Who Am I, Kaiser Sosa...

Now, I gotta write this! So I'm sitting around last night with my significant other, there really ain't no other way to describe what we are to each other, call her Bravestar...and she just blurts out of nowhere a question who's leading nature was only matched by its randomness..."Do you know how much a hit of heroin is?" Now, I readily admit to my moniker as the Son of the Ganja God, a deity in my own right, he who can multiply a few blunts worth of izm into a multitude of cyphers, he who can resurrect a dying spliff, he who sack runeth over and most importantly, he who has burned his soul in the eternal flame of blizzle after blizzle until he was purified and sanctified enough to share the blessed sacrament with all his disciples and acolytes, yes I am Weed Jesus and I have come to spread the gospel of the green, but heron, heron....that is a little beyond me.

I cop to the plea, I was the one that started my friends on this herbal adventure. Yes, many of them smoked before they met me, and yes many of them would have smoked if they had never met me, but call it ego, call it vanity, call it self-aggrandizement, but I doubt if any of them would be smoking like they do now if they had not met me. And it doesn't just stop there, I am somewhat of the go-to-guy when it comes to advice or answers in my little circle of friends. I take useless trivia to another level, as you see above I have a vocabulary that's bigger than my third leg and I've had a lot of experiences in my short life. So to some extent, I live with it, and to a large extent, I impose myself in situations where I can use the things I've learned, and to a little extent, I like being a help to people and giving knowledge sometimes is the best thing one can receive.

Hell, I've had friends come to me and ask advice on how to take their girlfriend's virginity, now that's something I doubt most people have an expertise in, much less a reputation for having said expertise. (As an aside, the only thing I'll say about that is, once you start, you better finish, or you'll be fighting that same battle over and over again until you do get it in, so you might as well get there the first time!) I have friends who ask me who to vote for (whoever I have most influence over, which is mostly Democrats), or friends ask me if they should take jobs, or if they were worthwhile human beings. But HEROIN?

That's a new one for me, I mean, yes I plugged "price of heroin" in my brain's search engine and eventually thought of the Wire (best show ever on television) and remembered the prices the dealers were quoting the fiends, and came up with an answer. Of course with caveats about frequenting open-air drug markets and the questionable quality of the wares peddled there. Also how a reputable smack dealer would cost considerably more and wouldn't sell you just a hit, like the street dealers would.

And how I being simply the manifestation of the weed gods on earth, I didn't know any heroin dealers. Now in the interest of full disclosure, WWWJD (or for the uninitiated "What Would Weed Jesus Do") has been tempted by the not-so-natural mind enhancers before. Yes, beside the beautiful gift from God of the greenery, I have experimented with ecstasy. Now of course, I was prodded by one Miss Bravestar to acquire said MDMA, and had to go through my usual herbal connect, who as a trafficker had access to other traffickers and could acquire said E, I was able to get my hands on it. And I tried it, and it wasn't bad, but it doesn't match the match-made-in-heaven appeal of marijuana. Truthfully, it seemed like the perfect compliment to the herb, weed makes you eat and sleep, X makes you not want to eat or sleep, and both make you want to bump uglies, so you're all good!

But HEROIN!?! That's a whole other story. I mean, I hope I don't have to tell you this, but I'm black, and heroin just ain't a black thing. Don't get me wrong, I know millions of blacks struggle everyday with addictions to heroin, and the hood still probably moves a good bit of junk every hour. But niggas moved over to crack in the 80s, I mean that shit is just a whole lot easier, all you need is a pipe and some rocks. No needles, no spoons or pennies or tracks, just light that shit and smoke that shit! (hmmm, maybe I should light up again....) The only place I know where the H is still king is Baltimore, and I've already made one Wire reference today, that's more than that city is worth!

