Stand Up Act 8 (stoneissuers, night work, handouts and nickle go)

(Stand Up Act 7)

Goddamn stoners.  God fucking damn stoners.  I don't have a problem with them for the most part.  I really don't.  Pot is legal in more states than anyone could have imagined three years ago.  Not even a decade, just three years.  Unless I'm completely off and time has been moving faster than I thought.  Or slower than I thought.  I'm not good with time.  It has nothing to do with drugs, just alcohol.  And college.  In college everything is oriented to due dates and when you need to wash your clothes because you're going home to your parents and they reek of the actual world instead of the bubble they built for themselves wherever.  I'm not good with time, but pot is legal and it's great.  It should be legal.  There is nothing wrong with it at all.

All kinds of legal things turn people into worthless sacks of shit all of the time and they're fine.  Weed doesn't even do that to people on a consistent basis.  If you smoke a pound of weed a month you will be in much better shape than the person who eats ten pounds of candy a month.  To the point though, I don't hate smokers or pot smokers, but stoners are a bit different.  Stoners are that one shade further beyond the smoker, for better and for worse.

Some stoners need that extra nudge to push and motivate and inspire them to operate and create and shove work through and enjoy other people and enjoy the chase of life in general.  Some stoners like that extra nudge to mooch and coast, but not just coast, but accelerate, and entertain and smooth their own course through the path of least resistance, not as a way of escape or relaxation, but as a way to live.

Everything takes on the slight pale of life and death once they enter the circle.  A routine trip to the gas station becomes a twenty minute conversation on the meaning of life and how hard it is to survive in the real world and if God hadn't created the man who created the coldcut sandwich the world as we know it would be horribly altered and disfigured to the point where walking out of your front door would be suicide.  Jesus christ, calm down.  We're gonna get food.  I know you couldn't bring yourself to leave your front door without someone walking with you, but for fucks sake, it's not the end of the world.  Not by a long shot.

I'm even okay with adventurous stoners.  The kind that get really high and then want to operate.  I'm a little bit of an adventure stoner streaker myself from time to time.  I know it's obnoxious in some ways.  It doesn't mean that I don't do it and want to push other people to, but I am that, and I'm never really all that sad when people shoot me down.  When I'm smoking, "I just had the absolute greatest idea ever" is the last thing you want to hear out of my mouth.  For one: it's probably a way too elaborate or distant quest to achieve a goal unique to me that I couldn't do without other people there (everything from playing some sort of multiplayer only game to crossing some distance to see or buy something much better crossed in a car).  For two: there's probably a good chance someone might actually get hurt (adds to the allure of the adventure.  When you have bad credit all you have is yourself, so while you gamble with imaginary numbers and scores, I gamble with my body...  because I have no credit).  And for three: by the time the idea comes out of my mouth, no one feels like moving.  I'm okay with that.

The stoner I can no longer stand is the stoneissuer.  The girl or guy who always wants to know what you have and then compares it to other high end "brands" they've had.  No one asked you.  Literally, no one asked you for your opinion on how this stacks up to Phonecase White Palidin (insert semi-obscure flower phylum here).

Yes, that's why I invited you over: to stick your nose into my bag and not shake your head, but give me the "weird" eye and ask the admonishing question of  "how much did you pay for this."   I'm begging the question in offering it, aren't I.  I needed your expertise.  I wasn't just bored the fuck out of my mind and out of videos to jerk off to and thought it might be fun to have someone else to talk to for an evening.  No, I wanted your sharp nose and your ten point critique of what is essentially free weed for you.  I'm not basically paying for your company like a truck driver picking up some fawn eyed drifter for a few hours of bullshitting til the next stop.

You asked to drop by and what I wanted you to do was pull out your pocket scale and shake your head and tell me I was lied to and it was almost a gram light and repeat over and over again that back home you wouldn't have paid over X amount of dollars for what I had while you ground up your Panda Blue Light Special shipped in from the west coast.

The stoneissuer is particularly distasteful because as soon as theirs runs out you are the first one they call.  You are the first one they try to buddy up with and then they come over and try to be modest about how much they are taking and go out of their way to point it out that they are somehow doing you a favor because what they usually get is more pure and they're not used to smoking a gentler high and the taste is way off but they can get accustomed to it.   Meanwhile the baseball bat in the corner keeps chirping in your ear "come on, just do it," but I love company more than my own sometimes and know better than to act out and act out of rage.   Most of the time.

