I have three daughters, ages six, four, and two, and they are all in bed by eight o’clock at night. My wife, who rises much earlier than I do, retires by 9:30 or ten. I, however, am a night owl, and I find it hard to fall asleep much before midnight. So usually I find myself with about two hours alone in my house, puttering about, wishing I had a better cable-TV package. Late in the day, I don’t have the energy to write, or even to read much. Last night, I ended up watching a 2009 Aziz Ansari stand-up special, streaming on Netflix, while eating a Häagen-Dazs coffee “cup,” one of those cute 3.6–ounce miniatures. Which got me thinking: Why am I not stoned right now?

This was not a new insight; for about the past year, I have been meaning to start smoking pot again. That sounds like a bolder declaration than it is—it’s not as if I were a problem gambler vowing to move back to Vegas. I never smoked much, probably a couple dozen times in college and graduate school. I was never the buyer, always the mooch. In 2002, the last of my stoner friends got his Ph.D. and went off to enrich young minds as an English professor, and after that, nobody was offering. I graduated the following year, got married two years after that, had my first daughter a year later. The drugging, never very lively, had met its natural, fitting end.

So this recent interest in drugs has taken me by surprise, and I don’t totally understand it. As best I can tell, my new thinking goes something like this: I have a couple friends who smoke occasionally, and it would be fun to join them. Since a rather lubricated spell in graduate school, I have pretty much lost my taste for alcohol, beyond the occasional gin and tonic on a summer’s eve; so I’m in the market for another intoxicant. And above all, my own government is practically telling me to smoke.

In Connecticut, as in many states, marijuana is getting sort-of legal. We have not gone as far down Decriminalization Road as Colorado and Washington did last Election Day, but two years ago Connecticut did make possession of less than half an ounce of marijuana, for personal use, a civil infraction, punishable by a $150 ticket. Subsequent offenses carry a $500 fine, but it’s not as if the New Haven police are sniffing around people’s backyards or sending bloodhounds after the scent of weed. I mean, I drive a Honda Odyssey minivan—cops don’t figure there’s anything dangerous up my driveway.

My own parents were a little too old to have really done the ’60s—they got out of college in 1966 and 1967, respectively, and during Woodstock my dad was an army reservist stationed in San Antonio, at Fort Sam Houston. By the time I was old enough to ask if they had ever done drugs, it was the mid-1980s, and while they probably thought Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” sloganeering was idiotic, it was also a pretty frightening time, on the uphill slope of the crack epidemic, and I think they felt some obligation to downplay even their tentative, ’70s-era drug use.