I got stoned last night.  Not politely stoned, not even Friday night stoned.  I got stoned; ripped; layed out.  I got stoned plenty of weed, plenty of alcohol.  It was like I was young again, and just as stupid.  Smoking weed in a canvas ‘hootch’, while the rain brings rocket mortars with it and home is 8,000 miles away is different than the weed I came home to.

A long time ago, fifty years almost to the day, I arrived back in the U S of A after serving a couple years in other countries with the U.S. Army.  When I did, I arrived with a moderate drug usage problem.  I didn’t need it to function but it certainly helped when I had ‘partaked’ of the bud.  I had learned early on with my first deployment that if you were an enlisted man you had only a couple of choices of behavior.  There were the alcoholics and there were the druggies.  There was another group, who didn’t ascribe to that behavior but I never met any of them.  The alcoholics were gung-ho soldiers, or at least they were ‘lifers’ who had hitched their wagon to a lifetime of service in exchange for a sense of personal worth. 

Then there were the druggies.  These were the soldiers who didn’t want to be soldiers but needed it for one reason or another.  G.I. bill tuition, or to get away from a sticky domestic situation, avoiding jail time, or like me—drafted.  We hadn’t picked drugs as our medication to begin with; at least I didn’t.  I was already well versed in the use of alcohol and I went that way initially.  It made it difficult to work the next day, but it took the edge off of the futility of our purposeless daily ‘jobs’.  We weren’t fighting anymore, we were transitioning into a peacetime army.  I pursued alcohol diligently, but eventually work interfered and I had to drop back a notch or two.

Then along came weed, and even better hashish.  Cheaper than alcohol and plentiful and with the arrival of these two liberators, I had suddenly heard music for the first time.  Conversations suddenly assumed greater depth.  Alcohol became a modifier instead of the main event.  I could use it night and day, work or no work and I didn’t hate my life.  That is until I came back home.

Back here people were uptight like they hadn’t been when I had left.  People hated what I represented in a suddenly anti-establishment society.  Although I wasn’t establishment, I wore the uniform of it and as I walked the gauntlet through airports, I was shunned.  So I retreated into my music.  I fell into myself and wasn’t able to rise out of it for a very long time. 

Evenings I would sit in my rescued and broken-down recliner with my headphones and my weed, a beer under my hand and disappear.  I would seek oblivion until the next morning.  Until I had to go forward and interact.  To lose myself in the memory of the things that I would never be able to forget and to hopefully see them from the distance. 

But like all things, it slipped away from me.  Slowly, I developed new social skills.  I accepted the corporate ladder as a viable structure.  I climbed, I succeeded, I aged from the inside out.  Music and introspection became a memory not a pastime.  I grew old.

                These days now I am beyond the wildness.  The exuberance of achievement has mellowed and I take my victories in smaller increments.  But still what mattered back then still matters today.  A solid handshake.  A sincere promise and a heartfelt smile still matter.  And all the water that has run under the bridge doesn’t amount to more than a photo album of missed opportunity.  Tonight I did some weed, and I had couple beers and tonight like it used to; the music mattered again and I let it.  Like in the old days, I got stoned and tonight the music mattered, like it used to.  Not because it was music, but because I remember when it mattered.