THE WORLD ACCORDING TO TOMMY

The I Chong

Tommy Chong

Tommy Chong, one half of the famous stoner-comedy duo Cheech & Chong,
spent nine months in prison after his company, Chong Glass, shipped a
few bongs in 2003 to a hemp store that turned out to be a front for the DEA.

While doing his time Chong penned The I Chong (Meditations from the
Joint), a breezily written volume that is part memoir and part prison
diary, with plenty of half-baked philosophical musings and
unfortunate political harangues.

Chong's recollection of his hardscrabble childhood provides the
book's most interesting material, and it's a shame there's not more of this.

His father was Chinese-Canadian and his mother Irish-Scottish, a
unique background considering multiracial families were rare in the
1940s. Squares uneducated in Cheech & Chong lore might be surprised
to learn he was born at the University Hospital in Edmonton and spent
much of his delinquent youth in Calgary, where he hung out with
outlaw bikers and went joyriding in stolen cars.

The book is surprisingly short on laughs, even when you take into
account that Tommy is still feeling a little down about the whole
incarceration thing. He relates a few amusing anecdotes about his
time in prison -- where, as the jail's resident celebrity, he joined
a sweat lodge and spent most of his time gardening, making pottery
and hanging out with his prison "dogs." But the funniest part of the
book is unintentional. While awaiting his sentencing date, Chong
floated around a few ideas for an anti-drug commercia l that might
perhaps soften up the judge. The concept he come up with was to
promote salsa dancing as a gripping alternative to getting high. His
reasoning was that the dance is too hard to do when you're on drugs.

Sound enough perhaps, but the thought of a stoner icon exhorting kids
to trade in their reefer for the seductive rhythms of salsa is almost
too ridiculous to believe. Initially I thought Chong was joking, but
the section of the book where he lovingly detailed his passion for
the dance finally convinced me otherwise.

Weird.

Along with his prison memoirs, the book jacket also promises "a
political indictment of the eroding civil liberties in post-9/11
American society," but all the reader gets is the type of overheated
rhetoric that would make Hugo Chavez jump up and down on his chair
and shout, "You go, girl!"

Chong's own personal life philosophy and spiritual beliefs are of the
standard love-and-peace variety and can be skipped over easily
without disrupting the flow.

Chong fans looking for real laughs should just skip the book and rent
Up in Smoke instead.