This blog is going to mainly deal with numerous drug stories and adventures from when I was 15 until about 28. I used to write a lot more when I was younger and looking to get back into it, so will share some stories, if they are somewhat well received. Will through in some arrests, some real close calls, and a day at the card room where I almost stared down the barrel of a gun.

The Closet of Forgotten Dreams, Pt I

In the basement of the house I grew up in, from the age of nine to eighteen, was a closet seldom used or thought of. A storage facility that grew lower and lower in height as one traversed its cobweb-infested interior. Filled with faded cardboard boxes of long lost dreams and hopes, random bits of decor and houseware from the turn of the 20th century. The zig-zag of the stairs running directly above and to the right of the closet gave it its triangle-on-its-back shape.

Starting in the fall of 2000, I found a very practical, yet risky, use for this long-forgotten closet. One that almost went up in smoke (literally and in the Cheech and Chong sense).

Having been busted by my parents with weed one week shy of my 16th birthday in the early winter of 2000, and summarily on house arrest (outside of school, of course), I did what most crafty, smart, yet naive 16 year olds would do. I started scheming and hatching ways to still smoke weed under such tight parental control. It started innocently enough, with me turning a cheap Walmart laundry hamper into a pipe. Think pvc tubing, elbow connectors and aluminum foil.

Sneaking out to the garage to smoke from my plastic Frankenstein pipe became an ordeal in of itself. Stealthing up the stairs to the door to the garage without squeaking any floorboards was like my own personal Metal Gear Solid game. The anxiety and heart-pounding adrenaline surge added to the excitement of it all. It was almost as if that was the true "drug" and not the marijuana. The high of concocting a plan that carried such risk and achieving it. A palpable, primal instinct would overcome me every time. Every step, every breath, every little movement of any part of your body, every urge to cough or scratch or itch, every thought. These all needed to be methodically controlled, despite feeling like a stoned marionette.

Soon the high wore of though. The thrill was gone. I needed to up the stakes. That's when the closet of forgotten dreams danced across my mind and I knew I was on to much bigger, and dangerous, adventures.

Enjoyed the writing and can relate to your experiences. Hope you graduated to using a more sophisticated smoking apparatus. Where are you from OP?

Mods, please close my other thread. This is the one I intend to keep updated.

Hank - Thank you for your support! I wrote these real quick and didn't really edit them at all. I know it's still a bit rough, bloated at certain parts and lacking some cohesion. I'm actually writing them on my phone, lol, on google docs. I am from Iowa City.

The Closet of Forgotten Dreams, Pt. II

"Whaaaa?" was all I could muster, the panic and terror seizing my larynx shut. The fire department, the closet, possible electrical damage. All these hit my brain like a Floyd Maywhether 1-2 combo.

One night, stoned out of my mind, I started to explore the basement where my bedroom was now located. My soon-to-be stepmom's ever growing frequency of spending the night over prompted my dad to reclaim the master bedroom located upstairs. The bedroom I had occupied since my oldest brother had moved out (again) a few years past. Relegated to the basement like a prisoner of war, having no choice in the matter.

After winding down two sets of stairs, the first (unfinished) half of the basement was split into my dad's office consisting of two Mac desktops and an assortment of hardware one would imagine that'd occupy the office of a computer programmer and a living room type of space with a TV, couch and dusty fixtures. What piqued my interest, though, was the closet direct below the upper set of stairs that led downstairs.

The closet was only illuminated by a single light bulb near the very end of the closet. Fumbling for the cord in the dark, hunched over due to the peculiar shape of the closet, I awoke the memories and aspirations that lay in hiding for over half a century with a single pull of my hand. I was not interested in awakening the past though. Instead, was intent on making new memories and seeking a sanctuary I could call my own.

It would be my own naivety that would be my saving grace (along with some parental disbelief added in for good measure). Using the most stereotypical way of masking the weeks of pot smoke that filled the closet, namely one lousy stick of incense per nightly session, can only add to the suspicion of chicanery going on should my dad or his girlfriend wander into the closet for whatever reason. Willful ignorance allowed me to quell these growing concerns of mine.

So, much to my surprise, one day after returning home from school, I was met with bewilderment and concern from my parental figures. "The fire department was here earlier. We thought there might be electrical damage because we smelled something weird," my father informed me. Panic and freight coursed through my veins, bringing me to paralysis. "The fire chief said he didn't think it was the wiring and said it smelled more like incense and smoke..." my dad's girlfriend added, leaving a purposeful pause at the end. This was no afternoon school special though, no tearful admission of guilt and begging of forgiveness. Because Strangers With Candy was my after school special.

