Goin' to Pot

I was shopping at the Mahane Yehuda shuk yesterday, as I always do on Fridays. The shuk is so lively and so crowded with vendors shouting, laughing, and some were singing, even dancing behind their stalls to the mid-eastern music on their radio. The smells of spices are strong (which once prompted my dad to remark "It smells like the shuk in here" when he opened up the kitchen cabinet in my NYC bachelorette apartment). I passed by a plant vendor selling something for tea called "Louisa", which I believe is lemon verbena, and commented that it looks like a marijuana plant. He laughed and showed me some Gat plants, whose effect is similar to that of marijuana when the leaves are chewed. Leaf chewers here are traditionally those from the Yemenite community, but it seems to be catching on to some of the younger, non-Yemenite crowd.

I once asked someone who voted for Israel's Green Leaf party why he would vote for a loser party that wouldn't get any seats in the Knesset (Israeli Parliament). He said that when you buy drugs, you support terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and was therefore in favor of people growing one or two of their personal pot plants, if they so wanted to.

I don't care too much for the drug itself, indulging perhaps one to four times a year, moreso for the ritual of the camaraderie involved than for the drug itself. For all I care, it could be filled with sage or cammomile, and I'd get the same buzz.

Friday night we sat down for our formal Sabbath meal. Hubby was completely out of whack. He smokes pot excessively. Too excessively and was goading some of the kids into a fight. They didn't take the bait and he walked out of the house for a nicotine puff. The kids all tattletaled on him at once - "I saw him with a bag with THIS much in it" "I smelled it on the steps outside" "He goes into his car at midnight and smokes up" "I caught him at two in the morning smoking that shit in the bathroom" "I pretended I was asleep when the computer guy came and asked him if he had some-and he said he ALWAYS has". Two kids decided right then and there that they were going to raid his briefcase to find his stash. I sat at the diningroom table frozen. All I could manage to say was "Well, when you find it, let's all sit around the table and smoke it and see the look on his face when he walks in." Everyone laughed, the search stopped, and I wondered why I never see any of these things. My blinders are too dark.