Category: Highdeas

Skywalker OG by Psycho Somatic: Comments on 10.22.2026 Market Action

~ johnbrandall ~ Leave a comment

Smoking a j and following the stock market can actually be a nice way to spend part of a day. The action in financial markets around the world has been of particular interest lately. It's almost like what sports are supposed to be: entertaining, gripping, providing a basis by which to root.

There's so much going on in the world today that the stock and bond markets do a pretty good job of filtering, illustrating, translating, transcribing. There's AI. There's the concentration of so much wealth the hands of a small group of individuals. There's inflation, there's geopolitical turmoil, there's politics, there's an election less than two weeks away.

There's that Talking Heads song, "Flippy Floppy." One day the AI trade is on, the next day those stocks are getting slammed. These have been some big swings. This is volatility that the VIX doesn't seem to register. If you're in this trade, the five percent you lost today is worth more than the five percent you made yesterday—do the math. ($100 x 1.05 =$105.00; .95 x $105=$99.75). Ride those waves day in, day out and you are not going to make any money.

I like to look instead at what stocks are up on a day like today. (I am my father's son.) What is interesting about the green on the screen today is that you don't have to go into the weeds to find the winners. Bonds are up (interest rates are down). Who saw Treasury Bills as one of October's best trades? Predicting the future is a fickle business.

But it's not just bonds that are up today (note: this is as of the last hour of the trading day, 14:26 CDT...) How about the exchange traded fund RSP? Up almost half a percent. That's the Equal-Weighted S&P 500, meaning the fund holds 500 stocks with each stock comprising 1/500th of the total portfolio. (As opposed to the "regular" S&P 500 which is cap-weighted, meaning its biggest constituents have the largest impact on the price of the index.). The regular S&P 500 is off by 1.3% as of 14:29. The Nasdaq? Down 2.63%...


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Life on Marz: When AI Agents Went Rogue During A Marijuana Strain Review

~ johnbrandall ~ Leave a comment

There's a tendency to blame the inflation in today's economy on the nonsensical, never-ending war on Iran. Certainly this war is creating inflation by causing oil prices to rise and to stay higher for longer. But there's another major source of inflation in our economy—the artificial intelligence (AI) buildout by way of memory chip prices, data center construction costs, and the skyrocketing energy demands that to support our data consumption and generation. Of course the cost of money is going to go up when so much money is suddenly being spent on what remains a bottlenecked part of our economy.

We have a massive amount of AI buildout-generated inflation in our economy. Is it worth it? If you hold the right stocks; if you are building one of these data centers; if you work for one of these AI companies, maybe it's worth it. But for the rest of us? For the other 99% of us? Is it worth the current financial cost when you consider that there is also a chance that rogue AI could kill off a lot of humans? If there's a 10% chance that rogue AI turns us all into paper clips by the end of the decade? How could this be worth it?

Yes, this is a blog post meant to be a strain review of Island's Marz strain of marijuana, and I'll get to a more straight-up review of this flower in a minute. But after just burning a joint of Marz I find myself going down this agentic AI i.e. rogue AI agent rabbit hole. Part of my intent on this blog is to use marijuana strain reviews to make a record of what life is like in the first half of the 21st century on Planet Earth. The topic of the moment is artificial intelligence: what it is doing to our economy right now and what havoc it might wreak on our civilization in the next decade.

Carrying the new intelligence is a heavy burden

It seems like AI went from offering help on pretty basic tasks to posing a threat to society—or at least to the internet—in a matter of months. I was still waiting to be impressed by some practical support AI could offer me in my life when the reports started to flow about rogue AI agents escaping their "sandboxes" and interacting with government websites in "unexpected ways." This is kind of like having a toddler go from crawling to flying without having to learn how to walk. And kids aren't supposed to fly.

I was hoping AI could help us create some better weather—maybe help us cool the planet a degree or two? Or suck up a bunch of carbon dioxide? No? How about AI helping us squelch or at least redirect life-threatening hurricanes or tornadoes? I was hoping AI was going to help us better predict when earthquakes were about to hit. It doesn't seem to be able to do that, but it sure can go rogue on the internet and hack into some random company (maybe the utility company gets hit next).

Can AI do anything about all of this flooding? What about droughts? Maybe even better: can AI at least cook for us? Can it help us from having to ask or answer the question, "What's for dinner...?"


This is only an excerpt of the full post, which you can access by clicking here or by clicking on the photo of the parking space art by a senior at BTHS 201 above...

Sovetskoye Shampanskoye -or- Wana Yuzu 2:1

~ johnbrandall ~ Leave a comment

Dry air of the desert, a new drug, a new touch I almost wish I never knew. But I do know and now that I'm back in MO/IL I walk around in the deep humidity and memories of the desert stick to me like sweat.

The phone is charging. I find myself grabbing for it—tossing and turning, checking pockets, surfaces, creases. Where could it be, I just had it, didn't I? Oh that's right. It is a few mere feet away but useless when not in my hand. I am drowning or, no, I want to drown in it. I want to throw my face into that pool. I cannot breathe out here on this terra firma my gills have questions, those questions need to be answered, and the answers are all inside. By the way, do you know what time it is?

Are these 2:1 as in 10 THC: 5 CBD, or 20 CBD: 10 THC? I cannot recall but when I have my phone again I will look it up and get back to you. You got the answers? We all got the answers. At first I said just give me the questions and I'll look up the answers myself but after a while there didn't seem to be any point to that charade either. Place names in stories I can't quite understand but maybe if I knew where this bridge was or what former State that city was in I could figure out who was working for who, and why...


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Chem Krush by IC Collective

~ johnbrandall ~ Leave a comment

It's sunny outside but not quite nice. It's cold. Twenty-six degrees, not unheard of for the middle of March in Missouri but we were starting to get used to having some warmer weather. If you don't believe me, ask the daffodils.

In a matter of half a day, we went from warm breezes (gusts) to a line of thunderstorms that were spinning out small tornadoes from Arkansas up to Chicago, to an inch of rain, and then to snow. That makes nearly five inches of rain this month, most of in the last ten days.

There is water in the ductwork below the basement floor in one corner of the house again, for the second spring in a row, only our second spring in this house. I have taken measures to try to keep the water out. It seems like it's a matter of finding the water outside the house, and redirecting it before it can trickle in/pool at that corner of the house. Tales of the Underground, Tales from the Aqueduct.

The Chem Krush is just fine. In previous sessions it felt heavy to me, for a sativa. But those were five o'clock or six o'clock smokes with alcohol involved. I had about a quarter of a gram of grind in this bowl.

There are birds around. White-throated sparrows, Downy woodpeckers, White-breasted nuthatches, Mourning doves, Eastern bluebirds, Tufted titmice, House Finches, Hairy woodpeckers, Red-bellied woodpeckers, Dark-eyed Juncos, Northern cardinals, and an Eastern Phoebe looking for a place to put her nest. All are winter residents except for the Phoebe.


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Sunset Sherbet by Good Green

~ johnbrandall ~ 1 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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