America's Stoners on 'Extremely High' Alert

ensions in the country are great in recent weeks, and everyone is going to great lengths to alleviate those tensions. Work helps some, planning for tough times makes others feel secure; then, there's America's stoners, who turn to alternative stress relieving systems during times of trouble.

"American pharmacological enthusiasts are as stressed out as anyone," said journalist J.D. Weber. "The economy is as bad as it gets, war with Iraq is becoming inevitable, and there's tremendous fear of some kind of terrorist attack. Now, more than ever, relief is needed. Primo relief."

Weber is one of the reporters working on a special edition of High Times magazine announcing a status of "Extremely High" Alert, expected to come out in March, assuming the staff doesn't flake on getting the layout to the printers in time.

"It's a revolutionary political stance for stoner culture, and High Times magazine by extension, which is the periodical of choice for that culture," stated Weber, very slowly. "High Times has taken political stances before, but this is bigger than the legalization argument. Unless politicians in turn ask us if we think it should be legalized, because we still stand for that. But our worldview is bigger now. These are hard times, and we need hard solutions, big, overflowing plastic bags of hard solutions."

Accompanying the article, High Times will be introducing a color-coded "Buzz-Killer" chart. Included on the chart will be colors correlated to the intensity of the threat the country is currently experiencing, as well as a number of hand-rolled cigarettes depicted that increase in number depending on the severity of the bring-down.

The first level, green, means that everything's copasetic. Engage in what you will, when you will, at your own discretion.

The second level, blue, means bummer. Increased intake of mood enhancers is encouraged, but never take more than you can handle. Exceeding normal dosages is not cool, dude.

The second level, yellow, means whoa, whoa, whoa, let's chill out. It's a good time to experiment with new, better-grade stuff. South America will be called upon to increase production and hopefully we can all just relax, no big deal, cool?

The third level, the current level, is "extremely high," and the color is yellow. At this time getting as much as you can and keeping a steady flow of easiness coming in is highly recommended. Hoarding, at long last, is cool. Even squares who usually get high on life are encouraged to experiment to forget their troubles.

After that, the highest color is red, and no contingency plan has been developed for that, but insiders are saying if that time comes and you have your hands on some hard stuff, indulge like the sky's falling, motherfucker.

Another color, purple, represents "narc." It is the only condition where even minor usage is highly discouraged. Before the condition passes, it should be ascertained that everyone in your company is cool. All possessions should be carefully hidden out of sight as long as the condition is in effect.

Before the interview with Weber could be concluded, this reporter was informed the condition had changed suddenly to purple without warning, and it would likely stay in effect as long as I was present in the room.

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Let me be the first to say I have no idea where I met those East Germans. It was one of those things where one minute you're ordering a vodka drink named after a Muppet, the next minute you're one of the founding members of a kraut-rock quartet and then the next thing you know you're smuggling guns into the harbor on an air skiff. Or whatever the hell was going on, I don't even speak East German and those guys sucked at Charades.

Needless to say, it was an interesting weekend. What I can remember of it, which is about an hour total of choppy flashbacks. All I know for sure is that I was blindsided by happy hour Friday night and I woke up this morning in the barrel of a cannon on a Navy ship. In-between it's like cable TV the week after your descrambler crapped out.

There's a slight possibility those guys were just tearing around the harbor on the skiff and trying to run over ducks just for fun, but they were pretty heavily armed for just some general drunken mayhem. Usually a pellet gun or a homemade egg salad cannon is plenty for that kind of action. So that definitely doesn't explain all the assault rifles or typewriter parts or whatever it was strewn all over the hydrofoil. It was dark.

There was definitely a little old guy with wire-rimmed glasses involved, usually a dead give-away as the evil mastermind behind the whole thing. He had some phony cover story about being pissed that I'd honked on his houseboat, but I'm pretty sure it was all a covert passcode, like "the raven barfs at midnight," the kinds of things you hear in the spy movies all the time.

Hands and Balls played along and bare-assed the guy as we were hydrofoiling by, they were definitely hip to what was going on. Come to think of it, I'm starting to doubt those were their real names, they sound kind of fake in retrospect. At the time I was wondering what was up with Fritz and why he didn't get a body part name, like maybe he wasn't really East German. But really, those guys were so hard to understand I might have thought they were saying their names when they were really saying "Pass me the screwdriver" or "I think you peed on the police." German definitely wasn't written to be understandable by English-speakers.

East German or no, these were some clever bastards. I'm pretty sure they were just using yours truly to pin as a scapegoat once everything went down, otherwise I don't know why they would have carried me from the short bus to the hydrofoil. I mentioned the short bus, right? Too late now if I didn't. Yeah, we spent a couple of hours riding around with the Special Olympics hockey team, singing the Chuck Wagon song. I'm not sure how that got started; I think we may have barged onto the wrong bus after the bar ran out of cocktail cherries.

The whole cherry thing happened while Balls was going on about how the Great Wall of China was overrated and how the Berlin Wall could take it any day of the week, and I dumped a whole jar of cherries down his shirt to save his ass since the Chinese guy down at the end of the bar was starting to look like he was going to put his ass-kicking shoes on. We left in a hurry after that since there were at least ten dollars worth of cherries that had gone down Balls' pants, and this burly-looking biker guy at the bar had just ordered a Shirley Temple.

Most everything is a blur after that as the East Germans' plot kicked in and I was along for the ride like a suitcase that barfs and yells out requests for Neil Diamond songs. When the cops finally got wise to the whole scenario the East Germans predictably tried to pin it on yours truly, wheeling out this cock and bull story about how they were tourists who came to see the museums and the next thing they knew they were being dragged around town by the collars by some psychotic drunk who had Fritz's wallet. They had the whole thing sewn up pretty tight until I played the ace up my sleeve and ran like greased hell.

Nice try, East Germans. Next time you'll have to find yourselves a bigger sucker. I'll give you Rok Finger's number, I'm still pissed he gave me that Wild Draw Four for Christmas.

Bricks Out.

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"When I was a young boy, no older than 24, my uncle asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. He said "Sampson, I want you to touch me right here between my testicles until I tell you to stop."

My answer that day, as it always had been, was that I planned on being a Viking.

Most laughed when I gave this answer, the same way they laughed when I said I'd be the first man to ride a cheetah at the Indy 500. In retrospect, it looks like they got the last laugh on that second part, thanks to restrictive poaching laws that came into effect in the 1940's. But I never cared. "Let them laugh," I'd say to myself. "Maybe they'll laugh so long that I'm the only one who ducks for cover when we get bombed to death by the Chinese." This would make them laugh even harder, and from then on I resolved to think personal thoughts to myself, rather than speaking them aloud.

Most thought that I would eventually give up my dream of being a Viking, as I grew older and wiser in the ways of the world. Many would have bet money on it, had the Hartwig clan not been genetically incapable of winning a money wager. But they were, as was evidenced the year dad bet the family car and the rights to my brother Goose on "Fat Charlie" Walker taking home the gold in the 50-yard dash at the 1952 summer Olympics.

But I proved them all wrong in the autumn of 1961 when I showed up at Minnesota's training camp wearing a ceramic helmet I'd made myself and gave them the best ten minutes of my life, in an effort to make the team. I may have been driven into the ground like a tent peg, but it was still a dream come true and sweet redemption in the eyes of all the Hartwigs who had looked at Sampson L. Hartwig cockeyed for years.

Later I learned that everyone thought when I said 'Viking' that I meant the guys in the big boats with the horned hats and such, and I understood why they were laughing."

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