Bread and Butter, Happy Belated Holidays, and Why I Took 3 Weeks Off

Good morning, Stoned Coasters, and welcome back. First thing’s first: while casual and new readers may not have noticed that I haven’t posted in a few weeks, and even regular readers may not have noticed because of the holidays, I do try to post every week, so I’d like to apologize for ghosting the blog for a bit. I ended up in the hospital for a few days not long after my last post, and for the same reason I briefly mentioned in my post back in August of 2023. For those interested, I’ll explain. If you’re just here for the cannabis content, feel free to jump ahead.

Basically, August of last year and then again last month fairly suddenly I started to lose most of the feeling in my extremities from knees to toes and elbows to my fingertips, accompanied by some numbness in my face, excessive fatigue, and intermittent brain fog. The easiest way to sum up the whole experience is that it feels like the numbness and tingly sensation after the initial jolt calms down after you hit your funny bone, paired with a feeling of being anywhere from slightly to very drunk, but drunk in that way where you know you’re more drunk than you meant to be and are not enjoying it. Both instances I ended up in the ER and then admitted to the hospital. Both instances I was tested for Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and similar disorders like Guillain Barre, as well as strokes (both major and minor), Meningitis, Lyme Disease, a wide variety of cardiac-related diseases (I had a freak but minor heart attack almost 10 years ago, so they look at my heart all the time just in case), and I saw a neurologist several times to test for all manner of nerve-related issues.

All that came to nothing. Possible explanations included the slim possibility that some of the above mentioned problems could be so early and minor that they’re undetectable and it was just a random flair-up, or that I was having an overreaction to some unnamed virus and that as I got better, that was my system just working the virus out. And I did get better. I didn’t have anything close to this happen from last year until this most recent event. But now it’s a pattern and my doctors and I are casting a wider and deeper net. I’m going to be having a contrast MRI of my brain this time, in addition to the non-contrast MRI’s that I had done on my brain, neck, and spine both last year and this year already, and the lumbar puncture (spinal tap) that I had this year too. The MRI’s I’ve had done looked for MS and other nerve-related issues. The contrast MRI will look at the blood flow in my brain. As a couple of doctors put it: we’ve looked at the electrical, now let’s look at the plumbing.

This all also may tie into a chronic issue I’ve been dealing with most of my life, which is Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS), a connective tissue disorder that causes all sorts of things, like hyperelastic joints and all sorts of problems with various organs and other soft tissues, like nerves and cardiovascular valves. It’s one of those medical diagnoses that can help bring a lot of seemingly unrelated medical problems under one umbrella, and while that doesn’t solve anything (there isn’t a pill you can take for it), it can help having a starting point for medical care. I’ve got a fantastic doctor helping with a lot of the hEDS already, but these numby-tinglies (as my neurologist calls them) are a bit beyond the norm for hEDS, so it’s still a mystery.

So that’s the bit of medical news and why I haven’t posted in a few weeks. At least it didn’t derail me like it did last time. I’d only published the blog a few short months before the first time this happened, and it got me out of my groove for longer than I’d been posting. I’m glad I had established a better routine this time around, so I wasn’t taken from this for nearly as long. I love writing to this amorphous audience of family, friends, customers, and strangers, and as I’ve passed an average novel’s worth of words on this blog, the reality of eventually turning this into a memoir in the form of vignettes all through the lens of cannabis has me really excited for the future of this project.

So, some happiness! Happy holidays to everyone, albeit a little late. I hope the holiday season was good to everyone. We had a pretty good one here. We seem to have a “big gifts” year for the kids every few years, and this was one of them. Some of those gifts include a laptop for my son, a kitten for one of the twins, and hermit crabs for the other (this is more fair than it may sound). We also got a 3d printer as a family gift, of which we’re still learning the ins and outs, but it is pretty cool having one, and once we’re all familiar enough with it for it to not be a big production every time we print anything, I think it’ll be pretty great. I’ve already successfully printed some minis for D&D, as well as a few other things, and the prints that come out are excellent. Oh, and I was able to make it to PDank Christmas to see Spose, despite having just gotten out of the hospital (I stood in the back like an old person), and it was an exceptional show. I need to make that a regular thing. I spent too long not going to see live music, and now that I’m in the habit (the family does Guster on the Ocean every year now, and my wife and I have made more excuses to see some bands we love in the last couple of years, either together or with others, like Cake, Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service, GZA, and They Might Be Giants), I plan to make PDank an annual thing, like I probably should have years ago. Thanks other Ryan for a great show.

