“The Godfather”

Dec. 6

OK everybody, so here’s a thing: I am mildly internet famous because of a viral tweet about “The Godfather.” Back in 2016, I was very stoned and watching the 1972 Rembrandt-y mafia epic and noticed that a dissolve between two scenes makes it look like Marlon Brando has a tree for a mustache. “my fave part of ‘the godfather’ is when his mustache turns into a tree,” I tweeted along with a screencap. It blew up for reasons I still don’t understand: Currently it has around 3400 retweets and 8500 likes and that’s just on my account—it has been swiped or screencapped and spread on Tumblr and Instagram. It’s not that funny. The piece I wrote about said virality, which doubled as a review of a weed strain called AK-47 and which ran in the Baltimore City Paper and the Orlando Weekly, did also talk up Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece. “I also appreciate how ‘The Godfather’: challenges dedication to family (over country, even) but also finds solace in domesticity . . . [and] hints that it is Michael’s time in World War II that prepares him for the role of cruel mafia boss,” I wrote. “[‘The Godfather’] is essentially, a tragic investigation of the immigrant experience and what immigrants give up to come here—very important as we continue enduring Donald Trump’s ethnonationalist hollering.” 8 p.m., The Senator Theatre, 5904 York Road, (410) 323-4424, thesenatortheatre.com, $10.

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Before we get going, crucial inside baseball worth your time: Weed writing, I fear, is maybe entering its annoying explainer phase, with lots of glib weed hot takes that essentially add up to “this commonly understood thing about weed is in fact bullshit.” Vice Motherboard published “Weed Strains Are Mostly Bullshit” on 4/20 of this year and the Portland Mercury’s recent Cannabis Guide ran a piece titled, “Please Shut Up About Indica Versus Sativa,” which declared, “supposedly, indica sedates and sativa uplifts. But here’s the thing: That’s all bullshit.” Both pieces are ultimately about the weed science vanguard: cannabinoids and terpenes. The former is the thing that gets you high, which is so much more complicated and does not end at THC, and the latter is what makes weed smell and taste a certain way and affects precisely how it gets you high, apparently.

Both pieces are important—at this point cannabis is an industry and we should not be lied to about things we’re sold—though I’d also say it’s generally not a good look to tell people what they are feeling and what is working for them is “bullshit,” especially when it comes to matters of the mind and body. My advice: When you’re reading up on the supposed specifics of weed or hearing your dispensary person’s spiel about some sick hybrid, ponder the info the way you might use a horoscope, which is to say, understand that it’s not so much about truth as a series of suggestions or offerings to take or leave.

If your horoscope says you’ll be sweeter to strangers or whatever today, it planted that thought in your head and that may dictate how you act. Even if it’s not cosmically or empirically true, it might make you be nicer to a stranger on that day—hooray. Same with weed: If someone out there somewhere thinks a certain strain helps them with depression or cleaning the house or whatever, smoke it, consider that, and see if it helps you too. If it doesn’t, you’re still stoned, so NBD.

If this is all reading as a touch hippy-dippy, blame it in part on Big Buddha Cheese, a strain with a truly staggering, evening-out quality that will fill you with good feelings and send you on thought tangents of the “yes and” rather than “no but” sort. Primarily an indica, Big Buddha Cheese is going to calm you (or maybe not, indica and sativa are bullshit weed, men yelling on the internet told me). And it famously took first place in the Indica Cup category at the 2006 Cannabis Cup. It’s a hybrid of Cheese, a UK standard that has since been refixed here in the States, and mashed up with serious Afghani stuff from noted grower Big Buddha. It is smooth with a subtle sting on the back end of the inhale, which hits your palette slowly—a bland then suddenly sharp taste. An easygoing smoke that yields nearly no anxiety and for serious smokers may feel as though you’ve not even smoked at all. BBC’s beloved for its easygoing, ambient type of pleasant. No bullshit.

