(Note: The above highlight is from the new West Coast Sojourn podcast, which features PDX creative Lev Anderson’s debut as cohost. My bit about the new Laker Luka’s weight issues was the warm-up for a Body High installment that a couple of hundred of you saw briefly on Monday. It’s very possible that the writing will resurface.)
For reasons not worth delving into, I’ve had access to truly awesome bud over a sustained stretch of time. I haven’t paid for any of it. This isn’t something I take for granted, as I recall erratic, low-THC, Reagan-era weed that I had to scour my remote little town just to find.
Early twenty-first-century ghetto sativa? For sure, that vibe remains familiar, too.
Blech.
So, I know that having primo bud in your world is as central an ingredient to living well as challenging oneself physically and having money in the bank. Pity if you haven’t learned this in your lifetime of cannabis consumption; now that the orange demon is running for King of Earth, our Mary Jane freedoms might be about to encounter a ceiling.
Good weed largely eluded me as a teenage Buckeye stoner. There was just weed. In the breach between transistor radios and the Walkman’s advent, sometimes the vegetation got you high, sometimes it did not. One time, bug spray added a little something extra to the buzz, after that you prayed that it would not.
Most of the cannabis consumed by me from the fall of 1978 to 1985 wouldn’t have cut it at even the lamest dispensary of today. That dispensary’s buyer would be fired if he stocked just a single brick of the seedy, brown Michoacan marijuana—harvested Allah knows when—that I was tokin’ on when Cheech and Chong were hittin’.
‘La cucaracha, la cucaracha Ya no puede caminar porque no tiene, porque le falta marijuana que fumar.’ (The cockroach, the cockroach Now he can’t go traveling because he doesn’t have, because he lacks marijuana to smoke.)
When I jetted to California, my weed reality flipped from night to day. My high-life quality baseline instantly improved. Sacramento, it turned out, is one of America’s underrated weed towns.
My days of cannabis instability were not yet in the rear view. At Fresno State I would endure cruel pot droughts that dragged on for weeks and weeks. Then, pockets busted back on the southside of Sactown, sometimes I’d be relegated to shitty hood Mary that was not much better than what I’d been toking on back in the Midwest.
And—like most everyone in the 20th-century civilian public—I was engaging in that smoker’s crapshoot: Would I be going “in da couch” because indica is what my man’s man had this time? Or, was a zany mental rocket ride in the offing because the mystery strain my lungs were sipping was this time a strong sativa?
The randomness was enough to make you—and I can’t believe I’m admitting this in print—consider not smoking weed.
There, I said it.
A few AWOL eps aside, I soldiered right through. Nobody’s quitter am I.
A terrible confession to make, one that no one wants to hear, is that I have barely paid for cannabis. Please don’t cancel your pity subscriptions or stop contributing to my figurative travel budget when I tell you that, um… in my life I have paid for probably 12 percent of the pot I’ve consumed.
That estimate could be a tiny bit off; I was stoned through almost all of it.
This confession is eight percent humblebrag. Overwhelmingly though, the impulse is toward transparency. I get free weed because I deal with cannabis products in the news media. And back in the eighties, Mary Jane made her way over to me because I knew—as they say—where the weed was at and functioned as a procurer. A love connector, in the early 1980s I brought a lot of Buckeye White boys to the hood. In the late 2010s, I walked off from many cannabis industry parties with gift bags full of top-tier product. Both free weed epochs felt transactional, both free weed buckets felt earned.
Like what I’m doing? Contribute to my travel budget.
In 2025, it seems, great pot just seems to come around me, no matter how broke I am.
*furiously knocks wood.
It’s fun to believe that I reap as I sow.
About that alarming line from the beginning, the one mentioning Mary Jane’s freedom having peaked. You’ve been wondering when I’d wend my way back to that, am I right?
When I was super broke, maybe a dozen years ago, San Francisco cannabis legend Martin Olive gave me free hits of vapor and called it “compassion.” So glad he survived that January shooting.
American religious conservatives and the wealthy opportunists who benefit from their God fetish are coming for our lifestyle. The new people running the White House have a slogan: If we want to get back to the fifties, we have to destroy the sixties. The voraciousness, the acquisitiveness of this Wypipo Express bears an ideology that’s the opposite of “live and let live.”
Those hungry-ass motherfuckin’ hippos are why I’ve renewed my push for California secession. The West Coast is dope, and down the road of this New Ordeal it will go through changes. We can come through it better, stronger, and more focused. This new American era doesn’t have to be the 1980s Fresno of our discontent. Let’s make something new.
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