If you are reading this and wondering ‘hey wait, didn’t you say you don’t smoke pot?’, well the answer is that largely I don’t. However, it is still in my umwelt in such a way that every now and again it pops up.

Largely, I am good at saying now, but every now and again it catches me off guard. After a particularly trying day my cousin turned up and invited me to a concert in an attempt to cheer me up. I needed it so agreed. He waited till we got to the concert to first sneakily say ‘hey, I brought a joint’ and then proceed to guilt trip me when I gave him a disapproving look. I was, at least in that night’s company, the only person with whom he could smoke. And so I obliged.

We waited for the headliner to get on stage to start smoking. It likely made the experience a lot more pleasant: the headliners were a group of middle aged people singing songs best coming out of the lips of people half their age (the catch from their hit song ‘I only like you when I am drunk’, was now available as a t-shirt in both genders), and despite the fact that group was calling itself punk rock, every song seemed to be in the style of 90 grunge/pop: here a song that sounded earily like Bush, Green Day, or Offspring.

So yea, the drugs helped.

And drugs are entertaining.

You begin to notice all the little things that you normally ignore: through the smell of spilled beer and other people’s joints, a short, stocky, silver haired middle aged woman in flowy summer dress walks by, her arms holding a whole-ass pizza a loft as she walks by, as if she were in religious procession bringing it to be sacrificed to the gods of the concert.

Mind you, not a pizza box. A god damned wood fire oven roasted pizza sat on a plate and exposed to the elements.

But of course, all this shouldn’t go unpunished. There is a reason that as a rule I don’t do marijuana. It’s because it isn’t good for me, in a very specific way. There is a history of minor psychosis in my family in the form of paranoia and hypochondria, and smoking aggravates it to hell. For me it is frequently the hypochondria, and right on cue it struck. Just as the drug hit I began to look around the venue, noticing all the naked, exposed mouths, and everyone just breathing on each other. Soon I was thinking of fluid dynamics, how breath flow in air currents, what could be a minimal safe distance….

There is still a fucking pandemic. And then it hit me:

I’m going to get fucking Covid out here.

The joint wasn’t strong, and the effect wore off. The prediction, however, landed. Two days later I would be diagnosed with Covid. The culprit was actually a person who was at the concert with us.

So yea, once again, drugs didn’t pay.