As recreational marijuana becomes legal here and there throughout the country, I feel like I'm losing what people saw as one of my good character traits.
Despite the fact that I was in high school and college during the 1970s and 1980s, I don't smoke marijuana.
Oh, I tried it, but it makes me vaguely nauseated, and it makes me very tired, so it's not much of a party drug for me. All it really does is make me feel like I'm coming down with the flu.
I use tobacco, and I drink, but both my drugs have always been legal and socially accepted.
Not smoking marijuana used to be a real asset. In high school, I might have smelled like beer, and I might have had a cigarette hanging from my lip, but it was 1973, and the redneck fathers of the girls I dated thought I was just "a little wild." I wasn't a "druggie," so his daughter was safe with me.
"Oh, I was same way when I was a kid," those men told their wives. "She'll be all right with him."
And she was all right with me, or at least no worse off than if she'd been with some other beer-drinking, cigarette-smoking boy.
It was that way at work for a long time, too. You could show up hungover in the office and joke about it, and the boss would joke about it with you and it was, "Have a rough night, Marc?" and a hearty laugh was had all around.
I've shown up at work so hungover, I probably would have been in better shape if I were still drunk. Also, I probably wouldn't have gone into the men's room to vomit.
Ah, but at least I wasn't talking about how high I'd gotten the night before. You got points for that back in the day.
The first big change I saw was when people in offices started to brag about how many drugs they'd done BEFORE they got the job, you know, back in college or high school.
"It was college," they'd say. "I used to smoke weed every day."
And everyone would laugh and people would start talking about that time in high school when they loaded up on acid and became convinced that their math teacher was a giant lobster.
I was losing the war. Good old bourbon-swilling me was no longer seen as a beacon of safety.
Pretty soon, people are going to be strolling into work bragging about how they smoked a whole ounce that weekend, and I'm going to be stuck with an out-of-style virtue.
This is real loss. It's a rare employer who doesn't want anything but your labor. Bosses like to know they have a little grip on your life outside the office, too. One of the little grips I always gave a boss was that I didn't smoke weed. It seemed to satisfy them, too.
I have a fallback position, though.
Crack cocaine is still bad, no? I'd say heroin, but, if you're a white guy, heroin use is a disease, like eczema. You tell your boss you're using heroin, she's just going to tell you that you're "in the grip of the opiate epidemic." Maybe she'll cry.
I don't want sympathy. I want to be seen as reassuringly normal. Bosses like reassuringly normal, particularly in the newspaper business, where corporate ownership has driven the drunks, ex-boxers, de-frocked priests, compulsive gamblers and people with colorful wardrobes out of the business in favor of people who live in the suburbs and have never bitten anyone's ear in a bar fight.
Don't worry about me. I'm fine. I don't smoke crack. It sounds weak, but it's what I've got right now.
To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, "The Land of Trumpin," is a stone-cold sober look at Trump's America, and how we woke up in it without our underpants. It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, iBooks and GooglePlay.
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