I first decided to smoke weed in the third grade. That is to say, the final straw that broke the authoritarian bind which prevented me from becoming a weedlover began with a simple English exam, where the teacher outrageously marked my spelling of ‘because’ as incorrect. I had opted for the clipped ‘cause’ since that’s how we spoke on the playground. English was my third language, but I loved it and paid careful attention to spelling. I knew I was expected to start with the prepositional prefix, yet I thought my bold vernacular would shake off the teacher’s dusty tradition. She didn’t give in, although I was willing to forgive this pigheadedness and confronted her, only to be told that there’s just one correct way to spell the word, and I’d made a clear mistake. So be it. I had faint suspicions that adults were out of touch, and that the world would remain ignorant until my generation took power. It would take a while for me to learn that the clipped spelling had been around for centuries, and that ‘be-‘ is itself a clipped version of the Proto-Indo-European root ‘ambhi’. As far as I was concerned at the time, the spelling incident had sealed my distrust of the old guard.
That’s why years later, when the lispy Ms. Stein told our 10th grade class that cannabith is an awful, terrible, bad thing we should stay away from, I immediately accepted the derisive laughter of my colleagues, and their conclusion that it’s overblown scaremongering. Before her failed intervention, I didn’t even know cannabis existed, or that people really wanted to do it but totally shouldn’t. Plus, if the old generation’s against it, there must be something important that they’re missing. After cafeteria meetings with theoretical and practical considerations of cannabis intake, I found myself in Joseph’s living room holding a bong and trying to inhale the spurts of smoke. I followed the instructions but it was still impossible to get the smoke in my lungs, so I gave up and settled for a sore throat. I was envious of Joseph as he relaxed on the couch, describing a flow of gorgeous visions projected behind his eyelids. This promise of visions was too fascinating to give up on, and I later took home a bong of my own to practice.
This so-called bong was brutally awkward, consisting of a small glass bowl jammed into the side of a plastic water bottle, roughly secured with layers of duct tape. This wonkiness might have had less to do with the prohibitive cost of bongs, and more to do with the suburban taste for grungy DIY stuff like duct tape wallets. I went inside my cramped closet after the parental authorities went to sleep, with warm orange light grazing the plaid shirt in front of me and flooding the soft pink carpet by my feet. I had to be quiet, gently sucking in tiny bursts of smoke that I struggled to pass into my lungs. After a few attempts sprinkled with gnawing worry about school the next day, I gave up and scrambled to hide the evidence. I justified lying by telling myself that my parents are prisoners of their generation’s stupidity and would only respond with hostility to things they don’t understand. My mom was born with a supernatural sense of smell, so she was clearly suspicious when she popped her head in my bedroom the next morning. Pointing to the open window, I explained that smoke must have drifted in from outside. She wasn’t buying it, even asking me directly if I’ve been secretly smoking, but she eventually dropped the subject after my rehearsed nonchalant denial.
A Single Spark Can Start a Spectral Fire
It took many more frustrating attempts to finally get the effects, about seven in total, but I became victoriously high in December of 2003. The auspicious event took place after Joseph & I smoked in the bare Canadian winter, immediately rushing inside after the smoke had entered our lungs. Once my conscious focus shifted away from animal re-comforting, the notoriously lovely buzz started to take hold. My body became friendlier to me, rewarding all movement with a sense of joy, and the anxiogenic confusion of adolescence became a hilarious absurdity. Laughter danced out of me as I wriggled around on a smoothly varnished oak dining chair, coupled with a general sense of wonder. I felt love for Joseph, my classmates, and my family. Reflecting on my comfortable middle-class life, I felt gratitude rather than the usual disgusted alienation. The fact that the older generation wanted to ban such harmless delight no longer brought up feelings of hatred, instead it seemed hilarious. Little did I know that just a couple of years earlier, the Canadian gov’t began to shift its attitude towards the drug ever so slightly, foreshadowing the full legalization many years later.
