I started smoking pot at Colorado College, an anomalous bastion of liberal arts in the otherwise stiffly conservative burg of Colorado Springs. It was a rich kids' school on a unique academic schedule called the block plan, in which you took three weeks of classes and then had a week off. This encouraged partying for those inclined to do so; while I worked at a furniture store or hardware magazine as a financial aid student, some people I knew took mushrooming trips to the New Mexico desert. 

It was a great place to learn about drugs, but I resisted mightily before acquiescing melodramatically just before my seventieth birthday. (I entered college early––a mistake I recommend to no one.) My roommate Dave was a serious pothead with more than one bong, and there always seemed to be a white cloud emanating from our dorm room in Mathias Hall. I didn't smoke with him at first because he wasn't my kind of guy (a popular, conformist type with no appreciation at all for art). Instead I tried to ruin my body and mind by using "nontraditional" drugs that were commercially available (camphor, hops, nutmeg, etc.) thanks to a book on that topic. 

I wanted to be different, dammit. But in the end none of those drugs did anything for me, and I wanted people to think me less of a freak than I truly was. So I caved in and got stoned for the first time, then the second time... and soon was emotionally hooked. Soon was smoking every weekend and many nights, too. Sharing bongs and joints with people I didn't know, doing hash with hot knives and a transmission fluid funnel. 

Yeah, those were the days.... The days I'd like to have back, that is. What would I do with that time? Become a better writer, a better hockey player. Get back into music. Almost anything I could have done would have been better than what I did then, and it would have saved me from a lot of wasted time in the future.

But I guess I made some friends. I guess? Nobody I talk to now, though. Only one person I've talked to in the past ten years. 

My most exemplary memory of pot culture at CC: crashing for the night on a dorm and joining my pot buddy M_____ for his "wake and bake" routine. He stashed his bong and special weed (Purple Haze, encrusted with big buds of THC) in a briefcase and, as he took it out for the morning, he pantomimed the pot inspection ritual he'd use someday in the future when the U.S. legalized pot. 

He'd be like a wine critic, he said, grading the qualities of a given batch of weed to assess its value and make recommendations to the buying public. I wonder where M_____ is these days, and if he's gotten his dream job yet. Heck, he was from Seattle and went to college in Colorado. Maybe his dream came true.