The Planet Fitness smelled like weed today. In the locker room, it was so thick I wondered if someone hadn’t smoked it right there. Every piece of equipment, every nook and cranny, all of it smelled like pot. It’s a good smell. I’ve never been a weed smoker, a pothead, never had time for the devil’s lettuce. But I’m glad someone is enjoying themselves.
There are pot stores all over Oklahoma, which is a bizarre thing to say the least. I’d never thought my home state would be one of the first to legalize the leaf. I was used to it when I lived in Portland, and there it made sense…here, not so much.
Thinking back on it, though, people here have never had much of a problem with it. There’re a lot of fundamentalist Christian conservatives, but they seem more focused on stopping abortion (lol) than stopping people from smoking.
It’s never been something that I took to. Every single time I smoked it, I became paranoid in a way that wasn’t fun. I’ve heard Joe Rogan say that’s the best part, just trying to hold on while you slip into a panic attack, but let’s just say I don’t need any help with that.
I’m envious of my friends who can smoke weed about their problems, even more so if they can maintain some kind of focus and clarity necessary to complete tasks and stay on schedule. Again, couldn’t be me. That was the major issue with booze: it knocked me off schedule.
I don’t consider myself a particularly strong person, but I’m smart enough to know that, and to consider workarounds. I know that I need a lot of landing strip to touch down all these planes I have up in the air. To absolutely mangle a metaphor.
What that means practically is that I know that if I drink a beer, I will drink two. Once that happens, I am no longer me. I am Two-Beer David. And Two-Beer David thinks a third beer is a great idea. On down the line until the carton is empty and I’m sitting in my office chair listening to Korn’s self-titled album. Not the worst way to kill an evening, but not the most productive, either.
The real problem starts the next morning. David is not a person who “powers through” difficulty. David is a person who will lay in bed until the discomfort goes away, until he can think straight again. We’re working on this, but at the moment, it is what it is.
David is someone who has to set strict schedules and stick to them. I go to the gym three times a week now because I was militant about it for about three years. Now I’m less strict, but if I don’t go to the gym, it kind of feels like when you’re mildly hungry and irritable. You don’t think “I must eat to power my mind and body!”, you think “I would like a burrito,” and so you eat one. Same thing with writing this blog. I must strictly force myself to do this (and write fiction) every day, because after a few years it will similarly become a thing that I just do, that I don’t have to intellectualize or explain to myself.
And finally, it’s the reason why I’m not drinking beers anymore. It’s been 80 days, but I’m assuming it will take around 1,000 to just kind of “not feel like it” anymore. It’s a project that feels worth my time. I won’t bother equivocating or explaining it away anymore. It just is what it is.
Hopefully, one day I’ll be at a point with booze like I was with the pot smell in the Planet Fitness: I can smell it, look at it, watch other people do it, and appreciate it for what it is, but not feel compelled at all to partake. I mean, I will probably never smoke pot again for the rest of my life. I can’t imagine why I’d do it. I don’t even like it.
Thus by the grace of god goes booze.
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