One of the Lesser Disciples

I was just looking at facebook and a friend was talking about why we say “He zigged when he should have zagged” and why not “he zagged when he should have zigged”. It then deteriorated into something about why did the chicken cross the road? Because it was attached to the punk rocker. My friend had no idea what that means or really any desire to ever find out.

 

The Zig and Zag started me to thinking about ZigZag cigarette papers. To be fair, they weren’t very good for cigarettes, but excellent for rolling joints, or so I have heard. Now that I think about it, I have spent a good deal of time rolling cigarettes in my life and it is a skill that I have no use for anymore. I suppose that it is a lot like riding a bike or falling off of a log, and I would pick it up again if I had to.

There was a time when I had very little disposable cash and in order to preserve more of it, I would roll my own cigarettes. It never occurred to me at the time that I could just stop smoking and save money that way. Just as well, because without a cigarette in my mouth, how would I be cool? I was never very much into the fancy foreign papers; I preferred Export papers and Export tobacco. There was a certain symmetry to it. I got very good at rolling smokes. I could roll in the wind, rain, snow, one handed (not very well), with a machine, under the desk in Mr. Weatherhead’s last period history class. I could roll while we walked along the street, but it always turned out better if you could focus on the task at hand.

I went out with a lovely girl that was definitely superior to me in every way. She would read two or three books a day to my one (if I was lucky), she had a “fuck ‘em  if they don’t like it” attitude which I just adored. She was really smart, well, except for the going out with me thing. She dumped me pretty quickly, so I guess I was a lapse in judgement.

She defended her mother from her dad. I just happened to come over to her place just after she had choked her dad and threatened to kill him if he touched her mom again. There was simply no way that I could respond to a situation like that. We went for a walk and she was just as mad at her mom as she was at her dad for putting her in that situation. She always carried a can of Export tobacco with her and would sit on the curb every now and then to roll a cigarette and smoke it. I told her that she could smoke and walk at the same time, thinking rather smugly that not everyone could roll as well as I did.  She looked at me like I was a barbarian and let me know that you can smoke in public, but a lady always smokes sitting down. I couldn’t argue with her, she was quite a lady.

 

When smoking grass, it seemed to enhance the experience for me if I used more exotic brands of papers. Big Bambu, ZigZag, Vogue and any number of different types of papers you could get from Head Shops on Yonge Street. I remember a paper that was liquorice flavoured and once I had papers made from hemp. There was a time when we had dope, but no papers. What to do? What to do? I don’t know what you would do, but I used some paper from one of those little bibles they used to give you in grade school. Kind of sounds sacrilegious forty years later, but at the time it was a genius solution to a thorny problem. In case you are interested, Bible paper makes really good rolling paper, but I would suggest using the writings of one of the lesser disciples.