Geed = Good Weed

Part I

Let’s say you are a SB, alone on a Friday night.  And let’s say you decide to roll a blunt and relax.  But I repeat myself…

Weed is not what is used to be.  It’s more prevalent, stronger, and more insidious than during the early age of the now-middle-aged.  And how we react to it is telling, like a Rorschach test.  Me- I react in the most un-mellow way.  Like curled up in the fetal position under a desk un-mellow.  The best payoff of smoking weed, the ability to take a step back, see things for what they are, distort things for what they aren’t allow yourself a  blurry-eyed helicopter-view of life instead of the focused street-level view of the competitor in this race we all run, can also be the worst result of smoking weed if you, like me, have a streak of anxiety running through you like lightning through your synapses.  That’s a long m-f-ing sentence!

When I used to take that weed-induced step back in my early teens, the 60s still in sharp relief in the near rearview (we didn’t even know they were over!), my friends and I would sit in someone’s attic, black light on and posters glowing, the Dead on the turntable, and just waste time wasted, laughing over nothing, obsessing over everything, lost in the comfortable cocoon of suburban adolescent life.

Now- the cocoon is not so comfortable, especially as an SB.  There’s kids to raise, mortgages to pay, jobs which are ever less secure, ex-wives to deal with and pay, the ever-increasing obligations of midlife sticking to us like dust to Pig Pen in Charlie Brown.  And what getting high does for yours truly, on the exceedingly rare times I have allowed by judgment to be swayed by some misguided nostalgic impulse, is to make me look down.

Say you are an SB.  And you have to deal with shared custody, alimony and child support, finding a new place to live using the paltry remains of your assets and income.  But I repeat myself.  And say you are high and sitting on the couch and that Friday night, you realize with a chill, you are ALONE, and there’s a chance you may always forevermore be ALONE because you are scared to death of getting married again, notwithstanding that you are even more scared of being alone, and you are old for God’s sake, 40, 50, you never thought you would even BE this old let alone this old and divorced or getting divorced with lawyers snarling at each other and your ex galavanting with whoever at your expense, or not galavanting and spending all her spare time ripping you to shreds on Facebook, to your kids, in your social circle…   You look down.  That’s what you do.  You look down, and you realize how far you have fallen and how far you still have to fall and you crawl into some safe corner and curl up in the fetal position ignoring the pings of your blackberry and the phone until, an hour or 3 later, you are finally not high anymore and regain some of your sanity and the glass tips a little from ¾ empty to 3/8 full to ½ full and you resolve, yet again, NEVER, EVER to smoke weed again.

OK that’s an extreme and admittedly very personal take on midlife marijuana.  But I can’t be the only one who faces, on weed, the threat of looking down, when you already feel much of the time you are on a high wire balancing the competing needs of career, the voracious demands of (i) divorce and/or lifestyle on your finances, (ii) parenting, and (iii) trying to find love yet again because you are a romantic idiot and can’t learn from these unfathomably expensive (emotionally and financially) mistakes.

Then there’s another and wholly contradictory risk- of allowing weed-induced comfort and relaxation to lull you into the inaction for which it is famed.  At the very time you need to act you anesthetize yourself on weed since you do not have that lightning streak of anxiety running through you which causes the near-toxic reaction I have to weed, but anyone faced with this wall of worry-inducing life stuff would be anxious and weed smoothes out the rough edges.  That is, until life catches up with you and makes the edges even rougher.  Letting alimony slide for a couple months?  Bad idea.  Letting kid visits slide for a few weeks while you watch Chappelle Show repeats, eat pizza and take time off from work to visit a stoner friend from high school in working as a waiter in the Catskills while the region slowly, agonizingly dies off?  Even worse idea.

And it’s insidious, no blatant symptoms like crashing your car into someone’s house, vomiting on a girl you thought you were impressing with your drunken wit in a bar, waking up at 4 a.m. on your ex’s lawn…

Yes there are some people, SB or no, for whom weed is like a martini to yours truly, it works for medicinal purposes to take the edge off and is consumed in moderation without deleterious effects.  But for others- I will go contrarian here and say, just say no to weed!   And then- there’s the kids, stay tuned for Part II!