The Time I Accidentally Had Too Much (Legal) Weed in Amsterdam During the Pandemic

The People We Hate at the Wedding is a fun movie and I could watch Allison Janney jiggling her upper arm waddle and eating weed gummies forever. Speaking of weed gummies, I’ve never had one, but I have discovered the pleasures of marijuana since moving to Amsterdam. I stopped drinking alcohol five years ago next month and I don’t miss it at all but about six months into the pandemic, during one of our many lockdowns, I decided to dip my toe into the pot pool. I’ve never been much of a drug user, I dated a guy in my 20s who was a big weed smoker, and I didn’t have much patience for it, but that’s probably another story. In this case, I biked over to one of the many coffee shops in Amsterdam that sell legal weed and walked right up to the counter and told the nice man that I wanted to procure some marijuana that would make me feel happy and laughy and like I was floating on a fluffy cloud and he said, so Sativa, and I said, yes, with authority, as if I knew what he meant and he showed me a menu of the marijuana leaves that were available to me. Since I didn’t know how to roll a joint he offered me a pre-rolled one and pointed me towards the vending machine to buy a lighter and I thanked him and took my new joint to the Vondelpark and smoked exactly one puff and then sprawled out on the grass and stared at the clouds and laughed, exactly as desired. I liked it.

I’ve never smoked cigarettes and I didn’t want to smoke joints, particularly with a global pandemic filling up the hospitals with deadly lung disease so I decided to try edibles. Amsterdam is a famously liberal city in the sense that there’s legal weed and prostitution, but it’s never really progressed past your basic 60s era weed scene. I knew from talking to friends in places like California and Colorado that thanks to 20 years of medical marijuana science and legalization in some States weed has evolved into dispensaries of tremendous precision. You can buy a gummy or a blueberry or a piece of popcorn or a coffee bean and know exactly how many weeds are in it. We don’t have that here so I went on YouTube and googled how do you make pot brownies and learned the way you make pot brownies is to make pot butter, so I followed the recipe and made pot butter and then I didn’t want brownies so I made pancakes instead.

I’d recently read Roxane Gay’s outstanding essay about her experience with edibles which resulted in her tying herself to her bed with her bed sheet and spending the rest of her evening in the safety of a nice hospital and I did not want that at all so I was extremely careful and conservative with my first edible experience. I cut my pancake into tiny triangles and nibbled a minuscule bite and waited and even though I didn’t feel much I did not eat more pancake as I knew from Roxane Gay and from all the other research I’d conducted on the internet that eating more pancake is something you absolutely should not do. But the next time I had a slightly bigger nibble and then an even more slightly bigger nibble and then I figured out that the exact right amount of pancake to eat is 1/8 of a pancake and that’s how much pancake I would eat before relaxing in a bath or in my garden or on my little canal boat under the shade of my flamingo umbrella while I made friends with the Grey Herons who live on my canal. Once my pancake wore off I’d stand in the kitchen pivoting between the fridge and the pantry, eating little bites of salty, then sweet, then salty foods and my husband said seems like you’ve got the munchies and I said — with complete earnestness — I don’t have the munchies I’m just really hungry.

I began referring to them as my magic pancakes. 1/8^th of a magic pancake was perfect, but I failed to document the amount of pot butter I’d put into that specific magic pancake so I had to do similar, careful experiments with the next batch of magic pancakes and then when I thought I had just exactly the right recipe and proportions for my magic pancakes I made a large batch and cut them into the appropriate sized wedges and froze them in the extra freezer we’d bought during the first wave of the pandemic when we didn’t know if there would be enough food available during the lockdowns.

So, it was with great surprise when, after I ate what I thought was the exact correct amount of one of my magic pancakes and was enjoying Robert Plant in the bathtub, we’d become very good friends, that I realized I was feeling what I described to my husband on a text as “a little too high” and I heard him push back his chair in the office and he appeared in the bathroom and said, oh yeah?

