I've never been athletic or even much interested in sports. In my teens, I was short, small, and scrawny. To top it off, I had all the coordination of a three legged blind donkey. In a word....I sucked at things like football, basketball, track, etc. I was briefly on the tennis team in high school; but that primarily consisted of screwing around on the tennis court while smoking cigarettes since no other school had tennis teams with which to compete. We didn't even have a coach. Mostly I was in the band. The cool kids were in the band. I first learned how to inhale cigarettes in the band. I first got seriously drunk on a band trip. I was introduced to mari-jew-wanna in band. Several of us in the marching band would regularly roll up a joint and get high before heading out to the the field to do our thing.
Fun times.
After high school, I went immediately to college. I couldn't wait to get away from the shitty little town I grew up in, so I enrolled that summer rather than waiting until the traditional fall semester. I remember first meeting my roommate when I entered the dorm. He was sitting by his desk smoking a bong....something I had never seen nor heard of....and offered me a hit. My first day at college was spent getting stoned out of my mind. It pretty much continued for a few more semesters and, more and more, I lost interest in going to classes until I basically flunked out.
Fun times....but now I was screwed because it meant I had to find a job.
So I moved to a city, got myself an apartment, and a job working in a liquor store. This was no rinky-dinky little shop where drunks staggered in to buy a bottle of malt liquor...it had a bit of class. The store was warehouse sized and well known for selling high brow (and high dollar) booze. The owner expected his staff to know what they were selling so we frequently had tasting classes with various wines, whiskeys, and other assorted spirits. We would also invite the richer customers into a tasting room where I would pour and talk about the fine subtleties of expensive drinking. I found that I was good at it....at least I could knock back several glasses and shots and still manage to talk coherently about all the bullshit qualities of whatever I was trying to sell. Yet even with all the alcohol I could ever want, whenever I would want it, I generally found it boring. I smoked pot. Loved the stuff. Occasionally I would try some speed. Either way, I was stoned pretty much all the time and eventually decided going to work every day was a drag, so I quit.
Fun times....but, holy shit, I had rent to pay and a nagging desire to eat.
---------- continued next Saturday----------
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