It was strange eating weed cake in front of her parents, but we did it anyway. Her father wanted some, but thankfully, she refused. The cake had those little silver balls on it that you find on little kids cakes. It was like eating through a big bankie full of weed seeds.

A guy named Ganja appeared a little while later. He was a good guy, strange, but good. He ate some of the cake. He fed some to the dog too. We all laughed behind her back about it. She would find out later.

We went outside to the new outside room her parents were building. We were there for a good 5 hours, smoking weed, eating more cake and drinking copious amounts of beer and the type of cheap wine that doesn't even have a box around it.

Someone put Kalifornia on at full volume. It was slowly tearing me apart and no one would turn the TV off. Half the fuckers in the room were already asleep, the other half in a stupor; slowly being smashed into nothingness by the sound of Brad Pitt splattering blood and driving through gates with a nuclear weapon attached to the front of his car. It didn’t really matter anyway; those were the good times, the days of the hot box, the best years of our life after high school. Who cared if an overly loud TV was destroying us? We were having fun and we knew it.

There was something strange going on. She had risen again as if from the dead, rolling a joint. We smoked it. Her father suddenly burst in. Half the people in the room died or pretended to fall asleep at light speed, and he was screaming something over and over. No one could hear him; Kalifornia was still playing in the background and Brad Pitt had just been hit with something heavy. There was blood everywhere and she said "What the hell do you mean the dogs have broken down the fence and are eating the ducks on the farm next-door?"

That was just what he meant. The two Irish wolfhounds, dogs the size of Shetland ponies who die if you feed them at lower than hip height because their stomachs turn inside out, had gotten a seriously bad case of the munchies, broken down a 6 foot fence and eaten all of the neighbours ducks.

At some point she laughed. Kalifornia ended, and I fell asleep. The cat came in and someone fed it some cake. She shouted at him and put the cat out. It came back. Over and over. Every time it did, it would lick the cake until she woke up and put it out. No one thought to close the window. It slept the whole of the next day. Those were the days of miracles and splendour all right. Those were the days.