Somehow, someway, I escaped from this close call with a simple "I have no idea", a feigning of ignorance. After all I had put them through, I think they WANTED to believe me, to trust me, to not have to spy on me with keyloggers. But, two years after the fire department paid a special visit to my parent's house, I progressed my scheming and manipulation to a point where they could no longer believe me and kicked me out on my own.

Sorry it's late and I'm confused..was the closet host to botany project or just a place to get baked?

After my parents divorced I went to live with my very permissive dad who allowed me to grow a single plant which ultimately flowered and produced about an oz of very good herb.
I always did worry about electrical issues even though I was using a nice lamp with ballast and timer.

Have a good herb story involving Muscatine IA and a Mexican restaurant but I'll save that for my own blog which may be coming soon.

We used to burn Nag Champa to combat the smell of burnt herb, what was your favorite?

Really enjoying this. Keep it up.

To Get Baked, Or Not, That Is The Question, Pt I


Having been born in 1984, I was part of the last generation of children that grew up on music videos. By the time of my adolescence, music videos became a fading phenomenon, with MTV focusing more on reality TV and scripted shows. Music videos were a serious craft, with sometimes dollars in the millions being spent to produce one 3-4 minute video. Many successful music video directors transitioned into successful movie directors. Yet one music video from my youth will forever stick in my mind, not because of the artistic effort produced in it but because of how it marked one of the most defining moments of my life.

Six years before directing Little Miss Sunshine, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris directed a music video for the single "Otherside" by The Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Inspired by 1930's German expressionist films, cubist paintings and the work of M.C. Escher, it's a surreal piece of art to accompany the song that dealt with former guitarist Hillel Slovak's battle with, and ultimate demise caused by, heroin. One week before my sixteenth birthday, on a seemingly normal Sunday afternoon, is when that music video became seared into my neurological framework.

My dad, at the time, was a hypnotist. Not in the entertainer, kitschy vein but an actual licensed hypnotist. He had an office in town where he would help people stop smoking, lose weight and shed unwanted habits such as fingernail biting. This is where he met my future step-mom, Jude. Jude was a patient of his. When Jude first started coming around as my dad's new "friend", I was 14 and my parents had been divorced for 6 years at that point. My mom, born and raised in Tokyo right after the end of World War II, moved with my dad and oldest brother Gerry right after he was born in a (I assume) U.S. naval hospital in Japan back to my dad's home state of Iowa.

It's no surprise my mom, after the divorce, relocated to San Diego. I'm sure the brutal winters of Iowa and the complete culture shock she experienced help her decide to escape Iowa and head closer to her homeland, both geographically and culturally. There was (and is) a big Japanese American community in San Diego and she already knew some people out there. To this day, I'm not quite certain why my brothers and I stayed with our dad after the divorce. It's all fuzzy in my memory. All i remember is her being there one day and the next day she was on the other side of the country. I've been told that we (as in my brothers and I) had a choice of who to live with. Maybe my mom, who was still adjusting to a whole new culture, language and landscape, thought that we'd be better off living with our dad.

Jude became a permanent fixture in the household that, for the past year or so before had been occupied by just my dad and I, when I was roughly 15. The stereotypical evil step-mom she was not. I actually got along better with her than my dad. I was comfortable talking to her, opening up to her and feeling like she truly cared about me. My dad and I had a relationship together that barely existed. He always provided and took care of my brothers and I, yet on any sort of emotional level is where things became non-existent. His outbursts of anger always made me feel uncomfortable, scared and embarrassed. It was always verbal, never physical and it was when it was directed at other people when it made the most unbearable. Yelling at my soccer coach for telling us the incorrect field for practice, getting very loud and confrontational at restaurants when they screwed something up. Stuff like that that makes it hard for that person's child to feel comfortable confiding in them.

So when my dad suggested I pick out a recipe from a vast array of supermarket recipe books for Jude to cook for us every Sunday, I agreed to oblige (if anything, for respect for Jude, as she was excited about it). Little did I know that this would indirectly lead to me being busted (for the first and definitely not last time).

Ha, I was born in Muscatine. Grew up in Coralville and Iowa City though. I was just smoking weed in the closet. I honestly don't remember type of incense I was using. Probably whatever I could find at my local Hy-Vee.

