Introduction
The past few times I've gotten high, I've either been told or have realized on my own that the things I say don't make much sense. This rather irks me, and actually gave me
a really bad, depressing trip a couple nights ago. I used to get the impression that I could at least make intelligible sentences while under the influence of THC. A few times I even managed to hold up my end of an argument against a sober person for 10 or 15 minutes before having to admit I'd been toking. I can't decide whether I was delusional back then, or if I'm just getting stupider. And if I am getting stupider (or THC is just starting to build up too much in my blood), I don't know in what ways I'm getting stupider. Are my symptoms similar to those of
aphasia patients, where language abilities are starting to falter? Or is it simply a matter of memory failure? In order to find an answer to these questions, I am now going to smoke a joint, record all my thoughts, and attempt to relate my opinions/recollections on several topics in an attempt to gauge the memory and lingual capacities of my THC-enhanced brain.
Method
Very shortly, I will go toke, and then attempt to describe several things I have done or seen within the past 24 hours. I have chosen three topics to write on: My day at work, George W. Bush's acceptance speech, and the episode of
Big Brother which aired immediately after the speech. My ability to recall the details of these events and describe them may be useful in determining which areas of my brain are most fucked up. Aside from the proposal, the method, and the headers, everything else in this write-up will be written under the influence of marijuana. Starting now.
Data I: Predetermined Topics
What happened today at work
My boss made me deliver a package first-class to her father, who is in San Diego. It had a book and a letter she'd been writing before she told me to deliver the package. So, I delievered the package and it cost $3.20 (she gave me a ten-spot to pay with), and I bought a large cup of decaf coffee and put some half and half and a package of sugarless sweetener, and that cost $1.21. and in return I got 5.59, which I put on her desk when I got back, and then got to wondering about how 1.21 = 1.10 * 1.10 and 3.20 = 1.60 * 2.00, and 3.20 + 1.21 = 4.41, and 4.41 = 2.10 * 2.10. (this makes more sense than I was making before, when I was thinking about the square roots of the numbers a hundred times greater. (2.00*1.60 + 1.21*1.21 = 2.10*2.10, rather than 1.21^2 + something*something = 2.1^2)) hey, the 1.60 times the 1.21 leaves a .1 in the .1's space! (a tendth? or a tenth? one nineth, the nineth, I guess that makes sense) so, that equals 1.21*2.00*1.60 + 1.21*2.00*1.60 = (shit, that was + * + that I was thinking of, rather than * + *) because (2.00 + 1.60)(1.21 + 1.21) = (1.21*1.60 + 1.21 dammit, all the 1.21's that I've been doing were supposed to be 1.10, as in 1.10 * 1.10, rather than 1.21^2, wihch has four
I've come to a conclusion. People who write nodes without links, have been doing drugs, so they forget to do things. oops
Bush's acceptance speech
Bush started off by naming off all the family in the audience; from his little puppy checkers to his old man, he said something about each of them. he told his mom her hair was white. he was shocked to have a father so old and nice be so much like a wall of bricks when he tried to headbutt him (sorry)
He said that Al Gore was sitting around talking to Edison, and he accused dear Thomas of being involved with risky anti-candle schemes. The only thing he has to offer is fear itself, so Bush did say of Clinton Gore. Just thing, if Gore and Clinton happened to walk into that crazy device from The Fly at the same time, and come out having two heads? and the other body walked around with no head, it appeared as well. so, we'd call the evil two-headed beast Clinton Gore. And the other one would be Al Bill. The little dolt who just keeps walking around, bumping into things because it has no eyes, and talking out of its ass. that's how you can tell that it's got no head; for it talks out its ass. And so are the parts of the Clinton-Gore white house seperated out: the better half of them is an evil two-headed beast. But the other half of them combined is an ass, possibly a jackass. More like breaking a couple of two-dimensional vectors into components and adding each up to get 3i + 4j or 3 + 4i or (3,4), rather than doing whatever I was thinking with all that crazy FOIL operation stuff with the price of Sarah's errands today.
Big Brother episode that aired August 3, 2000
Karen was all fuckin down about dissin George the night before, and she was crying in the bathroom to Brittany, and the other girl thought that she was crying and talking to herself in the bathroom stall. They took her out to the garden to talk, and George came over and said something, and then they were talking later, and he has a high-pitched voice when he starts emoting, and at one point George was talking to the camera, saying they were trying to trip him up. And was kicking his leg up, as if he'd tripped on a banana peel, and they'd tripped him like they wanted, and gotten people mad at him. And Brittany was saying that Jordan would get naked right infront of the camera and put lotion on herself, and do shit like that. Which is pretty whatwhack, you have to admit. ( oh shit, I forgot to vote, and now I lost my daily hit of XP) and that's about all that happened on the episode.
