John Randall is a writer living in Missouri. His interests include camping, running, walking, cutting and burning wood, messing around with magnets, foraging, and listening to podcasts, many of them about baseball.
Two hours in, I'll say the effects are certainly present and neither too up nor too down. I'm not sleepy despite this being a cold, cloudy Sunday afternoon. Indeed, the effects served early on as an effective aphrodisiac. Remember this for future purposes! I still feel a mix of brain buzz, body buzz, and some overall feelings of warmth. Not quite baked.
Earlier in the smoke session, I scrubbed clean my toilet using baking soda and vinegar. The high was coming on and it had me looking for something to do. This was an appropriate Sunday afternoon strain, but then again aren't they all? Later on, I was content plopping down into a comfy chair and watching (more) football I don't really care about. I don't have a team I root for, not after the Rams left. I don't bet. I don't play fantasy. And football's not even my favorite sport to follow (that would be baseball). But sometimes I just want to sit and have something on the TV to zone out with.
I've had a drink, and I'll eventually have another. I'll probably smoke again this evening but right now I'm still enjoying the pleasant background high, with my ears ringing just a little bit. This has been a solid two hours with the Apples and Bananas supplying at least an undercurrent. 15:29.
3.58 grams of Grow Sciences' Apples and Bananas cannabis flower
16:42. The background buzz faded gradually. I've been reading, casually watching football, and lounging. I am reading by headlamp light as the sunlight disappears. I am not quite baked but I've been "not quite baked" for hours. I have been slow drinkin' and feeling content, or pretty close to it...
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 elseāmy wife and her parentsāhave already eaten. I'm back in the bedroom taking a little time for myself to see what this Prickly Pear is all about.
A generous eighth of Prickly Pear from Grow Sciences.
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 anotherābut 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 dream was post-apocalyptic in nature. There was a world-wide war. What order there exists in our society had broken down. The new order was in the form of factions. I was with a group of nomads, Berber-style. There was no home. The primary task was a never-ending search for weapons. My wife and I had somehow gotten separated. I was trying to get back to her. I had a rough idea as to where she was.
There was a scout, an independent contractor of sorts, not unfriendly, maybe an ally. He was out on the frontier sending information back to this group I was with. His last contact said he was about a day's travel away from the group my wife was with.
The next part is a little fuzzy, and like I said, I'm not sure if it was actually part of the dream or if it was where I took the dream as I began to emerge from the unconsciousness of sleep. Maybe there isn't much of a difference, or not a meaningful difference. Either way, I came up with the idea, with the images associated with it. There was this Communication Room where you would go in and sit at a desk. On the desk was an old-style landline phone. You could pick up this phone and talk to whoever you wanted.
How was this possible? Magic? Sheer force of will? New technology? Supernaturalism? Or was it possible only because everyoneāor the two of us, me and my wifeāwere already dead, and we were both in the Bardo or some other stage of limbo between worlds. Or maybe we were already in our next lives, where incomprehensible things were possible because it was a different existence and who knows what else could be possible in such a new world. How could you tell, and why would it matter?
The taste on this Do-Si-Dos was sharp. Acrid. A taste I've encountered fairly often while smoking. 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 admittingāallowingāthat 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 still lack, both right at this moment and generally. 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? All we do is sit around, stand around screw around, feel like shit tomorrow?
Fritzel's Jazz Pub, toward the north end of Bourbon St. in the French Quarter
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, 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 any 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 which I miss. We had a dog, a deaf elderly, sickly dog who 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.
They spell it Rythm. Lose one h. Rhythm is one of the strangest words in the English language. Is the "y" even a vowel there? If a word has six letters and no vowels, how can we pronounce it? How can it be a word?
Anyway, I've been smoking this strain called Bananaconda for a few days now. It's strong. Not in taste, although it does have a menthol flavor; it numbs my tongue a little. There's some taste there but it's mostly a bland smoke, in terms of flavor. You're not smoking this one for the flavor.
The lineage is unusual. One of the parents is Dual OG, which comes from a cross of True OG and Banana OG. True OG is an OG Kush Cut. Banana OG is OG Kush and Sagarmartha's 60/40, an otherwise "unknown" strain. Can't go wrong with Banana OG. Then the other parent is a complete unknown, something called Snakes Cake. Don't ask me. The Seedfinder page (link here) has a little more info. The breederāHoney Sticksāwrites about how the strain came about; how it has become a hit for them. They appear to be based in Maine. I have seen other growers offer Bananaconda. Amaze in Missouri, for instance.
In most of my sessions smoking Bananaconda, the effects have come on gradually. It doesn't bring an immediate head rush. Not typically, though I am getting a bit of a head rush as I write this, this being my fourth go with this strain. Each time I am smoking about a third of a gram in a single-wide joint.
