Doglife

The People I Know Who Smoke Weed

Note: I realize that this is a rather simplistic take on the whole thing. I don’t go into statistics or great detail, but the subject doesn’t call for it. When faced with considering whether this pot-stuff is good or bad, it’s pretty open-and-shut. I have no problem with smoking if that’s what somebody wants to do, I am merely pointing out that like everything in life there are consequences. Also, this is based on my first hand experience, which is, like all firsthand experience, limited by how many people I know.

Comfortable
Comfortable wherever they are, in whatever situation they are. If they live in squalor, then they are fine with it. They are fine with unpaid bills, with mooching and screwing people over. They are completely ok living with piles of dirty laundry, unwashed dishes, with being dependent and lazy. There is no imperative to do anything write now though they can plan like hell. They can make lists and talk about shit they are going to do. I would say that the emotional imperative to be concerned is gone, the ability to be decisive, or the need to be decisive is also gone. Their conscience is now purely intellectual. It’s as if they only do anything because they know they should, not because they feel they should.

Slow
They are slow to pick up on hints, or on anything subtle. Now, because I didn’t know them before they smoked weed I can’t say for sure whether this is a product of it or not, but they are slower, on average, than the people I know who don’t smoke. It could also be that they are thinking about smoking, instead of thinking about what is being said to them.

They can hold off
The idea that weed is not addictive comes from the fact that they can pause their intake for a stretch of time. Long enough to get clean to do a drug test, long enough to convince somebody that they are no longer smoking. They always go back though. It is a crutch. I would compare it to an average drinker who is not an alcoholic, but who enjoys alcohol. It is still a kind of addiction, but not the chemical-dependency kind, more along the lines of returning to something you enjoy if there is not a more important goal in mind.

Fairly cool under pressure
This is true, though it comes across as just not getting it, not understanding the situation. There are situations in life in which the only logical reaction is to feel stressed. Feeling stressed may not help things out, but the fact is that you should be because there is bad stuff going on. It’s human. So yes, I am saying that potheads don’t really act like regular people.

They tend to be identity-seekers
They like the idea of smoking as much as, or maybe more than, the THC itself. Would-be gangstas, would-be hippies, would-be anarchists, all taking pride in the fact that they are smoking an illegal substance. They smoke because they want an identity. They are being defiant and rebellious. This is them defying the government and their parents. They like to wear stuff with weed on it, or Rastafarian insignia, like a brand to ensure that people know they smoke. They like being around other smokers so that they can they can feel like part of a clique as they smoke.

Why it should not be legalized
For one thing, it could be done if they were motivated enough.  Anything can be made legal with a motivated movement behind it. Look at the relative success of gay marriage. Are you telling me that gayness, which is strictly forbidden by the popular religions, is more acceptable in a country full of zealots than cannabis, which isn’t mentioned at all?  The fact that it doesn’t look hopeful in the near future possibly says something about why it should not be legalized. It kind of fits with the perception of lazy slowpokes who would rather wallow than accomplish. Maybe the reluctance of the government to legalize it is just a test to see how much opposition they will face. They predict that the potheads will just say “fuck it” and go home to hit the bong if they meet a little opposition, and they have been correct so far. Apart from the fact that all kinds of law enforcement people would be put out of work, it might seriously affect the national ability to get anything done.

Pot-heads and their sandy vaginas

So earlier today I whipped out a post, somewhat poorly proofread, as are most of my posts, on problems I had with weed-smokers and smoking. People I have known personally, and extrapolating from my little group of acquaintances. It was not intended as flame-bait, the next one may be, but that one wasn’t.  Unlike most of the stuff on the Internet these days, it was not pro-weed, and as such I expected any reaction I got to be hostile. I was right, there was much hysterical pants-wetting (well, more than I expected), for example, in this Disqus forum. How dare this motherfucker not agree with us! How dare he not fall in line with the fashionable opinion! He is ignorant!!! Ignorant, I say! That was pretty much the level of discourse. Only one of them, this guy, tried to actually articulate thoughts as to how I was wrong. The thoughts made no sense, but he tried, and for that I have slightly more respect for him than the rest.

There are no simple jobs

Impractical Science

The truth is that for all the supposed advances in science and technology there is very little in the way of practical benefits to show for it. So yes, your MP3 player can hold every song you ever heard in your life, and we can watch movies that look pretty on our really thin flat-screen TVs, and we can heat up our frozen boneless buffalo wings in 2 minutes, but none of that is even remotely important. Comfort, entertainment, convenience are all things mankind has proven that he can live without, but still that’s what everybody wants. All this brain-power thrown at the pursuit of pleasure and emblems of status, and yet science, the study of our environment is supposed to be so important. Mankind wants to wants to explore, wants to cures diseases, and make the world better, but more than any of that, we want cool stuff.

Sure we have medicines that cure a few diseases, but they can’t cure death. If they could, the world would be even more crowded than it is now and life would be miserable. They know stuff about the universe, yes, but how is that going to help anybody? How is any of that practically useful?

