Never Let Them Take Your Concentration

By the spring of 2006, I was well into my retirement. I had retired from smoking weed some time during the year prior. The year prior, sometime, in April I think, I was in Corpus Christi, Texas, JP 2 had just died and I was with my ex-wife and a local woman who had been a fishing boat captain turned waitress. We were at the house of the latter, smoking joint after joint when her teen-aged came home and thrashed us all to hell. This perhaps is another story for another time. And although I'm sure I smoked weed after this incident, I don't remember doing it. Yes, by the spring of 2005, weed was out and booze was in.

So, fast forward to the spring of 2006, about a year into my weed retirement. I was on a break from my restaurant gig. It was the middle of the afternoon, 16^th Street Mall, sunny Denver, Colorado. I was approached by a clipboard welding douche bag. Now, not all clipboard people are douchy but this dude was. He said, “Hey man, wanna legalize weed?”

Oh, god.

“Fuck no,” I said. I said it with only ten percent venom and ninety percent you got to be kidding me? It never made sense to me that the poster kids for weed were the sorts of people no one cares about. “Legalize weed? The quality will go down, the price will go up and the government will get their dirty mitts on it.” I cooked this dude's brain, made everyone around us laugh. The light turned green and we all crossed the street.

Weed has been legal in Colorado for almost a decade. I don't know how timely my statement is or was about quality, price or taxation. As for the government's dirty mitts, I'm sure weed is taxed, but my opinion of Colorado and the government here is pretty low and I'm sure the weed tax gets squandered, used poorly and we are not the better, as a group of people in a square state, for it.

But now, years later, I feel bombarded by weed people. And believe me, in Boulder Country, I'm sure everyone smokes it. The extreme users, and they're the same burners you've always known, really turn me off.

What I wish I'd said to the dude on the corner in 2006 is this: Too much weed going to make you dim, dimmer than you already are, going make you fat and complacent.”

I don't know if I can claim this statement any more true than the first, but I do have my own experiences to draw upon. I would never claim that I'm extraordinary in any way, nor would I claim that my experience is the same as anyone else's experience.

In my waning months working for the Boy Scouts of America in late 1999 and 2000, I was with people who always seemed to have weed. When it was offered to me, I usually, if not always, accepted. It did provide me with a nice escape because, after all, I was very unhappy in those last years with the Scouts.

I was unhappy with my life with the Scouts because I wasn't writing. I wasn't writing and I felt like I was abandoning the path in which fate had assigned to me. And rather than addressing what was truly wrong, and doing what I could to restore my writing practice, I turned to partying and that worsened my feelings of my job and it took me far from my writing.

When I left the Scouts in the fall of 2000, I began to write again. And I wrote day and night. And I was happy.

When I returned to Bohemian Denver by way of New Orleans, I should have been happier. I should have been a happy and productive writer.

I didn't do that. I worked a lot of hours. I partied harder than I ever had. And I began to smoke a lot of weed. I smoked weed daily. I smoked it with my friends. I smoked alone.

This is what I remember of those years 2001-2005: not much. I know I had a lot of fun. I know I wasn't very happy.

I write everything down. There is no denying that. I keep a journal and I have since the day I graduated high school in 1990. I've written poems and screenplays and short stories and novels and blogposts in composition notebooks since 1996. I've always got a composition notebook with me. I date them with when I began and when I finished them as a record of a time.

Two points:

One, I have very little record of that time by way of my personal journal or from any creative work done in composition notebooks. And two, what I do have is fractured, disjointed and practically unintelligible.

All of that aside, in my weed smoking years, the amount of writing (volume, quantity) decreased. I went from filling 20 notebooks in 2000 to half that in 2001. 2002, I wrote in four. Three in 2003 and in 2004.

In retrospect, what smoking weed did for me was to numb me. It muted the whole world and my life within the world. Perhaps that was a good thing. What it caused, ultimately, was a lack of concentration. I can say it robbed me of my concentration. And let's be honest, I robbed myself of concentration.

There are just too many things around us, daily, that jockey for our attention. There are the screens, there is the phone. There are the banners and flashy ads. There is the beeping, there is the notification bell. These things take our concentration. To an extent we cannot eliminate all concentration robbers. But some of these things we can easily throw away.

I'm grateful, for my pot smoking days, all those years ago. I'm glad to have had that experience. I'm even more grateful that that's not who I am now.

After all, I'd rather be here, with my composition notebook with my concentration and imagination intact.