When I Started Smoking Weed for Real: 2013

By J. Guzmán

When I Started Smoking Weed for Real is volume 5 of the series On Being

• Language: English
• Publisher: Loner Girl Press
• Release date: Sep 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781957210131

J. Guzmán

J. Guzmán was born on January 14th, 1991, at 8:42 a.m., in Lewiston, Idaho, USA. She is the creator of On Being, a self-referential, metaphysical, diary case history where she psychoanalyzes her consciousness throughout Time, uses tools like astrology to facilitate the investigation, and documents the entire process. J is building a life-long, narrative, archival data set of her life for astrologers and other researchers to use to show exactly how their respective theories, methods, techniques, and practices function. J. is the ultimate research test subject.

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When I Started Smoking Weed for Real

WHEN I STARTED SMOKING WEED FOR REAL

2013

ON BEING

BOOK V

J. GUZMÁN

Loner Girl Press

Copyright © 2023 by J. Guzmán and Loner Girl Press

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

For permissions and collaborations contact: [e-mail]

You can connect with J. on Instagram @jguzmanwriter, or visit her website https://jguzman.space

Sign up for J.’s newsletter called Nothing I Say is True: Open Letters to Void at her website under the Correspondence tab! There you can read her ongoing musings about life, the universe, and whatever the fuck.

Although the following narrative is of events that actually occurred, the story itself is only subjective truth. All books in the series On Being are J. Guzmán’s personal experience, interpretation, opinions, and feelings, not the Objective Truth of Absolute Reality. Her aim is not defamation and she understands that every character has their own subjective truth regarding events that occurred, and that others’ perspectives could prove contradictory to her own. Characters’ names have been changed to protect their privacy and reputation.

Preface

When I Started Smoking Weed for Real is volume five of the series On Being, an astrological, self-referential case history. It is Ana’s documentation of her year 2013, when she was 22 years old. If you’ve read up to this point in the series then you, the reader, will have realized that I, J. Guzmán, am the protagonist Ana, and that her writing is mine. If this volume is your first encounter with On Being, you can read an introduction to the series on my website at https://jguzman.space/, or at the beginning of volume one, The Thought Thinker is a Loner Girl. It is not entirely necessary that you start reading OB from volume one, although doing so will give you a clearer understanding of who Ana is.

Most of volume five is abstract, theoretical ponderings that don’t reference explicitly the actual events that instigated the eruption of ideas and poetry in Ana’s mind. Often she wrote while intoxicated, trying to outline the contours of her consciousness in a sort of psychological topographic map built of words. Obviously she failed; it is impossible to show with words exactly what it’s like to be high. Maybe Neptune sextile her natal Mercury explains it. Depending on how wide an orb you use, one could say Neptune was sextile her Mercury for almost the entire year.

2013 is an 11th house profection year for Ana, as a 22-year-old. This makes sense as she suddenly found herself with a lot of friends, something relatively unusual for her. If you profect from her massive 12th house stellium it’d be a 10th house profection year. I’m unsure how that would be relevant, but I bet someone could make a case for it.

Another notable transit lasting for the duration of 2013 was Pluto conjunct Ana’s Moon-Uranus conjunction. When Venus conjoined Pluto, both planets sitting on top of the degree of Ana’s Moon, she began a relationship with a man, who I call Alex, that eventually became quite toxic. Although she came to understand the toxicity for what it was, she still had a difficult time leaving him because of a kind of addictive quality of the relationship that left her feeling obsessive and compulsive regarding her desire to spend time with him. Because Ana didn’t document her interactions with Alex in as detailed a manner as she could have, the true nature of the relationship and all its nuances is not demonstrated fully.

However, I was able to salvage some email correspondence between Ana and Alex, which make their appearance in this volume. I made extensive commentary on one of Alex’s emails to Ana because at the time I believed it was the only one I had saved, and I wanted to demonstrate how shitty a person he was, to put it bluntly. Eventually I was able to find other emails they had written to each other, but I did not make any more commentary on them. I feel that the reader will be able to come to their own conclusions about the quality of Alex’s character based on his words alone. I also feel that Ana’s emails will betray clearly her own nuanced flaws and contradictions without further annotation.

That being said, I will go into more detail here about everything with Alex, just because I can, and because I’m still harboring some bitterness about it all for some reason. It’s not that I think about it often, but when I do I can feel a powerful undertow of resentment and anger there that I don’t have with respect to any of my other relationships. As I write this preface, Venus is retrograde in my 7th house. I feel that it’s no coincidence that I’m publishing this volume and thinking more deeply about this past relationship at this time. I want to analyze and kind of unravel and explore a bit some of our issues, which I think principally came down to a lack of communication and probably a lack of compatibility.

During our time together I would confront Alex about being consistently rude to me, shutting me down, interrupting me, and cutting me off instead of listening to me, blowing up at me instead of having civil conversations about our disagreements, trivializing my feelings, and belittling me. In his emails he justifies his bad behavior, often contradicting himself, instead of apologizing for being an asshole. He’d spend a lot of time explaining why he acted the way he did, but would never change the behavior – and subsequently he’d say that I was being unfairly accusatory. I already knew why he acted rudely, and I didn’t care. I just wanted him to stop being rude, communicate with me like a rational adult, and quit gaslighting me about my experience and perspective. These were chronic issues in our relationship that I was trying to address with him. Instead, he poetically dances around the topics, avoiding saying anything definitive, denying any responsibility, and refusing to take accountability for his actions and mistakes.

Of course I made mistakes, too. Of course I said the wrong things or my tone was rude or I tried to get him to be someone that he wasn’t, or I brought up serious issues at inconvenient times, or I continued arguing when I should have walked away. I apologized when I realized I had hurt him or that I was being unfair, and I tried to understand from his perspective what was going on. Did he do the same for me? Not really. It’s all justifications, excuses, and gaslighting.

It’s hard to communicate with someone that refuses to listen to you. I can try to explain for hours (which wouldn’t be possible as he’d refuse to let me even speak, and the few words I did get in he denied as pure falsehoods that I invented), or write pages and pages of text trying to make him understand that he should treat me with respect. But if he refuses to even consider that he ever did anything rude or disrespectful, or that his behaviors were actively hurting me, then it’s all pointless. I’d inevitably just get sucked into his aggressive arguments because I’d be trying to get him to understand me when he was adamant that everything I was trying to communicate was wrong. It always became an argument. And I am at fault for participating in the argument.

It took me way too long to realize that it’s pointless to try to convince somebody that they should treat me with respect. It’s absolutely futile and you should walk away and never look back and never talk to them again and never try to explain yourself because they will never understand you! They don’t want to understand you! For some reason they’re hellbent on actively distorting what you’re intending to communicate, to the point where you start gaslighting yourself. After all the heated, activated debates, you begin to wonder if what you’re saying actually doesn’t make sense, otherwise how would we have gotten here? Sometimes being a fair, accommodating person willing to try to see from the other person’s point of view bites you in the ass. You end up getting taken advantage of because the person manages to convince you that their perspective is the only one that’s valid. And when someone adamantly insists you’re insane for a long enough time and that your perspective doesn’t make sense, you start to believe it.

There’s a couple incidents with Alex that I remember that characterize our relationship that Ana never references. I want to mention them here for the record because along with being kinda funny in a stupid, bad way, I think they illustrate well the types of situations Ana frequently found herself in with him.

The first is the South Park example. Alex introduced me to South Park. I hadn’t been entirely living under a rock so I knew about it and had seen short clips from different episodes on TV randomly, but I had never seen an entire episode all the way through. So we’d smoke weed and watch them together at his apartment. A few days later after having watched some episodes, something happened that reminded me of one of the episodes we had watched. Unfortunately I can’t remember what episode it was or what had reminded me of it, which is really annoying and doesn’t help my case, but whatever.

