What Happens When You Try a Weed Cookie and Zone Out When Dosage is Suggested?

On peanut butter cookies, questionable judgment, and the enduring wisdom of hangovers

I begin with a confession: my head hurts, and somewhere behind my sternum a small ocean is rocking gently, deciding whether to stage a full evacuation. I don’t think it will. But negotiations remain tense.

I am not a victim.

This is entirely my own fault, because I am a sixty-two-year-old idiot.

Age does strange things to memory. You remember being seventeen with extraordinary clarity, except for the inconvenient possibility that most of what you remember is wrong. The past becomes a stew of fact, feeling and selective editing, and every so often the ghost of your younger self taps you on the shoulder and whispers: You haven’t changed, it’s still you.

You could still be that guy.

No. You cannot.

Last night, at the dog park, I discovered that one of my dog-park friends —who is otherwise terrifically accomplished, successful and devoted to his dogs —is also something of a marijuana horticulturist.

He grows varieties with names that sound less like drugs than discontinued children’s breakfast cereals. Pop Surprise. Something Berry. Possibly Fruity bouncy castle Irish delights. Whatever. I don’t remember.

Toby and Malibu

He offered me a peanut butter cookie.

Now, I adore peanut butter cookies. This information will shortly become relevant to the prosecution.

He warned me: “Only eat half.”

I listened. Mostly, I think it was two-thirds.

Mostly.

I also made absolutely certain that the treats he handed Toby and Malibu contained no THC, which demonstrates that somewhere beneath the recklessness there remained a functioning adult. Unfortunately, that adult was apparently responsible only for the dogs.

The cookie was delicious. My friend is brilliant and bears absolutely no responsibility for the nausea currently conducting collective-bargaining negotiations with my stomach lining. I knew I was now an alcohol lightweight, now I am an everything featherweight.

I remember being sixteen, seventeen, eighteen in the early 1980s, when someone’s parents leaving town transformed an ordinary suburban house into a temporary sovereign republic governed entirely by teenage boys and beer. Not two many girls showed up. No idea why.

We competed over how much we could drink as though Olympic selectors might be watching.

At parties where adults were present, I gradually discovered that normal human beings interpreted “I think I’m going to throw up” as a warning.

We regarded it as a benchmark.

I now believe the hangover may be one of God’s most elegant idiot warning system, a internal NORAD for alcohol poisoning. Without it, humanity would have disappeared into a haze sometime around 4000 BC.

I didn’t even know you could get a hangover from a peanut butter cookie.

Apparently you can.

Last night also brought another revelation: marijuana may be a terrible drug for anyone with access to food-delivery apps and no reading glasses.

(If I were DoorDash, I would immediately go door to door giving away such peanut butter cookies. Sales would explode.)

At about ten o’clock, I became ravenously hungry and ordered a full A&W combo meal, which on its own would already have been a respectable act of gluttony. But apparently I had greater ambitions. I also ordered three chocolate bars and two pints of ice cream.

Some of this, in my defence, may have been accidental. I didn’t have my reading glasses on, and I appear to have been filling the cart with the carefree confidence of a man who could neither see nor exercise judgment.

When the food arrived, I had the provisions of a small expedition.

I am fairly slim now. If I made this a regular dietary program, however, I would eventually become the land whale of land whales, beached permanently on the sofa and requiring a small municipal grant to turn over.

So perhaps the cookie did teach me something after all: apparently the distance between “I’ll just have half” and “why are there two pints of ice cream at my door?” is considerably shorter than I thought.

My body, after decades of relative restraint, now appears to regard anything beyond two ciders as organized crime. Somewhere inside me, several organs are filling out witness-protection paperwork.

And still I do not learn.

I made essentially the same solemn declaration about a year ago after experimenting with magic-mushroom edibles. Someone suggested them.

I accepted the suggestion because apparently six decades of accumulated wisdom can be defeated by the sentence, “You should try this.”

Ten minutes later I was in bed wondering whether it was anatomically possible to reach down my own throat and retrieve not only the mushrooms but several previous decisions.

It wasn’t.

The effects eventually passed. The lesson apparently did too.

There was also, years earlier, ketamine infusion therapy, which I tried medically for depression. I’m doing much better now, but at the time it seemed worth trying. It did not improve the depression. It did, however, convince me, for a brief and extremely sincere period, that space aliens were going in and out of the small clinic and that the blood pressure alarm was a warning system for the blue aliens, who were particularly feared.

I don’t remember blue alien identification being listed among the therapeutic objectives.

At least there was medical supervision.

The aliens, to their credit, eventually left.

And so here I am again, older, supposedly wiser, and making another solemn declaration that will surely be treated with the respect its predecessors deserve.

Two ciders. Maximum. No hard liquor. No mystery edibles. And at the dog park, the only peanut butter cookie entering my body will contain peanut butter as its sole active ingredient.

If offered a choice between a dog treat and a suspiciously cheerful-looking cookie, I’m taking the dog treat.

There are worse things than liver-flavoured biscuits.

I’m going to church on Sunday. I don’t know whether being an idiot is technically a sin. I suspect it falls under the broader theological category of “things God gave you enough sense not to do.”

So: sorry, God. Sorry, body. Sorry, head most of all.

Was the mild altered state worth today’s toll?

Absolutely not.

Would sixty-two years of accumulated experience have allowed me to predict that in advance?

Absolutely.

And yet here we are.

This will be the last essay I write about my adult experiments with legal inebriants. I promise.

Please do not send this to my minister or my wife.

My dad has departed this mortal coil. He was a wonderful man whom I miss dearly, and if my theology is even approximately correct, he is probably somewhere in heaven repairing a Model T Ford while a pack of beloved Westies supervises.

I have no doubt he already knows about the cookie and is shaking his head.

Toby and Malibu, meanwhile, say they saw nothing—but would like a warm sirloin mix to keep it that way.

Note to reader: I just discovered the dosage was supposed to be half of one quarter (or 1/8). I exceeded the dosage by a factor of four. This is making more sense. I wasn’t hungover; I was still high. But my thesis is still confirmed. I am an idiot.