We had been hiking for hours and hadn’t seen a single soul when we reached the top of the lookout. With sweat soaking my back, I laid my hiking pack on the ground. The view was beautiful.
With my friend standing next to me, I thought “how does it get any better than this?!”
As we sat overlooking Mother Nature’s supreme work of art, we soaked in the energy from the plants and animals that surrounded us. Just then, a couple came walking along the trail and stopped to take in the view.
“Do you want some?” our fast friend asked as he held up a bag.
My friend and I looked at each other. “Sure!” we blurted out.
Later that night we carved an apple to use as a pipe and sat at our campsite ready to partake in an unplanned adventure.
It had been 15 years since I had last smoked weed, and I was nervous (and excited)! When I was 12 I had smoked with some friends less than 10 times before I decided it wasn’t for me.
But who was I to judge something I hadn’t done in over a decade?
We lit the apple, inhaled, and the journey began.
That night was pretty amazing; we laughed, we soaked in the stillness of the Pennsylvania woods around us, and we connected on a deeper level than we had our previous 15 years of friendship.
Months went by and I didn’t even think of smoking weed again. Besides, I hated smoke, and had been programmed to think marijuana was as dangerous and harmful as snorting cocaine or shooting heroin! However, I had such an amazing experience the last time that I decided to try it again.
Pow!
Just one hit and I was back in the woods, feeling connected, and enjoying the present moment.
The heightened awareness, the sensations, and the dopamine release were nothing like I had ever experienced before!
I was hooked.
I would experiment and use marijuana off and on for the next 4 years.
Hey Matt…
looking forward to the rest of the chronicles.
I was raised in the Northwest suburbs of Chicago, and also brought up with propaganda of the “dangers” of all drugs (or herbs)
I was in sixth grade when Jimi Hendrix died in 1970. I was playing snare drum in the school band, growing my hair long & had just bought my first pair of bell bottom pants. Over the next two years, I started a rock band with a few friends, covering Zeppelin, Sabbath, Stones, Beatles, among many others… and my guitar player & I snuck some of his dad’s pipe tobacco, & ventured into our first head shop to buy some rolling papers so we could “practice” for the chance to smoke herb, which hadn’t materialized just yet.
By the last months of summer before freshman year, we had been initiated by my brother, and after a coughing fit of inexperience with the mechanics of smoking, I vividly recall the little threaded metal lamp parts pipe coming my way, but I waved it of, as I was experiencing a weightless sensation, and actually couldn’t feel myself touching the mattress where I was sitting in my bedroom. I was floating… and I recall Jimi’s “Isabella” was playing, from the Woodstock 2 album…
That same first buzz also led to a vivid, astral travel type of perception of myself having floated back up out through the corner of my room, behind my head… and I saw my room become an isolated luminous cube of activity, floating in dark space. The activity was seeing my friend, my brother AND MYSELF sitting there.
Now, to be honest, at 56 years old now, I’ve told this story a few times before, so I partly remember the remembering… but I am also sure that was pretty much how my first marijuana experience was!
Seeing my first Concert was a trip too… Johnny Winter and Rick Derringer in Chicago! Seeing weed being passed around in “public” was a first for me, and after that my friends and I were buying concert tickets for almost every weekend we could afford if someone cool was playing… and in Chicago, someone cool almost always was!!
The 25 years worth of stories between then, and 1998 could fill a book, but were basically all good, and similar, (though never as trippy as the first) but it was on my 39th birthday that I decided to “take a year off” from smoking weed. In fact, once I felt myself making that resolve so deeply, I just added on quitting alcohol too, as an after thought.
I should note that in 1998, I had been growing my own sinsemilla for years & was smoking a few fatties a day, on average, and drinking 5 or 6 beers most nights. But from that birthday, until my 40th birthday, I didn’t smoke one tiny puff, of anything… and not a drop of alcohol crossed my lips. Until my 40th anyway!
Anyway, I thought your part one ended before I was ready, so I decided I’d start a conversation down here while we wait for your next installment!