The first three times I smoked Bananaconda all turned out to be one joint nights. Usually I will smoke a couple of joints a night. Or maybe it's one in the afternoon, and one as a night cap. The Bananaconda has worked double duty. It is capable both of sending me off on a tangent or planting my butt in a chair so I can chill out and catch my breath. It's one of those strains that delivers a gummy-like high in the form of a smoke, and I like that.
The Bananaconda I've been smoking on had been in my inventory for a while. The jar had been sealedāeffectively sealed. But it had been packaged on 01.24.2024 and I didn't open it until 12.15.2024. I keep most of my unopened eighths in a sealed Mason jar, and then I keep those Mason jars in what I believe is meant to serve as an ammunition box. The ammo box has a rubber gasket, and clamps down around the edge in six places. Still, I know that if I sit on a jar for nine months, it's probably not going to be as tasty when I open it. It's a blessing and a curse to run a stockpile. It gives me peace of mind to know I have an inventory but things backfire, plans melt away, smoke rises...
I was on the /ILTrees Reddit a couple of days ago, checking in. Someone posted a question that asked the community, "What strains did you used to like that you wish they brought back?" The poster mentioned Gary Payton by 93 Boyz, among other strains.
I waited too long to try the Gary Payton but I did buy one bag of it, which I sat on for a while. About a year ago, I started working my way through it. The aforementioned Reddit post along with a newfound appreciation for what I'll call "basic cookies" strains has me revisiting my notes. I didn't write much about smoking the Gary Payton but it was clear it got me baked, which a good cookies strain should do. The cross is Y Griega x Snowman. Snowman is a GSC phenotype. The Seedfinder page (click here if interested) includes the history of how the strain came about. And, yes, it is named after NBA Hall of Fame point guard Gary Payton.
3.53 grams of Gary Payton from 93 Boyz
This is what I wrote about a year ago, one night after smoking a joint of the Gary Payton. January 8, 2025:
The Gary Payton is strong. I have been drinking. Feel glassy. Pepped. High. The joint burned well but it wasn't especially tasty. I've got that pressure feeling behind my eyes. If someone looked at me, they'd know I was high. That's how I feel, anyway.
Then I followed up the next day, 1.9.25:
The Gary Payton was strong. By the time 8 o'clock rolled around we had watched a couple episodes of a murder mystery show and I was couch-locked. I coulda stayed in that chair for hours. But it wasn't just the Gary Payton. For three days I had been doing snow and ice removal here and at the house we are trying to sell. I ran four miles at the gym and then drove over to Illinois to see my Dad in the nursing home. I was tired and sore. I still am sore waking up today.
I slept well. I remember some of the dream. I was in a hotel room that was set up outside, along a sidewalk. Passersby were waking me up, heckling me. What a terrible hotel room; choice of room. I was getting ready to go about switching rooms...
I woke up first at 11:15 last night. Felt fine. Peed, had some water, went back to sleep until 4:15. Some tossing and turning along the way, less than usual. It is cold out there this morning. Eight degrees, something like that...
September 6, 2023, 10:02 p.m. At my house in University City, MO. Smoked some of the Super Boof from Star Buds earlier in the day. The grower is Farmer G.
I had never had the strain. It's got a lengthy, convoluted lineage. Is there anything wrong with that? It's an open question I ask in earnest, I don't claim to know or have an answer.
Among its ancestors are: Black Cherry Soda, an unknown strain; Skywalker OG; Rare Dankness (which in turn is choc full of familiar building blocks like Chemdog, Triangle Kush, and Ghost OG); Larry OG; Grand Daddy Purple. And that's just one side, the Black Cherry Punch parent. The other side is Tropicana Cookies, which derives from GSC and Tangie. I had some Tangie earlier this year, or smoked something closely derived from Tangie and it seemed to make me a little crazy. Fitful, capricious, on the lookout for trouble. Not the good kind of crazy.
I had a touch of paranoia after smoking a bowl of the Super Boof. Taste was there, not phenomenal, not absent. I tasted that vanilla malt flavor, along with some helium balloon and a vague frozen vegetable taste. I can't put my finger on it, obviously. I didn't sneeze but my nose quivered.
I've settled in a bit. The writing helps, piecing through it. It could also be that my mindset leans rough and dark at the moment. I'm tired. Didn't have the greatest sleep last night. Smokin' too much weed or not enough. The drive back, unpacking in the dark. I won't miss the heat but I will miss the light.
Super Boof is a pseudonym of Blockberry. They are the same strain. The page for Blockberry on Seedfinder (click here) has the best description I've found. Super Boof might be the best example of a strain that might be indica, might be sativa. Depends on the plant, depends on who you ask. It might also be that smoking Super Boof takes you in one effects direction first, then winds its way around to another set of effects. This is why I smoke!
