some thoughts on ten years of smoking penises no homo
a bit of a reminiscence on my long-running relationship with the devil's lettuce, why blunts are my favorite weed delivery system, and the unique bond between stoners
I don’t know anyone else who remembers the exact date that they really smoked weed for the first time. But I really smoked weed for the first time around 10 years ago, Valentine’s Weekend 2014.
The reason why I remember when I really smoked weed for the first time — like, not just taking a baby puff but actually doing the damn thing — is because one of my friends was arrested for underage drinking and public intoxication on the way home from a college Valentine’s party, and after dealing with the stress of bailing him out, we all sat in a circle in silence until it became apparent that the only thing to do about it was to get high. Suddenly it all made sense, the need to distort your brainwaves, to tune out some fucked up bullshit and reduce it to an ambient hum in the background.
Essential Nadine lore is that I was raised Mormon. So of course I did not grow up with the ambition of becoming a stoned layabout with chalkboard lungs. In my mid-to-late adolescence, I lost my religion, but still had to play at it and pretend to be a good Mormon until finally my parents gave up on making me go to church when I turned 18. Even though I had stopped believing, I was still trying to be the child I thought my parents wanted me to be, and I wasn’t very actively rebellious. So naturally I wasn’t going to go to parties or drink or smoke because I didn’t want my parents to be disappointed in me or find out I wasn’t really into the whole Mormon thing anymore. But I tried to justify it to myself as not a Mormon thing, but something secular, almost like I was straight-edge: I have a very cringe memory of telling someone “I don’t need to make myself feel different, I’m fine just being myself.” The irony being that I wanted to be anything but myself and was screaming on the inside every day at how the world perceived me. What it mostly came down to is that I had still not been in a situation where anyone had offered me any kind of substance.
That all changed almost immediately when I started attending a state school. Sometimes I will reminisce upon my salad days and it hits me that many other people had significantly tamer college experiences than me for the simple reason that they did not attend a university in the SEC. Drinking was fun and warm and bubbly and new and there were so many types of drinks to try. Vodka straight from an orange orientation cup. Beer from a warm keg at a warehouse show played by a group that described their sound as “Trapplachian.” A box of wine that we bought with a Kramer-esque Ziploc bag full of loose change. Rum and RC Cola.
Weed seemed too complicated to me at first. All the effort involved in procuring it and the assembly required. For the first several weeks of regular smoking my friends had to light the bowl for me because for some reason I could not figure out how to flick a lighter without burning myself. I don’t even know how I was doing it wrong anymore because it is a motion that feels so instinctive to me now. One day it quite literally clicked and then we were off to the races and I could have sworn I was living in a goddamn Richard Linklater movie. I started hanging out with pretty much anyone who was willing to smoke me out and every conversation felt like the deepest conversation I had ever had in my life and have you ever wondered if the color blue that I see is the same as the color blue that you see and all that shit.
At a certain point in drug using, you look around and realize that a guy in a Ralph Steadman graphic tee is talking at you while a Slightly Stoopid song hangs in the background and he’s telling you about how he was studying chemistry at the state school but then he figured out he could make more money doing chemistry at home if you catch his drift and he can get you anything you want and did you see that movie The Wolf of Wall Street that was a killer movie bro you know how they did quaaludes in that movie well all my friends said bro I bet you can’t get quaaludes and I was like bro I bet I can get quaaludes and you know what bro I got some fucking quaaludes. And you start to think maybe there is something to be said about how this habit has lowered your standards and made you a little too easygoing. But then you remember that they’re letting you smoke for free, and suddenly you’re bobbing your head to the Slightly Stoopid song just a little bit, and you’re telling him that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was one of your favorite books in high school, and you’re asking if anyone wants to pack another bowl.
