"The goal that led him on was not impossible, though it was clearly supernatural: He wanted to dream a man. He wanted to dream him completely, in painstaking detail, and impose him upon reality." The Circular Ruins, Borges
I love reading Borges. His writing is not only strange but gorgeous. "..,a lean and evil mob of moon-coloured hounds" is his way of describing a pack of dogs and my way of describing Luke’s friends. As trippy as reading Borges is, Luke's friends are by far stranger and more other-worldly than even Borges. Luke’s friend Boss, for instance, is 6'9" tall and 5' wide. Boss is Russian; he has blond, short hair, and blue eyes with v shapes beneath his eyes and interesting crow’s feet. His hands are enormous, his head is elephantine, and his mouth is deep and labyrinthal. The teeth are yellow, jagged and like a garbage disposal; I would hate to accidentally put my hand down in there. Vegans and carnivorous humans argue over the physiological orientation of our species. Are we meant to be vegetarian, carnivores or both? Boss's teeth would be strong evidence of our flesh-tearing origins. The jagged, rugged pointiness of those piss-colored peaks demonstrate our strong carnivorous state. Humans must have evolved and refined from having Boss-like mouths to having straight and squared off, truncated teeth. I have nightmares of being chased through viny jungles and over grainy deserts by that giant lug. I imagine him on all fours with that lawnmower mouth overshadowing his giant, loping body. I'm glad he's not very mean to me because I would crumble. He used to be a Neo-Nazi, skin head but these days he is just a big old teddy bear.

One day long ago when I was first dating Luke, he and all his friends and I were at a bar, and Boss got into a fight if you could call it that. Boss towered over a much smaller guy, yelled several obscenities (something about if you ever look at my girlfriend again I'll kill you), then flung a globe-sized fist at the guy's face. The guy fell and didn't get up. It didn't look like Boss hit that hard or put that much effort into it, so perhaps the guy fainted or played dead.
This was one of the first nights that I had met Luke’s pack of friends. They were all in there twenties; even now I marvel that I went to bars with that gang of kids. I must have looked like the old perverted man in a van hanging out at the high-school giving girls beer and rides. We played pool, then danced and everyone got super drunk, then Boss got into a fight and we had to all hop in our cars and rush off because the cops were coming and Boss was on probation. Hilarious. I was forty. For the past decade I had been wiping snot off kid’s noses, picking up Cheerios by the bucketful off the kitchen floor, and stressing out over paying my Gymboree credit card, and here I was, running from cops with a pack of kids who just became drinking age. When I see movie stars dating much younger men, it looks glamorous and vindictive, a snub to rich old men with young hot babes; but I always wonder if Demi hung out with Ashton’s childish friends, watched them crawl on the ground and roll in the shrubs, barfing and too drunk to stand up. I mean you have to hang out sometimes with your guy’s friends, even if you are in a relationship with someone who is half your age. I figured I’d just adjust my attitude and pretend on those nights that I was the chaperone, like at proms.


Nick is Luke's other friend. Nick is 5'2", has a buzzed hair cut and blue eyes. He is Boss's miniature self. I sometime think of buying Boss a baby front pack. Nick's mother was a crack head when he was in utero and you can tell because he looks deformed. His body is small, his head is giant, and the forehead huge. Think very large embryo and you have Nick.
Maybe his growth hit some barrier at the three week fetal stage and stuck. He grew in size, but the embryonic construction remained. Nick stutters, talks about blowing up the world and screwing girls (which he rarely does), but he is good in spite of his self mis-representation. Boss and Nick both have fully tattooed arms of naked girls, swastikas, exploding earth and pot plants. They are both in their twenties. They came over to Luke's one Saturday to use Sheldon's bong and look up porn on the computer that sits at the ten foot long bar in Luke and Sheldon’s living room. Boss showed me disgusting pictures of one inch inverted penises and talked about going to pick up ugly, fat girls at bars. Boss and Nick were getting bored with me and Luke since I was doing a dolphin puzzle and Luke was watching “Black Holes” on the Science Channel.
"What do you wanna do?" Nick said to Boss.
"I don't care let's just get the hell outta here. I’m interested in black holes, but not out in space, let’s go to the bar," Boss said.
It was the middle of the day. Who goes to bars in the daytime? And after spending an afternoon with these odd fellows, I too wanted to dream a man; a man exactly opposite of these men to replace them on Earth. A man I could impose upon reality or even better, I would like to impose Boss upon a page in a book and relegate him to a corner of my bookcase.
Davy, Luke’s roommate at the time, was twenty-three, thin and Hispanic. Davy' s hair was giant and afro-style, and he had big hound-like eyes. Davy was like a mellow, sedated koala: sweet, gentle, exhausted. He talked like a stoner; slow, drawn-out and very low. He smoked a lot of pot, drank a lot of beer, ate a lot of food, and slept a lot of sleep. Davy smoked pot on his lunch break, slept on the couch during the day and ate every meal at the bar.
"Do you want to go to the movies with Luke and me?" I asked Davy one fine hot day.
"Maybe not since I'm pretty stoned," he answered.
When it was time to go I went up to him and I said, "Do you want to go?"
I startled him out of his elaborate stoner dream of living a beautiful life on an island with several sexy women, because he snapped his head to face me, his eyes were stunned, his hair a huge shocking square and said, "No I don't think so," trying to restrain his hysteria wondering if I weren’t a demon or the DEA or both.
The next day Luke, Davy and I went to a head shop to get Sheldon a Xmas gift. I tried walking and talking like a stoner so I wouldn’t look out of place.