Data II: Some Thoughts
I can easily trick myself into thinking certain thoughts, just because I snap my fingers! Not like that at all. I mean, I can make myself thinking (pretty fuckin good, huh?) (the strikeout, that is) (I can make mysel... shut the fuck up, man!) anything that I want myself to believe, just by (dammit, this is the Joe Satch song Home, I thought it were Sevendust) (anyway) telling myself to believe it. Even if it's irrational and nonsensical as all fuck,
it's still getting through. My defenses are down, and I will buy anything advertized to me. Because, you see (sic, for all of those, btw) if I can convince myself of anything, it stands to reason that anybody else could conivnce me to do something else. No, not smoke crack, you fucking public service (servance) announcements! tis not a gateway computer. I built it myself. Ha ha ha! (to confuse them, you see) (it's as easy to write stoned poetry as it is to breath) (the other day, my co-worker said "that's so money, it's not even funny!" He then added "Damn, I'm a poet and I didn't even know it'" "Ha!, two-fer-two" I wondered what he meant. Like, two-for-two dollars? Like, two atttmpts at amusing me, and two total failures to do so? Or like, two-for-two, both attempts at saying stupid thngs you heard from the leaders of your little clique? or from some idiot who was talking to you one day, saying he was a PSA who'd smoked crack cause MJ is a drummer who's a owner of a gateway drug, so they say. Now I'm starting to see what they were talking about. This si a song by steve vai called "speed", not because you have to be on speed to enjoy it, but because he plays the guitar real fast. (this must seem like such a damn joke, mustn't it?) (MU is for MUstache) (the damned M looks like a moustache itself.
Conclusions:
Draw your own conclusions. Make criticizing write-ups on this very node, and soft link like the little bitch you are, and give me a great big XP Bitch Slap right across the face. Doesn't that make you feel better? That the letters each have a... yeah, that reminds me, for a limited time only, you can tell me what a fool I am directly, through the chatterbox. until right around 6:45 server time, I'd imagine, until I start doing something else instead.
</stoned>
Alterations
I've gone back through the original ramblings and made a few minor changes, none of which effect the actual content of the data. First, I added hard-links where it seemed appropriate (at the humble request of the gracious soft-linkers); please note that while writing last night, I didn't link anything besides forget and XP Bitch Slap. Also, I italicized some words in the text; these were words I tried to strike-out last night, not realizing that E2 doesn't support <strike>. I tried to add the strikeouts last night when I typed something, realized it was stupid, but didn't want to erase it completely because I thought it might be of use for analytical purposes later on.
Analysis
Reading back through this, I'm amazed that my grammatical abilities stayed intact. Of course, that shouldn't come as too much of a surprise; language and the ability to understand and use basic grammar rules are hard-wired into everyone's brain, and it usually takes a disconnection between two parts of the brain, called Broca's aphasia, to mess up a person's sense of grammar. I seemed to demonstrate some of the symptoms of Wernicke's aphasia (spelling?), whose victims create sentences with proper grammar, but often use the wrong words; substituting table with chair or knee with elbow, for example. However, more than anything else, what stands out is the most is the frequency with which I lost my train of thought while writing, switching topics in mid-sentence sometimes, and forgetting that I'd been writing on something else until I glanced back up. You'll notice several times I refer to songs for no apparent reason; I had winamp shuffling through all my mp3's in the background, and when I was struck by a particular song, I started writing about it, dropping the previous topic entirely .
Conclusion
All in all, the obvious answer seems to be that THC wrecks your short-term memory, affirming something we all pretty much knew anyway. However, it is comforting to know that it has next to no effects on one's ability to make coherent sentences, as long as one can manage to remember what he or she is talking about the entire time. Devastating things happen when your thoughts start wandering in mid-sentence:
"or from some idiot who was talking to you one day, saying he was a PSA who'd smoked crack cause MJ is a drummer who's a owner of a gateway drug, so they say. Now I'm starting to see what they were talking about. "
I began this sentence simply referring to a random idiot that might have said something to one of my co-workers. But as soon I mentioned the word idiot, I started thinking about the guy on a public service announcement I've been seeing recently, who claims that as soon as he started smoking weed, the floodgates opened for him, and he started smoking crack and his life went right down the crapper. While trying to write something like "the guy from the PSA who'd smoked crack because he smoked marijuana, a so-called gateway drug", the word marijuana reminded me of my high school principal, named Mary Jane, who was referred to as MJ; but the drummer in my band, Michael James, is also called MJ. Iin the space of less than one word, I changed meanings three times.