• Strength: 7
• Nose: The cheese section of your supermarket but also cheap ChapStick
• Euphoria: 8
• Existential dread: 1
• Freaking out when a crazy person approaches you: 1
• Drink pairing: POM Pomegranate Peach Passion White Tea
• Music pairing: Warm Brew, ‘Small Victories’
• Rating: 10

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If you’re young, it may be hard to fathom just how underground the cannabis scene used to be. The drug war really was a war, and a lot of people have a lot of scars. It seemed then, in those grim years, that there was only one sane place in the world, one place you could go and buy buds without worrying about going to jail—and that was Amsterdam.

But in Amsterdam’s Red Light district, where people went to smoke, it could be too much. Your mind was still in fear mode and everything around you was bustling and crazy and it was easy to get paranoid.

I know because I did. I was in the Netherlands for a conference in the small, bike-obsessed college town of Groningen. But first I stopped in Amsterdam and wigged out. But when I got to Groningen, even though it was for an academic conference, I made plenty of time to go and sit in the “coffee shops.” (This is where weed is purchased legally throughout the Netherlands, though Amsterdam’s shops are by far the most famous.) It was such a relief to be able to calmly look over the wares and decide what you wanted to smoke. It was like heaven—even if the selection was far worse than the most paltry local dispensary you can go to these days.

I chose a strain called Dutch Treat. That was nearly two decades ago, so I have no idea how much the genes have mutated or if it is even the same strain, but Dutch Treat is a standard of the coffee shop scene and I felt electrified with a visceral thrill when I saw it again. The flowers, with the deep red of autumn underlying a glowing green fur, felt almost exotic, the odor reminiscent of something lost in another time, a quiet room with adults sitting around sipping coffee and smoking joints rolled with tobacco.

I wasn’t at all disappointed when I took a big rip out of a brand new bong. The pine-resin undercurrent was billowed by a kind of creaky funk, like backwoods kombucha and oyster-water. And the punch was near-perfect. In Groningen I would smoke, forget about the time, and then have to rush back to the conference, blitzed. But I didn’t stress it. And inside I was aware and alert—I commented on people’s papers and shit. And that was the feeling I’ve had these past few days trying out this pure sativa Dutch Treat. It gives an initial lift that kinda climbs up your spine and grabs you by the scruff of the neck and the eyelids and elevates your ass, but it’s also like it is cracking your back and chilling you out, like a long feeling of having had your back massaged. The overall effect is something like people claim for microdosing mushrooms, at least in the obsessive attention to detail that is still somehow lax.

• Strength: 8.2
• Nose: Kombucha, sap, and oyster-water on a flower petal
• Euphoria: 9.1
• Existential dread: 3.3
• Freaking out when a crazy person approaches you: 1
• Drink pairing: 4 oz. of black coffee with a shot of Jameson on the side
• Music pairing: The Magnetic Fields, “69 Love Songs, Vol. 2” (with volume knob at 4)
• Rating: 9.335

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Right after swallowing a big, unforgiving bong hit of Blue Frost, an indica dominant strain that crosses Blue Monster and Jack Frost that—although it’s 40 percent sativa—feels almost entirely like a lumbering indica, all kinds of confusion set in. About the baffling ’90s at first and eventually about everything else, but then an elusive body and head high and a swell of kindness that more than made up for the strain’s shaky ramp-up.

Begin with Blue Frost’s cool, intense menthol smell and taste that lightly numbs your mouth, which got me thinking back to the ’90s when I was a kid and there was a big deal arrival of a new Kool-Aid subgenre called Kool-Aid Ice Cool that was essentially menthol Kool-Aid—which made it weird that it was for kids but hey, the ’90s—because as Wikipedia says, it “gave the drinker a cooling sensation.” Indulging some Proust-like remembrances of ’90s bullshit past, I went to YouTube and watched a Kool-Aid Ice Cool commercial someone had uploaded where the Kool-Aid guy wearing um, giant khaki shorts for some reason, concocts the “cool” Kool-Aid (in two flavors: Lemon Ice, Arctic Green Apple) in his lab and hands it to a crew of kids he’s hanging out with. “Something’s happening,” one kid says. Another one finishes the thought, “In my mouth.” Then I spotted, below the video, a YouTube comment which reads, “Kool-Aid is a damn pedo, hanging with the kids, wearing only those shorts.”

