2.5 Milligrams is just right for me!

When it comes to work it’s all about dealing with the back ache. And, when it comes to using mota, it’s all about making that back ache go away.

I didn’t get back into using cannabis again because I had something wrong with me. It just came into my life in a happenstance kind of way and I was happy to have the time and be in the right place to rediscover it. To light up without the fear of the cops breaking down my door was a very good thing, indeed. As time passed I got further away from casual, recreational toking, and instead, found myself using the good plant as a sleep agent, as a pain relief tool, as an aid to reducing stress and a way to increase the joy and pleasure of food and company. 

Certainly, the one thing I didn’t see coming in the midst of this cannabis renaissance was a back ache. 

Many folks talk about work being a pain in the neck. For me it’s all about pain in my upper back. At the library I use an old oak chair for all my day to day desk work. No padding, no wheels, no tilting action, no swivel, just four legs, a seat and a back rest. Nothing fancy. Nothing ergonomic about it, just a plain wood chair rescued from the work room. When I first got here I had big, black fancy desk chair, typical office drone kind of thing. Somehow I kept slipping out of it. I would sit down and then slide. After a while it just got to be so ridiculous that I stuck in the corner and advanced to this old straight and narrow device. I have to think, after three or four months, that it just isn’t working either.

20 some odd years ago I got t-boned in an intersection, four or five days before Christmas. I got hit hard but managed to walk away from the accident. At the time I thought I was okay, didn’t even file a claim against the gal who hit me. Instead, what I got, years later, was soft tissue damage that has never really ever gone away. For a while it manifested itself in neck pains, sometimes so debilitating that I got notes from my doctor to stay home and heal. The City of Seattle even explored getting me a different desk but the desk was part of a historically important building. The desk had to stay, so this employee moved on. Years later that old injusy still flare up, but now instead of my neck they've moved on to my shoulder, something that helps to keep me from sleeping on left side at night. And how, just to add insult to injury, it seems to have found its way into my back. Coincidence? Maybe. I am betting, though, it’s just the chair.

So the chair was the reason I used as I went out in search for CBDs this weekend to help supplement my daily THC tincture dosing. My old stash was just about gone and I surely wasn’t going to take a drive back to Mendocino to pick up a new supply. I did take a trip to Loveland last week to check out a store I had read about online, Mad Mountain Wellness. They were in the midst of changing owners and so the stock was down to about nothing. I figured I would go back on payday, see if the changing of the guard would lead to a restocking of the shelves. 

Never made it back but I did stumble on something even better and for that I am thankful.

As things go I didn’t even go into Organic Alternatives in search of a CBD product. Instead, I was on a different misson, I was seeking out shops that carried Sweetwater Teas. I had just applied to the company and felt it would be best to try out their products ahead of time, just in case I was lucky enough to score an interview. What made their product so interesting to me was not only the quality of their website but the focus of their product. What they currently have out are three different infused teas…black, green and mint…with a max load of 2.5 mg of THC in every brewed cup of tea. Now, I am not opposed to folks wanting to blow their cranium with high doses of THC. Please, knock your socks off, if that is what suits you. But since I have been back in the game I have been always looking for those lower dose strains. I like today’s quality but I really want is yesterday’s buzz. So, when I read about Sweetwater, I had to say yes to what they were selling and wanted to try out a bit of their product, just to see if it would speak to me as much in person as it did in the ad.

But before I could get there I had to experience the joys of the establishment I had stepped into. I know it is the way of the world now but man, did I love the look of Organic Alternatives! Blonde wood, nice lighting, a great entry desk, helpful staff, a great looking back bar, loads of jars of herb to entice you but even better, pre-weighed and nicely packed grams to take home once you went through their well thought out selections. All the weed was similarly priced, a bit high end but all organic, well cured and pretty in their respective pouches. As I talked to the budtender he finally got the gist of what I seeking out. Teas didn’t go over well there but they had a product in stock, after dinner mints, that had a 2.5 mg dose packed into each little dulce. Now, that was a sale, along with a gram of Trinity. What really rocked my world that day was their medical desk, situated right behind the recreation desk, best of all, packed with the Stanley Brothers CBD flagship strain, Charlotte’s Web! I picked up a one-ounce bottle to try out. The price was steep but the pedigree couldn’t be better.

I didn’t expect to expand my cannabis horizons after that but somehow my partner read into my notes and hints and let us wander, after a day of magic shows, second handing, Indian food and museum explorations, to Boulder where I was given a couple minutes to see if Stillwater was really, truly in stock at The Farm. Sure enough, in their well-appointed waiting room, was a glass case, part of given over to a display of the cool and delightful product I was seeking. The Stillwater website was intriguing enough, but the cylindrically round tins packed full of tea magic were even better looking in real life. I perused the Farm’s menu board, thought twice about picking up some grams of Purple Hawaiian and Pineapple Thai but instead proceeded on to the sales floor and finalized my quest: two cans of tea, one green, one mint, in a nifty logoed bag, ready to take home and play with. What a happy man, what a great time to be alive in the world of legal cannabis!

So, after a full day of exploring the Front Range my partner and I went home and brewed up a couple cuppas, both of us coming on to the low dose of THC right after sleep set in. The tea was pleasant and the high negligible, just what the patients ordered. But this morning the CBD dose was just what the doctor would have ordered had he given me a script. I took a dropper dose along with my dropper of tincture and, unlike the product I have been nursing all year long from Fort Bragg dispensary, this one delivered. I finally felt that grand feeling of warmth and relaxation I have been looking for in a daily CBD regimen. I came to work fully expecting to face a busy day and, instead, was given a day’s reprieve my fellow supervisor. So, here I sit, straight up in my old library chair, and cherishing the fact that that nagging back pain has gone to visit someone else for a while. My back, apparently still a bit tweaked from that long ago accident, took a holiday today. Happy days, indeed.

No one ever said that good health comes cheap. Today I woke rested thanks to a decent cup of tea, a well thought out product designed for folks who really want to partake in the joys and promise of cannabis but who don’t want to get blasted every time they play. Well, that tea was dandy but not for every day consumption. Just can’t afford that kind of diversion in my budget on a regular basis. But the Stanley Brothers’ Charlottes Web? I have made up my mind that product will be a regular line item for purchase on pay day. I know that coupled with exercise, a good diet and plenty of sleep, pain, anxiety and inflammation will be something out of my past.

We are very, very lucky to be living in times like these. I am very, very fortunate, to have the bucks to buy these products, to be living in a place where they can be bought legally and freely. I am happy to have a job right now that doesn’t pee test me and pays me well enough to afford these luxuries. 

Maybe I shouldn’t call them that. Let’s make that necessities. A backache isn’t something we come into this world with. With a bit of mota we can make that kind of thing go away. Just call me a believer.

Salud

CW Hemp! Thank you, Charlotte's Web!
https://www.cwhemp.com/

Stillwater Teas!
http://stillwater.life/home

Organic Alternatives! Such a lovely place!
http://organicalternatives.com/?age-verified=63c829615d

Sensible brownies!
http://www.thecannabist.co/2016/10/20/pot-brownies-microdosing-edibles/65719/

Maureen Dowd's NY Times story. Freak out!
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/opinion/dowd-dont-harsh-our-mellow-dude.html?_r=0

A follow up to that tale:
http://www.thecannabist.co/2014/06/04/was-maureen-dowd-warned-about-edible-marijuana/13113/

Hilarious take on the Dowd story!
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/03/take-that-maureen-dowd-i-ate-90-servings-of-thc-and-lived.html

Reunion...naw!

40 years.

Where did the time go? It’s hard to believe that back in June of ’76 I donned a red cap and gown, stood with my pals under the dome of the Anaheim Convention Center and, one by one, just like all the rest, walked up and was awarded my high school diploma.

I have never been to a high school reunion, mine or anyone else’s. I suppose I feel lucky simply just to have graduated. From a Catholic school, a college prep one, no less. I knew that going there was a big deal. It should have prepared me for huge things, but the importance of all hugeness that was left behind in the larger picture I had painted for myself at the beginning of my senior year: I was headed off to join the navy the following fall and somehow the lure of sailing the seven seas seemed like a much bigger and far more powerful thing that cracking the books. No wonder I ended up the middle of my class. Academically I was not the most highly polished apple. My extra-curricular work didn’t shine much, either. I didn’t join glee club or take part in a drama. I didn’t debate or play football (but I did run track). I didn’t write for the newspaper, instead, I wrote tons of poetry. I didn’t take on tons of cool and interesting things to pad college application with. But what I did do was work.

Work allowed for car insurance, the only way that I was going to be able to have a car. Having a car in my senior year allowed for a wild amount of freedom, a true genie out of a lamp thing, something that I couldn’t even begin to wrap my head around when I was just a Schwinn-riding , Vans-sporting, callow youth. Work gave me license to keep late hours, something that was necessary when working at a drive-in theater. The drive-in gave me access to unlimited popcorn, extra-cheese and pepperoni on my pizzas and passes to see films at any Pacific Theater across the whole of Orange County. But having a car took that high flying attitude and put it into hyper-space. Not only was the popcorn and pizza a bonus, but I also had access to the teenage passion pit of every Catholic school boy’s wildest dreams.

Work was my jones and my means to an end from my sophomore year on. Work bought me threads and a set of wheels, but it also gave me an identity. Somehow I think the idea of going off to the service might not even have shown up in my rearview if I had just been playing ball or working on being the class thespian. Instead, I got out of the house, worked but more, started having adventures. 

Somehow I knew that the ability to bypass ticket booths was just a start. Work would lead to even bigger and better things. I made friends and had acquaintances that I would have never otherwise met. Believe it, working in a snack bar doesn’t require having a higher degree mentioned in your application. From 16 on my world colored in deep shades of interesting well before I ever hit the fleet. Through work I felt that I had finally found my tribe. That tribe took me down a road that lead to beer, cannabis and sex and for that I was forever thankful. Working with marginalized, interesting, varyingly educated, happy, weird and edgy people in a fast, gritty, late night, arty world gave me admission into a tribe that I’d never otherwise find in my uptight, constricted, puritanical Catholic school boy world. Or so I thought.

Enter weed. Cannabis gave me an “in” ticket to another, even bigger, overlapping tribe that I wasn’t even remotely aware of. Early in my senior year I breached access into this world. I certainly didn’t hurt that a member of my clique turned out to be an ace marijuana dealer. All my pals at the time had some edgy side to them, it seemed, and cannabis was just the gateway tool to bring it all out. We were all weird: brainy, geeks, outcasts. We sat at the edge of the lunch area and talked endlessly about girls, about film, about cars, about getting away from it all. We all found ways to get into trouble, but trouble of the mild, geeky kind. None of us were losers, per se, but we were seen to be that from all those who lived in the hills, in the rich and not so famous closed gated enclaves of the county. 

As the year wore on and we all got closer to graduation we began to see who else spoke the secret language of mota. With weed my tribe grew. We brought in motorheads, desert motorcycle riders, surfers and lowriders. I look back now on who my pals were then and think, yeah, at the time we were all outsiders and now all those things we loved to do…surfing, custom cars, choppers, tattoos, graffiti, PBR and an appreciation for good grass…are now all mainstream. We were far ahead of the curve back then and we didn’t even know it. And yeah, we all managed to graduate, some even with top honors. Some went on to join the service, a bunch went on to college. From what I can tell we all did well. I’ve run into government wonks, County workers, designers, travel agents, truck drivers and mechanics. Family men, happy, settled. Who knows about the mota.

I got my invitation to attend the reunion back in the spring. A cousin on my father’s side was one of the reunion organizers. I told her yes at the time but as the year passed I thought harder about attending. A look at the roster of folks who said they were coming clinched it for me. Of all the names that were posted not one of my old group was planning on attending. What would be the point, after 40 plus years, of seeing and talking to folks who were now truly outsiders to me? Sure, I could go and trip down memory lane but my times, my most important times, were shared with people long gone who pushed brooms, threw cheese and collected tickets at that drive-in. My times, good, bad and indifferent, were all colored by those other marginalized folks who rode surfboards, turned wrenches, polished their rides and took their ruckas to the beach on sunny days. With not a name to relate to I felt no big reason to make the 24-hour drive from the mountains to the coast.

Someday I am sure that I will make that drive back there. I’ll do it right, with my mujuer by my side, the kid in the back seat. I am sure we’ll do Disneyland, take in a swap meet, see family, grab some In-N-Out, dive into the sea. The Harbor Blvd. Drive-In is long gone, so taking in a flick there is out of the question. But maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to run into an old high school pal or two. My best old friend from those days still lives there. He’s a happy family man. Well adjusted, retired. And a big mota head, too. Somehow we are all still part of that tribe, still speaking the same language. Neither of us attended the reunion. None of them. 40 years and running.

Salud!

Ancient Chinese Hippie

Over the years I’ve known hippies and so I guess by saying that is that I know what hippies are all about. Well, I thought I knew all about them until I got to Mendocino. That was where all the true old time real deal hippies, the honest to goodness back to the landers who escaped Berkeley and San Francisco in the 60’s and 70’s, went to find themselves, raise families, establish communes, do art, write anarchistic screeds and grow dope outside the scope of government interference and the harshness of the law.

I thought I was hip when I was younger, I have no idea why, but that was far, far from the truth. I knew nothing at all about the real world outside my county but nevertheless I thought I had all the answers. Then my mom's cousin George came into my life and changed all that, made me feel like the punk that I was. Sonny was a real deal hippie, fresh from a commune out of the arid mountains of New Mexico. He was an old time Chicano, a black sheep relative who took a fall for a girl back in the day. He became part of the penal system as a teen when he was caught holding dope and that sent him into a lifelong spiral of bad habits, low wage jobs and hard drug abuse. But before I knew all that I got to know him as this long haired stand-up guy who took care of his mom, my great aunt Carmen, one of the saintliest people I ever knew. Sonny had a knack for working silver and turquoise, had mean looking jailhouse tattoos of naked broads on his biceps and had that tough muscular look that you only get from years of working in fields or pumping iron in the can.

He was edgy, hungry for adventure and mischief, always scamming but he was also very loyal to the family, funny, hip in a beat sort of way, deep into music, bbq and liked to party hard. My exposure to guys like Sonny up to that point were few and far in between. I had no idea how to bounce off him properly and really had no how to “jive”. At the beginning of our relationship he made me feel totally inadequate and quite the pest but as I got older he saw that I was corruptible and that made me fair game. What became more important as I got older was that I had a paying job and that meant, when the time was right and I was ready to have someone buy me and my pals alcoholic beverages, he was there for me, but, as always in the land of scammers, for a price. If I wanted a bottle of brandy, he got half. I wanted a case, well, the toll was a six pack. Fair was fair in his eyes, especially if I was buying.

But Sonny was cool, very hip, very beat. He was my mentor in all things that had to do with partying. He was the guy who taught me when you were out of cash and you wanted to get something to drink you just went downtown and donated a pint of blood. Sonny was the guy I went to if I was in town on liberty and wanted someone to do heavy drugs with. Sonny and I dropped acid a few times, found ourselves stranded on mountain tops with pipe loads of hash and no matches. Sonny and I found ourselves at loose ends when it came to his drinking but we managed to stay friendly and always shared a joint if we had one on hand. He was my cousin and blood had me overlooking a lot of faults.

Since then I’ve always felt that honorable scamming, a big sense of family and the party life was a big part of the whole hippy way of being. Some of the ones I’ve met over the years were cool but the packaged kind, the ones that bought wardrobes to dress up in over the weekend. I’ve met some that opened up fern bars, who dressed a bit too pretty, who smelled of way too much patchouli. I’ve met other who were real hustlers, family men, long haired guys who worked hard and who opened up wood paneled tiffany lamped style salons for men instead of traditional barber shops. I am sure that all that lean exposure to the hippie life had a lot to do with where I lived. Very conservative place, O.C. Besides, being the son of a barber meant that long hair wasn’t going to get within a mile of my household. Not in MY sixties.

My hippie experience was then saved up for my later years. I ran into them at barter fairs, in drum circles at Bumbershoot and in small communities in Southern Oregon. Long hair didn’t qualify a guy or gal to be a hippie necessarily so I had to discount a lot of folks I met in Seattle who were making their way up around the Sound in search of grunge and living a sort of neo-hippie lifestyle. Then I found my way into Mendocino and it was there that I finally met the real deal, the old ones, the old heads who still thought they were still taking it to the man, who were still protesting almost everything, folks whose old great locks and scraggly beards made the look like they got lost somewhere along the way but then found all their brethren on the coast.

That old hippie lifestyle I got to know there in Fort Bragg was the gateway to a life that had been lived long ago but, when looked at closely, had never really gone away. Many of those folks I met there in Mendo had helped to graft and breed the basic strains that are the platform genetics of a lot of the great dope we smoke today. I can remember when my friend Clay would come back with weed from this region back in the 80’s. He and the friends he had worked with up there had it tough back then, with California waging war with the locals through the CAMP programs and such. Those guys grew incredible weed back then and still do today. Many are still living a hard scrabble existence up in the hills, bringing in harvest year after year. But the hippies that I got to know best were affable townies, regular folks who were in and out of the library, who worked hard to parse apart government records, write up letters to the editor, fought fracking and who drank a lot of wine and did a lot of dope. They were the relatively sane ones, somewhat out there, a bit too much into strange religions and fantastical belief systems, but harmless, funny and a connection to a past I never lived.

I suppose that’s why the story I came across in the Cannabist today about the ancient burial site they uncovered in China recently had a such a pull on me. In that tomb they found a man buried with a large amount of female cannabis plants draped across his body. Hemp was an important plant back then for fiber, food and oil. There hadn’t been any evidence of any of that in the tomb they discovered. Rather, it appeared that the man who was buried was more of an aficionado of cannabis instead of just a guy who needed hemp to exist. First the Chinese pharmacopeia, now we now have even more physical evidence that folks, going back thousands of years, used marijuana in a psychoactive sense.

All around the world and all over our county there have been folks who’ve had to run far and away outside of “normal” society just so they could have a life that they thought was worth living. Somehow cannabis has been a part of all that. Cannabis was normal back in ancient times and is finding its way to being that again today. Cannabis was normal until it was outlawed in the 30’s. 

Cannabis was a normal part of a life with jazz musicians, with sailors, with migrants, with inner city folk and apparently just about everyone else, just the way it is still part of life in the Emerald Triangle today. It’s hard to be down on a plant that’s played such a big part in the history of the world. It’s even harder to fault those old hippies to took on a lot just to give us all the unique cannabis tastes that are with us in the world today.

I hope that somehow they can make more sense out what kind of strain that was draped across that old ancient Chinese guy in the tomb and make it available to smoke. I can only imagine the splash that would make in the dispensaries around the world. “Here, man, take a hit of some of this Ancient Chinese Hippie. Good stuff! But an hour later I am ready for another bowl!”

Salud!

Chinese OG Ghost story!

http://www.thecannabist.co/2016/10/13/ancient-chinese-cannabis-burial/65106/

Roll yer own, why doncha?

There’s no shame in it, really.

Some folks out there are really dexterous, have nimble fingers, do the fine hand arts, like weaving, knitting or crochet work, skillfully, easily, with grace and a sense of play that many of us, no matter how hard we try, will just never have. Some folks have hands that play beautiful music as their fingers fly over piano keys or guitar strings, other concoct fantastic foods and beautiful pottery through hand work that is result of years of patient, agonizing and repetitive practice. Some skills just require dedication, hard work and a mastery that only comes through years and years of toil and humility.

So dry your eyes, newbie. No one ever said that rolling a beautiful, functional, well-crafted joint was going to happen overnight.

When I first started out smoking mota I was lucky to have a school chum sell me weed that was all shake. I have no idea what kind of strain it was for sure but I have to assume it was Mexican. Good stuff, no stems, no seeds, all clean and ready to smoke. I was too dumb to take a stroll across the street to the local record store where they had row after row of pipes and paraphernalia for sale and pick myself up a pipe. I could have walked into the Alpha Beta supermarket and got a corn cob pipe off the rack, or even better, made off with one of my old man’s surplus, discarded pipes packed away up in the attic.

No, instead I went crawling to one of my hip buddies who, for a price, would roll me numbers. I don’t think it ever got to the “I’ll roll you one, I get one” phase but at first I am sure that kind of deal wasn’t too far off. I was too much into instant gratification at that point when it came to pot. I was too lazy, didn’t want to build the skill set or muster up the responsibility to roll a number all on my own. Instead I chose contract work and like all good businessmen had to figure in the cost of labor in order to enjoy my products and selfish pursuits.

Finally, though, my pal drew a line in the sand or just got tired of my lame ass attitude towards rolling. He sat me down one spring afternoon and told me in no uncertain terms that his rolling days for me were over. We had the house to ourselves that day, mom and baby brother were off shopping and the old man off working. He broke out a bag of schwag, a pack of Zig Zag papers and then proceeded to show me, for the millionth time, the fine art of putting together a joint.

