Aside from some beautiful memories I have from early childhood, when I had no sense of time at all because there was no place I had to be, I've struggled to be more patient, more relaxed in the face of time. "I eat too fast, I drink too fast, I talk too fast - what's my fucking hurry?", I wrote in my journal at age 20, and this is all still true, forty years later.
Time is elastic and erratic; it can race then crawl then race again, and my efforts to master it, and to be more patient with and more accepting of how fast or slow things unfold have been unsuccessful. So far.
Of course, back in the day when we ingested various substances with the express goal of messing with our cognitive processes, this impatience could - and did - take some comical turns:
Winter of 1972/73 I was a sophomore at Utica College; I was sharing a pretty nice old house on Kemble Street with two of my friends, not too far from campus, so I could even walk when a ride was unavailable, and if the weather wasn't too arctic or swampy (the Mohawk Valley's two main climate settings).
One evening, we decided to make a batch of pot brownies. We had come into a nice amount of weed somehow, but it was not especially high-quality - not much pot was, back then - so this baking experiment was our attempt to squeeze as much stoning power out of our stash without wrecking our throats.
None of us had learned how to infuse butter with marijuana back then, either, so - don't laugh - we just pulverized the weed into as flour-like a consistency as we could, then sifted it into the brownie batter. As a result, the end-product tasted as bad as you'd expect - imagine chewing stale chocolate off a dry lawn - and we also had no real clue as to how strong the brownies would be.
While we waited for the brownies to bake and then cool off enough to eat, the sun set, and we grew a little bored and antsy. So, we rolled a joint, smoked it, then another. Perhaps a third. Who can say.
But by then, the brownies were cool enough to cut into squares and eat, and with our appetites sharpened by the smoke, we devoured a couple of squares each with great enjoyment. Despite the taste.
Then we waited for them to kick in. And waited. And waited. "Well, hell, these must be weak; let's down a couple more." Each.
Eventually, we started to feel pretty high, especially in terms of physical sensations; we got out of our chairs feeling like balloons rising to the ceiling. Nice.
We must have walked to campus - we surely couldn't have driven - and since every possible activity now seemed equally random, we just sat in the Student Union listening to our hearts beat and the building hum.
I turned to my roommate. "Brad?"
"Yeah?"
"Does that wall look weird to you?"
He considered this. For some time. "Yeah, it kinda does."
We both pondered this.
"Brad?"
"Yeah?"
"I figured out why the wall looks weird."
"Yeah?"
"It's really the ceiling."
Time is elastic and erratic; it can race then crawl then race again, and my efforts to master it, and to be more patient with and more accepting of how fast or slow things unfold have been unsuccessful. So far.
Of course, back in the day when we ingested various substances with the express goal of messing with our cognitive processes, this impatience could - and did - take some comical turns:
Winter of 1972/73 I was a sophomore at Utica College; I was sharing a pretty nice old house on Kemble Street with two of my friends, not too far from campus, so I could even walk when a ride was unavailable, and if the weather wasn't too arctic or swampy (the Mohawk Valley's two main climate settings).
One evening, we decided to make a batch of pot brownies. We had come into a nice amount of weed somehow, but it was not especially high-quality - not much pot was, back then - so this baking experiment was our attempt to squeeze as much stoning power out of our stash without wrecking our throats.
None of us had learned how to infuse butter with marijuana back then, either, so - don't laugh - we just pulverized the weed into as flour-like a consistency as we could, then sifted it into the brownie batter. As a result, the end-product tasted as bad as you'd expect - imagine chewing stale chocolate off a dry lawn - and we also had no real clue as to how strong the brownies would be.
But by then, the brownies were cool enough to cut into squares and eat, and with our appetites sharpened by the smoke, we devoured a couple of squares each with great enjoyment. Despite the taste.
Then we waited for them to kick in. And waited. And waited. "Well, hell, these must be weak; let's down a couple more." Each.
Eventually, we started to feel pretty high, especially in terms of physical sensations; we got out of our chairs feeling like balloons rising to the ceiling. Nice.
We must have walked to campus - we surely couldn't have driven - and since every possible activity now seemed equally random, we just sat in the Student Union listening to our hearts beat and the building hum.
I turned to my roommate. "Brad?"
"Yeah?"
"Does that wall look weird to you?"
He considered this. For some time. "Yeah, it kinda does."
We both pondered this.
"Brad?"
"Yeah?"
"I figured out why the wall looks weird."
"Yeah?"
"It's really the ceiling."
