#26: Textural Rosewater Glasses Though Jelly Teas // An Ode to a Dirty Little Toothpick and Alice Waters Farm To Table Movement // Czech Tools & Other Musings
Plus: Terp washes and other ways to clean yr dirty wares
This is The Weed Witch. Feeling stuck somewhere between the real world and the spiritual world? Where truth is stranger than fiction? This is a magically pragmatic, cannabis-fueled newsletter dedicated to lifestyles of the credit poor and unfamous. For the healers and dealers, saints and sinners. The stoners’ guide to living during the crumble of the Western Empire. Discover delicious edibles, healing tinctures, and holistic remedies from the natural world and beyond. Pragmatic solutions inspired by Depression Era grandmothers and time- and space-traveling mystics. Stream-of-consciousness tales, scrappy DIY craft ideas, and divine wisdom from free-thinking societal outliers, a.k.a. the weed witches. An idea sampler platter and content wildcard for your inbox.
Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website, which includes the never-ending backstory of how I got here. Never miss an update. Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox, wherever that may be. #payme
Vol. 26: Ode To A Dirty Little Toothpick
Take me as I am, Chiron retrograde! // See ya, Cannacer season
Haunted places and Massachussets cannadreams // Should I become a facekini bitch?
Jell & Chill blows my mind. Plus, two weedy new cafes to visit.
The Nouveau Temperance Movement
The rent is too damn high here and everywhere
Ode to a dirty little toothpick, Czech tools & terp washes
Eco babes of the week: Alice Waters and Mollie Katzen
Your regular reminder to buy my book.
Hey coven,
I write to you from The Weed Witch cave where I am drinking Dream Lady Tulsi, featuring tulsi tea, lavender, rose, and chamomile. These herbs promote healthy weight and anxiety management, which is only half-effective because I polished off a box of these rainbow vegan cookies I picked up from Trader Joe’s and I’m pretty sure they are *not* healthy.
Decided to keep “coven” because we’re only a few months away from weed witching season and Chiron was just retrograde—the wounded healer—and I’m tired of feeing hurt over being a weirdo and so are all my broken, busted friends. TAKE US AS WE ARE WHO WE IS. Preach, Ke$/sha.
It’s Cancer season, which means everyone has some kind of cancer or they will soon if we don’t fix the environment. Also, the nice part about this newsletter is that I see more of you engage with reading this directly here than on Instagram, so I guess I will continue to pump out government secrets and conspiracy theories solely in this toxically cosmic and comedic newsletter. Thanks for being here.
Cancer season is the watery sensitive crab with its exterior hard shell that will teeter out from its hermetic state with childlike wonder, get whipped by the waves, then retreat into the nearest shell, batting it and saying, NEVER AGAIN. We are officially at the first quarter moon today, and the sun enters Leo on the 22nd. Leo is roaringly proud, a little dramatic, somewhat possessive, but loyal and generous AF.
Also, I just found out my barista and I have birthdays one day apart, except he has Taurus and Scorpio in his chart and I have Aries and Capricorn/Aquarius. This means nothing to about 50% of you and that is fine by me. It’s just nice to know that he puts up the horoscopes every day, even though the horoscope is wrong. Pisces starts on February 19, not the 20th, and I will argue this forever.
Here are 9 haunted places to visit in Greenwich Village
I have been very interested in Salem travel tips for weed witches. Please leave your intel in the comments! I will be creating a recon list for myself in the meantime. So far I’ve got Seagrass and Insa on my list, and I’ve been dying to try Cloud Creamery. Checked with all the other ghosts and they’re all sleeping because none of them are having it with this humidity.
Speaking of cool Mass grass, shout out to Mariko Kusumoto for these incredible textile sea creatures and coral installations. Really makes you wonder what you’re doing with your time as to not make something so remarkably beautiful.
Presently, I am drinking a coffee out of my Kush Queen mug with some homemade oat milk. Here is a very simple tutorial from Love and Lemons on how to do this. It is 8 a.m. on a Saturday and I am not hungover. This is a miracle, so thank you pandemic. My skin is glowing from the beach yesterday where I gently bobbed along with the waves. I already got my base burn for the season, so a few hours here and there are the most I can really handle. I may turn into one of those facekini bitches.
Last night, I took a stroll through the East Village and had a hankering for rosewater tea. It was a long, hot day, and the evening left everyone wandering aimlessly in their finest “going out clothes”: strappy black crop tops and freshly pressed ironic oversized t-shirts from the ‘90s. Very on trend!
