It’s time to turn on. Do a strain review. I’ve already done Blue Dream. So it’s Lemon Skunk or Durban Poison or Jack Herer. All sativas. The Jack and the Durban are probably the oldest. I’ll flip a coin. Head Jack, tails Durban. Tails.
The bite. Paranoia. It doesn’t taste like that first Durban I bought. I first bought an eighth of this UpNorth Durban Poison from the Mississippi Ave location of Beyond Hello. It was the tastiest weed I’ve ever smoked. I’d never tasted anything like it. Months later I bought another eighth from the same place.
The second eighth cost substantially less. The sticker price fell from $50 down to $25. I was a little suspicious. This second batch does not have the flavor profile of the first, not even close. But let’s see where the high will take me…
***
Early Reactions
Eh. Became aroused. Maybe better to use when at home. I’m wired. Thinking about mowing. I should say, for context. I am out in the rural countryside of Missouri, near the town of Iberia. I’m in an old farmhouse that has been part of my friend’s family for a hundred years. I come out here for solitude and to look after the place. It is mowing season.
I won’t start mowing now. There was a sudden downpour yesterday evening so the grass is still wet. I did some cutting yesterday before the weather rolled through. I won’t try to mow wet grass. If it doesn’t dry out by 2 pm I will not be doing any more cutting.
I noticed some poison ivy growing on the right side of the driveway, toward where the driveway descends to meet the gravel road. There was always poison ivy along the road but after the county road crew cut deeper into the roadside to clear brush, the low-lying poison ivy is proliferating in the vacuum. No bueno. Nothing I can do about it. Killing all that ivy would take gallons and gallons of herbicide. So I’ll stay out of it, which is easy to do unless I want to pick up trash along the road, beer cans and water bottles, which I have done here several times over the years.
Taste
Doing some high writing and that’s never a bad thing. The taste of the smoke was not remarkable. A slight tang, just gas, the taste of smoke, chemmy. Gassy terps? I like that phrase but I’m not sure I understand it. I’m not sure I can identify gassy terp taste. Fuel. Diesel. The first time I bought this stuff the taste was unmistakable. Citrus. Like the old school drink known as Tang. It was a fun smoke, just for the taste alone.
Wandering
While I was out on a short peregrination, walking peripatetic, I picked up one small tick, back of my knee. I took a large one off my boot yesterday not long after I arrived here. The boots had been on the ground either on the concrete patio I call the stoop or in the grass along the grassy drive that runs alongside the house.
Now I can feel something else. A crawler, left groin?
It appears to be a false alarm though I have some bites near my waist. Couldn’t find a tick anywhere around.
Whoa—! I just jumped. A blue dauber flew in and buzzed my tower. I’m a little jumpy. I have done battle here recently and for a couple years against a particular species of wasp, a red paper wasp. The blue mud daubers are also wasps but they have never stung me. They fly in and out of this kitchen, especially when I have the kitchen door open.
I could’ve brought half the amount of whiskey I did. Which I drank last night. I coulda brought half that amount, or none at all. I used to take trips here without bringing along any hard alcohol. I’d feel better if I could do that again but I haven’t mustered the will.
I’m getting pensive and a little melancholy. I’m in a little bit of pain. There is moisture in the windows. There’s been a woodpecker flying around out there. Red-bellied. Which are always nice. A very trim bird with a red patch on the back of the head, a buff neck, and a gray body. A little black in the tail.
Got buzzed by what I think was a blue dauber when I stepped outside just now. The humidity is lifting, the sun is strong. A white pickup goes by along the road. Ford.
It’s only 10:08 but all of a sudden the grass is just about ready to be cut. By eleven, it will be totally dry.
Effects
The Durban is fine. I haven’t gotten too up or too down, emotionally. Some of both along the way but not I’m settled into a comfortable middle ground. It’s a pleasant experience just looking out at the land.
I do kind of want to get some music going but the sounds of the birds and the bugs and the calls of frogs down by the creek are too enjoyable to swamp over with music. I can wait. A blue dauber is flying around in the kitchen. Looking for a place to start building a nest of mud, which won’t ever be its nest but the birthplace and nursery of the next dauber generation. I had put up fly paper yesterday to catch the pesky flies that bother me when I’m here. I caught two blue daubers as collateral damage and hated seeing them perish. I took the fly paper down.
Strangely, today, up until now (10:39 am), I had not—buzzed by dauber!—I had not thought about the plantar fasciitis (or whatever it is) that’s ailing my left heel. Could be a bruise that has never healed. A bone bruise? It’s bothered for eight months, since September.
Still fairly high on that Durban. I mowed for three hours yesterday, using a push mower, pushing and dragging that thing up and down the hilly landscape of this old cattle farm. This morning I had aches and pains but I don’t recall thinking about my heel. That’s odd.
I did recently try something new in an effort to eradicate the parasitic worm of plantar fasciitis from my life: I stopped wearing a particular brand/type of running shoe. A shoe that I started using regularly for the first time last year. Maybe those shoes have been the silent, obvious culprit all along. The Occam’s razor answer. If so, I will happily donate them and buy a new pair of the kind of shoes I used to put many miles on, Brooks Ghost.
Farm Errata
Four-wheeler went past, headed east. I did not see who was on it. A four-wheeler arrived here yesterday evening while I was in the shower. I had mistakenly concluded that there weren’t any cattle in the pasture because the grass seemed pretty high for pasture grass when there are cattle in there grazing. Going back two years to the Summer of 2021, the pasture was grown out here because there weren’t any cattle here at all.
But there must be at least a few cattle in there now, hanging back by the pond, because the pasture gate was open yesterday evening for a while. I noticed it wasn’t Kevin who had driven up on the ATV but his wife. I stayed back on the porch. Kevin and his wife have been leasing the pasture to run part of their herd for years, long before I ever set foot here (2012). I talk to Kevin on about half of the trips I make. I don’t usually talk to Heather. I was pretty crunked on whiskey and weed when she was by so I certainly wasn’t going to search out an awkward conversation.
I plan to shower again today before I leave. On days like yesterday when it is warm enough, I will shower with the water that comes out of the shower head, which is well water, unheated. Today it is still a little cool for cold water so I will take my solar shower with me into the shower stall. I have the solar shower filled with water, sitting in the sun. It’ll be ten degrees warmer than what will come out from underground.
It was plenty warm yesterday. Several hours passed between when I had stopped working and when I finally showered.
The sound of a cowbird,
the phoebe checks
its nest.
The “it’s weird” cardinal is ripping them off right now. It’s a cardinal whose call, in my opinion, can be translated into the English-language phrase, “It’s weird, it’s weird, it’s weird…”
Closing
I got through the Durban alright. It’s pretty much run its course. Noon approaches. I was high for 2-3 hours. A little paranoia at times, some heavy thoughts. Existential thinking. But I hardly sat down the whole time. I might’ve done more or might’ve started mowing already if the grass weren’t so wet this morning.
The Durban is a sativa form of marijuana. A straight sativa. As straight a sativa as one can get. There is no lineage to speak of. Durban Poison is a landrace. It’s native to South Africa, named after the port city of Durban. It is a racy smoke that will get you going. No sitting around on the couch after smoking a joint of the Poison. Maybe I’m still high and I’ll feel slow and stoned in an hour, while I’m mowing. I don’t think so.
The sun it out, the air is warm and still a little too full of moisture. The sound of someone on a four-wheeler in the next pasture. Another farmer, the mysterious Curtman, making his rounds.
—Iberia, MO. May 2023.
Weeds of Grass 