My friend and I are plopped down, per usual on Wednesday nights which provide little in the way of entertainment or violence, in a small opium den which our crowd frequents. Our hash has been waiting eagerly to be consumed all day, nestled warmly in a celophane packet in my wallet, the heat of my body bathing it like a mother bird does her egg. Soon enough we are gone, the quiet music in the background bathes us as a synthaesia laps at the edges of our bodies. I can feel myself slow and long like a blade in the dark, and my intellect sweeps over open hills like the motion blur clouds of an amphetamine afternoon. Then, the discussion begins. "Fog hates gags," I declare. "Fog must not be very nice," my friend says. But from behind the cloud of hashish smoke he can hardly been seen as serious. "But if He wasn't nice," I begin, filling my chest as I do when I go on my extended rants, "why would He send down his only Son, Light-Misty-Rain, to be sacrificed on our windshield wipers and to die for our rust proofing? He knows we cannot withstand His wrath, for it would destroy our truecoats and make our cars look like all those junkers that have been through long New England winters." I, sufficiently edified, shut up. Six or seven hits later, he starts in with, "But you have no proof, this Fog is just a concept. His Son is nothing but the dew that covers everything in the morning hours, before the sunlight of logic erases him as easily as carbonation is removed from soda." "I have proof," I respond. "I have many water stains on my car from the glory that His Son has brought down upon us, and some will not come off. They are, pock marks on my finish and so shall be forever. Not even the fancy polishes and finishes from commericials and, nay, infomercials can remove those marks. It is as permanent as a truecoat." "Oh, oh! And how readily you cling to your hollow beliefs, why not simply have the whole thing refinished. Why, simply spray paint would do the job crudely, you could replace it with anything you wished! As simple as changing your pants!" "You would have me do so, to change my finish like that. I cannot change so simply, for my finish has been with me since the day I entered that car and it shall remain. It was with me at my first ticket, at my first emissions test. It has been good and true to me since the day of its truecoating. To change that, would be to change the very nature of the thing itself," I am sufficiently exhausted at this point and am tired of defending my beliefs. "Why not simply get a new car?" my friend asks. And I, smugly reply, "what are you, a buddhist?" Before he has the chance to answer, the owner of the den asks us to leave, because our ideas are too controversial and the quiet stoners in the back are feeling too brittle to have their beliefs questioned. So, the two of us find our way to to the street, and its raining and hot and steamy. My friend laughs at the irony as we part and go our separate ways. He disappears into the shadow of an echoing alley way and I find my way back to my flat where it's warm and my girl waits with hair in braids and stale Chinese food in oil stained cartons.