Miss Marijuana

Hit or miss, I want to write about pot...About what I have learned.

There are glass pipes, steel pipes, aluminum cans (if you dare) bongs, hookahs, and joints. I am proud to say I learned a new skill which may one day come in handy, should I ever be recruited for certain political campaigns: I learned how to roll a joint.

I was sitting on the couch and saw the papers and took one out. "How do you roll a joint?" I asked, and then dropped my head to lick one end of the paper, and then examine the translucency of the paper where it was wet. D. laughed and shook his head. "Not like THAT." He took a paper and then folded it. He didn't roll it like one rolls up a poster, he folded it. Of course, imagining pot was inside the wrapper. "You just leave the ends open?" I said. I was thinking about burritos. He said yes.

The other thing I learned about pot is that it's a good thing to cough. Coughing, I guess, means you really took a good hit. And, if two people are inhaling strong on a hookah and one person suddenly backs off and puts their thumb over the end, the other person will want to take their mouth off of their tube because otherwise smoke from the one will pressure-shoot down the second person's throat. I remember how D. looked at me when he did this, watching me to see if I was paying attention. At times like these, I felt I was the one being observed, not the other way around, and I felt a decade younger than him. M. coughed and coughed and the room was filled with hazy brown smoke. I coughed too, from the second-hand. After this happened to M., he exclaimed, "I am higher than a kite! F---!" 5 minutes later, M. looked at me and said, "What's your name again? Tanisha? Amy?" and then sniffed some incense and said, "Mmmmm....smells like gramma 'n' baby powder." M. looked at me in a near-sighted way, with a smile on his face, and then closed his lids, over eyes which were squinty and red.

M. spent at least $500/mo. on pot. I guess, from what he said, that's average for most regular smokers. "WOW!" I said, "That's a lot of money!" For a habit, that's expensive. The other people in the room looked at eachother and smirked like, "What she doesn't know..."

The pot I saw was always called "the good stuff". I guess some is smashed or wet or weird, but this was perfectly dried, curated, whatever. Lots of crystals, and M. always wanted to show me the "purple cush". I don't know what cush is but it's pot vocab. The other variety I heard described was called "christmas green".

Pot stinks when it is smoking (I think), but beforehand, it smells like a fragrant herb. Personally, I think it smells like a mixture of lavendar, basil, and spearmint, and sometimes just a slight aroma of alfalfa, but I was told it's supposed to smell like a skunk. It never smelled like a skunk to me.

The last time I was around a bunch of people smoking pot (yesterday) it was next to a boxing bag. We were showing eachother our defense and "other" moves. They had finished a "session" and were sitting slack against the couch. Bored, I showed them my "roundhouse", and pulled my body off the ground drawing my knees to my chest with my fingers around a hook from the ceiling. D. decided to hang the boxing bag from the hook. He threw in some punches. Next, M. jumped onto the bag, curling his arms and legs around it, swinging on the bag which was suspended from the ceiling. He was smiling, dreamily. They told me to try it so I jumped up high, and then with my legs up near the top of the bag, and my feet hooked together, I let go with my hands and hung upside down, holding on with my legs alone. I asked M. to give me his hands so he could pull me off and up but he didn't move his hands up and my knees hit the floorboards. M. was high as a kite, as he says. (Memo to self, do not trust someone who has been smoking a 30 minute session to have quick reaction time) D. laughed and then kicked the bag with the side of his leg. Pretty good kicks. I tried to copy him and he said to put some power in it. It hurt my foot. It also hurt my knuckles when I hit it with my hands and now I know why you wear gloves. We quit after awhile and then D. noticed the bag was still moving when we were off of it for awhile. "It's a ghost," said M. "A good spirit," affirmed D., and then D. blew smoke onto the bag. "Look!" he said, "A face." and he was joking but M. sat there with his eyes getting wider and wider, looking for a face. And D. cracked up laughing.

Sometimes I wonder if maybe they really do need some pot. Both of them said in the past they were medicated for ADHD. Pot helps them more than ADHD meds they said. They were grumpy without it. Mellow is the right word. Lazy? Ummm...sometimes I thought they wasted a lot of time just sitting around, but they did work too. Everyone has a right to be lazy on their own time, I think.