He got me out of the bathtub and up the stairs and into bed and I instructed him to bring me a carafe of water, some Fisherman’s Friends mints and to check on me every hour and then I told him I was going to “choose happiness” and I proceeded to embark on what my husband referred to as tripping my balls off. I’m going to have to strap myself to the bed with a bedsheet goddamnit, I told my husband. You’ll be okay, he said, just go to sleep. I don’t know if I slept, I couldn’t feel my arms and I don’t want to get too into it but I was in bed for nine hours and there was maybe some Viking sex involved as I’d grown very fond of Uhtred of Bebbanburg while watching all six seasons of The Last Kingdom on Netflix during the last lockdown. He and my husband share similarly pleasing bone structure.

I later determined that I’d made a grave error in converting the ingredients in my recipe to the metric system. Math has never been my strong suit. 

I think discovering (or perhaps rediscovering) weed later in life is a gift for women. A little portal back to the you you were before you had the weight of 40+ years of life on your shoulders. A place you can visit and don’t have to stay for too long if you don’t like, but it’s full of music and the sound of wind in the trees and the kind of laughter that you can feel adding sand back into the hourglass of your life. For me, it’s tamped down my anxiety, which had reached new and epic levels during the first year of the pandemic, and opened up some nice creative doorways for me. Summer afternoons filled with sunshine and elaborate daydreams and staring at clouds that make funny shapes, although you don’t need weed to see shapes in the clouds in the Netherlands. The clouds in the Netherlands are works of art, masterpieces in and of themselves that incidentally hang on the canvasses of the Dutch master painters just up the street in the Rijks Museum. I don’t think those guys ate magic weed pancakes, but they saw what I saw in the clouds, of this I am certain. After eating a magic pancake my ideas flow so fast I can hardly capture them and now I don’t even try. After a few attempts to write my brilliant thoughts only to have them come out as inarticulate nonsense — one time I covered my entire living room in little post its with my brilliant tidbits and the next day I gathered them all up, they’d curled into tight little scrolls, Dutch post it notes do not stick to anything, the glue is nonsense, and as I unfurled each scroll excited to read what my brilliant creative mind had been churning out, only to discover illegible scribbles along the lines of “and she was a witch all along!!!!!!!!!” — I realized that trying to write while on magic pancakes was fruitless and it was better to just let the creativity and profoundly brilliant thoughts wash over and inspire me and enjoy them as they pass by, like waving to a smartly dressed friend.

My 78-year-old mother has also recently discovered the late in life joys of marijuana. When she came to visit me last spring she informed me that she had five cigarettes left and then it was going to be time to “do the marijuana.” I ignored her for a day or so but she was insistent so I biked to the coffee shop and purchased a joint for my mother, and she smoked two puffs and laughed herself silly then had some deep thoughts then took a nap in the garden while I cooked dinner. My mother and I have had a rocky history and I felt a closeness to her during this visit that I’ve never had before. We relaxed into each other, and there was a softness between us. We were both aware of time and how little there was and how grateful we were to have it. There was no criticism, no defensiveness, we lived in the moment and enjoyed each other for who we are now, together in my garden, flowers and vines growing all around us like an embrace. It was a gift.

Sometimes I daydream of sharing the gift of discovering (or rediscovering) weed later in life with other women. As I’ve told you before, I have aspirations of opening a coffee shop that caters to middle aged and older ladies. There will be velvet sofas with squishy pillows and little side tables with lamps with tassels and flattering lighting and I’ll decorate it in pinks and greens and maybe a smattering of purple and orange and there will be little pots of fine teas and candles and floor to ceiling bookshelves and a basket full of reading glasses of varying strength and puzzles and diamond art and you can bring your pets and I’ll invite all my writer friends to give readings. I’m going to call it Grey Herons. I’ll wear flowing robes and smoke out of a Cruella De Vil-style cigarette holder and greet you and serve you pre-rolled joints and magic pancakes. I can’t promise you Viking sex, but you never know, as my friend Uhtred says: Destiny is All.