Watching TV Without Weed: Reflections Of A Newly Sober Stoner

Hi, my name’s Neal, and I’m a stoner. At least that’s what I say at the Marijuana Anonymous meetings I’ve been attending. I quit weed in mid-November for good, just in time for the golden age of marijuana, soon to be available everywhere legally at low prices (unless Jeff Sessions has his way). But I won’t get to do any more magical pot shopping. The stores will be closed for me. My life, as they say in 12-Step Land, has become unmanageable.  

Up until very recently, I did everything stoned. Yoga was better high. I couldn’t imagine not ingesting before a hike, or a bike ride, or a walk down the block to the library. I certainly found it impossible to go to Costco without THC in my system. Bulk shopping was so much more interesting when I was baked. The chicken-patty and chocolate-covered pumpkinseed samples called out to me. There’s a reason I’m in a 12-Step program.  

But nothing got me to load the pipe or vape pen faster than the prospect of watching TV and movies. A stoned afternoon with Turner Classic Movies felt like Pennies From Heaven. I could binge-watch any Netflix show while binge-eating salty snacks. If you’ve never tripped on gummies while enjoying the last five minutes of an exciting NBA playoff game, you haven’t lived.

The last time I stopped using marijuana, for two months in the summer of 2013, I won $62,000 on Jeopardy! No such game-show fortunes await me imminently, but I’ve found myself wondering what else I could accomplish while not high. At the very least, now that I’m sober forever, I’ll have to re-evaluate how I consume media.

The level of consumption doesn’t seem to have changed all that much. I’ve always been culturally omnivorous, even if it’s just so I can accumulate more answers to trivia questions. That said, I find myself tuning into TCM less and less often. But I was doing that before I quit pot. You can only watch Meet Me In St. Louis and The Best Years Of Our Lives so many times, and it’s just not the same without Robert Osborne.

The other differences are subtle, and difficult to explain without sounding like a pothead. To the non-stoner, there might not seem like a change. It just looks like a guy staring at a screen. But inside my mind, everything has changed.

Basically, when I was stoned, the idea of watching something was exciting, as in “what crazy shit am I going to see this time?” The most mundanely entertaining shows suddenly seemed like insane magic carpet rides. Top Chef wasn’t just a well-produced cooking competition with sexy but predictable characters, it was a totally trippy journey into the dark heart of the American psyche, with bizarre people making insane food. The Amazing Race suddenly became “Whoa, Amsterdam is so awesome and Prague is even awesomer.” Something like Modern Family, on the other hand, should never be viewed under any circumstances.

“When I was stoned, Top Chef wasn’t just a well-produced cooking competition with sexy but predictable characters, it was a totally trippy journey into the dark heart of the American psyche.”

When I watched stoned, TV was just an aside to my amazingly hilarious mental journey. When I’m sober, I’m literally just watching TV, visual stories with characters and action and music. Whether or not the experience is fun depends on factors having to do with the show itself and my authentic reaction to it, without any chemical intermediary. Also, assuming the plot makes sense, I can follow what’s going on; I don’t miss a scene unless I leave the room.

For shows and movies with actually trippy visuals, marijuana was less of an optional stimulant and more a mandatory enhancement. Seeing anything with spaceships or superheroes without marijuana would have been like watching a 3D movie without the glasses, or a concert with the sound off. I refused to watch a cartoon or a Muppet until I’d smoked weed first. Something like Guardians Of The Galaxy required not only a sourbear two hours before showtime, but also three puffs off the vape pen 15 minutes before. Even though I consumed twice as many drugs, Guardians 2 still wasn’t very good, except occasionally. Marijuana doesn’t affect taste or judgment, it’s really a matter of how intense your reactions are.

Regardless, this is how I lived. I could remember scenes and individual shots, moments and the occasional joke. But I often found myself losing track of the plot. If I was riding a particularly powerful weed wave, whole characters could come and go without me having any knowledge of them. I found myself lost in side reveries, internal commentary, and weird memories. Often, I’d pause the show or movie, wander into another room, and then get caught up in something on the Internet or another TV. It could take me five hours to get through a two-hour movie. By the end, media consumption had become dissociative, fragmented, trippy, almost purely referential. It existed so I could riff on it, like a Butthead without a Beavis. My whole life felt like Twin Peaks, especially when I was watching Twin Peaks.

The last two months watching TV and movies not-stoned have been an interesting experiment. Thor: Ragnarok was the last blockbuster I saw before I entered recovery, and I thought it was incredible. My whole life had led up to the waking stoned fever-dream of a Hulk-Thor gladiator fight in space. But when The Last Jedi arrived, I was sober, like the movie itself. I found it somewhat less incredible than Thor. In fact, I found myself bored more than half the time. When you’re stoned, space ponies destroying a casino is the greatest thing of all time. Sober, I found myself looking at the time on my phone.

But now that I’m off weed, I don’t enjoy TV and movies overall any less than I did before. After all, I loved them as a kid, and I was never stoned as a kid, only as an adult. Bland fare like Molly’s Game or Murder On The Orient Express couldn’t have been saved by weed anyway, so it’s better that I saw them straight. And when I soberly watched Kong: Skull Island, a fine candidate for bong accompaniment, before we shut down HBO for the season, I still thought the monster fights were cool.

I watched the whole season of Curb Your Enthusiasm without any THC in my bloodstream, and it was still funny to me. The needle of stuff I watch with my teenage son also hasn’t moved. Family Guy still makes me laugh and also really not laugh. South Park is still always funny. Being stoned, amazingly, isn’t required to watch Children’s Hospital or It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. So while comedy seems unchanged by my new consumption patterns, there’s one huge difference. Now I don’t sit there trying to make up my own, generally worse, jokes. I can consume the media instead of getting involved in some sort of discursive fantasy.  

When the new season of Black Mirror dropped last week, it provided the ultimate control test. That’s the kind of show that, before, I couldn’t even conceive of watching without pot: Contemplative, trippy, pretentious, and effects driven. As of now, I’ve watched three episodes of the new season. There was a lot less of me thinking, “Whoa, what if corporations really did plant a chip in our heads to give us imaginary girlfriends? Maybe I should write my own version of Black Mirror, except it’s all about old Jews who can’t figure out how to use smart home technology. Hang on, I need to go write this down…” and more of, “That was a pretty good dystopian sci-fi story.” But I still enjoyed myself. Only for this season of Black Mirror, no one had to explain the twists to me and I didn’t scarf an entire bag of tortilla chips during the hour.

I’ve got at least 30 more years of watching TV shows sober. Hopefully, I’ll be able to remember most of them. Baseball season will be a real challenge, though. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get through a regular-season Dodger game against the Padres without the help of pot. Those games run long. Maybe I’ll just have to do something else instead.

Neal Pollack (@nealpollack) is the author of ten bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction. His latest novel is the sci-fi satire Keep Mars Weird. He lives in Austin, Texas.