Posts tagged with "marijuana"

A Year Of Sobriety

It’s com­ing close to a year now that I end­ed my affair with mar­i­jua­na. As refresh­ing, pro­duc­tive, and lucid as it is to be sober, I’d be lying if I said that I did­n’t miss it.

THC has the delight­ful abil­i­ty to make every­thing bet­ter: music, food, girls, writ­ing, rid­ing the bus, doing the laun­dry. There are also things that can only be appre­ci­at­ed after a joint. You don’t see, hear, feel things the same way.

It turned into a lifestyle, a word I like to use because it sounds so much bet­ter than “addic­tion”.

Between 2004–2006, I’d only be sober for about nine hours on week­days.

Weekends were straight wake-and-bake, espe­cial­ly if there was a par­ty, a camp­ing trip, or some good old dim sum.

I was a com­plete light-weight too; it did­n’t take much to have me float­ing for a night. As a result, one ounce of BC hydro would last me more than a year. An added bonus was that I nev­er need­ed a deal­er; there was always some con­ve­nient source through a friend of a friend. O Canada, land of the free, the Inuit, and the plen­ti­ful bud. I’m sure that Pierre Burton would agree.

Sessions were a habit­u­al provider of great mem­o­ries (from what my brain was actu­al­ly able to retain). I still think of Darren at the wheel of the Civic, look­ing over at me and whis­per­ing “Vanilla Sky” as he’d taunt our mor­tal­i­ty by let­ting the wheel drift the car into the oncom­ing lane. It was at once ter­ri­fy­ing and invig­o­rat­ing, some­thing you could only feel after a ses­sion in the park. Even a few of my favourite entries were either inspired by weed or writ­ten under the influ­ence.

Food was also a big thing. Every meal was like nec­tar and ambrosia. I nev­er real­ly stopped eat­ing over the course of the day, as I’d have food around me at all times. Pretty soon, I hit a sat­is­fy­ing all-time high (no pun intend­ed) with my weight. Now that I’ve stopped, I lost it all. They won’t even let me donate blood any­more because I don’t meet the min­i­mum weight require­ments. This is what I looked like, cir­ca ear­ly 2005, and this is what I looked like cir­ca ear­ly week­end. How I miss the full­ness of my face.

Sobriety is dif­fer­ent. Everything is clear­er, but toned down. Life gets evened out.

As much as I miss it, I won’t go back to smok­ing weed again. I had a hard enough time stop­ping in the first place, and the risk of get­ting addict­ed again isn’t worth it.

Maybe I was just get­ting old­er, but near the end, the side-effects start­ed tak­ing their toll on me.

Instead of the rac­ing ideas and inspi­ra­tion from when I start­ed, I turned into a zoned-out waste. I’d be com­plete­ly use­less when it came to talk­ing or think­ing. I stopped lik­ing myself when I was stoned. My stom­ach felt like it was slow­ly digest­ing a sack of peb­bles, and my throat became sore and dry. Even now, I still come across the odd stash of hon­ey lozenges in the back of a draw­er.

It was espe­cial­ly scary in the last few months when I could feel my tol­er­ance build­ing up. I was con­stant­ly chas­ing after that head-trip­ping peak from the ear­ly days, smok­ing more and more, but it’d nev­er last longer than a half hour. The weed would help me sleep, and when I stopped I turned into an insom­ni­ac. For a while, the will to do any­thing elud­ed me because noth­ing was enter­tain­ing.

Now I’ve quit my vices alto­geth­er. No alco­hol, no caf­feine, noth­ing. Sobriety is under­rat­ed.

I know I’ll nev­er go back to that time in my life, but I sure do miss it.

Autumn Recall

Fall approach­es. The trees have yet to shift their colours along the spec­trum, but the tem­per­a­ture has begun to drop. Even when the air is calm it’s a play­ful shiv­er down the spine.

One of my favourite things to do around this time of year, before I quit, would be some wake and bake to start the day. After smok­ing a joint, I’d open the win­dows, turn up the music, and let the breeze drift inside. Sometimes I would go for a walk with my iPod before the sun ful­ly showed itself. When the beat was right, the hard­est thing to do was not to move my body to the music, to groove embar­ras­ing­ly, and grind and sing and twirl.

With enough weed in the lungs, any­one will dance.

I won’t say that I don’t miss that lifestyle, because it was a way I could view things from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive. My thoughts would run freely on those ear­ly autumn walks. Music would sound bet­ter. Girls, cov­er­ing up in sweaters and long sleeves, would look nicer. It was a pre­scrip­tion I would need every week.

