420 All Month: Hyperion, and the Unrelated First Time I Smoked Weed

I will admit, Hyperion has been vexing me. It’s so good, but every time I’ve sat down to write a review for it (having just smoked it or otherwise) I haven’t been able to come up with anything interesting to write about other than the descriptive part of the review itself. Now, I have written some of these reviews having had no idea when I sat down what I’d be writing about, but for good or ill, something bubbled forth and became a framework for the review. And yet, Hyperion wouldn’t seem to open up like that. I would have moved on and forgotten this strain, but I haven’t been able to; as I said above, it’s just so good. It deserves a review.

So, I asked myself, what if anything has been unique, or at least most interesting about Hyperion? In my Goji OG and Lemon Shortbread reviews I wrote about a couple of ways by which the term “euphoric” moved from being an adjective I reserve for rare highs to being a more commonly used descriptor for a broader range of highs, and I realized that Hyperion had done that for me with the word “tingly.” I’m not sure why I was holding onto this one, unless this clip from Arrested Development (the show, not the band) explains it, but I’m not sure.

All that being said, a tingling body high still wasn’t telling me a story. Until this morning. And I have to tell you all, I’m so relieved. I really have wanted to review Hyperion for a while now, and I just couldn’t shortchange it with a brief and potentially uninteresting post. Recently I was regaling a coworker with the story of the first time I got high, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t told many of my coworkers this story, despite my predilection for autobiography. Now I’m going to share it with you all.

I didn’t start smoking weed until I was in college, which doesn’t necessarily sound interesting in and of itself, but the transition was abrupt and sharp for me. I grew up having a pretty low opinion of using any substances for mind-altering reasons. I didn’t like using the term “straight edge,” but categorically that’s what it was. I just didn’t want to be associated with that 90’s-style hardcore punk rock vegan straight edge Free Tibet crowd. Of course now I can’t believe I was kind of a dick about either of those things (weed for one, and all that other stuff for the other). This was the mid-to-late 90’s, and had I pigeonholed myself into the nerdy band geek Dungeons & Dragons and anime ska kid type. I just didn’t have time for all that drinking and getting high nonsense, which is hilarious, because all – and I mean literally almost ALL – of my closest friends drank and smoked weed, and in most cases I didn’t even know. These friends have – later in adulthood as we’ve reminisced about our youth – noted that my parents were the NARC-iest parents, and since I was already inclined to not drink or smoke, my friends tactfully avoided doing it or talking about it around me so that there was no way it got to my parents, and thus their parents. Which only further made me believe at the time that mine was the righteous choice, since it seemed like the people around me whom I valued most also didn’t indulge. My god, I was naive.

So, I get to college in the fall of ‘98. It’s a small, highly selective liberal arts school which I got into largely on the merits of my poetry portfolio, though I intended to focus on fiction more than poetry once there. This is a school that perennially ranks as a top college in the Princeton Review’s category “Birkenstock-wearing, tree-hugging, clove-smoking vegetarians.” On top of all of those other nerdy interests I mentioned above, I was also all of these other things. Which seems now to be in such stark contrast. I would smoke a clove cigarette or a cigar, but not weed? It seems like maybe I wasn’t so morally opposed to weed or drinking, as I was terrified of breaking the law. I wasn’t judgy about adults drinking alcohol; hell, my dad has been homebrewing for decades longer than it’d been trendy, and not only didn’t I judge him poorly for that, I thought it was a very cool hobby, one that I might go on to pick up… once I turned 21, I guess.

Upon arriving at this Upstate New York college, I was quickly labeled a hippy by my new friends, partially on the merits of the aforementioned Princeton Review’s list of qualities that I shared with our new school, but also – seriously – simply because I was also from Maine, a characteristic which I shared with more than 20 other members of my class of about 400. What’s that, about 5%, making it a disproportional representation of state and international populations?

I’m going to only mention for the sake of being thorough that I got (lightly) drunk my third night at college, breaking that whole “not drinking” thing pretty quickly.

About six weeks into college, I found myself one afternoon in my dorm room, doing some reading for my “Sexuality and Spirituality” class. The way my room was arranged, the foot of my bed was against the windows, so that if I was lying down on the bed, my head was pointed directly at the door, though I would be facing the windows. I was in such a recumbent posture while reading when a dorm-mate of mine whom I had become fast friends with asked from the door if I had five bucks so he could buy a joint off of another new acquaintance of ours. He also offered to share it with me if I could lend him the cash. I told him I had 3 dollars on me, but he was welcome to it and didn’t need to share, as I was still not interested. He graciously took the loan and disappeared for at least an hour, and I was alerted to his unnecessary return by having my view of the book I was still reading broken by the image of two joints sliding – from my perspective – down from above me and directly in front of my eyes. I tipped my head up/back to see my friend’s upside down face, grinning ear-to-ear.

