I’m in my curmudgeon crouch, smoking an artifact of recently rediscovered well-aged doobage on the patio. It’s been another long workday at the office, which may now and forever be thirty feet away, inside the house. Work is now a journey and a destination with no identifiable journey or destination. But work is worked for the day, so…
As the smoke wafts into the sky, I think to myself: Where do these pluming ashen particles go? Then I realize, the answer my friend, is literally blowing in the wind. Then I self-correct: No, if I can only figure out how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, then I will finally have The Answer, although we all know the desiccated chocolate filling is no licker’s paradise, dear friend, in which case journey is favored over destination by -7.5 points on Sunday. At least that’s the line at the Bellagio.
I’m excogitating so hard on these thoughts so deep in the abyss that I’ve stopped toking. But the joint, it’s still smoking. So now I ponder the next comforting, meditative thought: I will probably never have children. Yet, I know that I am still nobly (and proudly and fondly) cultivating a future Rhodes Scholar extraordinaire of an inner child. An inner child as sweet as a candy apple Tootsie Pop. So, the inner child question then becomes outwardly obvious: Is it still legal for me to have an abortion in Texas?
But, really, where does all that smoke go? Only the climatologists know. Into the stratosphere of charismatic megafauna-like disappointments, perhaps? Like, divorce? I might tell you of such things… for all the tea in Uzbekistan. Many say that Kramer vs. Kramer is the best movie about divorce. I would tend to agree, but only if they took divorce out of the film. Then it would just be Kramer. And we all know he was cancelled. A cancellation eerily redolent of another limp inflection point once thought to be a panacea for peacemaking. We all once believed that the short-lived mash-up musical marriage of Run DMC and Aerosmith on Walk This Way would solve race relations in this country for generations to come. Nice beat, but dream on.
Aerosmith in Concert in Arnhem, Netherlands – Julio Aprea, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
The smoke is climbing higher into the ether. I can barely see its shadowy tendrils evaporate above. Does the smoke get its fifteen minutes of fame? When do I get mine? Jim Morrison said, “Five to One Baby, One in Five / No one here gets out alive.” Yeah, he could be a bit of a downer sometimes. He and Hendrix were gone by twenty-eight. Is it worth a curtailed life for the price of being great? I suppose I’m already past the point of no return on that one. Did you know it takes twenty-five years after a musician first releases an album to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? In breaking news, Kurt Cobain could not attend his enshrinement in person. (You can’t say too soon on that one since we know it’s been at least twenty-five years since he took the bullet train to the Hall of Fame.) Only two things are certain for the rockstar elite: Death and Cleveland.
Anyhow, the smoke is now vanished. The bud is out. I’m through with Jack Handy and his shallow deep thoughts. But Brian Cox had this cogent thing to say about marijuana in the New York Times:
There is something fundamental about it. It’s a vegetable and there’s a root and you feel it goes to some kind of root in you. I got into it because I used to get so wired at the end of a night. I needed to relax, and I didn’t want to get into taking all kinds of pills. Marijuana was able to calm this whirling dervish of a brain down. I’m very grateful for it.
Brian Cox said that. The tragic thing is the only thing I could think after reading that quote was how happy I was my last name was not David Cox in junior high. Or any phallic allusion. I had enough problems. Then (sigh) and now.
Which brings me, ever so logically, to my last point. The Chinese Communist Party does not “believe” in human rights. Well, as I watch the smoke billow to the heavens, I want to say I don’t believe in gravity. But somehow, they get away with it.
And that’s The Blunt Truth.
David Rock has written for film, magazines, reality television, and even at one time (gasp) the WWE. He is the author of the hit play GRAND DELUSION and the Co-Executive Producer of ” American Gangster:Trap Queens” on BET. His new play MASTERS OF PUPPETS will debut next year. He believes in vices, but not viceroys.
