Two things I'm unsure of. How much of my family knows I smoke weed? -and- How much of my family reads this blog? There are other things I'm unsure of also -how mirrors are made, where Latvia is- but now is not the time to worry where Latvia is. Or if it is still even a recognized country; or maybe it's a city?

I know my aunt and uncle, my cousins, touch base here now and again. I know my mother visits because she calls all the time for the address. A fact that shames me, because this outlet was to be where I would lay down my struggling actor story. One that would tell daily of all the asshole actors I met; of my pounding heart masked by the performance of cool confidence reading awkward sides in front of some casting director. It was to be a journal neglected by days away, on strange acting retreats in The City, so full of color and life that when I finally sat down to write about them only adjectives would come out. Amazing... beautiful... bizarre. This was where family could read about lonely subway rides and my small creeping progress in the big Big city. Instead they read random musings on random nothings, no doubt wondering with every word why I had to move a thousand miles away to write about the Wildboyz.

Anyhow. I wonder because I've never kept my smoking a secret. I drop it in on occasion, but its mention is always in passing. I say I was stoned, cooked, blazed, that I got high. I mention rolling Js and smoking bowls, but for some reason I always assume my verbal paraphernalia flits right by their eyes, like a typo in a book that somehow got through all the rewrites and the editor.

I've never specifically addressed my smoking here. Or that I have smoked at least four days weekly for nearly the last two years straight. Because of my stagnancy up here, my refusal to go the same bars and drink the same beers with the same people every night, I go to work, come home, smoke til I pass out, and then do it all over again the next day. That does something to you after a while. Anthony believes it's doing something because I believe it's doing something, he thinks it is all in my head. Well, it is in my head, and it's in my body and my bones and it fills me like a cloud. Leaves me in a haze. The problem isn't while I'm smoking, that's the good part, the problem is that I feel the more I smoke, the more gravity hates me. When I wake up in the morning I go back to sleep five more times, I set my clock for 10 and then reset it for 11, 12, 1, 2, 3 even. It feels like on my back in bed at night, everything in me with physical mass -all my organs and tubes and blood- settles like soda in the bottom of a bottle, and then Mad Dr. Gravity slips in --through the same cracks all the goddam bugs sneak in through-- and plops right down on my chest. When I search for a word I know I know, it's like bobbing for apples blindfolded; I know they're in there, I just can't quite grab them. When I try to remember something, it's like driving through fog.

Thing is, I like smoking weed. I love it. It opens my mind and makes the most mundane things amazing. What I have done, is smoked so much for so long, that my reality is that fog, is that haze, that sluggish cloudy existence. I need to get my reality back; clear, visceral, accessible, and make smoking a treat again. I need to smoke weed like I eat fried foods, in moderation. So, I have decided to go Marijuana celibate for a week. I decided this Thursday night and have officially been weed-free for one. whole. day. And I tell you, just that 24 hour reprieve has done wonders. I got up at 10:30 this morning, went to the bank, went shopping, tanned, paid some bills, came home, read some more of an amazing brilliant book, went to work, and here I am and the words won't stop coming.

Maybe it's all in my head.

I could really go for a big fat bong hit right now.

P.S. -- Latvia is on the Baltic Sea in Eastern Europe between Lithuania and Estonia. It became an independent country in 1991 after the break-up of The Soviet Union. I had to know.

I slept out in the woods last week. It was the first time I had done that in about nine years. And it was the very day after I went into "the City" for the first time since moving up here nearly six months ago, to be closer to "the City."

It wasn't the people, what dragged me into the woods, but the woods themselves. The sounds, the trees, the prospect of wild critters. I was hoping for an epiphany, for the holes in trees to warp into mouths and tell me what to do. I wanted them to whisper, "We've always had the answers, you just never came into the woods." And maybe they did, maybe I just didn't hear them for all the fucking people.

It was so cliche, us driving out. Car after car after car of twentysomethings, straddling watermelons filled with vodka, nursing "roadies." Hooting and hollering over hip music. Everything but the opening credits. I kept waiting for a tire to blow, and for crazy mountain people to start slaughtering everyone. Starting with the most annoying people.