The internet felt especially weird right then and there, though I truly admired this commenter’s scrappy, poetic syntax and diction. I closed that tab in my browser. I pulled up Netflix. I couldn’t find my phone, which was a few feet from me as it turned out. I went back to Netflix and minimized the already full-screen browser instead of clicking play, then stared for a few seconds baffled, not sure what to do or what I did, and then finally reopened it to full-screen and began season two of “Stranger Things.”

And then oh man, that around-your-eyeholes tingle and an arms and legs and all the appendages lightness, and after that tension flew right out of me, almost too fast. I wasn’t full of anxiety anymore and only the idea of anxiety stuck around: Whatever was in my head that I was stressing about was still there but now in concept only and all the worry, melancholy, analysis, second-guessing, and so on (in other words, the hard parts of caring and feeling) were absent. My Bloody Valentine’s song ‘I Can See It (But I Can’t Feel It),’ came to mind. I had a wide-eyed empathy for the characters of “Stranger Things” and everybody else going through some things anywhere and it was clear to me that sequels, almost always bigger and dumber than the original, are also about us reliving trauma and watching characters we allegedly care about relive it too, which is kind of perverse, and this whole second season cleverly, kindly, makes that clear—its overarching theme is PTSD and the ways that we never really quite overcome. A stoner stoicism stirred inside me, my menthol-ish mouth kept low-key vibrating for a couple of hours, and I wanted to cry.

Strength: 9

Nose: A far-too-hoppy new microbrew

Euphoria: 9

Existential dread: 2

Freaking out when a crazy person approaches you: 2

Drink pairing: Kool-Aid Ice Cool Lemon (some people sell the discontinued packets on eBay)

Music pairing: Terry Riley, “Rainbow In Curved Air”

Rating: 7

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Many of us would never make it through the day without weed, for whatever medical conditions we suffer from. And people who suffer from anxiety know what a relief a good toke can be. But it can also send you in an insane tailspin of self-doubt and crippling anxiety. We’ve all been there, frozen in a corner over-analyzing every thought until you tweet out that you think someone is stealing your dog, as my colleague Brandon Soderberg did one night with me in the Hutzler Building for Michael Jones McKean’s solo exhibition “The Ground,” which we were attending after some particular angsty herb.

When you talk to older people who have quit smoking, that’s usually the reason — the antisocial anxiety is just too much. I’ve been smoking for 30 years so I’m usually somewhat immune to the creeping crush of over-sensitive self-awareness (also I am a white dude and, well, just look around, we’re not known for self-awareness). I’d learned long ago to deal with the anxiety by telling myself that it is just chemicals in my brain, it will pass, etc.

Blue Mountain Durban, a hybrid of the South African Sativa Durban Poison, Afghani 76, and the Indica Lavender, challenged that assumption a bit. It is the kind of weed that might send you into one of these black holes of self-doubt and over-examination. It is a magnificent mojo, but if you are stressed by, say, watching the president speak, you need to go for something else. I learned that the hard way. The angst of this year is so great anyway that we need our weed to revive and relax, not force us into a Heideggerian state of authenticity born of the realization that we will die. But that’s where I found myself after a few hearty tokes of the gorgeously-scented BMD. It tasted so pleasant that I had a couple more, with really deep autumnal undertones of dead damp morning grass covered with leaves.

And I had some more. And then there I was, back in that hole—as was the friend I was smoking with, who refuses to touch BMD again. But once you ride through the existential dread, you realize how useful a good ethical scouring and session of self-loathing can be and you ease into a smooth body high that is worth the terrors it takes to get there. (Baynard Woods)

Strength: 10

Nose: Wet leaves and mulch soaked in whiskey

Euphoria: 7

Existential dread: 10

Freaking out when a crazy person approaches you: 10

Drink pairing: Bourbon, neat

Music pairing: Albert Ayler, “Love Cry”

Rating: 6

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