High Maintenance

The gentle crackling of my joint muffles the reality TV in the background. The sound is small, domestic. Outside, Brooklyn hums with an orchestral madness. I moved here for softness, a quieter street, a slower rhythm, to try and let go. But even here, the noise finds me. It arrives through my phone, my inbox, my thoughts. It weaves itself into the fabric of my sheets and cradles me as I fall asleep. But this might be a me problem.

On any given day, I'm racing through a million tasks. Writing, posting, sharing, designing, thinking, doing, doing, doing. Weed feels like the only thing that can settle my mind. I’m secretly—and, among my friends, famously—a stoner. I smoke (rather constantly) because it acts as a blanket from the vulgarity of the world. It’s a reprieve from the constant demand to react. Getting high gives a distance I find necessary between me and all the matters of the world. It’s a tenderness I can reach for, a space I can make for myself when the rest of life is abrasive.

When life becomes work, and work becomes everything, taking a hit is like a private act of surrender. It’s a way of blurring what screens and schedules make sharp. A “research engineer” friend who will remain unnamed—because, even in the age of open drug policy, Wall Street still prefers its vices expensive and discrete—smokes weed on days when his work is “mechanical.” By “mechanical,” I assume he means the kind of labor that feels automated, where he’s a cog in a much larger streamlining process. Getting high and listening to music reintroduces a sense of humanity.

That’s the real draw: the moment your body slows down enough for your brain to follow. The data stops streaming. The mind stops performing. Life pulls back just enough for you to breathe inside it again.

There’s something moving about how small rituals of release can reconnect us to feeling. Rachel Bell seems to understand this, too. Her Gotham series, Hi, I’m High, is a love letter to the small absurdities of being stoned in the city. In one episode, she eats an edible before going to the DMV (on the record, she would not recommend this); in another, she wanders through Central Park with her dog, Ernie. Being high, she says, imbues all activities with a little bit of whimsy and silliness. Certainly, we could all benefit from that: a reminder that even the most mundane tasks can hold a glimmer of play.

Artist Matthew Tully Dugan calls weed “an important recalibration tool that returns me to a headspace where I am enchanted by the world around me instead of feeling like the pressure of existence is painful and overwhelming.” Living in New York, he says, it’s easy to absorb everyone else’s stress, to forget your own frequency. Weed, for him, reorients that signal—a way to step back into alignment, to build a small, spiritual perimeter around what matters. His description reminds me that enchantment itself can be a way of choosing wonder over wear.

For all its cultural ubiquity, weed still carries a faint sense of suspicion, a hangover from decades of illegality and uneven distribution. The unregulated stuff could be unpredictable, sometimes harsh. That old chaos gave weed its reputation for paranoia and excess. Now, there’s a little something for everyone: if weed freaks you out, try CBD; if you’re weed-curious, start light with a low-dose gummy, or a midday sativa. If you can’t sleep, smoke an indica. The point isn’t to escape yourself, it’s to meet yourself at a different frequency.

In September, Gotham returned to New York Fashion Week with Eckhaus Latta. Backstage at the show, Bloom vapes circulated like small talismans of delight. You could see it on faces as goodie bags made their way to the models. On the runway, Camilla DeTerre lit a joint. The moment landed easy and present, a small ripple of joy through the room. At the already intimate show, her gesture felt open and freeing. The whole moment, an antidote to a space usually defined by precision and control.

It doesn't seem like much, but in some ways, getting high is all i have against my pull toward efficency. In an age that prizes productivity, to be a little slow, a little silly, a little tender might be the most radical act of all.

Which is, I think, why I’m here writing this, smoke curling toward the ceiling, housewives (the Real kind) murmuring (yelling) in the background. The joint burns down to its final inch, and I melt into the stripes of my couch. The room wraps in that haze I’ve been chasing all day. I think about how many times I’ve sat like this, letting the noise blur, convinced that stillness itself is a kind of progress. Weed makes time elastic; it dims the scroll and stretches the breath. Peace, sometimes, has to be made, minute by minute, hit by hit, inside small, chosen silences.

These could be just my high thoughts talking, trying to find meaning in the rituals I’ve built to keep the world at a distance. But tonight, the world feels gentler. For a moment, I do too.