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To Get Baked, Or Not, That Is The Questions Part II

"Yo, Martin, you gonna come smoke with us? It's 420 today!" my new friend K asked me on the bus ride home from school.
It was the spring of my 15th year on the Earth and I had never seen marijuana, much less smoked it before. All I knew about it was from bits and parts of Cheech and Chong movies I had passed by while channel surfing.
"No, that's ok, you guys go ahead."

Being inquisitive as I was, I soon started researching all I could on marijuana on my dad's computer in his office (the very computer that would cause me to be busted for the second time roughly a year later). I soon discovered that all that I had heard about it being this evil thing were greatly exaggerated. Still, I was a bit hesitant to try it.

I had started researching legal highs around the same time, my budding curiosity getting the better of me. There was the incident where I ingested a canister of nutmeg and began violently tripping the next day at school. For some reason, high doses of nutmeg cause hallucinations and the effects can kick in up to 36 hours later. I began to feel it kick in during math class and excused myself to the bathroom. Suddenly I was seeing in double and my legs felt like they had 100 lb weights attached to them. All I remember is crawling on my hands and knees to the restroom. There was the failed attempt at getting high off of morning glory seeds, as I had not been meticulous enough in extracting the LSA found inside of them.

Flash forward to my junior year of high school. One day on the bus, K asked if I wanted to hang out with him and his friend A. K had moved up the street from me in my freshman year and we became best friends almost instantly. He had moved from a small, rural town called West Branch, whose claim to fame was being the birthplace of former president Herbert Hoover. A was two years older than us and still lived in West Branch. I took this as my chance to try marijuana for the first time. A's father, I'd find out later, was a pot dealer and A had first introduced K to marijuana.

A picked us up in his big, black truck one fall day after school. We gathered in the garage of A's mother's house and I joined the first of many smoking circles I would be a part of. Our friend N was there as well. I was the only newbie amongst us and it showed when I took my first hit.

A had a pipe he constructed out of a rusty shower head. My lungs felt like they were on fire, unable to hold the hot, acrid smoke in. I remember A, K and N giggling uncontrollably and eventually going to the trampoline in the backyard to revel in their THC fueled highs. I didn't get high but seeing how they reacted made me want to not make it a one and done ordeal.

K, A and I would go out to West Branch on most Saturdays during that fall and winter. Sometimes smoking in A's truck on rural country roads. Eventually we'd make it to A's father's (E) mobile home and smoke with him. We'd pitch in together, buy a bag from E and he'd roll us joint after joint.

One night at E's, we had a decent amount (to us, at least) of weed left from what we'd bought. We decided to split the remaining amount amongst us. Upon coming home that night, I hid my little baggie of weed in my dresser drawer, underneath my socks and underwear. It would sit there for a couple months, as I hadn't the nerve at that point to smoke it at home.

Well, one week before my sixteenth birthday, in February of 2000, I decided to break out my weed. I had bought a metal pipe with Stan from South Park on it from someone at school a few months earlier. I wasn't even planning on smoking it when I broke it out, as my parents were home. I had decided I would just break up some bud and pack the pipe for a more opportune time to smoke it.

I was laying on my bed, my arms folded up on my pillow and began breaking up a small chunk of weed. I had my TV on and the music video for "The Otherside" by The Red Hot Chilli Peppers was just beginning. All of a sudden, I hear a knock on my door. Before I can even think or say anything, my dad comes barging in.
"Did you pick a recipe for Jude yet?"
I instinctively throw my arms over the weed and pipe, and act like a deer caught in the headlights.
"Oh, not yet, but I will."
"What's that underneath your arms?" my dad asks innocently, not aware of the secrets I was hiding under my arms.
"Nothing" was all I could muster.
He then approaches me, throws my arms off and sees everything.

All I remember is seeing my dad go into a state of rage. He grabbed the pipe and weed and began yelling at me. He even went up the street to K's house and informed his mom that he just busted me and that he knew K and I hung out. My punishment was that the car I was supposed to get a week later for my sixteenth birthday was taken away from me and that I was on house arrest. I could only leave the house for school and had to come home straight from school. By my junior year, at the insistence of Jude, I was granted more and more freedom and even got my older brother's old car. That period of house arrest is how I started researching DXM. DXM is the active ingredient in cough syrup. What I'd soon find out, though, is that in high enough doses, DXM is a powerful hallucinogenic in the same class as ketamine and PCP.