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The previews... |
For the next 24-hours, you can enroll in any of my courses for half off with discount code maryjane. That's one word, all lower case. If you want to write prettier prose, I'd consider checking out Meet Cute. If you want to write prettier copy, Snow Cones. If you want to write prettier email, Don Draper. |
The movie... |
The first time I got stoned was the summer after my sophomore year of college. |
At the time, one of my best friends was a gangly tennis player by the name of Nate. He stood about 6 foot 3 inches tall, had the physique of a fawn and looked to have possessed the athleticism of a one-legged Ostrich. |
But, Nate was the physical embodiment of the cliche don't judge a book by its cover. |
It's said that in Western times when Texas Rangers and Comanche Warriors stepped down off their mounts, they walked around with a strange, bow-legged gait that looked apish, if not alien, but when they were atop their horses, both parties would take on a an athleticism akin to a barracuda knifing through water. |
Comanches, in particular, were exceptionally graceful, possessing the ability to slip off the saddle, ratchet their legs around either side of their horse and ride it crotch-to-ribs. This allowed them to dodge incoming missiles behind 1,500 lbs of muscle, all while loosing arrows beneath the animal's neck. |
While Nate would have certainly gotten the absolute shit kicked out of him in Western times, he was like the Texas Rangers and the Comanches in that he was awkward as hell off the saddle but the moment you handed him a racket or a paddle, he'd suddenly come to life. Nate was a collegiate tennis player and, still to this day, the greatest ping-pong player I've ever done battle with. |
I remember it wasn't uncommon for him to knock on my dorm room door at 2 a.m., hand me a ping-pong paddle and motion me to follow him down the stairs to the first floor lobby which housed a rickety Stiga table with a net so dilapidated you couldn't use it to catch goldfish. |
Nate would always give me the first serve and then, for the next hour or so, he would mercilessly and violently beat my ass. It felt like a metaphorical reenactment of Custer's Last Stand. |
Between a Cincinnati accent that clung to every vowel and a bizarre tendency to talk a mile a minute, listening to Nate speak was like listening to a podcast at 3x speed. Words would meld together forming new words entirely. |
It took me weeks to speak Nate's native tongue; to decipher that the English translation of "Whatscourdumass" was "What's the score, dumbass?" |
I miss those days. |
After my freshman year of college, I transferred schools but I'd make time to visit every so often to shoot the shit with Nate. |
On one such visit, Nate got me high for the very first time. |
Nate by this time, had moved off campus into a house where he took up a liking for marijuana. Not 5-minutes into our visit, he showed me his prized possession: not a racket but a hideous looking water bong he had rigged out of various doodads and doohickeys he had gathered around his house. It looked like something Optimus Prime's dog had shat out and then stepped in. |
Nate took a hit. |
I took a hit. |
Nate took another hit. |
I took another hit. |
The two of us went on like this, volleying the bong back and forth like our past days of 2 a.m. ping-pong, until I looked up and realized I was no longer on Earth. |
When you get utterly, completely and tragically high, the world looks like you're experiencing it through the windows of a passing train car. |
The moment you've had the chance to register a scene, the train has moved 200 yards down rail and you're onto the next scene, and then the next scene, and then the scene after that. |
I'd liken the experience to being stuck in one of those Cherry red vintage View-Masters that you'd hold up to your face as a kid like a pair of binoculars and click away as the pictures changed right before your eyes. Except, you have no control. You're not the one doing the clicking. |
I recall being so goddamn high after smoking Nate's shitty little aqua contraption that I genuinely thought there would never again be a day that I would not be high. I recall being so goddamn high that, from that point on, I'd be forced to live out the remainder of my existence in a state of complete and total highness. |
All that to say, when you're this high, it's really important that you re-establish a sense of reality. For me, this grounding happens by speaking universal truths to myself (or truths that can't be argued). |
"I have two feet." |
"The floor below me is made of hardwood." |
"I am standing on this hardwood floor." |
"I have five fingers on my right hand." |
