CHEFILEPTIC

16. weed (I mean medical marijuana)

I’ve had a very unique relationship with marijuana over the years, and I’ve developed a fairly unique perspective on the whole subject as a result.

I started using it younger than I probably should have, admittedly.  I think I took my first puff when I was like ten years old and was a semi-regular user by around age twelve.  This doesn’t mean that I think I should have done that, or would recommend this path to the general population–so don’t get me wrong.  It may have, however, played some role in suppressing my seizures, before I even knew I had them, as I’ll explain.

I explained before that I had the occasional smaller kind of seizures (which created the déjà vu spells) on an irregular basis as a young child.  This was not a daily experience, but it was often enough that I did notice that for whatever reason, these ‘spells’ seemed to become more irregular, and stopped completely around my early years of puberty.  I had no idea until much later that these events represented any kind of negative medical problem, and I even kind of missed them after they had stopped happening. I wondered where they had gone. 

I guess that having thought of them as part of my childhood caused me to think that they must simply be a ‘normal life experience’ that all people have, and it must just go away for all of us as we grow up.  Again, I didn’t know that they were an ‘abnormal’ experience, so they did not threaten or scare me, but I did notice that they had stopped.

Then, I began to notice that whenever I’d quit using weed for a few days (usually a simple supply issue or just being unable to sneak it in around the parents), those particular feelings from my childhood would come back.

As I grew, I was getting more into doing creative things like writing short stories and poems, and I was beginning to learn about and experiment with music.  I was fascinated by the return of my spells, and I recall that I tried to write during them, to see if I would not only be able to do it, but also to see if I would capture any great ideas I could use.  After associating my ‘spells’ with weed use and disuse, I began to occasionally stop getting high from time to time on purpose just to trigger them, as a sort-of ‘creative experiment’.

Now that I understand the bigger picture, I’ve come to realize that my association between weed-use and my spells was actually a unique, self-controlled ‘placebo test’. 

It’s likely that these ‘auras’, as the world of medicine calls them, were actually triggered by withdrawing from my regular pot-head routine, and it is possible that if I had had any other kind of regular chemical dependency going on, withdrawal from any other chemical might also have had this effect. 

In other words, it is possible that the change of routine and the actual process that the brain goes through as it goes through withdrawals, may not have been specific to marijuana; perhaps stopping regular alcohol use, or use of narcotics or anything else may also have had this effect and it is impossible for me to know. 

What I knew then was more like: “out of weed for a few days, here comes those funny feelings again”.

It is impossible for me to know if my habit was directly responsible for suppressing seizures, and if this actually outweighed whatever damage may have come from using it. 

I know that smoking anything is frowned on by the medical world for a reason, even if smoking weed is less damaging than smoking other stuff like cigarettes or crack-cocaine.  I mean, think about it—inhaling smoke.  Any of us that have ever cleaned a weed-pipe clogged with resin are likely to have pondered how much of the stuff has built up in our lungs as we scraped.

I’ve been told by some (who I am convinced are some of the best and most knowledgeable medical professionals in the current world of neurology) that I am damn lucky to be alive.  As I’ve learned, my type of seizures and the overall classification of my diagnosis is a very rare variety.  My seizures are of a type that are very intermittent, yet are very violent and damaging. 

I consider myself not only fortunate to have been treated by the team that I had gradually managed to ‘graduate’ to at Stanford, but that I was able to get to some real ‘frank talk’ from them, once they had realized that I could handle the ‘tough-stuff’, and wanted to hear their genuine opinions.

For one thing, they admitted that they were first and foremost surprised that I was still alive at all (this was in 2013 so I was age 41), because most others with my particular diagnosis are usually gone by that age.

Admittedly, I have lucked out—any of my falls and wanderings and all those times spent not breathing could have easily spelled the end for me at any time, and somehow, I had managed to just stumble on through (though not easily, of course). 

The next thing I was told that I’d surprised them with was the fact that I’d kept working for so long.  Trust me, that was not only a matter of luck, but was also a matter of simple determination.  I had to work so I could pay the bills and buy the pills so I could continue to work, so I had learned to work, despite my disease, and to just try to plan ahead as best I could–to keep myself working.

With all of this in mind, I’ve realized that whatever may be on the long list of experiences I’ve had, it all adds up to a basic, incredible success story—because I’m still here. 

