The scary thing is? I actually, seriously believed this.

This happened when I was eighteen, the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college. I was deep into my New Age woo phase: Tarot cards, astrology, reincarnation, Aleister Crowley and Robert Anton Wilson and just about every other piece of stoner bullshit spirituality that crossed my path. I was living in Alaska for the summer with my boyfriend, and we were getting pretty well baked pretty much every day. We had an assortment of joints that we’d pre-rolled from an assortment of stashes, and in order to keep track of which joint had been rolled from which stash, we marked them with little colored dots on the ends.

So one day we were going through our little collection, deciding which variety we wanted to enjoy… and we came across a single joint with a blue dot on the end.

And we freaked our shit.

See, we couldn’t remember marking a joint with a blue dot. We vividly remembered rolling joints from three stashes: one we’d marked with red dots, one we’d marked with black dots, and one we’d kept blank. Neither of us had any recollection of marking a joint with a blue dot, and we both had clear — well, okay, “clear” is perhaps not the right word, let’s say “vivid” — memories of having rolled joints from three and only three stashes. We couldn’t for the life of us think where the blue-dot joint had come from.

And so we came to the most obvious conclusion — which was that a friendly trickster spirit had planted the joint among the rest of the joints, and had marked it with a blue dot to confuse us.

I kid you not.

The alternate conclusion — that we’d rolled the joint and marked it ourselves, and had simply forgotten about it, what with being BAKED OUT OF OUR MINDS JUST ABOUT EVERY SINGLE DAY — we rejected out of hand. We didn’t remember doing that. Therefore, we hadn’t done it. Therefore, friendly trickster spirit.

I’m not sure that this story has a conclusion, other than the obvious ones: most parsimonious explanation, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, wishful thinking (we really liked the idea of the trickster spirit, it was entertaining and gave a touch of amazement to our everyday lives), etc. I mostly just think it’s a funny story.

So if you ever had religious or spiritual beliefs, what’s the stupidest one you ever had?