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Ladies and gentlemen I’m proud and brutally disgruntled to say that I’m just over six months clean and sober (yes this includes weed) after over 12 years of doing drugs.
Hold your applause, please. I’m happy about it and shit but I didn’t ever want to come to this. I love drugs like a fat kid loves cake. I just personally can’t be trusted with them anymore (if I ever could). I have kids now, I’m getting a little older and it was just time to hang up my drinking and drugging boots for a long and indefinite period of time.
That said, sobriety is damned difficult. I got high as a kite on all kinds of shit all day every day for over a decade and it’s no easy task to change my ways after such an extended jaunt down the proverbial rabbit hole. The general state of my life is undeniably better since I got sober but as a fellow wagon rider I know likes to say: sobriety is not all rainbows and blowjobs. It sucks dirty dog ass just to get out of bed some days and I’ve had to develop little tricks to keep my head in the game.
I was in the throes of one of those no good dirty awful very bad days when the idea for this article was born. I was in a group chat with some fellow drug reporters and derelicts talking about how Hunter Biden would make a way better president than his geriatric father or that fast talking orange fellow when I lamented that I would almost certainly break sobriety to smoke crack with Hunter Biden.
I would love to say I was joking but it’s a mortal sin to lie in print. If Hunter Biden invited me to smoke crack, ride water slides and fire off automatic weapons with Ukrainian hookers I would have absolutely no choice but to say yes. I may be trying to live a better life but I’m not fucking daft. That shit would rule.
Thus, I was reminded about the episode of Friends where Ross makes a list of all the celebrity women he’s allowed to sleep with while in a long-term relationship. A hall pass list if you will. As somebody deadlocked in a long term relationship with sobriety, I thought it might be helpful and motivating to have my own hall pass list of people I’m allowed to do drugs with should the opportunity arise.
Obviously, smoking crack with Hunter Biden is at the top of that list and I would be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to ask him in writing if he would be down to get high and ride water slides with me and some of my fellow drug journalist friends. So, Hunter, if you happen to be reading this please get ahold of me. Your dad, lawyers, girlfriends and/or ranking members of The Justice Department absolutely do not have to know.
Now it is at this time I feel I should be absolutely clear for my fellow sober people, this is just to have a laugh. I’m fully committed to sobriety and better living and I really don’t want to overdose again. I’m just trying to be funny, mostly. I also don’t think I’ll ever realistically be put into any of the following situations but who knows, life is cool sometimes. The point is this is supposed to be funny and I’m only like 2 maybe 40 percent serious so don’t yell at me and don’t tell my sponsor, wife, parents or kids that I wrote this.
Now that we got the disclaimer out of the way, here’s my sobriety hall pass list complete with the people I’m allowed to get high with and the substance we’re allowed to do together.
This one should be obvious. I have listened to the 56 Nights mixtape well over 10,000 times. When I found out my lady was pregnant with my first son I swear to God I put an earbud in her belly button and played Codeine Crazy at max volume. I never had enough access to lean in the mountains of NorCal to really sip like I wanted to but on the rare occasion it was around I loved me some dirty sprite. If DJ Screw or Pimp C were still alive I’d choose to sip with them instead but I’d still want to do drugs with Future even though I’m pretty sure he’s actually sober in real life. His music was the soundtrack to so many of my degenerate activities it would only be right to sip a double cup or three in the studio with the man himself.
Hear me out on this one, I don’t want to drink with Johnny Depp just because I’m secretly a little gay for him. I want to drink with Johnny Depp because he’s one of the few remaining people walking the Earth who knew and loved the late and great Hunter S. Thompson while he was still alive. As a die-hard Thompson fanatic with a Gonzo fist tattooed on my chest, I would love nothing more than to hear some stories about him from one of his closest friends and allies. I also know Johnny appreciates great literature and writing which I can sit and nerd out about with anybody, but to toss a few back with the guy who played Hunter in real life and trade stories from the dark and bloody ground would easily be the coolest moment I’ll ever experience in this lifetime.
Could it be any more obvious that I’m a Gonzo fanatic? Not only that, Ralph Steadman is one of my favorite artists and a noted lover of psychedelics, though maybe not so much in his old age. Either way, it would be an absolute gaggle of fun to dose with Steadman, watch his process, throw some paint around a studio and hear stories from his life. Art and acid also just go hand in hand for me. I used to dose up and spray paint manic scenes of pigs, butterflies and grim reapers (oh my!) on bedsheets in my old garage, so this would be a much more well-thought out version of that with one of the true godfathers.
The 60’s are, naturally, my favorite bit of American history I wasn’t around for and Jefferson Airplane is one of my all-time favorite bands. As the lead singer and mastermind behind some of my favorite tracks from that era, it would be unbelievably rad to toss back some nose-beers with Grace Slick and fast-track a conversation about the 60’s, the Vietnam War, the Chicago Seven, the original Woodstock and how shitty the weed was back then compared to now. She’s probably a little old to be railing lines now but hey, this list was never supposed to be super realistic. I actually reached out to her for an interview once but never heard back so if anyone knows Grace Slick, tell her to call me so I can pick her brain. Doing drugs together would not be required.
