#8

“Wanna get high?” goes the common stoner anthem/motto/rallying cry followed closely by a sarcastic “no” or an enthusiastic “hell yeah,” signifying the responder’s willingness to engage in the roller coaster excitement of inhaling smoke and probably sitting on one’s ass for a few hours as we, back then, me and my friends, engaged in endless pseudo-profound discussion and become armchair philosophers, if armchairs were bongs and Socrates was blazed all the time, although come to think of it, the philosophers were men of leisure who spent all day every day talking about the meaning of life and marvelling at their own profundity, so if herb existed back then I’m sure Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates regularly formed circles and passed around the old Grecian urn (or whatever they smoked out of in those days) and tried to one up each other with Deep Thoughts, then probably dared each other to write it all down and see if they could get descendants of theirs to believe they were profound thinkers instead of bored stoners. Maybe that’s how generations down the line will remembe me and my friends, great thinkers whose thoughts were so important they had to be spoken in a cloud of smoke that magically amplified their meaning. One of the allures of weed as opposed to alcohol is that you feel incredibly intelligent, a real borderline genius, while alcohol usually makes you feel stupid, not to mention sick to your stomach if you drink too much, and given that my 21st birthday party was a puking disaster nothing short of BESTEST BIRTHDAY EVAARRRRR material, weed stood there waiting to welcome me with arms open and promising easy sick-free intoxication with zero morning after consequences, of course failing to mention its powerful psychological addictive powers which it kept hidden under labels of “green,” “natural,” and “non-addicting,” so for someone for whom the romance of drikning had ended the very night it began, weed was kind of a Godsend. For about a year after I turned 21 I couldn’t touch hard liquor without getting a powerful gag reflex – even the smell of it would set my alarm bells off, which of course didn’t stop me from many more lovely nights of vomiting thereafter, searching for that elusive dragon called tolerance, testing how high mine was and usually failing. This caused me todevelop an early affinity and preference for beer, as it was tastier and safer, and combined with hard liquor’s nausea-inducing properties were probably the perfect alchemical cocktail from which my lov affair with weed began. For the first few months of weed smoking I would only indulge at Edgar’s house, Lydia’s “hooligan” boyfriend literally too cool for school, and as he was an extremely frequent smoker this worked out quite well, but as is the case with any habit-forming substance, eventually one is required to start purchasing one’s own smokables so as not to become that mooch who never brings any of his own stuff to the party – you know the one, that guy who was stupid enough to try weed and love it but smart enough to not quietly go down that long and dark road that beings with buying one’s own first baggie. This is a big first step in a stoner’s life, bigger even than a smoker’s first purchased pack of cigarettes, for the day when it comes is filled with acertain anticipation and excitement-laced dread as the thrill of being kinda sorta really truly getting into the illegality of it all by buying twenty bucks worth of green with which comes the promise that from then on you can smoke whenever you want and wherever you want and no longer have to rely on the clever devils who introduced you to your new best friend kind bud. At the time I was still in my senior year of college, living in a house just off campus with 6 straight-edge Christian types from whom I gained an additional thrill as I smuggled weed in and out of the house, starting out smoking a couple of times a week and within a fwe months was an everyday occurrence. As I dove into that world headfirst I steadily grew more brazen in where and when I smoked – I even bought my own pipe, another landmark day in a stoner’s life, which I christened Richard the Millionaire and from which I probably smoked over 500 bowls, but one of the very first was at the house with the six other guys, out back in a cave-like area housing our second fridge, situated under a deck extended outward from an upstairs room for parties and barbecues, many of which we had, none of which I attended, I mean why would I want to socialize with fun people and girls when I could stick safely to myself with the comfort of getting high almost literally right under their noses, sneaking out in the middle of the night to take a couple of hits, and then when I grew braver, cracking open the window in my tiny cubby hole of a back room in which I always loked myself away into, as I would rarely, if ever, socialize with my roommates, none of whom were potheads so obviously none of them were worth spending time with, because one of the first things you learn as a stoner is that only cool people smoke