Weeding My Thoughts
Like many writers, I have engaged with ideas of perception and alternatives and variations of temporality. Some seek new worlds and realities, giving their minds and bodies over to mind altering procedures and substances. The question of how these interact with the creative process has long been the subject of debate. The relationship, for example of writers with alcohol in particular has been well documented. Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Spring examines alcoholism in a few prominent writers, from Carver to Cheever, Hemingway to Faulkner and attempts to discuss why these, mostly male writers used alcohol (among other drugs) as a crutch and what effect it has had on the body of literature. Stephen King famously said: The idea that the creative endeavour and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.
The older I become, the less I like alcohol. It has always struck me as odd that such a drug is freely available, while in most parts of the world, people languish in jail for using, possessing or dealing marijuana. When the new government in Germany announced that they planned to decriminalise recreational marijuana use I was elated. I already live in a city where marijuana use is very widespread and at least in practice, the authorities are reluctant to arrest or prosecute anyone who has a small amount for personal use. According to § 31a of the German Narcotics Act, criminal prosecution for an “insignificant amount” of narcotics used for personal purposes is heavily discouraged. Different German states define “insignificant” differently. Berlin for example defines this as up to 15 grams of marijuana while neighbouring Brandenburg, far more conservative than the nation’s capital, has one of the lowest, of only up to 6 grams.
I have often wondered if I could write under the influence of marijuana. While in cities like Leiden and Amsterdam in the Netherlands where marijuana use is legal, I tried as many strains as I could. Once, sitting outdoors in a bar, I tried to write after using a sativa strain, observing everything around me, the sounds, the sights and my own thoughts. I typed it on my iPhone in the Notes app. Recently I went back to what I wrote to see if it made any sense. I present it here, editing limited only to punctuation. For some reason I chose to begin in the second person and switched halfway back to the first person. I have chosen not to edit this. Don’t ask me. Ask the sativa.
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