The 1996 Weed Cake Coma.

KIWI 90s Gen x shenanigans for the fail.

Driving along with my wife on our Florida beach holiday, she mentioned having Narcan in the car, as part of a medical kit that she got at a disaster preparedness class.

Despite being a loving hippie, I’m also a totally insane survivalist and slight social Darwinist.

Of course, I went into an angry spaz rant.

“Fuck reviving druggies; if they’re going to OD, the best thing is just to let them die. They will go right back out there and get more drugs. No one revived ME back in the day. They just left me to die, and I had to bring myself back to life! What’s wrong with just ODing and wrapping it the fuck up?”

Now I have worked in drug rehab and chemical dependency for decades. I intellectually know that it’s a complex subject.

My wife always brings me back to earth.

“What if it was our son?”

OK… we will save him.

“What if it’s a kid who accidentally ate a fentanyl pill thinking it was a Skittle?”

OK….I’ve eaten a few candies off the ground in my day… so we will revive that kid.

“What if it’s a frat boy that stumbles out of a frat house ODing because he thought he was taking ecstasy. And if we revive him, he will never do drugs again?”

That’s a tough one… don’t know if we need more frat boys… but maybe…

We settled on the frat boy or the teen who takes fentanyl by accident. But no hardcore homeless druggies, they can just fucking kick off and in the next life take it a bit easier.

According to our boy Socrates, “The unexamined life is not worth living”. So anytime I spaz out at something, I take a look back in my life and try to see WHY I think that way… what caused me to get angry and say “No one revived ME back in the day. They just left me to die, and I had to bring myself back to life!”

And there it was … THE WEED CAKE COMA OF 1996.

I shall now tell this tale.

---

It was the summer of 96, I was 19, and my pals and I were driving from Auckland ( New Zealand ) to a rural party up in the bush down in our hometown. We had moved to the big city for work, but anytime there was a blow-out party back home, we piled into my mate’s little Mazda 323 hatchback and headed down.

Many of our friends were weed growers, and on the way to the party, we stopped at one of their places.

No one answered the door. We went in, and they were all in the lounge… some on the couch, some on the floor… guys and gals lying about the place… stoned beyond belief.

They couldn’t even speak right… But one gal managed to say, “We made a weed cake with a pound of weed; we won’t be going to the party.”

I went into the kitchen, and there it was.

Now it’s not like it has a pound of vegetable matter in it…

You simmer the weed in butter to pull all the THC out, and then you make the cake with the butter.

It was a small cake… maybe only 8 inches across. It was half eaten.

I scoffed the other half.

Now this was a cake that had floored 7 or 8 hardcore weed smokers… and they shared half the cake.

But I always thought I was invincible.

I was also really stoned… from the hotbox drive down and had the munchies.

I did mental like this all the time. As you may have read in my book.

Take 10 Fly Agaric mushrooms at once. Do 3 cups of liquid LSD punch at a party where everyone is only allowed to have a shot glass worth “For safety.” Stay up all night, boiling down 40 pounds of cactus into one green snot jar of mescaine and drink it all so I wouldn’t have to share any…

This was just another time I did mental shit.

I like to think I did it so I could become a great chemical dependency counsellor later in life…

But that’s the me now trying to assign mystic foresight to the me then, and it is, of course, bullshit.

So as we drove off from our mate’s place, the space cake started hitting.

My vision started to tunnel and close up, and I was sweating bad. Everything was getting heavy and dim.

I said ”I ate the rest of their weed cake, guys. I’m going to need you to take me to the CAVE and get me three blue PowerAids. I won’t be able to talk soon.”

The CAVE was an old Māori burial cave. And I hoped that the Maori spirits would take care of me.

It was a place our town’s teens had used to drink, do drugs, fuck, and piss in for decades.

A bit about this spooky place. It was called Toumuia, meaning place of serenity, also known as Lovers Rock.

From the town’s webpage, “Here you will discover a pa ( Village ) site where the inhabitants were slaughtered by a rogue tribe from up north who were on the warpath, travelling down country, warring with all tribes they came upon. It was said they attacked the tribe at Toumuia as revenge for the warring chief whose niece had supposedly been kidnapped years earlier. This day in 1818, it is said the river ran red as those being attacked tried to swim across the river to escape, as by this time Ngapuhi, the attacking tribe, had possession of muskets. Many bodies were laid to rest in the holes and caves that are still visible to this day.

