The World Of Weed - Part One

November 15, 2023

The World of Weed - Part One

I remember it very well. 

It’s just like it was yesterday. These days, these memories are as fresh as they were when they occurred.

It was on a Saturday during my sophomore year at Gulf-Coast Bible College in Houston. I was in the dorm parking lot cleaning out my car. It had become quite a mess. Once the surface stuff was dealt with, with time on my hands, I decided to give that little Pinto hatchback a good deep cleaning. Oh. That little hatchback had seen some good times … if you get my drift.

I started by going through the glove compartment.

It was there that I found them … my “Marijuana Grower’s Guide” and a baggie with a small handful of “roaches”. By the time I was finished, I had picked another smaller handful of seeds and roaches from under the seats and out of crevices and creases. I had blue suede leather covers on the bottoms of the front seats. When I lifted them, the factory seat covers were full of burned holes where hot seeds that had fallen and landed. I showed them to one of my classmates and he laughed so hard I thought he was going to piss himself. That was over forty years ago now.

For those who know me and never knew, I feel certain that the self-disclosures being revealed in these pages that I am writing these days, is filling in a lot of blanks to questions most are afraid to ask me. If people don’t ask, they never know and live on assumptions based on ignorance. If you want to know, ask. I’ll give an answer. You may not like the answer. But that’s none of my affairs.

There are a lot of things I’ve never been public about over the years. There are a few with whom I have made personal discloses face to face. 

There are reasons for that and a “sense of shame” is not one of them. Shirli knew everything about me. I knew everything about Shirli. We had no secrets about our pasts. The primary reason I’ve not been vocal about these things related to my past was to keep Shirli from experiencing any kind of “bound to arise” repercussions that seem to always follow me around. 

There will always be those “nose up in the air” people who think theirs doesn’t stink. 

Hello. Yes. Yours does, thank you.

Over the years I’ve lived in pedestal church environments where these kinds of self-disclosures were viewed as inappropriate for someone wearing the “Reverend” title.

The one time I was openly honest at a church youth camp, and that to help some youth that were on troubling pathways and heading toward disasters in life, I had a church board, of all things, ask for my resignation. I thought about, prayed about it, sought wise counsel, then wrote the resignation letter. Me? I wanted to stay and fight to the death. But wisdom insisted that I get my wife and children out of that hellish environment and shield them, as best I could, from anymore assaults from “those” people.

I have a lot of eyes on me these days. 

A lot of the eyes are eyes that have been watching me all along. There are a lot of new eyes too. The grand difference now is that I don’t answer to church boards anymore and haven’t since the turn of the millennium. That’s almost a quarter of a century. And, quite frankly, at this point on the continuum, I am really no longer concerned about what anyone thinks when it comes to the details of my life. 

Those that I refer to as my “Most Important” people are solidly in place. I am secure within myself, thank you very kindly.