The holidays are a time for reflection, which means one thing I must admit about myself that I’m not very proud of is that, when it comes to products that celebrities make, endorse, or even just try, I have no scruples. I once Season 2, it’s safe to say that the most memorable moment from the entire season was watching Kris Jenner try to function at a Mexican restaurant while floating outside her body, stoned off half an edible. Kris takes her seat for dinner and promptly begins to come undone, staring at her daughter Khloé and crying laughing while wondering aloud just how Khloé keeps the ends of her hair flipped.
Both myself and my colleague Kyndall Cunningham agreed that we didn’t think Kris was exaggerating, but there was only one way to be sure: Trying the edibles myself. A few weeks ago, I got my hands on a package of 10 sour apple-flavored, Wyld brand cannabis gummies, each with 10mg of THC. In the episode where Kris gets high, she took a gummy from the same brand, albeit splitting the dose and going halfsies Khloé.
Some personal context: I had not taken an edible—or been high at all—since 2018; I typically prefer the natural highs produced by jogging or scrolling through the 792 photos in my phone’s Timothée Chalamet folder. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember the right weed-to-Coleman ratio, so, naturally, I consulted the internet. Some chart on some website told me that, for semi-experienced cannabis users, a 15mg edible would produce the perfect results. Because I have incredible deductive reasoning skills, I took the first chart on the first website I saw on Google and ran with it as the definitive answer.
Reader, 15mg was too much.
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I neglected to take into consideration that gummies produced by professionals in the multi-billion dollar cannabis industry would be—how do I put this…slightly more potent than the large cookie an old roommate made that I had a bite of in 2018. So I took one and a half gummies, which seemed reasonable and tasted great. I was expecting a two-hour wait before I felt any effects, time to run an errand or two. What I did not expect was to feel an intense sensation I hadn’t felt in four years creeping up on me 25 minutes later, in the checkout line of Family Dollar while trying to buy AAA batteries on a Friday evening.
Suddenly unable to properly tell if there were three or 30 people in front of me, I politely excused myself from the line and cupid-shuffled over to the display of holiday perfume sets that no one ever buys. I set the batteries between a Calvin Klein set and an off-brand Britney Spears Fantasy fragrance set (an act I’ll be self-flagellating for as a former retail worker for the rest of my life), and politely excused myself from the store at the lightning-fast pace of one rickety footstep per second.
Luckily, my apartment was just around the corner, and even more luckily, I had the good sense to order dinner before popping the amount of THC that Rihanna would call breakfast. I thought it would be festive to order Mexican to recreate Kris Jenner’s experience, and the feeling of walking back into my kitchen to see my burrito and enchiladas waiting for me while in the throes of a quickly ramping-up cannabis high was a comfort as visceral as being back in the womb.
At this point, I’d say I was teetering on becoming a lost cause. While plating my burrito, I longed for the comforts of my bed and absentmindedly forgot that eating a burrito in my bed was not a good idea. I remembered this as soon as I tried closing my bedroom door and ran into a wall directly behind it, nearly knocking my precious $18 burrito to the ground (I sprang for the good stuff). So I sat down on the floor of my living room, surrounded by a wasteful amount of paper towels in case of spillage, and turned on John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness—my millionth grave error in as much as half an hour.
By the time I finished the burrito, I lost any ability to follow what was happening in the film and became deeply terrified. This was a feeling exacerbated by my enchiladas, which did not travel well—which I should’ve known, but, as I feel I’ve already illustrated, this was not my brightest evening on Earth. From here, things careened off the rails for this beautiful writer. I crawled on my hands and knees back into my kitchen (a short jaunt from my living room…New York apartments), pushing my plate of enchiladas a few inches in front of me as I went. With them safely refrigerated, I washed my hands and retired to bed.
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Safely head-to-pillow and in complete and utter darkness, I was free to try to work through my high. For whatever reason, I was battling major ’90s nostalgia, but could not ascribe that label to it. I had a distinct shape that kept appearing in my mind’s eye, and, in a panic, summoned my boyfriend to try to describe the figure. Words failed me, so I attempted to make it out by motioning my fingers, a square with little flourishes on the corners. It wasn’t until the next day that I realized I had been trying to describe the peephole frame that sits on the door of the Friends apartment through a game of finger charades.
In a last-ditch attempt to ground myself with song, I threw Apple Music onto shuffle. The first and last song I listened to was “Always Remember Us This Way,” the devastating love song from A Star Is Born. As I always do when I listen to anything from that soundtrack, I started crying. But this time it was because I convinced myself that Ally Maine was a real woman—not a Lady Gaga character—and that what happened to her husband was a landmark tragedy in music. I knew in my heart that she was not. But at that moment, she became a symbolic figurehead for the toxicity of the music industry.
I had no choice but to go to sleep, I was too far gone. Drifting off into slumberland, I felt as though I could feel Kris Jenner next to me. I could not see her beautiful, doctor-perfected visage, but I could feel what I assume to be the weight of her sitting next to me on my bed, guiding me through the high. What is it that Jesus said, “When there was only one set of footprints in the sand, I was not gone, I was carrying you”? That was me and Kris Jenner, except she was weighing down the right side of my bed.
The next morning, I woke up refreshed after 10 hours of sleep, brimming after one of the most delightful nights of my life in recent memory. Like Kris Jenner, who was using the Wyld gummies for pain relief purposes before her hip replacement, I needed a little bit of release after accidentally running myself ragged for a month straight. And let me tell you: I had the time of my goddamn life.
In the weeks since I have gracefully learned what is the right dosage for myself (somewhere between 5mg and 10mg—not the full 10). I have enjoyed a warm high while rewatching Kristen Stewart fight ancient sea monsters in Underwater and giggled through my favorite compilation of ’70s and ’80s Christmas ads. Consider me a proponent of edibles once more, after four years off the sauce.
I don’t think that Kris Jenner ever intended all of this when she took 5mg of a gummy on television, but maybe the people that used to shout from the rooftops that the Kardashians were influencing our children were right. Except I’m 28. (But if you look at me up close I don’t look a day over 11!) And I’d like to think that, with a little cannabis here and there, I’ll be looking and feeling as youthful as Kris Jenner my whole life.