"Yeah, I'd like to look at that pipe, the one that you could take a big, fat hit off. I like it cuz I could fit a big wad of POT in that bowl, and I could SMOKE that WEED right out of it. Yeah I like to get HIGH on POT," I said to the tattooed, middle aged, large-bellied sales clerk.
The old drunk looked at me with introspection but said nothing. I knew, however, he was impressed that I, an obviously hip, together, successful, mature woman smoked pot. Yes pot, P.O.T. I smoke it.
Davy was buying something and showing it to me; I thought it was a pipe. I held it up to my lips like a pipe and pretended to take a hit.
"Yeah you just suck on it right here and get a good HIT," I articulated knowingly.
"Uh, Suzie, that's a bowl. You put it in the bong and it holds the pot. You don't hit off of it with your lips," Davy explained thoughtfully and sweetly.
"Oh."
An image of Krista’s horrified face popped into my imagination. Her reaction to my performance would have been mortification had she known of my behavior which is why privacy in my personal life is so important. A pathetic, middle-aged woman trying to not be pathetic or middle-aged is simply absurd.
In the car Luke said, "I was surprised that they didn't ask you to leave; you're supposed to refer to the bongs as water pipes, and you can't mention pot or weed."
"Really? I had no idea," I said as if I didn't mind one way or the other which couldn't have been farther from the truth.
Aside from the stranger with the dreads and hemp crocheted beanie, and the drunk sales guy, Luke was the one person I was most trying to impress thus my aggravation at this comment. Davy merely laughed. Even though I didn't wear my Born Clogs that look like nursing shoes or my high-waist pants, I still think I didn't pull off the mirage that I was a pot smoker and once again I did not fit in. Perhaps I never will, especially when I keep trying to fit in with people half my age and a fraction of my sobriety. And perhaps my bizarre behavior should be self studied and an improvement made. Whenever I act like an idiot I always wonder why I ever left my books. I could be reading, since I agree with Harold Bloom that there is never enough time to read, but instead I was trying to act like something I didn’t even like in the first place. Therefore, mental note: next time young people ask me to go to a head shop to buy a pipe-I will not go. I will not try to look cool; I will not pretend to be that which I am not. I will stay home and read about it. I need not be twenty-two and smoke pot to have psychedelic episodes like them. I need only read Borges and remember that I am just like him when he said, “Life and death have been lacking in my life.” And that now is no time to change.

“I foresee that man will resign himself to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.” Jorge Luis Borges

Because of my strange experiences, I am often asked if I think marijuana should be legalized. Hell if I know; we could tax it, people smoke it anyway, it would de-criminalize it. I get it; so I suppose my answer is yes. But that doesn’t mean I think weed is a worthy thing to do with your time. Conversely neither is drinking, but I do that so who am I to say. Pot makes people stupid and lazy; two personality traits I abhor; so legalize it yes, smoke it no. It makes you retarded. People who smoke weed defend it to the death. I wish I loved my kids as much as some pot smokers love their weed. And as for kids like mine? It is an abomination when teenagers smoke weed. Their little brains are still too new and growing and kinda dumb in some ways. Just wait kids, what is the rush to kill your brain cells, you have your whole life to become a dumb ass.