There’s no need to review this lovely, holistic collection. We’ll let this clip speak for itself:
What is there beyond knowing that keeps calling to me? I can’t turn in any direction but it’s there. I don’t mean the leaves’ grip and shine or even the thrush’s silk song, but the far-off fires, for example, of the stars, heaven’s slowly turning theater of light, or the wind playful with its breath; or time that’s always rushing forward, or standing still in the same—what shall I say—moment.
What I know I could put into a pack as if it were bread and cheese, and carry it on one shoulder, important and honorable, but so small! While everything else continues, unexplained and unexplainable. How wonderful it is to follow a thought quietly to its logical end. I have done this a few times. But mostly I just stand in the dark field,in the middle of the world, breathing in and out. Life so far doesn’t have any other name but breath and light, wind and rain. If there’s a temple, I haven’t found it yet. I simply go on drifting, in the heaven of the grass and the weeds.
“All that I want is keeping it easy.”
You may know Röyksopp from that caveman commercial, but their music is consistently awesome and the lyrics to this song are particularly relevant.
Despite what every stoner movie ever will have us believe, just because you smoke pot, does not mean you are an idiot.
Apropos of this fact—see, I used the word, apropos!—let us depart from your regularly-scheduled programming for a little collection of Après Moi Le Déluge poetry.
“Après moi le déluge” means ”after me, come the flood”, as in, ”once I peace out, may this whole fucking place and all y’all in it go to hell:
When I die, let earth and fire mix:
It matters not to me, for my affairs will be unaffected.
Dark right?
It’s kind of hilarious. Kind of. But who doesn’t like Poetry?
Just fucking read it!
Imagine if you could predict the future…
It’d be pretty nice, yes?
Well, with Astrology Zone, you might get damn close. It offers some of the most thorough horoscopes on the net. If you’re into the zodiac at all, I would strongly recommend you check their stuff out.
Here are some out of context, freshly sexual gems my from my horoscope:
“…you can take classes to bone up…”
“…now you will have the time to do it…”
“…as a special service to my readers…”
“…exert your latent powers..”
Books are hard for me.
It isn’t that reading is hard, what’s hard is finding a book that holds my interest enough to finish it. Maybe there’s just too much weed-induced ADD happening in my life these days. Rule of the Bone, however, was not hard to read at alll. In fact, it was fantastic. A modern-day Catcher in the Rye about a fucked up middle school kid who gets kicked out of his house and spends the next two years trying to survive first in upstate New York and ultimately Jamaica.
The New York part of the story is an excercise in squallor. A lot of sleeping on old matresses and hanging out with meth addicts, but the Jamaica stuff is where things really start to get cool. He meets a Rastafarian who shows him the intrinsically spiritual connection between ganja and the universe. Listening to the wise old I-man for half the book was one of many treats to reading it. So was this awesome scene where the kid hallucinates himself back to the days of slavery.
The amount of drug use that happens over a beautiful tropical Jamaican setting is enough to read a book (especially in the winter). You can almost feel the Caribbean sun on your face and definitely makes you want to spark a joint right along with them. But this is a book that isn’t really about drugs.
It’s about how shitty it is to barely still be a kid. And it has an ending that quite literally gave me the chills.
I am only just getting into to Tarot, but this so far has been an excellent deck to work with. It combines all the things you might expect from a tarot deck, but perfect for the beginner.
Osho is one of those Eastern philosopher guys who have totally taken off in the West. One thing I really like about his philosophy, is that it tends to be secular and holistic, instead of drilling down from the point of view of a particular religion. This comes across in his tarot deck as well. Instead of using overtly religious imagery, the illustrations are much more about tapping into the subconscious.
Here we have a nice, although distorted sample of what the cards look like. What’s nice about this deck, is that it labels the cards at the bottom things like “Trust” and “The Muse”. This is an awesome feature, because it’s not always easy to keep track of every single damn card in the deck.
It takes a long time to learn Tarot, but this is a nice, holistic, transcendental approach and there’s a lot to enjoy here when you’re sitting around getting high with friends.
I try to shy away from getting political here at Stoners. I usually save that for my other blog, but sometimes pot and politics intersect and, in the case of Tommy Chong, can turn a stand-up comedian into a drug lord. I’ll admit, I had no idea what I was getting into when I started reading his book. I was never a fan of Cheech and Chong. In fact, I don’t really like stoner movies at all. I find it’s a lot more fun to be high than it is to watch other (usually retarded) people get high. You probably heard he’d gone to jail, which seemed kind of inevitable and not all that surprising… but once I read his account of what the fuck went down, I felt outraged by the media shit-storm and scapegoating the DEA put him and his family through. They basically said that if he didn’t plead guilty to shipping bongs over state lines, then they would bring his son and his wife up on distribution charges as well. They even held the trial on the anniversary of 9/11 just to make the threat of drugs seem that much scarier. His book is poorly written to be sure, and a little heavy on the Holy Spirit, but it’s a really easy read. I would have liked him to compare his plight to the Nazi occupation a little less often. All things being equal, going to jail for 9 months is not the same as the slaughtering of an entire people. Moreover, sometimes his anecdotes felt like nothing other than page-filler, but overall, it’s a really fascinating look at what an all-powerful government can do with unlimited time and money.
The Music of Sigur Ros
Perfect for: Art House Stoners
To be Used: With Headphones
I’ve got to be honest, when it comes to seeing my favorite bands live, sometimes I prefer a few whiskey and cokes to a joint. Weed combined with the loud music puts me in a trance. I can’t keep my mind from wandering, which is, you know, preferable in most getting-high scenarios, but sometimes you just want to stay present and focus on the music.
