Staying Productive on Pot

Drug outcomes are unique for everyone, every time. There’s a stew of chemicals and receptors and setting events that’s never exactly the same.

About a decade after my first hit (I’m a bit over 20 years of varying use, averaging a bowl a day for the past 5, the occasional break week notwithstanding) a set of circumstances laid bare to me the prime nature of the beast that is my cannabis habit, and upon repeated reflection (while high) my memory of a non-extraordinary day also has intimated how one might go about getting a saddle on the dammed thing.

A true story:

One nipple-mustering winter’s morning I arrived at a hiking trail entrance with several friends, one of whom held a baggy full of dusty leaves. Now if it were up to me I would have smoked it all before disembarking the Hyundai Elantra (I hadn’t invested too many experience points in the patience column by that age), but I silently deferred to all the nonsmoking going on as we got out and entered the kind of snowscape in which intestines are inevitably disemboweled for warmth.

I’ll spare you the Jack London fanfic and say that the hike sucked. In my opinion.

I called several votes of no confidence in continuing ahead, my secret endgame being me inside a cloud inside the Hyundai ASAP, but my party failed me and pressed forward.

The snow was as deep as a gentleman claims his penis is long, none of it trodden.

After infinity miles we reached the meager concrete ruins of some castle or fort or mansion, which had been the objective for this particular expedition.

We interactively-loitered around the quarter-acre of white evergreeny hillside along which these remnants were littered, turning up markings and graffiti that spanned generations, and we soaked in those sweet post-apocalyptic feels (not the parlance you would have used at the time but).

Three out of the four of us passed around a joint (I think having a Thelma in the group is always really beneficial to the core dynamic, by the way) and as per usual with pot, I began deliberating to some degree more intently on whatever thoughts came to mind. Naturally I fixated on the scariness of surviving a world in which society is over, but you’re not here for that and I won’t trick you into reading yet another internet musing on inevitable collapse.

Then at some point in the exploring and climbing and intermittent smoking an almost-unfamiliar feeling hit me.

Enthusiasm under stress.

As stated above I was no stranger to pot at the time, so this feeling wasn’t from the firing of some heretofore virgin cannabinoid receptor.

Furthermore I’d gotten high in all manner of forests and museums and what have you without feeling this particular feeling, so the aura of wilderness and too-cold-to-sit-on stonework weren’t precipitants. And while endorphins from the hike no doubt spiced-up the stew and brightened my temperament, joints smoked before and after 5K’s hadn’t produced anything quite like this.

The difference was today I smoked while doing, and the doing didn’t involve awaiting whatever upcoming plot twists the Netflix had in store. This doing was something (mildly) difficult, a stressor demanding sustained acclimation.

I smoked cannabis while already beyond my comfort zone and it helped establish some manner of outpost amongst all the stress that lay beyond, a state of mind suited for enduring the stress, for compartmentalizing it and thinking above it.

[And so it was my life’s previous chapter of a daily rapport fostered between myself, weed and Netflix, and eclipsing most alternative, less passive pastimes that had made this feeling feel so almost-foreign.]

But today I passed the joint and climbed around (modestly) and investigated all the cryptic nonsense written everywhere. I explored a bit further up the trail with my group (without protest) before making the probably 2–3 mile journey back, this time all the unpleasantness partitioned off, the chafing and cold, moist toes and the cacophony of 8 boots crunching snow no longer looming in my mind, my thoughts untethered and swept by winds of action and fortitude and good-humoredly ragging on Thelma.

(Though I won’t deny running for the Hyundai as it came into view or monopolizing 1 of the 2 functional heating vents along the dash.)

Then, as any rational actors might, three out of four of us smoked a nifty little pipe-thing inside while Thelma texted and/or called Karen outside and a few feet away from the car.

And it was clear to me then that if I’d smoked before leaving the car I would have been DOA for that trail. I would have acclimated mind and body to that warm, beige Hyundai interior and then had to step into conditions I find unfavorable on my best days, only to reach a destination I knew from the get-go would be scattered bits of broken buildings.

I might even have been the source of some real drama if I insisted on breaking with the party.

But over time and with added hindsight that has been overshadowed by another, less obvious and therefore more significant one: waiting until after the hike to begin smoking would have been just as pointless as smoking beforehand. That is to say, the ‘First, Then’ approach of First work, Then reward is incongruent to pot use.

First clean your room and then eat your candy bar. It makes sense but not for pot, not for anything that is, at its core, medicinal. Medicinal drugs are not rewards, they are functional buffs.

If I first began smoking once back in the car I would have buffed my acclimation to that sexy beige womb only. First the hike, the struggle to do and know and become more, and then a boon for the spirits after you’re already back inside the coital Elantra. With that formula, our wonderfully mysterious and psycho-actively charitable plant is once more relegated to its pigeon-hole as a spice for your laziness and salve for the boredom of your complacency. But it can be more.

At its absolute best, pot is, for me, a mental lubricant/momentum-sustainer.

Which is to say you can only stay productive on pot, you can’t become productive on it.

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