Personal

When I Smoked Marijuana

At age 21, I smoked pot for the first time.

My friend and I were hanging out. He made a couple deals. We stopped at his brother’s place and passed a pipe around. I took two big hits.

I don’t react well to pot. Maybe it’s psychological; I’m used to controlling myself. For a couple hours I was disconnected from reality.

My mouth went dry. My heart pounded. My vision blurred, except when I moved my eyes. Closing them was the worst. So, I rocked back and forth and always kept my eyes open.

My friend grabbed me a glass of water. I used it to test my sense of touch, which was slipping. I carefully brought the glass to my lips. The rim was cool and snapped me back to reality for a moment. But reality was localized to where the cool glass touched my lips. Everything else was still hazy.

I drank. The cool liquid poured across my tongue, between my teeth, against my cheeks. Where the water flowed, I could touch reality. When it was gone, my mouth was as dry as ever.

I reached out to set the glass on a table in front of me. I did it very slowly, careful not to spill the drink or set the glass near the edge. I had to concentrate.

I was floating again. Only the cool glass could keep me grounded. I reached for it again and wrapped my fingers around it. I hoped I wasn’t gasping it too weakly or too strongly. I couldn't tell. I took another drink.

Paranoid

There were 3 strangers in the room, chatting. A party had started. I was freaking out. Was being high supposed to be like this? I had to interrupt them.

“Hey, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I want to give you a good story for the night. I smoked pot for the first time about 10 minutes ago.”

“Woohoo! Right on, man!”

“My heart is pounding,”

“Yeah...”

“My vision is blurring,”

“Yeah...”

“And when I move I can see better.”

“Yeah, man, you’re totally high!”

“And I don’t like it and I’m scared.”

Silence. They looked at me like I’d said I had cancer.

“I’ve never been high before, so . . . is this what it’s supposed to feel like?”

“Yeah, man, you’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it.”

I wasn’t too sure. I remembered all the movies I’d seen about punk kids doing drugs. You know the scene. One of them would have a bad reaction, but the others wouldn’t do anything about it because they were afraid the cops would bust them if they brought their friend to the hospital.

Maybe these guys were just telling me everything would be fine because they didn’t want their party ruined.

The train

My friend came back and took me for a walk. That helped. I had no sense of place or direction.

We stopped to watch a train, and the paranoid thoughts struck again. I thought, “Look at that train. It’s only five feet away. He probably wants to push me under the train right now, while I can’t defend myself!”

I eyed him warily and stepped back a few feet.

When the train passed, I regained some control.

“Hey, man, I want to be honest with you. One of the many thoughts going through my head right now is how this experience would make a great blog post. If I wait a while before posting and don’t mention any names, is it okay if I post this to my blog?”

My friend smiled his usual confident smile. “Sure, if you want to.”

Just act normal

We went back to the house. I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked normal. Even my eyes looked normal. But I didn’t feel normal. I don’t think I was moving my limbs normally.

I found a back room and sat down. One guy was telling another about a recent sexual encounter. I said, “Hey, I was just going to sit down here, as long as I’m not interrupting your conversation or anything.”

“No, yeah, go ahead.” He turned back to his friend. “So anyway, I was fucking her in the ass, and she said . . .”

I missed the rest. I was too busy waving my eyes back and forth across the room like a feather duster to keep the Great Blur from encroaching my vision.

Raccoon Testicles

My friend came back to me and asked me to come with him, his brother, and some girls to shoot pool at a bar. As we were leaving, a dog ate one of the pot buds lying on the table. I hope he is okay.

I could barely walk, so I didn’t try to play pool. I also kept quiet so I wouldn’t say anything stupid. That’s how I act when I’m drunk, too.

Later, we went to my friend’s house to watch a movie. It was Pom Poko, a Japanese kids movie about shape-shifting raccoons whose forest home is being threated by human housing developments.

The male raccoons attack the construction workers with their magical, expanding scrotums. One raccoon jumps on a dump truck and inflates his ball sac to cover the windshield so the driver can’t see. They go over a cliff.

In another scene, a platoon of raccoons attacks workers from above by inflating their scrotums to use as hang gliders. At the last moment, they drop down on the workers and smother them with their ball sacs. The workers fight back by clubbing raccoon balls with baseball bats.

It was a great movie to watch on pot.

Thoughts

I didn’t like pot. I’m sure it would get better with each try, but I don’t see the point. I don’t like to lose control. I’m happier when I’m not high.