Birth of the Wingnut

It felt much looser than it did before. He could feel it rattling about and clanking against the sides. He wondered if he should worry at all about it falling out, but decided his ears were too small to allow his brain freedom, but it definitely did not fit as snugly in his head as it did a few minutes ago. Looking at his watch it dawned on him that dawn was dawning on them all and those few minutes were actually a few hours ago. This was going to be the last time they let Wingnut make the brownies for a 420 party.

Wingnut was a marijuana connoisseur in every way a person could be. He could tell you the type of pot a person had based on a stem if he had to. He kept a sample of every bag he bought and kept them in glass jars in the medicine cabinet. He would take new people on a tour of his bathroom with the pride usually reserved for a first-time parent. “This one is AK-47,” he would say holding up a tiny glass jar. “This is Blueberry; Bubblegum; Juice; Kryppie; the Dank; Maui-Wowi.” The list was never ending. It was honestly amazing he could remember the names of each one considering he smoked so much he once forgot what city he lived in.

The name “Wingnut” was earned while living in the dorms. He was that guy who would take any drug at any time and usually ask what he took hours after ingesting it. He could not only tell how dirty a hit of acid was by looking at the thickness of the paper, but he could tell if it was visual acid or “mind-fuck” blotter. Yes the power of suggestion probably weighed heavily in the outcomes of his acid predictions, but this is simply the story of how he got his name, not if he really was some drug-messiah. The dorm-rats believed so he probably was a minor messiah of sorts. Either way, if you wanted to know if your stuff was any good you took it to the “wingnut down the hall.”

His room in the dorms was THE place to be. A wet towel blocked the airflow through the door so his room would very quickly become a foggy New England night. A foghorn would sometimes blow off in the distance as they smoked their parent’s money away. The lighthouse allowed them to see where the bathroom was and the television’s picutre could sort of be made out through the mist, but mostly no one was paying attention to much of anything except their hair growing and the brain cell apocalypse happening in their heads.

Wingnut graduated with a degree in chemistry, which really does not say much for the university he attended or rather paid for. It is not fair to say he “attended” anywhere since attendance requires being there. He took his classes by proxy. Any class with over a hundred students made it near impossible for any professor to know their student’s faces. All he needed was for someone to sign his name to the roll sheet and let him know when a test was. This way he only had to show up for the labs which usually consisted of a lower student to teacher ratio.

The reason Wingnut got his degree in chemistry was his desire to create the perfect drug. He loved acid probably more than his mother, but hated the come-downs. He would describe them as ripping out one’s intestines, stepping into them like a bag and entering a potato sack race then, after all that effort, losing the race. It was his mission on this Earth to give tripping people everywhere more bang and less pain. What other major could help him produce such ends? “Everything in the classroom will either blow you up of fuck you up” he loved to say. It was his catch phrase.

He never found the perfect acid, but he had mastered the recipe for brownies and his room was still the place to be. It was no longer in the dorms, but in a house just across the street from campus and he was no longer a student, but now a professor, yet the parties remained the same. His brownies unscrewed the fasteners of your mind and allowed it free-range over the farm.

He called them “The Stoner Mind-Munchie-Trap” and it was an apropos name. After eating just one a person would become victim to the most uncontrollable munchies ever known to man. The only thing that would satisfy these munchies would always be chocolate and, by the time the munchies completely took control, the brownies would be the only chocolate left. Soon the dilemma presented itself: do you satisfy your munchies by becoming more stoned, setting up a new munchies attack in thirty minutes or do you just ride out the munchies and find something salt based?

No one ever went the salt road and it would usually be about dawn that the loose-brain syndrome would set in. They would always swear he would never be allowed to make those cursed brownies again, but, the very next April 20 he would get the call to bring those “awesome brownies man.”