Inhale

I inhaled.  I inhaled a lot.

I'd gotten myself into smoking weed with the reprobate son of my music teacher (who I adored, spent a great deal of time with (I'll come onto India) and am still in touch with).  There was many an evening spent, laughing gut-wrenchingly, in his enormous, hammock-hung, bedroom, with just a detachable doorhandle for security.  Blowing dope smoke into the plastic ball that his hamster was playing in was a particular delight.

I continued and developed the habit at University and needed little encouragement to smoke through coke cans, bongs and very poorly rolled up joints.  We can fairly assume that a very large proportion of students were doing it in those days (I'm sure they're doing considerably worse these days) and it wasn't something that particularly worried me, with respect to longer term affects or, indeed, incarceration.

There were some who abstained rigorously (L, for example, thought the whole thing ridiculous and risible) and some who experimented unexpectedly.  There were times when U was trying to give up smoking when she decided that smoking weeed was the best way to get herself off of tobacco.  There were times when we ate brownies.  And there was a time when I ate it neat.  I threw up.  I threw up all over the downstairs toilet and passed out in amongst it all, only to wake up and gather the wherewithall to write a note to my housemates that I'd clean the mess up in the morning - something that impressed them disproportionately.

And there was a time when I tried something a little bit stronger.  I was with C and J (I'll come back to them another time too).  We started out at this enormous student pub, half way into town, and spent the rest of the evening aimlessly wandering the streets.  Children's playareas.  Other people's houses.  Parks.  Back at J's house, in his attic room.  It was rubbish.  It did affect me - absolutely.  It kept me awake all blinking night.  My abiding memory of the evening was J finding out that it was my first time.  The disdain in his voice that prevailed from thereon was not the substance talking - no paranoid delusions there.  Just disdain.  Thanks for that.

I never reached the point with any of these escapades, where I did the whole 'you're amazing', 'I love you', 'what's the point of money man....' thing.  My detachment, my rationality, my cynicism, seemed to stay intact throughout.

I just enjoyed the laughing.  The laughing was great.