Smoking Trees

The first time I smoked weed was on a beach in a town called Del Mar, North of San Diego. I was 16 and a friend had a ziploc bag of stuff that smelled pretty good. Unfortunately, as it turned out, nobody remembered to bring a pipe, rolling papers or any other way to actually smoke it. Clearly, we weren’t very good stoners at the time.

I’m not sure who came up with the solution but we finally realized we could fashion a crude pipe out of an empty beer can. So, we smashed the middle of the can, poked a few holes to create a bowl, added another hole for a carb, grabbed a lighter and smoked away. The resulting experience was, in a word, underwhelming.

Over the next few months I tried smoking weed several more times (out of a proper pipe or puff puff passing around a joint) but still found the experience lacking. I’m sure this had a lot to do with my own inexperience and also that the weed in those days (or at least what we could get) was not great. Whatever the reasons, it just didn’t do it for me.

As High School went on many of us found substances more interesting than weed. For me it was beer and, on more than one occasion, the hard stuff. It was during my sophomore year when I went to my first “three kegs and two bands” party and decided beer was for me. I never really looked back after that. Not for a long time, anyway.