Tracing down the genealogy of weed strains can be time-consuming and, ultimately, not particularly fruitful. The names proliferate like kudzu fever dreams. Based on its name, Black Jack could be the result of breeding Jack Herrer either with Blackberry Kush or with Black Domina. All of these have their own dubious lineages to complicate things further.

It turns out this is Black Domina—itself a combo of four heavy-hitting indicas—which, when mixed with Jack Herrer, one of the best sativa-dominant strains around, you have a hard-charging, soft-drug speedball. I’m not advocating for illegal drugs like coke and smack, more like coffee and whiskey for me, but there is something about the simultaneous ingestion of stimulants and depressants (to the extent that sativa and indica fit that bill) that is unbeatable. Black Jack gives you a gliding pep in your step that slides as much as it bounces, like an R. Crumb cartoon without all the weird sexism and excess body-hair.

When I offered some to a friend, he took the small, long, and dense bud. “It doesn’t really smell,” he said.

“Break it open,” I said.

“Holy shit,” he said as the sticky bud pulled apart between his thumbs and forefingers, releasing a damp floral smell. “It smells so fruity now.”

He had just been in the library and he told me a story about how he opened his bag up and the entire section of the library he was in started to smell like his weed—Blue Dream. We’ve all been there, smelling some super loud shit, wondering who is holding, and realizing that the smell is coming from your pocket. But if the buds aren’t broken, Black Jack is pretty discreet and chill, without being weak.

That fruity smell hits the back of the palate hard, especially from a vaporizer, making this one of the tastiest buds I’ve tried in a while. That along with the body relaxation plus the mental invigoration makes this a great bud for everyday burning—it isn’t too speedy with the sativa, causing your mind to run wild, and it isn’t too sleepy with the indica, sucking you into the couch.

Black Jack does well for the appetite, though, and it made my Thanksgiving food taste far better than it might have otherwise, as I stepped on the porch to take a few hits before loading up my plate.

• Strength: 8
• Nose: Banana and muddled mint in mud
• Euphoria: 7
• Existential dread: 3
• Freaking out when a crazy person approaches you: 4
• Drink pairing: Rye-rish Coffee (rye whiskey in coffee)
• Music pairing: The Who, “A Quick One”
• Rating: 7

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I don’t need my weed to be “bad-ass.” I don’t need anything to be “bad-ass” really, but in an attempt to describe certain strains that pack a real mind/body high punch, whatever Grub Street Pot Poet is naming this stuff recalls a bunch of teens in their basement coming up with names for their hardcore band—“tough”-sounding descriptors that connote intensity, chaos, brutality thrown out there in order to find one more way to basically be like, “This shit’ll fuck you up, bro.”

Ditto for this ultimately rather subtle if vehement strain that’s almost all sativa saddled with the dopey punk band name of Trainwreck. This strain is not at all bad-ass and will, as the preceding paragraph clearly indicates, send you on all kinds of thought tangents and riffs and into an interzone of general, brainy obsequiousness that would be truly intolerable (maybe they should’ve called this one Mind Trap!) if it didn’t bring with it a pain-relieving body high that’s truly something special.

There is usually an opiate-like feeling that comes with strains that are big on sucking the anxiety and pain out from under you for a while, but Trainwreck is more dreamy than cloudy (mainly, it seems, because it’s almost entirely a sativa with a low but crucial percentage of indica in there too) and is a strong example of the way cannabis is not only a way less addictive replacement for pain pills but a rarefied reliever all its own. It’s as if you inhale some Trainwreck—it has a delightful tangy, cologne sour taste that doesn’t recall any other strains—and it races through your body and latches onto your joints and then lightly pounds and massages them for a few hours. That must be the indica elements doing their thing, and it’s easily one of the most promising strains in terms of sativa and indica talking to one another—no, better yet, conversating, rapping with one another, you feel me?

Here’s how Leafly begins its description of Trainwreck by the way: “Trainwreck is a mind-bending hybrid with potent sativa effects that hit like a freight train . . .” So maybe they should have called it Freight Train instead? Being hit by a freight train is kind of different from being in a trainwreck. The former conjures a kind of immediate, maybe even blissful obliteration that isn’t far off from Trainwreck’s effects and the latter, a gnarled, burning and multi-part scene of chaos and pain. But hey, sounds bad-ass doesn’t it? Or OK, to be fair Wikileaf offers up this as the origin: “As the story goes the two brothers [from California who created it back in the ‘70s] had to pull their crop early because there was a nasty train wreck that happened near their grow site and they didn’t want it discovered, thus the name.” I prefer that possibly apocryphal story because it has a kind of scrappy, Townes Van Zandt-ian whimsy to it—and because, one more time everybody, weed is not “bad-ass.”

• Strength: 8
• Nose: Lavender-infused cheap beer
• Euphoria: 8
• Existential dread: 4
• Freaking out when a crazy person approaches you: 5
• Drink pairing: Just water (heavy dry mouth with this one)
• Music pairing: Power Trip, “Nightmare Logic”; or Townes Van Zandt, “The Late Great Townes Van Zandt”
• Rating: 8

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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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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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