Worlds Within Worlds Within Worlds: Looking For Answers at GanjaCon
by Chris Stamm
ONE: PILLOW BRAIN
I don’t know anything about cannabis. I know I like weed that makes me forget I am afraid of everything. I know I like a strain called Soul Assassin. It makes my head feel like a pillow and my pillow feel like an even better pillow than the pillow in my head. It makes me forget about checking the locks on the front door again. It makes me forget about earthquakes and falling airplane parts.
I want to feel good. That is all I care about. I am not interested in growing methodology and bong design and flavor profiles. I don’t have enough mental real estate. I have already committed myself to understanding baseball statistics. There is nowhere for cannabis awareness to go. I have to Google “difference between sativa and indica” about once a week.
I eat at McDonald’s sometimes. And I think I like knowing that my hamburger and my mouth form the final link of a devastating chain that is not good for anyone or anything. I think I like knowing I have chosen not only a hamburger but a horrible way of life. Not because I desire a horrible way of life, but because I want my experiences to have depth. Marijuana short circuits this desire for knowledge because its effects produce an illusion of deep understanding. Like this: “Wow, I am a pillow and my pillow is a pillow and really we are all just pillows.”
But I know I should care more about this thing I put into my body on a semi-regular basis. I know I should want to know how a guy who likes feeling like a pillow is able to achieve such profound feelings of pillowness.
So I enter GanjaCon with a vague mission: I want to get past the novelty and occasional silliness of a public celebration of cannabis. I want to try to take the people who take weed seriously seriously. I want to learn.
TWO: ON CRUTCHES
Rory and Ryan are the first vendors who must contend with my ignorance. They are repping Crutch Cards, a Eugene-based outfit that prints business cards designed to double as crutches. What the fuck is a crutch? Rory patiently explains: crutches are little tips for the mouth-end of a joint. They prevent the soggy roach compression that makes those final hits so frustrating. People can fashion crutches out of any thick paper. This is a thing that people have been doing for a long time: rolling up little pieces of paper and making joint filters. I did not know this.
THREE: THE TERPENE SCENE
I know about THC and CBD. I know the former can make me feel like I am dying. I know the latter helps me sleep through the night without having overwhelming dreams about ex-girlfriends hugging me in grocery stores. I also know this might be a placebo effect created by budtender bluster. So I want to dig into this CBD vs. THC thing today. But at the Zion Cannabis booth, I find out about terpenes. Turns out cannabis isn’t a two-party system after all. Zion’s Taylor Gorman fills me in.
“Terpenes are chemical compounds that are found in the trichomes with the cannabinoids, and they actually attribute to the smell and flavor profile of the cannabis,” Gorman explains. “They also have a lot to do with the effects, so we thought it was important to take those test results from the lab and put those [terpene] numbers on the menu. They’re really crucial to figuring out how that cut of a strain is gonna treat you.”
Taylor tells me that there are these terpenes called pinene and limonene that combine to create an anxious feeling. This mixture might account for the silent screams that fill the space right behind my eyeballs when I smoke certain strains of cannabis. I did not know this.
FOUR: A BETTER WORLD
I thought stoners loved video games. But the line for Given Borthwick’s virtual reality station is only three people deep. Given Borthwick is not the name of a company. It is the name of a man. It is a great name. I hang at the periphery of Borthwick’s curtained booth and watch a guy wearing a VR headset wave wireless joysticks in real space as his virtual hands do who knows what in god knows where. When he comes back to our world, I ask him if he smoked before entering the virtual realm. “No no no,” he says. “In real life, that’s amazing. It’s gonna change everything.”
I get in line. I know I should be learning about cannabis, but I need to see the future. The woman in front of me shares my desire.
“There’s free pot everywhere always,” she tells her friend, who is eyeing the weed booths. “But this is special.”
And it is. The VR game I play is called Euclidean. Borthwick designed it with a colleague named Lars Simkins. You have to have a cool name to design new realities. I do not play the game. I sink into it. Euclidean drops me into an alien ocean full of glowing rocks and faceless creatures. Anything that touches me kills me. I fall through water in slow motion. I die many times. I look up: water. I look down: water. I keep dying. My real body walks around the curtained booth as my virtual body dodges underwater meteorites and throbbing forms. I die and die and die and I want to stay in Euclidean and keep dying. It is eerie and scary and strangely peaceful and I don’t miss my dumb body for a second. In the real world, I have waking nightmares about drowning all the time, and here I am, I am drowning, and it feels good. I feel good. I die and die and die and die…
FIVE: BACK TO LIFE
And I finally decide it’s time for the next person in line to take a turn. I thank Borthwick. I return to GanjaCon. I resume my mission. I talk to Hidden Elephant Ganja’s Matt Baker, who uses tissue cultures to preserve cannabis strains. I talk to a man named Gas (who also goes by Swami) about living organic soil and the “slaves to the industry” who use pesticides. This is interesting stuff. I’m into it. But I want to be inside of Euclidean again. I don’t know how it works. I don’t know how Borthwick designed it. I don’t know how to survive inside of it. All I know is that I felt good there. I feel good out here, too, surrounded by people who care deeply about the plants they grow and the plants they consume. But I felt better when I was alone in a world I didn’t understand. I’m not saying this is a good thing. In fact, I am almost certain it’s a bad thing. A bad thing I think I already knew.
From K. Mike Merrill: I didn’t write this, I’m just publishing it. This is an article for a new magazine called Pot Dads. At Pot Dads we are excited about an integrated weed lifestyle. And no, you don’t have to be a Dad to read Pot Dads, it’s just a fun name.
