A Rambling
I had started a review for this week, and there have been times that I’ve attached a completely unrelated story or mini-lesson (for new readers, I was a teacher in my previous life and my undergraduate degree is in Creative Writing, so I am prone to bouts of unsolicited pedagoguery when I don’t otherwise have a story about the strain to share), but between starting the review and today, something happened that I can’t bring myself to shoehorn into a lighthearted preamble to a strain that has nothing to do with the story. Not this time.
This story is too consequential, too important to me and to the subject of the story to be clumsily juxtaposed against my normal tone. If you’re here for the laughs, or the reviews, I offer a sincere apology, but I also implore you to keep reading. This story informs my role in the cannabis industry perhaps more than any other, and while I take great pride in my reviews and in particular those reviews for strains that really spoke to me and inspired prosaic descriptions, I don’t know if I’d be as good at what I do, or if it would have sustained me the way that it has without this story.
As the Ghost of Christmas Present from A Muppet Christmas Carol says, “Know me better, man!”
A little over two years ago, not a month after I had been promoted to the Budbar Supervisor at the recreational dispensary where I still work, I found myself helping a customer who was entirely new to the legal cannabis market. This by itself is entirely unnoteworthy, as this happens quite regularly, but this time was different. This customer – whom I’ll call Hugh for this piece – was hurting in a way I still don’t know if I can fully describe. Hugh is just a few years younger than me, only months younger than my own little brother, and is a Marine Corps veteran with just days more than 20 years of service to his record. This is a man who towers over me (I’m 5’8”), and sports a groomed Viking-esque beard and tattoos up and down his arms (at the very least). He is the kind of person that is unmissable in mixed company.
But this grizzly bear of a human was unmistakably haunted, and hurting. It was clear to me before we began chatting, and only became all the more obvious as he told me about what brought him into the store. Details aside (and Hugh was professionally courteous about sparing what I assume are the more gruesome details), he had engaged in some of the more physically and psychologically damaging aspects of modern military service. And the lasting damage he suffered from was and is the largely invisible kind, as I imagine it is with many of those who have served. I’d never seen a person in real life existing in that constant state of always knowing where all the entrances and exits are, keeping his back protected by the environment, being in a totally safe space and still constantly showing subtle signs of being on guard. I know people who have been assaulted, and there was a short period of time in my early twenties when I lived feeling particularly on my guard due to specific event (we’ll see if I’m ever ready to share that one). I’ve seen people who feel as though they must protect themselves in this way, but this was deeper, more total and complete than I’d otherwise ever seen in a person. Despite what would seem comical given our difference in physical stature, I wanted to wrap him up in my arms like he was my own child and tell him that I would do everything I could to help, and that as much as I could possibly promise, things would be okay.
I’d like to offer a personal aside at this point, just for some context. I have never served in the military, and in fact abhor the idea at least for myself. But that being said, I come from a family with a lot of military and military-adjacent service. My father was drafted toward the end of the Vietnam War and served in the Navy on a pair of aircraft carriers. Both of my biological grandfathers and my step-grandfather all served in the Navy as well, with my paternal grandfather earning an officer’s commission. One uncle through marriage served in the Coast Guard, and a couple of cousins through marriage currently serve in the Army, with one having risen to the rank of Major General (for real). I also have the kind of family that one might generously call “thousands of cousins,” and I’m sure there are more service members in that group that I’m forgetting. Hell, it’s not the military, but my brother is an Eagle Scout in the (Boy) Scouts of America and a close first cousin is a merchant marine. Point is, while I have a lot of problems with the military and the military industrial complex (personally, I’m somewhat of a pacifist), I have a deep respect for so many of the individual people who have served or do serve, and while there are certainly some who join for what I might think are the wrong reasons, so many service members were just looking for a leg up, and what many of them have to sacrifice to do so seems terribly unequal to me.
But back to Hugh. My dispensary had just started focusing on terpenes, and while some of the more nuanced distinctions and the depth of importance of terpenes were yet to be made quite so foundational to my approach when talking about cannabis, I was already all in and excited to explore how these compounds could really shape an individual’s experience. We’re careful to draw a line between medical advice and recreational effects, but there is so much overlap that they’re really inseparable, so it’s more about verbiage and not making specific medical claims. When a customer is seeking medical or therapeutic assistance, many of us budtenders go directly to personal and reliable anecdotal experiences to inform our customer service.
