Last night in bed, after a long, exhausting, day full of brushes with frostbite and incompetent tooth-X-ray-givin', Dan asked me (not out of the blue; it was totally in line with our conversation) why I preferred not to consume pot. Like, what the difference was between smoking it and consuming it, and why consuming it was worse for me.

I gave him such an involved answer, detailing how it was so easy to eat too much before it kicked in, and then ending up stuck, no way back, with a way-too-high high, the kind where you feel like your brain's become maple syrup and is undulating around in your skull knocking into things and causing different and random synapses to light up for no reason before you're entirely prepared to deal with them, that even after I'd finished explaining it and turned over to try and go to sleep, I had described it so accurately that I felt exceedingly strange. Paranoid and strange and not very unlike being, um, way too high.

But I was able to fall in an uneasy sleep by shutting my brain down completely, and it lasted for about three hours before I woke up and felt, not high, but insane.

Literally, I felt like I had woken up into another person's brain. A frantic, obsessive, possibly post-operative person's brain. I'll never argue that I don't have neuroses, but I definitely don't have these particular neuroses, and there they were. Words, phrases, rhymes, were repeating on loop through my head and as hard as I tried to stop them or make sense of them, I couldn't. One I can remember was futon, crouton, and bowl. Futon, crouton, and bowl. It went through on loop so many times that my frazzled and shattered brain tried to come up with a way to make sense of it. And what it came up with was an exercise to see if it could figure out where a cat was most likely to be. But I couldn't manage that! I couldn't even manage picturing cats and futons, cats and croutons, or cats and bowls in the same mental image. Not for a long while. I just let it loop and tried and let it loop and tried again until I finally was about to think of a cat, sitting on a futon, eating a crouton, out of a bowl. Exhausted, I expected it to go away. But it didn't. The alphabet started looping. My breathing started sounding like letters. My stomach felt like a song was dancing on it.

Eventually I woke up Dan and tried to explain this to him, and got so sleepy trying that, mercifully, I fell asleep. I woke up in the morning feeling like I spent all night having seizures, but mentally, basically normal. Until now, anyway, where describing it is bringing it back.

Dan thought it was paranoid of me to guess that maybe a brain tumor was pressing on my brain and making me crazy, or that I had had a stroke. I concur, but it being paranoid of me has nothing to do with whether or not I do things.

It felt like I had a terrifying taste (another, that is; I have tastes spaced sporadically all across my life) of what it would like to be irretrievably crazy, lost amongst nonsense.