Every day – February 6, 2020

I guess if I want to get back to writing every day I should start by writing every day. Do I have to publish every day too? I probably should since one of the things that’s been stopping from the starting is the fear of not finishing. I’ll take the URL off my instagram, and I’ll just press god damn publish. If I can work out five days a week I should be able to publish a little turd five days a week.

Here we are. I think the first think I should mention is how wordpress is trying to shame us into using one space after a period by making two spaces look weirdly big. I am extremely outraged. I look typing class after 8th grade.

the quick fox jumps over the brown cow

There was no accommodation for stylistic changes. There’s no way back from here. Also, I don’t know how to move this blog or revise it or do anything. And who writes a blog anymore? And who reads a blog anymore? I haven’t had an office job in six years, but that’s where I did my most aggressive internet reading.

Maybe writing every day will help me find my old self esteem. I miss it.

The Basics

When I start talking about weed with other adults, three issues always come up.

First of all, I don’t know what the hell to call it anymore.  Cannabis sounds too square, marijuana sounds too racist, weed sounds too stoner-y, grass sounds too hippie-y, pot sounds too 8th grade-y.  I find myself flopping between grass, weed, and pot, but I don’t think any of these words are helping my cause of trying to normalize adult use.  So that issue is about 20 years into a lack of resolution for me personally.

Second of all, (which is also third of all) people tell me “weed makes me paranoid” or “weed makes me fall asleep”.  Now this is something I can speak to with authority as a user and as a weed nerd.

There are two subspecies of the cannabis plant: Cannabis sativa sativa and Cannabis sativa indica.  The short hand for these two types of cannabis are sativa and indica and becoming familiar with them is how regular users predict their effects.

The quick explanation: Sativa makes you feel high, but can make you feel paranoid.  Indica makes you feel stoned, but can make you fall asleep.  As a kid, you might have liked sativa to go to a concert, and indica to hang out on your friend’s basement couch and eat chips.  As an adult, you might like sativa to clean out the garage, and indica to stop obsessing about what an asshole your boss is.

In this wonderful epoch of cannabis we’re in, there’s a huge variety of sativa and indica.  You don’t have to be cis normative when it comes to your cannabis preference; in fact most people enjoy the two subspecies at different times for different reasons. And the very best development in modern cannabis cultivation: the blend!  In fact blends are so prolific and specific you can get sativa or indica dominant blends, or just a full on half and half.  It’s a glorious time to be alive!

It’s important to note that many adults don’t like smoking weed anymore because they only think of it when they’ve already been drinking.  Getting high when you’re already on alcohol is a party gamble with few rewards.  If you’re really lucky – you’ll feel a little drunker.  If you’re like the rest of us…you’ll get the spins and puke. It’s not very fun to have to face that toilet as a 40 year old moaning “but I only had four glasses of pinot noir”….although it’s one of those lessons you may just have to learn once a year.

As cannabis becomes more common in social settings, more users have familiarity with what strains they have.  It’s perfectly acceptable to ask before you partake and not bad manners to pass based on the answer.

If you have suggestions or opinions on what to call grass, please comment below!  And as always, feel free to ask questions in the comments, or email me at advice@poorluckyme.com

 

The First Time

The first time I got high I was 16 years old and George Clinton and the PFunk Allstars had just stepped out on stage. I was with my best friend and her sister, who wasn’t supposed to know we had snuck off to smoke weed.  We had huddled around a little metal bowl and held lit cigarettes between our fingers as cover as we burned a little pile of brown buds and took turns sucking in the smoke.

The first few amplified notes surged over the crowd and we rushed back to our seats.   After 6 or 7 tries at getting high in the past nothing had happened, so I had no expectations that this would be any different.  I shuffled sideways past a row of adults and sank into my plastic chair.  I avoided eye contact with the sister.

The stage exploded in sound and color and light and smoke and deep thumping base that entered my lungs and beat my heart.  I struggled to remember everything I had to do to keep functioning: breath in AND out.  Keep eye lids open.  Blink occasionally, not too fast.  Lift my arms to push my hair out of my face.  After ten long minutes – ten decades of minutes – ten centuries of minutes – I stood up.

I was standing on my own planet, watching P-Funk by myself, inhaling my own oxygen that the trees fed me and exhaling CO2 to feed them back.  I wasn’t self-conscious because I had no self.  Eventually I looked over to my friend, and the sister, and the thousands of other people at the show.  And we were having a god damn good time.

