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pot in the brownhouse
Wednesday, December 18 2013
We had another several inches of snow yesterday and so the first order of business was shoveling out the driveway again. It went quickly this time because the snow was very light and easy to shovel, and Gretchen shovels a lot faster than Sarah the Korean (who has never actually been Korean or even been to Korea).
My weekend begins on Wednesday afternoons after the meeting with the client. It went well today; he finally seems to like what I'm building, and I finally gave an accounting of all the hours I've eben working on it. With that out of the way, I could focus on some neglected chores such as gathering more firewood. The snow made retrieving it difficult; I'd thought ahead enough to pile the wood in a few places along the Stick Trail and so it was easy to find, but the snow on the trail was too deep to pull a loaded cart through. So I carried a single very large piece back home and then tried to split it before my muscles had recovered their strength. The process of splitting wood sounded muted and skeletal with my new ear muffs on. Wearing those, I'm much more aware of sounds being transmitted through my bones.
I occasionally like to smoke pot, which I usually like to do down in the greenhouse. But it was too cold for that today. So early this evening I had the idea of combining pot indulgence with a visit to the brownhouse. I even made a brand new little all-brass redneck marijuana pipe to be kept there, along with a small medicine bottle of the green manalishi with the five-point crown. The brownhouse is a nice little capsule of comfort in what can be a cold and snowy vastness of outdoors. I have a little 1500 watt electric heater than can make it toasty down there in just a couple minutes, and there is plenty of reading material available. Initially I didn't think a normal visit to the brownhouse would be long enough to have a good marijuana experience, but it turns out that pot crosses blood-brain barrier in less than the amount of time that it takes to heat the brownhouse. I was well and truly stoned before I stumbled out of there.
Initially there had been a plan for me to go pick up some Indian food takeaway from the Kingston Indian Restaurant in Uptown, but I'd thought that had been canceled after Deborah (who would be coming over) said she wasn't in the mood for food from the greater South-Asian subcontinent. But then it turned out that the plan for me to be picking up Indian food was still in place and that Deborah would be eating separately before she came over. This was how I found myself driving into Kingston totally stoned.
I almost never drive while under the influence of pot, since it seems to make my brain into even less of an effective thinking organ than alcohol does. It also screws with my sense of space and time, and driving is all about accurately negotiating space and time. But perhaps I don't give my stoned self enough credit; I drove perfectly fine. Just before that hairpin turn at the bottom of Dug Hill Road, a deer that had been standing on the side of the road decided to bolt in front of me and I hit the brakes quickly enough to avoid hitting him (though I think this led to a mild impact between Ramona and the windshield). It turned out that the worst thing about driving stoned was the heightened anxiety of doing something potentially dangerous that I don't normally do while under the influence of marijuana, a drug that occasionally causes me runaway feedback loops of anxiety. I should also mention that there is something unusually speedy about this particular batch of pot. If I didn't know for certain myself that it is completely organic, I might think someone had sprayed it with angel dust.
My anxiety was such that I wanted to shake someone following me as I approached the restaurant via John Street. So I drove forward into a parallel-parking space, hoping the follower would go around me. Evidently he didn't have enough room because he came to a stop and then I had the anxiety of trying to get out of my predicament while a car waited behind me. It seemed easiest to abandon that spot and park illegally on the corner of John and Wall Streets.
On the drive home, I took the edge off my neural condition by drinking a Mountain Brew Ice beer freshly-purchased from Stewarts. The soundtrack for the entire mission was a Terry Gross interview of the cartoonist-blogger Allie Brosh. In the state I was in, she seemed to be describing a lot of things that I could relate to, such as her inability to feel appropriate emotions. I couldn't relate as much to her descriptions of her various phases of depression, and by the time I was home I was wondering if perhaps she was really just another spoiled white girl with lots of problems, all of them first-world.
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