Basically what happened is that I told Alex about the thing that reminded me of the episode and how I thought it was funny. He just looks at me with this weird glint of suspicion and distrust in his eyes. He says something like, We never watched that episode together. I’m completely taken aback because that was not the reaction I had expected at all. I expected him to laugh and know what I was talking about, but instead he’s confused and seems upset about it. I say something like, Yes, we did, do you not remember? He vehemently denies that we ever watched that episode together, but of course he has seen the episode and knows exactly what I’m talking about. Now I’m confused because the only person I’d ever watched South Park with is him, and it had been just a couple days before that I had seen that particular episode. So it becomes an argument, and I remember him snarling at me and saying, One of us has a memory problem and it’s NOT ME!! That’s the only thing I remember word for word of the conversation. Everything else is a negative emotional imprint of a memory.

I think this example is perfect because it describes the chronic issues I encountered with Alex. He always made me feel crazy. He made me feel like I had memory problems or experienced the world in a way that was fundamentally wrong or incorrect. Don’t get me wrong, we did smoke a lot of weed together, which definitely has negative effects on my short term memory. Because of that I don’t remember much of the movies that we watched together while high, or the exact specifics of conversations we had. I can’t remember the actual details of that South Park episode and what made me think of it, so even now I wonder if I had been wrong all along and we actually hadn’t watched it together. But I remember that in that moment with him that escalated quickly into an argument, I was 1000% sure that we had watched that episode together. Where else would I have seen it so recently? He was the only person I watched South Park with! Like wtf?? Plus, social media wasn’t really a thing like it is now as I write this in 2023, so I hadn’t been watching Instagram or TikTok reels of short clips where it might have appeared. It definitely hadn’t been on the TV at my parents’ house, where I was living at the time. I didn’t, and still don’t, watch TV alone in my free time.

Another issue regarding this example is that even if I had been wrong and thought we had watched the episode together when we hadn’t, that doesn’t justify you yelling at me that I have a memory problem. Alex could have said, I for real don’t remember watching that with you and it kind of freaks me out that you are sure that we watched it together, because I really feel like we didn’t. And I could have said, Wow, that’s fucking crazy because I swear to goddess we saw that together. Maybe we are smoking too much weed! And then we’d laugh and let it go. But instead it became an aggressive, heated moment of tension and activation where he acts like I’m insane and that I need serious help.

Unfortunately, it was like that with everything. Every insignificant thing became an unnecessary argument instead of a simple agreeing to disagree situation.

The next example is more brief. We were at a pipe shop where they sell bongs and such things that people are clearly using for weed, but as weed was illegal at that time in Idaho (it still is at the time of this writing), you’d literally get kicked out of the shop if you mentioned anything related to weed. And that’s exactly what happened.

Him and I were with his friend who I call Sandra in this volume. She wanted to buy him a bong, I think. At one point I asked her, Why don’t you get one for yourself, too? Or something along those lines. Sandra says without thinking, Oh, I don’t smoke weed. Of course the guy working in the shop hears and we have to leave and can’t buy anything. And Alex FREAKS OUT. He has a temper tantrum in the parking lot and is a huge asshole, yells at us, slams the car door when we get back to the apartment, just being a fucking jerk.

That kind of shit happened all the time. All the fucking time he had these explosive, angry outbursts that were totally unwarranted, and I’d confront him about it and he’d never apologize. It was all just excuses and acting like I’m overreacting or being too sensitive.

It’s sad that I didn’t know I was writing an astrological case history at the time. Otherwise I would have gotten the charts of all those temper tantrums and I’m sure it would have revealed some interesting patterns, probably regarding Moon and Mars shit. Who knows, it’s all lost in Time. Ana had no idea what she was writing and because of that she wasn’t diligent or disciplined about it. Fortunately though, I do have the times of the emails that she sent to and received from Alex, as they’re timestamped in her email account. At first I thought maybe the times would be wrong, because you know how sometimes the time zone in your email or other software is wrong if you don’t make sure to set it correctly. However, recently I sent myself an email – to and from that same account – and it arrived in my inbox with the correct time, so I can only assume that the times I have are accurate.

A note about the emails: I’ve edited their punctuation and grammar, and changed the names of anyone mentioned to