Uncut

The world has found a way to create many pointless holidays out there but none so futile as 4/20.  It is cleverly disguised as the simply the date because of course it’s means to celebrate ia still actually illegal, but any youth knows this day is for smoking marijuana. Many other seemingly superfluous holidays at least have some basis of reason to them, days meant for excessive drinking like St. Patty’s day and Cinco De Mayo have cultural implications, even New Years Eve is the traditional cleansing and death of an old year to breed a new one. But what is the fundamental purpose for getting really high every April 20^th?

If you really want to reach for some sort of symbolism for the day you could make a hypothesis relating to it also being Hitler’s birthday. Yes perhaps to celebrate the many Jews who died at Nazi hands in gas chambers you must recreate the scene with drowning in your own smoke. Sounds a bit ridiculous doesn’t it? Or you could rationalize the day as an ode to the 1960’s hippie culture, Woodstock. Either way I’m pretty sure they don’t make a Hallmark card wishing you “A very happy national weed day.” The holiday is about as credible as national  “hug a ginger day” but since the amounts of potheads are so astounding it is much more widely recognized. These degenerates will search for any means to justify the activity they already practice everyday, which is sitting around, and doing absolutely nothing while stoned. 

I have always been critical of the drug mostly because I find it so keenly anti-social. I am a frequent drinker and enjoy the social aspects of bar life and drinking to induce conversation and interactions that might not usually occur. You are in an environment with people you don’t know and people you do drinking a substance that gravitates you to one another; interesting outcomes are bound to happen. However smoking is an act usually done indoors, and likely only with people you know, or even alone.  You don’t feel confident in meeting new people and have intelligent or flirty conversation, you just feel stoned, secluded in your own state of euphoria, sealed off to the world, inhabiting your own. I find this activity pointless, I realize it is often used as a “creative drug” The Beatles wrote some of their greatest music while under the influence of many drugs, but we are not all artists. What right do the rest of us have to constantly seek a way to escape reality? I see it more or less used as just a way to pass time, I suppose when high time passes more quickly, as it often does for me while intoxicated. But I am sure I spend less of my real time drunk than the average stoner spends high. 

I believe any self-respecting hippie-like stoner who insists on practicing this lifestyle should on this day above any others choose to abstain. The group practice of ones daily life on one day just for the sake of doing it to me has always seemed rather cheesy. Like the amateur drinkers rivaling the alcoholics on New Years Eve, or the preppy kid dressing up just as the Goth he beats up on just because it’s Halloween. These holidays take away the identity from the true followers and distribute them to the masses. I suppose that is what defines a holiday in present time, one day when people practice something out of the ordinary, just for the sake of it, when tomorrow, it’s all again meaningless.