“He gave me two for the five dollars,” he told me. “But Adam gave me the other two dollars, so I have to share with him now, and I don’t want to smoke with just Adam, it’ll be weird. This one is yours. Please come smoke with us so I don’t have to smoke with just Adam.”

Who these two friends are, or more specifically, the backgrounds of these two friends is only really relevant here for helping to draw an almost comical contrast of the three of us. Other than noting that I grew up very middle class, and that I’m white, I’ve described myself enough for this post, so that’s me. The friend with the joints, William, only went by (and I believe still does) what had become his stage name from rapping. I met his family, and they confirmed that they called him by his stage name, and so did his teachers in school, his professors, and so on. His family was not only the only Puerto Rican family on their block in the Lower East Side, but the only non-black family on their block. His parents moved to New York from Puerto Rico, and even though it’s an American territory, his was a very classic immigrant family upbringing, as he told it. Adam, this other friend, was an upper-class Jewish kid from Philadelphia studying theater, but was also the kind of guy who we would later learn would trip on acid and eat leaves off of trees, or dress as a trenchcoat-wearing flasher for Halloween and would actually flash people while we reverse Trick-or-Treated around campus (please keep in mind that this last thing was less shocking in context, as our college had a clothing optional stance most of the time, and while it was rarely taken advantage of, it wasn’t unheard of to see a bit of casual nudity from time to time). I could see, even that early on, why William was reticent to get high with Adam without a wingman of sorts.

So, we headed down to the laundry room of our terribly odd dorm. The building was built on stilts over a small ravine that ran through a chunk of central campus, so the lounge and laundry room felt like they were hanging off the bottom of the building (because I suppose they technically were). Having smoked cloves and cigars, I was confident that I could take a couple hits to look like I was participating, and then just hang with the other two while they smoked the rest. Plus, the wisdom of the time told us that no one gets high their first time smoking. I was in the clear.

The first joint got passed around, and William smoked like he knew what he was doing, and I took a hit that was smoother than a clove but still pretty nasty as I recall, and Adam took a puff and coughed his brains out, but kept insisting that he was a veteran at this and the coughing was unexpected. And it went around again, and I took a bigger hit to show off, and Adam nearly died taking another hit. And it kept going like this until we finished both joints. Looking back, knowing what I know now, we probably smoked between a gram and a half and two grams between us. So I smoked about what I’d smoke if I was just burning one solo nowadays.

Following this, I felt the best course of action was to go out on the small deck overlooking the ravine and have a clove. I was feeling a little lightheaded, and I thought some clear September air and a clove would normalize things. Before I had taken my second drag on that butt, the weed high hit me. I sat down into the lounge from the deck so my feet were still outside while my body fell back onto the hard and scratchy dorm carpet, and I just lay there for a while. Eventually another friend, Sam, whom would become my roommate and bestie at college, came down to the lounge and stood over me chuckling. I’ll never forget the words exactly as he said them, though the rest of the evening was a little blurry. “Awe, Hippie, did you get high? Do you want me to make you a double batch of beef ramen?”

All this story because Hyperion has a fantastic tingly body high, and it reminded me of the first time I smoked weed, a little over 25 years ago. This got crazy long, so let’s get to the review, shall we?

Hyperion doesn’t seem like it would stand out at first glance, so maybe what has kept me interested in part has been this tug of nostalgia that I hadn’t yet identified. The flower is a clean, bright green, with light brown pistils. The buds are slightly sticky and soft. All in all, it looks and feels like exceptionally good but slightly unremarkable cannabis. The aroma is the greenest I can imagine. It ticks almost all the green-smelling boxes on my list: herbal, mint, pine, and sage. It’s fresh and bright, like a cut-your-own Christmas tree farm, or the winter-themed section of a candle store if all the vanilla and cinnamon were gone. The flavor of the velvety smoke is complex, maintaining the herbal overtone, but bringing in rich and slightly bitter notes of wood and nuts and spices. It’s quite delicious. The high is a pretty standard but potent stony euphoria. It lingers pleasantly, calming the mind and body, while maintaining a manageable mood elevation. But that body high: it’s tingly. It’s not quite the rush of sensation of the ASMR-esque Pure Kush, nor the creep of relaxation from Albariño, it’s just a sustained tingly feeling.

I always hope that you all enjoy my ramblings, but this one is a deep cut, and given that I work in the cannabis industry, it’s a fairly important story to me. William was one of the very first people I told about getting my budtending job. So yeah, I hope you all enjoyed, and give Hyperion a try. It’s well worth it.

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