Prickly Pear by Grow Sciences

Smoked a Prickly Pear .4-gram joint. An hour ago? It’s 19:06 on December 21, 2025. I’m in Arizona. Catalina Foothills to be precise.

I am going between two notebooks, notebook shuttling. The House and the Senate, we’re going to need to conference, we’re going to have to reconcile two competing versions of these bills.

I’ve sipped some vodka; so far I’ve held off on dinner. Earlier I read more of E. Annie Proulx’s short story collection “Heart Songs.” The screen door is still what stands between inside here and outside in that dependable desert.

I am not quite baked on the Prickly Pear flower from Grow Sciences. I’m just short of baked. I feel the effects behind the eyes. I’d classify these effects as straight-up hybrid, 50/50. More and more this feels like where I want to be. The lineage is OGKB x Purple Chitral Kush (source: Leafly, link here). OGKB is said to be a descendant or perhaps a specific cut of GSC. Purple Chitral Kush is a Pakistani indica, something you don’t see every day. (Source: Seedfinder, link here). I’ve been seeking out or landing on these OGKB offspring recently because I’m seeking that baked effect.

At 19:11, I am getting ready to scarf some pizza. Everyone else—my wife and her parents—have already eaten. I’m back in the bedroom taking a little time for myself to see what this Prickly Pear is all about.

Invigorous insomnia, boycott embargo, inferno

I still feel the Prickly Pear, my ears are ringing. 21:26. That’s three and a half hours. Maybe this was what the kief and taffy did to me before I collapsed in the Farmhouse two weeks ago. Slew me. I could re-up, smoke another—but I think I’ll try again tomorrow. More of the Prickly Pear then, when I’m fresh.

It has been a non-sedative high without a sativa or Gelato-esque rush. Closer to the baked effect I’ve been going for. I’ve been awake and alert but very quiet. Just trying to make it through December, hat tip to Mr. Haggard.

The Harsh Art of Saying Nothing. I have aped, mimicked, imitated and mimed my dad all my life. Why would now be any different? He used to talk all the time. He used to ask question after question. If he was ever quiet it was because he was pissed off about something, his quiet a protest, a refusal. Now he’s twenty-two months into his stay at the nursing home and he ain’t talking. Increasingly so, neither am I.

I am surprisingly still awake at 21:39. Is it the Prickly Pear? Is it abstention from wine, compared to recent previous nights? I did take a short nap earlier, re-charge. I did not have any late caffeine. My wife is asleep. I am a little unsure why I’m not asleep. Only one-hour time difference between Tucson and St. Louis this time of year. Sometimes it’s two hours. Daylight savings, or daylight splurging.

I finished Alex Gildzen’s “Year Book” earlier. Loved it, one of my favorite reads in a while. All of the references to what he was experiencing as the year 1972 played out. He was working in a library at Kent State. This was after the massacre there. He traveled a fair amount during the year. To New York City, to San Francisco. He wrote a lot about art and movies. His writing was honest, forthright, and aware. He did not shy away from writing about the ups and downs of his life over the course of the year.

Simultaneously, I have been working my way through the aforementioned “Heart Songs” story collection by E. Annie Proulx. I’m enjoying it as well. It’s rough in parts. The stories, not the writing. The prose is exemplary. A dog dies, a widower loses his farm to in-breeders. Someone gets tarred and feathered.

I killed my own dog for what? In my yearbook, that’s my terrible brutal harsh no-sense nonsense dumbass dumbfuck good for nothing story. Took one of my only windows of love and threw it out of the plane with nothing so much as a ‘chute. I’ll wear this one forever. A black, barkless letter scarred way down deep.

Fine, hell. What’s left of this day, anyway? 21:57. I don’t smoke to hide how I feel. I smoke to confront how I feel. It’s not so pretty of late. But we encounter, and we keep moving.

The neighbor’s blue-white strands of Christmas lights hang out there like a lost city somewhere far below.