Yesterday I was power-walking on the bikepath, enjoying the dulled late-summer warmth and the subdued sunlight at 6:15pm. The bikepath passes behind the A-town High School and affords a view over the well-groomed athletic field, which is encircled with a burnt-orange track and flanked by aluminum bleachers. There is a chain-link fence separating the bike path from the shrubbed valley that leads to the high school premises, but an unofficial passageway has been forged for entry and egress, and local students are often seen milling on the bike path after school hours.
Four such young men sit on a wooden guard rail alongside the bikepath, and as I walk past them, a potent smell of marijuana fills my nose. I slyly glance at them through my sunglasses. They look like good kids, insofar as they have short hair and preppie clothes. One is talking very rapidly as I pass. The others stare slack-jawed at their hands or at the ground. Cyclists whiz by to the left of me, and one stoned lad looks up and jerks his head to follow the motion.
Don’t they know that marijuana smoke clings to the air like a swarm of gnats? You may be wondering how I know what marijuana smells like. Well, the truth is, I found out in 4th Grade on the school bus. There was a back-seat loud mouth named Mike K., who one day declared “This bus smells like pot smoke.” Everyone on the bus, including the bus driver, took a deep breath. I took several, memorizing the smell that had been identified as pot smoke, knowing this knowledge would serve me well in life.
(Oh, that Mike K. He must have had quite a home life. Another day he announced out of the blue “I hope I marry a screamer instead of a moaner.” He repeated this several times, an 11-year old boy obviously proud of his grasp of this adult terminology. I sat in the front of the bus with my book, parsing the statement. I knew it had something to do with sex because of the word “moaner.” But “screamer?” Why would someone scream? And why would he have a preference?)
Back to the bikepath. I believe whole-heartedly that marijuana should be legalized. Our country wastes an untold amount of resources on prohibiting marijuana in order to save kids like these from the scrounges of a drug that is less dangerous than alcohol. Meanwhile, the medical establishment is happily pumping these same kids full of psychoactive substances, and we’re telling them with straight faces “Don’t do drugs.” Are we effing serious?
But regardless, I’m still bothered by these boys, brazenly smoking weed on a bikepath that’s choke-full of old people, young families, and yuppies with cell phones. I had the urge to teach them a lesson by leaning over them and whispering, “Whadya kids smoking? Don’t you know you’re surrounded by narcs!” And then I’d run around the bike path, screaming “Get me some doooooooooowners!”
