Free Ping-Pong!

Did you know that City Hall has a secret womb-colored and bagel-scented ping-pong table on its bottom floor? WELL IT DOES. Yeah, that's right—womb-colored from the wall of red-glass doors that surrounds the alcove where the table sits, turning the whole space into a cavernous womb room, and bagel-scented from the little bagel shop next door. That fucker is amazing. It's a total fluke: Seattle City Council member Nick Licata is obsessed with ping-pong and got Northeastern University's Seattle campus to sell the City of Seattle the table for a dollar, just for fun. You can get paddles and a ball from the information desk with your ID.

Obviously, going to City Hall stoned isn't for everyone, so you can always try a bar. Teddy's in Roosevelt has a table out back, as does the Roanoke Park Place on Capitol Hill and the Twilight Exit in the Central District, during the warmer months. Olde 99 up on Aurora is reported to have one inside, accommodating all weather.

And ping-pong is such a stoner sport! One warning, though: Do not play against real ping-pongers (e.g., Council Member Licata—he will bruise you). ANNA MINARD

Go Swing a Racket

Being stoned and sedentary has its virtues, but stoned racket sports are a special kind of pleasure. When I'm on the court, the marijuana quiets down the static-y noise of thought, decreasing mental distractions (i.e., making me dumber) and allowing me to focus more clearly on the ball or the shuttlecock, bringing my mind and my body closer to something approaching a unified effort. Tennis and badminton are ideal—try a noncompetitive version where the object is to hit the 'cock or ball directly to your partner, requiring her to run as little as possible. If you're bad-to-mediocre at either sport, that will provide a perfectly pleasant challenge. Squash and racquetball are not recommended: That shit is way too fast and scary to play stoned. BRENDAN KILEY

Go Play Pinball!

This passage from Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine (which you should read, or reread, right away) explains why playing pinball while stoned is so great:

We begin, perhaps, with a brain that is much too crowded with pure processing capacity, and therefore the death of the brain cells is part of a planned and necessary winnowing... With fewer total cells, but more connections between each cell, the quality of your knowledge undergoes a transformation: you begin to have a feel for situations, people fall into types, your past memories link together, and your life begins to seem, as it hadn't when you were younger, an inevitable thing composed of a million small failures and successes dependently intergrown, as opposed to a bright beadlike row of unaffiliated moments.

Uncrowd your brain at the Seattle Pinball Museum in the International District, Shorty's in Belltown, John John's Game Room on Capitol Hill, and Add-a-Ball in Fremont. BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT recommended