Actually, I sometimes wonder how people who have extreme sex lives explain to their parents why they have every issue of Fisting magazine. Maybe they just pretend the copies belong to a friend.

The truth is, my sex life has never been particularly exotic, or prolific in terms of partners, and I've never tried half the things the teenagers on tv appear to take for granted. My drug use was limited to smoking a lot of dope for about ten years, with an occasional toot of coke (because I did live through both disco and the 80's, darn it).

Ah. There's the dark secret. I will tell you, but only if you promise not to mock me mercilessly from now until the end of time. Try, anyway.

This may not seem like a big deal, but when I gave up smoking pot it was cold turkey with no backsliding. It was hard. I didn't want to give it up, but I was not very happy with being a stoner. It was such a crutch. All I really wanted to do was to sit around and get high. I was in danger of losing my direction in life, and I knew it. I just couldn't figure out how to stop.

Then I had my first panic attack. Not anxiety attack, panic attack, a clinical problem with serotonin re-uptake getting out of control and causing the adrenal gland to go off constantly. You know how being frightened feels? Heart in the throat, pulse pounding, sweaty, cold as ice, every nerve screaming with the urge to fight or flee? Imagine that sensation occuring every two minutes. You can't stop it. You can only try to cope with it. Eventually, you faint, or fall asleep, or get your breathing under control long enough to call a doctor. You can't just get over it. You have to treat it. It's a body chemistry disorder that has its roots in mental disorder.

Well, mine sprung at me, fully developed, every time I smoked. A weekend of that, wondering if I was having heart attacks, wondering if I were dying, worked as aversion therapy long enough to halt the habit. I went to a crisis clinic, figured out what I was experiencing, started therapy and serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, and refused to touch marijuana or any other recreational drug for the next 13 years.

Because I cannot leave well enough alone, on my 40th birthday I decided I would smoke a joint. Hey, I thought, it's been years since I smoked, and years since I've had panic attacks, and I can't imagine after all this time that it would hurt to smoke just one little joint. And darn it, I wanted to do it as a way of saying goodbye to my youth.

I think we all know how those gestures generally turn out.

Puff, puff, puff. Hmm, not bad. Tastes the way it always did. Puff, puff, puff. Ooh, I'm getting high, cool.

Puff, puff. Huh. This is stupid. I'm high, but I don't care. Puff, puff, puff. What a waste. This isn't fun any more. There's no point to it. Puff, puff. I dreamt of smoking for years and years, I gritted my teeth and just passed the pipe whenever I was in a group of stoners, and for this? Puff, puff, puff. Fine, I'm high, I might as well finish this joint. Puff, puff.

Oh, oh. Everything's going all weird. I hope there wasn't something extra in that joint. Yow. I can't walk. I can't even read. My head's all woogly. This is kind of scary. I'm high, and it's not fun, and John's not home, and what if I'm having a psychotic reaction? Help. Help. Call someone. No one's home. This is distinctly bad. Must find poison hotline. Must find hotline of some sort. Getting too dizzy to find phone. Dial 911.

The paramedics came. They laughed their heads off. I remember that part. I told them I'd smoked a joint for my 40th birthday so they'd know I wasn't a junkie or something. I was horribly embarrassed but still very woogly. One of them asked if the marijuana had had little red hairs in it while he did a couple of tests to see if my eyes were tracking properly. It had, and they weren't. Laugh, laugh, laugh. "Lady, you're just extremely high. It's gotten a lot stronger since the last time you tried it." He thought it was a ripe joke, I could tell. I could hear one of them telling the policeman outside the door that it was nothing to worry about, no injuries, just a dizzy spell. I was utterly humiliated, and relieved nothing worse was wrong, and very, very grateful they only laughed. I'm sure the report said "Middle aged loser tried recapturing youth, forgot all common sense, will be high for hours but poses no danger to anything but the snacks in the refrigerator."

Take it from me, kids, it's really true. You can't go home again. Well, you can, but the door doesn't work properly, and the knobs have fallen off your old dresser, and that neat little secret spot you used to hide in has been ploughed over and turned into someone else's backyard. It'll only break your heart. You might as well just accept that there was a good reason why you left in the first place, and spare yourself.

And as Mike Leung says, "It's mean streets when you smoke a joint, call 911, and the MAN tells you that the marijuana you're used to isn't very strong."

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