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            I got the call inviting me to appear on this evening’s show on a Friday.  I know it was a Friday ‘cause I was doing what I always do on Fridays, listening to Hendrix and weeping for my lost youth.

            I went into something of a tailspin of anxiety and uncertainty, trying to figure out what kind of story I could come up with to fit the topic.  Thanks to the wonderful combination of Ativan, Paxil and good scotch, though, I was able to calm down and sit at the computer long enough to organize some thoughts.

            For years, my solution to the problem of anxiety and uncertainty would have been solved through the liberal use of marijuana.  For sixteen years I started each day with a bong hit and then celebrated each waking moment with another.  Because the side effects I experienced were nothing like the ones I had been told to expect, I never really thought the drug was having any detrimental effects on my life and my career.  I wasn’t apathetic; hell, I was writing more than anybody I knew, cranking out screenplays and plays and novels and material for my stand-up act at an alarming rate.  I wrote faster than Evelyn Wood can read. 

     I wasn’t paranoid.  Quite the opposite.  I thought everybody liked me even as I stepped on toes and made life-long enemies.  There is nobody on the planet more insensitive to the feelings of others than a pompous, hyper-intellectual stoner.  Even sober I can be pompous and insensitive.  I correct people on the difference between “nauseous” and “nauseated.”  Think about it.  That means I not only correct people’s grammar, but I’m willing to do it when they’re at their most vulnerable.  When I was stoned, I burned bridges in Hollywood an eighth of an ounce at a time. 

     At night, when I lay in bed, crashing, waves of sadness rolled in on me.  Loneliness, hopelessness and fear filled my room like the dense, unrine-humid air of an animal shelter.  Doubting my choices, my intellect and my talent, I would drag myself from the bed, go to my desk, load up the bong and put words in order until my exhaustion overpowered my repressed self-loathing.

     In the early nineties, my cyclical depression degenerated into genuine spiral.  Our cat, Jojo Precious Tiger Kitty had taken to perching atop the bookshelves and glaring at me while using his irritable, twitching tail to indicate the section dedicated to psychology texts.  Eventually I was told by my lovely wife – whose name escapes me at the moment – that I really needed to talk to somebody.  Apparently I’d reached the point at which even the dense marijuana and cigarette smoke could not mask the stench of despair. 

     I went into serious therapy for the first time since college.  A couple of weeks later, I began studying martial arts.  The powerful combination of heavy Taekwondo training and psychoanalysis gave me the tools to fight off my depression.  I quit smoking cigarettes, and then pot. 

     For the first several months after I quit pot, I had a recurring nightmare in which I was hanging out with Pat Buchannan and we were sort of getting along.  I would wake up in a cold sweat, panicky, trying to figure out who I was turning into.  Ultimately, though, I was relieved to find that, despite the changes in my habits and lifestyle, I remained the same person I had always been, retained my left-leaning politics, my liberal attitudes and my belief that marijuana should be legalized for industrial, medicinal and recreational use.  Just not for me.

     As my therapist and I delved into my history with depression and rage, it became clear that I had been self-medicating since high school.  His theory was that I surely would’ve committed suicide or found some other way to entirely self-destruct had I not used marijuana for all those years. I’ve since come to realize that the marijuana use itself was a form of slow-motion self-destruction.

     In some ways, so was my relationship with that therapist.  I didn’t come to realize that until I’d been sober for quite some time and I realized that his long pauses were not always a sign of disciplined contemplation.  Rather, they were an indication that he had, after years of listening to people talk about themselves, learned to sleep with his eyes open.  For quite a while I believed that his occasional grunts and twitches were an indication that I was onto a particularly interesting or insightful idea.  Then I realized that these were the same grunts and twitches exhibited by Sir Corwin the Beautiful Dog-Faced Dog, Brindled Beast of Sylmar when, unconscious on the couch, he begins to chase imaginary squirrels.  I stopped seeing that therapist entirely and began working through disappointments by talking to my dog.

     Shortly after I tested for my third degree in Taekwondo I found myself reeling with rage over the loss of life in Iraq, the loss of the Whitehouse to a Supreme Court Decision, the loss of Civil Liberties in response to a nationally sanctioned paranoia.  I went into therapy with a new guy.  He’s a strict Orwellian therapist who’s medicating me against political outrage.  Hence the ready supply of Paxil and Ativan.  The scotch is my own addition to the cocktail.

      Once my fear of having nothing to say tonight had been quelled, I sat down and composed this essay with relative ease.  I read it to a few friends over the phone, found that it got laughs in pretty much the right places and trundled off to bed.

      For a while I lay there, hating myself.  One of my friends had pointed out that the therapist who prescribed against political outrage should be Huxlian, not Orwellian.  I liked the sound and rhythm of “Orwell”.  I knew I was going to leave it that way for the sake of the line and I thought about the few real, literate intellectuals who might notice and judge me for it, thinking it an error.  I watched, in a distant, drowsy sort of way, the wrestling match between my pomposity and my aesthetic.  Eventually both were taken down by the powerful submission hold of the Ativan.

     At last, I drifted into a deep, warm sleep.  I dreamt that I was in Hollywood, trying to climb up a steep spiral staircase but Antonin Scalia kept blocking my way.  Finally, I got past him and I sat, watching televised election returns with John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama.  While they mapped out the electoral votes on the big map, the three of us passed a joint around.  There was a powerful sense of youth and hope and as the smoke filled the air, all those red states and blue states blurred together into sweet purple haze.