"In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity."
-Albert Einstein
I don’t drink much anymore. After a certain age, more than one margarita or glass of red wine really fucked with my sleep. The extra calories didn’t help either. A quick calculation showed that each visit to my favorite neighbors' across the street came at a cost of 500 calories and four hours of insomnia. Oy.
So at the beginning of Covid, while everyone else was attending Zoom happy hours and mixology classes online, I surprised the hell out of myself and smoked legal cannabis for the first time. This was surprising only because while I’d smoked pot at a few different points in my life, I hadn’t touched it in well over a decade, and hadn’t expected to ever again. I’d become rather uptight about cannabis, if I were being honest with you. I swore it off, was turned off by stoner culture, and swiped left on dating apps, no questions asked, if somebody’s profile indicated they were a stoner. Yup. I was that person, and I'm very sorry.
For starters, cannabis had been illegal nearly my entire life, so I always felt like an icky criminal whenever smoking pot or attempting to acquire it. I try my best to be a good citizen and not a menace to society at every opportunity, so avoiding things that could land me in jail seemed like the very least I could do.
Plus, Nancy Regan did a number on me when I was a kid; as did the after school specials on TV. "Just Say No". "Hugs Not Drugs". Messages like those made me feel like a loser for smoking pot, and the stigma alone was an effective enough deterrent. It’s interesting to reflect on that, because the worst behavior I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime was fueled by alcohol, not cannabis. Just sayin’, Nancy.
Also worth noting during my criminal days of weed use is we didn’t have any choices or information about what we were consuming. You literally smoked whatever was available, hoped it hadn’t been “laced” with PCP or transported inside someone’s body cavity, and you accepted that all bets were off on exactly how things would go.
Maybe it would be fun, or maybe you’d make a complete ass out of yourself at the grocery store and never want to show your face there again. Another time, you’d be too stoned to get up off the couch or tie your shoelaces. It was unpredictable and potentially scary. But this is a new era, and I’d been hearing that things were different now. So I put on my big girl pants, bought a great book called “A Women’s Guide to Cannabis”, and I decided to give that shit another whirl.
Frankly, there’s nothing unusual about what happened next, and my story would have otherwise ended there. I joined millions of Americans who tried legal weed for the first time and discovered its appeal. And it wasn't even such a big deal really, even though I had made it out to be one. I experimented with both edibles & smoking and found that I preferred smoking or vaping because the effects are immediate and adjustable. Edibles can take hours to kick in and often does so at different times and intensities for each individual, often leaving me out of sync with my friends. I found a strain of cannabis that I liked smoking in social situations (Red Congolese), another for deep relaxation (Kosher Kush), and with that– smoking cannabis became my preferred jam for unwinding instead of alcohol. Plus, no more sleepless nights.
But then I did something else in that first year of Covid that I hadn’t planned on, and that’s where my story takes its turn. I left California for six months to work remotely from other parts of the U.S. so I could enjoy the freedoms available elsewhere in the nation— like open restaurants and gyms, all of which were all shut down in San Francisco.
I keep a chalkboard in my entryway with a quote from Albert Einstein that I pass each day, which suddenly came into focus during lockdown to convincingly make its point. I saw an opportunity to escape months of isolation inside of my apartment, and repurpose the pandemic for a new adventure. Since I'd never lived outside of California before, I decided to spend San Francisco's Covid lockdown elsewhere, and work remotely from the Florida panhandle where I have some cousins. So I packed my suitcases, rented a small cottage a half hour away from my relatives, and set up shop in a whole different part of the country.
But there was one freedom that I completely failed to consider before skipping town. I'd totally forgotten that cannabis it is still illegal in many states, including the one I’d just arrived in. I had no idea how absolutely bizarre my own country was in terms of its cannabis laws and how much they varied from state to state. I was about to find out.
Comments