420 All Month: Lemon OG Haze

For today’s entry, I wanted to try something a little different. I will be writing the review immediately after smoking this strain for the first time, so I’m even less sure than normal where this one will go, and I’ll only edit after for mistakes or issues of clarity that will negatively impact the reading experience, not for content or harmless issues of clarity. I don’t know what kind of writing I’ll be doing, so let’s find out.

Alright, I’m back. So, today’s strain is Lemon OG Haze, by River Driver. This was gifted to me by a friend a few days ago, who also grabbed some of the same, and we’re going to compare notes. First impression out of the bag is that it is fragrant. If there weren’t already a couple of strains with the Lemonhead name, I’d say that by smell alone this strain could have been named for the exceptionally sour lemon candy. Oh, and I’ve not looked up this strain ahead of time, so I have no assumptions, other than those that I can’t ignore based on the name. There’s a bit of a pungent skunkiness to it beneath the very tart lemon. If you’ve ever had a chance to smell raw terpenes, the pungence is almost that bright, which I suppose is high praise coming from someone who puts so much stock in terpenes. It reminds me of raw myrcene and limonene terps. Very cool.

The buds are small and tight, rather typical of flower purchased a gram at a time, so no complaints about the size of the nugs. They’re still fuzzy, and you can see that even the pistils are very intact and have a ton of texture. The greens vary between a flat sage and the deep forest green of the sugar leaves. It’s lightly frosty, but the trichomes can be felt more than seen.

My take on the smoke may be a bit more harsh (it’s a joke, as I’m going to describe the smoke as harsh too) than normal, but I’ll make the concession that I smoked out of a glass taster rather than my normal bubbler, so I’m somewhat spoiled on water-filtered smoke, and this was certainly not. I found the first couple or three hits surprisingly harsh and almost acrid tasting. I will blame my snobbery and having to light it outside in the wind, so I may have pulled a little more from the lighter than normal as well. But I’m just telling it like I experienced it for the sake of this experiment. The upside is that the next few hits – even those after relighting it – were much nicer, and the smoke was always light and easy on the lungs, even if the flavor of those early hits brought out the bitter and skunky tones a bit. The later hits were more lemony, leaving an aftertaste mostly of lemon and that odd cannabis flavor that undulates between pungent, skunky, and bitter.

Oh right, this is a Haze. It tastes like Haze. But with lemons. But not Super Lemon Haze. Which is funny, because I specifically didn’t get into the details on the sensory experience of SLH. Well, it’s not as Haze-y tasting as Lemon OG Haze, for whatever that sentiment is worth. I said I’m not editing for content. You were warned.

The effects. This is an interesting one. At first, I felt that jolt of energy, which I was expecting (and hoping for since it’s like 5 in the morning, and if this had been a “Surprise, it’s sedative!” I was in for a rough day). But when I came back inside after smoking the energy quickly turned a little frantic, and I worried that perhaps this may also make for a less than ideal morning. I’m not prone to anxiety or paranoia from cannabis use, and while I’ve ever been uncomfortably high, it’s not from the lemony/sativa uppy highs. I’m just not prone to being too elevated. But I took a minute to get something to drink, and then sat down to write, and as I settled into my routine, the high calmed down, and I could isolate that the fluttery feeling was all brain and not body.

As as side note, I have a medical history that includes some cardiac issues, so I monitor my heart rate and other biometrics not obsessively, but carefully, particularly when I feel off in any way that could be heart-related, so I was – and still am as I write this – paying attention to my vitals. I’m fine. Like I said, the overly energized is my brain working overtime. It’s what I imagine a neurotypical brain would feel like on a reasonable dose of Adderall. I feel like I want to focus, but I want to focus on ALL the things. And once I sat down, my body didn’t feel antsy at all, really. I feel lightly energized, but I don’t have the wiggles (a term I really like from parenting and my days working in behavioral education).

This feels like a nice alternative to the Super Lemon Haze “getting shit done” high, if you want to get things done, but you’re not really particular about what needs doing, or in what order, or if you want to get several things done by alternating between them on a whim. It’s a great “getting low-stakes shit done” or even “doing stuff, but I’m not concerned about what” kind of high. On the other hand, I was able to sit down and bang this out without as much distraction as I thought I’d run into. If you’ve got good habits for getting focused, it might be able to override the hummingbird feel. If I’d been up doing something, like general housework or working on a crafting project (I paint miniatures and make terrain for tabletop gaming, nerd that I am), I could see this moving me from task to task a lot more.

I’m going to leave it there. All in all, a very nice high. Great for first thing in the morning for a really uplifting get-up-and-go that keeps things interesting.

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