A few weeks ago, a 13-year-old lectured me over Ventrilo because I was quoting John Prine’s “Illegal Smile”.  “Why would you listen to a song about marijuana?” he asked. Because it’s a good song. It’s fun. And it gives me a perverse joy to be far more anti-establishment intellectually than I am in reality; to be the polar opposite of my floorperson who thinks that “some of the stuff on Nickelodeon is a little suggestive” — you work in a casino! What sort of role model does that suggest?

And it all has me thinking of one of the more amusing escapades of my 14-year-old self convincing a few members of my freshman English class that I was really a total pothead. We were assigned to do a persuasive speech, and some perverse part of myself decided that marijuana legalization was a perfect topic. I was — and still am — pro-legalization.

Of course, the fact that I never smoked pot (or cigarettes, or drank underage) was exactly what made me the perfect person to do this. They made the assignment, they could hardly tell me that my perspective wasn’t allowed, especially when my main source was a recent special issue of National Review devoted to the drug war.

It wasn’t that unusual, as far as my teenage shenanigans went. Many of them involved drug references — Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a particular favorite. What makes that speech interesting after all these years was remembering how uncomfortable my father must have been, balancing his fears over his teenage daughter getting involved in drugs with the knowledge that, policy-wise, I really was on the right side of the issue, and once the issue came up, he was really too honest to deny that. It’s a special geeky sort of honesty that has to be a unique danger of geek-parenting: the “drugs are bad, mm’kay?” school is certainly much simpler.

Of course, he needn’t have worried; my high school years remained pretty innocent, while the bimbo-blondes with their pro-life speeches were, within a few years, always having mysterious “miscarriages” following nights of drinking and smoking.

Filed under: Personal