loopinfinite

The third and last time I got high was on July 4th, 2007. I’d gone to a park with some friends that night. We had arrived just as the sun was in the final stages of its descent. We were there to see fireworks.

The park, just off Gillham Road, was a bland field of grass with a playground at the far end. It was nice, I guess; I never went back or anything. I’ve probably driven past the place hundreds of times in the two years since. Sometimes I glance in its direction. I usually don’t.

The fireworks were a little boring. For a while I watched them anyway, leaning against the side of my friend’s car. Eventually I broke away from the group and wandered into the night.

I saw plenty of fireflies. People, too, with fingers wrapped around cans of Coke or Bud Light. Motionless cars in the grass all along the park’s perimeter. It was warm and humid – your stereotypical July weather. I contemplated taking off my jacket. (I’m always wearing a jacket or hoodie or something, even when it’s summer. I’m all too aware of my skinny, spindly arms.)

Something was there that night. Some presence, some indefinite nostalgic force. And indefinite nostalgia is the worst kind: nothing’s more confusing than vague longing for a past you can’t quite remember for reasons you don’t quite understand.

Maybe I was thinking about all those bygone summers of my youth and shit: all the swimming lessons, “science” “experiments,” family trips.

Maybe I was thinking about July 4th, 1994, the only other time I’d seen fireworks. Mom and Dad had taken me to a place rife with hills and lawn chairs. I don’t think we saw much.

My parents are immigrants; Independence Day isn’t in their blood. I think they were trying the holiday out that year. They gave it a whirl and decided it wasn’t for them. It’s not for me, either. I have – unfairly – come to associate the Fourth of July with asshole Republicans. Growing up in the Midwest can do that to you.

July 4th, 2007: there, in that park, clad in unnecessary jacket and cardboardy jeans and toe-pinching Converse, I stood watching the fucking explosions in progress overhead; I watched and I wondered, why did shit happen the way it did? And what’s next? Is anything next?

Man, I was depressed. And yet I heard a wry voice in the back of my mind. “Your nostalgia,” it told me, “is hilarious. You do realize: someday you’ll probably be nostalgic for this very moment.”

“The hell do you mean?” I said in my head.

“You think this is as bad as it gets? Someday you’ll pine for all this. This park. These fireworks. You’ll think, ‘July 4th, 2007? That was a night to remember.’”

“You’re full of shit,” I told the voice. I went back to the others. They wanted to know where I’d been.

“Oh, I just . . . took a walk,” I said.

. . . Much later that night, I got high for the last time. It had never been something I was entirely comfortable with, because my manner of smoking weed was both tentative and sissified. I had no finesse, no confidence. I was afraid of lighters. I was, above all, afraid of wrecking my respiratory tract.

I mean, you can’t get high unless you breathe in a lot of smoke and hold it in, and that holding-it-in is crucial. But every time I took a puff, the back of my throat would burn. That’s what it felt like: real, actual burning.

A bizarre image would then appear before me: the inside of my mouth on fire. I’d suddenly smell melting flesh. I’d have no idea whether I was really, actually smelling that or whether it was just my anxiety. It is (in part) because of this anxiety that I never became a legitimate pothead.

But that night I pushed, hard, through my terror. I broke the wall my fear had built. On the other side, in rainbow-world, I gave myself over to the power of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol. It was great. I was really feeling it. It started with the sensory changes: colors seemed brighter and sounds seemed sharper. My body felt weightless.

Then the whole world flattened into two dimensions. I became convinced I was a character in a comic strip. Everyone was a character in a comic strip, because that was what this planet was: a comic strip. This was (in part) the meaning of life.

“I’m a genius,” I remember saying. “I’m seriously a genius. I have all this shit figured out.”

My friend, whose weed I had been smoking, and who was, at the time, not nearly as high as I, laughed.  “You may not feel that way tomorrow morning,” he said.

“Let me see your computer, dude.”

I opened up Microsoft Word and started to type. I wanted to get my insights down for tomorrow morning, if not posterity. It was hard to put my thoughts into writing; eventually I had a whole paragraph of stuff. By then, I was tired.

I slept on my friend’s floor and awoke the following morning when I heard him leave for class. I groaned, put in my contact lenses, staggered to his computer, and jiggled the mouse. Right there, on the screen, was a paragraph of the most incomprehensible garbage.