KRYSTAL
There’s just one teeeeeny little problem we may need to fix.
EUGENE
Tell us, what did you do?
KRYSTAL
Well, I was having a bad day and I sort of accidentally ran over Martha Washington with a buggy, and she’s a little bit…dead.
EUGENE
You what!
KRYSTAL
It was an accident, I swear!
SARAH
Eugene, what are the time-paradox implications of this?
Eugene starts frantically touching his screens. Sarah’s looking over Eugene’s shoulders…Diego is helping with the screens. Aiden is checking his phone for text messages.
EUGENE
Drastic measures, Sarah. We’re going to have to destroy that other universe before it catches up with us. But there’s only time if I hurry and…
More screen touching.
KRYSTAL
You can do that? Destroy an entire universe — billions of solar systems and planets and everything?
Eugene is frantically touching his screens.
EUGENE
We’ve never had to do it before. It’s a special feature developed in case someone accidentally kills Hitler, which remains the gold standard of time-travel paradoxes.
Everyone’s really freaking out. Then Krystal speaks.
KRYSTAL
Hold your horses, Eugene! I was just kidding. Martha Washington’s fine. I didn’t kill her or anybody.
Everyone stops.
TOGETHER
Seriously? Really? Huh?
EUGENE
Oh, God. I nearly had a stroke.
KRYSTAL
Listen to me, all of you. The past is a dreadful, dreadful place. You don’t want to ever go there, trust me. Their outfits are made of rags and the smell of human poo is everywhere.
ORNELLE CAMERON
You were very smart to come back, dear.
KRYSTAL
I’d never want to do anything to trouble you, Grandma.
An “aww” moment, during which the three men put their fingers down their throats.
ORNELLE CAMERON
A terrific job, team. And now I want you to come upstairs. There’s something I want to read to you. Everyone, to the elevator!
15 - ORNELLE CAMERON’S LIVING ROOM
Everyone’s seated expectantly. Ornelle brings out her lorgnette.
ORNELLE CAMERON
I’m going to read aloud to you a letter I found, from Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Franklin, and in it he mentions George…(reading aloud voice) “I saw George yesterday and he is surely drinking from the fountain of youth. His enhanced appearance seemed almost like sorcery. He also says he found a dentist who made him an astonishingly good set of chompers. Doubtless he will win his battles against the English and bring peace to our world.”
Everyone makes a shocked face…
ORNELLE CAMERON (CONT’D)
That’s right, children…Together, all of us worked together to create world peace.
EUGENE
Everyone, come together! Fingers — make the sign of the “H.”
Everyone makes the sign of the “H.” They put their H’s into a circle and raise them while saying…
TOGETHER
(loudly) H…H…H…H…HOT!
Screen goes black at the apex of the circle.
END EPISODE
Pot
In June of 1978, on a Saturday night, I was playing poker with three friends. It was a typical Saturday night, and we smoked a joint, during which I drank a glass of water. Within a minute of finishing, I remember getting up from the table, going to the kitchen, getting one more glass of water, at which point I turned around and then blacked out. I learned later that I fell headfirst onto the table with all of its ashtrays and glasses. In doing so I cut a four-inch gash in the left side of my jaw. I woke up (I was told) ten minutes later, at which point I could already hear the ambulance sirens approaching the house. Oddly, I was no longer stoned. I was clear as day and totally lucid.
As fate would have it, my father was the backup on-call doctor at the hospital that night. You can imagine. He was paged halfway through a restaurant dinner he and my mother were having with friends. I can imagine how pissed he must have been to be interrupted, only to hear, “Well, Dr. Coupland, it’s actually your son. You might want to stitch him up.”
I wasn’t a druggie kid; I wasn’t a problem child. I just happened to be smoking pot at that magical moment in Canadian pot history when THC counts in BC bud went from the buzz equivalent of NyQuil to OxyContin—a thousand-fold increase in potency that was rarely mentioned in the press at the time. The press instead focused almost entirely on the pathetic US government attempts to destroy the Mexican weed trade by spraying crops with a herbicide called paraquat. While nobody was looking, BC dope growers quietly hybridized their crops to maximize THC in the same way monks hybridized strawberries for size and juiciness, and sweet peas for their ability to prove genetic theories. THC counts exploded in the late 1970s. You heard all kinds of lies about the pot that was going around—Maui Wowie or Kona Gold or “the best Mexican” or what have you—but nobody smuggled pot into BC at that time, and that hasn’t changed. Almost all bud in BC is grown in borderline industrial conditions, often overseen by gifted horticulturists.
Pot is everywhere in Vancouver. It took root in the 1960s when the city became Canada’s equivalent to hippie San Francisco, and from the 1970s onward, abundant, cheap electrical power allowed for an indoor grow-op culture that continues to flourish to this day. The city currently has over a hundred medical pot dispensaries, and when it comes to drug-law enforcement, the local police and the RCMP have prioritized their focus on the tsunami of hardcore drugs arriving through the city’s port. The tacit agreement in the city is no enforcement of the nation’s pot laws. In 2011 four of Vancouver’s former mayors endorsed a coalition calling for an end to pot-related violence in Canada. “Marijuana prohibition is—without question—a failed policy,” they said. Bonus: pot is also legalized in BC’s downstairs neighbours Washington and Oregon, and our upstairs neighbour Alaska. Extra bonus: massive amounts of weed are grown throughout the province’s many secluded valleys.
My parents still live on the winding alpine suburban slope above Vancouver, in the house I grew up in. About fifteen years ago my mother said to me, “You know, I really can’t believe there’s all this pot growing around here that you keep talking about.” So I said, “Allow me to take you on a tour.” And so we got in my car and started driving, and I said, “See over there, see all that water beading and humidity in the window? Grow-op. Notice that unmowed lawn and huge pile of unmoved shopping flyers? Grow-op.” And so on; there were dozens then. After being forced to reimagine her neighbourhood, one that in the 1970s had been the embodiment of Brady Bunch puritanism, my mother said, “Well, at least that explains why we don’t get any trick-or-treaters anymore.”
Back to 1978: that night, my father came into Lions Gate Hospital to stitch me up, and I’ll never forget his expression of disappointment as he stitched up my left chin like it was a cheap moccasin. I was the son who wasn’t supposed to be doing this kind of shit, and yet I was. He and I have never talked about that night and probably never will. In families every member is assigned a role, and as long as we play that role correctly, regardless of its weirdness, everyone is happy. The reason we work so hard to get home for Thanksgiving and Christmas isn’t so much that we know what things to discuss with each other; it’s because in a properly functioning family, everybody knows exactly what not to discuss with each other. And so my father and I will never discuss that fleeting bad patch simply because I was off script. What was I thinking? The injury, however, largely turned me off pot, but I suppose the scar it left on my chin is also on my psyche. In 2004 I wrote a novel, JPod, in which the main character’s parents have a grow-op in their basement. A local indie movie I wrote (Everything’s Gone Green) also featured parent
s growing pot. (And all of this was before the TV show Weeds.)
I was in kindergarten in 1967. I would have been five and a half, and I remember that it was 1967 because it was Canada’s centennial year and we were all handed mimeographed outlines of the country’s new flag design to colour with a red crayon.
One afternoon, the school had a scared-straight-style speaker come in to talk to our class. She looked maybe eight hundred years old, but in reality, she was probably more like twenty and doing community service. She said hello and told us she wanted to talk about her friend Karen, and so we all leaned in. She told us of how she and Karen were the best of friends and of what a good gal she was, and then she said, “But then Karen took acid.”
I know, using the word acid with kindergarten students? Seriously?
But what happened to Karen then?
“Karen took the acid. And she got high. And then something happened in her brain and her body froze.”