I saw a documentary on the History channel not long ago, about marijuana and the drug war. It interviewed people from the DEA and other government positions, who made busts and talked about the evils, and then they also interviewed people who used it for medicinal reasons. At the end, it showed this woman, a mother of 4 who was buying it from a dealer, for a major speech impediment. She could barely even speak her stutter was so bad. It didn't even sound like a stutter...but after she smoked, her muscles relaxed enough, she said, to allow her to speak normally. It was the craziest thing I've seen. It influenced the way I think about the drug wars.

Conservatives claim there will be more crime with "drugs" legalized and yet making pot legal would take the business out of the black market, which is usually where the crime would stem from anyway, right? And if someone can make this much money in the black market, you'd think they wouldn't really want to have it legalized either because they wouldn't have the black market power and prices would drop. I mean, monopoly. It seems like die hard corporate owning Republicans and politicians would have their hands in it more than liberals, although on the "morality" scale, more Republicans would think it was "bad" than liberals, probably, and believe what they're told. I don't know, I haven't thought about it that much really.

I do know that from what I've seen I think it may have addictive qualities or properties. Like with M., and some of the others I've seen, they love it like a woman. It IS their main woman. Yet, I'm finding out some of these guys were hooked on it at age 12. TWELVE! So how do you take it away from kids whose parents introduced it to them so young, or who stole it from parents, and started the habit in their prepubescent years? I know I think M. is a divergent and creative thinker and should be in college somewhere. I don't know that he could focus on the work with all that pot everyday though. There is sort of a "whhoooaa...duuuude..." stupor that seems to set in. But maybe it DOES work for ADHD. I know it supposedly works for a lot of different kinds of ailments, and I'm told, you can't "overdose" on it either. So therefore, what is so bad about it?

I'm more concerned about being around second-hand cigarette smoke than I am being around second-hand marijuana smoke. And I think it's really sad our jails are filled with people who are petty users or dealers. It's the wrong focus. I don't see a lot of pot smokers or stoners holding up banks or spurred on to commit sexual assault. If it makes a few people lazy or affects memory...that may be the lesser of all possible evils.

Accepting reality about my "ex" Latin Lover has been more difficult. I think it is a fault of my personality, that I must have been so bored I wanted to imagine more exciting possibilities (I tested as ENTP type on MBTI and it fits me to a "T", and is rarer among women, and comprises only 3.5% of the population! I looked this up to check on career options to accomodate my personality and questions) I think my "ex" is just a regular guy. I saw his resume. I watched him again today, from a better perspective and distance. He's a regular guy. He has good points, and fundamentally is a good heart I think. He has also been a jerk at times and manipulative or deceitful and laughed about it with those he's close to. He is also still a "momma's boy" and both the boy and the momma agree on this point. He's a normal human being with faults and assets, and far too much beauty and technique than one should be allowed to have. My attraction to him was physical. By imagining there was more to it than that, or he was more than that, I was able to engage my emotions. I didn't care that he didn't have a lot of money or the best job in the world or was even living temporarily with his mother. Being interesting, with a connection, would have been enough. He touched me in an affectionate way today, while driving, and I responded in kind, but it availed nothing in the long run; it doesn't change his mind about me or my mind about him. I don't know, could I grow to like him more if we DID date? if I knew he was interested in me? if I was more open-minded? or would it just, as I suspect, end up at a dead end?

I wonder if my disconnect with D., is anything similiar to the disconnect the U.S. has with marijuana? A mind-body disconnect. Perhaps we already feel we know what is good for us, and trust the boundaries society and our government have put in place. You don't know until you try it. Is this true? and to what degree? How much does one have to try to know or can one observe and know enough? Can we trust what we think would be best for ourselves or is it necessary to have other people intervene and influence the outcome, whether it's individuals or society, in general, dictating what sort of attraction or fear we should hold for a particular object (or person)? If I am to observe, how long is sufficient? How long does it take for societal approval to shift to disapproval or vice versa? Or for individuals to change their minds about what is best for themselves or for others, and should I have the right to restrict others?

At this point, I don't think it would be a good idea to try anything further with D., but I'm speaking from experience too, and I appreciate my freedom of choice. For me, the risks outweigh the potential benefits. It would cloud my mind. I feel the same way about pot, in a way, that it may have good effects for my body, but what of my brain?

I think those who feel the benefits outweigh the risks should be free to make up their own minds.

I know this has to be a lousy argument, and I'm sure I don't have my logic lined up right and that my analogy is overbroad and strange, but it's what came to mind tonight. I wanted to write about some of these memories before I forget about them.