	Did this ever happen to you?  You're at a party having a great
time when somebody brings out a beautiful, fragrant cola of
fresh Oaxacan.  You know the kind of Oaxacan I mean, that
bright-eyed, brisk and breezy buzz that energizes you, makes you
want to get up and dance or make your own kind of music.  So
you're smoking away, happily thinking about asking that
merry-eyed young woman over there to get out on the floor with
you, when some supercool pseudo gives out with a long sigh,
wearily gazes at the burnt-out roach and says, "Man, I'm
wrecked."

	Wrecked: What a lousy word to describe how you feel. But then
two or three others in the group feel obliged to nod solemnly
and chime in: "Yeah, man, wasted." "Paralyzed."

	I hate that kind of talk.  I think it betrays the essence of
the cannabis experience, and, ever worse, it spoils the party. 
I think it's time that -- just as we get more selective about
the kind of grass we smoke -- we get more choosy about the words
we use to describe the effect.

	Because the way in which we speak about the high can affect the
experience of the high, certain words can become self-fulfilling
prophesies.  On the most obvious level, if you constantly choose
to call yourself "wrecked" and "wasted" when you smoke dope,
it's likely those words themselves and all their wrung-out and
drained associations will flavor -- some might say pollute-- the
stream of consciousness with their connotations.

	The true cannabis connoisseur is not merely a judge of burning
vegetable matter; he -- or she -- is primarily a connoisseur of
consciousness.  An articulator of the inarticulate, he must make
what T.S. Eliot called a "raid upon the unknowable" and then
come back with more than a satisfied smile, a shit-eating grin:
He has to describe the high in words. Most people I run into out
there who think they could be connoisseurs, who've smoked a lot
of dope and think they can tell the difference between dirtweed
and Chronic, are, to put it kindly, either too illiterate or too
inarticulate to do it.  They may have as much smoking experience
as yours truly, but -to be a little snobbish about it -- they
lack the subtleties of thought and language that have earned the
connoisseur -- among other honors -- a Phi Beta Kappa from Yale,
Honors with Highest Distinction in English literature, and other
such recognition's of the refinements of his taste.

	With all that in mind, I think it's time that the Connoisseur
lead a movement to refine the language with which we speak of
the marijuana high.

	So let's examine some of the common expressions used to
describe the feeling of being high and see which ones pass the
Connoisseur's test:

Fucked Up: As in "Wow, am I fucked up by this reefer."  This
one's okay if done in a certain lighthearted way. But too often
you hear it in the sullen accents of people who were terminally
fucked up before they started smoking, and it's a little scary. 
In a sense it reduces the subtle distinction between elevated
altered states and crude stupid ones like the kind you get from
drugs like PCP and alcohol -- drugs that really fuck you up.

Blown Away:  As in "This shit really blows me away."  Both too
passive and too violent.  A synonym for being murdered by mob
hit men, while colorful, just isn't the best mood enhancer.  The
suggestion of blowing yourself away -- suicide by smoke,
Marihuana: Assassin of Youth and all that reefer madness-- is
too unpleasant.  Face it: If you get totally blown away by
grass, you were probably too lightweight to start out with.

Righteous:  Okay, but only for Rastas with dreads and no green
cards.  Or maybe if you're the son of a born-again Moral
Majority preacher, then you can say "getting truly righteous." 
Otherwise it sounds too pretentious.

High:  Certainly has a kind of simplicity and directness going
for it.  Everybody seems to relate to the many stratospheres of
meaning that might be implicit in the word: from cloud level to
low earth orbit to galactic, hyperspace, light-year leaps in
consciousness.  Has a certain spiritual overtone going for it. 
I never like the language of the I Ching (all that talk about
"the Superior Man does this," "the Superior Man knows that" -get
out of here with that Superior Mandatin stuff) until a Chinese
woman explained to me that a more sensitive translation of the I
Ching than the stuffy Princeton edition would call "the Superior
Man" "the High Person."  Suddenly it made sense.  Not superior
in the sense of castle or class, but superior in terms of
vision, someone having a higher perspective, an ability to
recognize a situation, take an action, from a position of
greater wisdom.  I think that's the essence of being high in the
best sense: getting in touch with the wisdom of the body, of the
heart and the spirit.  Seeing things form that perspective
whether it's the wonder of a merry-eyed woman or the wild
rapture of the Psalms.  If I were a rasta I'd go on about the
wisdom of calling grass "wisdom weed," but alas, I'm not, it
would be too pretentious, so we'll go on to -- whew, I was
smoking some of that Chocolate Thai while writing that
definition of getting high, it really gets you fucked up, I mean
high, but yes, we'll go on to...

