Day 149: The Drugs Don't Work

When I first told Karen what I was planning on writing about, she said she’d kill me. So instead, I have no choice but to write about how Karen’s experiment has probably affected my relationship with her on a more tangible, mind-altering level than it has with anyone else she knows. You see, Karen and I are drug buddies – well, at least we were until she embarked on this project and swore off the reefer. From the first time we hung out at film school until last Thanksgiving the vast majority of the times Karen and I got together, we’d light up. It was hardly spoken of, it was just what we did – smoke pot. And we were pretty good at it, too, although as I think about it, I would frequently have to remind Karen to actually hold the smoke in her lungs if she wanted the drug to work. Oddly, for someone so good at reading people, Karen isn’t the best listener. Maybe that’s why she took to smoking all day long for six or seven years running – which was news to me, by the way - it takes work to get high when you smoke pot like you’re smoking a cigarette. I’m reminded of the scene in Easy Rider when Jack Nicholson gets high with the hippies for the first time and Peter Fonda counsels “You’ve gotta hold it in your lungs longer, George.”

Look at me, now I’m George. Which is appropriate, since in the scheme of things I imagine I’ve learned a lot more from Karen than she has from me. Oh sure, I’ve taught her a thing or two about baseball, but that hardly compares to the insight she regularly offers into little topics, like, say, the human condition.

So now when we hang out, obviously we don’t smoke anymore. And, sure, sometimes we both miss the nice glossy sheen it puts on the day. But really, it wasn’t hard at all. Like Karen’s mom noted in her guest entry, she suspects that Karen high isn’t much different than Karen not high. Well, as usual, she couldn’t be more right. Sober Karen’s pretty much the same, although I suppose the pot does take a bit of the edge off when her anxiety meter is running into the red zone.

Smoking pot, it turns out, isn’t so much addictive as it is a habit - a repetitive rut easy to slip into. My personal smoking habit has been on the decline for the past several years as I’ve come to realize that for me marijuana is an anti-social drug. It tends to shut me down on the outside even while the inside of my head is bouncing off the walls. And now with Karen on the sidelines, practically none of my friends smoke anymore and I’ve found it’s generally no fun being the only stoned person in the room … unless I’m literally the only one in the room. Then it’s still pretty fun or, at the very least, makes watching television palatable. In a social situation, the problem I have with being high is that I feel as if I’m part of the conversation, but then I realize I haven’t said a word. It was all in my head. With Karen, though, it was different, I never felt that way. It felt like we were riding the same wave. But it also felt that way when we didn't smoke. Basically, Karen is the sister I always wished I had.

So, I guess it’s not really right to say Karen and I were drug buddies because it sort of implies that once the drugs were taken out of the equation we weren’t buddies anymore and, thankfully, that couldn’t be further from the truth - not then and not now. We still do all the things we used to do. As always, we still talk for hours about nothing and everything. So as an homage to Karen’s obsessively compulsive need to wrap her entries up with a nice clean bow, let me finish by saying Karen’s experiment has shown us just how strong how friendship really is. Oh no, we don’t need drugs to amuse ourselves, not us … but without backgammon, baseball, TV, writing, politics, the general desire to deconstruct everything and our dogs, well, we might have a problem.

- posted by George