My disjoined synthetic weed experience
Ben Taylor (He/Him) // Crew Writer
Christina Williams (She/Her) // Illustrator
Who cares about the last day of ninth grade? Let’s have an adventure! I’m scheming on securing some joints to start summer break the proper way. I wait for you at Wagg creek. When your mom drops you off, you pretend to head into class and we head to Lons. We skip getting McDonald’s; it’s tradition to hit the BK downtown. Like when we bought our first vape and Harry freestyled on a G-Unit beat for a chicken fry.
I’m still nervous even though this is the tenth time we’ve been to Planet Rock. We make as little eye contact as possible, and ask for two pre-rolls . . . please. The guy with the ponytail heads into the back room to grab ‘em. In the meantime, we try to look like we belong here and chat about bongs with the man who’s missing a tooth. Mission success! The bus takes us to the Chiba garden so we can finally get down to business.
This weed tastes kinda funny. It must be good shit. Oh my god! Bohemian Rhapsody is the funniest song ever. We hit IGA to get some essential snacks. The ground breathes beneath my feet. It’s so difficult to balance. Hang on. I need a second. This three point stance seems to balance me like a tripod. You clutch up and get the snacks alone. I sit tight on the bench.
Whew, I need a break. Everything is overly saturated and looks like when you accidentally put your TV on stretch res. Who’s this girl coming up to me? How does she know my name? Everyone else is just walking past us. Is she real? I’m just going to leave. This looks like a good tree! It’s still so hard to walk . . . I think I’ll just lay down here for a while.
This tree is our safe haven now; hidden in plain sight from all the pedestrians on the overpass. You bust out the JBL Flip 3. The playlist is so amazing it takes us three hours to realize it’s just the same five songs on loop (‘So High,’ ‘Wish,’ ‘Poe Mans Dreams,’ ‘Keep Floatin’,’ ‘Black Thoughts’). Salt and vinegar seriously is the best flavour.
We go to meet up with the squad thinking school must almost be over. No way, it’s only been an hour!? I could’ve sworn it had been six. Oh well, life is good under this tree. We get a move on towards the school. In our state it might take a while to walk, so we call the homie and tell him to meet us halfway on 8th and Chesterfield. Every ten steps I need to hit the tripod stance to ‘recalibrate.’ We only manage to make it to 1st. Luckily there’s another tree for me to lay under, and we just wait for him there.
The homie finds us comatose in the shade of the pine. We start to walk to the bus but my stretch res vision persists, and the ground has only gotten more and more wobbly. He’s starting to get pissed at how long it’s taking me to make it down the sidewalk, and I unsuccessfully try to explain my predicament. My head is pounding now. We’re on a busy street with cars honking and people taking wide arcs to avoid me every time I kneel down to the pavement.
At the bus loop we run into some quay rats that I vaguely know. They strike up a conversation that I opt not to participate in. I have to lock in on trying to focus my vision and overcome my dizziness. Somehow, the bus cures my balance problems, and on the walk to my friends house I don’t pause even once.
Now, around eight hours in, I’m coming down a bit, realizing that this can’t have been any ordinary weed. We shrug it off and come to the conclusion that Planet Rock must just possess the strongest weed of all time.
What knowledge we might have missed in that final Spanish class, we surely obtained from beneath the trees.