My lovely inaugural ride didn’t last long, since I realized with shock that I’d forgotten about a movie date with Trisha. The world already buzzed with beauty so it seemed absurd to travel far across the city in order to sit in a darkened auditorium, but the fear of losing my girlfriend was too strong. The next hour on the bus was an anxiety marathon as I incredulously stared at the vanishing minutes on my bulky black G-Shock watch, and afterwards sprinted through Yorkdale mall in a panic to get to the screening of Return of the King. Trisha was sitting in the very front row in a completely packed auditorium, utterly furious. I went to kiss her but she turned her head away in disgust. It was so disrespectful that I thought she’d made some kind of mistake, for a split second imagining it was a poorly timed muscle twitch. Had she known I was high, she might have wept and broken up with me on the spot, as she was deeply trusting of prohibitions. Hardly my Eve.
This kind of darkened twist at the end of a trip would become a reliable tradition. The second blast-off was next summer, when we went to the middle of a dense and inhospitable forest near my old middle-school. The high felt great at first, each plant glowing with bewitching mystery, but the return to social life brought a post-Edenic onslaught of pain, shame and embarrassment. Since we needed to smoke in secret, we were in the thick of an insect-ridden patch of forest, so I ended up getting the biggest mosquito bite I’ve ever had, smack-dab in the middle of my forehead. I took the bus home disfigured, with waves of paranoid humiliation washing over me as strangers gawked.
The Sepulchre of Suburbia
The worst experience of the early years was trying to smoke in the bathroom while my parents were out of the house. I would open the window and stand on the toilet, blowing smoke into the bathroom vent above because using any fragrant spray would be too suspicious for my olfactorily prodigious mother. The main problem with this technique was that the draft from the open window would make the door rattle, and since I was obsessed with avoiding detection, all I could do was focus on the sound of the door bumping into the lock jamb. Through the drug’s sharpening of the senses, the sound was steadily amplified and grew more dramatic, inspiring images of firefighters & cops breaking down the door to arrest me. Even after I went to a completely quiet room, I could still hear the door rattling alongside the ghosts of sirens, with virtually no control over it. It was like having my mind tumbled in a dryer of dread and anxiety without an off-switch.
Whenever my buzz wasn’t killed, it was like reaching a higher plane of existence. If a drug increases the sensitivity of the mind, it’ll cut both ways, either sharpening worry or deepening gratitude, depending on the external circumstances and interior wisdom.The buds of the cannabis plant are a kind of fragile gem, which is appropriate given the word’s Proto-Indo-European root connoting sprouts or buds. It’s an ancient gem, discovered and prized for thousands of years across the globe, from Romania to China. Highly sought after, it has inspired deities and rituals to appease and extract its magical powers. It dazzles with its viscerally hypnotic effects, tickling the mind’s eye in an infinite number of ways. Its integration into commerce has shackled and exploited many. This illicit sapphire reveals its beauty with great care, but is easily broken not just by conservative forces, but even by 420-friendly peers.
On the rare occasions where I went to a party and had a chance to smoke, the group ended up sitting in a darkened room staring at a screen, watching a movie or TV show. I took out a sketchbook to draw despite the poor lighting, and there was an old rush of elation that I hadn’t felt in a long time. Struggling in school, drawing had become an economically precarious dud, but the gem’s light extracted the ecstasy of expression and sight that I used to feel in my childhood. It was such a wholesome, peaceful, and productive experience that I decided to tell my parents about it.
This was a profoundly bad decision. The details of my confession are spotty, but I do remember that they reacted as badly as if I’d told them I secretly tortured disabled children for fun. I’ve never seen my parents angrier and more disappointed, which was terrifically upsetting since from my perspective, I’d made a marvelously beneficial discovery. To be fair, this was in line with the harsh anti-drug dictatorial communism they grew up with in Romania. My image as a worthy son was shattered, with my dad telling me that he wouldn’t have ever imagined I was one of those people. In my mom’s eyes, I was a despicable criminal, despite my tearful insistence on the spiritual significance of getting high. The event devastated me too, deepening my distrust of the older generation. After this blowout argument, I wanted to effectively break up with my family, and could barely wait to escape the household.
