On Friday night , I was on a bus to Chennai. My parents got off the bus to fetch something, I can’t remember what. The bus started moving without them and no one noticed them tapping on to the sheet metal body of the bus, No one other than me. I yelled out to the driver asking him to stop. The driver did stop but everyone started looking at me as if I was some kind of an apparition, asking me why I asked for it to be stopped without even noticing my parents who were still on the outside, who were still going on asking the bus to be stopped even though the bus had halted somewhere, that seemed to be between Coles Park and Shivaji Nagar .
How the hell did this place come on the high way to Chennai?
I do not know. Back to where I was seated everyone asked me questions yet I couldn’t answer, for some reason I had become completely dumb. Then I started choking on something, my mouth starts to froth. I take one look at my mother outside and look back in and I am a sole soul on what seemed to be Ghost Bus with its lights put out,hurtling down the highway at top speed avoiding other vehicles as if been driven by some master driver.I rush to the driver’s cabin to find no one there, just likethe rest of the bus. I pull the hand brake and push downon the brake pedal with all my energy, Nothing happens.I walk to the door and when I am just about to leap out......I wake up choking on that froth in what seems to be a dream. One look at the sky and the colour of it tells me that it is early morning. My watch reads 5:33 AM.
“What seems to be a dream”? You might ask. And let me explain , when you happen to be a bit too stoned ,a bit too often like your humble narrator , the fine line between dream and reality starts to blur. Your dreams seem more real and reality seems more like a dream, and you lose all sense of date and time. I am not aware if I am actually writing this or am just dreaming about writing this. It is a cursed life I lead my friends.
“Now how did a fine lad like me get into drugs”? Well it was on August 13th , I was late to college and unfortunately our vertically challenged Vice-Principal used to lockup gates , so that no one entered ‘his’ college later than the prescribed time. I was in no mood to go home , I therefore sent an SMS to a friend who I know wouldn’t be in college asking him where he was. He replied “Airlines,Come here”
I went there , sat in the back seat of his car. He offered me a smoke and asked me if I smoke. I replied negatively , to which Magic Man (I am not telling you the names of my fellow droogs) responded, “Be a man, take a drag”! And I did! I nearly coughed my lungs out , later when he told me he was going to a bar , I tagged along having nothing better to do.
“Take a sip ,come on be a man...” he said. “Come on take it , a sip for the new friendship”, the magic Man continued.And again I drank a glassful in his honour.I kicked both of these so called bad habits in a week ortwo..rather easily , but it was the weed that stuck. It stuck because it was my decision to stick to it and we have goodold James Franco to blame.Yes it was his portrayal of Soul Silver in Pineapple Express and the two Harold and Kumar movies which made me want to try it. Even though I strongly disagreed when it was said that movies promoted smoking amongst youngsters. It was a movie that truly changed my life.
Now what had sparked my current episode of madness was a lunch break in GP , you might guess what I was doing there. Walking back to college , there was a feeling pricking just behind my ankle. A feeling I knew a bit too well for the Wednesday of the previous week I had felt for the same. It starts with that prick and very swiftly shifts to feeling that you are walking up a steep surface. Then it hits you, the Vertigo, leaving you disabled to take another step.But luckily a friend who was passing by the park helped me back to it and then he left in 15 minute sas he had a class to attend leaving me seated on that park bench for what seemed like ages seeing the park ahead of me stretch to acres and acres and then hit back and return to its former size. I saw familiar faces with larger jaws and larger noses. But the watch proved me wrong , it was just an hour. My friends returned from class, I was still a bit dazed in the head..but I guess I was okay.
The thoughts that came to my mind when I was stoned were quite dazed themselves. “What if the Matrix wasreal...”? “What if we were just lying in pods imagining all this when in reality we were suspended by a machine that had taken over?” This is what gives reality a more dreamy feel. A kind of self alertness generates like the ones in a First Person Shooter game , only with a lot more to do.Now that’s what a bad trip feels like. You see a good trip is different. It is the most wonderful feeling one can have. On a good trip it seems like the Old Bog himself is working for you and everything seems to go your way and this is what keeps us stoners going.
I do feel a little bit of regret for having smoked up , just alittle bit. And it doesn’t mean I won’t do it again. But I amsure as hell that I would have been damned had I not......
Your Humbled Stoned Narrator
St.Jimmy
No comments:
Post a Comment