I hadn’t smoked pot for twenty years until recently. The last time I had smoked it the night ended in a dark room with worries of someone spying on us. Whatever pot did to my twenty year old brain wasn’t good. I smoked it as a pre-teen, starting as young as 13. I smoked it on and off with my friends – because what else was there to do in Upper Ojai, where I came from. It always made me feel like I was smarter than everyone else or that I knew them all better than they knew themselves – or I knew the truth that they were running from. It was very isolating. I hated it after a while. I loved and love my brain. I love the way it thinks. I love having it cleared to think. I love nothing more than being inside my own head and have no problem being lost in for hours. But after twenty years I decided to give it a whirl again to see what it would do. Turns out, it isn’t half bad in my old age. In fact, it’s quite good. Maybe too good? While I like my brain it’s occasionally fun to have it tuned to a different station. It feels like brain yoga, being stoned. But the last time I smoked it I felt those familiar paranoid feelings returning. Every time I said something I had an out of body experience and a critical voice that scolded me – as if to say, “how dare you speak?” So I probably won’t be a pot smoker for long, I figure.

On the other hand, I did note a couple of really great benefits. One, no PMS at all. No symptoms, no pain, nothing. I also noticed that it took away my nervous anxiety. Those two things alone make it worthwhile. What I need is a mellow hybrid of some sort that keeps the brain yoga part but doesn’t keep the paranoia/critical voice part.

Anyway, thought you, two readers of my blog, should know this.

Needless to say, it should be legal. What a waste of tax dollars policing something that can be grown in the ground.