Dispatches from the soft underbelly of being high.
I cry more often than I’d like to admit when I’m stoned, which is inconvenient because I’m stoned more often than I’d like to admit.
There’s no heaving, bumbling, or swelling movie score. It’s quieter than that. A small internal weather event.
The air shifts. Gravity turns hostile.
Music starts it most nights. It’s treacherous. It sneaks past the bouncers.
I’ll be fine—functional, sarcastic, engaged—then a melody hooks something behind my sternum and pulls the string. A harmony leans too hard on a raw nerve it doesn’t know it’s touching. And suddenly I’m blinking more than necessary, jaw set, pretending to be deeply interested in whatever is happening across the room.
Colin Hay is the most reliable trigger, but he’s not alone. Pink Floyd catches me sometimes. The later-era, Gilmour-led stuff. Less cosmic, more bruised. Radiohead does the trick when I’m already tired. Certain Dylan lines that sound like they came from a man who knows how loud a door can be when it shuts quietly behind your back—against your will.
I’ll feel it before I understand it. My eyes heat up first. Throat tightens second. Chest follows. My brain scrambles behind the eyes, late to the scene.
So I just sit there.
High.
Present.
Cornered.
Letting a song do whatever it wants to me while I pretend I’m still in control of my face.
Sometimes I am.
Sometimes I’m absolutely not.
There’s a look people get when they clock it. A quick recalibration. A quiet reassessment.
Is this guy sensitive? Should we give him space or crack a joke or pretend we didn’t see that? Is he going through something? Is this who he is now?
Most people choose discretion.
They look away. They sip their drink. They ask someone else a question they don’t care about, something about parking. It’s a kindness, mostly. A social mercy. We all agree to keep it from becoming a Thing.
But I feel it anyway—the way energy rearranges itself around my vulnerability like furniture around a spill.
There’s something funny about being a grown man with a functioning life, a decent head on his shoulders, crying because a song decided to pull up something sideways.
It’s inconvenient. But at least it’s honest.
Trying to clamp down on it just makes everything louder. The emotion keeps testing exits. It moves around the room like a worm looking for a crack.
When I’m high, the cracks seal up. And whatever comes in gets the room.
A Public Service Announcement: Do Not Hand Me a Guitar
Let me start this by saying: I hate playing, and then inevitably crying to Colin Hay.
Because it never happens alone. It always happens in front of people. Friends. Family. Acquaintances. Coworkers who thought “bring a guitar” meant Wonderwall-adjacent vibes and instead got a front-row seat to a man unraveling beside a folding table of warm potato salad, folded in on myself—pink, and useless as a cooked shrimp.
Someone always asks for “It’s a Beautiful World.”
And they always say it like they’re doing me a favor.
I’ll say sure. Easy song. Friendly chords. Major key. Sunshine shit. I can do that. I sit down. Tune the guitar. Crack a beer. Take one more hit of Super Lemon Haze because I’m already there and what’s one more molecule between friends.
The first verse goes fine. I’m loose. Confident, even. I make eye contact. I do the little head bob like I’ve done this before, which I have—many times—without incident.
Then the chorus shows up.
“My, oh my, oh my, it’s a beautiful world…”
Suddenly, my throat tightens. My timing slips. My voice goes thin, like I’m trying to sing through a straw. I push harder, which turns out to be a rookie mistake. My eyes get hot. Hot-hot. The bad, irreversible kind.
Now I’m in it.
I’m singing like I’m holding back a hiccup. Every line feels like it might collapse into a sob if I take the wrong breath. I stare at the floor, at the grain in the wood, like it personally owes me answers. My strumming hand speeds up, then slows down, then does neither correctly.
Everyone pretends not to notice. Everyone notices.
Someone shifts their weight. Someone takes a sip too loudly, or nods along with an exaggerated expression like they’re smiling through something they regret inhaling.
I power through. I always do.
I finish the song like a man limping across a finish line. There’s polite applause. Someone says, “That was really nice, man,” in the careful tone usually reserved for funerals and open-casket viewings.
I mumble thanks. I stand up too fast. I suddenly need ice.
I do not get ice.
Because once it starts, the lyrics keep running. Old plans. Half-kept promises. The weird miracle of the life I actually ended up with. The parts that feel unfinished. The parts that feel terrifyingly complete.
The people I’d panic for.
The people I’d panic without.
That realization can knock the air out of you.
