When you’re named Starshine, people expect you to be a pothead — and it’s not an unfair assumption. I was, indeed, raised in a cloud of skunk smoke, and cannabis is the national flower of my people. Many was the Sunday I spent rolling my eyes as my parents and their pals hissed on spliffs and cackled at things that weren’t funny as Pink Floyd warbled through our house. I would open a window, go back to playing Barbie, and think, “One of these goons had better have a plan to make me dinner.”
Even as a teen and adult, weed never lit my fire. The cotton-mouthed high that drags you down a rabbit hole of ungainly pondering with scheduled detours for jagged paranoia, slack-jawed lethargy, and wanton Triscuit-hoovering just isn’t my rapture of choice.
Which is why I was surprised to find myself plucking jiggly dollops of drug-infused gelatin from silicon ice-cube trays on a recent Sunday afternoon, rolling them in powdered sugar and plopping them into tubes labeled Fruity Pebbles.