---

Well, I was going to either survive and emerge from the cave… or be another laid to rest.

And so my good friends got the Three Blue Poweraids and laid me on my sleeping bag on the damp floor of the cave and left me and went to the party.

Of course, they knew I would be fine.

1. The Maori spirits would take care of me.

2. I was me and could survive anything.

3. I had the blue PowerAids.

   

   The joke is that Blue PowerAid was our cure-all elixir of health. It was never drunk as a sports drink… as this 2010 joke post from New Zealand shows :
   

   NOT EVEN HUNGOVER!
   
   On Sunday morning, Whakataki local Ben Fenton, 28, purchased and consumed a 750mL “Mountain-blast” flavoured Powerade, not because he was viciously hungover from the night before, but because his body was craving electrolytes after a bout of strenuous exercise.
   
   Blue Powerade has long been known to cure hangovers, but until now, we have not been able to find any documented accounts of it being consumed as a sports drink. Fenton has achieved what many believe is a first for New Zealand – and he was as surprised as anyone.
   
   “Dunno what came over me; I just felt like a powerade after my run. I didn’t even have a massive night last night!
   
   “To be honest, I ended up staying home with the missus, watched a boring romantic comedy. The boys were trying to get me out, but I said I had no money this week… which was a bit of a lie but, sometimes you just can’t be fucked, y’know?”
   
   Mark Chan, 51, the owner of the Blue Moon Dairy where Fenton purchased the drink, said that he’d never seen anything like it.
   
   “You can see blue Powerade drinkers coming from a mile off. They’re always slow-moving, bleary-eyed.. often wearing their town clothes from the night before. Their hangovers are very visible."
   
   “But this guy comes along in his running gear, still sweating from exercise. And you could tell he was feeling a general sense of achievement. Really confusing to see him marching up to the counter with a blue Powerade in hand”.
   
   23-year-old JJ Campbell, one of Chan’s regular Sunday blue Powerade customers, described how he uses the popular drink. “It just wakes you up a bit, gets rid of the dry mouth for a while, and generally eases the deep feeling of regret. Dunno why you would bother if you didn’t have a life-threatening hangover, but each to their own, I guess”.
   
   The Whakataki Times will continue its investigation into whether Ben Fenton has indeed achieved a first for New Zealand.

---

Well, I went into a weed coma for days.

Later that night, mid-party, my mates told everyone where I was, and half the party drove ( drunk and stoned ) out to me, and climbed up to the cave. With flashlights… as of course there were no phones… they checked on me and made sure I was still alive.

I had not moved. They stood me up and danced me around and pulled my pants down, and one chick slapped my butt so hard it left a red handprint. Everyone thought this was hilarious…

It was a better, simpler time.

They put me back and went back to the party…

The next day, my mates picked me up and carried me down to the car, still in the weed coma.

We drove back to the city and they put me to bed. Apparently, I would kind of wake up now and then and drink sips of the blue Powerade like a stoned slow-motion sloth.

They said I was all white and sweaty and looked like a little chicken, and I was sweating a sour weed smell.

Four days after eating the weed cake I sort of woke up.

I remember staggering to the toilet and powerspraying nuclear green weed cake diarrhea for about an hour while going in and out of consciousness.

This green spray stain was to never go away and somehow sank into the porcelain bowl and stained it so badly that the landlord had to get a whole new toilet when we abandoned the place… a few months later.

Every time a visitor would say, “Why is your toilet bowl bright green?” We would tell the hilarious story of my weed coma.

It was about a full two weeks before I was back to “Normal”.

I learned my lesson and never ate weed again after that, and neither should you.

My book is packed with Gen X mental case stories of a better, simpler time!
Buy it! Read it! BE REBORN!

My book is packed with stories about my life that I hint about in the above!

If you want to send me money because you want to support my writing here :)

buymeacoffee.com/obsidianblackbird

If you like the story and want to support me, subscribe, restack this story and share and buy my book! 500 pages of Gen X storytime goodness.

BUY THE BOOK !!

Kindle

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FVVFHZTS?tag=bk00010a-20&th=1&psc=eniuslink=true

Hardcopy

https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?params=qpgeD35Sbj5Uk5XRfEycCkaS1djAkDiZDZQX01Q4hN4