I lift the vaporizer's whip, coiled up like a translucent plastic snake, to my lips and pull. A gust of hot green air inflates my lungs. I hold my breath and wait.
I am Captain Cannabis, a ganja soulja taking my smokeshow on the road from the suburbs with their wide lawns and narrow minds to Hanover, N.H., in the shadow of the Green Mountains, where Ethan Allen and his boys once harvested wild weed in quiet hollows. Probably.
My throat screeches with cottonmouth so I marinate it with a splash of Jack Daniels. The whiskey crackles darkly on my heavy buzz. Weed fuels the intellectual curiosity of my group of cannabis companions; we take flight in a spaceship of dubiously heightened awareness. My vertebrae feel fused together like a python's. We discuss the inherently political nature of military intelligence. We are so baked.
This morning pulled a wake and bake, blurring the boundary between sleep and waking and somnambulation. Smoked and drove Posner-style down to Dunkin' Donuts and then sunbathed on the golf course where the emerald grass feels cool to the touch. The clouds look like people, man
I think, I've hit more bongs and eaten more blintzes than Goldmember.
Back in the room we're thinking of band names why hasn't anyone ever used the Joint Chiefs? We gotta copyright that shit, man.
Left side of my face hangs in paralysis. I cough a sweet burnt asthmatic cough, let the pressure pound behind my fat and puffy adder eyes. A neon feeling corkscrews down my ear canal, boring THC into my brain. We light a joint. Swisher Sweets Peach-Flavored Blunt smoke rolls through the room like a fogbank. This old carpet mottled with salmon and mauve. I wonder what if we get a calumet peace pipe would that be offensive? Or just like, peaceful?
We talk about the future: MBAs, JDs, MRS degrees Mr. President gets thrown around a lot, but what about, maybe, one of those lesser-known but still VERY important Cabinet positions, like, Secretary of Transportation? Or, like, Prime Minister?
I swivel my neck like a snake smelling the sky. I look outside and watch the hazy blazy afternoon sun melt into twilight, turn back to the room and the joint in progress and feel like I fell down an elevator shaft into a pool populated by mermen.
The microphones S&S has no doubt planted in here somewhere would pick up some strange acoustics. Hyena laughter, manic and brief, surrounded by a white noise of slow conversation, hiccups, extended lapses of deliberative silence. What if we, like, are actually just brains in vats somewhere on a UFO hurtling into the void? Woah, dude. Woah
Pass that here, bro.
Feeling more splattered than a Steadman drawing, I send the roach scuttling across the floor under the bed. We start talking about the tree climbing incident, when the Captain, feeling especially in touch with nature, climbed a lone pine drooping next to a larger tree. Once atop the pine tree I leapt across the chasm to the other tree, and tried to monkeybar across one of its branches. But I had confused THC with HGH, and five feet over my marijuana muscles just let go. I dropped thirty feet. Crashing down through the boughs, I landed sprightly on a bowed branch and stepped softly onto the ground like Jesus descending from heaven, my friends freaking out, flapping their arms like seabirds.
I was covered in sap and pine needles, looking like a pothead who got a hold of the wrong stuff. And maybe I was this had been "that Taliban weed," straight off the slopes of the Hindu Kush.
Time for some fresh air. We're standing outside and I'm watching the cherry sparkle red in the night wind saying, Burn, baby, burn.