My decade-long weed habit has been defined by varying phases of fixation. In the same way that I will get really hooked on a very specific meal or sweet treat or special beverage and crave it ceaselessly until one day I literally can’t stomach it anymore, or listen to the same song over and over until I start listening to another song over and over, I will be extremely loyal to one weed delivery system and then suddenly it will start tasting a little weird and I switch to something else. Frequently throughout college, but especially that first year before I explored the joys of stoned solace, I smoked whatever I was able to smoke: bowls, badly-rolled joints, one-hitters, a gravity bong made from a paint bucket from Home Depot, a gravity bong made from a water cooler, a gravity bong made from one of those crystal skull vodka bottles. I actually still have the first piece I ever owned, a left-handed bowl that I bought from the Hookah Hook-up on The Strip in Knoxville which I believe is probably one of the last establishments left that has not been bulldozed and replaced by joyless styrofoam “luxury condominiums” — let it be known that I am not a lefty, it was just cheap and I didn’t really know what I was doing. That first year of smoking alone was rife with paranoia and over-preparedness, given that I still lived on campus: door snaked, the other door snaked, the other other door snaked, sploof loaded up, shower like a sauna. I probably freaked myself out more by going to such lengths. When I got my own place off campus everything changed and not only was my relationship to weed different but my entire relationship to being alone was different.
I had the bowl phase, I had the joint phase, I had the bong phase, but I break bongs too easily and even though I loved my Trailer Park Boys bong, silicon just really does not hit the same. But the great love of my little stoner life has always been blunts. Blunts were the thing that I really learned to smoke on. Not just a little bowl and not just scraping together a spliff full of resin and mostly tobacco with a bunch of broke college students, but like actually smoking some shit, actually hotboxing, actually just sitting in the wafting atmosphere and not saying anything at all sometimes for long stretches of time. I hosted a rap radio show on the college station on Sunday nights and after a few months, a couple of local guys came in wanting to see if they could freestyle on the air. At first I was very protective and precious of my airtime but increasingly the cypher sessions started to take over more and more of the show as these guys brought in more friends who brought in more friends and eventually the whole thing was a fucking party and we stopped hotboxing a shitty little Honda and relocated to a supply closet that was then dubbed “The Elevator.” A lot of those local rappers were not very good, but that is also part of the beauty of a freestyle cypher, sometimes someone is not very good but you just keep it moving and give everyone a chance. But some of them were really good. Like, I swear to god, those two original guys were some of the best rappers I have ever heard in my life. In the flesh, on the record, anywhere. They were like the fucking 8Ball & MJG of East Tennessee. As corny as it sounds, I very much treasure those hours spent with them just passing blunt after blunt after blunt around and connecting over the fact that we thought that Belly was the craziest movie ever even though our lived experiences were totally different. Sometimes they would play their own music, sometimes they would play UGK or Boosie or early Jelly Roll before anyone outside of Tennessee had ever gambled on the white boy. But my favorite moments were whenever they kept the radio on after my show ended, because at the stroke of midnight, the dream pop/shoegaze/post-rock vibes show would come on and before you knew it these dudes would be doing like Screwed Up Click freestyles over Slowdive and Spacemen 3 and Godspeed and shit. Which when I think about it, that unexpected synthesis of classic Southern rap flows and reverb-heavy trippy shit was probably very formative for my music taste. But it was also very formative for me in terms of not just smoking weed but like… how smoking weed informs my whole life. They never asked me to throw a dollar into the pot, it was just a given, if you were there, you were smoking, and nothing else mattered.
Ever since then, I have been a firm believer that above all else, weed is for sharing. I love smoking weed alone but there is very little more meaningful to me than the unique bread-breaking it allows. No offense to anyone who doesn’t smoke weed. But it is just another level of connection that I don’t really feel like I can have in the same way with people who I cannot share weed with. The other day my psychiatrist was pushing me on my weed usage as doctors are prone to do, and I tried my best to explain to her that like… it’s just a part of my life. It’s not really a thing. When I have been depressed, weed doesn’t usually help, and I still feel depressed. But when I feel amazing, weed makes me feel even more amazing, and it makes me feel more bonded with the people I smoke it with. It’s not just a vibe test or a sacramental ritual but something that can bind you like twin flames: how can you be closer to another human being than when you’re breathing the same fire?
Some things I have written recently: