Category: Highdeas

Sunset Sherbet by Good Green

~ johnbrandall ~ Leave a comment

Smoked a Sunset Sherb joint. .4 grams. This time I felt the bite. Which is to say the smoke gets all up in my head and starts my mind going like a hamster on a wheel.

There is less alcohol in my system than what is normal for me for this time of day. The emotions are flooding. I am letting what annoys me take over my entire mindset and well-being. This is the bite. I have noticed recently that Group Texts are staging a social media coup of my phone. I am not on Facebook. I used to use Instagram but I quit it early 2024. I am not on Twitter or X or whatever they're calling it these days. I've never used TikTok; never will.

I have this blog, and another blog (JBR.com) and I use Spotify, if that counts as social media. But now my Messages app seems like a backdoor means for sudden social media-like twisters to work their way into my awareness. Larger and larger groups of people. Reactions to this or that. Today, a poll. I'm not cut out for this kind of communication anymore. I'm just not interested. When it comes to texting I find myself ready to go back to the days of dumb phones.

Opting out of these conversations (even though I never opted in) seems harsh. But I also dislike feeling like I need to have a reason to "leave." Now I'm feeling this textbook Sherb bite and the bite is taking me right into this confused, ambivalent headspace. Into the Complaint Zone. Rant and rave. Wasting time, wasting thoughts! Any more to have my peace it feels like I have to throw up walls and then I feel guilty.

My wife is headed out of town but I don't want to go anywhere. I'm happy at home with Nora, who is otherwise partial to my wife, even shadows her. Now that I'll have a chance to bond a bit with the dog, in my wife's absence, I don't imagine I'll want to do anything else. Solitude, if and when I can get it, is a rarity. A scarcity. I won't give it up so easily.

The Sunset Sherb once again has me putting pen to paper. I have finished a beer but I don't have any vodka in me (yet). Perhaps this allows the bite to set harder, truer. So I try to write the bite away. Just putting this mini-diatribe on paper has me feeling better, calmer. I should try to move onto some other topic. And steer clear of the vodka for at least another hour. 17:01...


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Rum Pie by Curio

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'Twas given me by a friend last night around a small outside fire. Pre-roll. This was before the snow.

Curio says this Rum Pie strain leans sativa but most of the references online classify it as a 60/40 indica. The genetics are intriguing: Mandarin Cookies x (I-95 x Chemdog).

Whenever I see Mandarin Cookies in a lineage I get interested. I went through an eighth of Mandarin Cookies earlier this year, a most enjoyable experience. It created that "baked" effect by which I am relaxed, curious, carefree, open. I have not seen straight-up Mandarin Cookies since but if I see it listed as a strain's parent I'll give that strain a try.

I also know I-95 x Chemdog—as a parent, not as a standalone strain. It's one of the parents of 91 Bacio, a Fig Farms creation. The Chemdog in this cross is ChemD. I-95 is Triangle Kush x (Legend OG x Stardawg IX2). It's the phenotype of Stardawg named after Corey Haim. Source: Seedfinder, link here.

I was always curious why it was named after Corey Haim. The best explanation I found is on the Greenpoint Seeds site. (Link here.). Top Dawg seeds created Stardawg. Greenpoint worked it further. They say the phenotype was named after the tragic child star because it is the "black sheep" of the Star Dawg family. As they put it, "The moniker suggests a strain that is 'too much for most to handle.'"

Anyway, this post is about Rum Pie so let's get this thing back on track! If you can't tell I am slowly becoming quite baked, my mind happily drifting from one curiosity to another.

This is the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Five inches of wet snow fell early this morning. After a pleasant evening around the small bonfire last night, we awoke this morning into a totally transformed winter landscape—surreal.


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Apple Cobbler by Good Green

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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 everyone—or the two of us, me and my wife—were 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?

Apple Cobbler!


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Do-Si-Dos and The Reader

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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 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 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.

Do-Si-Dos!

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Bananaconda by Rythm: Strain Review

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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 breeder—Honey Sticks—writes 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 sealed—effectively 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...


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Blue Cheese x OG Skunk by Vibe

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11.18.25, 10:21

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 hasn’t been bitey, so far. It’s billed as a sativa, which feels appropriate. I have been in the midst of leaf cleanup. It’s 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 can’t do much else with the day. I’m grounded.

There are a lot of trees around our house; they are mostly through dropping their leaves. I’m putting the leaves on a tarp or in a bag and removing them to a spot down the hill, outside the backyard fence. I don’t want to clean up the same leaves twice.

