Make that the teeniest, weeniest little fragment of a cookie.

I had been looking through the refrigerator drawer where I keep my baked goodies when I ran across a sealed foil package. I instantly knew what was in there, because I had acquired it at the 2010 Cannabis and Hemp Expo, but I had plenty enough to worry about at the time, so I just stashed it away and never opened it.

I figured it was time to see whether the contents had survived their one year plus sojourn in my refrigerator.

What we had here was cookies. Not your mother’s soft oatmeal cookies (unless your mother was Grace Slick or Alice B. Toklas or someone like that) but two of the finest, dankest cookies available from an outfit called Clarified Confections.

They’re still in business and apparently doing fine. And the next morning, so am I 🙂

These particular cookies (two for $5, eat your heart out non-medicated America) were labeled as two-dose cookies, meaning the baker thought that half a cookie would be the proper dose.

Perhaps they should have labeled these things for species. That is, maybe they mixed this batch up with some cookies they were sending to the San Francisco Zoo for an elephant with chronic pain or something.

Bearing in mind all the too-exciting trips I’ve had on edibles, I was trying to be very cautious and follow my own advice about new edibles: try 1/8 of what you think is a dose first.

So I just snapped off the very end of the thing. You can see what’s left here, and actually it wasn’t as round as it looks; it was just a sliver, I swear. I wasn’t really looking for trouble. See for yourself:

I sniffed the cookie and it smelled pretty strong (my son said he got to [1] just by smelling it :-). When I tasted it, it tasted danker and stronger than any edible I’ve ever tried. And yes, the color in that photo is correct: they’re green. These are all hints.

So now I have three edible rules:

1. Try less than 1/8 of the recommended dose for any new edible.
2. If it smells strongly, it probably is serious.
3. If it tastes strongly, it really is serious!

I was actually planning to finish up an article, but I wanted to exercise first. About halfway through the exercise session, the LCD panel on my machine started changing contrast and doing weird things. More alarmingly, my pulse rate went a bit higher than normal and was going down slower when I backed off the exercise intensity.

Well, that’s why I monitor it in the first place. But still…I had started at [4] and was going up rapidly, maybe one level every 30 seconds.

So I got off my machine and decided to just sit down and listen to music. Luckily, just about the best thing in the world popped onto my shuffled playlist right then…Refried Boogie by Canned Heat. The original one, of course: over 40 minutes of insane Sixties jamming. I stood there at my desk, closed my eyes, and watched Canned Heat play this song…first in the studio, then on stage. Then I became the guitarist. Then I decided to lie down on the floor (hint: it’s very hard to fall off the floor at less than [15]).

I was at least touching level [13], because I was surely tripping but starting to freak out a little. Luckily I had the good sense and experience to keep my pulse monitor running, so I was able to reassure myself that my heart wasn’t taking any wild swings off in either direction (too much or not enough pulse = bad). And also, this teeny dose must have just been a little too much instead of a lot, because I went down almost as fast as I had come up, so I wasn’t too high for very long.

But I decided to just sit down and watch a movie for the rest of the evening (Galaxy Express 999 if you’re interested, and yes it was cosmic, man 🙂