Marijuana

            I have been a big smoker since I was young. I usually smoke hash or marijuana. When I had my first joint I laughed a lot, that was the main reason by which I am a big smoker nowadays. Not only laugh but feel some kind of perception nothing to do with drunkenness obtained from a natural medicine led me to adopt this way of getting high and not other. So it is for me kind of a culture like in many other countries among people that use hash or marijuana to feel better.

            It depends on what’s in the market for me to buy any of both. My preferences go to hash’s pollen, purest of all parts of the cannabis sativa plant. Don’t tell me no more, Leopoldo, thanks. Many people attributes still a certain grade of degeneration to hash and marijuana smokers, some times by mere ignorance, others by the way young people smoke this or that when they share a joint, as though they were comitting a crime, because in many countries yet the authorities forbid people to smoke.

            Being hash the most extended ‘bland drug’ among young people in Spain, and being it difficult for dealers to bring to Spain some of the enormous quantities of hash there are in Morocco, through Gibraltar’s Strait nearly always, due to the special surveillance of the Spanish borders guards, you can imagine what it must be now in times of a pandemic. So it turns out that Moroccan hash doesn’t reach the Spanish market, at  least not how it did before. Then you have everybody searching for pollen, the really adicted to excellence, or just simply hash, and everybody get the same offer: I’ve got no hash. There is not hash. (Things at the Strait are complicated) But I’ve got a very good marijuana of interior. Take a small bag with you, 10 €, and taste it. You will like this. You will see.

            Well, the case is I feel like having joints when I am writing, some times when I am reading too. As I have already told you I am a big smoker since very young, so it is not rare that liking reading and writing and smoking I have done an almost big production of short stories, articles and poetry in the last three years under the effects of hash. Just to settle one thing for once, I don’t invent anything ever. All my writings belong to my past or my present or are the faith image of my dreams. Therefore my mind is not corrupted as to invent fantasies because I am always protagonist and not inventor. A writer or writress can be fantastic and write fantasies, what would it be of our children if it was not so. I have written myself Children’s short stories and poetry, but the case is doing this or that I claim that I or the people are protagonists, and we can be fantastic, although not inventors. We have learned everything from others. Let us leave inventions to scientists and engineers. So many writings in, let’s say, a body of 40 sources. I decided to procclaim myself an autobiographical narrator and to divide my major ‘masterpice’ in events I call episodes, for there is a start with a shooting, then resounded happenings, and finally the desired Revolution in the world. So having my major ‘masterpiece’ such relevance, to the extent everyone is expecting it will turn out a Catharsis of the people poor, let’s give our hearts for that, you can imagine the daily dose I must have to write and to keep calm and go on soldier.

I live with my mother. My mother gave birth to my five brothers and me. She has worked with Jesús, my youngest brother since she was 50 and retired being 73. She is 86 today and she likes to read books too, and so fast she reads them I can’t explain myself all she recalls from the books and how long does it take to her to shrewdly make a summary, the summaries when I ask her become adorned with so many details she recalls that I wish she abbreviates not to make it so long, but I surrender immediately, I want to listen to my mother talking about books. I bought her a notebook on which to write down as she likes reviews of books she has read. She comes into my room many times a day and she always knew I was a big smoker of hash. Only once or twice in 40 years has she said to me anything to do with hash, apart from that I don’t roll the joints in front of her. A little after the pandemic started in late February I have been scoring marijuana, so it’s been difficult for her to accept the stronger smell of marijuana and she has shouted to me Throw it away, that shit!

I have tried to explain to her that marijuana is a natural medicine. After her complaints I told her that in some European countries it is prescribed by doctors to patients and it is not forbidden its growing and consumption. After her airy critic to this I told her that marijuana cures glaucoma and asthma. She said to me she wouldn’t believe it. I told her Peter Tosh has a song entitled Legalize it that goes like this: Legalize marijuana…, it is the only natural medicine that cures glaucoma and asthma… Yes, I told her, true . And I followed this way: Mamá, my heart, don’t you know that in some cases it is prescribed by doctors for patients to feel better? That some aged people need to take a little bit dope, that they enjoy their lives in plenitude doing this?

She remained standing beside me in confusion, silent. So much in confusion I saw her and her smile was so captivated that I remained silent too for some moments. She was like asking: True? I didn’t think it twice. I told her not to hallucinate, not to have an illusion. What do you think you are going to make me score?, I asked. Do you pretend to live as if we were first quality pollen addicts?, I asked half laughing. And then the brilliant half burst out laughing with no contention and derived in my mother’s contagion and saying You are silly, and she went out of my room laughing. I could not restrain and laughed loudly yet. My mother chuckled uncontrolably as she was coming downstairs saying What a silly boy!

My mother and I understand each other not needing to speak. Of course it springs out always finally Revolution, the main reason we dedicate our lives. There is certain complicity between she and me and that takes in many vital happenings in the world nowadays and since a long time ago. Only to say about this that they started when I was two years old, when my father and I with two small pistols, one in each hand, killed a man in the kitchen of our house in the village, my mother there too began to shout as in hysterics: What have you done, Luis? What have you done?