I am a natural born addict.  It is as simple as that.  When I was a little kid sitting at the breakfast table with my five other siblings, I would pour my own cereal and milk.  I don’t even know if you can call it milk, because it was that powdered stuff they gave people on welfare.  It truly tasted like shit.  I couldn’t wait to go to my grandma’s house, just so I could taste real milk.

“Todd, you have to stop drinking the milk like its water!” she would always tell me, but I knew I only had a short time to consume as much as I could.  So, I did.  I would try to remember how great it tasted when I was drinking the powdered stuff, thinking that perhaps it would help.

Anyway, when I poured my cereal I would place two heaping tablespoons of sugar in exactly dead center of the bowl.  I would then proceed to eat around it so that at the end I would be rewarded with a few soggy flakes that were totally drenched in sugar.  This was a wonderful ending to a crappy bowl of cereal.  Once in a while my mom would sneak behind me and try to stir it up.

“It’s my bowl of cereal! Let me eat it how I want,” I would tell her, freaking out.

Every once in a while in the summer, when my mom would get a gut full of all six kids, she would give my oldest sister a one dollar food stamp and tell her to walk all of us to the store to get one piece of candy each.  We all would get Bubbs Daddy Bubble Gum, a long fat tube of juicy goodness.  I would cram the whole thing in my mouth before we ever made it home.  An hour later, I would beg my little sister to please break off a small piece for me.  This was my first memory of “jonesing.”

I am the only person I have ever met that didn’t have someone else to blame for the first time they got high.  It was the summer of the seventh grade, and I loved to read.  I was rifling through some of my older brother’s stuff, while he was at work, when I found a book titled A Child’s Garden of Grass.  I read it from cover to cover in the next couple of days.  It was a “how to” owner’s manual for smoking pot.  It told you how to make your own pipes out of an empty spool of thread and a Bic pen.  It told you how to grow it, smoke it, bake brownies with it, make your own hash with it, and anything else you could do with pot.  So, after I finished reading it, I went straight back into my brother’s room and started looking for his stash.  Sure enough, I found it. 

I was in Bountiful, Utah at the time, so I couldn’t tell any of my Mormon friends about my new discovery. However, I made myself a little pipe and put a small pinch of my brother’s sack in it every day.  I proceeded to stay high all summer (and for the next twenty-five years) without anyone knowing the difference.  Then, I was at my grandma’s house, and I had the munchies coupled with cottonmouth.  I started eating saltines when someone said something funny, and I blew cracker dust all over the kitchen.  My uncle’s girl friend called me aside.

“You’re totally stoned!  How long have you been smoking?”

“All summer.”

I now had someone to get high with, and that was a lot more fun.