Visualizer

Maybe you had a hard day, a working Saturday. Maybe you read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on a very long subway ride, almost the whole thing in one shot, like your own drug-fueled road trip on the Q train, complete with hallucintory attorney. Maybe when you came to you were a neighborhood in Brooklyn where all the women are either Orthodox Jewish and wearing clever contraptions to hide their hair or Slavically bored, smoking, bare midriffs impervious to the cold. Maybe all you got home and mixed yourself a martini, a dirty one, and fulfilled your daylong dream of making a teeny-tiny tuna casserole in a small Pyrex bowl that you baked in the toaster oven.

Maybe, as you watched M*A*S*H and sipped the olivey dregs of your martini, you remembered a friend you used to get stoned with, and how one night you accidentally discovered the visualizer function on your iTunes. You soon figured out how to make it full-screen, and sat in delight for what seemed like hours, leaning into the mid-nineties illumination and swaying gently as it tumbled on the screen. You listened to a whole Led Zeppelin album, believing that the undulating colors were somehow specific to the music. You whispered in confusion about how to get back to iTunes, until one of you hesitantly pressed the space bar.

Achieving that kind of ultimate stoner dorkiness truly is its own reward.

“I’ve found there’s only one thing I can’t work on and that’s marijuana.” Hunter S. Thompson said that.