Much to the relief of my family who may be reading this at some point in the future, I'm not going to talk about sex, just drugs and rock & roll. As the kids know, my wife and I feel sex is a wondrous and beautiful thing, to be shared in private. It's a vital factor for happiness in life and anything between consenting adults is their fucking business (literally and figuratively) and no one else's. As my grandkids know, because they talk with grandpa about these kinds of things at thirteen years old, if someone says no to sexual activity, that fucking means no and all activity stops. Great-grandkids, if I'm not alive when you're thirteen and your parents haven't told you and somehow you discover this website, remember that phrase, "no means fucking no”. So, let's move on to drugs.

Our kids know, because I discussed it with them when they were young, that I've done just about every kind and type of drug except for heroin and crack.  Never did heroin because when I was a teenager Famous Framous, who I'm sure has been dead for a very, very long time now, told me, "… it's so good, don't even try it once.” He then proceeded to hit some up and fell out. I thought he was dead but luckily he wasn't, so I knew right then that shit wasn't for me. I never liked coke, it was like a short-term, garbage high when you had access to Eskatrol and Preludin, so crack was never a temptation.

A lot of people couldn't get through the 60's and 70's without trying Quaaludes but again, they weren't for me. Working full-time and going to school full-time wasn't really conducive to taking barbiturates. I remember taking a Doriden one night, which was stronger and longer lasting than a Quaalude, and waking up sometime the next afternoon having missed a class. Fuck that shit. I know a lot of guys used ‘em to get laid but I always thought of a quote from A Child's Garden of Grass that says something to the effect of "seducing a drunken woman is about as much fun as having a philosophical discussion with a dead goldfish.”

There is a vast difference between using and abusing drugs, whether legal or illegal. I'm not even going to attempt getting into opiate od's, except to say there are reasons in our current society why people want to get so fucking numb they forget to breathe and die. In addition to cannabis, I'm also going to write about mind expansive drugs including LSD and psychedelic mushrooms. Contrary to popular opinion, you don't consume these substances and go out to rob, rape or kill anyone nor do these substances cause fatal overdoses. These drugs allow you to discover realities that are not able to be perceived with the conscious mind.

To answer a question that non-family members who may be reading this will have about whether I want our kids/g-kids/g-g-kids to use these types of drugs, my answer is; after they are sixteen to eighteen years old, if they want to, that's their decision. I emphatically believe everyone should find their own way to mind expansion and to my knowledge, only one of our kids has followed that path. He's quite successful and happy, as are our other three who are straight.

There's absolutely nothing morally or ethically "wrong” about using these substances, so we'll move on to rock and roll.

The first time I tried cannabis, I was listening to Surrealistic Pillow by the Jefferson Airplane. I didn't really know what to expect but was with friends I trusted.  After a couple of hits, things began to change and everyone was joking and laughing. One song seemed to flow into the next with a mix of rock, folk, ballads and blues.

Then White Rabbit came on.

After Jack Casady's thumping bass intro, everyone stopped talking and it got real quiet. When the song was over, I looked up and all of us had that same contented, happy look on our faces. For the first time, I heard each separate instrument blend together with vocals to create the song I was hearing. I would have that same type of experience down to the atomic and sub-atomic level later on with the aid of LSD, but that's a story for another post.

Everyone from my generation is familiar with the Youngbloods song Get Together, it was kind of an anthem back in the day: "Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now". What most people don't know is the guy who actually wrote the song, Chet Powers, had to sell the publishing rights (and untold future multi-million dollar royalties) to it in order to afford a lawyer, after he was busted for possession of cannabis and diet pills. He was sent to Folsom fucking prison. Years later when he got out, he was a different person. He formed Quicksilver Messenger Service and wrote a song called What About Me? Listen to lyrics, as they are just as true now as they were then. Even now, almost 50 years later, I'm still a Fugitive From Injustice.

Pirate's World at Dania Beach Florida was an amusement park in the early 70's that also had concerts. Like Thee Image in Sunny Isles, just about every major rock and roll group played there including Led Zeppelin, Traffic, The Dead, Jethro Tull, etc. One of the best I saw there was Sly and the Family Stone. Can't adequately describe exactly how it was to actually _feel_ the bass thumping my chest when they did Higher. The joints started flowing with everyone sharing, so I pulled out some Jamaican sinse I got from the surfer. People could easily tell it was very different from the standard Columbian that was readily available. Whites, blacks, browns, Cubans and every other South Florida nationality you want to name were there, all rocking out and getting higher.

I'll post at length sometime in the future about this subject but for now let me emphasize this point, not every-fucking-body in the southeastern U.S. is a racist. Just like everyone in the Pacific NW is not a depressive, introvert who wants to kill themselves or all people in the northeast are arrogant, loudmouth know-it-alls who think they're better than everyone else, or whatever other regional stereotype you want to think of. We're just Everyday People.