Huh?
“That’s right. She was trapped inside her body. She was a prisoner. She couldn’t move; she couldn’t speak; she couldn’t even communicate by blinking her eyes. She was completely frozen inside her body, and the doctors absolutely confirmed she would never, ever, ever be able to communicate anything with the outside world.”
Screams. Shrieks. Wailing.
I mean, what the fuck were these scared-straight people thinking?
But…
…But I have to say, it really worked. We were the only kindergarten year to get the “Karen” lecture, but directly as a result of it, my fellow classmates were the drug-wimpiest, most socially low-octane birth cohort to ever pass through the West Vancouver School District Number 45. We had been, in the most programmatic sense of the term, scared straight. As a result I’ve never done coke or acid or ecstasy or MDMA or G or pretty much most recreational drugs. Thanks a lot, Karen.
To this day, if I encounter a social drug, all I see is poor little Karen with locked-in syndrome in some forgotten wing of a forgotten rehab ward of a forgotten institution in some part of Vancouver that nobody ever goes to and nobody ever will…and thirty years after that scared-straight lecture, I wrote a novel, Girlfriend in a Coma, in which the coma patient is named Karen. I never actually made this connection until writing these words here now. The human soul is sneaky.
Sneaky human soul.
Clueless Doug.
I mentioned that in 1967 we kindergartners had been asked to colour in the new Canadian flag. It’s not an easy flag to draw; the maple leaf in the middle is more of a corporate clip-art logo than it is, say, a US star or a Japanese rising sun. Three decades later, when I was on a book tour in the United States and Canada, I handed out index cards and red pens to people attending the event and asked them to draw the Canadian flag. I was thinking a lot about Canadian identity then and wanted to see how people in both Canada and the United States saw it in their minds. And…basically, everyone drew a pot leaf because nobody really knew how to draw a maple leaf. The one truly good flag I got was from a guy in Chicago. I was actually kind of touched by the level of his maple leaf’s draftsmanship. He said, “I didn’t really do it from my head. I was sitting by the travel book shelf and copied one from a book.” These days, of course, iPhones and Androids would render this drawing experience pointless.
Thinking of maple leaves and trees, I remember the relatively unusual, deep red, large-leaved sugar maple in the southeast corner of the yard of the house I grew up in. For this horticultural reason, the lawn beneath it was possibly the most dense psilocybin mushrooming ground in the suburb. My parents never understood this, and my mother would come to me and say, “Brian Rath is in the front yard on his knees. What is going on?” Of course Brian was shrooming, and I’d have to go kick him off, saying, “Jesus, Brian, my mother’s watching you. This looks so creepy.” The same scenario happened every year and my parents never made the mushroom connection. (But he said he was doing a “science project.”)
During the 2010 Winter Olympics, well-dressed Europeans were smoking huge spliffs on downtown Vancouver street corners. This was funny because while pot may be tacitly legal here, good taste suggests you ought to be slightly more discreet. But what is discretion? Who knows? Nothing makes a bottle of booze look more like a bottle of booze than a brown paper bag. And what is good taste? It’s anyone’s call.
April 20 is Vancouver’s official 420 Day (obviously). At 4:20 in the afternoon, the city slows to a crawl while everybody downtown gets, essentially, baked. It’s largely fun, and the radio stations forecast a traffic “carmageddon,” which usually adds about three minutes to the average commute.
In May of 2014 I was installing a show in the Vancouver Art Gallery, and people smoking weed outside the building’s air intake system turned the air in the building into a sweet, syrupy goo. It felt like tendrils of a living organism were reaching into the building in search of humans to feast upon. It was sci-fi, like The Andromeda Strain—alien and beyond control.