I’ve naturally wondered about all kinds of crazy things I’ve done and whether or not any particular thing is to blame for my seizure condition, including that whole list of recreational drugs I’ve played with over the years.  I mean, don’t get me wrong here, but I couldn’t help but wonder from time to time: what if I had never done any hallucinogens?  What if I had never tried weed?  Or those few powders I had tried a bit of here and there?  Or alcohol, or purple Kool-Aid, or msg, or overeating when I was a fat kid, or this or that or this… I mean, what exactly should I have avoided, or taken, or taken more of or less of? 

And I know now that this is a pointless spiral of pondering.

Whatever is on the ingredients list of my history, I’m still here and I still know my name.  So, whatever might have damaged me might just as easily been a lifesaver.  I mean, who’s to know… maybe I made it this far because I did or didn’t do whatever drugs or eat or drink whatever, but the one thing I am sure of is that regret is not going to help me now.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that too much of that would be more likely to hurt me than it would be to help me, and I’m pretty sure that my keeping some optimism and a somewhat-positive attitude are at least part of what has carried me through to this point.  So piss-off on the whole dwelling-and-second-guessing-myself thing.

So, with that in mind, I don’t regret that I was using marijuana from a young age. 

This does not mean, though, that I would tell all kids to light up, or even that I would tell parents with kids who are having seizures to try whatever forms of marijuana for seizure control as a first step–at least not at this point in time.  While I am glad to see that the green stuff is getting made available to more and more people who are in pain, or simply want to use it for fun, I can’t quite ‘go there’ when it comes to being able to give a black-and-white answer when it comes to whether or not I am totally sure that using weed was a totally effective means of keeping me ‘in control’, even though I was a card-holding California Medical Marijuana patient from April of ‘05 to April of ’08.

Once I had learned not only that I had seizures, but had also associated a connection in my mind with their suppression and my marijuana use, I was pretty unshakeable on that association.  I had looked back at my life, knowing that my spells were actually small seizures, as well as finding out that I had already had full-blown grand mal seizures, and it seemed clear that when I used the weed I had less seizure activity.

This also corresponded with more and more stories coming through the media listing seizures as a marijuana-treatable condition.  Add to that the whole reverse-checked self-placebo test thing I had lived through, and my opinion was sealed.

Not only that, but as I looked back, there seemed to be even more experiences in my past for me to make this correlation with.

See, when I first had that one seizure (the one that had sent me to the emergency room leading to my first proper diagnosis at age 26), it just happened to be during a time period during which I had been conducting my own personal crazy experiment that invoked a state that I hadn’t experienced since childhood—daily, ongoing sobriety.

I was then working with Mike and our friends at quilted fish records on my album, which I’d named Red Dam.  I’d begun working on that project in late spring of ‘99, which coincided with that ‘personal experiment’ I undertook. 

Part of this was that I had decided I wanted to know what would happen to my creative drive and to my ideas if I went 100% sober.  I mean, I had been such a routine pot-head and somewhat regular beer drinker for so long that I really was curious, and I also had a lot to prove to both myself and everyone that knew me, especially because this project would not only contain only my writing, but I was playing a lot of the instruments on it. 

So I wanted to focus, maybe even more than I ever had previously done before.  I had decided that I would go totally sober for at least six months while I worked on the album, and that seizure happened about three months into that stretch of sobriety.

So, I wasn’t stoned at all for several months prior to that event—I was clear as a bell when that little feeling from when I was a kid started up and then got that first ambulance ride to the ER.

A big part of the advice I had gotten, both directly from my doctors but also from pretty much everything I had read about seizures, seemed to agree on one thing—that seizures tend to worsen for their sufferers with disruptions to routine. 

This is actually pretty much a cornerstone of seizure treatment, and it’s one I still totally stand by today; once you figure out what is working you keep it up.  So, part of the game when trying to keep seizures under control is taking the prescribed amount of medications at the same times every day, trying to eat on a regular basis, making sure to sleep every night and trying to do it at around the same times… you get the idea.

And at some point, for quite a while actually, part of the routine that I had kept up with was using marijuana, and I got pretty darn methodical about it.  Shortly after California started to allow it, I made sure to get a Medical Marijuana card.  I went to a separate doctor who had advertised as writing these prescriptions, and I had learned enough to know that I would be best to tell my ‘western-type’ medical doctors that I used it, but I did not put them ‘on the spot’ by asking them for a prescription.

I then grew a small amount, which I both smoked and cooked with.  I also made sure that I always had some on-hand, and that I did not allow myself to have withdrawal-related symptoms triggered by skipping days–which pretty much just means I was always stoned, but I did end up getting a bit more obsessive about it than the average stoner, to say the least.

Once I had made this connection between my marijuana use and my pattern of seizures, I was convinced that I needed to use it to make my seizures less likely to occur.  And as timing would have it, I was coming to these realizations just as California had passed Proposition 215, the California Compassionate Use Act (which was the first medical ballot initiative passed at the state level in the USA).

For a while, I was making ganja butter (meaning I was cooking weed with butter to get the psychoactive compounds from the plant into an edible form), and I was using an eye dropper to fill empty gel-capsules with the product.  This way, I could take a very metered-out dose of marijuana in the same way that I was taking my prescription pills—the same amount at the same times every day.  I had one of those plastic pill-holders with the snap-shut spaces for every day of the week, and I would sit and make a whole bunch of pills all up from my green-butter stash to set up all my medications for the week.

What a pain in the ass.

Keeping myself in weed, whether growing or buying, still cost me money.  Eventually I got ‘the card’, but It still took all the errands and money that it had taken before to obtain the product.  And I would have to admit, looking back over a longer period of time, it did not completely prevent me from having seizures that I know I’m lucky to have made it through.

So, who knows?  Maybe during my ‘medical use’ years I had less seizures than I would have had—there really is no ‘scientifically valid’ way to know.  Maybe I had more of them, or maybe weed really had nothing directly to do with it in the first place.  Again, at least I’m still alive to ponder about it.

I’ve managed to learn to ‘conceptualize’ a few things from the doctor’s perspective, too.

At first, I pretty much went into any new relationship with any doctor I saw sort of assuming that I could expect them to be stuck in the proverbial pockets of ‘big pharma’, and under the thumb of whatever insurance machinery.  I saw them as concerned first and foremost with covering their own asses, with making money taking a close second—which made me, and my wellbeing, fall somewhere down their priority list. 

It’s taken me some time to get some respect, and to get past letting these be my default assumptions. 

A patient should never start off asking a doctor to help them to get better if they don’t think that the doctor genuinely wants them to get better.  So-what if they make however much they do—you need them more than they need you, if you’ve come to see ‘em.  If you’ve decided that you’re unwell enough to be in front of a doctor, and they will probably be caring for you, it’s best to start off right on your end as a patient, and if you are thinking “I bet this person can’t help me” or “this person doesn’t really care about me, just making money”, you are at least somewhat less likely to get the results you’re seeking.

My own surprise plunge into the dollar-fueled non-medical concepts of uninsured-ness and pre-existing condition-ness had me on the defensive, and expecting any doctor I dealt with to be unlikely to condone–if not totally disagree–with my medical marijuana use.  I, however, had my own unique experiences to draw from, and my own under-educated foolish arrogance to help fuel my opinions.  I knew what I knew, and if a doctor told me that weed wasn’t the right tool to suppress my seizures with, it simply meant they weren’t ‘on my side’. 

I had to look back a bit to learn that I should always at least give the all the doctors in my world the benefit of a doubt and have a good listen to whatever they have to tell me.  If I then don’t get info from them that I can use to get better, or if I feel like they’ve ignored the info that came from me, or feel like they don’t really give a shit about my well-being after all (when I know I did my part to start things off right), I can always just look for another doctor.

A little reading and research about the Medical Marijuana movement (that I was in the middle of) enlightened me to some valid concerns that doctors would naturally have about prescribing weed. 

For one thing, the ‘tension’ in the law, which is still present today, is that the federal government still considers weed illegal, regardless of what laws any states have passed. 

So, if you go into your official ‘western-medicine-type’ doctor and ask for a marijuana prescription, you are asking them to do something that the federal law still prohibits.  Depending how ‘hip’ the doctor is, you may be making them think about all those years of school, and everything it took to become whatever specialization of doctor they are, all going up in the smoke of a bong hit coughed out by a foolish patient that gets busted by ‘the feds’ kicking in their door. 

As this movement has made some progress, the doctors in many places are less likely to have such paranoia, but all of them are likely to have heard some horror stories of colleagues that have ended up wrestling with the law, and they may have already made their own decisions out of this hype however long ago. 

Unfortunately, this may, of course, have already inspired the doctor not to be honest if they really do think that marijuana (or one of its newer forms) might work for a patient.  I have learned to give my doctors some ‘relief’ when I discuss this matter with them, so I can try to get their real opinions.  I do this by telling them straight-out that I won’t be asking them for a marijuana prescription, but that I do want them to know my history and current patterns. 

