If you smoke long enough, you’re probably going to find a strain that suits you best, a go-to breeding that fits your personality and hits you just right. When you smoke it, you know. It feels like home. For me, it was that cheese: Barney’s Farm Blue Cheese, to be exact.
The technical information lists BFBC as an indica-dominant plant bred from Cheese, a U.K. strain from the ’80s and ’90s that developed through breedings at an alternative living community called Exodus from the Skunk plant crossed with landrace strains from Afghanistan, Mexico and Colombia. This Cheese was bred by DJ Short to Blueberry, an 80/20 indica cross whose ancestor plants include Thai, Afghani and Mexican strains.
I remember the day I grabbed a zip from my boy Charlie D. I remember the blazer I was wearing, a tweedy number approximately ¾ of a size too small before that kind of thing was cool. I wrapped my scarf around my head and wandered around the edge of the city in a misty rain at a gentle glide. That Cheese was some serious outer space weed. My mind rose straight through my crown chakra, past the clouds and into the universe and it hasn’t stopped yet. I was carried away with the high, a starchild with galaxies in my eyes.
Those two quick puffs from a wooden bowl changed everything. It was a spiritual awakening, to borrow a phrase. As I think back on it, six years later, I know now that it was half the Blue Cheese and half me. I walked over to Charlie’s house a couple hours later with a couple questions, still carrying constellations in my gaze.
“Can we get more of this?”
He nodded.
“Can we, uh …” and I remember the way my voice rose, “grow it?”
When life is right, I don’t have to work at things. Everything makes sense. It’s fluid; it flows. I’ve known that flow my whole life. After kindergarten, laying under the three row of pines between my yard and the meadow, teaching myself how to whistle; at the town pool as a high-schooler holding my breath for another second or two each day until I could stay stuck to the 10-foot bottom for three and a half minutes; running through defenses during lacrosse senior year, when it was sunny every day even if it wasn’t; that September day two Siberian huskies dragged the future Mrs. G. through the back door at my job training dogs …
Marijuana is a nice tool. It has an ability to alter consciousness that works for me. It softens my focus and slows down my breathing. It works like tai chi or rereading Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son or a walk in the woods or dancing to Viral Sound until I start to blend into the molecules surrounding me. When I had my basement garden, watering my “hula girls,” their leaves swaying to the fans, I knew why. Soil, water, wind, sun, it’s pure and elemental. It can help us remember that we’re children of planet Earth, children of the dirt, of the water, the wind and the sun.
The cheese brought me there because I was ready to go. It helped me to remember that every sensation I’ve ever had is stored away within me, accessible if I’m willing to work toward it and that life is out there just waiting for me, for all of us, to commit to it. Let’s do some work between now and next week to get into the flow. Be well ’til then.
Christopher Gallagher lives with his wife and their four dogs and two horses. Life is pretty darn good.