Getting high was like finally learning to speak the language after 16 years of living in a foreign country*.  It didn’t make everything perfect, but it helped things make sense.  And as I grew into my teenage years and watched other kids use alcohol to fit in, I knew why they felt so weird.  Alcohol makes time speed up, imbues you with a false sense of entitlement and amplifies your urges.  Grass makes everything slow down and uncovers the false veneer that everyone is working so hard on.  Nothing matters other than what’s right in front of you.

Four weeks after the Parliament show I was a committed stoner.  Years went by before I tried drinking again – I just didn’t need it the way the other teenagers did.  When I began searching for a college to go to, I bought a huge book and dog-eared all the schools that listed “pot culture”.  As I got older and had no interest in limiting my weed smoking, I had to come to terms with how people would think of me.  A 20 year old female stoner.  A stoner waitress.  A stoner failure at my first career.  A 30 year old female stoner.  A middle aged stoner.

It made me feel less embarrassed to just tell people.  I usually give a new person about 40 minutes before I find a way to work it into the conversation.  Sometimes there’s a hesitation, an are-you-for-real look, maybe a dumb joke…but for the most part no one gives a good god damn.

I own a successful business and raise a funny, precocious daughter.  I don’t take xanax.  I exercise regularly.  I set goals and I achieve them.  And I smoke weed every day.

Now I’m going to tell you about it.

 

*this was particularly poignant when I continued getting high while living in Italy, but never actually learning how to speak Italian.

 

 

So Let’s Say – Monday April 23rd

Things aren’t going the way I want them to go.  Wait that’s not it.  Things are going the way I want them to and it’s not enough for me.  I should be more passionate.  I should be more enthusiastic.  I should be able to access joy authentically, not by gritting my teeth and forcing myself to.

Faking it until I made it worked, but it doesn’t feel real.  At least with the deep dark lows came the ridiculous highs.

I’m going to be more methodical.  I’m going to spend some time every day being active, being creative, being driven, being social.  And I’m going to god damn write it down and be accountable.

The problem is the same problem that I always have, the one everyone has, the problem that there’s always something to get in the way of doing the hard stuff.  But I’m tired of letting it get in the way.  I want to go back to my aggressive, driven self.  Not this complacent self.

So let’s say I can actually do this.  I worked out today, so I was active.  I wrote this shitty blog post, which I’m counting as creative.  I’m going to do some research for me New Big Idea, which will be driven.  And I’ll call a friend to be social.  I can do this, I can be methodical and focused.  I can be an adult.

I don’t want to wake up one morning as a 75 year old and say “well shit, I had every opportunity in the world, and all I did was watch the time go by”.

Maybe this afternoon I’ll actually write something that I’m proud of.  But for now, I’m proud that I’m pushing myself forward.

When My Creative Epiphany Turned Into My Creative Apocalypse – Wednesday October 25th

Chicago, IL

El Train: Brown Line

One impetus for my creative epiphany was a series of random and incredibly fun events I’ve been going to with a friend of mine.  She’s more accurately a Superfriend: fun, thoughtful, dear, sympathetic, supportive, and encouraging. I like to think of myself as her ringer, but she’d probably argue that I’m just so fucking fun she wants me to come along to whatever she’s going to.  In the past month we’ve gone to a famous sports guy benefit, two Cubs games, and a benefit liberal social services that make a difference in the local community.  These events involve incredibly fun pre and post parties, usually at a fabulous restaurant that I had never heard of until we walk in and are hugged by the owner.

I own my own business and go to many many industry events.  I know how to pay for your lunch at someone else’s event… I went out of my way to talk to the akward client, or give feed back if it was helpful, or buy an unreasonable amount of raffle tickets because I was drunk and couldn’t figure out how the app worked.  (By the way, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to know that they design those apps specially to trick the drunk and the elderly.)  But these small gestures paled in comparison to the opportunities she was giving me.

And then Superfriend texted me an invitation to see Katy Perry perform at the United Center in a skybox full of business people.

“That sounds like my worst nightmare” I graciously replied.

“Please” Superfriend wrote.

“Yes, of course I will” I typed quickly.  It would be powerfully shitty for me to only say yes to the stuff I wanted to go to, and say no to stuff that made me want to hide in a hole until it’s popularity faded.  So I arranged for a babysitter for Thursday night, I charged up my Hoverkicks, and started to psych myself up to see Katy Perry.  I figured I had a few days to get right in the head about it- Thursday was almost a week away.

Wednesday evening I took the EL home.  It was a nice commute, I saw a new mom-friend and we talked the whole ride back to the suburbs.  When I finally looked at my phone, I had a few missed text messages from Superfriend.

“Hey, we’re all at the bar, you on your way?”