For entertainment, I’m listening to this week’s Discover Weekly. It’s fine. The Cheese x Skunk is also fine. It does provide the opportunity to clamber down some rabbit holes…


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Pineapple Express by Cresco

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The Plow Plows On

10.14.2025, 17:01

That burnt chocolate flavor. It’s distinct. There was some in Cresco’s Pineapple Punch as well, which makes sense considering Pineapple Express is one of the parent strains of Pineapple Punch (the other is Durban).

There is a chocolate exhaust chewiness. Tootsie Roll? Not quite. The only way I can explain it is not quite to explain it—it escapes me. It’s not generic.

I’ve had Cresco’s Pineapple Express three times now. This is the third eighth, I mean. Chocolate-dipped fresh tennis ball. That smell you get right when you crack a fresh tube of tennis balls.

The Pineapple Express Open, a tennis tournament where everyone plays high. Tagline: Let’s Just See What Happens.

The lineage of Pineapple Express is Hawaiian x Trainwreck. Hence the name. I am happy to try any strain derived either from Hawaiian or Trainwreck...


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Garlic Fusion by High Noon Cult

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…17:03. It was a nice smoke. From the glass, that creaminess that I don’t get when smoking joints. But I didn’t taste any garlic. R Greenleaf, the dispensary in Clovis where I got the Garlic Fusion (along with grams of five other strains) is deli-style. The bud isn’t old but those jars get opened however many times a day and the air in New Mexico is almost always so dry. If you are expecting a huge rush of flavor from NM deli-style, you’re going to be disappointed.

What’s the answer? Sorry, I’m not sure, can’t deliver, can only complain and stare at my phone some more. The phone, lifeblood, life-sucker, such a strong drug these devices. First the internet then “the phone” then social media.

We are in a whirlwind of technological evolution! For better or for worse, I’ll not say. But things—time—will slow down, at some point. This is an unusual chapter in human history. What is being thrown at us right now is of an exponential magnitude. It’s too much for me.

Not that I’m checking out. Nothing is that easy. If I had to offer proof of an afterlife—what a wonderful phrase, an oxymoron. There is no afterlife, can’t be. It’s all just “life,” always has been. We see bodies leave but we don’t know what happens to their inhabitants after. How could we? This one place exists—just this one?—and that’s all, there’re no others? That doesn’t make sense.

How did I get there? Forget: who am I. Who cares?! I don’t need to be anyone. I’m more concerned about

Garlic Fusion!!!


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Duct Tape by Farmer G

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Next Recorded Duct Tape Smoke Session, 6.21.2025, 18:38

First smoke of the day. I'm baked on the Duct Tape. A chill, workable effect. I revised a poem—took a few words out, changed one bird (Chuck-will's-widow instead of Whip-poor-will). I never hear Whip-poor-wills in June but I did hear Chuck-will's-widow this week at the place I call Farm in Miller County, MO.

The parents of the Duct Tape strain (lineage link) are GG #4 (aka Glue or Gorilla Glue) and Dosidos. I have smoked Glue before but I have never smoked straight up Dosidos (sometimes Do-Si-Dos) (lineage link). I'm not going to try to assign whatever effect I'm feeling to whichever parent. I'm not sure I believe in that sort of attribution anyway. It could be pseudoscience, some sort of genetics fallacy.

I haven't had much to drink. This Duct tape and several drinks would probably KO me after a good hour. Anyway. There's a raccoon around so I'm gonna go check that out.


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Honey Bun by Twenty Twenty

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The Honey Bun is good. Solid base high leading at times to crazy zany but legitimate writing ideas/scenes/sketches.

The smoke had a spicy menthol flavor; was a bit sweet maybe.

Jays. Carry. Zingy even now smoked...two hours ago? Maybe 90 minutes.

Is it the Nigerian in here? A la Velvet Glove, an Illinois "indica" by Columbia Care / Seed & Strain that buzzed me this way. Or Cresco's Rollins, which also draws its lineage from the Nigerian landrace. I have purchased two eighths of Rollins. One held some of the raciest sativa flower I've ever smoked, the other didn't get me all that high. You pays your money, and you takes your chances.

The only other strain I've smoked that I know has Nigerian landrace in its lineage is the BK Satellite from Alien/Connected in Arizona. When I first wrote this entry in the notebook, I had only tried the Satellite once or twice but I'm recently back from a trip to Tucson where I thought I had some BK Satellite in my stash. Only I couldn't find it; it wasn't there. That's what I call a disappearing eighth...


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