God Save the Green
But the gap between me & my weedly peers grew as well. Joseph was my closest friend for years, but we drifted apart after we moved to different schools, so I resorted to selecting friends via an online forum of fellow alienated youths, forming a group that meant a lot to me. Once, we decided to go to a concert together, but as soon as we got high, the idea of loud music in a dark, crowded and stuffy space was ridiculous. Everything was beautiful already. At the last moment I told them I wasn’t feeling it, that I’d meet them again later, and headed into Eliot’s second-hand bookstore. I cut straight to the tiny Religion & Philosophy section and browsed the titles, miraculously coming upon a single frayed copy of Alan Watts’ Behold the Spirit, his doctoral thesis on Christian mysticism that I’d been aching to find. In my heightened cannabistic state, the introduction spoke to me just like the friend I wished I had, elegantly reckoning with life’s depth. I only needed to pay six bucks for such a treasure and sat in a cafe to wrap my head around the mystery of God. The more I read, the more it felt like my soul was tickled by the prospect of coming to terms with God again after many years of atheistic drift. That’s how The Gem was meant to be handled.
Disharmony in my relationship with youth culture in general and weed culture in particular would continue to replay itself. Visiting Terry’s basement apartment would often involve getting high and watching stuff, while I tried to draw or write in my sketchbook without him noticing. Although I was grateful to be immersed in impressive new visual culture, these rare meetings were crucial for my schoolwork, furnishing ideas that helped me finish my thesis. I couldn’t help but think how much more I could get done if this was a daily practice. One of my most ambitious illustrations began after I hung out with Matt, who promptly fell asleep on the couch after we smoked, allowing me to sketch stunning psychedelic visions filled with Christian symbols. I spent months working on the resulting illustration since I considered the visions provided by The Gem to be sacred, something like a mentorship with a hyper-intelligent alien.
Ripening estrangement from family, friends and society at large took its toll on me. I tried going to a psychiatrist who had a three-stage approach to counselling young men with depression. His first tactic was to moralize, asking me my religion and pointing out that it forbids suicide. Secondly, he offered Prozac. Faced with skepticism on both fronts, he finally stated that he didn’t care whether I lived or died. Third grade flashed in my mind; another old idiot. Yet again, I felt justified in my distrust of authority, convincing me to give up professional help and finding my own solace through art and philosophy. Although I had many great moments, this was a fragile strategy that would often result in a weary spirit, eventually edging me to depths of anguish.
Bud Buddy
Luckily, during the worst psychological crisis, one of my classmates wanted to introduce me to her boyfriend, saying that we would get along really well. I hated the idea since I had a crush on her, and meeting her lover was pouring salt on a gaping emotional wound, but I went along anyway owing to some obscene allegiance to being polite. This turned out to be an excellent decision, since her boyfriend Benjamin was the one person who I could actually get along with. His alienated introversion rivaled mine, and while he was primarily interested in fiction he was able to keep up with me on philosophy, often besting my arguments, and leading to all-night talkathons that elevated my spirit. With the aid of copious amounts of cannabis and caffeine, I opened up to him about everything and anything, knowing I could rely on an intelligent response. It was during those nights that I felt I made the fullest intellectual breakthroughs, finally gaining important insight on topics ranging from atonal jazz to chemistry. Naturally, he was approximately my age, making him part of The Greatest Generation.
When Ben decided to move to Montreal, I was ready to join him and began preparing my luggage, one bag holding my bulky computer tower, and the other stuffed with clothes, books and art supplies. Having just graduated, it was the perfect opportunity to break free of my metropolis with its mass of unrelatables, although my parents were astonishingly supportive. Ben already knew a couple of people who lived in Montreal, so he left Toronto before I did, and once he settled in, I got an email suggesting we become roomies to save money on rent, which seemed like a great idea. The only thing I was worried about leaving behind was the large dance space afforded by my suburban house. After a pleasant bus ride where I eavesdropped on a six-hour conversation, I could finally step into a room of my own, tucked on a hill with giant maples and a quick walk from the gorgeous Mount Royal.