I couldn’t even begin to draw appropriate parallels for Hugh, but I understood intellectually what he was dealing with, and I drew on the closest and most recent experience I could to talk about my experiences with cannabis as a tool rather than a toy. I won’t rehash the whole story about why the strain Princess Magic Girl is so important to me, but you should take a moment to read that post here before finishing this one. The long and short is that the calming effects of that strain helped me reacclimate to being in public as the worst of the COVID pandemic was finally behind us, as much as we could be sure of that at the time. This was where we started. I feel like Princess could get its own mini series of posts, the Grocery Shopping Adventures of Princess Magic Girl, Princess Magic Girl vs. The Anxiety Gremlins, Princess Magic Girl Goes to Work Like a Normal Person. That kind of thing.
It’s beside the point getting into all the details of the strains, methods of consumption, cannabinoids and terpenes, and all that that helped Hugh. The point is, that with some trial and error (luckily much less error than not) we were able to find specific products and broad types of strains and methods that began to help. I can’t recall the exact timeline, but to the best of my recollection, within just the first few visits, Hugh reported that he had stopped drinking, down from – and again the details may be a little off – a handle of liquor every couple or few days. Regardless, if you’re measuring your drinking in handles, that is usually very dangerous. And let me repeat that: he had stopped drinking. I can’t in good conscience say that cannabis can help everyone cut an alcohol addiction, let alone one like that, but at least in this case it did.
There were other things that the cannabis helped Hugh with as well, from sleeping to pain relief, to simply helping him feel better in general, to feel like he had some control over his life again. And all of this had the backdrop of being a father to two daughters not much younger than my own. In every way, my heart just went out to this guy, and it meant more to me than I was fully able to comprehend or describe at the time.
If you didn’t read the Princess Magic Girl post before, I implore you to read it now. It really is a big piece of the backdrop of this story. I throw out there a lot that I’m a former teacher. I used to say “former educator,” because my teaching roles through my almost 15 years working in schools were not always strictly classroom teacher positions, and in fact the school year that the pandemic shut down early (2019-2020) saw me transitioning to the school library from the classroom, a move that I thought would be the new direction of my career. But coming out of the first full school year affected by COVID, where I had stayed home with my own kids (two 1st graders and one 3rd grader) to oversee their remote learning, I was not ready to go back to school myself. It was tough decision, made only easier by the fact that I had struggled for years to find a “permanent” teaching or library position anyway, that I had almost completely isolated myself from humans not directly related to me for that year and a half, that I knew I wasn’t going to be fully comfortable out in the real world yet, and that it seemed like what it meant to be a teacher had changed so drastically and so rapidly that I wasn’t sure I even wanted to be a teacher anymore. This all lead me to feel like I wouldn’t be good at the job as it needed to be, and not just for myself but for my potential students. I’d rather not be a teacher than be a shitty teacher.
But teaching is a soul-filling job. Teachers aren’t in it for the money (they’re criminally underpaid), or the glory (they’re often unsung beyond the most local of levels if that), or the prestige (teachers seem to get the blame for all student failings anymore), which is all insane. Most teachers are putting in more than they’re required to, with their time, their energy, and even their money. I know this is a soapbox and I know I’m doing the equivalent of yelling from it right now, but teaching is a job that you really need to want to be the very best you can be, and most teachers do in one way or another. I always wonder what those occasional teachers are there for that seem to hate the job. If you’ve got the credentials to be a teacher, you’re qualified to do other things that you might not hate so much, and that probably come with better perks. I chose to be a teacher because the very act of facilitating someone learning makes me happy. Seeing someone “get it,” or find a new interest or love that they can throw themselves into because you helped them access that thing, there’s nothing like it.
Changing professional fields had me worried on two fronts mostly: would I find it fulfilling in a way that I had structured my adult and professional life around to that point, and would it be able to sustain me enough to consider making it a career, as I’m in my 40’s and I’m not really looking for a distraction, but something with staying power. I have kids, and a mortgage, and all that, so I need a job to have the potential to be a real job, not just something that comes with a week-to-week paycheck alone.
Before Hugh had come into my store, I’d helped other customers who were struggling in one way or another. Common areas in which we see customers looking for relief are sleep, pain, anxiety, and general mood. There are the occasional customers with more complex issues, but as I’ve mentioned, we’re recreational, so our focus really is more on experience rather than diagnostics. But no one I’d helped before had presented such a case that I felt so invested in, especially once he had started coming back with those successes like the aforementioned stopping drinking. We developed an excellent budtender/consumer relationship, exchanging phone numbers so that I could contact him about commissioning a piece of fine woodwork which he had shown me examples of, and so that he could check with me about when I was working. I felt like I had made a friend, really. And he was regularly expressing his gratitude for all the help I’d provided.
So I was both elated for him, but personally saddened when he told me that his family had finally found a house and were moving about an hour north. I knew we could stay in touch, but that he was likely not going to be frequenting the store as often if at all. But the hardest this all hit me was a series of texts I received from him on Christmas Eve two years ago. It went like this (edited only slightly for grammar, punctuation, spelling):
Hugh: Yo! Merry Christmas! You working?