“My phone is going to run out of batteries, if you can’t meet us call one of the other people in the group, we can meet at the United Center”

“Is everything ok?”

Huh.  How odd.  I wrote back: “Shoot, I can’t go out two nights in a row – I just got off the EL by my house”

She replied “You’re not coming?”

I called her; “Ummm are you guys pregaming for Katy Perry?”

“Hi! Yes! Are you ok?” Superfriend said with concern in her voice.  I can be a terrible flake, but not a casual canceller.

“Superfriend, I thought it was tomorrow.  My babysitter is for tomorrow…I just got home.  I screwed up.” I hung my head as I talked into my phone.  ”I’m so sorry!”

“Pfffft it’s fine!” SF said. “I don’t want you to come all the way back downtown, it’s not worth it for this.”

“But but but I wanted to say yes! And my blog! I was going to write about it! And I owe you this yes!”

She laughed and assured me that she’d find someone to use the ticket and would try to have fun without me.  I felt like a real shitheal.  I berated my brain: “if that had been Beck you NEVER would have fucked up the day!  You worthless turd!  You can’t even run a mile without stopping.”  That last one is a standby in my shame cycle.

Eventually I realized that my whole creative epiphany was going to be derailed.  I wouldn’t have Katy Perry to write about.  Then I’d be frustrated and I wouldn’t write about an upcoming advertising party.  Then I’d sink lower into the chasm of self loathing and ignore the whole weekend.  And I’d feel like shit.

I talked to Superfriend the next day.  The show was everything we had imagined it would be.  It was the best/worst, it was stupid/fun, it was ridiculous.  I’ve never been so mad to miss something that I had no interest in going to until I couldn’t go.

So fine, I’ll write about that.  It took me days and days and it’s not perfect and that’s barely even bothering me.  Just kidding, I care so much I just realized I could write about that someday…about how much I care about stupid shit.  And here is where I think of some inspiring thing about productivity and self loathing and choosing your own happiness or something.  And I write it in a way that won’t embarrass me when I read it six months from now.

 

Brain Goes Boom – Monday October 24th, 2017

Pabst Riverside Theater, Milwaukee Wisconsin

Alt J (with special guest  NoMBe)

I stood in front of my seat in the Pabst and couldn’t believe how much fun I was having.  The tickets were general admission, but that included the option to sit in the theater instead of standing in front of the stage.  I hesitated at first- what about the energy of the crowd, the collective joy, the slick sweat of the molly’ed out frat dudes who always wedge themselves in front of me? Then I chose a seat.  A glorious aisle seat, a protective little piece of real estate, a red velvet force field.

The theater is intimate and easy- even 2/3rds of the way back it was the best view of a band on stage I’ve had since the 8th grade, when my height was still average.  The beer lines were short and accessible, the bathrooms were not disgusting.

When the first notes of 3WW creeped out and the lights came up, we all stood in our seats and gasped.  All of us.  Every one of us.

It occurred to me that I didn’t have a concert enemy.  You know that horrible person who ruins a show for you no matter how carefully you avoid them: The Talker.  The Wasted Chick Who Swings Her Hair In Your Beer.  The Guy Who Pushes His Crotch Against You. The Space Stealer. The Falafel Burps Guy. I could see those people, standing in front of the stage, but from the safety of my seat I just enjoyed their enthusiasm.  I drank my cold beer without being jostled, I sang loudly and bobbed along happily.

All it took for me to have a creative epiphany was two years of melancholia, a road trip to Milwaukee, my (current) favorite band, and access to euphoric and mildly hallucinogenic state.  Everything suddenly fit together.  Like, this must be what it’s like to have religious faith – I could see purpose in my struggles and disappointments. All the fears and insecurities and dullness and ache fell away as I stood there. It was just me and my brain, loving each other again.

I’m back.  I’m writing again.

 

His 5th Birthday – May 10, 2015

It’s hard to have this blog still exist.  I recently became a blog-writer-denier, in front of someone I had just met.  I don’t want people to know anymore and I don’t want to write very much anymore.

When I was in the third grade Mrs. Long had us write essays about what we’d be when we grew up.  I wrote that I wanted to be a writer.  I was already a voracious and mature reader, and my parents encouraged me.  I overwrote and overwrite everything, but I can’t help it- I’m addicted.  I’m a logophile.  I write lists to start my day and I write sentences to organize my thoughts and long emails I have to cut down (but don’t).  I doodle words when I’m on the phone, admiring the shapes that represent the sounds that conjure up images.  It’s like magic.