"I am placing my right hand on the end-table beside me." |
"I am high because I smoked marijuana." |
"Because I'm high, my grinning friend looks like The Joker." |
"The effects of marijuana don't last forever." |
"In a couple of hours, I will not be high." |
After speaking a handful of universal truths, you can become grounded again and when you become grounded again, you can enjoy the ride... somewhat. |
This is a superb time to talk about "beliefs" versus "realities", which is ultimately why I'm writing you today. While a reality is a universal truth, a belief is something you're accepting to be true. |
It's good that humanity has universal truths because otherwise we'd attempt to do all sorts of unfathomable shit like breath under water, jump off of seven story buildings or fornicate with Bengal Tigers. |
But, because it's universally true that humans can't breath under water, levitate a hundred feet off the ground or produce bizarre, chimeric offspring with large predatory cats, we don't partake in any of these mad behaviors. |
Nobody says "I believe that pigs can't fly" because it's a universally ackowledged truth that pigs can't fly. |
There's nothing to be believed or to not be believed about whether or not pigs can fucking fly. Pigs don't have wings nor the hollow bones of birds so they simply can not fly. |
Now, it's perfectly appropriate for somebody to say "I believe we don't go anywhere after we die" or "I believe we do go somewhere after we die" because heaven is a belief. It's something that is either accepted to be true or not accepted to be true but, unlike the universal truth that pigs lack the ability to fly, it can't be proven. |
Now, if tomorrow we designed some sort of hyper-advanced spaceship that allowed us to travel from this dimension to another more heavenly dimension and watch angels sip coffee and smoke cigarettes and drink Old fashioneds and do whatever it is that angels do, then heaven would be a universal truth because it could no longer be argued. |
If some rich atheist asshole randomly decided to pop-off in congregation about the religious being full of Optimus Prime's dog's shit, the minister could grab him by the shirt collar, throw him in the church's spaceship and say, "Buckle the fuck up, dumbass." |
The reason heaven is a "belief" and religion is often referred to as "faith" is because we don't have a spaceship. |
Faith, in my opinion, is what makes the human existence so beautiful and interesting. While universal truths give us parameters that we must exist within, there is ample space in between these guardrails for us to sprinkle in our own personal beliefs. |
While beliefs aren't universally true for everyone, they can be true for you or for me or for Nate. Because of this, we must be abundantly thoughtful about what we say after the phrase "I believe..." because what we believe is true for us. |
If you believe you are worthless, you are worthless. |
If you believe you are worthy, you are worthy. |
If you believe you are forgetful, you are forgetful. |
If you believe you are thoughtful, you are thoughtful. |
If you believe you're incapable, you're incapable. |
If you believe you're capable, you're capable. |
And so on. |
Over the past couple of years, I've noticed that I have more negative beliefs about myself than I do positive ones and, because of this, these negative beliefs have become the basis of my own identity; my own reality. |
Reframing and revising my beliefs has felt like attempting to get grounded again after finding myself suddenly and very extraordinarily high. |
The difference, of course, is that stating universal truths doesn't help much here. |
What helps is the word "but". |
In the latter years of the neuroscientist Oliver Sack's life, he fell in love with a writer by the name of Bill Hayes. After Sacks passed, Hayes wrote a gorgeous memoir called Insomniac City on their life together. |
In one passage, Hayes describes Sack's adoration for the word "but"... |
" |
Oliver often said that ‘but’ was his favorite word, a kind of etymological flip of the coin, for it allowed consideration of both sides of an argument, a topic, as well as a kind of looking-at-the-bright-side that was as much a part of his nature as his difference and indecisiveness. |
” |
When I have a negative belief about myself, I try and remember the word "but" and I then try and force myself to consider a counter belief about myself, a more positive belief about myself. |
I'm a shit fucking writer but |
By Cole Schafer. |
P.S. If you enjoyed this newsletter, you can support it by subscribing to Sticky Notes or purchasing one of the following goodies from my store... |
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