The only practical pursuits in science are to lengthen human lifespan, to improve the quality of life throughout that lengthened lifespan so that people can be more productive, and to ensure that life on planet earth is livable when everybody is living longer. Wanting to figure out the age of the Earth when everybody is afflicted with death is like wanting to catch the end of the in-flight movie before your plane crashes. It is all about discovering things that are irrelevant to the true nature of our existence.

The sad thing is that nobody seems able to tell how meaningless all of the gadget-making, minor-drug making, and space/time exploration is. The public gets so enthralled every time a smaller, powerful computer comes out, or a bigger thumb-drive, or some kind of new erection-aid is discovered that they forget that none of those things is really essential, and not even all that convenient, just minor improvements on things we already have.

There is an upside to everything

Loneliness
Loneliness when viewed on it’s own, without thinking about how other people are, is not a bad thing, especially when compared to the horrors of failed relationships, and the fact that most people are a waste of time. The loneliness experienced when surrounded by other people, is far worse that sitting at home in a quiet apartment with only your cat for company. Society pressures people to associate with other people, not because this makes sense or because this is necessarily healthy, but because your average person lacks the emotional and psychological resources to survive without a support-group of friends and family. In a sense, being lonely, and being able to handle it for more than 10 minutes, means that you are stronger than you average person.

Impotence
Sex, like Christmas, like Valentine’s Day, is just another commercialized product that big-business has taken control of, repackaged and is in the process of selling back to you. Commercial sex is a lot bigger deal than the real thing. The whole problem of psychological impotence is due mostly to sex being such a big thing to everybody. If you are impotent and are able to accept it, then that takes some of the pressure off, which in turn will take care of the impotence if it is, in fact, psychological and not, you know, cancer.

Exhaustion
You get to sleep at night. There is nothing like being tired at night to get you to sleep. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, and in those cases, being exhausted can serve as a distraction from other problems you may have. Like pain it tends to swallow up everything else in your life.

Hunger
Apart from making you appreciate food, you get a tolerance for those basic uncomfortable situations of which adult life is full. It makes you less of a pussy, and patient. Note that short-term hunger is different from chronic hunger leading to starvation, though I guess, the same principle holds true. You also may lose weight if you are hungry enough of the time.

Smoking
There are apocryphal benefits relating to the positive effects of nicotine on the part of your brain that is affected by Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease. There is more stuff concerning the relative immunity of smoker’s to airborne diseases due their passages constantly being flooded with mucus, but there are more definite benefits to smoking, that while not make up for the obvious drawbacks, are definitely there. These benefits include:

• Something to do with your hands

• A basis to socialize with other random people in designated smoking areas

• Something to look forward to every hour or two

• A long tradition of smokers in movies that serve as a club to which you have been admitted

• Something to force self-righteous non-smokers to keep their distance

Poverty
There is no greater motivation to work hard that the desire to escape poverty and a life among the poor. The whole reason rich kids like Paris Hilton are the way they are is because they have not had enough poverty in their lives. Poverty can also teach you the value of money. To be honest it does not always work, but it’s an excellent teaching tool that is available only to the poor.

Incompetence
Incompetence and stupidity do not always go hand in hand. A stupid person can be, and usually are, competent at limited tasks that don’t call for a lot out outside-the-box thinking, and most intelligent people are incompetent at something. The upside of incompetence is that you get the motivation to learn if you are courageous enough to keep going even after your incompetence has been demonstrated.

The crack pipe of denial

You have all of these rules that don’t fit with the complexities of real life in the real world. Don’t smoke this. But why? Because we say it’s harmful. But the science doesn’t say that. Ok, here, go to jail, get raped for a few months and we’ll see what you say. You don’t hit your wife even though the crazy bitch once punched through a plate glass window and threatens to do it again about once a month. Click the wrong link on the Internet, go to jail. Your browser pre-fetches the wrong page in an innocent Google search (Firefox does this by default) and you go to jail. You can deny and deny and deny all you want to, you are still going to jail and there is not a person who knows you who would argue otherwise because of the shit they found on your hard-drive (“I can’t believe he was into that!”). You will see a story on your local TV news about the guy who got caught with this shit on his computer, they will give your name, and that’s it for your entire life.

It doesn’t matter what you actually do, what your circumstances actually are, or whether you had no control over the situation. If they can catch you, and offer some evidence that you are guilty they will and that’s that. The bruises on her face will make the jury and the public hate you even if you were the one in traction for a month. Not even your lawyer will try very hard. The truth is irrelevant to everybody else but you the way it was irrelevant to you when the same thing happened to somebody else.

Seriously, does it matter to you at all that there are men in prison for crimes they did not commit? Does it matter to you that many of the “releases because of DNA” stories never reach the local, let alone national, news? Does it matter to you that many of the innocent men in prison never committed crimes that would involve DNA evidence? No, it doesn’t, because you don’t want to think about the possibility that it could happen to you, even if you aren’t poor, or from a minority group.

