“Well, I’m thinking about finding a place in Pacifica. I hear it’s really foggy, but at least the rent’s cheaper.”

“You’ll fit in perfectly, son. You’ve been growing up your whole life in a fog.”

Being the stoner of the family means you’re bound to be on the receiving end of some slyly crafted quips pertaining to your lifestyle with every prolonged phone call.

Some are blatant.

“You aren’t wasting all your money on dope, are you?”

Others tip toe upon your intuition.

“I’m sending you a gift card for Chili’s so you don’t starve.” Translation: “I don’t want to send you cash because you’ll just spend it on dope.”

Most are smack dab between the two.

“You smell [like weed]. You need to take a shower.”

But you’ve got your suspicions, too – the times where you could have sworn the Cuban your dad was toking contained some special ingredients.

“The weed in my day was much better than that stuff you kids have now.”

Cough. Did he just try to relate to me? An attempt at communication, but I can’t help but laugh at the ignorance in his statement. I remind him of his seed story, it doesn’t click. It’s bliss.

“Oh, yeah. We used to take the seeds out and eat them in milk the next morning. Like cereal.”

WTF? Thanks for proving my point, Pops.

But these first few examples are the easy ones to come to grips with. Sometimes the fam does its best work under the cover of darkness.

“I liked your article today, son. But I didn’t like what it was about.”

I appreciate your kindness, but now you’re making less sense than me. Where do paradoxical answers fit into parental logic? I’m the stoner – accent on the present tense. Nothing has changed back at the front. Apparently I haven’t been back in a while.

While I’ve met the types of parents who actually toke up with their own offspring, for some reason I am grateful to translate covert expressions of disapproval instead of having my rebellion tainted by their company in the rotation. Maybe it relates to my utter fear of Big Brother getting his greedy, filthy hands on my baby, Mary Jane, once it’s legal.

Smoking with your friends’ parents may seem like a good warm-up exercise for the real deal. But the grass always seems greener on the other side. Instead of being told to wash the dishes from your recent onslaught of the munchies, this pair is telling you to roll up another one. Yet it seems the only way I could even approach the idea with my King-Queen offsuit is on a bluff. Forget it, my mom’s a poker player. She can read my eyes like an open book.

I almost appreciate my parents’ silent disapproval, though. I fuck up and leave king-size Zig Zags in the family car and I don’t hear about it. But I know they found them, because the papers have vanished from existence. There’s no way in hell I’m ever finding a trace of them again.

But it’s this silent border that I’ve been consciously transgressing which has led to a brief revelation.

There is no line. No silent boundary. There was never a fist in the air under my parents’ ceilings in the first place. I’m only doing what they did to their parents before me. I might have taken their experimentations a leap further, but, like they once were, I’m the newest carrier of continuation in my forgotten fractal of ancestry. Whether they ate the apple, grabbed the bone as a tool or had the inkling to walk upright above the rest, I’m simply the next participant in the rotation of existence. It’s just my turn to puff. And I’m going to bask in it.

Because, in no time, my turn will pass.

“Hey, son. You know all that stuff you’re doing that you don’t think I know you’re doing? Well, you can do as much of that as you want in college. But you have to get in first. So just hold off for a sec.”