Well, I finally tried my hand at it and of course what I got, first time out of the chute, was a lumpy, soggy, sorry looking mess of a joint. I ripped that one apart and proceeded to roll another. And another. And another. And as time went on I started to get better. The glue held, the paper didn’t rip and the cylinder of pot goodness I held in my fingers looked like something we could possibly smoke together without having it blow up in our faces. I felt proud, happy and liberated. But, the consumer in me was not all the way pleased. Those early joints still looked all too lumpen, too much like a kindergartners version of what art i supposed to look like. I wanted perfection, I wanted mass production and I wanted product that would smoke right the first time and every time.

Enter the saving grace of my early pot smoking days, the Bugler Rolling Machine.

I have no idea where I stumbled upon it. I am sure that I couldn’t have bought it by myself as the boxed set t I bought that day long ago not only had papers but a packet of Bugler tobacco contained in it, too. I was no longer intrigued by cigarettes, my cigar days behind me. No, what I wanted to do was put that machine to work to roll out quality doobies. Knowing there was no way I could do it at home my pal DB and I went over to his girlfriend’s house, and, as always, her mother Aunt Betty was more than kind enough to let her wayward kids goof at home when they should have been hard at work at school.

With signed sick notes in our pockets we got to work and knocked out an ounce worth of good rolled weed in no time. The Bugler was, and still is, an efficient machine. Paper goes in one end with a bit of weed and, once cranked, out comes a beautifully rolled product on the other end. Professional, package worthy and ready to fire up. So, with a baggie full of mota sticks in the truck of my car we said good bye to our enabler and took off for an afternoon of smoke headed fun at the beach. There is nothing so rich and powerful as an afternoon of stolen time. That day the beach was gorgeous, the waves refreshing and the mota, so commercial looking, so seamless, so perfect, well, became a perfect accompaniment to a perfect day.

I went on to learn the fine art of hand rolling. I had to. There was no way that cigarette machine was going to find its way into my sea bag.  It came down to the simple art of repetition, to endlessly grinding it out, to fingers gummy sticky with resin, to eyes bleary from sampling too much product. Along the way I’ve picked up my share of bongs and pipes, learned to build bats from US government issued pens and crumpled many a good empty beer can for an emergency smoke. But in the end it is the fine art of rolling a joint that has saved many a day, that has allowed me and my friends to partake and enjoy dope over and over again.

Yes, after all these years I am perfectly happy and content with my less than perfect skill set. I will never go off and be a doobie roller for the stars nor will I ever build airplanes, tree limbs or other such stuff to smoke and impress. No, I am happy with, will always be happy with my goofy looking pinners, with my lumpy, unimpressive fatties. They will never be the joyous, machine rolled wonders I got out of my Bugler machine in days of yore but when pressed into service those journeyman looking joints I roll these days will still get me high as a kite, thanks!

Salud! 

A rolling machine sale description:
http://coinsandmoreonline.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=36

History of rolling papers:
http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-unfiltered-history-of-rolling-papers-plus-tommy-chong/

Everybody's Everything

Public libraries have become a place where almost anything goes. Certainly, we have rules and regulations in place to help guide our patrons, that dictate terms of use, but since we are so inclusive we seem to take on the widest possible focus when it comes to programs, services, opportunities, entertainment and liberties afforded to the public.

We are the place where new moms bring their young to participate in a story time. We are the place where seniors come to read newspapers in the morning and check out large type books to take home for bed time reading. We have computers so folks can fill out job applications, update their Facebook accounts or play Angry Birds. We have all manner of books, movies, music, downloadable titles, videos to stream, access to 3-D printers, puzzles to arrange, toys to play with, fish to watch and chairs to snooze in. We have so many diversions to check out, stories to share and talents to utilize that we are, really, the one stop shopping place for hundreds of people in our community every day.

Libraries. I love what we do for our citizens and believe in what we represent in our communities. I feel that we are here to promote democracy, advocate literacy and bring fun and enjoyment to the widest group of people at the best possible price, and for the most part, that price is free.

Yes, we are everybody’s everything. Wide open, accepting, full aperture focus, private, non-assuming and quiet.

Even cannabis seems to have a place here.

Today I was making the rounds and did what all good librarians do… check out the bathrooms for graffiti, potty accidents and other nefarious things. Today I stumbled on, in the family bathroom of all places, the remains of a blunt building operation. A pile of unwanted tobacco on the floor, a Swisher Sweets package crumpled under the toilet, stray specks of dope and cigar left behind on the lid. I was surprised but not surprised all at the same time. We live in a state where cannabis is legal to folks over the age of 21 but we have a lot of restrictions in place where a person can smoke it, let alone roll it.

I am sure that whoever it was that broke down their cheap cigar in our restroom was someone who, at least, had the sensitivity not to break down his smoke on a table top in the children’s area. I am sure that if I had stumbled upon that kind of scene I would have had them take it outside. But today has been overcast and a bit breezy. It looks almost like it plans on raining. That blunt building operation held in our bathroom was one that was taken on with a sense of desperation.

You might ask me, who am I to rain on someone’s parade? Who am I to take away someone’s cannabis moment when it seems like almost everything else happens here? We support the right to vote by having voter’s registration on our main floor. We have meeting rooms where you can sign up to hold a wedding shower, a real estate promotion or a health class. We have summer reading programs, we have computer classes and we have a teen advisor group. Why can’t we support the needs of cannabis users in Colorado, a state where it is legal to light up?

