For the past two years, during which time I have written and edited thousands of articles for this website and cofounded one profitable LLC and two political-action groups, I have gotten high hundreds of times. In fact, I’m high right now. I used to think that I’d get fired if anyone found out about this, but a lot has changed politically in the last few months, and anyway, I’ve got nothing to be ashamed about. I come from an accomplished, if fractured, Midwestern family. I earned straight A’s at an elite university. My behavior is legal (to some extent) in 28 states, including California, where I am registered both as a voter and as a medical cannabis patient. If you met me, you might think I was a little bit of a weirdo—especially if you’re the sort of person who never, ever smokes pot—but you’d definitely trust me to house-sit, or to watch your kids, and they’d love me.
My relationship with Mary Jane hasn’t always been serious. We hung out a few times in high school and became intimate in college, when I got to know her alongside my friends in the honors dorm and continued to see her openly after the RA, who lived right across the hall, said she really liked my incense. She—MJ, not the RA—was my muse, midwifing moves at dance rehearsal, lubricating term-paper language, turning autumn hikes sublime. I brought her with me to Widespread Panic shows and on shopping trips to D.C. On graduation day, however, when the afterglow of our tryst in a serpentine-walled garden was snuffed out by a parental audit of my career prospects, I decided it was time for us to break up. I washed my glass bong crystal-clear and placed it in my empty bedroom closet, a mitzvah for the next occupant to discover.
I moved to New York, and soon I didn’t even miss her; I was too busy doing battle in a media business that eats its young. My pantsuited boss would not under any circumstances abide the conversational confusion of “bring” and “take,” and so I more or less avoided my plant paramour altogether, save for a jaunt to Jamaica during which I ate a pot cookie and tripped my face off at a large party at which I was the only white person, which is an experience every white person ought to have. Later, when I was dating someone I was really excited about, we holidayed in Jamaica together and didn’t touch the stuff. Years passed and our adrenals got blown out and we got engaged and fled for his native L.A., though perhaps, come to think of it, such a dramatic move wouldn’t have been necessary if we’d just smoked a little pot once in a while.