The Muppet In The Mirror

Okay:

So, let’s talk about drugs.

We all know about Slick Willie’s “I didn’t inhale” fiasco.

Old Dubya apparently had or has an affinity for beer and the white stuff.

And even my man Barack has admitted to experimenting with weed and coke as a young man.

It’s more than an epidemic now. It’s a permanent fixture in America’s youth culture. Remember how all those eighties comedians used to joke about experimenting with homosexuality in summer camp? The joke that wasn’t a joke.

Well, today we can replace the image of Jimmy and Tommy playing with each other’s junk behind a log cabin, sugar-high on green lime juice, with the image of them bumping a line of Bolivian white with the counselor. This is now a rite of passage, not something that you can declare war against.

I’ve had my history with them. Two of my sisters were drug addicts. I myself used to do a lot of drugs. I had a rule against cocaine and heroin, but I was game for pretty much everything else.

My drug of choice, for the most part, was reefer. And like most weed smokers, I had convinced myself that I was not “on drugs”.

“Weed’s not a drug. It’s a medicinal plant,” I’d say. “It cures the cataracts and a bunch of other more shit.”

You couldn’t tell me anything.

For years, I smoked every day. I spent my life in a foggy daze. In the beginning it was like an adventure. My buddies and I would pile up in someone’s car, pool our money together and go hunting for the best smoke we could find. Sometimes we would go clear across town for “The Chronic” or whatever they were calling good shit at the time.

See, I grew up in DC. We didn’t have designer weed back when I started smoking. You had “Regular” and “Chronic”. Now they’ve got all kinds of fancy names like Haze, AK-47, and Sour Diesel.

At the 7-Eleven they’ve got all different types of cigars, wraps and rolling papers.
An assortment of flavors: Peach, Grape, and goddamn Vanilla Bean.

When I was getting high you had your choice between Phillies, White Owls, Backwoods, and Dutch Masters. It you went to a nice CVS somewhere they might have Garcia Vegas, which were cool because each cigar came in its own plastic case. You could put your roach and all other kinds of shit in that case. Once or twice those Vega cases stopped me from getting arrested.

See? It was an adventure.

It was years before I could actually enjoy being high though. Once I started enjoying it, really appreciating the high, I wouldn’t be caught dead without at least a quarter ounce in my possession. I started smoking joints because I had grown out of the group thing and I didn’t want any stinky cigars funking up my apartment. And I would smoke anywhere between three and four joints a day.

Then one day, I discovered that my high was becoming a little less pleasant. It was something they had always told us in Health class, but I had never experienced until then.

Extreme Paranoia.

At first I thought I had a bad batch of smoke. But no matter who I bought from, it was always the same thing.

I would hear strange noises. I became extremely leery of the police and anyone who looked like the police. I would clean my apartment incessantly hoping to mask the smell of weed in case someone came a knocking at the door. I vacuumed at least once a day.

Remember that movie Reefer Madness? It was something like that, except in color.
And sometimes…just sometimes, I thought I looked like a Muppet.

That’s right. I would go stare in the mirror for hours and nobody could have told me that I didn’t bear a strong resemblance to one of Jim Henson’s creations. My nose was cartoonishly big. So were my lips. My head was way bigger than the rest of my body. My skin was a funky orange or orange derivative. This made me really sad and self-conscious, which wasn’t fun.

Then I would feel really bad about myself, like a loser, like all of my dreams and aspirations were dumb and not worth the time. I wasn’t anywhere near as talented as I thought I was. People were just humoring me.

They had also mentioned this in Health class. I was being robbed of my ambition. I was losing my motivation.

The final straw was the erectile dysfunction. Something else they told me in Health class was true. It is impossible to put a condom on a limp penis.

So, I quit.

Cold turkey.

That was seven years ago and I haven’t looked back sense. Best decision I ever made.
I will tell you about the acid, the mushrooms and the pills later. That’s a whole ‘nother blog.

Thanks for reading.

GOBAMA!

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Factoid: There are 3 different species of cannabis: 1) cannabis sativa 2) cannabis indica and 3) cannabis ruderalis. Sativa is the most common; it can grow in any moderate climate. Indica is the most potent; it only grows in the tropics. Ruderalis is the least potent; it can grow in harsh, cold climates.