Banana Macaroon by High Noon Cult

Take One, on the road

We are somewhere near the border of New Mexico and Arizona, headed to Tucson. I’m about to smoke some Banana Macaroon, grown by High Noon Cult. I bought a gram of it in Ruidoso, New Mexico, at the R Greenleaf dispensary there. Did that shop go all deli-style? I used to prefer deli-style, a.k.a. bulk. But deli means no package dates, no provenance. Maybe it’s better that way, no fussing over dates. What you get is what you get.

I bought single grams of seven different kinds of cannabis in Ruidoso. Made my own sampler pack. Of the seven strains I purchased, this Banana Macaroon was the most visually distinctive. Lots of red hairs. Crystals on mint-green trichomes. Thin, tall, even skinny buds. This gram weighed out to 1.06 grams. It has a pleasant, fruity scent. It’s spongy. Soft. Unusual-looking bud.

I am breaking off a little morsel from the skinny totem-shaped bud. We are now in Arizona.

The Banana Macaroon hit well. I used the $6 glass one-ee I (also) bought in New Mexico. I have my own glass back home but I don’t mess around driving through Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas to get from the St. Louis area to Tucson. I didn’t find the Banana Mac to be especially flavorful but I did taste some cream and some fuel.

It’s been a while since I have smoked in a car. I should say, I am riding shotgun. I am not driving. I don’t drive and smoke. Not since 2011 when I made a bone-headed nearly disastrous driving decision after just having puffed a one-ee from a dugout. It was about four years ago that as a passenger I fired up a Grape Kush pre-roll from the Pecos Valley Productions in Roswell right along this stretch of road, Arizona along I-10 headed west just over the New Mexico border. My wife has the wheel the rest of the way to Tucson, so I’m blazing. We’ll be in Tucson in two and a half hours.

I’m feeling the fuel. There’s an energy in my legs. The rush, the bite. San Simon River, dry. Mountains all around. Ranchland, scrub land, desert, speed limit 75. There are snow-capped peaks on some of these mountains, which is not usually the case. The sky is clear but the air is hazy. Two hours to Tucson, 13 miles out of Bowie. Telephone poles, electric lines. Remorse, regret, second thoughts. This is that bite. The weed goes in and starts pulling skeletons out of your closet, if you have them. But it’s part of the process, it’s part of the high. It can be therapeutic. This is the hard part, you just gotta get through it.

A car-hauling truck (aka a car carrier trailer) runs over a shard of tire and pulls off onto the shoulder. Waylon Jennings plays on Chris Stapleton Radio. We are making a list of things we want to get. Top of the list is a small, portable device that we can use to boil water in a hotel room. We want the boiling water for making instant coffee and also for adding to freeze-dried meals that otherwise make for an easy dish in the hotel room after a day spent on the road. I’ve found that boiling water in a hotel microwave is often gross, grody, disgusting. If you’re microwaving water in a paper cup, the cup absorbs all of the grime of the microwave, and then that’s the cup you’re drinking coffee out of the next morning, barf. We also want to get a thermometer or temperature sensor for monitoring meat we are smoking on the grill. You’re really not supposed to lift the top of the grill while you’re smoking the meat so they make thermometers that have a wire with a probe that you can read without lifting the grill lid.

See? This is the good part of the high. This is pretty classic sativa brainstorming and writing things down. I have also been researching fermented foods. I want to add them to my diet as a way to get some enzymes into my stomach. I am beginning to think my pancreas is not making enough enzymes so I am having trouble digesting food. Such foods include raw honey, sauerkraut, kimchi, ginger, and miso. I guess ginger is not fermented, and I’m not sure raw honey is either, but both naturally contain enzymes that aid food digestion.

There goes another car-hauling truck. We are seeing a lot of them, and it seems like we are seeing far fewer trains along this highway than we normally do. Is that because it’s a Saturday? Or is something else going on. Card readers have been down at the last two gas stations. It’s grim out here. The wind, the sun, that change of pace, the pace of change coming at us from the top down, from Washington D.C. March winds have harried us from Missouri into Kansas, through the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles, across New Mexico, and now into Arizona. The clerk at the Best Western Pine Springs in Ruidoso Downs said it wasn’t the wildfires last year that were so bad but the floods that came right after the fires, once the hillsides around Ruidoso had been stripped of their ability to absorb. We saw sandbags still in place around many buildings in Ruidoso. That was never the case before.

