The Boss is singing, Growing Up and I’ve got it cranked. It is a live performance and Bruce has a genius for connecting with dreams of hope and life’s accompanying despair. This has nothing to do with what’s on my mind, but if you were born anywhere near NYC, his anthems have a resonance that touches deep inside. I was just about to lower the deafening sound and then Mick and the boys blasted through the ether with Sympathy for the Devil, which gets a little closer in time to where I want to begin my story.

It was early in the summer of 1966. I had just graduated Queens College and I was working at NBC as a page, glorified ushers in search of careers in show biz. I managed to get into that club, because of a connection through a broadcast production course at school. It was a magical leap for a kid from Queens, but not the first of a series of incredible adventures, including working at the ’64 World’s Fair, driving wealthy visitors all around the grounds in little golf cart looking vehicles, with couches in the front. If you weren’t around for the Sixties, you missed quite a time.

One night, after working the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, I headed over to one of the page’s walk ups on the upper east side of Manhattan. Going to college at a City school meant living at home and the revolution was a little slower in arriving. Kenyon Slaney, was one of the fabulous characters working as a page. He had to have been in his ancient thirties, with slicked back hair and a wardrobe of outdated and over used, double breasted, pin stripe suits. The purpose of walking up the five flights to his tiny apartment was to smoke pot, a first for me. I had a world class experience. His bedroom was outfitted with sheets, joined in the middle of the ceiling, adding an exotic, Lawrence of Arabia, flair to the entire experience.

I was twenty-one, feeling true freedom for the first time in my life. it was a graduation I had been impatiently waiting for. I was raised by a single Mom, forced into that position as a result of losing her husband, my father, when I was a young boy. As child, I always worried about her and tried, often in spite of myself, to be a good son. From the age of nine on, she was all that stood between me and becoming an orphan. However, those childhood fears didn’t stand a chance against the temptations of the time. I was ready to grow up and make my own rules. Finally, I had outgrown the age of being punished for my transgressions and the freedom was supremely intoxicating, something I had been praying for.

I wish you could have been around then, because it was a time never to be duplicated, innocence has suffered an ugly death over and over again since then. From the moment I glided down the five floors of Kenyon’s smoke filled, tented bedroom, my life was altered forever. The college days of drinking too much cheap beer and puking was replaced by rolled joints and a new kind of high. For years after, I remember walking down Fifth Avenue, wearing my suit and carrying an attache case in one hand and a joint in the other.

I think the reason why it stuck with me for so many, many years is because I always felt uncomfortable in my skin. I was never able to simply get lost in the moment and forget I was Larry. It was also a secret club and the membership seemed to be exclusively young people. It was a badge of the Sixties and music exploded back then, the soundtrack of the stoned subculture. Getting high became the new normal, separating us from our incredibly uncool parents and their establishment that felt like prison. The world belonged to us and getting high was the passport for all.

I don’t recall a time in my past when I gave it up for more than a month or two. It always felt like a celebration of being alive. Millions of people gave it up as they got older, cutting their hair and joining the establishment. It never lost its attraction for me and simply became part of my life for decades. There always seemed to be a reason. Very often, waking up was reason enough. This pattern has continued unabated for well over fifty years, that’s fifty years. Every now and then, I’d think about quitting, but I was always high when the very brief internal debate occurred and exhaled away.

I am probably an overly sensitive person, if there is such a thing. Long before I met the Buddha, he was always talking about life being inseparable from suffering. We look for permanence, a mirage of misguided perception. I have been living with this kind of pain since the night my father died. Marijuana was my medicine and I loved it. I was always able to hide in that cloud of smoke.

It became the great enhancer for me, as it did for so many. Everything was more fun, even the most mundane activities imaginable. We have been partners in life for decades. When I was in my early forties, I left NYC and all that was familiar. In addition to being gifted a fabulous array of cassettes, my soundtrack for a truly life changing experience, were a dozen beautifully rolled joints that didn’t last past Tulsa, Oklahoma, on my way to Santa Fe, NM. This habit of mine was portable and went wherever I did throughout my life. Camping in the foothills of the Rockies was unthinkable without my stash. It had effortlessly become the internal uniform I wore whenever I was awake. There was never a reason to quit, because it made life so much better for me and age and frequency were never a consideration.