In 2000 Martin Amis was touring for his autobiography, Experience. A publisher friend asked if I’d interview him and I said sure, not realizing what a huge amount of work is involved in interviewing. We were to meet for lunch in a Japanese restaurant downtown, but it was the day Vancouver introduced harsh new no-smoking bylaws, and there was a big kerfuffle in finding Martin a room to smoke in, where he wouldn’t be written up by bylaw enforcement zealots. I walked into what appeared to be a closet with a plastic butterfly palm, and he looked at me and said, “You’re really not going to go through with this, are you?”
With relief I said, “Thank you. No.”
We then went to score some weed from a friend, Jamie, and then drove off to allow Martin to enjoy the sunny afternoon on a local beach.
Half a year ago I was on a flight from Toronto to Vancouver, and fate put me beside someone I knew from home, a man famous for his sunny disposition. I’d had a terrible day, and so I asked my friend, “You always seem to be in a good mood, and I’m always in a terrible mood. How do you do it? What’s your secret?”
He said, “I’m always in a terrible mood too. But what I do is this…” and he opened his jacket to reveal a collection of thin plastic tubes with spray nozzles filled with very dark brown liquid—pot syrup, basically. He took one out and spritzed the back of his throat. “My wife and I make it. Try some.”
“I haven’t smoked pot in twenty-five years.”
“It’s not smoking, though, is it?”
“You have a point.”
Spritz-spritz. This was over Lake Superior. The next thing I remember, the cleaning staff on the ground in Vancouver were nudging me to get out of my seat so they could vacuum beneath it.
I’ve smoked pot maybe ten or twelve times in my life. The last time I smoked it was actually twenty-four years before the flight from Toronto, in the spring of 1991. I went with friends to see Reveen the Impossibilist at a local theatre. Reveen was one of those guys who calls people up on stage and hypnotizes them and makes them cluck like chickens and that kind of thing. We actually wanted to be singled out by him, but he didn’t choose any of us. He’d been doing this for decades and could probably tell from a hundred feet away that we’d smoked up.
For the first half of the show, everything was magical. “He guessed the numbers people had in their heads…He…Oh my God, this is the most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen anybody ever do!”
And then came intermission, and the pot wore off, and suddenly we were sitting in a room with people who may or may not have been genuinely hypnotized and acting like chickens. Within a minute we bolted out the door. My disillusionment with magic melted into my disillusion with pot, and that was that.
I think people are helped by pot but not necessarily improved. I just read the last sentence and it seems like the sort of statement that would rapidly be upvoted/downvoted on Reddit. Help? Improve? Palliate? Damage? Cripple? Liberate? Transform?
Here in 2015 there have never been so many mood options availab
le to so many human beings. But then, what’s a drug and what’s not? We have legacy substances like pot and opiates, which our species co-evolved with, and then we have psychotropic pharmaceuticals, which have exploded in the past three decades and map onto nothing that’s ever existed in this universe. Think about this: there is no other place in the entire universe where molecules of, say, Effexor or Wellbutrin exist. None. Nowhere. In the entire universe. That’s really insane. And cool.
Many of these new “pharmaceuticals” have turned into recreational drugs, and some recreational drugs have become medicalized. The line is blurry. Then there are drugs like Adderall and Ritalin, which some people use to “super focus”—and maybe this is an instance of drugs actually improving people. I love that Bradley Cooper movie Limitless, in which he uses all of his brain potential to the max. It’s the way I felt in elementary and high school, long before the real world beat me down with a stick and I realized that intelligence is also about emotions and empathy.
In the 1990s I began noticing people in altered states of being that didn’t really seem “stoned” or “high” but, rather, merely medicated in some way. People were suddenly “different.” Quieter. Louder. Raunchier. Boozier. More subdued. Gappier. Whatever. But they were recognizably not in moods that we once understood moods to be. I figured out then that we really had entered the smorgasbord era of drugs, which is actually kind of interesting and not necessarily a bad thing. If nothing else, all those people who formerly would have been hidden beneath multiple blankets in dark rooms were at least out in the world experiencing life. Maybe not to the max, but with better options than had been available historically.
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