serial times, pt 9

The Pkg

(continued from before...)

I looked longingly at the pkg sitting on my friend’s kitchen table and decided I was too tired to get up, walk over, slice open the taped-up box with a knife, and pack a bowl to smoke. I was that tired and lazy—I didn't even want to walk ten feet, so how the hell was I going to get the pkg sent overseas?

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At that point, I didn't care. I began to hallucinate horrible thoughts, like ganja was overrated and that I could go without smoking it while I was overseas, or that I’d never regret being lazy on that day, or that I felt on the floor at that moment to be the most comfortable I’d been in years. I was already thinking of absurd lies to tell my friends as explanation for why my attempts to send myself the pkg had gone unsuccessful.

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I wasn’t looking forward to the oven’s alarm that would go off momentarily, either; I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to overcome my lethargy enough even to save the pizza from being burnt. My eyelids started to droop and I began to see the baseball game on television in fuzzy and multichromatic images that resembled those images on the microscope slides at which I’d peered as a youngster in sixth grade science lab. The dawning somnolence that ensconced me was something I welcomed with every fiber of my semi-consciousness.

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Images of long-forgotten dreams from days, months, and years before me danced across the blank screen that was my mind behind closed eyes. I felt myself giving in to the urge to sleep, to rest, to have not a care in the world. It was euphoric and I wanted more of it. I couldn’t believe that I already walked so much that morning and still had such a long day (and night, and next day, for that matter) ahead of me. What would possess me to want to walk anymore that day?
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What would possess me to do something that wasn’t involuntary? More than a year previous to that point, I had smoked grass on a daily basis and built up a modicum of tolerance so that I had the ability while stoned to function at a point above recline; however, on that morning, I had been at a point where I’d not smoked much pot in over a year. This meant that I had lost my capacity to be or do more than anything while in something other than a supine position. I was blissfully immobile and wanted that condition to end not anytime in the future.

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Strange and pleasantly bizarre images flashed in and out of my brain, leaving light traces not unlike those on the movie screen when the Millennium Falcon or USS Enterprise entered warp drive. Then I imagined those light traces to be results of the less-than-dangerously-thought explosive collisions between matter and anti-matter. A girl I had seen in Ralph's flashed by me in a tie-dyed shirt that she hadn’t been wearing in the supermarket, a winged tadpole fluttering on her shoulder. I saw a frolicking six-dimensional alligator, in slow motion, amidst a field of wild mushrooms, as it dreamily resorted to vegetarian ways. I thought of Emile Sinclair, from Hesse's novel, and his chats with Pistorius in front of the fire; I thought of how they looked at the images in those flames, how they discussed Abraxas, German philosophy, realized their self-discoveries, and pledged their souls to transcendence.
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I thought of my Thai Chicken pizza from California Pizza Kitchen and that it must be burnt by that time.

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My eyes cracked open like an eggshell against the edge of a kitchen counter. I involuntarily took a sniff, but detected no smoke.
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Relief overwhelmed me, but, still, I fairly leaped--relatively speaking, of course--to the oven to check my pizza. I was just in time, too, for some of the edges of the pizza crust were just beginning to blacken into a crisp.
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Twenty minutes later, I think (who knows, you know? I wasn’t too interested in keeping an accurate barometer of time), I lay on the floor like a beached manatee. I had destroyed that pizza and annihilated those chips and now I felt as if a thermonuclear bomb had detonated inside my abdomen.
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Much like a helpless and lolling jellyfish in the surf, I turned my head to the right and looked over at the pkg on the table. It looked like it was too far to be seen even with a telescope, but I was stoned, which meant I could see things that normally were unable to be seen without binoculars or a telescope.

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I did not care, at that moment, about whether or not I’d be smoking in the future, about possibly not having any ganja in the future, about even making it into the future.
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It was going to take a monumental effort just to blink.
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Suddenly, I was jolted by a minion I know had to have been sent from the future. It told me that I was really going to regret not having any ganja the following week and that I was also going to regret how my friends and fellow tokers were going to perceive me.

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I couldn’t have that.
It was an inconceivable thought and I bludgeoned it into retreat.
A better one replaced it.
A thought that made me smile.
A thought that would spawn stories and urban legends about me.
A thought that would earn me special treatment.

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There was no possible way that I was going to be able to make it; I was never going to mail the pkg to where I was going.
So, I was left with only one choice:
I had to smoke the entire half-pound right then and there.

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It was genius. Why had it taken me so long to figure it out? Why had I agonized so much? Why I had gone to so much trouble walking around a few hours earlier instead of having stayed in the apartment and smoking myself paralyzed?
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In some instances in any person's life, I guess there are moments of delayed genius.
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It took me a while, but I finally managed to swivel my head from the sight of the pkg on the table to that of something above me and of the television in front of me.
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I could feel the smile spread on my lips, like spring pollen on grass in a windstorm.

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(to be continued...)