Now, I like my mota, as you very well know. What I am saying here is that I really don’t want folks coming in stoned out of their minds (it scares kids), nor do I want sales going on in the conference room, nor do I want to see baggies of flower out on the table tops or folks weighing out grams to share with their friends in the genealogy area. What I want is for us to be better able to talk about the goodness of cannabis openly and informatively, to support up-to-date collections about cannabis in the non-fiction area and to have informative, educational classes about marijuana to illuminate the wonders and glories of the sacred plant.

I suppose some would say that isn’t enough. If we can have changing stations in the rest rooms we should have rolling stations, too. I suppose that’s where I draw the line. Let’s not have them in the rest rooms, please. Not only are those areas not sanitary but it would it would put a completely different spin on the term “good shit”.

No, I suggest let libraries take the high ground (no pun intended) on providing all you heads out there with the information and entertainment you need to be the best possible cannabis diplomats you can be out in the world. Let us guide you through the world of pot by providing you with computer terminals where you can log into Leafly and the Cannabist and become a bit more illuminated. Let us send for titles for you that will help you be a better urban pot farmer, a more savvy budtender or an ace cannabis executive. Let us guide you to movies you might need to see when couch locked or cookbooks you will certainly need to help keep those munchies under control.

Just don’t use our bathrooms for blunt rolling, please. And next time, if you do, at least clean up after yourselves. It is folks like you that give upright and considerate stoners a bad name.

Salud!

Dear Uncle Sam and the boys down in the DEA....

Please stop Federally sponsored cannabis eradication programs. And after you are done doing that, channel those millions that are being blown pulling plants out of the ground into programs that matter and really help people, like road construction, senior services, education or school lunches!

Thanks!

Signed,

Citizens of the United States of America

Two great articles from the Cannabist on why cannabis eradication programs must end!

Salud!

http://www.thecannabist.co/2016/10/10/dea-marijuana-eradication-program/64942/

http://www.thecannabist.co/2016/10/10/marijuana-eradication-single-pot-plant/64933/

Inventory!

It's Sunday and I am still sore.

I spent my “day off” Friday working down in my basement. This was a much belated project, the kind of house work that most of us tend to put off for other things because, well, other things are far less painful and usually a heck of a lot more fun. When my lovely partner and I moved into our new and very spiffy NOCO digs last June we found that 6 U-Haul pods worth of accumulated stuff was not all going to fit into our home. No, clutter wasn’t going to do in the living floor of this townhouse, no sir, not after the cramped, wee little house we shared and left behind on the coast. Open space is the thing and that means a lot of what we had was going to go either into the garage or into the basement.

All in all I have to say that we are pretty lucky. We landed well. The wall space in our new home is generous but the main room on the first floor is mostly given over to vertical space, not a bad thing for art but not so good when it comes to furniture. No big deal as I really love our place but we still had a multitude of boxes to face. Well, I had a number of boxes to face because, truth be told, most of that stuff is stuff I accumulated and humping that stuff down below was a job meant for me and for me only.

Basements and garages are the kinds of spaces that I love and that I just can’t seem to live without. I have a storage locker up north in Washington that's packed with art, electronics and furniture from the house I owned years back, stuff I can’t stop paying rent on because of the photos, heirlooms and other tchotchkes that are still stashed there. No matter how much I seem to unload stuff before I decamp from a place there always seems to be a baggage train packed and ready to go. Stuff always seems willing to come along on the ride with me, just like loyal camp followers, and the worst part about it is, I just don’t seem to mind.

That is, until the day comes around to shift, repack and make sense of all that stuff. That's when my back tells me how much I really, truly do mind humping all that stuff.

Friday was a good day, wrenched back or not. I had already started the project a few weeks back when I decided to dump all my dvds into contractor strength garbage bags in order to sort them out. Good librarian that I am I was happy to think that I was going to do it in alpha-order, not so much to be orderly but to get a grip on what I currently have in stock here in Colorado.  Buying movies, books, music and art are passions of mine but they are weighty passions and moving them, not only across state lines, but down in cramped spaces, is a chore. The big plan of really harnessing the might of my collections would have to wait. No, I would not be compiling some sort of master list this go round. This time I was happy just to get them off the floor out of the bags and back into boxes.

So, I did. I hustled and sorted and boxed film. I emptied out boxes of cds and reboxed them into other, different sized boxes. I took art pieces, framed work after framed work, out of specialized containers and sorted and stacked them, too. As the afternoon wore on the space became more open, the light less dingy and the music more robust. But by the end of the day I had become a little more cranky, a little less inclined to think about the next shopping run and truly wishing for a toke off a pipe.

Earlier in the day, before the big movie downstairs, I had been upstairs on the computer doing another kind of inventory. I keep a hand written log for all my mota purchases and needed to do an update, not so much what I had in stock but what kinds of mota I had on hand. I truly believe in the medical side of the business and wanted to see what kinds of medicine I had in my locker. Thanks to Leafly and the Seedfinder I found, in the end, that I had a nice collection of flower on hand, a great balance between indicas, sativas and hybrids, a good thing, I think. All that typing left me desirous of a burst of mota for the job ahead, but instead of blazing away on a doobie or a bong bowl I opted for a touch of tincture, instead. That day it was going to be four drops of a cinnamon flavored, THC/CBD balanced 50/50 mixture from Terrapin Separations, a full, sensible 10 mg dose. I found a nice selection of their products at Kind Care in Fort Collins the week before and was curious to see how much different the high would be from my daily subliminal doses of Mendocino CBD and Old Tub Lock.