And on to the cannabis. What are we even talking about today? Bread and Butter by The King’s Stache. This is a fascinating cultivar. I love anytime we get new strains at the shop, but I get particularly excited about strains that don’t have a provenance that immediately tells me something. It’s one thing to see an OG Sour Purple Monkey Cookies Haze (a completely made up example), as the name is likely telling me a lot about where it comes from and what I’m likely to experience with it, but Bread and Butter, whose parents are Donkey Butter and Baker’s Dozen, didn’t tell me much. It’s listed as either a 50/50 Hybrid or an Indica dominant Hybrid in various places online, and we have it pegged as a Terpinolene dominant strain as far as terpenes profile. Just a little digging gave me any more to work with, as Donkey Butter is a hybrid of Grease Monkey and Triple OG, and Baker’s Dozen is Milk & Cookies crossed with Rainbow Chip. So, I’ve met all of Bread and Butter’s grandparents, and I have a pretty decent opinion of all four of them.

But I have to admit, while I would have tried this strain anyway at some point (as I endeavor to try everything we sell, within reason), I have to give credit to my buddy Shane, the frequently mentioned budtender that works with me, that I like to refer to as my “pre-roll guy.” If we have it in a joint, he’s had it, and I trust his takes. Despite the listing as a more Indica-leaning strain, he reported that it was an excellent daytime high, good for being active and getting stuff done. The Terpinolene dominance and some of the lighter Indicas in the lineage might have hinted at that, but it was nice to hear before trying it. So, with some time to myself for the first time in a while, I finally got to trying it last week.

My first impression is that this flower smells sweet and fresh, with light notes of gas and dough, I suspect carrying down from one grandparent on each side (Grease Monkey and Milk & Cookies respectively). But I wasn’t satisfied with that broad of a description; there was something more specific lingering somewhere between the aroma and my memory. I’ve done enough of these that the disaggregated aroma notes sometimes cause the more cohesive “what does this smell like?” description to evaporate. So I enlisted my favorite nose to help me out, and she helped me come to a much better, more narrative and descriptive conclusion: a vernal forest, wet moss and earth and loam, almost like petrichor, but not from rain, rather from a small and winding tributary running toward a not-too-distant river. It’s specific to parts of the Hudson Valley, though perhaps not exclusive to it. How the dough and gas folds in seems lost in this description, but nonetheless it captures the greater experience of the aroma of Bread and Butter.

The buds themselves are somehow vibrant despite being largely composed of paler greens. In and amongst are sugar leaves of a darker piney green and light orange pistils. The nugs in the jars I’ve opened have mostly been slightly irregular and small-to-medium in size. It’s perhaps a difficult cultivation for getting glamour shots at home, but in the hand, the buds are really nice to look at, and have a good texture, feeling dry and dusty, with a spongy feel to them, allowing the to grind very well. These buds are also just covered in trichomes; the picture I took had to be color-adjusted a little to show the details better because the colors washed out so easily due to the snowy reflection.

Strangely, the first hit each time I smoked Bread and Butter was not the friendliest, I suspect owing to the kief-like nature of the flower once it’s ground. Those aforementioned trichomes and overall composition of the buds leave the ground flower so well broken down that it lights quickly and easily, making those first hits kind of smokey and a bit harsh, but once the bowl becomes more embers than ignition, it smokes quite well, becoming creamier, both in texture and flavor, again harkening back to its Milk & Cookies lineage. Which brings me to the flavor, which was simpler than the aroma, carrying those lighter notes of diesel into a strong earthy and herbal flavor, again tempered by the creamy flavor that comes after the first hit or two. Ultimately, after that first shock, it’s a very enjoyable smoke.

Which brings me to the effects. Bread and Butter has a somewhat simple kind of high, but it’s quite nice. I’ll go back to Shane’s description that it’s a great daytime high, good for doing stuff. It’s not the hyper focus and energy of a Super Lemon Haze for instance, but it’s uplifting, energizing enough, and has a kind of brainy focus that could be distracting (I’ve written about “hummingbird focus” before, where I can flitter from focus to focus, and it’s almost like that), but if I settled into a single activity I was able to stay in that mode and be productive. The body high was minimal, but supported the head high. I found it to be gently energizing, with a lightness that kept me moving. It did come with some hunger, so I made sure to just stay full of water and to keep myself busy.

This is a great high for cleaning or other chores, for tackling a project you want to do but maybe were dissuaded by the scope of it, for making yourself get back to your blog that you love but that you’d taken a few weeks off from writing. I recommend it for anyone who’s an all day or at least regularly during the day smoker, whether that’s for powering through manual labor, just trying to keep your household together while your kids are at school and you have those few pressure minutes or maybe hours to yourself but that means chores, or a college student with a lot of work to do outside of class.

---