She's So High

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As I scroll through Instagram, I get food envy from all the people out there flexing their culinary skills during this quarantine. I've consumed 50 quesadillas since the beginning of March. I hate dishes too much to start cooking like I believe processed food is poison, but I’ve written a decent amount of fart jokes.

A few days ago, I got high for the first time in almost a decade. It was a THC concentrate tincture. I took it an hour before an interview to do social media for a magazine. It's a volunteer position, so they can't be finicky about a person's recreational activities, but I started noticing it kicking in the last 10 minutes of our chat, and this made me feel uncomfortable nervousness I masked by incessantly talking.

The next day I had a horrible headache that lasted every waking second. It could have been from the THC concentrate, or maybe from watching 7 hours of TV after taking it, without my glasses on. I grew up in Lake Tahoe, so weed is a very normalized part of the culture. However, I stopped smoking pretty soon after high school because I made the conscious decision that I don’t enjoy crippling paranoia. 

I spent many an afternoon in a dense cloud, paralyzed on a couch, convinced I was reading everyone’s mind. These are not fond memories for me. A lot of potheads like to tell me that all I need to do is smoke more weed, in order to overcome this uncomfortableness. It just seems like a lot of work, when I’m already really good at lounging around and watching movies while eating quesadillas.

Thankfully, my kids were at their dad's that day, so I didn't have to homeschool with a headache. My homeschool strategy is to work as fast as possible, get it out of the way, because I have my own work to do, and I need some time for cooking meals that require minimal cleanup and writing fart jokes.

My kids are a good source of material though. My son asked during his writing assignment, "Mom, how do I spell 'do'? Is it D-O or D-O-O?"

"Well babe, it just depends how you're using it."

We watched a dinosaur video on YouTube, and I did not need to be high to think, "OOOOH WOOOOW, Dinosaurs are fucking aaaamazing!"

But, I am grounded enough to think the timeline for dinosaurs sounds like a load of horseshit. I emphasize to my children, "They are trying to tell us that that bone is 60 MILLION YEARS OLD?!"

I expand my argument on why they should question this theoretical timeline. “We haven't ever found a lawn chair capable of surviving a single Sacramento summer. The people of Pompeii were buried alive by Mt. Vesuvius erupting was 2,000 years ago. Now lets consider multiplying that by 30 MILLION!!"

My kids were probably like, mom, you sound high, but they don't have that sort of vocabulary. Just like how I don’t have to capability to translate to them that 60 years ago academics were recreationally taking LSD.

I gave them a probable scenario. Dinosaurs are enormous lizards that live inside the earth’s layers. Air bubbles within the planet allow them decent living spaces and access to water. These dinosaurs die, and their remains work themselves up to the surface. I came up with that L. Ron Hubbard shit, and I’ve never even done LSD.

The other day I drove by Starbucks, and saw a drive-thru line a mile long. I imagine most of those people don’t have any hopes or dreams, but I understand the need for high impact caffeine. Making coffee is the only culinary skill I can flex at home, so I can enjoy it while working on flatulence humor.