I have lots of great memories with Gus and Simone. Nights of drinking, doing hot knives, sex (not among roommates, though: they’re cousins, and Gus isn’t my type). No, I don’t spend all my free time drowning pre-teens. I have my little habits, sure, but no murders since Fat Fiset. I’m in a dormant period. In hindsight I’d ascribe my passivity through those years to our favourite pastime: smoking a shit-ton of weed. Everybody knows that the herb saps your motivation. We’d get high before eating a meal. We’d get high before watching a movie. We’d get high before listening to music, and we’d get high before having a chat. We’d also get high before class. And after class. We’d get high before fucking. We’d get high with our morning coffee, with our evening noodles, and while taking a shower. Basically we’d get high before getting high.

Simone believes in cutting the filters for our joints out of materials with symbolic importance for us. My favourite is the student newspaper. Gus likes to work his way through all the funeral parlour bookmarks left over from his father’s funeral. Simone is partial to marriage and birth announcements. They come from a huge family, so we can barely keep up. The little rectangles keep getting bigger and bigger, and we keep rolling tighter and tighter.

One of our genius ideas was our attempt to insulate the apartment. Most of the air currents were coming in from the street side, along the ground where the wall met the floor.

January 12: It’s -14 degrees Celsius, -23 with the wind chill factor. We’re freezing and the heater isn’t equal to the task. So we smoke a joint and decide to take a trip to the hardware store.

We let a sympathetic father figure talk us into buying a can of spray-foam insulation. It’s on sale for $9.99, which we can manage between the three of us. We opt not to buy the spray gun to apply it. Dad’s annoyed, says that’s a sure path to a half-ass job, which is, of course, precisely what we intend to do. We get home, smoke a little more reefer to get in the mood, and get down to work. Without the gadget to flatten the tube and extrude the yellow foam at a uniform rate, the result isn’t pretty. Gus mans the foam while Simone and I provide running commentary. Eventually all the cracks appear to be nicely patched, and we’re proud of ourselves. Just one hitch: it turns out we bought “expanding” foam, meaning its volume swells as it dries. We hadn’t planned on quite so much expansion. The magic of chemistry!