Boulder, Colorado is a great place to be stoned. Even back in the day, before it became legal, Boulder felt to me like the epicenter of pothead culture because weed was everywhere. I never called myself a pothead, and I don't think any true stoner would have called me anything more than a casual user. But it was the heyday of my marijuana use because it's the place where I got stoned with friends––real friends, not just the people I happened to be around, the way it was at Colorado College and Binghamton and anywhere else. 

They were great times. Even though I'm not a big fan of pot these days, I'll never be so cowardly as to disown the camaraderie I experienced in the Brotherhood of the Bud. I remember hanging out at my friends E____ and R____'s house, getting high in their living room and playing music. They knew me so well that they'd be able to predict when I'd start getting crazy ideas that I just had to write down, and when the time came R____ would point me to a pen and a stack of scratch paper. Typical stoner ideas, completely incoherent and rarely memorable in the morning. 

Though I did have this one great idea that has stood the test of time: The Museum of Frozen Foods, which would track the history of this culinary staple.... Yeah, great ideas like that. Real game-changers.... 

It was great fun, and even though I don't get stoned anymore, I still hang out with some of the people I used to get stoned with back in the day. I got stoned alone, too, because there were always people around who could give me a little bud. Just a tiny bit about the size of my pinkie tip, in a plastic baggie. Enough to keep me stoned if I wanted to be, or to have some handy just in case I tricked some girl into a date.

But I can't pretend it was all fun and games, because I clearly remember a time when I had a definite problem. I was just about to head to Lake Charles, Louisiana for grad school, but I couldn't tell my employer yet because of some, uh, poisonous elements in the work atmosphere. I actually bought a bag then and, for a month or so, smoked more weed than I'd ever smoked before. I'd get up some mornings and smoke, even. It got so bad that my eyes started looking red at the corners and purple underneath. Totally raw. Afraid. Seeking shelter in the herb that made me laugh until it couldn't make me laugh anymore. 

That was the beginning of the end for me and pot. Sort of a last hurrah, except it wasn't the last. It wasn't even a hurrah, really. Just a desperate attempt to build a smokescreen that would allow me to hide from the realities of my life, get down on the floor of it, and try to claw my way back to a lost innocence. 

I went for the old innocence instead of trying to grow a new one. That was my marijuana-fueled mistake.