It was his mission, not mine, but I understood. I remember well the thrill of being a teenager opening that $15 bag of stems and seeds to choke on some Mexican weed that now couldn’t get into a CBD shop. The high was more psychological than real, but so was the allure: the tempting possibility of gaining the knowledge of the forbidden fruit while also dealing a blow – or so we thought - to The Man. It was worth going to jail for, we thought. We were fools and probably still are, but less radically and less obviously so. The mission of my friend, after all, was to find legal weed. Ah, the transparency of youth!
So I went with my eager friend into a liquor outlet named “The Party Store” in the small city of, well, let us call it “Munchkin,” on the shores of Lake Superior, Michigan, not too interested in getting high, but feeling the adolescent pull of something exotic and out of the mainstream. Their name surely meant that they knew the where-abouts of a legal pot dispensary, and they did: “The Dragon’s Breath” or something like that, they told us, just across the street from the hardware store where we had just shopped five minutes before. This was the same hardware store I had been in two days before that, where a young woman who worked there had told me in a hushed voice, “I have to watch what I say. They are sooo Republican here!” I have been going to that shop for nearly 20 years, and they were that Republican, not that it mattered to me. But it did matter to my cannabis-seeking friend regarding who we might ask about a pot shop. Not there; the “Republicans” might not approve, or so we thought in a knee-jerk reflection back to 1969, when the location of “The Man” seemed so obvious. That, too, was a foolish youthful notion, but whatever. We now had the name and location of a pot shop. Next stop surely would be hippy heaven.
There are some, maybe most, realities that do not live up to expectations, but The Dragon’s Breath did and then some, a hippy heaven indeed. There were posters, pipes, screens, bongs, the weird smell of patchouli mixed with something else, and most especially, the blown-out caretaker, all arrayed in a smash of psychedelic colors. The caretaker was a young man of about 20, and his pink eyes gleamed out from locks of lank hair with a stoned acumen that was remarkable, given his obviously elevated state. Surely The Weed had to be here. But in this heaven, there was not only no beer, but no pot.
“The nearest store is in Gwinn. We just have all the other stuff,” he said, waving his hand about loosely like a groom waving at everyone at the reception except the bride. This was seconded by a growl from the square-headed pit bull at our feet, the favorite breed of drug dealers. We, especially my friend, were out of luck, camels at an oasis that had everything but the water.
I was all for leaving, as he could simply go to the place in Escanaba on the drive home, but he meant business. “Is there some other way I could buy weed around here?” he said in an astounding nod to all those cop-and-pusher shows I’ve been watching ever since Covid 19, phase one. “Nope,” said the stoner, now eyeing us old guys with short hair even more suspiciously.
Undaunted, my friend waved off the look with a surprising lack of self-consciousness and moved through the wall of beads that separated the front from the back of the store. There we found more stuff from the reefer world, including a huge selection of “chillums,” or small wood pipes favored in my day for smoking hashish. He fingered several before choosing one while the suspicious stoner continued to eye him and I eyed the other products, settling on a box titled, “Artificial Dried Urine.” What the…?
As my wannabe pot-head friend peeled off a ten-er for the chillum, I asked the young stone-meister about the dried urine. He looked at me with my ample, un-druggy-like form and cropped white hair, and then disappeared mutely behind a blood-shot wall of suspicion. I continued with the same lack of self-consciousness as my friend: “Oh, it’s something strange, huh? Like some weird sex thing? I mean, as far as I know, they sell stuff like this to keep animals like woodchucks out of the garden.” I shrugged, perplexed at finding garden products in a head shop. He eyed me again, sighed internally, thinking (no doubt), “Well, he’s probably just stupid and not a cop,” and then relented.
“Yes, some people use it for fetishes (a word I did not expect him to be familiar with, but it’s a new age), some for gardens and others – and this is illegal but some still do it – for urine tests.” Ohhhh. Duh. In a state where pot is legal, it is still forbidden by most companies to show signs that one uses it. This is because, unlike alcohol, there is no cheap and easy test yet to show whether or not the traces of pot left from use are still active, or are just a by-product of a fun weekend.
And thus it remains a forbidden fruit. It couldn’t be better for the growers and sellers, even if they could advertise on TV, which they can’t, reinforcing its forbidden nature even as it is legal. Every purveyor from the underground knows that we want to explore what is forbidden. We often continue on with what is forbidden even when we don’t like it, hoping that someday it might give us what we imagined it would – hoping, in the case of pot, that it might still give us the transcendental knowledge denied by our culture that will, in the words of the infamous snake in the garden, make us “… like the gods who know what is good and what is bad.” (Genesis 3, 5)
And so it was with great amazement that later that evening my friend posed this question to me while I was hunkered down with a cold bubbly glass of another, less forbidden intoxicant: “Why bother with thinking about God and eternity when such knowledge will be given us after our death?” To me, he might well have said, “Why do anything else but eat bananas and scratch our arm pits all day?” After all, what had he been doing that afternoon but pursuing questionable esoteric knowledge from the wrong side of town?
But the question has since forced me to think a bit more about the quest for esoteric knowledge, and for this short essay I have narrowed my answer down to two points.
One: We have no idea if our questions are answered after death. In fact, we usually study the spiritual to find out what might await us after death, and what we can do now to make that outcome more favorable. For Christians, for example, it is impossible to get into heaven once Christ is offered and then rejected. For Buddhists, getting into heaven is impossible, period, unless one knows that one must reject attachment to all things and then does so. The truth is, all the religions I know about require some pretty heavy lifting before the pearly gates are swung open for our (hopefully) eternal reward – the ultimate pleasure and knowledge gained from union with the divine.
And Two: We are made for answering the big questions just as we are made with hands so that we can create tools. Tool- making requires knowledge. Tools are what separate us from being meat on the hoof for the bigger predators. Knowledge, then, has not only been good to us, but has been essential for our survival. And, like our trips into outer space, we never know what our knowledge-seeking might bring. We just have to know. We had to know how lightening works, for example, and that has worked out well for us with everything from the light bulb to the electric car. We are now spending billions on super-accelerators and who-knows-what to find the building blocks of the universe, for better or for worse, with few practical ends in mind. How, then, could we not want to know what is Behind the building blocks? How could we not want to know the original law that created all other laws? How, that is, could we not want to know the mind of God?
The need to know took us out of the Garden, but is apparently necessary to get us back into the Garden. Regardless, we were created with a will to know that has brought us our greatest triumphs and many of our defeats: crossing Antarctica, finding the source of the Nile, discovering microbes and galaxies, and discovering the laws of physics and chemistry that have made MRIs and atom bombs and space ships. All this we have gained from the will to knowledge that drives us on and on before the final curtain falls, a curtain which might not, for all we currently know but simply must find out beforehand, be final at all.
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