How to Make Your Life Better

(By Smoking Pot)

by Jesse Vernon

I would love to share a spliff with Betty Crocker. Especially
her 1965 incarnation (the hottest), with those delicate pearls, her
flipped bob, sharp eyes, and flirty smirk. She’d sit on the counter
while I did the work, doling out wise guidance (“Grease your pan with
unsalted butter”) interspersed with anachronisms (“Peanut butter
cookies are a favorite with men and children”), her blazed grin and
glazed eyes defying her corporate creators.

See, baking is magic disguised as domesticity. And magic should
always be done high. First, take a hit (or two). Then take a bunch of
ingredients that can’t hold their own (unsweetened chocolate scarred my
childhood), combine them in a particular order with precise
measurements, swirl them around with instruments of varying shape and
composition (wood here, steel there, silicone intermittently), and
apply heat. In the time it takes to smoke a bowl, your gooey brownish
blobs will have transfigured into little glistening disks of delight.
Ta-da. Even the most epicurean of potheads has fallen prey to the lure
of the quick and easy munchie fix, but the restorative powers of any
off-the-shelf sugar bomb are paltry in comparison to a treat of your
own creation.

While pot expands the breadth of my senses—mundane textures
become fascinating (slimy, elusive egg whites; silky, billowing flour),
common smells become seductive (melting butter, caramelizing
sugar)—it also finely hones them. My sober friends would be
surprised to learn that a lot of my best snacks are made under the
influence. The neuroses-enhancing side of pot is helpful, especially if
you’re already a details person: With near-neurotic accuracy, I’ve
learned to heed Betty’s direction (her Cooky Book is my holy
book) and create bites of perfection. As long as I remember to set the
timer.

(By Smoking Pot)

by Brendan Kiley

I was 15 and not so good at gardening, which was too bad
because gardening was my job. Being outside was nice (when it wasn’t
November) and I liked the idea of being a gardener (like Gregor
Mendel), but the actual gardening could be crushingly
dull—especially
weeding the perennial beds at the neighbors’
house where I worked on Saturdays. Starting was easy, but I’d get
restless and rush through the job, leaving weeds in my wake.

Rick, the other gardener, was studying graphic design at an art
college. He was a nice guy, but my lousy work ethic frustrated him.
“You’re a good worker when you want to do something,” he would say.
“But when you’re bored, you’re useless.” Then he’d go back to talking
about music and girls and stuff.

One Saturday, he solved my problem. We went into the woods and
smoked some pot out of his small, silver pipe.

The garden I stumbled back into was not the garden I’d left. It was
brighter and richer, I paid more attention to textures and colors, and
the plants seemed to have grown personalities while I was gone. The
work was suddenly fun, my attention span seemed infinite, and lunch
came faster than ever. (That afternoon, eating chips and salsa was like
discovering a continent.) Pruning roses, transplanting
Crocosmia, turning the compost piles—it was all fun, fun,
and fun. I could sit out in the dirt, let my mind wander, and happily
weed my life away.

Gardening was the gateway drug. Eventually I learned pot improved
all kinds of chores: laundry, sweeping, scrubbing the bathroom. A puff
is to my patience what a can of spinach is to Popeye’s muscles. Don’t
want to do the dishes tonight? Just hand me a joint and a sponge.

(By Smoking Pot)

by Christopher Frizzelle

I n middle school, I quit swim team, watched my parents’
marriage self-destruct, and ate a lot of Cheez-Its. I would stack them
between my fingers and eat the stack. One day after school, I unsealed
a jar of Planters Dry Roasted Peanuts and ate it in a sitting. Then for
dinner: Taco Bell, Burger King, or pizza. Military family. In the
suburbs. Trying to save money. In high school, my brothers played
sports and stayed in shape; I started the school newspaper and literary
magazine, and produced them almost single-handedly (with the assistance
of Planters Dry Roasted Peanuts). You get so fat that, at a certain
point, not eating another homemade chocolate-chip cookie isn’t
going to do you any fucking good—you’re so far gone already, and
it’s not like you have any friends to impress, and it’s not like you
can come out of the closet in your shitty town anyway—so you just
go ahead and eat it. The next time you see a chocolate-chip cookie, you
do the same calculation. By the time I was 17, I was six foot four, 280
pounds. I used to say, “I’m big boned.” My older brother would say,
“How big can bones be?”