weed, and anyone who doesn’t smoke weed is a bit of a prude. I didn’t lose any friends that I had, but I did hang out with them less as my circle morphed to include more stoners and fewer sobers. My college campus was down by the river, where I discovered some other stoners sometimes in the dark of the night, toking away on their own secret sin, because if you’ll recall this was a Christian campus that frowned upon and in fact had rules against alcohol and any illicit substances, so this fact created an extra-insulated-super-secret-layer of stoner kids, because we were all surrounded by people we didn’t hesitate to call squares or judgmental or ignorant just because they didn’t approve of weed and were determined to actually follow the University’s lifestyle expectations, which we had all signed in pen that we would follow, but who cares about contracts when a riverside bowl of weed is calling your name to join the other Christain cool kids who are discovering weed’s many pleasures made all the more fun and fantastic because of its extra-taboo nature. Oh we were self-proclaimed bad-asses all right, and I was reveling in it like none other, going from buying twenty bucks of weed every two or three weeeks to, and by the time I moved away from Seattle a year and a half after graduation, 60 to 80 bucks of weed a week, depending on how much we could afford. One’s tolerance for weed grows exponentially ever so slowly, and you really don’t know it has hit you until it is too late. If you’ll recall my girlfriend at the time disapproved of my cigarette habit (silly thing) but she was even more bothered by my weed smoking, as she was about to get her master’s degree in school counseling, so her main beef with dating a stoner was that you never know what can come around to bite you in the rear and affect her reputation, and as you can imagine this was completely the wrong thing to say to my fiercely independent newfound attitude but I was too much of a coward to give her the courtesy of ending it sooner, so like any reasonable stoner worth his weight in herb I dragged it on for months telling her she had nothing to worry about because I had both the nicotine and the green completely under control, so as I was lying to myself she had the misfortune of being caught in between me and my newfound lover of drug addiction. So often did I swear to her that I could never break up with her over something as inconsequential as weed, that I just had to break up with her over the phone one weekend because I decided I no longer felt strongly about her, and also she was cramping my style with her ridiculous demands that I cease my weed indulgences for the sake of her career and my mental health and future, I mean really how dare she? How dare any friend of any stoner ever step in between them and their drug? Don’t they realize how stupid they are to care? To worry about a waste of talent and life that evaporates with each puffed cloud of smoke and a healthy hacking cough signaling true freedom? I can safely say now that it was right around this time that weed began to unnoticeably dull my emotions, as I probably did care about her deeply but could not see through the haze. The fact that I wanted to smoke and made a big deal out of the principle of the thing covered up any actual care I felt for her with reactionary outrage that it was MY life and MY choice and I had EVERY right to break her heart because she was tyring to break my death grip on my pipe, as I retreated bit by bit day by day out as a balm to soothe any stress that most people are able to deal with by, you know, dealing with it, but which stoners deal with by just covering up the stress with the easiest inebriation possible because hey, weed is awesome man. And you wanna know the punchline? Less than a year after I broke up with her she started dating a stoner and even found herself indulging once in awhile, as it was right around this time that weed was beginning to gain social acceptance. Hell, it’s even legal in Wsshington state now. If I had just been patient I probably could have stuck with her and discovered the joys of smoking weed like the occasional drink, as a hobby instead of a compulsion, with the love of my life but no way man, weed was just too sweet to pass up for a girl, and onward went my weed adventures as I sought out alcohol too and learned the joys of cross-fading and partying, wisely putting my English degree straight to good use by spending the next year and a half after graduation high almost all day every day, thrilled to the bone that I had found a way to have fun without any effort at all, faced with a welcoming home in the arms of stoners far and wide, as I set off on a path that would keep me in a fog for a solid four years. But hey, I had fun right? That’s all that matters to a pothead, to a soul seeking simplistic intoxication free of any consequences except the steady long-lasting ones that suck life out of you patiently, steadily, inevitably, coloring your every perception with its sweet stink. Weed – yummy. Oh, young Brandon, how delightfully naive you were.