It’s 4/20. And even I know what that means, because I have teenagers. They explained it to me. They cannot imagine a world in which someone like me, their erstwhile oatmeal-boiling, berry-buying, don’t drink, don’t smoke, goody-two-shoes mother could even imagine sparking up a blunt and getting high.

So, I told them: I am not inexperienced with this. I know whereof I speak. Not all choices are as easy as asking myself, “Do I want to be present during my life or do I want to miss it while I’m otherwise engaged, lying beneath a pile of Dorito’s bags and Snicker’s wrappers and pizza delivery menus while a cloud of smoke fills the room.”

Uh wait…should that question be so hard to answer?  Um…

Happy 4/20. Live long and prosper!

The joke was totally on me, recently. I was actually IN Colorado, standing outside the door of one of those medical-and-to-the-public dispensaries. I was on vacation. I had a fat wad of cash in my phone/wallet/purse thingie. And I thought about all the times in the past I’d wished I could get high: while I was having my babies, or when said babies were throwing any one of the seven hundred billion shitkitten fits they threw or when they were getting themselves into trouble or making me look like crazy woman because I just… well… I am a crazy woman because I have kids.

I thought about my mostly excellent track record of mature, sober, maternal diligence and all that mindfulness meditation where being even MORE present is the object of the game–present in my life, my anxiety, my pain. Present in my frustration. In illness. In deepest, darkest grief.

And yeah. That dispensary doorway really f*cking beckoned me with long smoky finger-tendrils of promised oblivion.

It said, come to the dark side, we literally have cookies.

And I passed it by. Which is not to say I’ll never enter, ever. If I’m in Colorado again and the mood strikes I just might. I did buy a chocolate bar with bacon in it, a few doors later. Or I thought I did. Turned out it was chocolate with habanero chiles, which was even better!

In the book Deep Deception, which I’m working on right now, Donte, my Italian nobleman vampire, is living with his lover Adin in a secluded cabin in Colorado. Due to his boyhood in a monastery’s herb gardens, he’s got one helluva green thumb. He’s exercising it by growing vegetables and marijuana and it amuses him to get baked in his greenhouse at the end of the day, while he waits for Adin to get over his anger and come to terms with being Undead.

For his part, Adin isn’t adjusting. He’s moody. He’s intractable. He’s determined to subsist on animal blood, but for a vampire, that’s like throwing a recovering sex addict through the doors of Studio 54 in 1978.

Donte indulges him but maybe that’s the last thing he needs. A little tough love in the form of Cristobel Santos and Adin’s old friend Sean could start the couple’s healing process, but only if it doesn’t put an end to them forever, first…

Stay tuned!