If you start running every other day after school, you notice very
little change. It wasn’t until I kept running and stopped
eating—almost entirely—that anything changed. I always knew
it was a corrective measure and not a long-term solution, though.
Simply avoiding Taco Bell and Planters Dry Roasted Peanuts doesn’t do
it. If your body has been very fat before, your body would like to be
fat again. The only thing to do is to make working out a regular part
of your life, a three-or-four-times-a-week thing.

Lifting weights is, of course, boring. Goddamn, it’s boring. Here,
pick this up and put it down again and again and again and again and
again—times a million. I tried lifting weights for years and
could never stick with it past a month or two. Then one day, a friend
confessed a secret. REALLY?! Right before going to the gym? Don’t you
have trouble breathing after having all that smoke in your lungs? Don’t
you get tripped up while warming up on the treadmill? Don’t you
accidentally drop things on yourself? He insisted I try it, and we
did—and lifting weights, and running, and the state of my biceps
have never been the same. Pot takes any rote activity (see also:
parenting, cleaning, baking) and turns the boringness into mental
candy. It makes time stretchy. It limits your ability to focus too long
on anything, so you don’t get stuck thinking about how repetitive
something is. You can run forever: Between the pot and the music in
your headphones, you’re on a bodiless plane of existence. Pain is kind
of fun, so you can lift more than usual. (Be careful.) And, because
you’re breaking the law, you’ve got a secret—a mischievous habit,
a private rebellion—that you associate with going to the gym (a
corporate, brightly lit, rule-bound environment) that happens to make
the gym really fun.

I’m in better shape than ever. I finally have muscles. The last of
my love handles will be gone soon. People always ask me about having
been fat, about how I lost it, about how I keep it off. Some friends
simply think I’m unusually dedicated to health and fitness. The truth
is, I’ve just been smoking a lot of pot.

(By Smoking Pot)

by I. Havenoballs*

W hen my daughter was born in December, my life took the
expected course correction. Excessive drinking, video games, smoking
pot, chronic masturbation—save for that last item, each weapon in
my free-time arsenal was dismantled, melted down, and converted into
things like bottles, diaper bins, and tools to combat meconium.

Recently, however, smoking has started to make a bit of a comeback.
Gone are my days of waking and baking, but one thing I’ve learned over
the past eight months is that when it comes to the mind-numbing
repetition of playtime, a little puff makes the experience not just
bearable, but enjoyable. It helps keep me sane—and during the
first year of parenthood, sanity tends to be in short supply.

Take my daughter’s current obsession with a set of cheap plastic
cups. These cups vary in size and color, and she can spend hours having
me stack them in the proper order just so she can quickly unstack them.
It’s a game that never gets boring for her; every time the cups are
stacked, it’s as if they’ve been stacked for the very first time. And
during these extended sessions of monotony—first green cup, then
blue cup, then red cup, then yellow cup, then orange cup, then rinse
and repeat—a quick hit of pot can cut through the stress and
noise that comes with new parenthood and instead keep me focused,
patient, and engaged with my daughter’s development. And that, really,
is all that matters.

(By Smoking Pot)

by David Schmader

O ne of the traits I inherited from my German-on-both-sides
family is a deep drive for certainty, tidiness, and order—three
things in short supply during the act of writing, or at least during
the early stages of writing, when making a mess is the point.
Brainstorming, jotting down half-formed ideas, banging out messy first
drafts—these tasks made my skin itch. Saddled with a brain
obsessed with finding the Right Answer (or as Germans sometimes call
it, the Final Solution), I found myself paralyzed by the possibilities,
as my would-be happy playground of creativity morphed into a gulag
rigged with a million ways to be wrong.

And then I smoked pot. For some people, pot means munchies and
moving in what feels like slow motion; for others, stress and
sleeplessness. For me, pot is the perfect stupefier, slowing down my
frantically racing
thoughts—OhmygodwhatamIgoingtowrite
andhowamIgoingtowriteitandwheredoIstart
andwhatdoIincludeandhowdoIincludeit?—to
the point where each thought can be addressed individually, while
leaving me with enough brain power to do the addressing. Properly
stoned, I could wade through the swamp of messy imperfection that lay
before every finished piece and finally start writing.

