Drugs

February 6, 2015

Just now I stood at the kitchen counter eating a cinnamon bun thinking to myself, this isn’t even eating, this is using, as I felt the sugar hit my bloodstream and my synapses gurgle with sedate happiness. Yeeeeeessssssss.

Moments before, I took the container that held the cinnamon buns down from the top of the fridge thinking to myself, now I don’t need to eat one, I can just have a taste of the icing.

Wrong.

I had just finished eating a healthy and filling lunch. A giant green salad topped with tuna and little bit of grated sharp cheddar. It was delicious and filling. I ate the salad because I walked into the house at 12:45 thinking about the cinnamon buns, and knowing that half the battle was legitimate hunger. Salad with protein was the quickest and best thing I could think of to avoid eating a bun. I ate. I was no longer hungry. So when the idea arrived to simply pop a small fingerful of cream cheese icing into my mouth I just went with it.

Oops.

I knew this would happen. This morning before I left the house I removed the container of cinnamon buns from the kitchen counter and put them on top of the fridge and out of my line of sight. Out of sight, out of mind? 

Apparently not.

I wound up scarfing a cinnamon bun, and scooping out a few extra fingerfuls of icing from the bottom of the container because by then, what the hell, you know. And here I sit, three minutes later, tummy ache a-brewing, wondering, what the hell?!? Except that I know exactly what happened there. Habit happened. Sugar happened. Home baking deliciousness happened. Because body chemistry. Because I have a will of play-dough.

Drugs have come up a lot in conversation around here lately, especially pot. As we live in the Lower Mainland, I can hardly go for a walk without strolling through a cloud of it. There was a front page story about it in the paper the other day. A documentary aired. (Did you know there are more pot dispensaries in Vancouver than there are Tim Hortonses?) Anyway, I was out with a group of friends recently and I admitted how much I really love the smell of marijuana. Whenever I do encounter that scent I stop where I am and take a big whiff of it, like smelling the proverbial roses, only now with more stank. It makes me feel happy and carefree and mostly nostalgic. It takes me back to my teenage years, when I used to smoke pot with my cousins and school friends all the time. It burned my throat and it never really did much for me in terms of getting high. Back then (as now) I’d rather just have a nice strong drink if I was in the mood to party, but I smoked up anyway. I did it to be cool. Life was simpler then, and that smell takes me back to a simpler time. I like it. And it always gives me the idea that somebody nearby is having a good time, which is nice. But I’m a grown up now. I’m over it. Occasionally someone I know asks if I want to get high with them, and I always say no. It’s like if my friends said, hey, do you want to pool all of our money together and hire that crazy purple limo with hydraulics and go to a punk rock show? In grade ten I would have been all over that. But now? I’ll pass, thanks guys. (Well, on the purple limo part anyway. I’d still like to go to a show. Any show. Please, someone pry me away from the netflix and get me out of the house.)

Pot. No thanks. That is like, sooooo nineteen ninety-six.

This is me asserting my own new version of cool. It’s twenty fifteen and my drug of choice is cinnamon buns with cream cheese icing.

I’m so cool it hurts.