Life Will Be the Death of Me Read online

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  I once fell out of a seaplane and into the Hudson River. I was flying out of Manhattan to visit a friend upstate. After the plane landed, there was a little rowboat waiting to ferry us back to the dock. I slipped stepping into the boat and landed in the Hudson River in my boots, jeans, sweater, and wool peacoat. It was Thanksgiving weekend and we were less than ten feet from shore. You know those babies being taught how to swim in YouTube videos where they are bundled up in sweaters and boots? That’s what I looked like. It was freezing and it was funny. Chunk bypassed the little rowboat too and jumped right into the water after me.

  Bert and Bernice are never going to rescue me. Even if Bert tried, he’d drown. Bernice would probably just look the other way.

  Some people are not built for drugs and alcohol. I believe that I am. I believe I am built for the apocalypse.

  I reconnected with marijuana in my late thirties. As I’ve previously shared, I’m open to most drugs as long as they don’t leave you with a hole in your arm, or staring through a keyhole of an apartment door, looking out for drones. At this stage of my life, I find it prudent to avoid apartments altogether.

  I loved pot when I first discovered it in high school—or pretended I did, because I thought it made me look cool—but after a few years of recreational abuse, it just ended up leaving me paranoid and self-conscious, and in one instance, getting up to leave the theater when a movie ended, only to realize I was on an airplane.

  Then, one year, my family and I were on our annual Christmas ski trip to Whistler, Canada, and our chef made special “adult” cookies. Every night, my brothers and sisters would line up in the kitchen on our way to dinner, and I would dole out half of a cookie to each of them—and if any of my nieces and nephews stole any without me seeing, it was none of my business. Our family thrived that year. Our family doesn’t really fight, because we’re all so exhausted from our childhoods, but it definitely marked the beginning of a new era for the Handlers.

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  The legalization of marijuana in California raised standards at dispensaries. The educative component that was lacking for so many years was now available on all store-bought weed. The labeling of strains, along with the labeling of THC vs. CBD ratios, was all right there in black and white. With the advent of medicinal-grade, controlled micro-dosing, there aren’t a lot of people I wouldn’t recommend it to. I’ve turned straight-arrow people into people I can actually spend time with. I’ve gotten friends who have never done any drugs, friends who have had terrible experiences with edibles, my Mormon sister, people’s parents, Muslims, and one nun to imbibe. About ninety percent of the people I’ve introduced to marijuana are now frequent users. I take a lot of pride in being an enabler or, a term I’d like to coin, a “pharmacological intuitive”—one who instinctually knows the exact right dosage for each consumer.

  After Trump was elected I came the closest I’d ever been to depressed. My anger rose to the surface, rather than simmering just beneath it. I had something identifiable to be angry about. So, instead of masking it, I treated it.

  That’s when the news started to get fun. Kellyanne Conway, stoned, is a good time. It’s up there with Eddie Murphy’s Raw. Same for Sarah Suckabee Sanders. One day, Sarah Suckabee Sanders came out for her press briefing with emerald-green eye shadow shrouding one eye, and zero eye shadow on the other eye. I’d find myself laughing when Chris Matthews would interrupt his guests while spitting all over them, and I started to see the news for what it was: a twenty-four-hour spin cycle filled with conjecture and speculation about whatever idiotic or racist comment Trump had tweeted that day. I realized that I had allowed this administration to rob me of one year of my life, and I wasn’t going to give them another. I needed a channel change.

  The thing that non–cannabis users fail to recognize is the way cannabis bends your frame of mind. It allows access to a recessed part of your brain that I, particularly, was deeply needing to engage. How to be less reactive, how to sand down the edges—these were things I had been working on with Dan. As a result, things became slightly more poetic. Less final, less “end of an empire.” My sleep got better, my moods got better, even my dreams got better. I stopped watching the news on a loop, and I even started waking up laughing. Pot, politics, and Dan summed up 2018 for me. The year I had to fall apart in order to come back together.

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  I was sitting in Dan’s office one Monday morning, telling him how passionate I had become about this new marijuana renaissance.

  “My opinions have always felt fully formed,” I told Dan. “With pot, it feels like they are finally unfurling. Every canvas is blank. Everyone is so much less annoying and everything is a little more tolerable when I’m a little bit stoned,” I explained. “I also don’t feel compelled to talk as much, and with my voice, that’s a bonus.”

  “In what way is everyone so annoying?” It was always funny to hear Dan use “annoying” in a sentence. “Annoying” seems like a word that expires after adolescence, like “conceited.” I liked that I was finally rubbing off on Dan.

  “The thing I’m realizing, Dan,” I said, leaning on one elbow, but missing the arm of the chair and falling into my own lap, “is that I’m the one who’s annoying. It’s like, I’m just now finding out, this whole time, I’ve been the annoying one.”

  Dan stared straight at me, and it was hard to discern his take on my new hobby.

  “I used to think that something was wrong with everyone, and now that I know I’m the one with the problem, everyone seems a lot more interesting,” I explained.

  “I don’t think you should judge yourself so harshly,” Dan said. This was a phrase Dan repeated to me frequently, and one I’ve never quite gotten on board with.

  “I do,” I told him. “I feel like that’s what’s been missing this whole time. Circling around other people in order to avoid myself. I deserve to be on the receiving end of my own judgment. It’s my comeuppance.

  “It’s like this little porthole into a whole new world has opened up,” I continued. “When I’m stoned, I can find joy in shaving my legs.”

  This was when I realized I was stoned. I had popped a chocolate-covered Kiva blueberry on my way out the door that morning. I don’t usually take them in the morning, but I had therapy and thought—Why not? That’s my favorite thing about edibles: forgetting you’ve taken some, then feeling a little psychological twinkle, and suddenly things get just a wee bit more dynamic. Weed lit up my curiosity in things I hadn’t had interest in for years. That’s what I was missing—getting lost in life a little more.

  Dan told me that if I could access that state of mind when I was high, it was already part of my psyche—which meant that I could access it without anything at all, or through meditation.

  “I’m not there yet,” I said. I had been trying for months to meditate, and it was going nowhere, fast. I could only do forced meditation when I was with Dan. He made me short recordings and long recordings, and I’d try it for a few days at home, and then forget, or remember—and then forget.

  “Not only is it easier for me to be around people, it’s definitely easier for people to be around me. I am able to have conversations with people I never had the patience to listen to before. I’m so much less judgmental. Everything becomes a little bit softer, less apocalyptic. No black and white. More middle. More pleasant.”

  “Well, that’s great. I don’t have a problem with you taking edibles,” he told me.

  “The other good news is—it’s cut my drinking in half.”

  This was a sentence that I never expected to come out of my mouth, so I want to be very clear: I have no intention, now or in the future, of giving up alcohol. This isn’t a book where I get sober at the end. However, cutting my drinking in half was an unexpected perk, and that is when I started to g