I’ve realized that having learned how to negotiate this delicate matter with doctors is one of my ‘wins’.

When I tell a doctor that I won’t be asking them to prescribe marijuana, I’ve usually felt some pressure-relief in the room right then–the doctor knows I won’t be asking them to put their ass on the line. 

I’ve learned that there has been an established legal precedent (in many places, at least) called ‘implied consent’.  What that means is, if you tell your doctor you do something, and they don’t tell you directly that you need to stop doing it, you have their consent.  So, I’ve told my doctors about my pot use and history, and I feel like I’ve been able to get some of their real, honest, uninfluenced opinions back about it, without putting them at risk.

When I started carrying a California Medical Marijuana card in 2005, I was paying something like $150 a year for it, plus having to see a separate doctor to obtain it.  At that time, the dispensaries were not competitive with my usual resources for getting the bud (especially when I grew it myself).  And apparently, this legal precedent of ‘implied consent’ had been used successfully by patients in that state that had been busted, and then had successfully appealed their cases without even having the card.  Eventually I decided that I needed to save the money; I already knew how to be a discrete pot head, so I finally quit renewing the card in spring of 2008.

A more recent conversation with one of my doctors also revealed some great reasons that would still discourage them from reaching for weed first from the prescription shelf.

For one thing, until we get to the point where it can be grown as a commercial crop, it won’t be inspected by the Food and Drug Administration.  This means that you can never be sure what was sprayed on it, where it was grown, and whether or not it really is the variety that it is labeled as.

For a patient that is focusing on stabilizing and controlling seizures, having different amounts of different stuff involved can add some unintended variables.  Keeping watch over this kind of thing is supposed to be one of the ‘good things’ our government has been empowered to do, but unfortunately, the way things have developed over the past few years has made this doctor’s point clearly valid.

In Santa Cruz, the growing weather is kick-ass.  As just about anyone that has been there is likely to know, it’s full folks that know how to grow the good shit (and have learned to grow it in stealth over the years, both indoors and outdoors).  When prop 215 was passed, patients with the right ‘legit’ proof that they were growing for their own physician-approved medical purposes began.

Now don’t get me wrong here—politically I have been, and likely will always be of the stance that it should be fully legalized.  Like everybody else that takes this position, I’ve voted to support it, and I’ve cheered when it’s won.  I would have to admit, however, that I, like everyone else with two cents worth of reality going on, knew damn well that somewhere along the way somebody without a note from their doctor was going to end up taking a toke, even if only medical use had become legal.  Darn.

Well, the Santa Cruz mountains were poised and ready to grow all they possibly could from the get-go.  Methods referred to by the media as ‘guerilla grows’ went on all over the place, and in some areas, larger grows were staffed constantly.  Folks started growing everywhere from high up in the trees to on the sides of the hills, clearing trees out to make room for grows, and using any number of products as they did so.  During the growing season, water was diverted all over the place and there was, let’s just say, little or no organized ‘human sanitation’ going on for the crews of workers. 

At one point, the city of Santa Cruz had big ‘town hall meetings’ to allow everyone to voice their concerns, and the Santa Cruz supervisors voted and decided that it was shutting down the growing in the area until further notice, based on ‘environmental concerns’.

Now, right from the get-go, there were some very serious and focused growers that produced some well-differentiated, clearly labeled, and even organically grown product.  However, after having worked all the years that I have handling food, I would immediately expect that without ever having someone like a health inspector pop in here and there on worksites, any number of issues that come up in food service would be likely to appear.  Sorry to sound a little nerdy, but it is a plant that is being grown for human consumption.  So, until it’s a lot more like growing food commercially, there actually are a higher number of risks for the consumer.

Finally, I’d have to point out that chemical consistency is really the final imperfection when considering using marijuana as a primary seizure-controlling tool.  The changes in our laws are currently allowing us to try more and more varieties and hybrids of marijuana to treat different afflictions, but we are also learning more and more methods of refining it—meaning folks are making different consumable forms of it at varying strengths. 

Of course, any pothead will likely know that even aside from whatever ways the plant ends up being processed after it’s harvested, different varieties of cannabis have differing effects already.  For those of us that have used it recreationally, it’s pretty well understood from the growers on down through whatever networks of dealers all the way to consumers that this is part of the fun after all, but unfortunately for medical use, this means that some varieties could work better than others, and thus the user may experience fluctuations as different weed comes and goes. 

