1.21.2026, 17:11
About to burn a TK Lime. Triangle Kush x Lime F4 from Proper…
1.22.2026, 12:04
…I did burn that TK Lime. The come-on is not quite noticeable but it accumulates and all of a sudden there it is. I ate some dinner. Then I was going to read but I was tired—worn out from a recent trip to New Orleans: eating, drinking, walking, running, staying up, being out. Ready to give myself over to the embrace of sleep. I slept for four to five solid hours, roughly 7p-12p.
It doesn’t bother me to fall asleep at this time. If I’m in need of sleep, and let myself have it, then why should I regret it? I missed TV time with my wife, yes. But there are other nights for that. And the pending weekend, which this time around will be frigid, promising to keep us largely inside, TV time ensured.
But it’s not the TK Lime fueling me now; the TK Lime was first but not foremost. Enter Do-Si-Dos from Cloud Cover. The effects are there, here. I am, as I mentioned, awake again after an evening nap. Flushed, mostly, of alcohol—although I am about to commence (resume) sipping beer. Into the zero hour.
My mind is wandering. There is some bite. The onset of a drug. It’s having an effect—wasn’t that the point? I went into a rabbit hole, reading an article about the Tom Petty song, “Crawling Back to You.”
Beaumont Tench, the Heartbreakers keyboardist, was in New Orleans that first night we were there. I didn’t try to see him. Shows aren’t my thing but I have some regret. Regrets. They pile up like cars by the side of the road in a sudden intense snowstorm.
The taste on this Do-Si-Dos was sharp. Acrid. A taste I’ve encountered fairly often while smoking. Supposedly the Do-Si-Dos strain was named after a kind of Girl Scout Cookie. And GSC is in its lineage. But if that’s somehow the taste of cookies, then they’re burnt cookies, made with too much baking powder. I struggle to put a name to the flavor. It is chem-y. The word fuel comes to mind but what fuel? I also though it might be ammonia. A sharp sinking taste, the flavor of absorption, of being absorbed.
As quiet as I wanna be. The Rilke has really gotten to me. And Tom Petty. Rilke in Letters to A Young Poet talks about putting a wide space around you, enforcing solitude, and admitting—allowing—that it’s going to be painful but that without that space it’s going to be impossible to write. A moat basically. Instead of battlements or weapons, it’s space. A moat. Stay away. Let me be. Let me have myself to myself until enough work has been done such that one can emerge from that solitude with confidence, a sense of completeness, a satisfaction that will allow for a savoir faire, ease of attitude, peace of mind.
Which I lack, both right at this moment and in general. After a couple of days out and about in New Orleans, I really didn’t want to spend much time around other people. I never was myself until I’d had enough to drink and smoke. Only then would I let myself out, and who was that self, anyway? Emerging only by force after dumbfounding myself, drowning myself, smoking myself out of my own house, leaving myself nowhere else to go. OK, I would think, Here I am, I am out in the night. What is it that we do now? How does this go? What we do is sit around, stand around, screw around, feel like shit tomorrow?
Socializing, too, is a drug and it can also lead to some wretched hangovers. Somehow being out and about, with people, leads me to the worst hangovers I have. Then once I begin to feel slightly un-dead again the next day, I go out and do it all over again. That was nights three, four, and five in New Orleans this January. Going through the motions. Why, having not done this sort of trip for several years, was I antsy to have nights like these again?
I fear that I put this misplaced desire ahead of things that should have been more important: my writing, my reading, my home life which for nearly five months now has been lacking a dog, the presence of whom I miss. We had a dog. A deaf, elderly, sickly dog named Hugo whom I blamed for holding me back. I blamed him for preventing me from working seriously, I blamed him for keeping me from going on a trip to New Orleans with a bunch of other people. Five months he’s been gone and now I’ve had to look in the mirror and admit that I have not been working any more diligently. If anything I have been even more adrift, less focused and less earnest in my writing discipline. And now that I’ve concluded this much-delayed trip to New Orleans, I have to admit it wasn’t all that I had told myself it would be. So I’m feeling empty-handed, self-shot in the foot. Awake in the middle of the night writing a rambling weed strain review about Do-Si-Dos that is nothing more than a poorly disguised peregrination of lament and self-flagellation.
Do-Si-Dos!
I must say: the Do-Si-Dos passes the pen-to-paper test but I wonder as usual if it isn’t so much the strain as the context—the always important circumstances of the moment in which I smoke, and the surrounding environment. I am sitting up in bed under a heap of blankets—it’s not even cold yet, not like it will be twenty-four hours from now. But I am embracing and easing my way into what I expect will be a winter storm-enforced hunkering down. We are forecast to have the kinds of days where you couldn’t go out even if you wanted to, if we really do get six to ten inches of snow. This is now the second consecutive formidable Winter, which this time around started in the Fall, on the Saturday following Thanksgiving. 12:46.
