The Stoned Night
It started off in a very ordinary way. I just stopped by my
friend Satyajit’s house for a drink before I went to my usual Saturday day
night hang out – Palmers, for karaoke. But things became different when I
smoked that joint…
I have smoked weed before but never felt what I felt last
night. I do not know if it was just really pure material or the amount I
inhaled was excessive. It all started changing when we were outside smoking in
the balcony of his house, overlooking a variety of cars, parked below in a very
geometric manner. Speaking about subjects related to our own mundane lives in
this new country, we focused our attention on some blinking lights in the sky.
We had a small argument about whether the plane was passenger or a cargo plane
and then something magical happened. (Call it chemical reaction, or just what
the cannabis does to the nervous system and the brain). The plane seemed to get
closer to me. My friend said it was miles away from us, but I had this ominous
sense of the plane being very close to me. I felt anxious and went back inside
the house.
Meanwhile, we had been playing some Pink Floyd songs and a
certain Led Zeppelin song on loop – “No Quarter”. I really like this song, how
trippy it is and how the verses convey warning and agony together. Anyhow, when
I came inside and sat on the sofa, my body felt really relaxed. Every nerve in
my body seemed to flex out and straighten itself. (I know we usually say that
about muscles, but that is how it felt to me).
Deep within my solar plexus, at the very center of my chest,
between the bones and the lungs, I felt a power source. I thoughtfully compared
with the blue chemical power source that Tony Stark has in in Iron Man and
found myself giggling profusely. The laughing and giggling was a pattern that
continued throughout the night. I experienced a kind of time dilation that I
find hard to describe in words. But I will attempt it for the sake of my
readers – Every second seemed to stretch into a minute, and I, someone who is
usually a control freak kind of person, felt like I could not measure the
lengths or durations of events which had just occurred. It seemed that I was
out in that balcony hours ago when it had just been a minute, per the clock. I
kept throwing anxious glances at the clock, while the tunes played on the TV
and wondering if I was going thru my first true stoned experience, and yes, I
was …
Sure enough, I got hungry after 5 minutes (2 hours in my
world). I asked my friend for any food that was readily available. He was kind
enough to warm up some instant food and serve it to me. At that point, I
discovered the second phenomenon of my grassy experience. My tongue seemed to
have become very keenly aware of all different tastes in a food item. It seemed
to break down the taste of what I was eating into discrete parts and rejecting
and accepting portions of the taste. This surprised me because I usually am not
the kind of person who is into tastes and food as a whole is mostly about just
not being hungry. I seemed to enjoy the more extreme tasting foods better –
like Vinegar Chips or Salted Caramel chocolate bars. During the phase where I
was eating, and it seemed like an eternity to me, I remember remarking to my
friend about trying to find the perfect taste for my tongue – “ a taste that is
congruent to my own – that just fits in and fills those slight crevices in my
tongue’s sensory bed perfectly, oh so perfectly that the taste and the tongue
become one continuous entity leading right home, to my stomach.”
Time passed very slowly and it was almost excruciating to
wait for the uber cab that I had called up to take to the heart of Redmond Town
center for the next adventure of my night. There was something abnormal about
the cab. When I glanced at my phone, the time remaining for the cab seemed to
increase from 10 mins, to 11 and to 12 and so on … instead of decreasing. I was
not sure if this was just the Uber app on my Windows Phone or my state of body
and mind. Eventually the uber Driver, Omer, called me and I was escorted
downstairs into what seemed like an abyss of darkness. I started to frantically
look for the uber cab, but after 10 mins of wandering in the darkness, we could
not find each other and I had to cancel the cab. I called my friend to come
help me, get inside a cab, and be on my way…. This had never happened to me
before - an Uber cab not being able to reach where I am located.
It took really long for the next cab to come by and get
myself to Palmers. I finally managed to get in. I was 25 minutes late. My
friends Sunandan and Giovanni (yes he is from Milan) were waiting for me to
kick start the boozing process. They had no idea that I had smoked what I had
smoked. I greeted them with peals of laughter and a countenance that they found
strange. They had never seen me before like this. They had no other way but to
smile back at me. I found myself increasingly paralyzed as I sat on the bar
stool and glanced at people singing painful karaoke. People who clearly had no
singing skills or experience were throttling out drunkenly bizarre melodies.
Now, fellas, you have to understand that I regularly visit Palmers and this is
nothing new. But under the circumstances of last night, this all seemed very
very different to me. My hearing sense seemed to have become acute and I found
anything that was not musically tasteful very painful to my ears. To add to
this, the flashing lights and the gyrating people on the dingy dance floor
seemed to throw my vision and brain into a chaotic reverie. I had a sensation
where motion, and motion specifically in my head sustained in a self-continuing
loop even after the actual physical motion had stopped. And this strange
feeling seemed to catalyze the feeling of time dilation. I remember not being
able to have conversations and just making short one or two word remarks to
whatever my friends said. I think they now seemed to understand my state and
seemed to calmly and joyously accept it.
I wanted to sing – Yes, for those who know me well know that
the major reason of my frequent visits to Palmers are the Karaoke Jockey and
the great overall singing experience at this small Dive bar in RTC. But there
were a lot of obstacles to my singing – or that is how it seemed to me. On an
ordinary night, I would just pick up the karaoke slip, the pen (which can be
hard because there are only a few pens and the bar is dark and full of people),
pick up the song book, pick a song, write it down and give it back to Big John
– the KJ. Last night, these simple tasks seemed to be very complicated to my
brain. I asked Dan to help me get the slip and the book. The book was kept on
the other side of the bar on a table in a booth where a few people were loudly
chatting. The book seemed really far away to me, and I told Dan “I cannot get
to that book even if I tried, it is so far away…” . Responding to a friend in
need, he got the song book to me and I started scratching my way thru the book
to pick a song. I took nearly 15 minutes to find a song and my vision was
disturbingly blurry. I ended up picking a song that I thought would complement
my mood and state – “riders on the storm”…
This is getting really long and I understand it is breaking
time for an average readers’ attention span. So I will keep this short and say
that my singing did not go as planned, and I made many mistakes (I usually am a
decent karaoke singer) – most of them being associated with the timing of my
words and my pitch, which seemed to vary without my own control, and perhaps
poorly aided by own sense of hearing.
The night ended when I was dropped back to where my car was
and fortunately was thrown into a soft sofa with a nice blanket where the furs
seemed to crawl into my skin and caress me to sleep. Yes, I have kind friends
and I am glad something untoward did not happen last night.
Goodbye, it is beautiful and peaceful today….