I really had no expectations about having any kind of high considering the high CBD mix and set about moving boxes, but as the morning moved along I noticed a complete and total sense of peace and calm setting in as I went about my task. My body moved along fluidly as I shuffled boxes around the floor, time moved along nicely as the music wafted through the air and by the time I took a quick break for lunch after noon I found myself happy, starving and ready for another cup of green tea.

I left that high, not so high mix to settle out in my system and spent the rest of the day straightening up the rest of my basement space. By the time my sweetheart got home from work the task was mostly done. I was bushed but instead of reaching for my pipe and calling for my fiddlers three I decided that liquid refreshment was more the order of the day and proceeded to knock back some of the Front Ranges best. All’s well that ends well.

I must say the same about my inventory for the day. I feel much better having a handle on my current movie collection. I have a pretty good idea what I want to hang up next on my incredibly high walls. I am more than just a bit curious about what still lurks in those darned cd containers. And I am super jazzed about my new found floor space. All that work left me with one even bigger project, though, and that’s the garage. More stuff, more repacking, more sorting, more stacking.

And, I have to say, a bit more of that delightful Terrapin tincture!

Salud!

Thank you, Terrapin! Here's a link to their website!

http://www.turtleextracts.com/terrapin-tinctures

Stash box!

At the time I didn’t know I needed one. A stash box. I was too new to the game and too delighted with grass and I just took it for granted that no one would notice a bag of weed sitting on my desk, out in the open, for God and everyone to see.

Well, my mom found it one morning and thought it was funny as hell to see me walking around the house after school, checking out trash cans, turning over newspapers, looking in all the hidey holes around and in my room, in search of that wee bag of weed. Well, for her it was contraband, spoils of war (or housekeeping) and she took it and squirreled it away for her own happy times later on.

Grass has a funny power over people, especially if it doesn’t belong to them. I suppose that is why it is a number one priority in states and countries where grass isn’t legal to hide your shit. When I was a teen I came into grass late and just didn’t have any street sense about it. I took that stupidity with me into the service. I was always keen to smoke or buy weed but didn’t have the stones to carry it back on base. I would leave it to others to hold it and somehow that dope or my shipmates would magically disappear. And even when we, as a band of brother stoners, would stash our weed someplace off base, like, say, under a railroad track trestle, when me and the other boys would come back we would find that our stash had mysteriously disappeared.

Something had to change but when you are a shipboard swabbie you really didn’t have much in the way of options. Sometimes we would take it on board, smuggled in our socks, or taped to our crotches or even stashed in our overnight bags, stuck between dirty pairs of undershorts (gives a whole new meaning to “good shit”). I finally got smart, or lucky, and was able to set up a crash pad in the attic area of my mom’s house where on choice liberty weekends my stereo, cold brew and baggies of dope awaited me. It was around that time that I started to acquire paraphernalia…papers, bongs, pipes…and needed a place to corral it all. For the first time in my smoking career I secured a device, in this case, a wicker “suitcase”, to put all my dope and toys into. From that moment on I’ve always loved a stash box.

For a number of years I used a small grass-like basket that I picked up in Korea (how appropriate!) It had a fine green design woven all around the lid and it held just enough product that I never really had a need for much of anything else (not that I could stash a bong in it or anything, mind you!) I went from there to a flat, round, lidded Japanese wicker style basket, simple, good for papers, screens and small bags of grass. One time I was married to a gal who was a true mota head. She and I had to have separate stash areas in the house because she just ran through the dope too fast. There was nothing worse than to have a dry spell of grass in a world full of blow teaming with cocaine users. The Bolivian Marching Powder came and went, so did early craft beers and lots of wine, but our mota, especially with my gal smoking daily, was always in short supply.

Later on, in more conservative times, with a different wife, as my weed supplies diminished, I ended up with a small wooden Moroccan box for dope and all my old Indonesian pipes and dried out papers stuck in dresser drawers or in bags of costume jewelry. Dope was ridiculously hard to come by and it was too risky to take on holding any amount with the police only a few doors down from the house. It was sad times, those Just Say No days. It was a long ways off from my wilder sailor years when I had a variety pack of grass going on all the time. My old stash boxes became someone else’s make up kit or toe nail clipper holder. Oh, the tragedy of it all!

But then I arrived in the land of plenty, Mendocino County. I went from having nothing to sitting on large coffee cans full of cannabis in no time. I slowly got comfortable with the glass shops and picked up toys of the smoking kind that I hadn’t seen or had in my possession in years. I found that old cookie tins worked well for rolling and storing. And somehow an old ceramic plate that was gifted to me back on my birthday in ‘91, made especially for breaking down big bad Oregon buds, made its way back to me and my coffee table top. Life, after years of hardship, was good.

