Smoking Pot: Why I Am Not A Chicken Nugget

Smoking pot is not for everyone.  It used to be for me.  It no longer is.  I get incredible paranoia, and cannot leave the house, even for something minor.  Small every day conversation becomes belabored, incredibly difficult and suspicious, and I feel horrible about myself, as if my brain was stretched thin and put in the sun to dry, and then I'm talking through the stretched brain filter, and words are all taffy and my thoughts are all glass.   I mean, it is really familiar, because I used to try be more okay with smoking and did it more frequently.  You know.  When things were boring.

Turns out that smoking IS what's so boring, to me at least.  Instead of quelling anxiety, it heightens anxiety, and simultaneously affixes me to one spot, so that I cannot excise any of the associated lightning thoughts with the balm of exercise.  So, smoking pot is not for me.  At all. 

And yet, once when I hadn't smoked for a long time, I tried, and viola, a crushing surge of thoughts about my own life surfaced, tremendous perpective, and I saw everything clearly.  Insights upon insights.

Well, not exactly.  Turned out that I was just stoned.  What I thought was largely incoherent and nonsensical.  The deep fear, of course, is that what I now think is also largely incoherent and nonsensical.  The deep fear, fuck it, the committed mentality.  All of my efforts are to cast away the casket that wraps around me with conclusions of chaos. 

I've always seen through what matters to other people, and known that I didn't share the same preferences.  The problem is that I cannot build a life on criticism.  I mean, shit, I tried.  I got drunk.  I failed. 

Still, we all need some release, no matter what.  And perhaps exercise, or yoga, or writing, or conversations of some sort, provide this thing that we crave, this conflict, this grating out of meaning into little pre-baked frozen goods.  Just pop them in your microwave for a few minutes and you'll see that they have all the indicia of what you used to want, and none of the flavor.  Injecting flavor from flavor squirting gun will not work.  I am not a chicken nugget.

Waves of friends have washed over me.  They are standing out there floating about.  I feel that time is a myth, and yet it affects me in a crucial and painful way almost all of the time.