The other week, someone told me I had “stoner vibes,” and I didn’t really know that we still said things like that. Contrary to popular belief, I have only entered a period of chronic daily marijuana use twice in my life and only for a few weeks each time, which, if you think about it, makes up an unbelievably brief interval in the wide arc of my life thus far. I have only ever dragged my toe in dependency. 

In high school, my friends and I enjoyed a similar status of “stoner vibes,” but I was never sure what to make of it because everyone I knew then smoked all over the heaving, sporadic episodes of quarantine. We didn’t make much contact with the Fast–Times-type longue-durée of weed-smoking. We knew older brothers who smoked furtively out of water bottles in their family home, and older sisters who toked behind the Korean Presbyterian, but we never subscribed to the well-cultivated aesthetics of stonerhood. 

Our weed-smoking was effortless and detached from convention. Always embodied. Always anchored to place. We wandered and found ourselves outside of the home. We ranged with people we loved. Close enough to touch. We cowboyed. When we smoked, I was always someone somewhere, and, really, at the little pressurized, high-heat crystal of the thing, I thought we could do it artfully. The way I saw it, there was something old and dirty and undeniably beautiful to the whole thing.    

When I see those friends now, sometimes it feels like we don’t really know what to do with our hands or mouths. Eight of my ten friends smoked every day for years. All of them have tried to quit. For some of them, it worked. 

I first tried weed at fifteen, I think, when one of my friends invited me on his family vacation to Hot Springs, VA, which was lovely in the late summer. We wore boxers and slid ourselves into a hot tub that was really only warm. He impressed weed into the bowl so gently with his thumb. He held the little one-hitter hand-pipe so deftly. I was enamored by process. 

I spent the night dead-legged by this barometric sensitivity that tried to take every minute fluctuation of how I felt into account. I was jumpy, and had no idea what to look for. The hot tub jets bubbled and stopped erratically. I felt pinned to the surface of Virginia. I felt like I made a small entomology of myself against the night. The treeline throbbed with cicada sounds and frogs. The wind turned the trees. Then, I knew I was high. 

Chronic Daily Use Period #2

One summer, I ran a six mile loop in the woods close to every day. I finished dead tired, muddy, and prickling with sweat. Sometimes, I got tacos and a 20oz on the way back to my grandma’s house in Chapel Hill, NC. 

Then, every night, I smoked in my grandma’s garden or, sometimes, the guest room, which was Southern and lacey and proper. Two or three times, I smoked with my older cousin behind an elementary school near his house or on the bank of a little backwatered oxbow. My aunt tried several times to smoke with me, but I managed to avoid it. 

I liked the garden best. I sat right outside my grandma’s window, but I don’t think she ever suspected anything. It was easy to be ghost-like in these pinelands that slung so low in their valley. It was easy to smoke under my grandma’s window while she lay so still and silent in her bed. Easy is the operative word. Here are all the flowers I could name in her garden. Daisies, petunias, honeysuckle, hydrangea, azaleas, gardenias, coneflowers, milkweed, phlox, and a big magnolia in the front yard. 

I am mostly unashamed about my appreciation of these WASPy, dead guys like David Foster Wallace and Dave Berman. These guys who, when I mention that I’m a fan, elicit, not an eye roll or a groan but a more pity-laced “come on, man.” Soon enough though, you’ll find that most of the groaners and eye-rollers haven’t actually done the work of reading or listening or weed-smoking. 

I think at least part of my identification derives from their transparency about weed dependency. You can smell it off DFW’s prose. Ken Erdeddy in Infinite Jest not only smokes too much but does it with stunning expertise. Wallace writes: “he would smoke the whole 200 grams–120 grams cleaned, destemmed–in four days, over an ounce a day, all in tight heavy economical one-hitters off a quality virgin bong, an incredible, insane amount per day.” 

Berman, “Random Rules”: “Broken and smokin’ where the infrared deer plunge in the digital snake.” This guy knows what he’s talking about. 

In high school, my friends and I used to buy weed from this 26-year-old named Zay, who had a kid and was rumored to have a gun. My gutsiest friend drove Zay to the gas station and waited in the car for him to buy an iced tea and pork rinds. Then, he drove him back to his apartment. Sometimes, we’d get a discount on his shake-and-trim. After we lost contact with Zay, we bought once or twice from a girl in our class, who, at the time, was four months pregnant. We bought from a few members of the varsity lacrosse team. We bought from a friend’s coworker at Trader Joe’s. We bought from a deceptively straight guy. We bought from a deceptively gay guy in the year below us. We bought from a childhood friend. We bought from an art school student. We bought from a guy whose senior superlative was “class medicine man.” We bought from a guy who dropped out and went to wilderness rehab. We bought delta-8 one time from a 7-11 but never did it again. We bought from a friend’s brother. We tried to buy from another friend’s sister. We bought from the first guy we knew to get a med card. Then, one of my friends got a med card. Then, another. 

We were stopped by a cop one time while smoking behind a vacant office building, but he let us off, and it was unremarkable. 