And yes, I know BG from Cash Money was hooked on heroin (sorry as a suburban child, most that I know about other places come from hip hop or tv and movies) and I loved Requiem for a Dream (Marlon Wayans was incredible in this, the best cautionary drug movie ever), but I'm sorry, heroin is for white kid rocker wannabes and models...the high seems a little too beautiful for the shit I gotta deal with everyday. Plus heroin is just plain bad for you. Its injecting yourself with just short of the level of morphine needed to kill you, but with the part that makes you really addicted to it. Plus once you start, every time you use it again, its a little less strong, until you don't even get high anymore, you just do it to keep away the withdrawal. An actually half-way decent movie about heroin addicts was Gridlock'd with Tupac (though I'm not much of Pac fan) and Trainspotting, the british joint was cool as well.

Which of course all betrays the point of this post, that it is audacious and spurious to believe that I, just because of my Weed Jesus nom-de-plume would know how much a hit of heron would be. Hell I guess anyone can ask anyone a question based on the off-hand chance that the person asked might know the answer, given all the stuff we don't know, in the lives of people we know the best, but for me, it is as if I am the great oracle, and all is lost if I do not know. OK, that was an exaggeration, but I do feel some pressure to answer people's questions when they ask me.

Now I know a lot of this is my own doing. I mean, if there was a kid in school who would have been called a know-it-all, that would be me. I was the dirty little kid who always was holding court, explaining at the playground the intricacies of sex and anatomy. I was always the one who you could copy off of, if you wanted a good grade and I was always the one to correct you, if you said something incorrect. (Yeah, as you could see I was a little smart-ass kid!) From the time I was young, I have had an insatiable obsession with knowledge, I have spent nights, days, months and years researching things which interest me. Every time I have a question about something I look it up, the internet has been a great savior for me, because encyclopedias suck testicle cheese! Truthfully, sometimes I think my only real talent in life is that I can recall most things that I have learned in my life. (Which is funny for a guy who smokes as much weed as I do, isn't it?)

Because of all of this, most of the shit I know, just sits away in my brain, waiting until a word or feeling or vision or sound or touch or taste or idea crosses my mind, and I jump from what that conjures up, to what the conjured conjures up and so on and so on. That is my mind. That is what has served me so well, and that is what drives me, and that is what torments me. My mind is going so fast, so often, I really wonder what takes up other people's thinking time. I think about politics, I think about sports, I think about music, I think about movies, tv, computers, sex, women, men, raising children, education, religion, marketing, design, history, economics, grammar, science, reason, love, friendship and everything in between all of those. I would consider myself an amateur expert on all of those subjects having spent years reading books about each, reading on the internet, talking, listening, debating people about these things, so I have something worthwhile to say about them.

Maybe that is what bothers me most about people assuming I know the answer to disparate, random questions, its the fact that when one asks me something I don't know the answer to, it strikes me at my core, because it undermines all the knowledge which I've spent my life accumulating. I've always wanted to be the guy with the answers, when I was young I wanted to be an old man, so people would ask me stuff and I would have a lifetime of learning, experiences and relationships which to draw on to give them sage wisdom. If you ask me something, no matter how trivial, no matter how random, no matter how difficult, if I don't know it, I'm not being the person I want to be. And even if there truly is no way I could have known the answer to your query, it still eats at me, most of the time leading me to seek the answer when I have the time.

So, I guess that is why I get offended sometimes when I get a question which I can't understand why the questioner believed I would have the answer, even as I seek to be the person with the answers to all questions. How beautifully contradictory! But like most things which for some unexplained reason bother you, you can find their genesis within you and have more to do with your self-perception than whatever catalyst invokes your ire. I guess knowing me like all people, is a balancing act of contradictory truths which must be satisfied organically as they shift in importance and influence as pressure of stress or daylight of scrutiny or darkness of depression is applied. And one can never be too vigilant in calibrating the scales for maximum harmony and understanding.

Or maybe my definition of random questions, is any one which I don't know the answer to, and I just say that as my defense, to cover-up the fact I don't know the answer to it....c'est la vie!