Ripped:  Sorry, but here's another of "GEMiNi" no-no words. 
It's got all the wrong connotations.  Too passive/too violent
again.  There's a classic moment in the James M. Cain novel The
Postman Always Rings Twice when the hot-blooded diner girl says
to the horny drifter, "Rip me.  Rip me."  So maybe getting
ripped is sexy for women to say when they're getting high.  But
there's, well, too much edge to it, too much of a Jack the
Ripper taint to the word, to make it pleasant for all but
extraordinary occasions.

Space Out:  Mixed feelings on this.  There is, well, a certain
metaphysical aptness to it that is undeniable while under the
influence of, say, some Buddha sticks.  One does do some space
travel in certain sorts of highs.  But my feeling is that space
out has been degraded by too much sloppy usage.  When someone
who's turning his brain to curds and whey on PCP or alcohol is
called "spaced out," then the phrase has lost all validity for
the special subtleties of the marijuana experience. It's so
often associated with fuzzy thinking even by people who aren't
fuzzy thinkers that it may be terminally tainted.  I say, Let's
use it very specifically -- when we're referring to the
psychedeliclike experience of mind-space travel one occasionally
gets from superior smoke -- or just drop it entirely.

Wasted/Wreched:  Let's lump these two together, then fling the
offensive lump into the offal heap.  if you're going to get
wasted and wrecked, if that's the highest elevation your
consciousness can attain, do me a favor: Stay home and attain
it, don't spoil my party with your whining swamp-gas exhalations
of decay.  Do you like being around people who are wasted and
wrecked?  Okay, start a pen-pal club, but keep those dreary
words form polluting my stream of consciousness.

Stoned:  I've never really liked this.  There's always too much
confusion with the dumb-drunk high, or the painful-martyrdom
high (the true subject of Dylan's "Everybody must get stoned"
anthem).  Stoned:  too dense, opaque, sterile, lifeless,
painful, rock bottom, low down, insensitive, unsensuous,
unfeeling, numb-dumb and stupid.  That's my connotation of
stoned.  It's not my idea of getting high.

Twisted:  This has always been a favorite of mine, because it's
playful, has a nice Waylon & Willio outlaw country-music flavor
to it, conjures up that shit-eatin' grin of delight when the
weed starts to light up the cells in the other hemisphere of the
brain.  Then there's a nice biological aptness to getting
twisted too:  Twistedness is at the very heart of cellular life
in the two gracefully twisted strands of DNA that can encode in
their twisting all the wisdom evolution has been able to
transfer.  what do two strands of DNA do when they want to
create life?  They get twisted.  Only negative connotation of
the phrase:  Chubby Checker.

Zoned:  Has its charms.  In fact, it surpasses getting high in
at least one respect.  Getting high often suggests, narrowly, a
physical dimension -- as in "The Empire State Building is higher
than the Chrysler Building" -- whereas zones suggests not merely
a variation in height but a whole new frame of reference,
perhaps a different realm of being.  The phrase seems to have
had a dual birth; There's an element of "twisted zone" and of
Commander Cody's "Lost in the Ozone," and it may even be a play
on suburban-American "zoning," pedestrial "zones," and American
form of "Zone Buddhism," perhaps. In fact, it might be nice if
zoned replaced space out.  It's much more specific.

Zonked:  Kind of an earthy version of zoned.  Zonk combines zone
with conk in a way that suggests that zoned-out people will get
a conk in the head for having it up there in the clouds.  A
little too much of the alcohol connotation, kind of dumb
sounding, but we'll have to live with its immortality thanks to
Zonker in "Doonesbury." 
	-GEMiNi