There are, of course, those groups who thrive on having a trance-inducing sound, and to ignore their unique musical style by notsmoking weed is just really fucking stupid. My favorite of these is Icelandic band Sigur Ros.
My buddy saw them a couple years ago on ‘shrooms, and apparently, for two hours, tears streamed down his face and he felt like he was staring into the face of God. For those of you who haven’t heard of them, their sound is very cinematic. It feels driven, epic, triumphant, and I can tell you, they put on a hell of a show.
I’ll admit I wasn’t ‘shrooming when I saw them at an orchestra hall in Portland, but I was very high, very high.
Sigur Ros (Icelandic for Secret Rose) is front-lined by this lead singer who looks and dresses a bit like a viking. The whole time, he’s pulling a violin bow through an electric guitar, thereby producing these glaciers of sound that move, almost tangibly, in big blocks throughout the space. Adding weed to the mix only heightened the three-dimensional quality of their music. I could almost see it ignite and refract off the surfaces of the venue.
Though I might not have been staring into the face of God, I was extremely impressed. I kept turning to my friend and being like, this is amazing!
As musicians, Sigur Ros has one of the most sophisticated discographies I have ever seen. It may be due to the speed at which they burn through their drummers, but each successive album seems to take on a new disposition and make new discoveries.
Over the coming weeks, I will review these albums individually, but you can use this simple, incomplete guide to help you determine which Sigur Ros album you might want to look into first:
- ( ): Also known as Parenthesis, this tentative, quiet album is best for falling asleep, sitting around the campfire, or beginning a ‘shroom trip. The lyrics are in a false language, designed to force the listener to really listen to the sound. Here’s the amazing, horrifying music video of their first single.
- Takk…: Of all their albums, Takk… is the most traditional. The guitar comes in clearest, the lyrics (albeit in Icelandic) are foregrounded, and the drums are much more severe. Over all, this album is less of an innovation than the others, but it’s quite good and also holds my favorite song of theirs.
- Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust: The cover of this album, as well as the first music video, features a bunch of nude folk frolicking through a field. This is as good of a metaphor for Med as I can imagine. There is so much joy here. It breathes of rolling your car windows down and clapping along at the intersections.
Two hours later, the show concluded with their firing off these massive cannons of confetti out into the audience to a song from Med that roughly translates to Within Me a Lunatic Sings. As you can imagine there was much revelry.
It was easily the best concert I’ve ever seen.
The Music of Sigur Ros
Perfect for: Art House Stoners
To be Used: With Headphones
How to Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto by Tom Hodkinson
Perfect for: Enhancement Stoners
To Be Used: To Break Free of the Bullshit
There is great pleasure in sleeping in, in eating long lunches, taking walks, having drinks, etc., but to me they’re more than just pleasures. They may well be the reason we were put on the earth in the first place. On their own, they are divine, but with a joint it is heaven.
We know this.
Smoking weed isn’t always about getting high - it’s sometimes about making everything else a little better.
I’ve been reading Tom Hodgkinson’s life-changing manifesto, How to be Idle, which in charming British speak, dares you to cast off the shackles of the 40-hour work week in favor of more introspection, personal joy, and bursts of accelerated productivity. Forgive me as I, decently stoned, sit down to write this - I sound like a Brit. I’m definitely American, but you should hear the accent in my head right now.
It’s because I’ve been reading his book for the past six hours.
Each chapter explores a different aspect of living more slowly. But slowly isn’t exactly the right word. Really, it’s about living freely. Based on the fact that you are reading a blog about being high, I would bet you don’t have a 40-hour work week, but if you did, wouldn’t you love to be able to destroy your alarm clock or take an afternoon nap?
Or if you could do both on the same day. Oh, what a day it would be.
How to Be Idle is easily one of the best books I’ve ever read. I now know how the Fundies must have felt when they stumbled upon the Bible. Just like the Bible, nearly every line could be calligraphied and put up on the wall.
Here’s a couple gems:
There’s even a fifteen line poem, each of which a different scenario by which to enjoy tea.
Basically, this is good stuff, people. Nearly every activity he describes can be augmented with a little weed. There are, however, several sections on napping, so take care to smoke before (not during) your nap.
I do have one warning however. If you do, in fact, have a 40-hour week, it might make you suicidal. I thank the good Lord I can read How to Be Idle like a checklist of how I already live instead of how I wish I did.
And since there’s nothing left to do but crawl into bed, hit this joint, and keep reading, then so it shall be.
And if you were wondering. Yes. I’m sleeping in tomorrow.
How to Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto by Tom Hodkinson
Price: $12.05
Perfect for: Enhancement Stoners
To Be Used: To Break Free of the Bullshit
Einstein’s Dreams
$10.36
Perfect for: Philosopher Stoners
Imagine we lived in a world where Time as we know was completely different, where you could, for instance, travel to the center of time just as easily as if it was a spot on the map, or if Time flowed like a choppy river with waves, eddies, and echoes, or if our pasts and not our futures were constantly changing.
There are a few dozen of these alternate-realities in one of the Mind-blowingest books I’ve read lately, Einstein’s Dreams. Nothing has been more glorious these past few weeks than rolling a joint, sitting out in the sun and reading through these simple, yet intriguing vignettes.
Einstein’s Dream is designed for those stoners who get high, zone out, and then return to the world, convinced they’ve discovered the meaning of life.. If you’ve ever uttered the words, “Dude, think about this…” then Einstein’s Dreams is for you.