The stoneissuer will trash talk you sideways.  The kind of person who, in a race, would nudge your back end out and force you off the road to get ahead and then say "well, I was holding my same racing line, but you were diverting from your own to hold me back, so it's kind of your fault you spun out into sand on your last lap."  They will passive attack in attempts to try to insure and assert their value to the group as the token expert, without realizing that no one really cares as long as they get something out of experience.

Stoneissuers are usually descended from higher, no pun intended, echelons of the hierarchy of smokers.  Rich folks all too often, trying to distance themselves, but be included in, the experience.  The thing that makes them the most distasteful is that, if they aren't already motivated to stay away from the lower grades for the fact that moving up is sort of a socioeconomic graduation and going backward implies some sort of failure in tastes or earning power or status, as soon as their shit runs out and they go enough days without it, they're right back with you.  Suddenly what made them curl their lips and flare their nostrils and roll their eyes like you just said One Direction is the greatest band to grace the face of the Earth, becomes "hey, that's not so bad.  I kind of feel it."  Suddenly "how much did you pay for that" and "you got ripped off" turns into "that's pretty good" and "is it alright if I steal some more?"

Yeah, it's fine, but nightwork is great.  I think I realized one of the reasons why I like working night shifts so much, and it's nothing profound.  It comes down to the fact that I don't give all that much of a shit when it comes to my clothes.  It's not a complete abandon fueled by the functionality of homeless people.  Nothing close to that.  I have no one to impress so it makes no sense to impress people.

Sometimes it's a matter of detailing.  Everyone likes a well detailed car or house, why not clothing.  I am sometimes gripped by the thrill of matching.  It's real.  I am aware of my body and I ride in my body all the time.  Everyone does.  When things match, it's easier to not notice it and when you do notice it, you have color cues to make that understanding zip through your brain that much faster and then, that much faster, you can carry on being yourself.  For the same reason I don't read too much into people obsessed with matching.  It really is a matter of cutting down variables and freeing up much more, or at least that much more, free time and better yet, uninterrupted thought and brain space.  That's pretty damn valuable for the small price of picking out clothing beforehand.

Consider when you're deep in thought after work, pulling the day in front of your eyes like that choppy 8mm film on the two spools that burns up if you leave it in front of the lens too long.  That stuff your parents parents watched home videos of themselves on in dusty attics or family renunion Wonder Times grainy video project screen things or whatever it was they did kind of things.

That spool is running and you're trying to figure out ways to do that again, but without that 45 seconds of frames in the lunch break room where you put the pack of coffee filters you didn't pay for in your locker and that 72 second stretch of frames where you could've and also would've done your job better because you actually do care, but come off wrong sometimes over the phone.  That spool is running and right in the middle of it.  When you are beginning to build some understanding, it switches to a high definition video of rally cross for an hour compressed into ten seconds and switches back.  Bad news.

That's what makes night work so great.  It takes the work out of work.  You can up and go with pants with their crotch completely ripped out and no one gives a shit and it already blends in with rest of the night because the lighting is so poor so even if you did look down it wouldn't matter because you can't see anything.  It's a near perfect situation.  Everything is dark and everything follows that dark pattern so even if someone did think they could see something, they wouldn't be able to really know beyond what's inside their own head and everyone knows as much as half of what's in their is bullshit anyway.

Nobody wants handouts.  Sometimes you have to help your dealers, because some of them do it for a living and are subject to market forces same as any kind of investor.  The truth is there are two sorts of dealers.  There are the shorters and the careers.  The shorters are on a temporary schedule.  Volatile products and volatile prices.  They're on the get wealthy very quickly and retire permanently track or supplementary income (McDonalds) track.

Sometimes you have to help folks out.

"Do you want some gas money?  I can just bring you some money for gas.  I don't want anything right now."

"You might as well take it though.  You can use it for something is all I'm saying."

"I know, but I would rather have the money for later, 'cause there isn't a bank I can go to is what I mean.  That's you're issue right now."

"If you just take this right now, I'm fine with that.  I just need to put gas in my car because I had to push it off the street when the engine stopped."

Pineapple Express backwards.  I always feel a little bad when my parting words are "hey, take care of yourself."  Even when nothing is given, the sentiment itself implies the person it's directed to is completely incapable of and must be reminded to do better by their machinery.  Nobody wants hand outs.  Ever.

Happiness is contagious.  I'll give you a nickle both to go down either road A or road B.  Whichever makes me happy as I go is the one I'm taking.