I loved writing.  I used to write prolifically.  I would write on this blog every single day.

On May 10th 2010 I gave birth to a baby boy.  I helped the nurse change his diaper through little openings in an incubator and read him The Hungry Little Caterpillar and got to hold him against my chest, twice.  (I’ve written these sentences over and over and over for five years now.) Then I started writing about it.  As I was going through it, from inside the hospital I started writing how I felt on this blog.  For years I wrote everything here- from the physical pain to the horrible secret thoughts.  But five years is a long time for other people.  The people who were there back then might think you can’t get over it, and the new people…well it does’t seem fair to subject everyone to all of it.  Everything in my life has changed in these five years except the sadness.

It’s impossible for me to write anything new about what happened.  One of the most consistent sufferings of a writer is the guilt of not writing enough.  There’s always more to write.  And there’s always more a person wants to write about grief.  It changes so dramatically and seeps out so unexpectedly.  A few nights ago it appeared as humiliation.  Another time it was fuel for aggression and triumph.  Usually it’s loneliness.

The loneliness is easy to redirect because my joy for life and shattering sadness are not mutually exclusive.  I never need help looking on the bright side: I live on the bright side.  I just have a summer home on the dark side.

I am self conscious about how sad I will always be sometimes.

On May 10th 2010 I gave birth to a baby boy. I helped the nurse change his diaper through little openings in an incubator and read him The Hungry Little Caterpillar and got to hold him against my chest, twice.

He was alive and he was his own self. That’s the sentence I would say if I could.  That’s what I would tell people.

Don’t Try – Friday August 1st

poem1982-06-11-the_old_big_timeIn anticipation of getting pregnant, many women take prenatal vitamins, get their body in shape, and do other shit I don’t know about.  I imagine there is a lot of sitting beside windows flooded with sunshine while holding their bellies and feeling serene.  They probably get professional photos taken of themselves and get pregnancy massages.

I act out.  If my acting out was described as a mathematical equation using literary references instead of numbers it would be something like  <<Hunter S Thompson + Oscar Acosta (Dr Gonzo) raised to the power of Bukowski divided by Tim O’Brien = One scared white lady about to jump off a really high cliff>>

Obviously Oscar Acosta’s disappearance shouldn’t be ignored.  And I use Bukowski instead of Hemingway because I think his demise was both incrementally spectacular and more subtle than Hemingway.

I am very grateful to be loved by a group of people who monitor my behavior without making me feel oppressed or weak.  I am already usually in a state of embarrassment and horror about the things I do.  The embarrassment isn’t just about the all apology notes I owe to people who were sucked into and then spat out of my acting out storm system.  It’s about the disparity between what people see in me and what is really there, underneath.  Close up – if I let them – a few people can see the sloppy stitches and the too many layers of White Out.

If something goes wrong there’s no escape hatch this time.  Hazel is here, and she and Tom need me.  I can’t disappear, or have a nervous breakdown, or.  I kept my shit together last time because I wasn’t ready to throw in the towel after one tragedy.  I’ve got too much pride in my intellect and understanding of the human condition to really consider calling it quits after I lost my son.  I might have felt differently if I knew what was in store for me and my family in the years that followed.

But this time, I do know.  I know I could lose another child, I know that if the pregnancy is successful it’ll be painful and scary and complicated, I know that Tom and I both work too much, I know that the things I do to help my children could be the things they think are the most annoying about me, I know the child could arrive in the proper time frame but still not be healthy, and worst of all slash I finally understand how little control I have over any of it.

And so I keep letting the water flow through my gills.  I tap into to a level of excitement and joy and love that a lot of people find overwhelming.  I let myself be as down and dirty depressed as I need to be, but only for a specific amount of time prearranged between me and my brain.  Unfortunately grown up life keeps happening at the same time, and sometimes it all gets a little sloppy.

Soon the scales will tip and Tom and I will want a living sibling for Hazel more than we’re afraid of what we know. And then, like all the creatures on the planet capable and desirous of procreating, we’ll figure it out.  Even if the worst happens (my personal definition of “the worst” changes by the hour) I already know I’m sticking this out.  I won’t lose my shit.  I’ve lived through pain, I know it doesn’t kill a person…but I didn’t know that until I was pretty old.  Hazel needs me around at least until she has to find that out for herself, and there’s no way that I’m going to let my absence be the thing that teaches her about pain.

