Jerry Wilson Over Coffee Appearing each Wednesday in the Edinburgh Courier, the weekly newspaper in Edinburgh, Indiana and periodically in Indiana's Daily Journal newspaper.

R.J. and the Weed

I've never been very successful at writing fiction. Maybe it's because I can't come up with a good plot that hasn't been done before. But then, that never stopped most TV sitcom writers. Anyway, I just find it difficult to come up with a good plot outline that resolves itself in a logical manner.

Allow me to experiment a little here....

Once upon a time.... (I know; it's been done!) Anyway, back in the days just after the dinosaurs, (about 65 million years after), when people liked living in caves, there was a young boy, named R.J., who liked having friends and liked to "fit in" with his group. They liked doing things together, but, being the younger of the three in his social clique, he often felt a little left out and insecure.

One day the two older "friends" decided to test their slightly-younger playmate. As a sort of rite of acceptance, they concocted a plan to see how loyal their young friend was to the group. They found this sun-dried weed where it had been growing near their Cape Code style cavern. They picked it, ground it up, and rolled it up into a long cylinder, surrounding it with a section of another leaf from the same plant.

When R.J. met with them later that day, they gave him this weed stick and told him that, if he was truly a friend, then he must set the end of it on fire while holding the other end in his mouth. Then, he must suck on it, so that the smoke would go down into his lungs. He must do this until the weed stick was completely burned up.

R.J. thought they were nuts! "But we do it all the time," said one of the older boys. R.J. agreed to give it a try, to prove he was as good as they were. So he lit the stick and started sucking. He coughed and hacked and gasped for breath. He got a little sick. But he finished burning the weed stick. His friends told him the next one would be much better.

"Next one?", R.J. questioned. "How many of these sticks do I have to burn?" They told him at least 20 every day. "That's how many we burn," they said. Not wanting to be the odd ball, R.J. agreed to give it a try.

After a few weeks of huffing and puffing, the two older boys noticed that R.J. was no longer bothered by the smoke. In fact, he seemed to look forward to lighting up another weed stick. So they decided to try sucking on one themselves. Like R.J., they too eventually became hooked.

But they realized they had a good thing. Since they were hooked, if they could only coax other cave boys and girls into trying the weed, they could mass produce the weed sticks and sell them to the addicted customers and make a bundle!

But R.J. wasn't buying it. He had been rolling the weed sticks himself for over two months, and he thought he could do a better business with the weeds, because his father had some experience in merchandizing Cave-O-Matic wall designers. So he had some business experience.

So R.J. and his father went into business in competition with his former friends, Philip and Morris. They sold their weed sticks far and wide. Over the next several years, all three entrepreneurs developed a chronic, nagging cough. They had no idea it was caused by their weed sticks, so they continued selling them.

But, after they eventually died from various pulmonary ailments, their descendents kept their business alive. They eventually caught on that there was a link between sucking on a weed stick and dying prematurely of lung disease, but since it was a good, profitable business, they decided to continue selling them. They just wouldn't tell anybody about the nasty side effects.

Well, that's my story, and you see the plot does not completely resolve itself. I always thought a good story should end with, "...and they lived happily ever after." But in my story, that phrase doesn't seem to fit very well.

Copyright © 2001 by Jerry Wilson. Get permission to reprint this article.