My husband gently reminded me that marijuana is among the most benign substances a person can ingest. Hadn’t I told him that government sources calculate a lethal dose of marijuana to be one-third a person’s body weight, consumed all at once? Had I swallowed forty pounds of weed? No? Well, then, I wasn’t going to die.
That was all well and good, I told him, but now I had a problem even worse than my lungs. I knew for a fact that if I didn’t tell my heart to beat it would stop.
At this point, his phone cut out for the third or fourth time since we started talking. I had been frustrated when this happened before, but now I was relieved that it took him a little while to find a signal and call back. Forcing my heart to beat was requiring a tremendous amount of attention, and I had little to spare for someone who was failing to appreciate the seriousness of the circumstances. I was performing CPR on myself, with my mind, and I needed to focus.
He called back. We went around on the subject of voluntary and involuntary bodily functions for another two minutes, or an hour, or a week. (My sense of time was a little whacked.) Then I gasped.
“Oh my God.”
“What?”
“I just died. Right there. For a split second. My heart just stopped.”
My husband observed that this was not very likely, since I had been talking nonstop for the past five minutes. Even in my addled state, I could tell he was getting bored.
“Okay,” I said, realizing that I’d taken up far too much of his time and attention. “This is what we’re going to do. I’m going to hang up and try to sleep. But you keep your phone on for the next half-hour. If I die, I’ll call you.”
“If you die, you’ll call me?”
“Yes. I promise.”
“You’ve got a deal.”
Sweetheart that he is, he stayed up until four in the morning, just in case I tried to call to tell him I was dead.
I didn’t use marijuana again until the pain of frozen shoulder made me desperate enough to go back to the pot club. And even then, I was careful to buy only weed engineered to be nonintoxicating. I’ve got enough to do without having to sit around keeping my lungs working and my heart beating.
When I imagine experiencing anything like that again, but with the intensity of LSD, it makes my stomach clench in horror. Not for me, a regular LSD trip. I’m happy with my microdoses.
Day 21
Normal Day
Physical Sensations: None.
Mood: Fine, until the evening, when I lost my mind.
Conflict: None.
Sleep: Fine, once I fell asleep.
Work: Fine.
Pain: Moderate.
I am convinced that adolescents take up exactly the same amount of a parent’s time as do toddlers. With toddlers, you spend those long hours tending to physical needs. You change diapers, spoon food into mouths, set up towers of blocks to be toppled. With adolescents, you spend those long hours fretting. Though my eldest child does an admirable job of caring for herself while she is away at college, I find I am punching the time clock with the same regularity as I did when she was thirteen months old and had just learned to walk. Back then, my day was spent chasing after her as she hurtled through space. Nowadays, I just worry.
Some research has shown that light at the blue end of the spectrum—the “short-wavelength light” emitted by e-readers, laptops, or smart phones—interferes with circadian rhythms and with the sleep-promotion hormone, melatonin. It can take as much as ninety minutes longer to fall asleep after exposure to blue light. Even a glance at a screen can reduce and delay REM sleep, and make a person less alert the following day. During this protocol, sleep feels so precarious to me that I have tried to avoid watching movies on my laptop, reading on my iPad, even on the dimmest setting, or even peeking at my phone in the hour before bed. But last night, while lying there getting ready to go to sleep, for no reason other than that I’d had a good day and was, I fear, feeling immune to trouble, I picked up my phone and opened Instagram. I was swiping through, liking photo after photo, when I came upon a photograph my eldest had posted. It was blurry, a selfie shot in a dim room. Her head was angled up and to the side, her face turned away so that her throat was in the frame. The shot was blurry, but I was able to conclude that on her neck she now sported a blue-black tattoo that looked like this:
: /
My eldest had already acquired a number of tattoos. The first was a quote from William Faulkner etched on her side beneath her arm. She got that one the summer she turned eighteen, when she spent a couple of weeks alone at home. As tattoos go, it’s not bad. You might even argue that it’s a reasonable choice for the child of two writers. A year later, she got a complementary inscription on the opposite side of her rib cage, a quote from a somewhat less illustrious source: a fellow college student’s response to T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Those tattoos are easy enough for a mother to tolerate. They are generally hidden by clothes, and they are competently executed.
I cannot say the same for the stick-and-poke tattoos she’s scrawled on her upper arm, along her wrist, on her ankle and thighs. Blue and blurry, they remind me of the marks my prisoner clients would carve into their bodies to pass the endless months and years of incarceration. I know that my daughter is not alone, that she is only one of a million artistic college students sticking and poking her body. But I really don’t like those tattoos.
I was taught that Jewish law forbids tattoos. By “taught,” I mean I heard it on my parents’ Lenny Bruce record. When she sees his tattoo, Lenny’s aunt, whom he calls the Jewish Seagull, caws, “Hah! Hah! Lenny! Vat you did! You ruined your arm! Vy’d you do that? You can’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery!” The Jewish prohibition against tattoos stems from Leviticus 19:28, which states, “You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead nor incise any marks on yourself: I am the Lord.”
“Any marks.” Seems pretty clear. But of course the Bible also prohibits holding grudges against other Jews (Leviticus 19:18 “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people”), and Lord knows I hold many a grudge, especially against the children of my people (I still haven’t forgiven Maxine Nudelman* for stealing my boyfriend at Camp Ramah in the summer of ’76). Also forbidden? The eating of shellfish and pork. I’m typing this while stuffing my face with two tacos, one fried shrimp and the other carnitas, so obviously this has nothing to do with law, Jewish or otherwise.