Smoke Dreams

I'm in Colorado, where, as you perhaps have heard, they recently legalized marijuana, or, as the "potheads" call it, grass, pot, boo, gage, rosa maria, tea, shit, weed, mary jane and/or dope. 

Which is not what I'm out here for, but the relentless Rocky Mountain High and Doritos cartoons with which we've been bombarded did make me think back to The Good Old Days, which, unlike David Brooks, I don't dismiss as youthful silliness.

It was youthful silliness, yes. But I don't dismiss it. 

Nor have I ever had much patience with people who say, "I experimented with drugs." '

Jonas Salk experimented with drugs. We got high.

And when it comes to embracing the silliness of the time, there isn't anyone more silly than the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. I'll do a more wide-ranging view of the era tomorrow, but this episode of the Freak Brothers is worth treating on its own.

Let me warn you that it is not a paragon of cartooning excellence. In fact,I will warn you in particular that the ending is absolutely horrible. But, like the curate's egg, parts of it are excellent.

Thing is, for all the attention this strip got at the time, it's no better than a billion collegiate strips that came along later. In fact, it's a whole lot like "Academia Waltz" "Bull Tales" (see comments) which became "Doonesbury." But it was earlier and, whether or not Trudeau ever saw it, it ushered in that younger slice-of-life style that became the norm.

And, dope aside, there are a lot of nostalgia clicks in here for irresponsible people of a certain age aside from the cost of a cheap-ass electrical fan that would have been a prized possession in the places we lived, if only because it might have cut through the aura of incense and cat urine that pervaded most of them.

But record clubs and trial subscriptions! Not that we would ever take advantage of the companies that beleagured us with offers to try three months for free or to get X-number of records for free if you simply agree to move and leave no forwarding address.

They also used to send unsolicited credit cards to college students. It didn't take them long to figure out why this was a very, very bad idea, but, in the meantime, the pizza joints made out pretty well.

But where were we?

Oh yeah. 

Gilbert Shelton is conflating a couple of things here: Teenyboppers and runaways, but maybe they were the same thing out his way.

Expecting that every knock on the door was a potential bust was pretty universal. In the dorms, we stuffed towels under the doors to try to prevent the smell of marihooney from drifting into the hallways and had special knocks to let us know it was cool to open the door.

Paranoia? Maybe. As time went on, we unclenched. But Fat Freddy is only a comic figure in the sense of self-mockery, because we were there.

As for teenyboppers, I think there has always been a kind of kid who hangs around campus trying to be older, and some of them were obnoxious and some were fun and all were underage. And whatever the difference between a 16 year old and a 19 year old in mathematical terms, we were pretty well aware of the difference in legal terms.

I don't think there was anything particularly special about the drug culture that allowed pretty girls to get away with obnoxious behavior. It was just the culture in which they happened to be that time around.

I knew guys who had this idea that the girl could do the housework and stuff, plus, y'know, and it would be great. But every one of those situations either ended up that she wouldn't do the housework at all or that she had been misjudged and was a quality person who was not up for that bullshit.

Either way, the dishes didn't get done. And the amount of actual y'know never lived up to the media hype. 

Meanwhile, the know-it-all factor among people who are too cute for anyone to ever bellow "SHUT UP" at was then, and I suspect remains, enormous.

I saw "Woodstock" with a very pretty girl who claimed to know pretty much everyone in the film, not personally, but in a way like a birdwatcher, where she had to call them out as if she were keeping a notebook of sightings. If all cats are gray in the night, a dark movie theater doesn't cut a pretty girl much slack either, and that was absolutely our last date.

But of more lasting import is the snobbery that grew around grass, with or without strawberry rolling papers. There was a certain type of person who was never smoking good dope right now but had really had some dynamite stuff recently, and could go on endlessly about where it was grown and how and how they snipped the buds and ... well, see above remarks about bellowing.

Only somehow they won.

I was amused the other night by Jon Stewart going on about an ounce of grass as if that were some massive quantity. It's a very reasonable quantity of reasonable grass, but nobody wants reasonable grass anymore.

There was a time when Californians would bitch, insisting that a "lid" was three ounces and half a lid was a nickel-bag, though they would concede that an ounce might be a nickel-bag under the right circumstances. Like, if you paid $5 for it.

But the "you must have gotten burned" snobbery came later, when grass went from a mellow high to a contest to see who would score the most potent, mind-blowing weed. It was as if wine drinkers decided you should really be quaffing pure grain alcohol instead.

That was what acid was for.

But after awhile, it was what grass was for.

This is why, legal or not, I ain't into it anymore.

I warned you about the ending.

Anyway, here's a tune for the teenybops:

I  

Comments

[Mark Jackson]

"Sometimes the price is sixty-five dollars
Prices like that make a grown man holler"
- Jefferson Airplane, singing about a kilo

By the way, I believe Trudeau's college strip was Bull Tales - The Academia Waltz was the precursor to Bloom County.

[Mike Peterson]

Right you are. Must have been the lack of oxygen.

[Mark Jackson]

Don't forget to inhale.

[Mike Peterson]

Another media miscue to add to the "Gore lies" and "potatoe" list.

He didn't say "I didn't inhale and I didn't enjoy it." He said "I couldn't inhale and I didn't enjoy it." Clinton has enough allergies that the annual Christmas tree was a trial for him.

Proper follow up was "Did you try the brownies?"

Reporters. They're still parsing whether "did you have sex" means "of any kind" or "actual intercourse."

And they never picked up on the fact that he was answering "did you smoke?" rather than "did you try?"

Unarmed combatants in a battle of wits.