Behind The Curtain 34: This Changes Nothing – November 9, 2010
Greg woke up as usual, got out of bed, removed his tray from the bedside table and took it into the bathroom.
The newspaper decrying the night before’s election results lay on the table. Greg walked past without looking.
“Doesn’t mean a damn thing to me,” he said to himself.
The morning ritual of sitting on the toilet and cutting up the morning bud never altered. It was always the same. Morning after morning, day after day, month after month, year after year, and no vote would change that. The little metal poker used to clean the stem of the bong was thick with resin as he ran it in and out of the stem and bowl. A black layer of dry resin lined the bottom of the tray from years of scraping bud into a little mound for the bowl.
Friends urged him to get a 215 card, but he declined on principal.
“No one should have to pay money to prove they need the herb to be well,” he’d say. “It’s a weed for the masses, and it knows no prejudice – no religion, no color, no politics. Damn them for trying to legitimize something that’s been the only sane go-to in my life for the past 30 years.”
He justified his usage of cannabis to no one. No apologies, no regrets.
Greg packed the bowl of the bong with bud, fired up the lighter and took a long drag.
After smoking a few bowls full, he put the tray away, made his bed and headed for the kitchen.
All his rituals were the same, get a bowl from the cupboard, fill it up with cereal, grab a banana, a napkin, and head for the couch. Rather than turning on the news this morning, he decided to watch last night’s taped Flight of the Concords.
Once his breakfast was set out around him he moved his tray to the living room and began the process, once more, of cutting up bud for the bong.
“So what if it passed – what if it didn’t,” he said to no one in particular. “My life won’t change. I’ll still be respectful of my neighbors, won’t blow smoke in their faces. Especially not the little kids in the neighborhood. No one had to pass a proposition to tell me that. But you can bet people will still be drinking alcohol in front of kids, falling down drunk, getting violent. What a stupid world we live in.”
The few small grows he had in his little greenhouse would be commonplace in a world of condoned personal use. The only difference would be a lack of paranoia. While others crashed cars and became dismal stars on Cops drunk from alcohol, he would continue his laid-back life as a stoner to get through his days harming no one.
“‘Under the influence’ means alcohol,” he would rant to who ever would listen. “When they pull you over, it’s always about being drunk, not high. Alcohol rots your body, makes you do stupid things. If someone were to create alcohol today it would be outlawed as a poison – too dangerous and destructive to be legal.”
Nothing would change for him. His life would go on like it always had, legal pot, or not. Greg stopped the ranting in his head, turned to his tray, began cutting up more bud, and cued up South Park from the night before.
