Dead Skunk(weed) in the Middle of the Road...
When I was in my teens and early twenties, I smoked my share of pot. To be clear, I may have also smoked your share of pot and a couple other people’s shares also. I was young and dumb and we drank and smoked and raised hell… and then most of us grew up. I did more than a few stupid things that given the opportunity I probably wouldn’t do again, but the truth is that I do not have a lot of regrets. Sometimes I miss the good old days and I miss being dumb enough to do things that were completely inadvisable without having any clue of how bad things could possibly turn out. Ignorance is bliss and all that stuff. To be honest, I’ve also had a lot of fun in the past twenty years and I have often continued to show bad judgment on a sporadic basis. Quitting pot all those years ago apparently had a limited effect on my level of maturity.
With that said, this blog is not really about taking a trip down memory lane as much as it is about skunkweed. For those of you who are unaware of what it is, skunkweed is the new improved marijuana of the day that smells exactly, and I do mean EXACTLY, like a dead skunk in the middle of the road. And as the old song goes, it’s “stinking to high heaven.” (For you pot smokers out there who are unaware of these lyrics, you should Google that song. Make sure you’re stoned first). From what I am told, skunkweed is powerful enough to knock out an elephant and I have to say that I don’t get the point of stinky pot strong enough to nearly paralyze you, any more than I get the point of full grown men wearing tiny suits that are obviously two sizes too small for them. It’s like the world has become the anti-hippie movement.
Back in the days of the hippie movement, which was about a decade before my youth, almost everything to do with the new culture was about breaking away from the chains of our historically restrained society. Everyone was giving up their suits and ties and aprons and living with a free spirit, filled with carefree love and natural highs. Clothes became loose and comfortable and started taking on a fashion that was anything that represented anti-establishment. And pot? First of all, keeping with the back-to-nature theme that came out of the 1960’s and continued through the 1970’s, it was a natural drug that had a pleasant, almost spicy aroma when we smoked it. It was nice and easy and harmless. It smelled good and made us feel good. And depending on what we happened to buy and how much we smoked, we could get anywhere from slightly buzzed to pretty damn wasted. A friend of mine recently told me that if I ever smoke any of the new stuff, to be careful. More than a hit or two will blow you away. I guess just getting buzzed and taking the edge off is a thing of the past.
These days I walk outside and I’m often greeted with the stench that tells me that the neighbors either just killed a skunk on their back porch, or they just got stoned. Now, I want to be clear. I do not care that they are smoking, but it bothers me that it’s quite apparent that they’ve done something that has killed their sense of smell. No sane human being with a properly functioning olfactory system would pick up something that smelled like a dead skunk and think, “Hey. We should smoke some of this.” How sad it must be that they can no longer appreciate the aroma of lilacs or beer or…. good smelling pot. Lucky for them that they do not apparently smell the stench that is filling their cars and clinging to their clothes and pouring out into the world around them. I walked past a guy in the grocery store last week and I had to look to see if there was a dead skunk’s tail sticking out of his back pocket. I didn’t see one, but it smelled like he possibly had one stashed inside his shirt.
Not all that long ago when I lived in the islands it was pretty common to go for a long walk on the beach and smell the sweet smell of pot drifting through the air. To be honest, every once in a while I was tempted to go up and ask for a hit. The whole blue water, white sand, island vibe thing was admittedly enhanced by taking in a whiff of ganga drifting through the warm Caribbean air while listening to the soft splash of waves on the shore, perhaps even while walking in the warm blue sea. I also have to be honest and say that if I was walking down the beach and smelled skunkweed, I’d probably say, “What the hell. I smell a dead skunk. I didn’t even know that they had skunks in the islands.”
I suppose if I have one little piece of unsolicited advice to give to the up and coming generation, it would be this. For god sakes, go out and find some decent smelling pot and stop smoking that nasty, stinky, rotten smelling skunkweed. You literally smell like a dead skunk in the middle of the road, stinking to high heavens.
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