I stole this one from Jon Cappetta but it was too good to leave out. I’m not the most political person in the world. Frankly, everyone who gets too into politics seems to be fighting a losing fight against what I can only assume to be a superhuman race of reptilian overlords. That said, Obama was by far the coolest lizard-person ever to grace the White House since I’ve been alive (Although Slick Willy was in office the year I was born I was just too young to remember and too young to know what a blowjob was). The Secret Service would likely have to be there which would be really, really funny to me. They might even have to test the weed first, in a highly classified fashion of course. I also want to ask the former president about the night we killed Bin Laden, what it was like in the Situation Room, etc. That seems like it would make for some fun, light weed conversation.
Before anyone accuses me of anything let me be clear: this is not a sexual thing. Emma Watson just seems like she’d be fun to party with and I don’t want to take Molly with dudes. Not to mention I already saw Daniel Radcliffe in person once after doing a bunch of cocaine on a sea cliff (the details of which are here) so as my other favorite character from the Harry Potter series and somebody who generally seems cool as shit, I just have a weird feeling that it would be super fun to take Ecstasy and go to a light show with the brilliant Hermione Granger. Maybe we’d fake magic fight just for fun. Miley Cyrus also seems like she’d be fun to take Molly with, for whatever that information is worth.
During the course of writing this I was surprised to find this was actually a bit of a difficult list for me because all the people that came to mind originally are dead. Mac Miller, Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, Warren Zevon, Joan Didion, MF Doom, James Gandolfini, Charles Bukowski and plenty more I can’t be bothered to remember at the moment would have all made the list ahead of the rest but they tragically passed before the fateful day I sat down to write this silly little article, many of them far too young. Maybe that says something about who I choose to look up to but I think it says more about the bargain you make between heaven and hell when you decide how you want to be remembered. Greatness takes a heavy toll on the mind, body and soul after all. Live fast, die young and don’t leave enough money behind to pay for the casket.
Anyway, I won’t turn this into a philosophical diatribe. I’d have to be high for that and I am regretfully…not…. I’ll end by saying that getting sober was a smart choice for me at the time I decided to do it but I don’t regret getting after it as hard as I did, not for a second. You gotta get a little weird with it sometimes. You gotta balance out the mundane with some good old fashioned freak power. You gotta have a backup plan to get through the pain of being a well-functioning human. You don’t necessarily need drugs to do that and I would be remiss if I did not take the time to strongly recommend sobriety to anyone struggling with substance abuse. It helps, it really does. Everyone else feel free to party on for the rest of us who can’t anymore.
That said, if anyone listed above wants to get high with me you can find me on AOL Instant Messenger. My screen name is “5ubstanc3Dumpst3r143.” Until then, you can find me hanging out with my kids, fully present, telling better stories than the other parents and casting my vote for Hunter Biden this November.
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Wow. Heavy. A little too People Magazine for me but this is High Times 2.0. or Hight Times lite. Which means all staff are drug tested. Oh, wait, that's Rolling Stone. Never mind. Celebrity culture doesn't really appeal to me. Neither do ex-druggies. Thompson was mean and would yell at you. Why would that be appealing to get high with a guy like that? Celebrities are always on the phone and don't have time to hang out and get stoned or drunk or cracked out. I never got into hard drugs because my parents never got divorced. I went to an N/A meeting with some girl I was delusionally into to see what it was all about. I was shocked at the level of self-abasement I wittnessed. With members standing up and proudly proclaiming: "I'm a drug addict and a thief and I'm still a drug addict and a thief," delivered as if this was some triumph. I get the group support for those in deep need but, yuck. In Los Angeles I biked by an N/A meeting place and was shocked at all the hipsters on view. It was just major. Later on, I biked past another meeting house, this in a fairly nice neighborhood near a park. It was daytime and no one was about. Two cops in a car flashed their lights at me and jumped out. "Biking on a sidewalk, guy. Let's see some I.D." You see, they knew all the N/A druggies hover around there waiting for a meeting or a score. They figured it would be easy pickens. They were both young rookies. I told one of them that I didn't consent to a search. He paused for a moment thought about it then went to his car. He pretened to diddle around on the computer then came back at me: "There's a warrant for your arrest." I was incredulous and demanded what for. "Failure to pay a bus ticket fine." I almost never rode the bus and certainly was never cited for anything of the kind. It was preposterous and he knew it. He then greedily searched my bag. He found only some really nice indica. He looked at it in all it's splendor and handed it back to me. He rifled through rest of the bag and found nothing. He simply falsified a warrant to search my bag. I didn't file charges against him and his partner because I didn't need the hassle and plus I really enjoyed gettting my cannabis back unmolested. A cop actually giving me back my succulent budds was a luxury I had to savor. In retrospect the whole scene was egregious beyond belief. If this young cop claimed I had a warrant then by rights he would take me in cuffs down to the station. Instead he gave me back my bag got back into his car and left. Total abuse of power. I remember being stunned for the rest of the day and night.