By: Carson Jane Robles
I. Jack and I tiptoe out the back door and clamber over the fence that separates his backyard from “the Canal.” Tomorrow, we will get in my Volkswagen Jetta, and I will drive him three hours north to drop him off at Northern Arizona University. He’s getting a degree in physics or geology or astronomy (he keeps saying astrology, but he means astronomy). It’s almost midnight and the summer heat swaddles us in familiar discomfort.
The Canal is our third space. Onyx-black water rushes beneath us as we trudge along the accompanying dirt road. From the Canal, we can see the entire city: villages of suburbia speckled across an unflinching desert. In the distance, fluorescent white streetlamps illuminate the Loop-202 freeway; beyond that, more desert engulfed in night.
We walk until Jack’s house is completely out of sight. Every mother in Arizona warns of walking this dirt road at night. I recall parables of dissident teenagers losing their balance and tumbling into the carnivorous waters below:
It doesn’t matter if you can swim, warns my mother’s voice. If you fall in, you won’t be able to fight the current.
But I don’t heed her warnings. Jack and I have walked this path many times. Usually down to Gilbert Road, where we wander a mile to the gas station for a pair of Red Bulls. Today, we have another vice. Jack pulls out a set of surgical instruments:
An empty can of Mountain Dew. A short metal cylinder that looks like a pencil sharpener. A ziploc bag of something pungent. A bottle of lukewarm water. A lighter.
Jack sits on the dirt and gets to work. He is the surgeon and I am his nurse.
Open the Ziploc. In it is a germ-looking thing, the size of a golf ball.
Hand it to me. It sticks to my fingers like something covered in syrup. It reeks of piss.
Hold this. Jack hands me the can of Mountain Dew. He pulls apart the germ into little, gooey crumbs. It sticks and smacks as he maneuvers it into the pencil sharpener and twists, twists, twists again.
Let me see that. I hand the can back and he curls over his instruments, engineering his invention with mechanical precision.
Here. He stands up and puts the mouth of the can to my lips. He lights a flame beneath.
Inhale. I do.
The smoke attacks my virgin lungs. I don’t even have time to exhale before I keel over in a coughing fit. The water bottle finds its way to my palms. I throw warm water down my throat. As I stand up, I notice that my field of vision is expanding. In the corner somewhere, Jack is laughing at me. He takes a hit of his own. I think I might die.
Breathe through your nose. Eventually, the coughing subsides and I’m left with a cottonball-shaped welt in my throat. I try to swallow it down. I massage my neck. It sits there stubborn.
It’s good, says Jack. If you cough, that means it’s a good hit.
Any feeling of embarrassment, pain, anxiety is replaced with the tectonic realization that I am so fucking cool. I take another hit — smaller inhale this time — and scan the flat, suburban cityscape that lies beyond the Canal. I realize: I am the coolest girl in all of Mesa, Arizona.
II. Six and a half years later, I am lying in bed, high off my ass and flat on my back. I have been scrolling Instagram Reels for twenty, thirty, sixty minutes now. I have severed ties with the clock and observe my phone with soldieresque devotion. I land on a fifteen second video of a woman in a black crop top and polka dot minishorts. Bouncy house music plays as she completes a morning routine. Through a series of spliced-together secondlong clips:
- a joint materializes between her fingers.
- a bowl of fruit becomes a colorful breakfast platter.
- two eggs sizzle and fry.
- a jar of matcha powder expands to a tall, iced latte in her hands.
I spend five minutes watching this woman turn her food into a plate and her high into something productive. She’s so cool.
When I’m feeling masochistic, I open the camera app on my phone and investigate the contours of my face. This ritual, while humiliating, also serves to untether my sense of self and whittle away at years of self-confidence. I take notes:
- My eyes are red and heavy with exhaustion.
- My skin is breaking out near the left side of my lip.
- My hair is greasy and needs a wash.
- I do not look cool.
