It’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance.
It’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance. It’s generally assumed as attractive to be the former. While being the latter will likely cause choruses of derision and distaste amongst the general masses. Another term for this is known as “hubris”. Don’t know what that means? Just ask Icarus.
The more cannabis you smoke, the higher your tolerance will build. But it’s one thing to suck the smoke back deep into your lungs, and it’s a whole other thing to slowly digest an edible over a painfully protracted period of time. Say you’ve been smoking for a while, and as far as you’re concerned, you can handle yourself. Your confidence/hubris builds over time, as does your tolerance.
Everyone has their own “first time I tried an edible story”. It’s important to be safe and comfortable when you’re trying something for the very first time. You take out the cookie and bite off a small piece. Then another and another. Before you know it, you’ve eaten the entire thing. The shortbread flavour dances around in your mouth and disappears. You’re disappointed that there’s no more cookie left.
That doesn’t matter, because the warm feelings in your body kick in almost instantly. It hits quicker than a joint, but isn’t as harsh as an unfamiliar bong. You feel ensconced in the perpetual warm embrace of a familial hug. You enjoy the trippy romance film playing on the TV of the two very attractive people questioning their cosmic place in the universe. You can relate. You think to yourself that edibles aren’t nearly as bad as you’ve been led to believe. Your whole life is now a lie.
You wake the next morning and feel stone-cold sober again. It’s October 31st, so there’s a horror movie playing on every single channel. And then it hits you. Like, it really hits you. A full twelve hours later. How is this possible? You’re as high as a kite at the end of Mary Poppins. How long have you been sitting there? How long have you been watching that scary movie on the TV for? Have you been watching this same movie on a seemingly endless loop since 11PM last night?
Your stomach sinks and tightens. Your chest feels heavy, as does your breathing. Your lungs do laborious labor. You go outside to help rake the leaves for all of seven seconds before deciding that a shower should sober you up better instead. You feel the water beat down on you like a sad character in the second half of a sad movie. The water doesn’t help, because your mind thinks you’ve been in there too long. How long has it been? Five minutes? Or five years? Did you just waste the entire world’s water resource? Are you now Public Enemy #1?
There were plans to go to a friends’s Halloween party later that night, but you know that you’re in zero condition to drive. Taking a bus just sounds like an absolute nightmare. You like walking, but your friend lives deep south. That will take at least seven hours to get there. Maybe more. You cancel on your friend, and feel terrible for doing so. You Google that you think you’re dying and the internet asks if you need a special helpline. You’re okay in that regard, but you’re not okay per se. Eat. Food. That’s still a thing, right?
You head upstairs and pound back that day-old Vietnamese food still in the fridge. Now you’ve given yourself a food-coma, so your body crashes on the couch accordingly. Only to be awoken by your phone ringing. You don’t recognize the number. You hate answering the phone in general, but it won’t stop ringing. The voice on the other end asks if their friend is there. You have no idea who they’re tal
king about, but you want to help out. So you ask to write down the voice’s number for their friend to call them back. It takes you way too long to find a pen and paper, but you finally do. You did your good deed for the day.
It’s not until 11PM that night that the effects of the cookie finally wear off. In the midst of you watching a low budget, dialogue-heavy, time-travel movie do you finally feel sober again. You wish you could go back in time and never experience this ever again. After a full twenty-four hour fever-dream delusion.
You remember the phone number, looking at the piece of paper. What started out as a series of numbers quickly devolved into many tornado swirls and an even more elaborate farm house being ripped off from the ground. A very distressed cow is also getting sucked up into the chaos that is your brain.
Maybe you should brush up on your Greek mythology again.
Mary-Jane