Who the hell smokes dope at quarter to seven in the morning?

One of the oddest things about my commute up and down Lilyfield Rd is the frequency with which I smell someone smoking dope. In the afternoons, it tends to waft from the windows of utes driving by - hopefully, only the passenger is partaking, and not the driver. But what stuns me is when I smell it first thing in the morning. The earliest time so far was last week at 0645hrs. It didn't seem to be coming from a parked or moving car, so I presume it was emanating from the Housing Commission apartments that line that section of road. What sort of dope smoker has the inner fortitude to wake up at that hour of the day and light the first cone?

And yes, I know what the stuff smells like. I haven't inhaled in a long time - at least a decade or more. I even partook in trying to grow it when I was at uni - each attempt was a fiasco. Although our group included numerous farm boys who have since gone on to grow enough grain to feed large sections of the third world, we were woefully inadequate at coaxing a weed to flourish. Perhaps it was because they were much better at killing weeds than growing and smoking them.

Only two crops showed any signs of producing a reasonable crop. The first disappeared when some thieving bastards came over the back fence and made off with the whole lot. The second disappeared when the mother of one of the farmers turned up one weekend to tidy the garden in the share house. Whilst we were all recovering somewhere else from a party and a hangover, she removed a trailer load of weeds (good and bad) to the tip. None of us felt like driving out to the tip to fossick through a mountain of garden and vegetable scraps to find them.

After that, we tended to stick to brewing our own beer. That was generally more successful - except when we added too much sugar to one batch and the bottles exploded one by one in our holding area under the stairs. We weren't game to go near them in case one exploded in our faces, so we waited until all 30 bottles had exploded before cleaning up the mess. That took about a week. By the time we moved in with shovels and a rubbish bin, the under stairs area had turned into an interesting mix of broken glass, the remains of dried beer and mold.

I don't think we brewed any beer after that experience either.