Ye Olde Shakespearean Twist

“And if you can’t be, with the one you love, honey,
love the one you’re with.…”

Stephen Stills
“Love the One You’re With”
1970

Rob dove into one of the suitcases and found a huge stinky bud peeking out of one of the neatly wrapped bricks. He proceeded, using the sectional map as a rolling table, to crush it, de-stem it, and dribble the makings along the length of a giant EZ-Wider rolling paper. He carefully twisted it into a big ugly looking doobie like what Cheech and Chong made famous.

At first, we just coughed a lot due to the fact that our bronchial tubes had managed to heal up nicely during our unintended drought. That was over. Then I started smiling. The uptight mood that I had apparently gotten so used to over the past few weeks that it was my new normal began to shift slowly and pull my psychic pendulum back to the lighter, non-gloomy side, which would hopefully become a more permanent normal for a while.

The scenery was spectacular from our view five thousand feet over central New Mexico. The stunning mesas and mountains carved by millennia of wind, sun, and water in so many fascinating colorful shapes made it hard to concentrate on flying. The music beat a rhythm in sync with my pulsing blood that was both exhilarating and soothing. Layers of heavy anxiety simply peeled away, sculpting up my psyche in deeply satisfying, artistic, and wondrous ways. I began to feel at one with the patterned…