I first began smoking Marijuana in 200X. It was at the behest of a friend named Christian, who introduced me to the drug. Well, not introduced exactly. I had been exposed to Marijuana before, I had just never partaken of it. I felt it was somehow beneath me, until Christian finally convinced me to partake with him. For some reason I felt as though I wanted to be hospitable to him, to impress him, so I succumbed to Peer Pressure.
When we first began, we smoked an extremely cheap variety of weed we dubbed “Bub’s Bunk.” Christian’s only source for marijuana was his brother Bub, and his brother bought exclusively the cheapest weed he could find. (Well, except for a special occasion here and there.) It was almost unbearably shitty, and barely got us high at all. After several weeks of smoking it, it did almost nothing to alter our Consciousness.
Eventually Christian started hanging around a local indie band known as [REDACTED], and of course they had their very own weed supplier. So Christian got in good with him, and from that point on we were able to smoke substantially better weed. I’d say some of it was even the best you could get, although such occurrences were rare. The dealer’s name was Ricardo and he did deliveries almost any time of day or night. I only rarely remember being dissatisfied with his weed. Eventually Christian branched out to multiple sources, so we had a large variety of weed in addition to high quality.
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I got to where I smoked weed all the time. Everything I did, I felt was better as long as I was stoned. I started to enjoy incredibly terrible 80’s movies and bad Adult Swim cartoons like Space Ghost and Sealab. I watched a metric fuckton of anime on the substance. I played Baldur’s Gate and Suikoden 2. I even got high before riding the public buses to and from work at {The Company}. They say Marijuana is not an addictive substance, at least physically. But I can vouch for the fact that it can, for some people, be extremely psychologically addictive. I felt as though I couldn’t have fun unless I was high, and if there was a movie or something I wanted to watch, I would wait until I secured some weed before watching it.
As my marijuana habit deepened, I began passing it around to all of my friends. I brought weed down to [REDACTED] to smoke with Bill, and they picked it up and started smoking it frequently themselves. I would stay high the entire time almost every weekend I was down there, and we would play Magic: The Gathering (even participating in tournaments at times), watch anime (on a computer with external S-Video hookups that I brought with me), and played Dungeons & Dragons (primarily in the Planescape universe). Bill remembers these few years, from 199X until about 200X, particularly the weed-smoking period, as some of the best times of his life.
Eventually, as happens with a lot of Potheads, I lost all motivation to accomplish anything. I dropped all the classes I was attempting to re-take at the University of Kentucky and I started skipping out on work. I didn’t want to do anything but sit around, stoned. My slide into Mental Illness came around this time, and there were a lot of precursors to the illness. They say Marijuana is closely linked with and might even cause Psychosis, and I believe it. Of course, I tried many other drugs at the time, including salvia divinorum, acid, and mushrooms, so one of them might have been the “tipping point” as well. It was a confluence of circumstances, really.
After my Mental Illness developed, I began experiencing extreme episodes of Paranoia whenever I smoked Marijuana, particularly if I smoked heavily. I started to believe that my friends were going to turn me over to the Authorities as a Terrorist, that Al’s baby monitor was a wireless signal transmission device, that my XBOX was secretly communicating with Microsoft servers to report my activities to them, that Christian and Jed were trying to poison me with drugged muffins – all kinds of crazy shit. The Paranoia was so extreme and horrifying that I eventually had to quit completely.
My last period of Marijuana–smoking took place in Delaware in the spring of 200X. I went there on vacation with Erin, and every evening we would go out to the beach and get high. I would only take one or two hits at a time, and Erin got to where she rolled it up with half tobacco or more, so the experience was mild enough that my paranoia never surfaced. However, the very last time I smoked weed, probably in about 2008, I took a huge hit off one of Al’s bowls and my Paranoia exploded into every synapse of my brain. It was terrible. I vowed after that night that I would never smoke it again, and I haven’t.
Lately, however, I’ve been desiring to pick Marijuana back up again. The primary reason is that there’s a terrible Science Fiction show with puppets from Jim Henson’s Creature Factory that I want to watch while I’m stoned. It’s called Farscape, and I used to watch it all the time when I got high back in 200X or so. There’s usually some type of trippy, mind-altering sequence in every episode, and of course there’s a tiny, pompous puppet who’s always eating sloppily or farting or shitting on things. I know, I know, it sounds ridiculous, but trust me, it’s hilarious and trippy when you’re stoned. I think if I limited myself to a couple hits a time, I could avoid the Paranoia, but I’ve been afraid to risk it. Not to mention I doubt that my Brother would approve of any smoking being done in his house. I doubt I’ll go back to it, but I really want to. I think if I don’t, I’ll abandon that Farscape show as a lost cause – at least when you’re sober.