Most Saturday nights you could find us congregated around a coffee table in someone’s rec room or campus dorm. Tethered to our rum and cokes or vodka and orange and always within reach of the ash tray; we would just hang out, talk, play cards and listen to albums. To us music was a necessary; a basic level in Maslow’s life needs: food, shelter, sleep and music. We all smoked in those days, cigarettes and occasionally pot – choosing to ignore the Surgeon General’s reports.

Without a lot of fanfare someone would pull out their bag of weed and pass a burning joint around the circle. If I had the opportunity, I’d often volunteered to roll it. It was my thing: always perfecting my craft – slim and tight with no flying seeds to pop and burn.

The room would fill up with a smoky haze.

I recall one particular evening when a frozen Oreo dairy queen pie made an appearance. It was set down in the center of the coffee table and each of us was handed our own spoon.    We morphed into a pack of wild dogs; shoulders pushing against shoulders, fighting our way into the circle to shovel up our share.   A monstrous scoop of Oreo ice cream was packed into my salivating mouth. I could barely close my lips around it. Instinctively my tongue started to work rolling and sucking the frosty goodness.   Then, for a shadow of a nano-second I time traveled to a heavenly world of sweet and coldness. It is almost orgasmic.   I am blissfully content. Uh… my brains to registers a new incoming signal.  The contents of my mouth have liquefied and slipped away. The afterglow dissolves. Must have more.   I dive in for second and third, and fourth spoonful.   In under two minutes the entitle frozen pie is gone. Nothing as ever tasted that good before or since.

Time for another joint.

Our smiles stretch out and push up into our cheeks; actually, reducing our vision.

“Look at how squinty your eyes are!”

On the table among the glasses, packs of smokes and wet condensation rings sits the sad remains of our frozen pie – scrapped clean of its icy contents. Someone stabs at the packaging with the end of their spoon.

“Hey, this has a secret bottom. Its chocolate graham cracker. Oh My God. I thought that part was cardboard.”

What? We lean in to investigate. It’s like multiple fireworks erupting in our brains at once – revelation!   We had somehow forgotten to eat the sugary chocolate biscuit bottom. It’s crazy. Once again, we scramble to find our spoons. Like human trash compacters we destroy the tasty shell in seconds.

How could we have missed the bottom? Really? We find it hilarious. For the next ten minutes we squeal and roll with gulping out of control laughter. We can’t stop. Its exhausting. Just when we think we are settling down, someone snorts and sets us off into another bout of spontaneous, sidesplitting euphoria.

That’s what weed does to you.

Good times – long ago