I've never been a fan of pot. I used to always say this when people - when the large mass of people I've known in my life - who all enjoy smoking pot - this is what I would always say as to why I don't enjoy marijuana: "I never got past the point where it just turned my brain into a block of wood."
But this is true. I might've only smoked the dreaded ganja ten times in my life. Unlike that moment when I had a beer & it tasted really, really good, I never got to the point where I enjoyed myself while high. Mainly the guys I worked with at the video store in Austin would make me smoke it to level out my drunk so they could go do cool things & I could close the place. Being high would make it really hard to walk home.
The first time I smoked pot, I was 24 years old, & there's even a picture of it, it was such a momentous occasion:
I was with my friends Russ, Scott & Suloni, & we were at a chick named Karen's house. (I think that's Karen's hand in the picture.) I don't remember getting very high. Everyone else did, though. They were all giggles. I didn't do it again for years.
Initially, I had a reluctance to do anything that might be mind-altering. My father was an alcoholic, & while I didn't see him enough as a child to understand what that entailed (he was a very functional alcoholic, it seemed, most of the time), the hatred my mother had for his destroying their marriage & their family obviously rubbed off on me. I was happy to see him, because when I was a kid, he'd bring gifts (or take us places, driving while intoxicated, & buying us comic books & Slurpees), but I naturally sided with my mother, who freaked out when she came home from work & Daddy had visited us that day.
As far as I know, my father never tried pot, but I had two older brothers who did*. They tried it all the time. All through my childhood. At some point in high school my brother Ralph (the younger of the two) tried to use my love of the Beatles to convince me that marijuana was a kind of sacrament. It was a weird conversation. He was insistent, for example, that John Lennon was singing "Everybody smoke pot" at the end of "I Am The Walrus." I had read by that point as many interviews with Lennon as I could - it may have bothered them that I knew much, much more about the music they grew up with by the time I was thirteen than they ever did - I told my brother that Lennon insisted he was singing, "Everybody's got one."** My brother said, "Of course he'd lie!" I confronted him with the fact that Lennon said this in 1980, right before he died, & he talked openly about his heroin use, among other things; why would he want to be coy about advocating pot in a song? To this, my brother Ralph had no reply.
Ralph did, for a time, replace the word "drugs" for the word "love" in songs he would sing when he heard them on the radio. For example, "All You Need Is Love" became "All You Need Is Drugs." It was very funny, to him.
My brothers resembled the stoners at school, who weren't part of my world, & who seemed to have given up giving a shit for the sake of getting high. I didn't enjoy school much, but I did well there, & it seemed that it might lead somewhere, & I couldn't see turning into my brothers as much of a future.
By the time I tried marijuana, I was will to do anything. I would do acid for the first time in the coming months, for example, & I had become a social drinker. The fact that marijuana held no charm for me is distressing on this Cannabis Day because I'll soon be living in a state where medical marijuana is plentiful. If you've read anything I've written here, surely you must know I am an anxious sort with all kinds of obvious nervous conditions, which I'm certain marijuana could help with. What will happen, I wonder, in the future? Can you recommend an understanding medical professional in the Greater Los Angeles area?
Because I haven't ruled it out on anything. It's just that whiskey tastes better. Maybe you can get marijuana whiskey in California. Couldn't that be a thing? & if it is, would it be at all interesting?
* My oldest brother, as far as I know, has never done a drug, had an alcoholic drink, or smoked. Interestingly, my younger brother - the two of them are nineteen years apart - has a similar resume, although I think he's had a beer in his life.
** In the Playboy interview, when pressed about this, Lennon said, "Everybody's got one, a penis, a vagina, whatever." I am paraphrasing my memory.
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