What they don’t know is that we have all died. We are vampires and ghosts haunting the village, and I do happen to live in the nicer village. Both villages are for wicked weed witches, so I take solace in the Hudson separating us from Jersey City as a reminder that I live in the ghost town and across town is piss town. Our piss just has a little more glitter in it because of Stonewall.
The tea houses were closed, everyone was out getting beers, and I stumbled upon Jell & Chill, a not-so-new-but-always-new Southwest Chinese bubble tea-type shop featuring flavor tripping textural dreamscapes with gelatinous bases, premium ingredients, and combinations not built for the unadventurous.
Rose water jelly tea with peanuts, almonds, raisins, haw flakes, tapioca, brown sugar, melon candy. Like elegant trail mix soup.
I had just taken a hit from my Miwak Junior using some flower I got from a friend in Massachusetts. Everyone was lighting up and suddenly the mystique felt a little tampered. College students, mainly. Finance bros. New York felt practically normal again. A friend flew in from Paris for her second time with her child. I felt jealous. Ireland is opening international flights again. And after a year, I finally acquired a chair for my TV tray masquerading as a desk.
By the way, there’s a new CBD cafe in lower Manhattan called Cafe Cannal with a menu that looks bomb! Rose Blue Dream Iced Tea and a slutty brownie? Sign me up. You can now order CBD edibles and flower via Seamless and GrubHub, which is how I got a refresher that Ollie’s Ice Cream + Stuff in Bushwick sells lighters, Zig Zag papers, glass bowls, and a medicine cabinet on top of all the shit you shouldn’t be eating like Smuckers Uncrustables and Capri Sun—or basically the age demographic living in Bushwick that’s slightly above or nearing legal consumption.
Ultimately, I’ve been living like a scrappy tourist in my own city: eating cheap eats, walking everywhere, getting caught in the rain, and remembering you can live here your whole life and not see everything. Except I’m “old” so I’ve been put with the fellow “olds” because once you’re in you’re 30s you become a living Sex and the City trope and can’t stop eye rolling at yourself. After all, Ilana is pregnant and black women are still fighting to become screen stoners.
This has been a tough few years and I think with the nouveau temperance movement during the lifting of Prohibition, we can see more Whoring 20s mixing with places like Spirited Away and Boisson—two booze-free artisanal beverage shops in New York City featuring an impressive mix of zero octane drinks with full flavor. I’ve also been eyeing the alcohol-free spirit category as someone who wants to partake in socializing at bars, but might not want to get slammered anymore because who misses a hangover? That said, I am not here to knock the beer, spirits, and wine industry—just the wasting water industries. If your beer sucks, stop taking up precious water.
New York isn’t an easy city to live in, but there are so many good resale shops, boutiques, free public parks. It is also a trash dump because this is New York. You can’t be too precious about it, after all. In other news, St. Theo just opened in the West Village and it looks like all the celebrities will likely be hanging there now that they have returned from the disgrace of abandoning New York City in a pandemic. I did pass Amy Sedaris last week dining outdoors in a place with white tablecloths and the overwhelming aroma of wet garbage, reminding me that celebrities are just like US! They eat!
*I can’t ever hate on Amy and David even though they both pander to the bourgeois. I hope she had a really good pandemic vacation. I would craft with her any day and also probably sit in on a masterclass about how to revive Strangers with Candy.
In other news, my family can’t afford their condo mortgage that skyrocketed from $800 for a two-bedroom in the south suburbs of Chicago to $1,200. It’s not even in a desirable area. I’m not sure where they got the nerve to up the rent when they haven’t even created shopping and resources to make it worth living there. Comparatively, I have no idea what the cost of living means anywhere except that most people agree that it’s too damn high.
The amount of people in New York who care or empathize with this situation is non-existent because most people can barely seen outside their own situation, let alone empathize with the microcosms of country and suburban folk in broken down America. I’ve toured it a few times as a brand ambassador and let me tell you: America could really do with a revival of our train and public transit systems to really bridge together our communities together. Outside of meth trade, I mean.
Anyway, I think I’m always going to be a little scrappy on this site because while I love some bougie shit, I really just appreciate trying to find ideas worth stealing. It’s not just about Weed and witches. It’s about making things work. So weird it works?!
That said, I am not a live, laugh, love person. I like vintage records, holiday mood lights, tasty snacks, upcycling, and fresh food for the chain stores here and everywhere: in Eureka California or Eureka county in Nevada, Weed beach shops, and all the other abandoned ghost towns where people live, work and are trying to make their gardens grow. (Shout out to my friend and Weed Witch reader Dena Rash, who is a poet, plumber and farmer in Oregon, as well as a medical user!)
