“The salad days” are akin to the opening course of a meal — light and leaving you eager for more.
The salad days are easy and fun, a forerunner to the challenges everyone encounters later in life.
In my case, the salad days involved the literal consumption of a lot of greens. My college years, into my early twenties, are still obscured in a haze of pot smoke, and I smoked as much as I could, as many different ways as I could. I do have a lot of great memories from that period, although I have more memories that are only half-remembered. There was one cannabis-fueled weekend that we took a trip to the state capital, and after that it’s all kind of hazy. I woke up the next day and panicked to find a wedding band on my finger, and thought that while baked on marijuana I had made a huge mistake and got married! It turns out that was a prank from my friends, and that whole incident taught me to cut back a little bit on the inhuman amount of cannabis I was using on a daily basis. I came to find out that smoking a little less cannabis made me appreciate it a lot more. When I got high enough to enjoy the feeling, but not so high I passed out or lost memories, that made cannabis a lot more fun. Some people binge drink alcohol, but my problem was binge smoking too much cannabis, thankfully that is a habit I left behind in the salad days.