That last sentence is staring me in the face.  It’s mocking me, it’s saying -”You know trying to have another baby introduces the real risk that you will not survive the gestation or birth.  It’s not a huge risk, but it’s real.”  It probably makes sense to apply some Joseph Heller to the aforementioned mathematical equation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Imaginary Time – Wednesday July 2nd

You want to know why there have been so many remakes and variations of the movie “Freaky Friday” (including “Like Father, Like Son”, “Vice Versa” “Prelude to a Kiss”)? It’s because that actually happens all the time.  People wake up one morning in the wrong body, and they have to figure it out and just act cool until they go to bed one night, or get hit by lightening, etc etc  and wake up back in their old life.  It does happen all the time, and if you really think about it you already knew that. It’s probably happened to you.

Remember the show “Quantum Leap”?  Same basic concept.  Obviously there is a lot of romanticizing and dramatizing of the phenomenon which is why you might not have noticed when it was happening to you.  Some people look back on their lives and realize all through junior high they were in the wrong person, or their entire year abroad in college, or the summer between 11th and 12th grade.  During particularly stressful times you can get flipped in and out of other people within a matter of hours.  You look at the clock, realize it’s 6 pm and the past two hours you were just somewhere else, just trying to figure it the hell out.

I watched John Oliver interview Stephen Hawking a couple weeks ago on “Last Week Tonight”.  Stephen Hawking mentioned imaginary time and I couldn’t stop rolling the words around in my mouth.  After a few days of just saying the words, picturing them in my head, writing them over and over like a love sick teenager- I needed to know if it was Freaky-Friday-style imaginary time.

Predictably, trying to understand the actual concept was impossible.  I got three sentences into the Wiki page and had to lie down with a cold cloth on my head.  I did six or seven rounds in the ring with Google before I gave up.  I can’t even remember enough words from the articles I tried to read to piece together a joke about how little I remember of what it really means.  But when I’m not really concentrating on anything specific, those words slip back into my mouth.

Imaginary time.

In physics, it means something very very complicated.  In regular life it means waking up, or coming to, and being right in the middle of a different existence.  You know when you’ve felt like you were watching yourself act impossibly bad, or brave or beautiful?  That’s the jumbled way your brain tries to sort out the memory of it.  A lot of really hard habits to break also happen to take people to a comfortable or at least recognizable spot in imaginary time and let you just hang for a little while- like smoking cigarettes, or biting your nails, or heroin.  You can drive into imaginary time and end up at home.

People don’t talk about it very much unless you bring it up in just the right way.  Then everyone falls all over themselves explaining when it happens or where they go.  There are always a few people who act like you’re crazy, but you know those are the people who go somewhere really far.

Imaginary time.  It seems to just be a part of the human experience.  It looks best written in cursive.  It inspires mostly crappy movies.

 

4 Years Since a Birthday – Saturday May 10th

photo 2

There are codes that writers use to describe the way humans experience life.

“Her face crumpled”

“Her eyes filled with tears”

“Her heart ached”

These are short cuts and sure things.  It’s not laziness, it’s like spelling Lead Zepplin “Led Zepplin” so there wouldn’t be a bunch of assholes walking around saying Leed Zepplin.  Here though, I get the luxury of not caring if any of it makes sense.

Four years ago my son was born.  All of our lives flashed before his unopened eyes in five days.

Here’s what I mean to say: When I stop myself from doing something I want to do, I feel like I’m agreeing to have a rope tied tightly around my throat.  Any moment that I let my mind wander back to that thing, the rope gets tighter.  I can submit, and relax the muscles in my neck and trust that the rope will loosen with time.  Or I can panic and clutch and pull at it and bulge my eyes as it strangles me.

May 10th came, then May 15th, then all the other days.  The rope just became a part of my new life; sometimes just dangling there but most often rubbing the skin raw without choking me.

A lot of my memory is sensory based.  I remember the smell of a nurse’s hand lotion and the feel of cold steel under my finger tips and the sound of beeping machines and slaps of doors closing.  And the words.  I remember some words as clearly as I remember the smell of bleached hospital sheets.  I won’t write the words here now.

Here’s what I’m trying to say: My face crumpled, my eyes filled with tears, my heart ached…then I jumped the fuck off the bridge.  I keep landing without shattering, and the next day I know I have to get out of bed and jump again.  I’m not very different from anyone else it turns out, which I find comforting.  Every time someone tells me about a leap they took, I want to look into their eyes and see what made them do it.

Four years ago a tiny human took five days in May to change everything I ever thought I knew to be true.  His days changed every other day.  I always want it to be a happy birthday kind of day, but I don’t this year.  I don’t care if it’s a sad day, because the culmination of those five days and the following 1461 averaged out as pretty kick ass as far as I’m concerned.

 

 

 

 

 

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