I don't know if it was my fevered imaginations and for the record,
they are quite fevered, but I imagined that there was some cachet
with high school kids to having some inside knowledge about drug and
alcohol consumption. To try and impress those not in the know I often
pretended to have much broader experience with mind altering
substances than I could actually legitimate lay claim to. If some one
mentioned drugs I would knowingly chip in some slangy-winky kind of
implication that I didn't just know what they were talking about I
'KNEW'. I thought that this pretense made me seem more worldly,
dangerous and cool. I don't know if it worked but the fact of the
matter was I had never used drugs and have still never used drugs so
I was a poser in the most clinical and scientific sense of the word.
I had been in the house a couple of time when people went into
another room to smoke some weed and once at a Steve miller Band
concert every one in our group was high but my date and I. That
actually may not be entirely true because there was so many people
smoking so much marijuana that by the end of the show when they
played 'Fly Like an Eagle' I was thinking the rudimentary graphics
projected on screens behind the stage were pretty awesome and the
song's message was pretty deep. In the cold analysis of sobriety they
were not either awesome or deep. That leads to only one conclusion, I
had a second hand smoke high of such an intensity as to make the
watered down saccharine existential musings of a second tier
seventies rock band seem relevant and insightful.
This is neither deep nor insightful. The only way you could think that is if you were high.
Besides that I was
a squeaky clean teetotaler that was intimidated by the idea of the
addiction and spiraling self destruction that would inevitably follow
indulgence. Now that I have confessed to being a good boy we come to
the point of this story. A few weeks after my snowy brush with death
I was back out in Delta to try again with a date. My friend wanted me
to come to a party with her so I drove out and picked her up and we
went to a house even farther out in the boonies where there were lots
of teenagers. There was, however, no adult oversight and there was a
serious lack of fun going on in the house. There was some beer and
bottles of hard liquor on the counter and a few kids were
halfheartedly pawing at a couple of open cans and looking at the
bottles. Whooo-hooo par-tay. Some kids were in the other room
watching a movie. It was that stoner classic and absolute steaming
turd of a movie 'Dazed and Confused'. Oh man that movie sucks, and I
am going to say, 'especially if you are sober' but I would have to
add 'and not a full blown idiot' to that qualification. After I
wandered around the first floor for a bit looking for something even
slightly entertaining I went to the basement to see if that was a
more fruitful field. It was not.