The innocent guy behind bars for another man’s crime is so played-out, has become so much of a cliché that nobody cares anymore, it has lost whatever shock-value or empathetic charm it had before. It’s not as cinematic or entertaining. Once you take away all that good stuff what you have left is the depressing fact of a man who has lost years, often decades of his life in a hellhole with genuinely vicious people. It’s depressing, and who wants to be depressed? Well, ok, at least he’s out now, let’s give him some money and move on. Let’s think about something funny and hip! Hey, wanna see a picture of a cat? It’s a cute cat!

Seriously, escape, diversions, that’s how you choose to handle the difficult things. If you don’t look at all the ugly things showing in through the cracks, then you don’t have to deal with the feeling that maybe you should be doing something, anything, about them. It’s much safer in a darkened room, with an episode of Lost playing on your new flat-panel, and your laptop open on your lap. If you don’t think about the ease with which your rights, your freedom, everything you have worked for, can be taken away from you, without you even trying, then you don’t have to be afraid. You can just light up your little crack-pipe of denial and puff away.

How people react to new things

Fear
The first thing they feel is fear. How do I handle this? How do I react? Usually they try really hard to pretend that nothing strange is happening, that this is all normal. They try to ignore the oddity. When first faced with it they dredge up the last thing they remember hearing or reading, and adopt that as a guideline. As things filter back, things heard long ago or seen on TV, or overheard in restaurants, they refine their approach a little bit.

Searching
If the recovered bits of knowledge from the furthest reaches of their brains are not particularly negative they may try, tentatively, to embrace the new thing. Often they will opt for peaceful co-existence. But they are always looking for knowledge, new ways to process it, always open to the observations of others like them.

Whispering
At this point they will gossip, sitting and whispering, sharing speculations. At some point somebody will voice a particularly frightening possibility, or even an outright lie regarding the new thing. Panic will over-ride reason and they will react as a group, each one reinforcing the fear of the others. See, I am afraid too, there must be something to this.

Lynching
Not necessarily literal lynching. They will seek to remove this new thing from their presence. They will broadcast their fearful speculations as a means of infecting more people with fear thereby getting power to remove this feared object.

Recipe for a compliant society

1. Domed cities
This is less about aesthetics or about clean air than it is about control. You want a greenhouse, a place where you so completely control the citizenry that even what they breathe I not up to them anymore.


2. Crack pumped through the ventilation system
This will keep everybody happy. Instead of a salary in currency you give them a crack high every few hours as an incentive to get more work done. The people who want to get high without working will be weeded out by the real workers themselves.


3. When they have outlived their uselessness they get recycled
Eventually all they will want to do is get high all the time and their productivity will fall. This is the point at which you recycle them and replace them with the young fresh ones who have never been high.

Phallic football

You ever notice that football players look like penises? That rounded helmet and the body-protection that keeps them rigid. There is also the matter of tackling where the player launches, or thrusts, himself at a target, helmet first. I have noticed that they spit a lot on the sidelines too.

Other issues here that are not found in other sports:

The tight pants. Why? It’s like playing in a latex body-suit. Why does a manly sport need to show off the glutes of its participants?

The contact. They all have to pile up to stop a runner or to get a loose ball. Piles that are two or three men deep, writhing and grinding.

The shape of the ball. Not exactly phallic, but elongated, which makes it more phallic than a regular spherical ball.

It seems like there is a lot of denial here. Being a heterosexual male football fan myself I am no way implying that this sport is gay, however, it does seem to have been designed by someone with issues.

Sex as a sport

Living in a Red-State or claiming a puritanical religion does not really indicate a lesser interest in sex, as the red-state obsession with adult material indicates. Clearly there is a market there that is in the closet and willing to indulge themselves only in private because sex has a negative stigma. I suppose that one way to make sex, and also porn, more publicly palatable would be to market it as a sport. A contest of fitness and skill and will. A version of wrestling where the winner gets certain benefits, or perhaps some kind of who-can-orgasm-first contest. Before you dismiss this, let me point out why this could work, how the athleticizing of sex would make it more acceptable:

Not for “pleasure”
The moral objection to sex is rooted in the fact that sex is pleasurable for most people. If the objective of intercourse is, say, for procreation, the it loses it’s offensiveness to moralists. In that case you clearly are not doing it for recreation, therefore you are not a hedonist or whoremonger. Well here you go, a reason to do it that involves competition instead of erotic bliss.

Feminism
Here we have an arena in which men and women could compete as equals and individuals. It’s about skill, not about upper-body strength or predatory instincts. Sex is the one arena in which men and women operate as equals in real life as well.

It is not all that different from many sports
Thing about the amount of close contact between MMA fighters on the floor, or boxers clinching, or basketball players posting up. Think about the nudity in professional wrestling, diving, tennis, bodybuilding. The only thing missing is penetration and heterosexuality.

Local sex leagues
These will provide all the benefits of any kind of local competition, like college or Olympic sports with the same tribal mentality and vicarious conquest. Conservatives love competition, and the lust for victory may eventually outstrip any prudishness.