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/