The Banana Macaroon gave me quite a head rush before tapering down and letting me exhale. I probably only smoked a tenth of a gram. It isn’t one of the longer-lasting strains but some sativas play that way. I’m curious to see what a joint of this would do. Seems like a great strain for daytime getting things done and putting pen to paper. I’ll take it for another spin once we get settled in in Tucson.

Take Two (in Tucson)

Smoked a third-of-a-gram joint of the Banana Macaroon. It was tasty. Tastier than that first bit I smoked on the road on the way out here. This time it tasted the way it smells, which isn’t always the case with flower. It has a creamy, fruity aroma and flavor. Nice.

I rolled fourteen joints over the course of the last few hours, taking frequent breaks. I rolled two joints of each of the seven grams I bought in New Mexico. Each joint was about a third of a gram. So I will not be left with much of any gram once these joints go up. I have been listening to college basketball, the men’s NCAA tourney. Florida won, Duke won. Now Illinois is playing Kentucky.

There’s a definite head-rush from the Banana Macaroon. I’m high, alone in the casita that is detached from my in-laws’ house here north of Tucson, in the Catalina Foothills. It’s a cool little office, and the weather has been impeccable. The temp is perfect for opening the windows and the doors. There is also a gentle breeze that is moving the mild, dry air around. It doesn’t really get any better. This is where the phrase “made in the shade” comes from. Or maybe that will be in a few days when temps will top 95 degrees. That’s pretty warm for March, even in the desert.

I am fairly high behind the eyes. I’m getting a headband effect. My eyes are probably really red. I was crying a little, it always feels good when I am high. Sativas tend to make me cry more often than indica. I don’t fight it. It’s part of the process. I was reading something I wrote a year ago but never typed up until this morning, when I typed it and re-worked it a little. It’s writing about birds at this Farm I go to in the middle of Missouri (link here). I will be sending this Farm birding short essay to Advanced Leisure, an online lit mag that a couple friends of mine are running (link here). I am pretty happy with what I wrote and I am also nostalgic. The high takes these feelings and ratchets them up an order of magnitude, hence the crying.

The Banana Macaroon can be a productive high. I’m standing. I’ve had a little less alcohol than I am used to before I start smoking. So maybe the weed is hitting a little harder than I am used to. Or maybe the Banana Macaroon is just for real. It hits really nice. High Noon Cult has a good one here. It’s such unique-looking flower. Like it was homegrown, one piece didn’t even look trimmed but it was still tidy. The skinny braided-looking piece. Like a soft baguette of tasty weed that had just been plucked from the plant. If I had known it was going to be this tasty, potent, and unusual I would have gotten more than a gram. But that’s the game we play, taking a chance on some rando weed while we are driving halfway across the country to see our in-laws for the first time in over six months.

If I have any quibble it’s that the high does not have significant carry. Hence the notion of wanting to have bought more. To keep the high going. Because whatever I smoke next might carry longer but not give me such a pleasant tweaking. Now with a small amount of bourbon on the rocks I am catching a funny second wind. It’s been a while since I thought I wanted to have a bong around to take a huge hit of something that might give me some crazy high-deas. I’d love to go back and take a close look at the deli jar of this stuff at R Greenleaf, to see if the other buds look as nice as what I walked out of there with.

And, noted, this Banana Macaroon would or could serve as an aphrodisiac. It’s got me feeling those feels as well, stirring. Strain of the Year candidate for sure.

Lineage

It’s not a common strain. I can’t recall ever seeing Banana Macaroon before. Plenty of banana strains. Maybe I’ve seen a strain with macaroon in the title? Not sure.

But, according to Seedfinder (link here), Banana Macaroon comes to us from Symbiotic Genetics. It is the result of crossing Dosidos with Banana Punch (#4). More and more, Dosidos strains seem to be to my liking. Dosidos or DoSiDos is OGKB (a GSC phenotype) crossed with Face/Off BX1. Banana Punch (#4) is Banana OG crossed with Purple Punch. Purple Punch crosses also seem to agree with me. Adios, goodbye, and, baby, that’s a winner!