I would even point out that different branches on the same plant can vary quite a bit in terms of potency—any of us that have ever trimmed up a plant will be able to tell you that—so even if you find out that a particular strain of cannabis works for you and you grow it yourself, there will probably still inevitably be some fluctuations.

When I had a great conversation about this with one of my doctors that I really respect, he pointed out that even if I found the particular type of weed that keeps me from seizing, I’d have to know that I can find it, in a somehow super-consistent form, wherever I choose to live–for the rest of my life.

Hmmmm… he did have a point there.

Where things are now in the changing and evolving law-scape, it does still seem like an unreasonable gamble for me to go betting the whole farm on.  I had to weigh that even though I have so far beaten some extreme odds just to be alive today, we just aren’t quite ‘there’ with it yet.  I mean, our society is making some headway, and I will continue to support legalizing marijuana, but if I were my doctor, I would tell a patient in my particular situation the same damn thing.

I understand that right away any number of people reading (or hearing) this will bristle up, wondering if I know that there are two basic types of marijuana (the sub-species cannabis indica and cannabis sativa), and that they both contain varying levels of two basic types of chemicals (THC and CBN) and that different forms have been derived (such as drops, capsules, oils, lotions, and on and on) and that these all work for different afflictions and that sometimes someone who is having a problem like seizures or anything else bad which nothing else had worked on and they tried one of the magic new kinds or forms of weed and all of the sudden got results that none of the pharmaceuticals and methods of western medicine had helped…

Yeah, I know, people!  Don’t throw rocks at me yet, I’m still a freak at heart for crying out loud, whether or not I am using the weed at any time.  I do know why people do it (and maybe should), and I don’t judge here, or think anybody that is using weed for medical reasons and is getting results is just getting high with some placebo-affected positive results.  I know it works in a lot of positive ways, and is bound to help us all in a growing number of ways as we get more and more access to it.

However, unlike the pharmaceutical faucet pouring out all them loads of pills, the weed is not comparably clean and evenly metered YET, and the weed is not being sold down every block at every drug store in every town YET. 

Who knows where we will be in a few years, but for now I have to agree with the points my doctor had made (just in case anybody might want to consider arguing about all these points with me).

Every time I see a story in the media about some suffering person who got some results from trying weed, I really do want to cheer.  But then, I want those legitimizing hands of ‘official science’ to reach in asap and study these results and publish them and make them available to the whole damn world so that more people can get this relief! 

It’s great when I hear that someone is having less seizures or headaches or whatever because they were finally able to try marijuana, but all these people still can’t travel with this medication to every state without legal risks, and for now they can’t be guaranteed ongoing access to safe and consistent product, so we still more have work to do.  And unfortunately, in our country, these hands of science usually move along with money—and we all know that a number of the big machines behind the scenes don’t want the weed in legal reach.

So that’s where I see the end-game needing to be played.  At least here in the USA, we still need to make the federal law change, so that the pharmaceutical industry will not see competing with, or ignoring marijuana as an option.  Rather, the pharma-companies need to be made to see it as a resource, and figure out how to extract and process and package whatever aspects of it give patients specifically-tailored relief, so they can make some nice big money out of the game. 

Otherwise, weed will be handled like spices or tea and people suffering from various afflictions will continue to approach their own relief as one approaches a food recipe; and likely sometimes it will work better than other times.  I would say this is still superior to our current system of banning and punishment, though, and I will always be glad to speak with my vote.

Whether or not marijuana was helping or hurting me from a medical perspective, the first ‘wave’ of medical marijuana laws in California definitely did not foresee a number of problems that would come along with (supposedly) allowing patients to grow and poses a small amount of weed and/or a few plants grown for medical use. 

One area that certainly needed (and still needs) development is defining who can do what when it comes to landlord/tenant relationships, for instance.

Bryan and I had been in the house we were renting for over four years back in 1999 when I had my first spaz-trip to the emergency room.  It was a small ‘mother in law’ style-house behind the main house that our landlords lived in.   Shortly after that, I explained to our landlords that I was using medical marijuana and wanted to grow a small amount as was now allowed under prop 215.  I was met with some resistance, but eventually I was able to grow like six plants indoors, under a small high-pressure-sodium type light.

I did this during that first stretch of time I was disabled (not working), in part because I didn’t want to leave the house very often in case of seizures, but also because I had to save some money–as I had begun to realize the financial pressure I’d be under, now that I was basically on unemployment.