When the fat-drunken-old, white men, finally realized there was money to be made, the lunacy of Reefer Madness, a must-see piece of fear-mongering film propaganda, was buried by the dollar sign. It was absolutely inconceivable that smoking dope would go corporate. When I moved to Kauai around fifteen years ago, nothing much had changed regarding the pot culture. Surfers have probably been getting high as long as the jazz musicians of the forties and fifties. Maui Wowie was mythological even when I started in Queens, but all of us back east smoked grass from Mexico, packaged by the kilo in thick red paper.

Believe it or not, the reason why I have felt so compelled to write about this is because I think I have quit and that is the story I want to tell and I am sorry it has taken so long. First, I want to be abundantly clear, I have zero judgment around it and I have not had some sobering epiphany regarding its usage. Semi-automatic weapons are a sacred right in America. We are killing children and they are now killing themselves at a terrifying pace. We are surrounded by madness and cruelty. Kent State was unthinkably shocking back in 1970, because it was an aberration. Today, black brothers and sisters are criminals of their color. Science has now become fictionalized propaganda. Poverty and powerlessness are lethal tools in the hands of the wealthy, devoid of conscience. There are much more dangerous highs today than toking on a jay.

Sure, I could argue about the merits of being straight versus high and how it’s a way of denying who you are and where you are, but hypocrisy is not my strong suit, especially as someone who has constructed so much of his life around being stoned.

Recently, I have devoted much of my attention in my writing and thinking to getting older. Wait, that is not quite the right wording, rather it has been about being older. I have tried to share how different it is up here. I have been terribly frightened, feeling like I don’t have the tools to repair the toll of time, spiritually fractured. Speaking of tools, back in the dinosaur days of dope, you could roll a joint, fill a pipe or load a hookah, if you were really cool. Today, thanks to those same old, fat white guys, pot has gone full on corporate. There are so many different ways to ingest pot today. Gummy bears will never be the same. In the past few years, I have taken full advantage of the hardware revolution.

Finally, after probably having lost the few readers I have on a good day, I am on the verge of making my point. I just haven’t been feeling right and never imagined be continually high was now bad medicine for me. I was having full blown panic attacks at night, unable to sleep, afraid I would die, the bed feeling like a coffin and the air sucked out of the room. My life was making less and less sense and getting high was actually tempting the demons to come out of hiding, emboldened by my fear. I didn’t seem to have an internal language that brought me any comfort.

Imagine if you had a habit of any kind for well over fifty years? Now, when I write these kind of numbers, I don’t know if a twenty-five year old can have any idea how long that is. For what it is worth, I am writing to you, not as someone who knows more, speaking from the throne of experience, which is absolute bullshit. Over time, my life has changed in so many ways that my memories seem like a stranger’s possessions.

As of this writing, I haven’t gotten high for a week, which might as well be a life time for me. I am closer to God than I ever imagined and it has nothing to do with religion, which I really don’t give a shit about. I knew the distance was lessoning, but my vision felt terrifyingly blurred, a near sighted fear. I’ve got loads of unfinished business and it requires a level of honesty and awareness that has been too frightening for too long.

Half my body weight is probably THC after all these years of indulgence. The paraphernalia sits where I left it around a week ago, in a kitchen draw I haven’t opened since. It is a purposeful reminder that avoiding temptation is not possible today. The choice doesn’t disappear with a decision and living with it is the best way to stay clear.

I am so sorry it has taken this long, around five minutes of your time, which is a life time in our new world order of micro-attention. I remember the day I realized I had beat the cigarette habit, three packs of Pall Mall a day. I couldn’t believe I pulled it off and when I crossed that line, there was this gorgeous internal smile of having defied all the odds. I knew it. I knew it.

For days now, I have been shocked at how good I feel. It is exactly like being high, everything feeling exaggerated, identical to being stoned. Colors are absolutely stunning. My imagination is on fire. The discomfort of being Larry seems to be have been crowded out by the joy of just being me. I am falling in love with each moment, feeling each as a gift. For you all of you twenty-five year olds, when you are afforded the opportunity to spend over seventy years with yourself, it is simply unbelievable the relationship you develop and you might not want to interfere with it any longer. It is tough to navigate through the clouds and I want to see where I am going.

Thank you so much for your time.