Tracking down the Oneiroi

I've made it no secret, my newest pet project. I'm searching for the American Dream, plain and simple. If not just to grab it by the throat and choke it half way to death, leaving it's elusive body gasping on the floor of some North Carolina strip club stage knowing what it's like to be down on your luck. Funny how every time I go looking for the Dream, I end up face-first into some diabolical foray of endlessly iterating drug frenzies, alcohol binges, and aimless cross country driving. The damned dream gets further away for every stab in the dark I take at it's wispy-thin effigies dancing in the shadows of our nation's last-call bars.

I found myself smoking weed in public last week, a habit I don't indulge frequently. Setting the scene, we were at a local downtown haunt frequented by a large cross-section of Kalamazoo's finest. Next door, Ani DiFranco was playing at the State Theater (a casual coincidence.) I sat on a shady picnic bench with my friend Mike, and his buddy patiently yet frantically awaiting the telephone call that his first child was about to be born. On a bet, I asked two attractive young ladies at the bar if they'd fancy a jaunt down the street to have a few puffs on some lovingly cultivated, high potency marijuana. The ladies excused themselves from their dates, their husbands, who were left sulking at the bar as their newlywedded brides went off with two scary looking men in black clothing to smoke a plant most definitely still illegal in the United States. Both teachers in the Kalamazoo Public School System, the young ladies admitted that they had been on the hunt to get high ever since they went downtown to see Ani.

"Are we going to your car, Zach?" the blond asks, bubbly yet inquisitive.
"Nope," Mike interjects as he jams an index-finger sized joint in the poor thing's face.
"In public?" the stern and visibly more assertive of the two blurts out, as if accidentally.
"Sure, why not?" I say, as the passer-bys keep to themselves and stare straight forward.

There we sat, fifteen minutes in all, as the crowded bar district of Kalamazoo dispersed it's drunks accordingly. I thought to myself, if only for a second, "have I found it?" as we wandered back into the bar. Six pints deep, I had to occupy the lavatory. Naturally, so to speak. As I washed my hands, some rube walks in and says

"whoa, who's been smoking the reefer?"
"Oh, not me, I must have just missed out. It smells damn good, though, I can tell ya that much"
"Damn right, It's like fuckin Snoop Dogg was here or sump'n"
I laugh as I tell Mike the story, and he says
"Oh, I was ripping a chillum in there a few minutes ago"

As my mind wanders back to the places I've been, the people I've met, and the things that I've seen; one thing remains constant. Smoking marijuana. If it be Hashish-laced cigarettes in the Great Pyramid of Giza, back stage at the Club Soda, to every concert from Nobuo Uematsu to ICP to Opeth to Kenny Chesney, under the thundering elevated trains of Chicago, in the back alleys of Manhattan, in the dense thick of the Redwood National Forest, in the dazzling lights of Las Vegas, at all the parties, through all the late nights, in the kitchen coolers, the bar bathrooms, and the beds of girlfriends - one thing remains as a constant. Every one I know, and everyone I hang out with, and nearly everyone I've met smokes marijuana. Yet every few weeks, I hear that another one of them has gone to jail because of it.

I think, futher still, about the American Dream. I think about all the endless hours of driving with a smoldering bowl of chronic tucked under my leg, all over the country. I think about all the strangers I've encountered and smoked with. I think of all the grow-ops I've seen, all the strains I've smoked, all the cops I've nearly hit my pipe in front of. I think about my friend's close calls and near-misses with getting busted. The favorite glass pieces broken on brick porches. The stashes dumped down sewer drains. I think about the off-duty cops I've smoked with, I think about the Oklahoma billboard I saw, "cops against prohibition."

I think of the American Dream. I think of smoking weed on the streets of Washington, D.C. during the Inauguration of Barack Obama. I think about what it all means. I think about the bong my dead friend Stan bought us that sits in my footlocker. I think about the connections that we all share, as people caught up in the moment of being people. Sharing stories, passing a neverending bongload around a cicle. The joints around the campfires. The feeling you get, not when you're busy living, but when you remember the good times you had.

That feeling is the Dream in action. The feeling of connection with some great big idea that no one can quite hold on to, but for a moment of fleeting reverie. Needless to say, no matter where I'm drinking a mug of beer, there's always someone who's eyes sparkle when I say those two words we all hear every day.

American Dream.