My drug career is like the Supertramp song Take the Long Way Home... to Cannabis. And I'm grateful that she always takes me back. Even though I wasn't always honest and I blamed her, but it was always me. I got scared and left. I own that. But we're back together again and having fun, doing a lot of laughing, eating ice cream. A fairly typical middle-aged stoner couple. Didn't they invent Netflix and chill for us?
But it's always been feast or famine. When I'm not doing it I know why and feel like it the relationship was doomed from the start. I was the kind of infatuated Stoner kid who would rather study by not reading anything and then smoking right before the test. Doesn't work. But at the time suffering grades seemed a small price to pay for the tremendous insights I was having into the utter improbability of it all, life's wonder and weirdness and tragedy. The specifics don't matter it was real at the time it's all about the moment anyway. Or was.
Probably it's better to start with cannabis after you brain has fully sized up. I can't imagine what it's like for young people today, with a prescription for adderal & taking Lexapro, Abilify, Convivia plus smoking fearfully strong stuff from the dispensary.
The closest thing to a universal cannabis law somebody told me once was that young people need to learn to say no but older people need to learn to say yes.
What other recreational drug can you have a respectful two way relationship with your whole life? Maybe wine and beer. There's nothing better with a delicious meal than a glass of dry red wine or a crisp lager, and there's even health benefits and all that jazz. Not so much with booze. Some famous writer said he'd taken more from alcohol than alcohol had taken from me. But that's exactly what somebody would say about a codependent relationship
Cannabis meets you on your own intellectual level and gently nudges you to pay attention and it's very clever and mercurial until it turns on you. I met a guy in rehab for cannabis induced psychosis, he was from an affluent Iranian family young guy no more than 20. Seemed completely normal except that you could tell he had a bad fright. When you're a college student at a top university and all you have is money and time and all you want to do is smoke bong hits you're pretty much leaving your soul in idle and spirits can and do come in. He was a tragic character out of Russian literature in that he was one of the most sensitive, thoughtful young people I've met with impeccable manners, yet he was in a locked ward.
The best relationships with cannabis remind you of all sorts of things that are important, gratitude, reverence & respect for nature. Even the Bible ends with a vision of the Tree of Life which stands paradoxically on both sides of the river of the Water of Life, bearing 12 crops of 12 exquisite fruits. "And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the Nations."
www.bluelight.org
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