Brad turns to his companion Les. He is wearing an oversized t-shirt sporting some trendy pop-culture phrase that has long since lost any reference or significance. He sports jeans that are neither loose nor tight, very functional. Brad is in essence, every man America. Les is a skinny short boy, pale with frizzy blond hair. He too is dressed in a peculiar sort of anti-fashion, a fashion so slyly plain and unrecognizable that it defies the very nature of fashion itself. They are both seventeen. “Yo, when’s Tim coming back with our trees? I need to blaze before I go home.
Engaged in the continuing struggle to find marijuana, Brad is neither distressed nor overly excited, but displays a Taoist sort of calm. Les responds with an ambivalent answer and a request – “What’s the best kind of music to listen to while you’re high? ” In this simple question, Les may anticipate the next wave of marijuana culture. But to understand the cultural currents and nature of this existential convergence, we must first dive deeper into what has become the most genuine counterculture of modern times. Marijuana was originally viewed as merely another tool for spiritual short cuts and mind expansion.
At this point, it was confined to an elite group of self-righteous hipsters who could find no better way to communicate the essence of the drug that outdated modes of artistic expression. However, in post-psychedelic America, marijuana soon took on a new, more democratically inspired significance. Marijuana became a more recreational drug, soon finding its way into the melting pot for subversive trend, teenage America. Marijuana is a mild hallucinogen, but really it’s more like a combination of speed and rat poison, only not bad for you. Marijuana makes each moment significant.
The now takes on supreme importance. The future and the past become no longer points for idle speculations, but reductions of functionality constrained by the now. It is this post-temporal affect that serves to liberate users from their previous outdated modalities of experience-defined enjoyment. Experience is secondary to the transcending reality of every moment. Cognizant of the fact that meaningful experience is really quite unlikely, these post-hedonists embrace the continuation of their culture as a surrogate for experience; when the now is the all, an experience is created.
There is little risk of long term consequence, as they recognize the danger in harder drugs like ecstasy, which is a combination of coke and heroin, and LSD, which is essentially pure speed. This helps to prevent a backlash as the divergent experimentation is kept to a minimum, and confined to safe drugs like alcohol and whip-its. They reject the aspirations of self-righteous drug enthusiasts like Aldous Huxley or Nicholas Saunders, who believed that drugs were merely a door as opposed to a way of living.
Indeed, in this proto-transcendentalist state, a primal reversion takes place. This reversion is not energetic in nature, but rather an infusion into the continuing now of the most basic elements of what it means to be human. The culture is easily recognizable, and communication mostly consists of bragging about pieces and plans for marijuana intake. Indeed, the democratic flow is evident as “mad headz” are sought to make an experience more fulfilling. There is little communication, as collective experience of the now overpowers the need for pointless and empty chatter.
Something much more profound and functional is going on. In this simplistic, purified environment, the pretensions of previous generations are cast aside like the shackles of post-experience. Indeed, in this proto-evolutionary state, the post-primitive roots of human collective experience manifest, and assert their dominance in inter-personal relations. In post-idealistic America, this basis for freedom, the very core of capitalist evolution, serves to democratize the culture by providing access based on self-assertion without intellectual or moral pretension.
The outdated moralities of proto-420 intellectualism tainted counterculture are thrown aside, as a social order that is neither nihilistic or utopian, purely functional and self-serving, takes shape. The androgyny of sexuality is thrown aside and sexuality returns to its pure, functional state: an extension of the dominance-submission mechanisms that underlie the ego. It is this unleashing of the ego in the post-superego climate that really differs the culture of marijuana from its predecessors. For appreciation of the now and unleashing of the ego allows a quiet compatibility with society at large.
Defined as counterculture almost by technicality, if the now allows any political focus, it is solely self-preservation. In short, the new mental rebels are defined as such by beuorocrat, a necessary cog for its existence in a neo-doublethink era. Of course they wouldn’t realized it, as they are just too fucking stoned. So where has is this new breed of counterculture headed? There is some disagreement on this. The proponents of the continuing experience of the now insist that any change or attempt at “evolution” would be a betrayal of the principle ideologies of the culture.
Some say that the appreciation of the now should creep into more aspects of experience, as previously enjoyable experiences are contemplated in terms of their immediacy. The goal is to increasingly do more and more drugs, and therefore be high more and more often. In a sense, the more one can appreciate the now, the higher one becomes on the neo-Darwinian order, helping to reinforce the urgency of getting hurt. Critics of this idea say that any critical evaluation of the culture, be it an assertion to reject evolution or an attempt at expansion, is out of context because within the culture critical thought is very passe.
Admittedly, the previous sentence makes no sense. However, the majority of “pot-heads” (derived from an ancient druid practice of putting a pot on one’s head and then eating cat rectums) just say “What the hell are you talking about? I don’t know what’s going on. ” It is these people who are at the culture’s heart, and ultimately, it will be them who lead it into the post-twentieth century. Brad finds his weed. Content within his place in the new but timeless counterculture, he takes an hour, finds a spot safe for smoking, and enjoys himself. After he is done he goes home and takes a peaceful nap. Long Live Marijuana.