I had seen Do-Si-Dos on menus commonly a couple of years ago. Now I’m getting an after-image of the way the Do-Si-Dos tasted, like bad fruit. Like sour wine, or the wafty smell of an old drink or an old beer when you’re in bed and the cup or can is on your bed stand and you get the alcohol fumes’ scent, just barely. That plus a burnt, earthy, dirty noxiousness is how this stuff tasted. Not a great flavor for my palate but the pen keeps scrawling and scratching so who can complain? I’m awake, I’m not drunk, and it’s quiet. The Holy Trinity. Until I decide, Gee, it’s so nice that I could really go for a drink, how about a few splashes of vodka over some ice in that cup on the bed stand? Then I’m drunk, asleep, and whether it’s quiet or not is moot.
Where was I? Do-Si-Dos. I had seen it on menus but I thought the name was silly—what’s in a name, the play’s the thing—so I passed. It’s probably also true that if I see a strain on a lot of different menus I’ll label it “trendy” and pass on it out of some misplaced rebel-punk toughness. That’s how it was with Gelato. Why would I want to smoke something named after ice cream? What’s with all this Gelato, folks? Get over it. I stayed away from Gelato for years, until it was difficult to find. Only then did I try it and realize I liked its effects.
I had passed on the Do-Si-Dos I was seeing on menus but I did buy some Duct Tape. I bought a gram of Duct Tape in Clovis, New Mexico, from a now defunct producer known as SWOP (Southwest Organic Producers). And I liked it. Then I bought an eighth of Duct Tape at the Trinity dispensary in St. James, MO. The grower was Farmer G. It was dry but a moisture pack brought it back. The high on that Farmer G Duct Tape was a quintessential “baked” effect, which is hard to get. (Link to that review here.)
I’m not far from that roasty, toasty, smushed, rolled-in-oats, baked feeling right now. It is cozy under this pile of covers. The euphoria is starting to fade but that’s why I have books and beer.
The lineage on Do-Si-Dos is OGKB x Face/Off OG BX1. (Source: Seedfinder, link here.) OGKB is a cut or specific phenotype of GSC (which used to be called Girl Scout Cookies , a name that is no longer used for obvious reasons). Some descriptions say that OGKB stands for OG Kush Breath. Is OG Kush Breath its own strain or simply a GSC cut? I am a little unclear on that (link here for that version of the story). I like to think OGKB stands for “Original Kind Bud”. Back in 2000, that’s what people used to call the visually appealing, non-compressed cannabis flower that was starting to become available—in Missouri, anyway. KB, kind bud. Everything else we were smoking back then was so-called “brick weed”. Also known as “Mexican brick”. That’s all there was! It was dry as a bone and smashed down flat so it would take up less space as it was being smuggled in from wherever. We would break it up and then put it in a container with a chunk of apple or a tiny piece of wet sponge. That brick still got me plenty high, though. Twenty-six years later, here I am!
OGKB, OG Kush Breath, or the Original Kind Bud, a phenotype of GSC, which genetically is OG Kush x F1 Durban. OG Kush is the unknown “Emerald Triangle” and Neville’s Hindu Kush. F1 Durban is F1 (unknown strain) x Durban Poison, the South African landrace. A pretty basic lineage, compared to most of what else is out there these days.
Face/Off OG BX1 is mostly OG Kush but with another unknown strain involved, a “pheno #32” which is an unnamed clone of… Face/Off OG. A tautology. If you’re still reading by this point, you deserve an award of some sort. The BX1 seems to indicate that the Face/Off OG used in Do-Si-Dos is a cross of Face/Off OG with itself, which is not the same as Face/Off OG itself. It’s like if you could reproduce with yourself, the result would not exactly be you.
Anyway!
Before I lose the short-term recall or the “present-sense impression” I should say in short that New Orleans was a struggle for me. That’s because of me and not because of the group. I’m just not feeling like Johnny-Go-Lucky Have A Carefree Night on The Town these days. Or maybe those days are over entirely. We had a nice hotel room, and I could have lounged in that room for many more hours than I did. I could have read more, drank less, and felt better. But then I would have had to say no to the social aspect of going on a trip with other people and I didn’t have the courage to do that.
Or maybe I should look at the bright side: I went to New Orleans and came back with a better sense of who I am, and who I am not. I don’t need to go to bars. I don’t need to drink up to keep up. I don’t need to run in a pack. What I needed, then more than ever, was to be like this fella who we could see out of our window. He was sitting on the balcony of a building on the other side of St. Ann in a green hoody that said something like, “Université de Paris.”
I dubbed him “The Reader” because for hours he would be out there in a simple chair, alone, smoking cigs, drinking beer, and reading. First it was Yuengling and physical books. Later it was some can I couldn’t make out and a tablet or e-reader. He would pour his beer into a short highball glass and just sip and read, sip and read, all damn day. I thought to myself, “This guy’s got it all figured out!”
I did some sipping, reading, and scribbling in New Orleans but I didn’t do a lot of it. It was never the focus. When I was in the room I always felt truant, rebellious, statement-making. Which wasn’t the case. I just wanted the downtime! Instead, it was trying to keep up: who was arriving, who was leaving, who was going where, where was everyone at?
The inner world, the outer world. Which one did I want to exist in? Of course I tried to exist in them both simultaneously. I tried to do two versions of the trip at once, and I did them both badly, which is what I do best!
Weeds of Grass 