It's not a scientific undertakingāfar from it. My process is biased in many ways. Much of what I bought in New Mexico this year was purchased as a single gram, so those strains never could garner a "disappearing eighth" tag. Other strains I might have taken notes onāby hand in one of my notebooksābut haven't typed up yet, meaning I haven't tagged them on this site, and can't turn them up through a search.
Like this Jabberwocky, which right now is acing the pen-to-paper test, which could be its own tag except that any strain I end up reviewing by way of this blog must have passed the pen-to-paper test so it would be redundant to mention that in the review. Some strains might deliver effects typical of indica flower, meaning I might not be alert or motivated enough to write anything about them. So my reviews are probably biased toward sativas!
It's also possible that I am biased toward the strains I happen to smoke earlier in the day (which would also more likely be sativas or sativa-leaning strains because I don't want to feel sleepy or couch-locked early on in a day). Which then also raises the influence of alcohol on my ability or willingness to write strain reviews. I'm more likely to put pen-to-paper after a smoke if I have had nothing or less-than-usual to drink. If I've been drinking and I fire up some indica as a means of circuit-breaking alcohol overindulgence, I'm not going to have much to write about because I will be on my way to Slumberland.
Jabberwocky!
It strikes me now as a pretty good strain. Which is interesting because the first one-ee of Jabberwocky I smoked didn't seem to do much. This was a last chance puff. So how does it land with a thud the first time around but then fire me up and have me writing like mad on this occasion? My guess is that my reaction to a strain depends a lot on what time of day I smoke it, how much I've had to drink, and what if anything is planned for later on in that day (hanging over me). Here at my in-laws in Tucson, dinnertime and my preferred time to smoke in the evening often clash like oncoming trains.
The Chem Pie is fine. No additional sneezes. Prime Leaf on Park has Modified Rootbeer and White Truffle. Those were some of my favorites, my OG Tucson strain faves from back in the day, actually just two years ago. I think I got White Truffle again last year and it wasn't as "wow" as the first time. Flight 45 looks good.
That's Tucson. What about Roswell? It's September 5. We will be there September 21st, a Thursday. I'm looking at all the 2g options. There are 62 2-gram pre-packs. Seems like a lot.
What stands out? Trainwreck by Cranium Extracts. Two grams for $22. They had some Golden Goat but it's gone. Nothing else stands out. Oddfellow Sour Diesel?
SWOP and Pecos Valley in Roswell looks weak on the 2-gram flower. Finding good bulk offerings has gotten more difficult this year. The market seems insistent on selling eighths. Alright, but then why not three grams, or four, or five? I saw five-gram offerings on one Tucson menu. Five grams of mixed buds. Yeah, I like that idea. I don't want to buy a whole quarter of anything.
I don't want to bring a lot of weed back from Tucson. Then what do I do with it? Not buy much? If I had to buy by the eighth, I'd get three for variety but then I'd have a bunch left and I would have tried only three strains. Not good enough! For now I have the Prime Leaf bulk options which include some weed I want to try so I'm grateful. I need to get a firm sense of that Roswell Dreamz menu and just purchase something that is newly arrived but still available by the time I get there. Otherwise I'm going to walk out of there with some old weed.
Biscotti Menthol from Botapharm, $24 for two grams. If it tastes like it sounds, then it should be good. Kush Mintz? Now I'm on New Mexico Trees on Reddit, LOL. One vote for High Noon Cultivation. They have a Tropical Infusion on this menu, $24 for two grams. The two other growers this person mentions are N/A.
Now a vote for Leaf & Flower. Rattlesnake Venom, MAC, Wedding Crasher 9. A vote for P 37. Cement Shoes, Dark Rainbow. Shouts out for Urban Wellness, which has the only custom, detailed explanation of their offerings. Kush Mintz, Red Mountain Pass, Cherry Canary.
Someone else mentions Carver and Growers Circle but I don't see these names. Maybe they aren't offering bulk. Another vote for High Noon Cult. Dreamz has Glitterati available as a single gram. Glitterati, indica. Tropical Infusion, hybrid.
New Mexico trees isn't all that active or robust. 2k members. It's no /ILTrees...
Smoked half a .4g joint of Blue Cheese x OG Skunk, the flower grown by Vibe, the joint rolled by me.
It provided an immediate lift and it hasnāt been bitey, so far. Itās billed as a sativa, which feels appropriate. I have been in the midst of leaf cleanup. Itās humid and warm. So humid that I had to stop to change from pants to shorts. And while I was stopped to change I figured, Why not burn one?
I have Covid so I canāt do much else with the day. Iām grounded.
There are a lot of trees around our house; they are mostly through dropping their leaves. Iām putting the leaves on a tarp or in a bag and removing them to a spot down the hill, outside the backyard fence. I donāt want to clean up the same leaves twice.
For entertainment, Iām listening to this weekās Discover Weekly. Itās fine. The Cheese x Skunk is also fine. It does provide the opportunity to clamber down some rabbit holesā¦
Weeds of Grass 