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.
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.
