What it is to be cool.

I sometimes make the mistake of doing drugs. This weekend for example we rode our bikes to the beach in the blistering heat and ate Stan’s brownies. He said, “brownies are a good time,” I knew they wouldn’t be but I did them because we were making a day of it; who am I to interrupt the natural flow of a Sunday? Long before the drugs took effect, my brain started to stress about what could potentially happen to me. For someone as completely uncool as me, I spend an awful lot of time considering what it is to be cool. Coolness is a precarious blend of self-assuredness, casual detachment, wit and charm; it is the sum of all the qualities I’ve failed to cultivate, and to be totally honest, I hate it because I ain’t it. My own inability to be cool is one thing, but witnessing my close friends try -and fail phenomenally- at being cool is particularly punishing to my senses. Especially when I’m growing higher by the minute. I love Stan dearly but he sure can be an ass; I’m quite certain that rudeness and mean-spiritedness are never cool characteristics anyway. Imagine if you can, a pleasant and attractive woman in her early twenties approaching you on the beach, she’s talking on her phone loudly and happily. There is a quality in her voice that’s mildly reminiscent of girls in high school who finish each sentence with an upward inflection, each sentence then sounding something like a question. Certainly though it’s not the thing to notice about this girl: she’s got lustrous blond curls, a cute face and a very pleasant round quality that’s arguably preferable to her skinnier beach equivalents. You can imagine then how shocked I was to hear Stan blatantly mock this girl’s phone conversation. It wasn’t just one or two cutting remarks under his breath either. It was really quite malicious, he imitated each thing she said with the hammiest bopper voice he could muster. Andrew and I exchanged pained expressions as we ushered our condescending (and decidedly uncool) friend down the beach to a shadier spot. Here we could really melt into the sand without getting sun burnt. This is where my all too familiar feelings of stoned paranoia started to show their ugly head. It’s usually at these times Andrew likes to pound home his feigned belief that the effects of marijuana are universally agreeable and anyone who says otherwise is participating in a humiliating form of self-important theatrics. This always succeeds in making the feelings worse even though I’m on to his trick. We eventually decided to go for a swim. The tide was really far out and it felt a bit like Laurence of Arabia journeying northward to destroy the Ottoman Empire. When we finally reached the water, truly, I was high.