But later on, the fear subsided and I realized the inherent beauty in my new surroundings. The greens are greener and blues more blue than ever, and I felt that I could get so much accomplished, that the world was a stream of never ending possibilities. That’s right, I’ve joined the probably hundreds of people that wake up before 11 a.m. It’s scary to think, but maybe I’ve finally found my niche as a morning person.

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca