Paul Pearson is a simple man with a simple dream. It is a humble dream; an achievable dream; a dream he shares, by his estimation, with “hundreds and thousands” of other noble dreamers. It is the dream of a humongous bong.
Pearson lives in the small town of Woodenbong, Australia, a town that, inexplicably, does not yet have a namesake wooden bong standing proudly in its town center. Thankfully, Pearson has a plan to change that—if the town’s other lame-ass residents will let him, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports.
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“I’ve always had an interest in bong-making and art,” Pearson told ABC last week. “I’ve been doing it all of my life.” He’s now aiming for what would undoubtably be the pinnacle of his long bong-building career: making an absolutely massive one for the town out of wood. Pearson launched a petition to gin up support for the thing, hoping to convince folks that—aside from being a fucking masterpiece, the likes of which this world has never seen—the gargantuan pipe would bring some much-needed tourist revenue to Woodenbong.
“Tourism is our only option for survival [in] this dying village,” he told ABC.
Unfortunately, Pearson’s fellow townspeople don’t see him for the modern-day da Vinci he is—and the killjoys are fighting to keep him from fulfilling his destiny.
“I haven’t spoken to one person that thinks it’s a good idea,” Chris Reid, the head of a local fundraising group, told the New York Times. “We don’t want to promote drug use.”
“It’s quite a conservative community,” Mayor Danielle Mulholland told the Times.
But Pearson is undeterred. According to the Times, he’s planning to present his big bong idea to a Woodenbong tourism council this week. And just how big is “big,” you ask? Well, Pearson hasn’t hammered out the specifics, but he told ABC he wants it to be “taller” than a 50-foot statue called the Big Merino, so, uh, it would be pretty goddamn huge.
For now, the big bong is still no more than a big dream. Pearson has his work cut out for him if he wants to get the townspeople on board—and that’s before he starts the actual work of figuring out how to make a wooden water pipe the size of a building. Speaking with ABC, he shrugged all that off with the casual ease you’d expect from a man dedicating his life to building a giant wooden bong for a town named Woodenbong.
“I don’t think I need to convince people,” he told ABC. “It’s pretty obvious.”
Come on, Woodenbong. Embrace your fate. Imagine the sweet, sweet sound of chiming cash registers overflowing with tourism dollars, and allow it to soothe whatever hesitations you might have about living in the shadow of a gigantic weed apparatus from here on out. The dankest gods have spoken, and to Pearson they say this: “Upon this rock, you will build Our massive bong.” Please—let him answer the call.
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