The expe­ri­ence isn’t the same until it’s this time of the year. Smothering sum­mer heat dulls the sens­es. Winter over­stim­u­lates them into sobri­ety, and even after a full bowl, all one can feel is cold. It’s only in the fall, in the per­fect weath­er, that brings one to ones’ sens­es. The green air, full of that cold con­crete smell, gives a rush to the head.

Until I walked out­side this morn­ing, with !!! pound­ing in my ears, I nev­er thought I could feel this way again.

The approach of fall has brought this back to me.

Boxing Day '04-'05

Exactly one year ago today, I was doing this. Even though the annu­al par­ty at Chris and Clarmen’s actu­al­ly starts on the 25th, I real­ly see it as a box­ing day par­ty, the way a New Year’s par­ty real­ly starts on the 31st of December.

That night we used the excuse of going to Timmies for all the par­ents as a way out of the house to have a ses­sion. Unfortunately, this meant remem­ber­ing about a dozen drink orders, some­thing that proves dif­fi­cult under the influ­ence.

In chrono­log­i­cal order:

  1. We met up at the house, where Darren’s fin­gers brave the tur­tles
  2. A ses­sion occurred out­side, and on the way to Timmies we intro­duced Chris to Dreamtheater (hence the music selec­tion)
  3. An order is made for about a dozen drinks with great dif­fi­cul­ty
  4. We drove back to play Slap Hand, which is a vari­a­tion on Slap Jack, except the pile is hit every time the cor­rect num­ber is called (and for increased dif­fi­cul­ty we played with +/- rules where the pile is only hit if the num­ber spo­ken is an addi­tion or sub­trac­tion of a dif­fer­ent spec­i­fied num­ber)
  5. Darren ran­dom­ly deals every­one a hand of hold ’em and plays it through, and this caus­es me to make fun of his obvi­ous addic­tion
  6. Darren pre­cise­ly deals a full hand of 13 cards for a game of Asshole, while talk­ing, for which I count my cards in dis­be­lief and final­ly real­ize just how much he plays cards

Other signs of how stoned we were:

  • Darren and Chris’s voic­es drop an octave, while my voice rais­es two (two!)
  • I can’t keep my jit­tery hands under con­trol
  • The way Chris says, “Just awe­some guys. Awesome.”
  • At one point we have to stop to count to the right num­ber in Slap Hand
  • I laugh, a lot

This year, today, Lam joined us instead since Darren is off in Las Vegas.

Resonance

(This took four months to write)

I was kick­ing back on the couch with ____
with the lights out and the music on.

Wut wut.

Anyway, we were stoned out of our skulls and it was Naked As We Came by Iron And Wine. We sat there, lis­ten­ing to the dul­cet notes of a lone gui­tar lead into Sam Beam’s sug­ary voice, soon to be gen­tly round­ed off by his sis­ter, Sara, as the har­mo­ny. A sum­mer-morn­ing-dur­ing-har­vest song, or danc­ing in the mid­dle of a cool rain­fall.

She says ‘If I leave before you dar­ling
don’t you waste me in the ground’
I lay smil­ing like our sleep­ing chil­dren
one of us will die inside these arms

Eyes wide open
naked as we came
one will spread our
ash­es round the yard

And we sat there, lis­ten­ing, remark­ing to each oth­er about how mor­bid it all was, yet so beau­ti­ful.

How two peo­ple can be so inti­mate with each oth­er as to be com­fort­able enough to casu­al­ly talk about the dis­pos­al of remains. They were plan­ning it like an ado­les­cent cou­ple decid­ing the num­ber of garages or chil­dren they’re going to have.

Even John was moved, but how could he not be? One of them would die but there was solice in the fact that it would be in the embrace of the oth­er, as if nei­ther one would want to die any oth­er way, doing any­thing else.

And it felt like, for the first time in my life, John could under­stand a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent side of me.

Paint Chips

Paint chips 1

Paint chips 2

Paint chips 3

Trolley and I went to get some paint chips. It was­n’t too long since my last ses­sion before we left. In the store I was sur­round­ed by colour, a pedestal of float­ing gra­di­ents.

We move in a lit­tle over a month. I think I’ll do my room in a dark blue, and two walls of the liv­ing room in light beige. Trolley’s think­ing either light grey or deep red for his.