totes sobers, day four

Marijuana was part of my life.

Is that a sentence?  It feels incomplete.

Marijuana was part of my life for decades.

Yeah, still looks like a sentence.  Still feels lopped-off.

Marijuana was part of my life for decades, even when I wasn't smoking it.

Hmm.  Closer.  I dimly recall, at seventeen, trying (& failing) to smoke my parents' pot.  I wasn't a smoker, at that point.  I hadn't had my first cigarette with Cameron.  My first time smoking weed was with Chris Neal, probably 1998.  Had a little anxiety, got minor spins, but it wasn't any stronger--  or more pleasant --than alcohol.  I had convinced myself that since previous exposure hadn't done anything, what I smoked with Neal was laced.  And of course I was a human party foul because I expressed this anxiety to others, trying to convince them something was awry with the weed.

That put me off it for a bit.  I stuck to alcohol, when I was drinking.  Which wasn't infrequently, but it wasn't an avowed Habit, either.  The only full-on habit was cigarettes.  It wasn't until '99 that pot came back into things.  There was a band kid, James Blackledge, and a friend / neighbor, JoMichael Nelson.  Summer, we'd smoke up and listen to Massive Attack vs. The Mad Professor on the rooftop of the converted motel we were living in...  Take late night field trips to Auburn University's art department, or the practice spaces of nearby churches, and do guerilla recordings.  This was the first (adult?) time I ever flirted with actually Making Music, which speaks to how fuckin' high I must've been.

But still, not really a habit.  I didn't keep weed around the apartment.  In part because every time I ever sold anyone any mushrooms or acid--  my plug was my manager at CheeBurger, CheeBurger  --then every useless teenage waster in Auburn would somehow make their way to my door.  For a while there was a sign on my front door which declared "THIS IS NOT A HIP PHARMACY", to deter the dopers.  Just being around them made me want to be straightedge.  Which became the other extreme of the pendulum, for me.  Either I was amenable to altered states, or I was too wise for 'em.

As you can see, I've not gotten any more personable.  Or concise.

The Richmond & elsewhere years, weed didn't really factor in.  So there was roughly three, four years where drugs didn't happen.  Mainly because in the fall of '99 I overdosed on 'shrooms.  A violently unpleasant bit of psychic fragmentation, there; I got the whole "ego death" thing the heads of my parents' generation used to drone on about.  Put me off drugs almost entirely.  Encouraged me to doubt my sanity more than I already did.  The skittish look in people's eyes might have been projection, but there was no way to be 100%.  So I took it as a given that there was Damage, and to steer the hell clear for as long as was tolerable.

Ut!  But I tell a tiny lie.  There was some weed in the Richmond era.  I lived with a doorman at Bogart's, a lousy mob-run jazz club, and that dude smoked more than anybody you've ever met.  Pete was a True Loser, bombed-out ragged-out from heroin use (which he would never deny), seventy if he was forty-five, and a gross old freak like I've never known before or since.  Kept a television tuned to static in his bathroom, "as an art project", liked to sit and smoke on a stool by the vent fan in the terminally disused kitchen with his feet in the oven, and had an intractable attraction to using my toothbrush, which, given his bog monster dentistry, disgusted me.  I don't know how many toothbrushes I bought him, or why he kept losing them, and using mine.  I couldn't keep much of a stash around because if Pete ran through his, he'd sniff out mine, no matter where I squirreled it.

Eventually he pocketed all my-and-his-son's rent--  he rented an art studio to his kid, who lived elsewhere  --and fucked off to Newport News to try and scam his daughter into caring for him, leaving his kid and me cleaning up that rat's nest and getting kicked out.  Which was half a shame, because I liked the sound of the piano teacher, downstairs, and the widow's walk on the roof was my favourite feature from any home I've ever had.

Pete was an object lesson in what addiction looked like, and sometimes I forget what a warning he was.

But here it is, day four.  And I remember.  Lord.

Marijuana *was* part of my lives.  All of 'em.