[The following article is from our “High-Brr-Nation Cannabis Guide” which is packed with fun, interesting stories about surviving the winter with weed. Check ’em out here!—eds.]
“Don’t you want to experience alternate realities?” my college roommate asked, incredulously, when I declined to smoke weed with him.
I don’t know what varieties he had at his disposal, but they were apparently good enough that he indulged every afternoon on a schedule far more reliable than that on which any of us attended class. I lived in a four-person suite for most of my college time; the pot-smoking roommate was a poetry major, but his true gift was weed marketing.
Our junior year, he created a pot palace, bringing friends over to sample various strains and enjoy meticulously-selected snacks paired with that week’s flower like a sommelier matches steak to wine. He had a selection of stoner-movie DVDs to watch, a Rube-Goldbergian fan contraption that vented the smoke through a barely-cracked window, and a shockingly reliable mental accounting of the 420-friendliness of seemingly every student at the school. His afternoon gatherings, attended by a rotating gallery of guests, were like tupperware parties for weed. From September to May, I watched as he gradually converted dozens of students into stoners.
At the center of the experience was Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, a 1999 Playstation game with an irresistible magnetic pull on all of us, whether sober or stoned. The full version of the game presented a variety of skate-able environments, asking the player to button-mash their way along rails and slopes, building up speed and soaring through blocky geometry on a skateboard with greater and greater speed.