“They lie about marijuana. Tell you pot smoking makes you unmotivated. Lie! When you’re high, you can do everything you normally do just as well – you just realize it’s not worth the fucking effort. There is a difference.”
– Bill Hicks
It’s tough being an Asian pot smoker. Add some THC to already slanted eyes and they get so small it’s like seeing trying to see the world through a pinhole that has been compressed into an oval through which the tiniest gnat would have difficulty poking his smallest leg.
This is the 3rd update to the 30 Days of Marijuana experiment, and there’s some good news.
First, the bad news. There seem to be some minor short-term memory issues. For example, misplacing things more often than usual, then taking longer than usual to find them. So the opposite result of the 4 Hours of Sleep experiment.
Also, and I may be imagining this, but I seem to be spacing out more often during less-than-stimulating conversations and while reading boring passages in my books. I don’t know if this is related to this experiment.
Now the good news. Smoking pot regularly for the past few weeks seems to have put my creativity in overdrive. I’ve been having a ton of great ideas lately. Too many. Most are for the project I’m currently working on and keeping secret until it’s ridiculously successful, so I can’t divulge yet. But unlike the last update in which I mentioned that ideas are worthless, these ones could actually be lucrative.
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I’ve thought several times that when I have the money, I’d love to sponsor a $50K giveaway to aspiring entrepreneurs who are unhappy with their jobs. People would apply and give me their stories, and the most convincing/impressive candidate would receive $50K over a year and quit his/her job upon winning the prize. Wouldn’t that be cool?
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It seems to me that my mind has expanded a bit from this experiment. The somewhat different perspective granted by cannabis has seeped into my normal thinking as well. For example, driving down the highway last Friday…
There I was, in a several-thousand-pound case of metal created by machines invented by thousands of brilliant men, hurtling down the highway at 80 mph, totally comfortable, listening to music created by a large number of creative minds, some long dead, but all who spent great amounts of time by themselves composing their music, pulling the sounds from the non-physical realm of their creative imaginations and making them physically realized, and I was having a physical, verbal conversation with a kindred eternal consciousness, my girlfriend, both of us unnecessarily wearing clothes in the warm weather because society frowns upon the human body and teaches us to be ashamed, as we glided (“glid” should be the past tense of “glide” in my opinion) over the road constructed by thousands of workers over years and years using machines not unlike the machines that built my car, and as we traveled down the highway on the way to see my grandmother, my mother’s mother, who made my existence possible in spite of the crazy odds of her even ever having met my grandfather in the first place, and I think that’s enough for this sentence.
We arrived in Hudson, NY after just over two hours of driving when a short 100 years ago the trip would have taken days, and for those two+ hours all of the electromagnetic waves reflecting off of all of the surfaces were used by our eyes to create a mental image that makes sense to us and allows us to navigate this particular physical reality, although our visual experiences as separate humans may be vastly different from one another, and are definitely vastly different from other, simpler life forms.
I often think of life and this physical reality in the manner above, but lately it’s been on overdrive. And when I think of things in this way, after five or ten minutes, I realize…I understand the ridiculousness of it all and I have to laugh. What a joke this all is! A big, beautiful joke.
And it is beautiful, all of it. I feel it.
Do you feel it? Do you see the beauty in everything?
I can go on for hours breaking everything down as best as I can, which, I have realized, is not closer to the truth, to reality, but farther from it. I read a great passage the other day, I believe by Osho, in which he explained that science seeks to understand by destroying. Although we may understand more about the minutia of a flower, for example, and what each group of cells does, breaking something beautiful like a flower down into its components destroys its beauty. Its beauty is irreducible. Its beauty can only be felt and experienced while it is whole, and its beauty is more real than any of its particular functions.
That’s it for now.
You can read the experiment’s conclusion here.