Ooh That Smell

My wife, who worked at a desk 13 feet away from me in the newsroom, noticed it first.

“The parking lot of the Walmart reeks of weed,” she said. “I mean all the time. In the afternoon, in the morning, at night.”

“Sometimes, even inside.” she said.

A few months later, she reported back from a local grocery store.

“Not in front of the Stop & Shop,” she said. “But, if you walk down to the area between the grocery store and the gym, it always smells like weed.”

I’m not a weed smoker. I tried it quite a few times. It makes me slightly nauseous and very sleepy. In short, I feel a little like I’m coming down with the flu.

I drink, though. Beer and Irish whiskey, sometimes on the same night.

But there are times in the day, and places in the world, where I drink, and places where I do not drink.

I’ll drink at home or in a bar or at your wedding or at your Super Bowl party or in a restaurant.

I do not drink in the parking lot of the Walmart or in my car on the way to the Walmart.

“I think I’ll have a couple drinks and go to the grocery store,” I have never said in my life.

But there it is, that smell, and, following in the sake of my wife’s sensitive nose, I started taking an occasional sniff when I was out.

Outside a convenience store? Yes. Inside a convenience store? Yes. Auto parts store. One of the last remaining malls? The public library? Yes. Yes. Yes.

Of course, in Massachusetts, where I live, weed is legal, so maybe that encourages the cloud of smoke and smell to grow.

And, of course, there’s liquor. In this state, they sell what we call “nips,” tiny bottles containing a single shot of liquor. Empty nip bottles comprise at least 80% of the trash I find in my yard or in the gutter in front of my house.

In America, we’re ripped, stoned, hammered, trashed or glowing gently like a night light.

We should be calmer as a people, but we’re not. Maybe it’s the crack or the meth. We’ve got a little bit of an edge. We’re combative.

This is not to say we’re all high all the time. Members of evangelical Christian churches receive a pretty constant barrage of “don’ts” when it comes to intoxicants. Maybe that’s why they don’t forget to go vote for the anti-abortion, pro-gun candidate. The race is not to the quick, it’s to the sober, or at least to those who are the most sober most often.

In the Jazz Age stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, you get a sense of what it’s like to be among, and one of, a microsociety of people who are crawling drunk a good deal of the time. The stories are a fun glimpse of high life when you’re 20, but they encourage a twisting cringe when you’re 40, or they should. Fitzgerald died cringing, as did Hunter S. Thompson, just a short time after his drug habit got so bad he could no longer hit a deadline.

We’re supposed to worry about drugs “coming in” over the border, though they wouldn’t come in if the market wasn’t here. And the junky panhandler on the median strip is a living statue of our fears.

But the rest of us aren’t doing that good either, says the weed smell in the parking lot and the nip bottles in the gutters. Good luck electing a president! Hope you remember who you voted for!