Today’s commonsensical persons are of one mind regarding the merits of Medical Marijuana. It can provide ease and consolation to sufferers of many ailments. But this publication is not unmindful of the less-than-helpful side of mood-improvement, and I was asked by my publisher, Mr. Marx, to prepare a short piece setting forth the perils of Mediocrity Marijuana, so often used by those suffering from a surfeit of attentiveness. Because Mr. Marx has known me all my life, he knows that I am eminently qualified to report on this because, unlike most drug-adventurers, I drug-adventured through my marijuana experience completely sober all the while.

The Neighborhood Gains a Pothouse
The idea was born in that font of so many dubious notions, academia. Seattle, 1972; technically, still the Sixties. My father, a scientist by trade, had gone back to college to fulfill his dream, a doctorate in English history. There came the pressures of forced learning, and one of his fellow scholars propounded getting baked every day. An unremarkable idea in the technical Sixties, which I lived through but mainly read about later.

Pop was already a two-pack-a-day Lucky Strikes man, and his lungs were excited at the prospect of a new flavor of hot smoke. But buying pot carried the death penalty in Singapore and Saipan, and Pop was a law-and-order type. So he learned the ins and outs of at-home cultivation, and within a couple of seasons there were thirty thriving pot plants in the sun-lit corner of my little brother’s bedroom.

A regimen emerged. The Cal Tech grad and Master-level bridge player would begin his dumb-down around mid-morning, ready then to forge through his day with greater imprecision and lack of focus. The domestic consequences were subtle at first. The mom bailed. Family game night went by the wayside, because when you can’t cogitate, spell or remember, you can’t out-Scrabble your twelve-year-old, and Pop wasn’t having that. In fact, nights of any kind fell away as Pop secured himself behind the bedroom door at dusk, minty haze seeping through, and the great wolfing sound of peanut butter cups meeting their fate as he bored his way through shitty sci-fi to sleep.

Making New Friends
They’re a dying, anachronistic species today, but in the Sixties hippies were plentiful and in full flower. Affable and wise, attuned to their senses, hippies are drawn to pot the way males are drawn to bacon, and before long our well-to-do home overlooking Lake Washington had become a hippie warren. Squeaky, Mookus, Rooter and Shemp, Goth, Beezer, Skeeter and Fool could be found throughout the home nesting, rooting around and holding forth. Speechifying was their thing, dig. They taught me about the coolness of confronting The Man, and I learned that property is theft a few times. And listening to a rec-room full of free spirits belt out Dylan’s “Everybody Must Get Stoned” taught me about hating music.

Other life lessons brought on by marijuana:
• Pot leads to crime. The crime of people stealing your pot. When Pop’s hippies, neighbors, or in particular the friends of his sons journeyed up the stairs to gaze upon the glittering garden, some of them figured on taking that shit for themselves. Pop wasn’t a handyman, so there were any number of jury-rigged windows that could be jimmied for hassle-free break-ins. These visits were inevitably followed by the arrival of the police, who gave the house a room-by-room look-see with their sniffer dogs. Their reaction to the pot room was level-headed: shrugs, chuckles, mumbled words of admiration. Hey, hippies? Cops are cool.

• Stay out of the car if you can. Fifteen-year-old kids need rides to soccer, and that could be a conundrum for us. Had Pop forgotten? Well, yes, of course he had. But was a reminder the best idea? Depended on his state of bakedness. Sometimes marijuana is terrifyingly romanticized as an actual enhancer of one’s driving ability. Eventually I realized that soccer was beneath me, a pursuit suitable mainly for those whose hands were too soft for real sports, a European pastime. Conundrum solved, and I turned to stamp-collecting.

• You cannot write a doctoral thesis if your muse is Cannabis Sativa.
Well, Pop is 75 now. He no longer holds intoxicant-soaked smoke against his alveoli because he gave a lung to the cause and his doctor taboos it. But occasionally he hints friskily that a little medical marijuana baked into a brownie might help take the edge off.

His three sons weren’t too thrilled with his appetites when we were in our formative years. But that’s done and gone. Chemo’s a rough deal. We’re going to hook him up.

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Did you have stoner parents?
Send stories and anecdotes to ray@wildworldnews.com

Story by Mills Rackley

This story originally published in Mary Jane Magazine #1, Spring 2010.