Me: To you as well! I am not working today, though. Got that family time this year.
Hugh: Fuck yeah man, enjoy! Was gonna swing by and say hey before Christmas but I waited too long. 😂🤣
Me: Thanks, dude. I appreciate that so much!
Hugh: Are you kidding me? You helped save my life bro, my family gets another Christmas with me because of your help.
Me: I might cry. For real.
And I kind of did cry a little bit, or at least got teary. I’ve been working on this piece for two days now, having reread those texts several times, and I am getting a bit misty-eyed now just typing those words. To be told directly, in no uncertain terms, that you helped save someone’s life, not metaphorically, not hyperbolically, but literally, and in a professional context, too, it’s unparalleled. Hugh was, by his own words, drinking himself to death, if the other things he was struggling with didn’t get to him first. Certainly there are other professions where saving lives is the job itself (EMT’s, doctors, therapists), but as a 40-something former teacher dad of three less than a year into selling recreational cannabis? To have had that profound of an impact on someone’s life? It changed the job for me.
Why am I telling this story now? Why did I have to put aside the strain review I was working on for this? Well, this past weekend I was at a funeral about an hour north. My closest cousin’s father had passed away recently. I never remember him being married to my aunt, as they divorced long enough ago, so he wasn’t really much a part of the family growing up. I’d met him a few times, and he was a really fun dude as I recall. But that’s not the point here. My family was at the reception after the funeral service, meeting cousins of cousins and the like. My kids were playing with my cousin’s kids. Everything was about as nice as it could be for that kind of event.
As I was making my way to the front of the rec hall to get something from my bag, I noticed that someone standing in the wide doorway had a service dog lying at his feet, and as is my habit I ignored the dog so that it could do its job undisturbed. But that meant I happened to ignore the person too. I thought nothing of it at first, as most of the people there were distant relations and friends of my uncle that I didn’t know. In my peripheral vision, this tall gentleman had the look of the side of my cousin’s family that isn’t blood related to me.
And then he seemed more familiar. I moved up a bit so as to be in his peripheral vision too, and now that I was certain of who it was, I raised my hand and casually pointed to him. He noticed this movement, looked at me, and I watched the recognition light up Hugh’s face.
I asked him what in the world he was doing there. He casually replied that the son of the deceased was his best friend. And he in turn asked what I was doing there. To which I replied that this best friend of his was my first cousin, which I had told him about when he had told me where he was moving two years prior. In fact, I’d joked that this cousin who lived in that same town Hugh was moving to looked somewhat like a cross between me and him, so if he met a guy that looked like that, it was probably my cousin.
We laughed, we hugged, we caught up.
Turns out that the two other kids playing with my kids and second cousins were Hugh’s kids. He’d met my cousin when his own daughter had told him about her new friend at school, who happened to be my cousin’s daughter, who is also very close with my own daughters. We basically spent the next hour and a half or so retelling our story to everyone there, even though they’d almost all heard it from us individually before. When Hugh introduced me to his wife, I was introduced as something along the lines of “This is the guy,” and she knew who he meant right away. She hugged me, and thanked me for everything I’d done for Hugh, and for their family. She almost cried, I almost cried. This was not what I was expecting from this funeral, to say the least.
There’s certainly more to the story, like how Hugh is working with a group to help get US military veterans access to cannabis for medical and therapeutic uses, which apparently would otherwise disqualify vets from getting other health benefits. Or the other ways in which he is doing better across the board because of being able to get his physical and mental health much more under control. It was intensely gratifying to see him with his family too, outside of the context of the store. We lamented that we didn’t have a chance to sneak off and actually smoke a joint together. And of all things – and this is one of those “the universe is just weird like this sometimes” things – I had thrown a Princess Magic Girl pre-roll in my bag should anyone be feeling their feelings a little too hard at the funeral and wanted to chill a bit. I presented this joint to Hugh, as a gift for him that I didn’t even know it was when I packed it. He looked like a kid on Christmas.
I have enough day-to-day interactions that scratch the teacher itch, so much so that I’ve been saying for a while that I’m still surprised how much this job fills that gap so much more than I anticipated, but these big wins are so very significant to me. Not that other budtenders aren’t personally affected by the customers they help; I don’t want to minimize anyone’s experiences. But for me personally, I had always viewed myself as someone whose professional life would be built around making other people’s lives better in tangible ways, and leaving a career where that was the point to one where that point was a bit more nebulous seemed risky. My experience with Hugh solidified for me that this was a good choice, that what I’m doing does matter, even if not at every moment and with every customer. But for the ones where it does matter, it matters more than I ever thought it would.
Thanks for reading. I’ll be back next week with a normal review.
Stoned Coast 