We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. . . .” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”

You never said it had to be original.

So me and two buddies had just smoked a gram of some proper chronic, this shit was hella dank and the crew had just come out of a T-break too, so it hit us like a freight train. I thought that my lighter was missing so I look for it for like 10 minutes only to find it in my pocket, me and my buddies laughed for a good 5 minutes at that, but that’s not the funny part. Me and the crew go into class, and our teacher knew we high, but he was really cool about it because we just kept our mouths shut and got on with it. He walks up to us and quietly asks “How high are you?” And I swear on Snoop Dogg, RAW rolling papers, and Cali buds, my friend replied “It’s actually pronounced, Hi how are you?” The thing is, everyone in the class heard and completely lost it.

We used to go down to an abandoned train station to smoke in my home town. It was so isolated and huge, which is why it made for the perfect place to go and smoke with friends, skateboard and just generally hang out.
So my friend and I were sitting on the edge of the platform smoking a joint and chatting away at about 1am. It was so silent and peaceful. No wind blowing, no noise at all. It was a serene moment.
While we’re blazing, we see a white owl come and land on the platform. My friend and I freak the fuck out. An OWL?! A WHITE OWL?! HERE?! Fuuuuuuck, we were so taken back by this owl. It blew our minds that this majestic creature had chosen to grace us with it’s presence. It truly must have been our spirit animal reaching out to us in a moment of enlightenment.
So my friend pulls out his disposable camera and snaps a shot. We high five. We hug. We smoke another joint in celebration. Minds are blown all over the fucking train station.
A few weeks later and we’ve told everyone about our experience. It was so “out of body”, man. Such a spiritual experience that cannot be expressed in mere words.
Anyway, my friend got his pictures developed and it was a seagull.
But it was a fucking SWEET seagull, though.

Dope!

This happened back in the day, down in the Florida Keys when Sloppy Joe’s was still a local walk-in watering hole, where you cold purchase and drink a cold beer wrapped in a paper bag from a gas station, as you were tolling down A1A wavimg the beverage at the local, sweating police officers as they stood on the roadside, while they waved back. A different and other worldly time.

Anyway, the story. We were returning north, late at night to Marathon, about halfway in the Keys, from a lost weekend in Key West. Our goal was to get home so that we could stagger into our construction jobs early Monday morning.

We were driving a bit erratically, in a mid 60’s grey step van, decaled with Mack’s Mud Jacking on the sides. We were using this to tour the country a bit, stopping and working as we got a bit hungry. It was renovated so that we could live in it if housing accommodations proved a bit too expensive, as they seemed mostly to be.

We were driving north over the 7-mile bridge. As I had mentioned, this was a lost weekend. At the time the side rails of the 7-mile bridge were constructed of old steel railroad rails, welded horizontally, which were salvaged from the old railway bridge that went down in a hurricane a couple of decades earlier. To have some, probably not well thought out, fun we started swerving into the steel guard rails which crunched the van a bit, but resulted in sparks worthy of any July 4th or mind altering celebration. It was a time – at the time.

To digress a bit, back at this time the Key’s were know for having some of the best weed around. Regularly, boats would run up to the islands and offload their product. There was also a heavy Bob Marley influence in the local population.

Thankfully we made it over the bridge with the mud jacking truck still running like the tough old bird she was. Unthankfully at the same time a mass of flashing lights pulled up behind us, with another mass screeching in front of us. Needless to say, we were a bit confused as to what was happening, thinking maybe that we were being pulled over for inattentive driving.

Quickly, officers with handguns and shotguns drawn yanked open the side doors and the back door of the van. All kinds of orders were shouted, all kinds of gun barrels and flashlights were pointed at us, with us too dazed to know what to do.

Then one of the officers shouted, ‘This is not them. Let’s get going.’ They all lowered weapons, not saying anything to us, and speedily entered their vehicles fleeing into the night, looking for someone or something apparently quite nefarious. We sat there for a while, in our minds praising whoever who had the kindness to remove us from a situation where a little bit of excitedness could have caused a finger to squeeze. And wondering if it really had happened.

This is going back almost thirty years now, when a few friends of mine, and myself, travelled up to the big city to see a concert, and hit a few record shops. I was the driver as I had the roomiest vehicle for the group.

Our first stop was to visit a friend of someone else on the trip, who had injured his back on the job. When we arrived at his apartment we found him flat on his back in the middle of the floor, rolling a joint on his chest. I personally have never had the rolling skills to even attempt this, but this fellow was just churning out perfect fatties with every attempt.

At this time in my life, I had never been stoned. I had often joined in for a few puffs whenever it were passed around, starting when I was a teenager, but for some reason it never had any affect on me so I did not think it ever would. It became a social thing and I think I did it just to fit in.

On this afternoon, I told everyone that I was going to head out early and visit a few shops on my own before we all met up later. The on-his-back-joint-roller then sparked up one of his creations and started passing it around, and then he lit another, etc. I joined in for a while and then excused myself, walked downstairs and headed down the street to the public parking lot.

I got into my car, started it and backed out of the spot, made a perfect 3-point turn and headed for the exit, when the world suddenly went crazy. I was, for the very first time, incredibly stoned. This was not the perfect moment for me as I had never experienced it before, I was alone, and I was piloting a vehicle out of a lot and onto a major street. I stopped right before the exit and I was immediately aware of all of the police cars around the area, and the insane traffic around me. At this time, the local college station, that I had dialed in, started playing the new single (at the time) from Ned’s Atomic Dustbin called ‘All I Ask Of Myself Is That I Hold Together’. This ferocious, pounding song became my theme as a huge wave of Hunter S. Thompson level Fear swept over me.

After briefly considering continuing on my journey, I swept out on the street, performing an immediate U-turn out of the exit and back through the entrance of the parking lot and parked back into the spot I had just vacated. I sat in my car with the radio on and the windows down until the buzz levelled off and the fear left me.

I headed back up to the apartment where I was ridiculed for hours.

Thankfully, I now have a respectful relationship with marijuana and I have not had the Fear consume me since.

I smoked pot for a month one night.

Went to see sleep in athens ga a few years back, drove from myrtle beach sc, got stoooooned the whole way there, when i got there i got even more stoned cheifing doob after doob, about an hour before the show, a good deep puddle of liquid lucy really made the senses tingle. Seeing sleep stoned out of my gourd and tripping balls was an incredible experience that i will never forget, it was fucking church. After the show i wandered aimlessly around athens til sunrise, still tripping nuts, lighting up roaches i kept finding in my pocket, maybe it was just one roach, maybe it was many, the world may never know….

I used to go on blunt rides with the guys across the hall from me in college. If you’ve never listened to Hamburger Train by Primus while high and driving around on rural back roads, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

I tied for 2nd at the Afroman Blue Room pre show smoke off vs Swank and Afroman. That’s all I remember.