In the periphery of my camera, I see a Klondike bar wrapper on my nightstand bleeding all over my laptop; I swore I would submit an application tonight.
The rest of black-crop-top-stoner-woman’s posts are similarly chic. She frequently mentions balance and equilibrium.
“Is this what they mean when they say, ‘find a balance?’” asks one of her Reels. She cuts across the screen, first smoking a joint, then pole dancing, then doing her skincare, then dancing through a beautiful, forest landscape, and then smoking again before returning to do some at-home pilates and cook herself a cutesy little meal.
Somewhere far in the back of my brain, I am stockpiling fables of people like black-crop-top-stoner-woman. I file her Instagram page into a folder alongside Snoop Dogg, Seth Rogen, a playwriting professor who told me she smokes weed before revising her plays, my younger brother who’s getting an accelerated Master’s and rips a bong every night, Bob Marley, and a spattering of Reddit users. These individuals exist as taunting proof that one can be a stoner and be productive. And here I am, unable to convince my body to rise from its supine position.
In his 2012 article, “I Don’t ‘Get’ Smoking Weed,” William Arkwright makes a jab at me:
These are the casualties, because for every Willy Nelson, every Snoop Dogg, everyone who’s handling their shit on the bud, there’s a jobless, catatonic, paranoid person whose problems can be directly linked to their habit.
I’m not jobless, but I am catatonic and paranoid. I feel a vile, churning sensation kick at the base of my stomach. I’m suddenly worried that I should be doing something.
I always feel like I should be doing something. I should be writing, submitting, planning, sending an email, getting a coffee, getting a drink, going out dancing, making friends, paying for headshots, booking a trip, calling my mom, doing my laundry, writing an article on paranoia.
Arkwright says, “when I take drugs, I do it … to feel sharp and to artificially augment my own sense of self-esteem.” Is that what weed should do for me?
III. Two weeks from now, I will accompany six of my most attractive friends to the beach. It’s going to be a gorgeous day. High of 91°F, low of 77°F. I love New York in the summer.
At the beach, I will fish out a Ruby Farms five-pack of pre-rolls. Sativa something. Sour diesel? Three or four of us will pass it around before nibbling on the mangos and ham sandwiches we packed in our lunchbox. I will lie on a sandy, yellow beach towel, lethargic and stupid, trying my damnedest to track the names in Cien años de soledad, which has taken up (permanent?) residence in my tote bag since November.
And it will be in this lazy, useless stupor — sand-crusted and salty — that I will take out my paper journal and write. Taking occasional breaks to munch on a ham sandwich or sip from my Vitamin Water, I will spend thirty, forty, sixty minutes fiddling with an old article idea or starting a new one. I will not look at a mirror or my phone camera, and, in fact, my phone has already overheated, so I will not be scrolling TikTok either.
And then, I will stop writing halfway through because, suddenly, I have to be in the water. I will not come back to that writing today or tomorrow or maybe ever. I will not pull out my journal to hit a deadline or finish a script. Rather, for one blissful hour, I will remember that I enjoy writing.
At nineteen, fresh out of high school, the coolest thing I could do was shirk responsibility. Ditch class, pull an all-nighter, speed down the freeway with the windows down. Smoke some illegal kush out of a soda can on the Canal. Now, every Aritzia-clad, Core-Power-regular, creative assistant with a B.A. is popping 10 milligram Caminos and watching Love Island nightly. It’s not counter-cultural to get high. So maybe it isn’t cool.
It may never be cool the way it was when I was ogling Jack as he made smoke rings out the window of my Volkswagen Jetta. But whatever, girl. Smoking weed is a beautiful thing to do. It forces you to seek out immediate gratification and sink into your couch.
I will not stop smoking weed because it made me paranoid one night. Maybe that paranoia isn’t the high itself. Maybe it is the cruel, productivity-pilled headspace that worms its way through everything I do. Maybe the key to weed feeling cool again is as simple as chilling the fuck out.
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