WHITE RABBIT by JEFFERSON AIRPLANE. Confession by Martina Medica.

Suburban Melbourne, 1996 and 2018

1996

You’re a straight-laced, uptight, anxious, uncool sixteen-year-old, and you’re watching the Woodstock VHS cassette for the first time with stars in your eyes.  You’ve spent the last six months devouring the 1960s – The Beatles, The Animals, Dylan, Zeppelin. You’ve moved through folk and rock and flower power, and into psychedelia – early Pink Floyd, Cream, The Doors. And now, Jefferson Airplane.

Grace Slick is a hippie angel in a white singlet top laced up loosely at the front, wide white flares, thick dark curls surrounding her head like a rockstar halo. And like just about everybody else at Woodstock, Grace Slick is also stoned out of her mind.

You desperately want to be her – look like her, sound like her, move like her. Look! Look at how bohemian she is, that mellow little smile on her face as she croons, like she knows all the secrets of the universe. She loves music, loves life, loves love! The audience groove with blissed-out faces and loose, unrestrained movements, and you want to be them, too.

‘White Rabbit’ soon becomes your anthem, your path to becoming a cooler and less uptight you. One day you’ll be just like her, you think. Like all of them. Mellow and carefree, celebrating free love and music and peace. You’ll smoke marijuana upon waking, drop LSD with friends over lunch, and have magic mushrooms for dinner. You’ll be cool and creative and free-spirited, like George Harrison and Robert Plant, Melanie Safka, and the celestial Grace Slick.

2018

You’re a straight-laced, uptight, anxious, uncool thirty-eight-year-old mum of two small humans. And you’re home alone, overnight, for the first time in a long time. What to do with this fleeting moment of freedom, what to do?

You put on some music, and crank it up. It’s a good start, but it’s not quite hitting the “I want to be a cool grown-up and not a completely uncool mum” note you’re going for. Your mind drifts to the little stash of pot you know lives in the top of the cupboard. With the rollie paper right next to it. Maybe…?

While you’ve never tried anything even medium-hard, you have smoked pot before. Not until your mid-twenties, admittedly, and only ever socially – passing a joint around with friends, barely feeling the effects.

Is this the time to do it on your own? Prove to yourself that you are, in fact, cool and free-spirited, just like you wanted to be all those years ago?

The idea firms in your mind as you grab the stash down from the cupboard: Roll your own joint. Put on some suitable music. Turn off the lights for atmosphere. And actually…get stoned.

It takes you half a dozen tries – and a few sheets of paper – to roll a joint, then another half dozen to get it lit long enough for you to take a few proper tokes. You figuratively pat yourself on the back. See, you think. I can be cool.

Time for a playlist. You consider your options carefully, creating one that your 16-year-old self would be proud of. Floyd and The Beatles and Zeppelin. Naturally, you put ‘White Rabbit’ on there too. Three times.

You’re not feeling anything yet, and the joint has gone out, so you re-light it and take a few more puffs. You wait a bit. As Grace Slick sings about the White Knight and the Red Queen, you feel cool. Chill. Maybe even a touch…mellow. It’s nice. Feed your head, Grace sings. Feed your head. So you do. You have a few more tokes. And a few more.

It’s only 15 or so minutes after you’ve finished the entire joint that you realize you’ve made an emphatically terrible mistake.

You can’t feel your hands. Why can’t you feel your hands?! Your heart is pounding. What if I forget how to swallow? Or breathe? you wonder, pacing the length of the house in a panic.

There is NO chill. No mellow, no spacey blissing-out, no love or peace.

No, it turns out that cool, free-spirited, stoned Martina, is actually anxious, paranoid, stoned, and alone Martina.

You continue freaking out. Your husband’s two hours away. You can’t call friends, it’s really late. And – they’d laugh at you. So you do the only thing that every cool, free-spirited, stoned 38-year-old does in a situation like that.

You call your mum.

And of course she comes over and helps you calm down, without even telling you off (even though you know she desperately wants to, because she always warned you not to experiment with anything stronger than cordial). And when she goes home and you go back to freaking out, she sends your brothers over to keep you company until the wee hours, when you finally manage to quiet the panicky noise and fall asleep.

Because that’s the kind of thing mums do.

A few lessons are learnt that night:

1. Don’t get stoned for the first time alone.
2. A whole joint in half an hour may be a bit too much for a beginner.
3. Smoking pot doesn’t necessarily make you free-spirited. Or cool.
4. And, most importantly: mums – even the least free-spirited ones – are cool.  Mums may actually be the coolest.

At least that’s what you’ll keep telling yourself.

Stereo Story 866