But through all that, even with all the cool old baskets, wooden boxes and Folgers coffee cans I never had a proper or truly large enough place to stash my grass and all my weedy tools. For the past few years I kept all my accumulated grass and gear in a card board box. A total lack of dignity for the kind herb. I finally decided a few weeks ago to find something meaningful and truly useful and stumbled upon a nice, used foot locker at a local Goodwill. Deep red, paperboard construction, with clasps and a lock. A good thing to have when you have a youngster in the house. The best part about it, beside the roominess of it all, is that the surface is perfect for all the cool stickers I keep coming across.

For the first time in almost forty years I have a proper place to store my stash. It may be big, it may not be the coolest and may be pretty darned conspicuous, but it’s a stash box. And it is all mine.

And yeah, thanks mom for making me a bit more security conscious. I you enjoyed my stash!

Salud!

And here's a link to a local Colorado stash box maker!
https://www.coloradostashbox.com/

Fire it up!

Paper. Spit. Some mota. A match. Very simple, pure, easy. The only tech requirements to enjoying a cannabis spliff is a bit of patience and some doobie rolling know-how. No computers needed, no wall sockets to plug into, no butane burners, no batteries, no funky cartridges that are prone to failure. Just a bit of time to play with and a lot of passion for the plant.

All that being said I find it mighty powerful indeed to be part of the cannabis scene at this stage in the game. Thanks to the ubiquity of computers and the general ease of accessing the internet the world of cannabis…politically, educationally, medically, commercially… has changed radically. So much of what we know about weed today and how we gather information about cannabis is all thanks to the internet. Without the internet I couldn’t indulge in my daily gleaning of marijuana news from across the nation and around the world. I think it’s mighty fine, in a world that still shadowed heavily by marijuana prohibition, that we can share information about weed so openly and grow more powerful because of it. Just gathering information on cannabis is a form of civil disobedience. By actively gathering and sharing knowledge about cannabis and using that accurate information and trusty knowledge to the good, allows us to parry our well-meaning but misguided opponents, makes us more powerful and less inclined to listen to anything but straight talk about the good plant.

One of the things about the web in recent years has been the rise of commercial sites dedicated to cannabis. Some are political, some commercial, very few are non-profit and a lot are informational. Some of finer sites, such as Leafly and Seedfinder, can aid you in your quest for knowledge. Others, like Marijuana Business Daily and Cannabis Business Executive, can keep you up on the daily news and doings of cannabis in the world of commerce. Need politically minded fare? Take a gander at Normal. Need daily commentary and a gathering of cool and socially meaningful news? Take a look at the Denver Post’s The Cannabist, the first nationwide daily cannabis column out of a big city newspaper.

For instance, thanks to the internet I have been able to broaden my knowledge on quite a number of cannabis strains. What I like to do, most days, is to spend a bit of time on Leafly trying to, one, understand the history and genetics of the incredible array of strains I find in the dispensaries around the region, but two, I like to find out what is happening with my fellow psychonauts and see what they think about their experiences with the kind herb. I feel that by reading what cannabis users feel and appreciate about the plant they partake in helps me make more informed decisions and to be more confident and better able to share that knowledge with folks out in town and on the other side of the counter.

It is one thing to know that a particular strain in is going to make me laugh, or be sleepy or get the munchies. That’s all well and good. But I also want to know where that plant came from and what the lineage is. As I go from pot shop to pot shop I take that online research with me and get the right kind of herb I need for the tasks ahead. Sometimes you just want a good sativa to help you clean the house, sometimes you want a indica to zone out with. With an hour or two of prep time on the net you can go just about anywhere and talk like you have at least a bit of sense. A good thing when really good cannabis can go for more than twenty bucks a gram!

But electronics have taken their place in the world of cannabis in other ways besides the net. For example,  I have a little Magic Flight Launch Box, one of the simplest, easy to use and goof with vaporizers in the world. Made of wood, boxy design, a plastic slide top, a screen to rest your mota on and a AA battery to get it all going. I would like to advance to a Firefly or a Pax device but for now I am happy with the easy to use pleasures that my Magic Flight brings to my life. And to add to my pleasure I also have a Vapor Bros device if I want a more sturdy and ongoing source of power to fire up my weed. Sure, there are more space age and better designed units out there but for what I need the simplicity of the Vapor Bros rig does me just fine (and if just have to get rid of your Volcano, I will kindly take it off your hands!)

I like flower but a lot folks, according to statistics in the newspaper, are favoring concentrates these days. Firing up that oil is as easy as grabbing a pen out of your pocket. Once again, ease of use is coupled with battery power and down the road you go without the need of a Bic or the worry about having a pack of matches on you. I know that fire is still in style when you grab your bong, your spoon, your bat or what have you. I haven’t advanced to dabbing yet so I know that that special rig and the high powered flame needed to make that magic happen doesn’t have to be on my mota apparatus shelf just yet. Time enough for everything, I suppose.

But for the moment I am happy knowing that no matter what kind of cannabis experience I want I can find it on the internet. Need a dispensary? Want to make mota brownies? Have an ache to find a 420 event? Just broke your bong and need to know where the closest glass shop is? The internet can take care of all of that for you.

If after all that you still find that you still don’t know how to roll a joint there are online YouTube tutorials out there for you. No fire needed, just basic net surfing skills, a bit of dope and a pack of papers. How cool is that? No need for a Rizla rolling machine ever again! Roll your own, electronic style!

Salud!

How to roll a joint for beginners!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSA6N4SDHus

Magic Flight Launch Box!

https://www.magic-flight.com/

Vapor Bros!

http://www.vaporbrothers.com/