What better way to start a blog than to write about finally starting a blog? I know, everything is meta nowadays. I was watching Disney’s Disenchantment with my wife and daughters last night (last night as I begin writing this, at least…). Mrs. Stoned Coast and I kept quietly – and sometimes not so quietly – noting that Disney has leaned real hard into self-referential jokes, making fun of all the big tropes that they themselves made the contemporary standard of the princess/fairytale genre. It feels like Disney said to itself “If Shrek can make fun of us, WE can make fun of us better!” and then crafted their entire (non-acquired properties) model on that premise. I think the snake eating its own tail on this one (sorry for a “spoiler”) was Idina Menzel belting the entirety of her song “Love Power” which is basically an antithetical response to her super hit “Let it Go” from Frozen. But this wasn’t intended to be an essay on Disenchantment or Disney in general, so I’ll move on.
But Maya Rudolph can do no wrong, by the way. It just had to be said. Fight me.
Starting a blog, though. Here I am, a few years into my 40’s, having been sitting on a Creative Writing degree for over two decades, having formulated plans for what feels like dozens – perhaps scores – of writing projects that might propel me into the world of Getting Paid to Write (even as a side hustle), having left all of those novels, short stories, poems, blogs, roleplaying games, et cetera, idiomatically collecting dust on floppy disks, flash drives, hard drives, and Google Drives. The straight-edge teenager way in the back of my brain who wanted to be a fantasy novelist a la Tolkien or Salvatore is confounded by this shift to writing about weed of all things. The public school teacher that I was until fairly recently is also shocked. It’s not that I wasn’t using cannabis therapeutically or recreationally already, but this feels like a real 180.
I’ll write more about this major transition in a future post, but for now what happened is this: I had been teaching for some time when we found ourselves in a global pandemic. My son is high risk due to immunosuppression, so I stayed home with all three of my kids for the 2020-2021 school year, and when it was time to re-enter the world at large I found myself in a headspace which was not ready to go back to teaching. But needing income I applied for a budtending job somewhat on a whim, was hired, and now a year and a half into that new career (it seems like it’s becoming a career and not just a job) I have found that this new work makes me happy. And no, not just because of the cannabis. That helps, certainly, but it’s not as though I’m high all day at work. I’m not. But the work itself scratches a ton of itches and meets a lot of criteria I feel are important, at least to me.
But why the blog? Why spend my own time writing about the thing that I am paid to work with on the clock? Well, one of my few itches that budtending doesn’t scratch is the writing itch. I found very early on at this job that my wordsmithing for reviews of cannabis strains was much appreciated. I had received positive feedback from my supervisors, fellow budtenders, and customers for my florid prose and elaborate specificity when talking about the characteristics of various buds, but when one of my very favorite growers told me that my description of a particular cultivar of theirs was one of the best she’d ever heard, I felt the writing spark reignite, and I knew I needed to share with a wider audience. And it’s not an ego thing. Sure, I feel good when people appreciate the work I put into my reviews, but this also hit on why I enjoyed teaching so much. I like sharing my love of a thing with others and inspiring them to find the means to love that thing too. And if I’m already crafting such meaningful responses to various products, why not just put them all in one place and in a common format. Nerd that I am, there was already a spreadsheet. I just needed to get over my decades-long battle with leaving projects undone, find a blog format I liked, and just commit to getting this going.
And here I am, getting this blog going. I hope you’ll enjoy reading.
Stoned Coast 
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