Before long, I was getting paid for my writing—a lucky break
that came with an implicit invitation to become a professional pothead.
Luckily, the work doesn’t pay enough to support such an arrangement, so
eventually I set about learning nonpot methods of stupefying my
answer-seeking brain. Mundane things like sitting still for 15 minutes
and breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth. But there’s
no denying that the welcome mat to this new way of being was a big wad
of pot.

(By Smoking Pot)

by I. M. Whipped*

T he only thing worse than spending time with your own family
is spending time with someone else’s family. Sober.

For years, I was dragged to Thanksgivings, Christmases, and Easters
with my wife’s family, which is about as right-wing nutso as you can
get without joining a militia. My father-in-law is a Fox-News-loving,
we-need-a-border-fence-now, George W. apologist. He is a mountain man.
I am a city slicker who works for an artsy-fartsy homo newspaper. We
have little in common.

Normally at family functions, I’d sit in the corner, try not to make
eye contact, and only make small talk when escape was not an option.
There was never any booze, making all my other problems—social
anxiety, a psychological aversion to family time—agonizing. Then
Christmas 2006 happened. As gun-nut uncles, pregnant teenage nieces,
and trailer-park-dwelling grandparents held hands and prayed to baby
Jebus around the living room of a suburban home, my wife, my
sister-in-law, and I snuck out, drove around, and smoked out of a
gross, resin-stained glass pipe until we were suitably baked and
alarmingly affable. It was a Christmas miracle, and it has since become
a holiday tradition—a permanent solution to any anxiety about
spending time with family.

Now, septuagenarian aunts’ and uncles’ stories about internal family
battles seem like fascinating epic poems, sitting on a couch and
staring into space is no longer a chore, and engagement in small talk
is less teeth-grindingly awful. Smoking pot hasn’t made me like these
people any more, but it makes my wife not want to strangle me so much
now that I’m perfectly willing to sit and talk to her dad about
computer parts and the benefits of FAT32 and NTFS file systems for the
better part of an hour. And if I get stoned enough, I barely remember I
was there at all.

(By Smoking Pot)

by Ari Spool

H aving sex on dope is almost everything your parents said you
should never do, with the exception of eating ice cream for breakfast.
But we all know by now that the things your parents specifically railed
against are the things your parents were totally doing when you weren’t
looking.

The reasons your parents were (are) having all that sex on all that
dope: (1) It just feels better, and (2) you can tell the other
participant what you really want to do without feeling shy. When my
roommates go to bonetown after smoking a blunt in the living room, I
hear slapping. When they are sober, it sounds boring—not even any
moaning. And they’ve been dating forever; they know each other inside
and out. Stony sex is way easier and cheaper and hotter than couples
counseling or being instructed to dress up or other weird things that
couples on TV do when “the magic runs away.” Also, I don’t know about
you, but I get all pouncy and am way more liable to look at you next to
me on the couch with popcorn on your shirt and give you that
look. I am thinking “RRRAAAWWWRRR MAKE ME NAKED!”

This is way healthier than the drunken “RRRAAAWWWRRR,” because I
already know you. We were just getting stoned on the couch together,
we’re at least buddies or probably even dating, and pot hasn’t made you
look any hotter than you actually are (weed doesn’t give you drunk
goggles). I am making a much more educated and safe decision, with no
weird, shameful walk home in the morning. And there’s no rush. Take it
slow, baby.

I honestly don’t know why you would ever have sex without getting
stoned first. Those fun sex jokes are more likely to happen, and maybe
there will be tickling. You have no one to tickle? Well, it makes
masturbation better, too. I’m talking to the dames. Maybe you’re kind
of nervous about it? Like, you just bought this new dildong and you are
looking at it and, let’s be honest, you aren’t sexually
attracted to it. And you are gonna do WHAT with it? On weed, that
weirdness goes away. You just nod and proceed to make yourself happy
enough to never shoot up any fitness centers, ever.

* Pseudonyms for Stranger writers who are wusses.