Before entering a dispensary you have to present a valid drivers’ license to an associate stationed at the door. Under no circumstances, will they remember your face, even after regular visits. Inside, you have to approach a desk and present your valid drivers’ license to a second associate, who will ask you “medical or recreational,” which doesn’t actually mean anything anymore. They might ask you if you’re a member or want to become a member, and the answer should probably be “no.” You have to wait in a waiting room for a third associate to receive you in the actual dispensary. The second associate at the desk has to buzz you in. 

Every dispensary looks the same. I’ve heard friends compare the interior to a yoga studio but also an Apple store or a third-wave coffee shop. It feels corporately hostile. It feels far–geographically–from Zay’s apartment and the faint, spectral sounds of his infant child through the wall. 

There are still some permit-related weirdnesses at the dispensary. If you pay with debit, it shows up as a cash withdrawal with a heavier than anticipated ATM fee. Before you complete the transaction, you have to present your valid drivers’ license to this third associate, who always looks at it for a little too long. 

Chronic Daily Use #1

One winter, we smoked on a nightly basis, tight in our winter coats, in sun-faded lawn-chairs on my friend’s porch, in the great blue-dark of those chasmic evenings. We listened to Joni Mitchell and Vashti Bunyan and the wind tearing around slats of the porch. The blue-blackness just out of reach of the light from inside seemed to seethe with grainy substance, as if we looked at it through an old camera. The night so full of noisy, radiating stuff.

I have very few recollections of any that happened those nights. I was dating this girl and was horribly unhappy about the whole thing. My dog was dying, I think. My brother wasn’t talking to me. I don’t know. It was like I was never really there. 

Flower so heavy with terpenes that it leaves residues you can’t clean from your fingers for days. Flower that boasts THC content as incredible and insane as 35%. Flower that might better resemble the stuff my parents smoked interminably deep into the past. That flower dry and shrunken. Flower, when I got to school, with names like The Michelle Obama Pack. Flower cut with rosebuds or lavender or mugwort herbal blends. Carts flavored like Black Cherry Fruit Punch. Carts that get hot in your hand and threaten detonation. Carts that survive far longer than expected and become burnt and almost undead. Flower scraped together like gleaners. Flower that comes in a wrinkled ziploc bag. Flower that comes in vacuum-sealed packaging. Flower that smells predictably, unforgettably like cat piss. Flower that smells like nothing at all. Maybe you’ve gotten used to it. 

You can read these sections in any order, and when you finish, you can read them again if you want, but I wouldn’t recommend it. All you can do with these sections and the small space between them is try to trace lines in the fabric of my relationship to a substance. From there, you can start to trace the lines of my friends, but you don’t actually know them.

You can make like a cowboy out here. You can wander across these plateaux of intensities. You can be in a body and be in a place. The whole thing is very easy. 

My baby-brother turned seventeen the other week.

When I smoke too much for too long, I feel scrapped out and insubstantial and sort of translucent. In the end, it’s just weed. 

The PuffCo Peak Vaporizer works by heating a copper coil around this amberish wax concentrate of THC, CBD, and terpenes. The vapor percolates through a chamber of water, and–here’s the really magical part–you can activate the rig through an app on your phone. You can use the PuffCo Connect app to turn the thing on, and you don’t even have to be in the same room, from what I understand. 

I heard one story from an ex-girlfriend’s roommate. A guy she knew had this PuffCo Peak Vaporizer and the app and used it. Just a really great smoking experience all around, great enough, he said, to be worth the admittedly colossal price tag. The only problem was that one time, as a result of some software issue, from time to time the vaporizer came to life all on its own. This guy walked into the room and found the vapor already percolating, the chamber already filling with the thick, impenetrable stuff. 

In the summers, we returned to that porch, and, when he was in town, we smoked with my friend’s older brother. He lived in New York, then DC, then the Bay, but we could generally rely on seeing him every few months. 

He overdosed this past summer, but last time, the evening light felt watery. We toked from a dusty bong, and from time to time, resin caught the bowl in the down-stem. My friend’s brother told me about his job, which sounded boring, but, for a job, it didn’t sound so bad. Behind us, the sun set without us noticing. 

In a bookstore one time, I met a woman who had met a guy who had sold Animal Collective weed in high school. They’re another “come on, man” artist, but I can sympathize with a real particularity because they’re from where I’m from. We know the same lovely, desolate landscape. I can listen to their music and know that I am one person in this long, brotherly continuum of smoking at the reservoir, in the parking lot of the Jesuit school, the fairgrounds, the field where electrical pylons stagger like wayward giants moving West. 

One time, I picked this girl up in the battered four-door that my brother and I shared, and I smoked her out on the shore of the reservoir. I told a bad joke, and she didn’t find it funny. When we hooked up in the backseat, I was too high to get it up, and so we just sat there and sweated. We listened to country music from the four-door’s tinny speakers, and the summer made noise outside. We breathed very carefully and waited on something.