Saturday Morning Sesh #1! POV: You're a hashmaker
A new Saturday series of fun, light, weedy reads for your waking and baking pleasure
As I delved into the Cannabitch archives the other night, a realization hit me like pulling from a four-foot-long bong. There’s been a shift in these letters lately; they’ve become very serious. We used to have a lot more fun. After all, we're talking about weed, the epitome of fun for me.
I believe weed aids creativity and that the types drawn to making the plant the center of their lives tend to be bizarre, beautiful, fascinating, deep-thinking (sometimes, lol), and controversial people. So we should pay attention to the art and/or yarns they make. I don’t think I’ve been doing that enough!
I will run this section on Saturdays whenever I have something to send (feel free to get involved if you’re a wordsmith or any other type of visual artist whose medium might fit here. Video? Music? Poetry?). It need not be about weed, just inspired by it, with some light but obvious connection. It’ll be called the Saturday Morning Sesh, intended to aid in waking and baking pleasure.
This first dispatch is from writer , who has a Pynchon/Thompson-esque brain in his body and pen in his hand (fingers on the keyboard, whatever). This week, he wrote this hilarious, prescient, and genius screed for High Times about how Hunter Biden would be his Sobriety Hall Pass pick (he is sober from all intoxicating substances in this period of his life!). Pat’s produced weed at all levels of the growing supply chain, is a graduate of Humboldt State, and he’s made hash, too. It’s a wacky love letter to hashmaking, and if you know hash people, then you know. All absolute nutters. We salute you.
Picture, if you will, a dirt road.
It's not just any dirt road; it's the most pothole-laden dirt road humankind has ever conceived of or built. Your 2004 Hyundai Sonata with 191,000 clicks on it nearly falls off the side of the hill as you climb and climb and climb and climb all the way up to the top of the mythical Hash Mountain. You mightn't even know it was there if you weren’t looking right at it.
Giant towering redwood and pine trees line the dirt road. It feels as if they are judging you as you lumber up the road at about five to ten miles per hour. At the end of this road is a house. Cannabis plants surround the house in a delightfully haphazard fashion, which indicates that the home’s owner expanded his plant count similarly over the years. Looking closely, you can almost see where prices rose and fell in the maze of 150-gallon smart pots.
Out of the house walks a lanky man about six feet one inch or six feet two inches. He’s wearing a faded T-shirt with the logo of some mysterious and likely long-bankrupt hash brand from the days of yore. The man cracks a smile of crooked teeth, teeth that have never known the loving touch of an orthodontist. He immediately invites you inside for a dab. There is absolutely no time to waste.
The dab is easily 0.4 grams, maybe even a full half, which the hash maker knows is too big for the likes of you, but you go all in because, hey, when in Rome. Your soul leaves your body entirely as you cough like a shrieking banshee and hack up ancient phlegm that probably entered your lungs during the Great Recession. The hashmaker laughs as he does the same treatment without breaking a sweat.
“Time to work,” the man tells you, indicating in such a tone that your presence would likely not be welcome without a little free labor. It would be impolite not to lend a hand.
You enter the cold room, which is basically a regular bedroom lined with Home Depot insulating foam, and kept calm with a window AC unit sketchily attached to a translucent blue device via tin foil. The numbers on the device emit a neon glow, casting an eerie shadow over the room, which makes it feel like it could be used for much more sinister and Dexter-ish purposes. But you try not to dwell on that because you don't have much recourse this far into the middle of nowhere. Best to stay positive.
You are handed a paddle with bite marks taken out of a portion of the handle, likely chewed up by the hashmaker’s Rottweiler affectionately and aptly named “Pussy.” There is also a Border Collie named “Killer” who is not allowed to be around strangers after that whole incident with the trimmers last season. Poor girl still doesn’t have full mobility in her left hand.
You spend the afternoon performing backbreaking labor. You lift trash cans full to the brim with cold hash water and hold the giant mesh bags full of weed, waiting for what seems like hours for the water to drain, all the while able to feel the skin literally peel off your fingertips from the cold air. You spill water all over your shoes as the hash maker laughs that any real hashmaker has his or her pair of galoshes ready to deploy at any given moment.
In fact, there was an excess of talk that afternoon about what designates a real hashmaker instead of a fake one. You can’t help but feel that the hashmaker doesn’t actually like many other hash brands, but you suppose that’s just healthy competition.
You leave that day physically exhausted and high as a helicopter, invigorated with a newfound appreciation for hash. You are determined to discover more, so you will do some due diligence on Instagram. You find a Whole New World scored by the little mermaid and all her stoned aquatic friends of artwork, events, and culture, swirling like a bloody hurricane around one short but potent and satisfying word: hash.
Hash coins, pins, prints, blotters, jars, jar labels, rips, pipes, hats, and haters—the word becomes nearly meaningless as you fall down the beautiful tie-dyed rabbit hole of the hash community.
Before you know it, you’re smoking the most expensive jars you can find from elusive and exclusive hash makers—reclusive and skittish hermits who only show their faces once a year on the harvest moon. Little is known about many of them; much is expected. Legend has it they all carry the same scowl, for they all detest how little their sweat and toil provides for them in the end.
These beautiful men and women all share the same crooked smile and the same minor scowl, for they give so much of their love and energy to these crooked little trichome heads and the accompanying water-soluble minor cannabinoids that cannot love them back - or maybe it can, but only for as long as the high lasts. The resin can’t stare back. It can’t see us; we can only see it. We can’t help the hash. Hash can only help us, and that’s tragic and beautiful at the same time. I wonder if those little trichome heads know how obsessed we are - the ones who stare at resin. I wonder if we’ll ever be able to say a proper thank you.
Hash, if you’re reading this, we love you. Thnks fr th Mmrs, or lack thereof.
A quick last snap before we part:
Read this Rolling Stone piece: “Phish Fan Banned from Sphere for Taking Bong Rip: ‘No Regrets’” by Miles Klee
No promises, but I have reached out to the bongsman, a self-proclaimed “Sour Diesel fan for life,’” in hopes of securing a chat for this very newsletter. Stay tuned.
 | A guest post by
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Why does AI "think" that the wake and bake lady would have her shirt tucked in and hair combed? I think it is a hallucination.