Wait, Does Weed Make You Lazy or Not?

I’ve smoked about a pound in the past month. Not that I’ve been weighing scrupulously, or any strange thing like that, but when I first got back here to the farm I’d been given a turkey bag full of B-buds and now the thing’s less than half-full. I won’t pretend it’s not been wonderful, starting my day with joints so big they’d make Snoop blush and knowing that I have this enormous supply of sweet, sweet cheeba just for me. If I had to throw out a ballpark number I’d say an average day’s smoking is 15-grams. I’ve also made for myself a handy little stash of canna-oil, so there’s that too.

I like to stay stoned- and what of it? It makes me feel good and I enjoy the way that it makes me interact with the world. My days usually begin around 5am. Begins in the usual sort of way, piss, coffee, more coffee. Then I’ll sit and write for 4-hours or so. There’s a few simultaneous projects I keep revolving around, but one thing that drives me insane about writing is sitting still for so long. Thankfully there’s plenty around the land to keep me busy. Yesterday we worked for 9 hours to finish the outhouse. We’d tucked it up the hill in the meadow, north-east corner of the property. Scott and I cut the cedar ourselves, stripped the bark by hand, flayed them into long slabs with an Alaskan Timber Mill. It took three solid days of work and ended with a 9-hour stint in the rain, but it ended satisfied. I stayed up until 2 or so that morning getting back into some of those projects.

But it hadn’t always been this way. In the yore of my stoner youth, a typical day for me might line up something like this:

Wake up

Roll joint

Smoke joint

Perform morning ritual

Roll joint to be smoked during lunch break

Smoke joint in traffic on way to work

5pm, leave work, get home, roll joint

Smoke joint

Watch Buffy reruns

Think about doing something productive

Meet friends for Mexican instead

Go home

Sit in front of the computer trying to write

Roll joint

Smoke joint

Go to bed

That’s a pretty terrible routine by anyone’s standards, but the time would usually come around that I would blame all my problems on weed. I loved the stuff but also bought into the propagandist B.S. that all my life’s problems were caused by smoking it. I was late for work because I smoked a blunt and played video games too long. My phone got temporarily suspended once, kept buying baggies instead of paying my bill. It’d usually be after some awesome screw-up like that I’d tell myself that I should quit, take a long break at least. My life was a wreck. What was I doing with it? Where was I going? I’d tell myself that I needed to cut the shit and start acting like an adult.

There’ve been several periods of my life where I have quit too. The longest I’ve gone without smoking was 5-years, I missed it, but hey, gotta grow up sometime right?

The funny thing is that my problems didn’t really go away, they just sort of looked different. I wasn’t late anymore because I smoked a blunt and wanted to play Gears of War a little bit longer, I was just late because my priorities where all out of whack. I had to come to terms with the fact that I was just a procrastinator. Somewhere along the way I’d simply developed into a lazy human being and it had nothing to do with the number of joints I’d light up in a day. Sure, making out with Mary Jane made me want to lay on the couch, watch Seinfeld and eat donuts, but not because there’s some sort of mysterious compound in cannabis that does that to me, but because part of me thinks that sounds like a great fucking time.

Eventually I had to be honest with myself. I couldn’t treat not smoking herb as if it were some talisman that would unlock my greatest inner potential. Only I could do that; stoned, dead-sober, it made no difference at all. It was only my lack of self-discipline and will power that made me such a terrible decision maker.

These days things are great. Don’t get me wrong, I smoke lots of herb, but when I can’t I don’t. I’ve learned a few things along the way, like I love to run, but usually if I’m high the farthest I’ll get is throwing my shoes on before having a “snack” and finding myself an hour later suckling from the glass-teat and making a boob out of myself next to an empty bag of Cool Ranch Doritos. On the other hand I can hike 40-miles-a-day throwin’ smoke stacks down a trail like a chimney. Long distance trekking whilst stoned is one of my favorite things to do actually.

My point is this: you need to find out what works for you. If you can smoke before work and operate like a normal human without getting yourself fired, then by all means, roll it up Cheech! But if you know you’re going to act like a weirdo and probably get yourself fired, then maybe it’d be good to take a step back and reevaluate things a little bit. If you can’t function high then don’t. Save it for when a time that it’d be absolutely ok to just get stoned and sit in front of the fire.

Bottom line is this: if you spend all your time smoking and chilling and no time dedicated to your actual life, you don’t necessarily need to quit. Just be honest with yourself. If you can’t handle cannabis then maybe it’s time to say goodbye, or maybe you just need to figure out when you should and shouldn’t smoke. Only you can answer that. At the end of the day the person staring back at you in the mirror as responsible for your decisions, not the doobie in your hand. So hey, if you’re happy with the person looking back at you, light up, kick back and celebrate. Smoke one in honor of adulting. You’ve earned it.