The Austin Chronic: On Joint Rolling, Wonderment, and Turning 40
Am I Feeling Anything Yet?
By Kevin Curtin, Fri., July 12, 2024
Late last Saturday night, when we were entering our usual stage of wonderment, my friend asked me a question I haven’t heard in over a decade: “Did you get high the first time you smoked?”
The question sent me time traveling: spring of 1998, eighth grade field trip to Dearborn, Mich., in the tiny bathroom of our hotel room. I’d already procured a small amount of weed, a lighter, and a pack of papers that bore on the packaging a bespectacled Italian professor smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper. The only thing I was lacking was any clue whatsoever about how to roll a joint. I clumsily dispensed the broken-up cannabis into a paper and ungracefully folded it unto itself, pinching the ends desperately as I licked the edge. Voilà.
Immediately, it spilled open like a burrito made by a teenager on their first shift at Chipotle.
What I didn’t know then was that the papers I was using, the now-fabled Club Modiano, were gumless – meaning they have no sticky part. To get them to adhere, you had to tear a thin strip off the edge, then lick it, so the fibers would bind together. These were heady connoisseur rolling papers in the hands of a 13-year-old doofus.
But that doofus was resourceful. So I awkwardly twisted up the doobie once again and borrowed a piece of tape off the packaging from the hotel soap to hold it together. The resulting joint was an abomination, resembling a snake that had eaten a basketball, wearing a Santa Claus belt.
And hell yes we smoked it, in a grassy little ditch behind a strip mall. Of course, it had to be relit after almost every hit and we just kept asking each other those five oft-spoken words: “Are you feeling anything yet?”
“Maybe it’s creeper,” my classmate reasoned. It wasn’t. And, alas, we had to spend an afternoon at the Henry Ford Museum not high.
As I finished recounting this recently unlocked memory, my friend stared at me incredulously. “You... smoked... tape?”
The point of the story, though, was that I believed I didn’t get stoned on my first try due to user error.
In retrospect, this all strikes me as a lesson. Yes, I rolled potentially the worst joint in human history, but today I consider myself a craftsman joint roller. I can roll cones you’d mistake for a store-bought pre-roll or straight hooters as cylindrical as a cigarette. I can crack a Swisher with my thumbnail and twist a perfect blunt. I can even surgically undress a Backwoods and reroll it without it being droopy. In fact, if I had to challenge the Grim Reaper to a contest for my soul (which, yes, is a key plot point in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey), I would probably choose joint rolling.
This skill, which I acquired through decades of being my friend group’s de facto “rolling guy,” has panned out into many transferable applications, like making homemade spring rolls and swaddling babies. Had I been born 40 centuries ago in Egypt, I think I’d be pretty talented at wrapping mummies, too.
“Not too tight,” I’d say as I stretched bandages over a dried-up pharaoh. “You have to allow airflow to get a good pull.”
The moral here is that if you make something part of your daily routine, you can go from being absolute dogshit at it to being an expert. Try new things, practice them out of duty and love, and don’t allow yourself to feel discouraged.
Why am I attempting to dispense basic life advice in my cannabis column? Because I’m trying to act my age... and annoying people with unsolicited, questionable wisdom is part of being old.
You see, this week, I turn 40.
That middle-aged milestone has me reflecting on my long journey with cannabis. As I smoke and ponder, three thoughts stand out.
I’ve Been Witness to a Weed Epoch
Pretty much everything about cannabis is better than it was 25 years ago. In the Nineties, most marijuana found in middle America was dry and flat and harsh to inhale and if you got caught with it, you’d get handcuffed and have to go to court. Today, having beautiful, fresh, and delicious cannabis is the norm and it’s legal for the majority of Americans to possess. Contemporary stoners might debate if a bud’s aromatic profile is heavy on limonene or pinene, but back in the day we didn’t even know what a terpene was. And what’s really crazy is an eighth costs roughly the same now as it did a quarter-century ago – what else in this world can you say that about?
My Tolerance Has Never Really Grown
How is it possible that, after 26-plus years of smoking, five or so hits of weed still gets me lifted? I don’t know – I’m not a scientist, maybe it has to do with the variance of people’s endocannabinoid systems – but, to me, cannabis stands with coffee as the only head-changing substances that can be used daily and have the same rewarding effects.
And the Rewards Have Changed
When I was young, cannabis was entertainment – a cure for small-town boredom. It existed to me as both an important social activity and a tool to enhance the repeat viewing of very limited surroundings. At (almost) 40, I view marijuana much more spiritually. It’s a thinking cap I can put on that gives me access to thin-air thoughts that I believe I deserve no credit for, like I swiped them with a butterfly net from some other consciousness or they’re gifts from the Weed Gods. If all day I’ve been stuck on how to tell a story or articulate a funny idea, a new angle can suddenly appear that clarifies it. As such, I can often take very little credit for what’s in the Austin Chronic column.
As I’ve grown older, that change of perspective that I get from marijuana also helps me get over my bullshit, like letting go of resentment I have toward someone or myself – because forgiveness is a wellness practice. It can also serve as an antidote to despair. The other night, after watching two elderly rich men debate over who deserves to be emperor of Scam World, I smoked a joint and was reminded how nice it is that I was born one of the very few species on this planet that is not ever hunted by predators. Most of all, I value that cannabis stokes my sense of wonder, because of all human qualities, I believe that wonderment is the one that keeps us young.
So these days, when I ask myself “Am I feeling anything yet?,” it means something very different from when I was on that eighth grade field trip. And the answer is always yes.
