Accidental Crack Smokers And A Pants-Dwelling Beetle

On Saturday or Sunday Starcat, Frances, Fidridge, M, and I were hanging out on the lawn in the park, not doing much of anything except stretching and reading and smoking, when one of us started up an interesting conversation. I think it was Fidridge who mentioned a strange incident in which he had accidentally smoked crack.

I was completely taken aback, and not because I was shocked that my baby brother had smoked crack. I was taken aback because I had been under the false impression that I was the only person I knew of who had accidentally smoked crack. Not only I but also my brother had unwittingly done it. This seemed too strange, so I told my story of accidental crack smoking and asked if any of the other three of us had ever accidentally ingested it. Would you believe that two of them had?

This means that four out of five of us in a small, random gathering of friends and acquaintances had smoked crack without meaning to. Four out five of us had smoked crack. That just seems ridiculous to me, even after having a few days to mull it over. All these years, I thought that my story was fairly unique, but apparently this is about as common as losing your virginity before the age of thirty-five.

You are probably asking yourself how it happens that a person ends up inhaling a bunch of burning crack fumes without knowing. It is surprising how easily this can happen and how common it seems to be. Follow along as I tell you how four people ended up accidentally smoking crack:

  • I won’t get into all the specifics of my story, because I could write an entire novella about how I ended up on my science teacher’s sofa without knowing it was his house, but suffice it to say that I was sitting on his sofa. Before my friend passed me the pipe, she told all of us that it had been her landlady’s husband’s, and the landlady wanted my friend to have it after he died. This was all supposed to be very touching, so I tried thinking about how this was some old dead guy’s pipe and felt shocked knowing that old people smoked pot, too, when I began to feel really weird. After my second hit, I said “hey guys, I think there’s more in that pipe than we thought”, and then my friend said “Oh fuck, I’m sorry, he smoked crack in one of his pipes, and I bet it was this one”.
  • M was leaving a bar or a party or something like that, and he asked someone if he could take a drag off their cigarette. They passed it to him without telling him that it was laced with crack. M says that he mustn’t have gotten very much, because he hardly noticed more than maybe a slight buzz. I thing that’s just plain rude to hand someone a crack-laced cigarette without telling them about the situation beforehand!
  • Fidridge was at someone’s house, and they offered him some pot. He accepted, picked up a bong, and inhaled. It was the wrong bong. Apparently there were two bongs, and the one with crack in it was not the one that his friend had meant to offer. Oops.
  • Frances was only fourteen at the time of her accidental crack smoking. (In answer to The Accidental Tourist, I’ll write The Accidental Crack Smoker). She was visiting Cityville from out of town and had met up with a bunch of guys. One of them handed her a joint, which she smoked a bit of it. He and his friends laughed when she was done, because they had laced it with crack and thought her smoking it was really funny. Yeah, real funny. Ha ha. Giving crack to fourteen-year-olds is a riot.

    • So, there you have it. The stories of four accidental crack smokers. Don’t judge us. We totally didn’t mean it, and none of us continued down the path to absolute subservience to the crack gods. We are good, non-crack-addicted folks to this day.

    How about you? Got a crack story? ‘Cause I’d love to hear it.

    I was walking outside as part of my mail duties at work this afternoon, which is one of my favourite work things. The sun was warm and the breeze light in that way where it plays with your hair, lifting up bits and pieces, but not really blowing it around. That’s how the wind always was in 1970s movies when they wanted to show that a female character was really wholesomely beautiful.

    I was on my way back to the office, imagining myself to be all wholesomely beautiful with naturally shiny and flowing hair (not the accidentally purple kind I’m stuck with for the time being), when I felt something funny in my pants.

    That was such a great ending to the sentence that I have to repeat myself: I felt something funny in my pants. No, this is nothing crotch related, so don’t get your hopes up, unless you’re the Fiery One, in which case do get your hopes up, because you are so far away and deserve some excitement.

    The funny feeling was above my butt but below my waistband on the left side. It felt crawly, and so of course I started flashing through all kinds scenarios like it was a bee or a sudden tumour. In case it was something alive that could possibly sting me, I tried to keep my pace even and developed a heightened awareness of how much pressure there was at any given moment between my pants and skin on that side. I worried that the slightest move might send me yowling and running across lawns in a very embarrassing manner.

    When I got back to the office, I went to the bathroom and gingerly peeled away my pants and then my underwear. Nothing. I could not see anything that would have given me the impression of having a living thing in my pants (stop snickering). On my second poke through the inside of my pants, though, there was something – a mid-sized black beetle.

    A beetle! This was so much less frightening than my bee / wasp scenario or my hallucinating things being in my pants scenario that it actually calmed me to see it. No biting! No hallucinating! Just a little black beetle who I decided was male, and I named him Chuck, because I flushed him down the toilet. Now I feel ever-so-slightly guilty for killing something I had bothered to name.

    I should have a “Today Is The Day That…” section in my posts. Today would be:
    Today Is The Day That I Named A Beetle Chuck That I Found Living In My Pants.

    Palestinians prisoners started an open-ended hunger strike to fight for better treatment in Israeli prisons.

    There has been increased volcanic activity in Yellowstone.

    Teleportation has leapt out of “Star Trek” and into reality.

    Elan Morganlinks, miscellany, past, listsComment