I dropped off my luggage and took a walk in the neighborhood, feeling like I was finally free. No more exams, teachers, lectures, TV, passivity, moralizing, conservatism, or arguments about my lifestyle, just the need for money. It was like a tedious nightmare coming to an end. With Ben around, there was a constant inspiration to be passionately creative, without any restriction on cannabis use. At first, this was exactly as fantastic as I’d hoped it would be, although actually getting weed was tricky. As much as I resented being at the mercy of other people’s offers to smoke me out, it was nice to avoid the deplorable silliness of trying to buy illegal plants. It felt like I was in a bad novel, meeting someone who moonlighted as a gun runner and secretly exchanging weed with special handshakes. Our weed dealer Alex was, unsurprisingly, always late, rarely answered his phone, and mumbled awfully, which inspired us to look elsewhere but with little luck. Benjamin & I walked along the restaurant district and some scary guys sold us something that looked like dirty oregano, but we didn’t feel like complaining since our lives were worth more than ten dollars. This technique didn’t always result in bad weed, since a young punk couple once sold us spectacular hashish, so great in fact, that when I first tried it out and Ben asked me how it was, I could only reply with giggles so intense I had to fart.
Alex was hard to ditch since his weed was so good. He claimed to be selling a strain called AK-47, a mix of Colombian, Mexican, Thai and Afghani pot which is known for inspiring creativity, although I didn’t much care about its pedigree. I just felt blessed to have any at all. When I unpocketed the little plastic package at home and loaded it up in Ben’s makeshift gravity bong, the experience was more like finally landing on planet Earth rather than floating into clouds. Without social obligations or the paranoia of getting caught, I could calmly absorb all the lessons The Gem had to teach me.
The Green Light
The overarching theme of The Gem’s lessons was that of radical appreciation, dissolving critical distinction into an ocean of awestruck gratitude. As I poked my head out our second-story window and stared down at a footprint in the mud, I was overwhelmed by its beauty and began to tear up. It was gorgeous not just because of its richly saturated hickory with specular highlights from the dazzling mid-day sun, or the reflective puddles giggling with green leaves, but also its transience and Biblical echoes. Cutting open a tomato was like peering inside an alien miracle decorated in luscious hues ranging from crimson to blush, oozing seeds packed with an unfathomable language.
Having secured a professional commission and given full creative freedom, The Gem got me thinking of myself as a potential success, as opposed to what I had anticipated in my despair, namely, a penniless nobody at the margins of society. Getting stoned and browsing art history books on the lush summer grass even persuaded me to think I could make something of myself, maybe earn millions and enjoy earning each penny. Suddenly the fact that there was a tiny chance of success was a source of great hope, rather than cause for resignation. I could take charge of the world and make it better, more beautiful, smarter, just as I planned to in third grade. A thousand year Reich of beauty and self-exploration!
Well, it worked out fabulously for a few months. I engineered days with existential magic, feeling happy and grateful from morning until night, just as I dreamed of in my moments of dreadful sober loneliness. Taking a walk past the endless lush gardens in people’s front yard was enough to fill my soul with awe, and watching traffic lights reflect off of wet asphalt was simply to die for. It felt like I’d reached the pinnacle of psychological health; directly connected to an immanent divinity, in love with life but tuned to the dark edges of my emotions, ambitious yet satisfied with what I had, appreciative of friendship but self-sufficient and autonomous. And thanks to weed, this could be a sustained state of mind. What could possibly be next?
At around the same age I was at the time, Neil Young sang in Old Man that living alone in a paradise made him think of two. So, as marvelous as Ben was, my feverish attraction to women was hard to ignore, and I wanted someone to share my bliss with. Rather than leaving well enough alone, I figured that adding a lover into the mix would catapult me to an even higher level of satisfaction. Like Adam’s partner in Genesis, it turned out this would be the key in my expulsion from my weedly garden of bliss.
