Memoirs of a Pothead

"Good Ass Intro"

                  Hi, I’m Alex and I’m a pothead. This is no intervention though. I’d probably slap you if you tried to throw me an intervention for smoking weed, and I don’t even know you. The moment I go out and start sucking dick for weed is when I’ll allow myself to be intervened on, and that’s never going to happen so I guess we can just forget about that whole scenario, huh? Anyways, this is going to be kind of a different novel, but not necessarily a bad one. I’ll explain a few of the differences.

                First, I’m going to break the fourth wall quite a lot. In fact, let’s just pretend like it’s not even there. A lot of the book I’m probably going to be talking right at you, and yes, I am also going to acknowledge that it’s a novel. Some people may say that this takes away from the literary aspect of it, but hey, Twilight did well right? Don’t worry, I’m not just going to be talking at you the whole time, I have a story to tell, I just want to tell it in my way. I promise it’ll be worth it though.

                I’m not really going to be making up complete fiction and I’m not necessarily going to be talking about things that happened to me. I guess that makes this fall under the “fiction” genre but really I’m just going to be talking about real shit. If this story was a rap it would be like a Cole flow. Nah, I take that back, it would be a Kanye song. Early Kanye though, like “The College Dropout” early. That’s exactly how I’d like to describe this story actually; this is like “The College Dropout” of literature. And that’s my favorite album, so I hope I can live up to that title. I just want to let people into my world the best way I know how.

                There will probably be a hell of a lot more differences between this novel and what you’re used to reading, but at the moment, I can’t think of any. So I guess we’ll come back to this when I think of them. And that’s about it. There’s only one logical place to start this story. It would take too much typing and straining to remember foggy details to start from the beginning of my life and that would also make this too much like an autobiography. That’s not what I want this to be. And if I started at my life right now, you would miss a pivotal change that I had to go through to understand me. So we have to go back to when I first really started to change, and that would be when I first started smoking weed.

                If you show me a person who has said that smoking weed hasn't changed them at all, then I'll show you a liar. I’m one of the last people that want to perpetuate the stereotype that once people start to smoke they become a completely different person, but it’s almost inevitable that you’re going to begin to change when you start smoking weed. Because smoking just makes you look at life in a different way. It’s hard to explain if you’ve never smoked, but if you have I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. Before I started smoking, I looked at life in a completely different way. In all honesty, it’s super ironic, but in like 5th grade I even won a drug-free ribbon award thingy for this poem I wrote. If I ever find it I’ll have to let you see it, it’s quite possibly the definition of irony. But I honestly never thought I would smoke, until my junior year in high school I thought smoking weed was one of the worst habits you could pick up. I was brainwashed.

                My junior year I had this goal, I knew it was impossible, but I still wanted to try. I was going to try to read every fiction book in my library before school ended. There were easily a thousand of them but I was reading through them like three books a week so I felt like I could knock it out. It was like halfway through the year, and I was really into this book, “Going Bovine” I wanna say it was, but I’ll have to get you the author later. And in it, the main character smoked weed, and then around the same time I started to realize that my mom smoked weed regularly, and it began to hit me. I'd just been made to think that weed was bad all my life, but some really amazing peope have smoked weed, so maybe there was more to the story. I began to think for myself, and I realized I actually wanted to try some weed and make the decision for myself.

                So, it was junior year and I hit up my friend Antwan to see if he knew where I could grab some. I was an honors student who didn’t know anything about weed at the time. He told me that he did and that he could pick up some after school and we could smoke. Decent.

           So that day he came to my house, and I hit up my friend Brandon. Brandon had been my friend since Kindergarten. We hung out like every day when we were growing up. That had changed freshman year when he started to get interested in other things. He had joined a stupid high school "gang" that was nothing but a bunch of suburban kids getting into trouble. Me and another one of my friends had even tried to spring an intervention on him to get him to stop. Like I said, I was brainwashed. But, back to the conversation. I asked him if he wanted to smoke and he said yeah, and that we could do it on his back porch. Extra decent.

                So we walked around the corner to Brandon's house and I called him when we were outside. He came out with a crude aluminum foil pipe since none of us could roll or had pieces yet, and a big smile on his face.

                "Look who's trying to smoke now, huh?" Brandon said, busting my balls about my hypocrisy. 

              "I'm not saying I'm trying to smoke regularly, I'm just trying it." 

             "I feel you. Well...let's get high booaa!" Brandon said as he took a little of the weed that Antwan had grabbed after school and put it into the bowl. After he was done he picked up the lighter and began to put the flame to the weed, but stopped just as he was about to actually light it. To my surprise, he handed the bowl to me, allowing me to .

                Now, let me clarify a few things. The first time I smoked weed, it was reggie. Reginald Sanders. Regina King. Schwag. Shake. Booty. Not-Dank. Whatever you call it, it was weed of lower quality. And I got high off it. We smoked like a bowl, and although I wasn’t super high, I could feel it.

                When I got up from the chair it started to set in. My body was light as hell. The wind was lightly blowing. Why hadn’t I noticed that before? My body felt like it could ride the currents of the breeze and fly away if I let it. Brandon and Antwan were laughing about something, but I wasn’t paying attention to them. This wooden ledge about a foot from Brandon’s driveway was calling my name.

I walked over, laid down on it awkwardly, and looked up into the sky. It was bluer than it had ever been. The clouds were lazily moving across the sky, and the sounds of nature faded into the background for a few seconds. That’s when I realized that weed was a good thing. I had never felt more in touch with nature, myself, or life in general than I did in that moment. I was content to just lay there forever.

                “Dude…what the fuck are you doing?” Antwan said.

                “Aaaahhh…he high as hell!” Brandon said laughing.

                And there was that moment.

                “Hell yeah, y’all tryna hit another bowl?” I said. And the rest of that day I was high. And the next morning. Those were the days when I would still feel high days after smoking. The good days. But as I smoked, I began to realize that the weed was changing me a little. It was just subtle things. I felt more comfortable in my own skin. I didn’t worry as much as I always had. I was more serene than I had ever been.

                After that first day of smoking, we kept smoking, like once a week or every two weeks, until school let out. Then we smoked a lot more. We were high pretty much 24/7, and when we weren’t high we were still buzzed from the last high. We did a lot of stupid stuff, and had a lot of dumb high adventures.

                Antwan ended up moving away, but that was okay, because I had other friends. There was really never a dull moment. In short, That summer was epic. 

                In case you actually cared, I didn’t finish reading all the books in the library. But, I did smoke a lot of weed. I met some really cool ass people. And I had some really epic times. They were nothing like the times I had senior year, but we’ll get there.

               Since then, I’ve taken a bunch of other steps on the road to becoming who I am today. And I’m not done taking steps yet, but I have kind of a map of where I want my path to lead me, I just wish it would quit changing so much.