I dragged a cooler, chock full of beer and ice through a mile of half-paths; over rocks and logs, up and down hills in a journey so taxing, I would compare it to the moving of stones for the Pyramids at Giza. Yeah, that taxing. Then people started drinking and putting up tents, in that order.

It was a guy named Hawk who assumed the role of Alpha Male. Digging a fire pit and finding more reasons than there were to use his laughably giant Crocodile Dundee knife. With his name HAWK embossed on the handle.

I walked off into the woods as it got dark, it reminded me I don't know what dark is. Not really. Not the kind of dark that is alive all around you. It's not like the walls of a room. It was superb. When I got back to camp everyone was hammered and crammed on coolers and old chairs in a half moon around the fire. It was 9:30pm. And that is where everyone stayed for the rest of the night. Most of it in awkward silence. Some of it in riotous approval of some fourteen year-old break dancers. For all the drunk twenty-year-olds the lack of sexual tension was embarrassing. Luckily way back before I even dropped the pyramid block of beer I was getting high. And in that cloud I stayed all night. I feel like I go to all these things to be a spectator rather than participator.

The trip the day before the Taxing Boring Camping Trip, as I have dubbed it, was quite the opposite. Christian, honoring a long standing tradition of HandMeDown electronics, (including this very computer) gave me his jukebox. Which had been made obsolete by his sleek new iPod. I tell you it is quite extraordinary to have all your music readily available in a little box, wherever you go. For instance, a train into Manhattan.

Where I had not been since coming up in February to shoot George's show. Which, by the way, finally aired. If you missed it, I made my National television debut eating low-card food for a second and a half on The Food Network last Sunday. I felt my work was subtle, yet engaging.

So what finally drew me to the Big Apple after so many stupid months? A movie of course. For the first time in my life, instead of being wild with envy at people in New York and L.A., who get to see all the goddam movies first; I was one of the lucky sumbitches.

A lot of firsts recently. First night in the woods, first trip to "the City," In Times Square I had Olive Garden for the first time in half a year. Which was another thing that made the trip great, not having to rush a vacationing friend around to all the touristy spots; not having to eat at an authentic New York restaurant. Our only agenda was to see Garden State. Which I have since seen again, making it the first movie I have seen twice in the theater since Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace. Strange that it was another Natalie Portman movie, strange also that I HATED Phantom Menace both times I saw it. And maybe a little strange that the reason I saw that CGI dreck a second time was because of a different Natalie.

We hit a couple book stores and then decided- fuck it, let's see two movies. Open Water had been surfing a massive hype-wave since Sundance and I had been buying it just as long. Christian was more skeptical but, as he would say, "It had to be seen." When Owen Gleiberman says that it will chill you to the marrow, that it ACHIEVES A PRIMAL TERROR!, I give him the benefit of the doubt. After seeing it though I've got to tell you; the premise was phenomenal.

I've never related to a movie, in my life, the way I do Garden State. And it isn't just the obvious. STRUGGLING ACTOR finally goes home for his mother's funeral, is HOMESICK FOR A PLACE THAT DOESN'T REALLY EXIST, FEELS NUMB TO EVERYTHING AROUND HIM and TRIES TO MAKE SOME HEADWAY WITH HIS FATHER. It's in the whole feel of the film. In the beautiful shots and the fitting, inspirational soundtrack. It's in the grasp Zach Braff has on what it's like to be in your twenties and feel confused and disconnected. It's in the way he plays Largeman sitting back in a group, never all there, always on the fringe. It's in the familiar visuals. Smoking weed with cats. It's also in the hope; in Natalie Portman's character Sam. In her quirks and spunk and life, in her beauty and intelligence, and realness. In the way she changes him. It's nice to know that clarity might be just around the corner, in a doctor's office waiting room, listening to The Shins.

Thank you Mr. Braff, for my Reality Bites.

A couple more firsts. This is the first time I've slept in a real bed since moving up. I finally got rid of the raft. Also, this last weekend was the first time I've ever had to watch a hurricane tear through my home state and not be there. Ever.

Good Luck Florida.