Story time.

WE'LL CALL HIM FRED THE HEAD

        I met him when we were 16. Another friend of mine knew him. He was just some kid then. We were all just some kids then. The first time I ever laid eyes on him was in a joint circle.
        My other friend, Bill, introduced pot to our group of friends and, at the time, that made him the coolest fucking guy ever. He was kind of like a celebrity in our eyes and we were kind of like his dis­ciples. I haven't seen Bill in years. The last time I came across him he was fixing a broken urinal in a casino john. No shit. And he was blazed to the sky while doing it.
        "So this is Fred," Bill told us that day so many years ago. "He's cool."
        Back then, we were all enthusiastic, if inter­mittent, pot smokers. Bill was our only source and we orbited around him like space junk, just waiting for him to smoke us up. By the time we all hit 19, we had become daily pot smokers with sources of our own.
        I was Fred's best buddy by then and we smoked and smoked that wacky tobacky. We watched cartoons and found the subtext, and worse, the Ultimate Meaning. We ate like shit. Fast food. Munchies. Shit from gas stations. We were invin­cible, so didn't care. We were unconcerned with our mid-20s, which is when we'd start getting pudgy and sick a lot–pudgy from the fat content, sick from the lack of real nutrition, sick from all the chemicals.
        I started getting tired of pot around 23, 24 years old. To this day, I much prefer alcohol. Pot makes my brain work feverishly, which annoys me since it's always working pretty feverishly anyway. Alcohol blots out the mind and this is something I can really get down with. Sometimes, I just need to sit there with a stupid look on my face and a single thought in my head: PUSSY!
        Fred continued on…and on. He smoked pot daily, several times a day, for years on end. I blos­somed into a health nut with a mild drinking prob­lem. He turned into a couch potato with love handles who knew a lot about different tv shows and how 'trippy' they were.
        "Dude, you gotta check out Adult Swim. It's sooooo fuckin trippy!"
        The weird thing is, we remained friends right up until here recently. He still liked drinking occa­sionally and I still smoked pot occasionally. Hell, I just got baked, like, two weeks ago. But it was clear that we had each found our drug of choice.
        We broke up over conspiracy theories. That's right, conspiracy theories. Specifically, his belief and need to talk about how THE GOVERNMENT is be­hind everything, even as far back as the Lincoln as­sassination. Of course, THE GOVERNMENT killed Kennedy and did 9/11 and put crack in the ghettos and caused the banking crisis. THE GOVERNMENT faked the moon landing. THE GOVERNMENT in­stalls computer chips in us when we give blood or have surgery. Everything.
        Everything you can think of was planned and executed by THE GOVERNMENT. Pot has warped his mind and given him structure. He sees puppet strings everywhere. Plans everywhere. Secret plans that are always executed perfectly.
        I would ask him how THE GOVERNMENT could successfully do all this if it couldn't even keep him, Fred the Head, from smoking a simple joint, but that too was part of the plan. You see, when a plan fails, why, that's planned.
        Invariably, he had to talk about this shit when we got together and we began hanging out less and less. Sometimes 4 months would go by between hangout sessions. But then I would get bored or lonely and call him up.
        The final blow came a few months ago when he revealed that THE GOVERNMENT was really controlled by space aliens. He started rambling on and on about UFOs and Area 51 and Infiltrations of upper echelons and coverups and I just lost it. I just snapped.
        I was standing in the kitchen, having just got­ten another beer, when his "revelation" came spew­ing down the mountain of his 15 year long high like a big yellow avalanche of piss.
        I paused for a minute, trying to be open-minded, and then began hurling full cans of beer at him as hard as I could.
        "Ow! Ow! Hey! Hey!" he was now saying in­stead of this insane shit about THE GOVERNMENT and space aliens. He was saying something dif­ferent each time a beer hit him, something new, and this was most welcome to my ears.
        Most welcome.
        He jumped up off the couch and ran to the door, cussing at me and saying how he'd kick my ass if it wasn't for me holding the big kitchen knife I hadn't realized I grabbed.
        I guess alcohol has warped my mind and giv­en me chaos. I see no puppet strings anywhere. No plans within plans. No structure, no hidden mean­ing, no secret agenda. Only this here, this one mo­ment of me expressing myself, of me calling out into the dark.
        I'll take this any day of week.