I hate to be Erin Brockovich about it, but we’ve got a water crisis, folks! Won’t be any dank nugz if we’re wasting money and resources. Let’s keep supporting our BIPOC and lady friends committed to making it work. Shout out to NYSmallFarma for hosting a panel on ancestral work in cannabis, as well as this dope panel I just stumbled onto for Women Empowered in Cannabis to raise the bar for more female leadership in C-Suite roles in this growing sector. Alicia Fall of Her Many Voices Foundation, in particular, is someone I can’t wait to hear more from on global environmentalism.
Is your brand sexy and making environmentalism cool? Drop a line at itstheweedwitch [at] gmail [dot] com or in the comments.
Ode to A Dirty Little Toothpick, Czech Tools & Terp Washes
Ever take a hit off a pipe that should have been cleaned ages ago and get a hit of resin chunks? Gag. Put this in your pipe and smoke it: toothpicks and Bobby pins aren’t the only tools you can use to clean your bowl. I know, we all felt like MacGyver trying to dig out some nasty resin and wondering: is there a better way? Yes. There is.
But first: TOOTHPICKS SHOULD JUST HAPPEN. You aren’t supposed to buy toothpicks. They should come into your life. Usually at old diners where they are so overlooked as relics that they might even have working cigarette machines and some guy named Norm with a shaky hand and a bulletproof memory. Or Greek diners. Either way, these are what you need to clean your shitty bowl that you should really be cleaning but mostly just need to loosen up some resin. Hold on it. It’s a reminder that you’re putting that in your lungs and should probably just eat edibles now.
But first of all, let’s talk about things I’ve used like McGyver. A wine key—from the Inns of Aurora and Wines of Languedoc—are both useful Swiss Army Knife replacements. I have also used hand-held gardening sheers, hair clips, pens, paintbrushes, and everything in-between.
But you want the grown-up option. Here are the basics: a Czech Tool, or a three-in-one, consists of a picker, reamer, and tamper. According to the consensus on Wikipedia:
The pick is a narrow rod or pin that can be used to clear the shank of debris, or to aerate tightly packed tobacco. Because it is sharp it may scratch the bowl of a pipe, and so should not be used for scraping.
The reamer is a flat instrument shaped like a dull pen-knife blade or a flattened spoon, used to scrape ash and unburned tobacco (dottle) off the sides and bottom of a pipe.
The tamper is a blunt instrument, either a simple dowel or shaped like the top of a nail, with a flat end for tamping down the tobacco when the bowl is being packed, and for crushing the ash together to aid relighting.
A pipe nail is a nail-shaped tool with a tamper at one end and a reamer at the other. Tampers and reamers may also be made as separate tools.
Keep It Clean
Cleaning your pipe is usually an exercise of patience, rubbing alcohol, tor hot water and salt. But I am a huge fan of the terp wash from our friends at Miwak Junior x Primary Elements. It features a delightful limonene smell and gets through the grime while also managing to be environmentally friendly! (Also, the bottle is quite stylish as they’re both artist types).
PIPE DREAMS
Z’s Life Brass Tamper - $35
This is one of the best tampering devices I’ve used. It’s a bit of a spend at $35, but the brass holds up and is great for smashing down joints and cleaning out bowls. Plus, it looks so classy! Like a fancy baseball bat!
Classic Czech Pipe Tool - $7.99
Here she is! Very understated and somewhat Draconian in its aesthetic But it’s cheap, useful and built for your pipe.
Vintage, kitsch and super cute—use these to dig out your dirt to keep your bowl a little cleaner in between cleans.
Eco Babes of the Week: Alice Waters and Mollie Katzen
I don’t know if Alice and Mollie smoke grass, but they undoubtedly love the farm-to-table world and both have names down the looking glass, so I’m going to assume they’ve touched some plant matter.
Smithsonian Magazine has a nice ode to Waters’ Chez Panisse, celebrating 50 years of sustainable, regenerative farming as a culinary movement. Waters put California cuisine on the map, defining terroir at a time when the wine movement was still coming to fruition during the Judgment of Paris (the first time American wine outranked Old World French in a blind taste test). Chez Panisse, it should be noted is among the best dining experiences I’ve ever had, even as I am generally lukewarm to fine dining just because so much of it is filled with toxic masculinity and is so gauche. The meal at Chez Panisse was epic, and my server looked liked Fred Armisen. Buy the Chez Panisse Vegetable cookbook here.
Mollie Katzen of Moosewood in Ithaca, New York, has two cookbooks that are near and dear to my heart (among others). She is what I would consider the East Coast complement to Waters as far as ladies championing local as part of the natural foods movement (she’s a bit crunchier than Waters IMO). Buy it here and here.