My Kind of Book

I watched a video on Cracked.com's website about some different ways our ancestors had gotten high. It was silly and somewhat informative, which is exactly what Cracked does. They've taken the idea used for so long to great ends by The Daily Show---real facts hiding in a grove of humor---and present various conundrums and historical tidbits through the lens of humor to get the point across.

They do their part to make history lessons "more entertaining," as if that's a serious thing. (It IS a serious thing, just ask any high school history teacher.)

Anyway, the person running the video mentions that he spent a few years doing research on the topic and wrote a book covering both his research into the history and his experiments in recreating many of the ways that people centuries ago wrecked themselves with inebriation.

Upon hearing this, I got on Amazon and got busy:

Some of the critiques I read before starting the book was that it didn't have enough citations; or that Robert Evans didn't really prove that "Bad Behavior Built Civilization"; or that there were too many dick jokes...

Pshaw, I say, PSHAW!

This book is around 250 pages long, with fifteen chapters and maybe two-thirds of which have experiments. Each chapter is on a different topic---ur-booze, music, the ephedra shrub, et al---and each chapter reads like a Cracked article. It's around 250 pages of cracked article with some how-to's added in.

THIS IS NOT A BAD THING.

The tone is conversational and the details are not hidden away. He mentions so many different articles and authors that I was shocked anyone would complain that he didn't cite enough things. I mean, goddamn, this isn't a research paper bound for a dusty tome on a back shelf of a university library (I have some papers in those places...and its about as exciting as it sounds). I could tell, as a  writer who writes for a blog (among other places) that he was trying to strike a balance. He mentioned enough names that anyone who was interested could easily enough find the pieces to which he referred.

His target audience doesn't give a shit about citations! And if you have a problem with wrapping your head around how vices of the inebriation variety and trash talking might have shaped the development of society, then you're also likely not part of the target audience (and you probably need to lighten up a little).

While the Cracked article format is a specific approach, it does make for a quick read. I devoured the first hundred pages in a sitting, and could have easily finished it with a pot of coffee and a quiet few hours.

Plenty of things I didn't know about, like:

• The ephedra bush nearly conquered the world, only to be nearly forgotten because of caffeine and nicotine, and then remembered just in time to be made illegal because of its readiness to be synthesized into meth;
• Chicha, a Mesoamerican beer made by chewing up corn meal and spitting the mixture into jugs to let it ferment, tastes best when the ladies do the chewing and spitting, an old tale that their experiments supported---lady chicha is better than fella chicha;
• The original tobacco the natives smoked was way stronger than today's and would get people super effed up;
• Stonehenge is, either by accident or by design, an incredibly good music amplifier that hums when a specific drum resonance is hit, making it the earliest rave scene ever (possibly);
• Milking a poisonous salamander and mixing the poison with vodka and drinking it does...something...

So far I've tried a few of the experiments, like using my cast iron skillet to fry whole coffee beans (1 cup beans, 1/2 cup oil) for about 20 minutes. The result, while not as tasty as Mr. Evans would have me believe (I'm willing to try it again with a different bean variety and for maybe more time in the oil), did give me a snack that gives the best parts of the coffee experience without the having to pee or getting the shakes or the Breathing.

The write up for the chicha experiment was hilarious and awesome, as was the bhang-lassie experiment. The tobacco laxative experiment was also one of the ones you'll never forget (I will write it up here as a SPOILER in a second).

I would like to note, though, that Evans never does any thing with illegal drugs in this book; he goes to great length to procure his items legally through mostly internet-based distributors when the going is tougher than a trip to the grocers.

And, to end it on a gross note, the tobacco laxative:

Mix with a mortar and pestle:

tobacco from one cigarette

garlic, two cloves

Add to:

one shot, your own pee

Mix well, and slam down the hatch

He described it like shooting a warm Slim Jim, and because his quotes are best, in his own words:

"It worked! After about twenty minutes my constipation was gone, and for the next hour my body purged everything it could, as fast as it could. I vomited three times, likely thanks to mild tobacco poisoning. I personally think the garlic deserves just as much blame."