Well, it wasn’t exactly easy to get the landlords to approve of me having an indoor garden in the first place, and I recall that we had argued about how California had passed prop 215, but the federal government still did not validate it—and basically we seemed to be posturing for a court battle. 

They felt like ultimately, they would win out because if it went up and up and up through a few levels of appeals, they’d end up with Uncle Sam on their side, and they certainly had more money to fight such battles than me and Bryan did.  So even though they eventually ok’d me to grow my own (after they considered that I’d already proven that I had been a good solid rent-payer for years), there was still a general uneasiness about it.

Then, things got really weird.  At the end of our tenancy in June of ‘05, the landlords decided to sell the property, and were showing it to prospective buyers.  We had agreed to the ‘usual routine’ that most tenants find is the rule in this situation—they’d let us know a full day (meaning 24 hours) before they wanted to show our house, and then we would let them do so.

Thing was, the landlady could not seem to help herself with sharing my medical info with the prospective buyers.  I mean, we would be sitting there, in our home, and the landlady would be showing total strangers around–saying stuff like “and this is Nate, and he has epilepsy and he uses medical marijuana that he grows himself in a garden in the attic.”

So, we ended up in court, which sucked. 

I would not stand by and allow my personal medical information to be shared with total strangers this way, right in front of my face, just because I used marijuana to treat my medical condition–and I was ready to go down fighting. 

By the time it was all over we were ‘serving’ each other papers from our lawyers, and they more or less evicted us, even though we really didn’t take long to get out.  We wanted to quit giving them our money by then anyways, believe it. 

The amount I ended up spending getting legal advice was very hard to justify, but again, I knew I had to have some rights in the picture, and I was ready to do whatever I had to do to make sure other people don’t ever have to put up with their landlords telling total strangers all about their medical situations, and the prescriptions that they may have agreed with their doctors to use to treat them with.

Even though I don’t feel the need to use medical marijuana now, I still think this is a grey area of ‘tension’ in the law in many places when local areas try to make progress against the federal standard, and I hope that people keep in mind that the ride may not be a smooth one when their state finally takes the first steps towards allowing doctors and patients access to marijuana. 

With good intentions can definitely come conflict and confusion, for sure.

Anyways, since the big round of procedures I went through at Stanford during 2013-14, I’ve let myself smoke a little weed, on and off.  I had stayed completely away from it for like the first six months after that, and then I started having a little here and there. 

I don’t consider myself a ‘medical’ user anymore, just an old-fashioned recreational one.  Lately, I usually take a single puff and call it good—the stuff is pretty potent here in Michigan, where it became legalized for recreational use back in December 2019. 

I’m very fortunate to have had the choice—meaning using it on and off hasn’t appeared to have directly caused me to have seizures (I always knock on wood when I say that).  What it has done for me though, since I’ve used it again, has been an arguably healing thing; it at times has helped me escape from the whole crazy reality of my situation just enough to let that old radio in my head get a little louder over the background noise.  It’s a balancing thing, and I’ve leaned on that old familiar crutch a bit, knowing I can walk just fine without it also. 

I was told when my big adventure at Stanford ended that since we did not proceed with the full surgical process that we were then considering, I could expect my seizures to return–and likely to worsen.  Also, it was explained to me that the seizures have gradually been damaging the area of my brain that is basically the short-term memory handling region, and when I do have more seizures, I can expect more degradation in this area.  It was summed up as that I will probably still know my name, and be able to tie my shoes as my brain degrades, but eventually I might not be able to tell you what I did yesterday, or last week, or a minute ago.

Most of us that know anything about getting stoned have at least heard somewhere along way that marijuana does not exactly ‘help out’ one’s short-term memory.  I know I’ve spent plenty of time when I was stoned looking around for ‘whatever-that-was’ myself, but oddly enough, lately using weed has seemed to help me break into my musical memory a little more. 

Since the surgery, (and the scattered but sometimes nasty seizures I’ve had since then), it’s been difficult to pick up instruments and spout out music from memory.  A number of times I’ve gotten discouraged and just put my music down, frustrated as I’ve seen how much work it will really take for me to return to the level I’ve been at before.  I’m still far from having my previous music skill-set back, but when I got a little buzz on, I begin to stumble through more and more music that I thought was gone, and this has helped me get in touch with different ‘blank spots’ in my memory of my own history.  When I play the music, I ‘remember those times’—and I get back more and more of them when I let myself play some tunes.

I guess maybe I’d rather walk with a crutch than not at all. 

At least now, in the state I live in anyways, it’s my choice.