BH 12: A sobriety tributary
Eight million ways to live. Choose one
My new job as activities coordinator at a Northeast Los Angeles elementary after-school program is my exercise now. Pick-up football season has arrived and I’ve been playing lots of quarterback. Possibly too much quarterback.
Ouch, says the elbow.
His eyes widened and he marveled, “Wow, you’re a good teacher!” Now, what the fuck is better than that? I haven’t had cocaine in about 15 years, but I really, really, really don’t remember the drug feeling better than that exclamation sounded.
I haven’t been to the gym in three weeks. The revelatory low-resistance equipment at Echo Park is no longer in the geographic mix, for detestable reasons. My diet over that period has been a C-minus, with far too many carbs gobbled down.
As August moves toward its close, my 58-year-old bod is a lot doughy-er than it was in this picture, taken about a month ago.
Sometimes you don’t make progress toward your goals. Sometimes, it’s all you can do to just hang tough.
Doritos vs Shepherd’s Pie
The ways that we’re convinced what to eat fascinate me. That content is what’s most compelling to me about this clip. Never mind RFK.
I happen to enjoy a good Shepherd’s Pie and am probably not as scrutinizing as Josh Johnson is of one’s contents. Regardless of the affinity, I do still wonder if the dish would remain popular if it didn’t have tradition on its side.
Doritos are a whole nother… uh, bag. It’s a wonder people don’t die from Doritos OD, they’re such well engineered taste. Johnson’s insights into non-Americans experiencing the snack for the first time has been on my mind since I heard the bit.
It was right there in my anti-workplace harassment training, a protection that, growing up marginalized over weed in Flyover Country, it was impossible to imagine: California prohibits discrimination based on cannabis use outside of the workplace. Reading the 2024 law, I couldn’t have been more proud to be a Golden State resident.
Never felt more safe to consume my medicine.
As I stretched in today’s predawn hours, I thought:
Never leave THC gummies in your backpack.
I must remind myself every time that I go to the day job. That’s my sole restriction. I have no fear of discussing this Substack with my coworkers. I’ve regaled a teaching sub or two with the story of how weed association got me kicked out of the Echo Park house, two days before this job began. I asked one to consider what factors have gone into making the smell of cannabis so offensive to her.
There’s no worry at all about word of my lifestyle getting me called to the principal’s office.
Very little of America lives this way, I thought, sinking deeper into the above-pictured stretch that massively relieves tension in my lower back. I’d just taken a couple of puffs from a joint to go with 15 milligrams of edible THC. Yet another reason, it occurred to me as my muscles seemingly unclenched fiber by fiber, why electing the nation’s first Democratic President from Cali matters so much.
How our weed-bearing lives are lived rolled around in my mind, as privilege at first. Then, because I am an obsessive critic, I asked myself, “Should it really be against the law to have edible cannabis on your person at a school?”
“What if the THC were in the form of a tincture? Would that be okay in my position?” The issue was so compelling that I forgot one of the stretches that will help get me through an afternoon of fifth-grade football.
After I write this last paragraph, it’s back to the floor.
All through this Body High narrative the subtext has been physicality augmented by cannabis. Now my main fitness activity is playing out where I have to be straight. One week in, a new consciousness is settling upon me. The kids are the drug. The feeling that elementary school students provide upon learning new things is a novel intoxication. A bit like getting spiritual jollies via parenthood, but different in a way that I can’t yet put into words.
Elementary students are so unabashed in their gratitude. On Day Two, I taught a boy how to use his legs to get more out of his jump shot. He didn’t even actually make the shot. Still, his eyes widened and he marveled, “Wow, you’re a good teacher!” Now, what the fuck is better than that? I haven’t had cocaine in about 15 years, but I really, really, really don’t remember it feeling better than those five words.
And coke was primo yo. I was doing it with Hollywood doctors.
Did you see coming this narrative twist? My physical sojourn—or at least the telling of it—is going to reside in the realm of the sober, at least for a little while, perhaps until the winter rains of Los Angeles come and the games are driven inside and I find myself back at 24-Hour Fitness, stoned as I want to be.