What's against legalization in a practical sense? A couple of college kids figured out how to take a hemp plant and turn it into newspaper and it was actually a better quality of paper. It was cheaper and if you plant hemp in a field it revitalizes the soil. You can grow food in a dirt lot if you do enough harvest of hemp. I don't pretend to know the specifics of the economics of it to say how much we'll be getting, but there is money to be made there that is not being made because it's illegal.

That was my dad's sense of, you know, laughing at himself, laughing at existence, the universe, all of it and not being too serious about what we do with because at the end of the day if you're here it's a blessing. It's you know life is hard. Life is hard for everybody at some point, but it's those who are able to laugh at it and laugh with it and roll with it that ultimately I think live the fulfilling lives that we're all trying to do. You know, and big step there is to not take yourself too seriously from the start.

I was about 20 when my mom got sick with cancer and it was bad. It was very scary and at the time I was doing my first screenplay and I was on deadline and was alone with my father in Massachusetts. I said, "Pop, you know, I don't how I'm going to work. I don't know how I can get this done. You know, I got to hand this script in and I can't think about anything but Mom." He said, "Well, you know, now is the time when you're going to learn what it means to compartmentalize." And those words really had an impact on me.

My father, Norman Mailer, expected a lot from us and he really pushed us and you know one of his favorite lines was, "If you think I'm being hard on you, wait until life hits you because life is a hell of a lot tougher than I am." And I took everything he said to heart. He taught me how to write, which was scary and intimidating and hard, but ultimately one of the biggest gifts I could have ever asked for.

Writing and acting are almost diametrically opposed in terms of being an actor it's in your interest to be in shape and to be healthy and to have a strong voice and to be flexible. As a writer you're sitting in this position for hours on end. You get up and you can't put your shoulder down. It's not a healthy existence so to speak and it's probably not healthy for the person that lives with you either, but you do the best you can.

I'm probably most proud of the plays that I've written just because as the playwright, you know, you're God. You get to do everything. You don't make any money hardly at all, but you really get to kind of control the scene.

It was something that hopefully sparked a few people to do similar things down the road and will keep a certain flavor of magazine publishing alive. I have to say at the end of the day I am glad not to be spending all day, every day in the High Times office, you know, covering this particular angle of life.