If you grew up in the southeast U.S. in the late 60's to early 70's and listened to rock and roll, you knew the Allman Brothers were from here. A little country, a lot of blues and all rock & roll with a multi-racial ensemble of working class guys who played what we felt. It's easy to debate who the best rock and roll or blues guitarist is because there's so many to choose from… Duane, Clapton, Hendrix, Page, BB, Buddy Guy, Stevie Ray, etc. However, there can be no debate who the best _two_ guitarists in _one_ band were and that's Duane Allman and Dickie Betts. Both were monumentally talented individuals who formed a symbiotic relationship to bend and twist the strings to create a fusion of sound that transcended the traditional lead and rhythm guitar roles in a rock and roll song. Resting on the massive, foundational bass of Berry Oakley and supported by Butch and Jaimo's precision percussion keeping everything together and in-time, Greg's vocals and melodic keyboards brought them all together to create The Sound of the South.

Owsley Stanley engineered and recorded what you are hearing in the above video and I'll write about him next.

One of the main priorities I've had when developing SouthEast Lights has been to enhance the easy growability of Northern Lights and transform it into a Terminator strain. I wanted it to have a focused and relentless desire to survive and thrive. I always remembered Vic High's trials and tribulations with Blueberry from his posts on the BCGA web forum in the late 90's. He got seeds directly from Marc Emery, who got them directly from Sag, who had just started to market them for Willy Wonka… er I mean DJ Short (I'll have more thoughts on that Grantland article sometime in the future).

Vic didn't know if they were treated with colchicine or just inbred to death but his first grow with them sucked. Half the seeds didn't survive and those that did had variegated leaves, were sickly, scrawny and weren't very potent. To me it was ludicrous to develop this strain when the only thing it really had going for it was it smelled like a fucking blueberry. Now in subsequent grows, I know it got much better for him. I know he liked working with it but I couldn't see how an average grower, especially one just starting out, would do well growing this type of cannabis. Sensitive to variations in light and fertilizer with a propensity to go hermie just didn't sound like foundational, developmental stock to me. I respected Vic but disagreed with him on this subject.

I wanted the exact opposite for the cannabis I was growing.

That's why I purchased Sensi's Northern Lights from Gypsy Nirvana. In the Usenet newsgroup alt.drugs.pot.cultivation there was a participant by the nym of Jock who lived in Amsterdam and was willing to discreetly mail cannabis seeds to the U.S. In 1998 I managed to get 10 Sensi Jack Herrer seeds sent to me via Jock and was not all that impressed after the first grow. It wasn't that much better than the Jamaican Type IV/Hybrid plants I'd been working with for over 20 years, though the bud density was much better, as was the amount of visible resin.

After a couple more grows I noticed the plants were exhibiting different phenos. Some would stay shorter in stature, like my closet environment required, while others were almost pure Type I/Sativa. I should have known getting such a new strain but that's what Jock sent me instead of my first choice, which was Sensi's Hash Plant. After much research, which in those days was pretty much limited to adpc and the BCGA forum, I decided to acquire Sensi's Northern Lights.

For the first grow of Northern Lights, I nursed and babied those plants from sprouts to harvest. That was the last time I did. From that point on, with the luxury of thousands of my F2 seeds, I would treat them just like I did when I was guerilla gardening outside in the early 80's. No different from corn, green beans or tomatoes I grew in the garden. I would germinate 75-100 seeds, pick the 40 best appearing sprouts to put in soil, eventually thin and cull the outliers down to around 15-20 and when they were sexed, keep as many females as I could fit into my restricted space. I've used that selection process for 6 generations of the line-bred Sensi's Northern Lights and 4 generations of backcrossed SouthEast Lights

Over the years, my wife and I noticed a preference for cannabis I had let develop weeks past the normal flowering period of 2 months. It wasn't because it had any more sedative or "couch-lock” qualities, in fact quite the opposite. It didn't make us sleepy or lethargic, it just helped us be happy and feel good, even when we felt like hell. Not just mentally but physically as well. After wearing a heavy, lead apron for many years as part of her job, my wife developed cervical spondylosis. This causes severe pain that was barely relieved by opiates but made manageable by cannabis, so she didn't have to take disability. After seeing myself in a video with one of my grandsons looking like my father, I decided to lose weight. Instead of taking an hour and eating lunch, I vaped a bud before I hit the treadmill and weight machine. I lost a quarter of my body weight and have kept it off many years now. There's no CBD couch-lock with SouthEast Lights, at least not for us.

I gradually increased the amount of time I let each generation of plants flower and noticed that, contrary to popular belief, not all strains of cannabis trichomes turn brown with extreme age. I refuse to believe that you can tell when to harvest a plant by observing trichomes alone. You have to look at the plant as a complete entity, not a minuscule, subjective measurement of resin color at a given point in time. I found the longer I let the plant develop, not only did the flowers get larger and more dense but the sense of well-being and contentment I felt was longer lasting and tolerance resistant! Tolerance is a complex and controversial topic so I'll just say that after almost 2 decades of use, it still only takes me 4-5 hits off the vape to do what I need it to do.

When the plant is not forced to do things unnatural, it will become what you want it to be.