By the last chorus, I’m bargaining: Just finish it. Don’t make this a story people tell later. My voice breaks on “I tried talking to Jesus, He just put me on hold.” Because, of course it does.
When it’s over, I feel wrung out. Like someone grabbed my insides, rattled them around, and put them back slightly out of order. Later, I replay it. The moment my voice slipped. The second someone looked away to give me dignity. I tell myself I should stop playing that song.
I never do, though.
Because every time I’m high, the song sneaks up with a clipboard like it’s here on behalf of my future self.
Love.Fear.Gratitude.Regret.
A quiet notice that I still have a lot of work to do. The tab is still open.
When Walking Out Felt Cowardly
Movies are worse.
A movie asks for your attention with the lights down and the doors closed. A movie wants everything: your eyes, your breath, your pulse. And it makes walking out feel like storming out of a church mid-service, aware you’ve just become part of the lesson.
I watched Grave of the Fireflies high and it flattened me in a way I still haven’t fully shaken.
I knew what I was walking into. I’d heard the warnings. People talk about that movie the way they talk about surviving a natural disaster they knowingly walked into.
I thought a joint of Miyazaki Mango counted as emotional PPE. It didn’t. Though OSHA would probably disagree.
There’s a line near the end that lands and stays:
“Why do fireflies have to die so soon?”
I cried right away. And I didn’t stop. Forty-five minutes of fat, ugly tears. I stayed exactly where the movie left me, staring at the smallest lives getting crushed under the weight of history and hunger and indifference.
As the credits rolled, breathing on manual, something heavy settled into my chest. It wasn’t sharp grief. It was a hungry, dull sadness that sat down and started eating what was left of my defenses.
The feeling had nowhere to go. So it stayed. And I just sat there.
And in that staying came the quiet groan of awareness—the fragility of everything, the volume of suffering, the way adulthood teaches you to keep moving because stopping would break you and nobody has time for that.
That night, stopping was the whole point.
Cannabis held my face there.
The Long Way Through the Nervous System
Being high changes how emotions move through my body.
They travel. Slowly and deliberately. Chest to throat. Throat to eyes. Eyes to hands. My breathing changes before my thoughts do. My posture gives things away I haven’t admitted yet.
Sometimes my jaw unclenches. Sometimes my shoulders drop. Sometimes it feels like my nervous system gets reintroduced to itself.
Eventually I learn to stop fighting the sudden honesty, the unrequested tenderness, and let it move through.
I try distraction sometimes. Scroll. Snack. Change rooms. Change songs. Change subjects.
It works about as well as telling a raging bull to calm down because you’re too busy to play. So why not just let it smash through my red cape, wreck the furniture, and leave muddy footprints all over my psyche?
‘Cause that’s when things get strange. Memories surface without being summoned.
A smell pulls me into my grandmother’s kitchen in Santo Domingo, boyhood rushing back faster than I can brace for it. Then, a line from Heat bubbles up a version of myself I barely recognize anymore.
“Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat.”
That used to sound cool. Now it sounds lonely as hell.
The Version of Me I Don’t Argue With. I Like Him Better.
There’s a version of me that shows up when I’m high that I like living with.
He’s slower. More patient. Listens longer and interrupts less. Leaves space between reaction and response. He also texts people back faster.
He cries more too. Because of that, he carries less static.
Less defensive posture. Less reflex to assume the worst. He moves through conversations with curiosity instead of suspicion. He gives people grace—other people, and himself—without making it feel like a project.
His love shows up heavier in that state, too.
I’ve been high, sitting next to my partner, and felt the weight of recognition. The quiet gravity of knowing this is the life we’re already building. This is the person I choose. This is the future with mornings and compromises and responsibilities baked into it.
That realization sits on your chest like a warm cinder block. And that weight demands honesty.
I usually respond with a joke. Same move I’ve used since childhood and still haven’t retired. If I laugh, I can pretend the feeling doesn’t need anything from me yet.
Other nights I let it sit there until it scares me into being better. I need those nights. We all do.
And being high, I feel it fully. The truth takes a seat between us, uninvited but honest, as real as the love holding us there.
What I’m Willing to Live With
I cry more often than I’d like to admit when I’m stoned.
I also laugh harder. Sit longer. Love louder.
Cannabis never has to knock. I invite it inside—this vampire that skips the blood and mainlines emotional availability instead.
And even when I fight it—when I kick and rage and swear I’m done—those nights still take something and leave something in its place.
They always will.
And I’m grateful for that.
