Stupid books are everywhere. Most of them will end up in thrift stores, clogging the shelves, mindless filler between musty copies of Fahrenheit 451.Useless celebrities get book deals and make dollars. Snooki from “Jersey Shore” has a novel coming out next year. Every time an athlete, politician or idiot reality television star “writes” a book, he or she steals food out of the mouth of a real writer (ghost writers not included). Those poor, starving writers are often forced to survive by eating copies of The Way Things Ought to Be . Oh, irony, you are a cruel mistress.The dumbest book in the universe just came careening across my desk, the biggest waste of perfectly good trees, the most irretrievable loss of valuable seconds.The book: The Official High Times Pot Smoker’s Activity Book (Chronicle Books). I say this in spite of having received an advance copy of How to Beat Up Anybody by Judah Friedlander, a 200-page collection of bad photos of a guy in a trucker hat karate-chopping dinosaurs and dressing up like a woman.The pot smoker’s activity book is a collection of puzzles, weed-related humor and … it doesn’t matter. I’d rather not write about marijuana. It seems like such a juvenile topic.I will say this: I think that if alcohol is legal, reefer should be too. AIDS and cancer patients should get all they want. Marijuana is less harmful than alcohol. A person in the depths of marijuana addiction will be lazy, stupid and shiftless, but he will probably not punch his wife, crash the mini van and die thinking a giant rooster is trying to eat him.But for God’s sake, don’t write an activity book about it. This book tickled the part of my brain that makes me irritated (the entire frontal lobe). I had to speak up.This book is stupid for the following reasons:1) Smoking pot is an activity in and of itself. It requires nothing more than a television and somewhere comfortable to sit.2) It’s not even being ironic. Where is my cruel mistress when I need her?3) Since the book has no irony, it is geared toward people who have fried their brains smoking pot. At $16.95, good luck finding a stoner with nearly 20 bucks to blow on an activity book. That’s a quarter-ounce worth of money.4) How is someone who can’t find his or her feet expected to read?Hey, how about a methamphetamine activity book? It’s a box of Nintendo parts and two VCRs to be assembled over a three-week period, plus five copies of “Pulp Fiction” to re-edit so the story is all in sequence. A cocaine activity book would only work if it were printed on a mirror.Marijuana is no methamphetamine, but putting out a book celebrating drug use is tacky. High Times magazine always seemed like a vast conspiracy to me anyway, like every time I picked one up I was being photographed. By the way, I’m naturally this paranoid. This is not from any substance I may or may not have ingested.
Why Does John Bear Hate The Official High Times Pot Smoker’s Activity Book?
The Dumbest Book Ever: A Tirade
Alibi
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