Pubdate: Tue, 26 Aug 2008
Source: Nelson Daily News (CN BC)
Copyright: 2008 Nelson Daily News
Contact:  http://www.mapinc.org/media/288
Note: The newspaper does not have an active website.
Author: D.B. Wilton

CONFESSIONS OF A RETIRED POT HEAD

To the Editor:

I see that the pot debate is raging again in the letters pages. (NDN, 
Thursday, August 21), a tempest in a tea pot so to speak.

As usual the debate is highly polarized between those who love the 
sacred weed and those who see it as precursor to hard drugs, crime 
and even schizophrenia.  Perhaps as someone of experience and a 
seeker of the Middle Way, I can inject a little realism into the discussion.

Back in my hippie days on Fourth Avenue I sometimes saw the dealer 
pull up in his long yellow car but I was never tempted because I used 
my weed to generate paintings and poems and I thought that hard drug 
addicts seldom produced either.

Like many lonely writers I found pot amenable to my practice for 
three reasons: first it overcame performance anxiety: the fear of the 
blank page and the rational mind's aversion to wasting yet another 
evening in useless scribbling.  When I was high the page became a 
glowing portal to infinite possibilities.  Secondly it enabled me to 
focus so intently on the immediate sequence of words that I no longer 
cared where they might lead and that meant I was in for an intricate 
journey of discovery through a labyrinth of memory and 
imagination.  In short it made writing fun.

Subsequently I read a medical brochure on the dangers of pot which 
warned against this "rigidity" of attention and I came to see that it 
does have a downside.  While I was raptly following the unpredictable 
course of consecutive words I would often fail to notice that the 
stew pot had boiled dry and the dishes heaped in the sink were 
starting to become colonized by mold.

Because the combination of pot and language was such an effective 
alternative to the existential conditions of solitude and poverty it 
reinforced those conditions.  Over the years I became an adept 
wielder of words but also a bitter critic of the society that failed 
to reward my self-perceived talent, forcing me to rely on a 
miscellany of odd jobs and handouts to keep a roof over my typewriter 
and subsequent computers.

I know that many famous works were written stoned, ranging from 
Kublai Khan to Beautiful Losers but when I attempted to write longer 
fiction and nonfiction I discovered that writing stoned made it 
impossible to give the work a sense of seemly proportion.  The 
branches became too wordy and the tree of imagination failed to 
develop strong, earth-deep roots.  In short I discovered that, if I 
were ever to find an audience for my words and give birth to whole 
and shapely works of literature, I would have to give up the sacred weed.

I won't refuse a toke on the rare occasions that one comes my way but 
generally I'm too busy writing and reading to smoke and when I walk 
through the gratuitous beauty of a Kootenay summer I can see each 
flower, stone, child and crow as it is, in a world much less obscured 
by thought balloons of compulsive ideation.

D.B. Wilton Nelson, B.C.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom