#8. On Mercury Retrograde, Cancer Season, Hatemail, Stoned Love Letters + Transformation
Plus: Inclusivity Megalist, Now! That's What I Call Weed Witch Vol. 3
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.
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Dear coven,
Mercury went into retrograde began June 17 and is continuing until July 12, followed by the transition into Cancer season (June 20 – July 22). I was late on both accounts.
Weed and words are on my mind. Specifically: mixed messages. Mercury is the planet of commerce and communication, and when things are in retrograde, nothing is as it appears. This is because the planet appears to move backwards—a “resetting of the clock” if you will—for a three week period a few times a year. In short: lots of fucked up communications and also the opportunity move forward with business. If you’re good with time management, you can get a lot of shit done. Also, please see figure A. on why people pay for qualified astrologers.
Cancer marks the beginning of solstice, a.k.a. Hot Girl Summer, which I missed last year when I was in Moderate Weather/Slow Broadband Irish Summer. Symbolically, this a time of celestial connections to nostalgia and ancestry, reconnecting with loved ones, and internal transformation. Just like the crab retreating into its shell, this is a good time for introspection and healing. I recommend an uplifting and creative strain like Gelato or a chatty Sour O.G.
Naturally, I did exactly what I wasn’t supposed to do this past month, according to my numerology: doubted my abilities, pushed myself too hard, absorbed the misdirected energies of the world, started arguments, caused problems, and burdened myself with the repercussions of bad karmic justice that I truly earned.
I waited too long to send things I was supposed to send, missed opportunities and am now paying the price for that. Case in point: you’re receiving this email now, instead of in advance, of Mercury Retrograde and the solar eclipse of Cancer marking the beginning of solstice.
Still, the timing couldn't be more appropriate because it’s a new moon, baby! Make sure to light your intentions. Put into the world what you want to get back. It’s a good time to hit the reset button and open the door to repairing things with people you might have otherwise dismissed. I am also a stupidly optimistic Pisces and a pothead, so I kind of need to have the benefit of the doubt.
P.S. Did you ever see that article about the Neo-Nazi girl group that turned into peace-loving hippies because of weed? I have no idea what happened to them!
This issue is honest, but resolved to keep living, laughing, loving as a stoner bitch for life, as well as making fun of live, laugh, love memorabilia for life.
Yours,
The Weed Witch
P.S. - ICYMI Goldleaf featured me as part of their 14 Cool Women in Cannabis Making A Difference!
From The Before Times to the Post-New Normal
Looking back since starting this newsletter as an impromptu project, so much has happened. I rewrote this about 20 times over the past few weeks. There was simply too much to absorb and address. Too many emails and communications. Too much palpable desperation, uncertainty. Too many opinions and emotions. Too much to fix.
It’s weird to think we’re six months into “The New Normal” and we don’t even call it that anymore, like an antiquated joke. I am fine with letting go to move into the future.
In New York, we went from hoarding toilet paper and two-hour lines at Trader Joe’s to complete silence with the palpable fear of uncertainty as over 120,000 people perished. Evangelical Christians took over Central Park, a COVID fleet pulled into Manhattan, followed by judicious nightly clapping. A huge chunk of the city fled, breeding its own form of resentment as millions of people were laid off and essential workers had to bear the burden.
I got tired of being online and decided to go volunteer, which also became its own form of resentment for those who thought it was “performative.” Then, the protests started happening.
Meanwhile, as this was happening, every person seemed to be starting an exciting new life as a career coach, launching a Zoom business, newsletter, podcast or pursuing their dreams. Most people were either completely fine and living in some other reality, or hiding the fact they were on the verge of losing everything and just wanted to keep up appearances until things were “normal” again.
I wasn’t “normal” — were you?
It didn’t seem appropriate to talk about brands as storefronts boarded up and workers went on strike. I smoked a lot of weed, made art and edibles for friends coping with the associated chronic pain of autoimmune disorders and depression. So many had to move back home to live with their parents or take refuge with friends. Divorces and separations emerged, along with quiet forms of suffering in the uptick in domestic violence.
My colleague at CNN moved to Hong Kong, got cancer, and then had to deal with chemo in the middle of COVID. My friends with kids started going nuts, and it was even worse for the ones who had children with autism or other special needs. Collective trauma.
And everyone collectively judged everyone over it.
I cried until I couldn’t anymore. My sadness turned to rage, because, fuck Nazis. Then, consumed by my hate, perpetuated it all over again through poor misdirected communications, and then ultimately remembered: don’t become the people you hate.
Sometime around the point I jumped over the Brooklyn Bridge to escape a crowd of running bodies during the protests, was when I decided that I am too fucking old to be jumping over bridges at protests.
Still, I guess risking your anxiety and life in the middle of a pandemic to protest actual fascism is kinda gangster shit. I spent the early part of the quarantine going out to the Upper West Side and East New York to volunteer delivering meals to the elderly, so I guess I am a “spiritual gangster.”
Side note: I am very proud to come from a long line of badass protesting no-nonsense Jew bitches. My great-grandma insisted on being wheeled out in her goddamn wheelchair to go protest the opening of a Woolsworth in West Philly that refused to hire any black employees despite opening in a totally black neighborhood.
My grandma got called into the principal's office when she was 12 for organizing a protest so girl's could wear pants to school like the boys. THAT WASN'T EVEN 100 YEARS AGO YOU COULDN'T WEAR FUCKING PANTS. Respect your elders, bitches!
Even small acts of resistance help. Sometimes we just need to do shit: remembering to give a homeless person an extra dollar if I have it or taking a few hours to help volunteer with 826NYC editing kids dystopian novels. There are literally hundreds of opportunities to immerse yourself in more meaningful ways. It’s also OK to take time to disconnect. Do what you can, where you can. Help someone else. Make it fun.
New York is in Phase 2: excessive fireworks, perpetual honking and backed up traffic. A palpable sense of awkward reentry into society and mutual distrust. The upside: we saw the push for LGBTQIA+ workers rights, Black Lives Matter protests and Juneteenth, the DACA ruling was overturned, the federal government decided to stop shitting all over National Parks. Triggered by progress.
Long story short: this period offers an opportunity wipe the slate clean and start again. So, if you’ve been carrying some emotional weight of things you haven’t done or feel like you should, this is an excellent opportunity to take what you know now to start fresh and do better by the communities you know and love.
Writing about cannabis—just like food and travel—always comes with a responsibility to know history. You present the past and present to help shape the future, deciding what to hold onto and let go.
But also: sometimes you just want to smoke weed or eat a sandwich without absorbing a guilt trip. I try my best to strike a balance between both, as I think dogmatic preachiness isn’t effective long-term allyship, and it’s generally good practice to diversify your content/seek original voices.
That’s the mark of a good journalist, and also why I have included intersectional resources below to help you seek out voices that can best match up with people who are doing really valuable work.
Notes From The New York Underground About Ethical/Safe Weed + Protests
On the cusp of the outbreak, my first interaction in the New Normal was with a dealer in an unmarked car, clad in an ushanka, face mask, and gloves. He told me business was good and offered a pump of hand sanitizer. It seemed so shady, but also, kind of comical?
A major magazine wanted me to report on the safety and protocol of buying on the legacy/illicit market, which I felt ethically shitty about and decided not to. How could I ensure safety? I barely knew if going to the grocery store was going to kill me or not. A legal recreational dispensary would be helpful. We're still waiting.
Everyone wanted to know about buying cannabis on the illicit market during the shutdown or what constituted “safe” or '“ethical” consumption. Can people smoke or not? What about vapes?
I was tired of having all of the answers because ultimately no one does. There’s promising medical evidence for a lot of amazing discoveries with this plant, reinforcing the longstanding holistic practices that leaned on this plant throughout pre-prohibition history. Prohibition and the War on Drugs still adversely impacts communities, and may never be solved in our lifetime.
Some businesses are doing the work to help right these wrongs, others won’t. That’s just the world we live in for all business. Even the language within the industry is fragmented. How do you translate a bagboy into a dispensary? Do all bagboys want to be there? There are over 1,200 words referring to cannabis, while most consumers are just learning difference between sativa and indica.
The learning curve it pretty tremendous depending on how granular you want to get. Everything truly is connected. It takes time for some ideas to resonate.
Inclusive/Ethical Weed Megalist Update
“Ethical weed” is a complex and very layered subject, but overall the cannabis industry is undeniably white- and male-dominated (explaining why yours truly is operating a pirate radio Substack!) with varying state and regulation compliance and equity issues.
The good people at Cannaclusive and PussyWeed put together Accountability List on pledges for inclusivity. Merry Jane has compiled an enormous list of transparent lists for Indian, Black, LGBTQIA+, Asian, Latin, and Indigenous cannabis brands. If you’re into the cannabis industry business reports, Green Entrepreneur does a really good job of reporting on this.
Here’s a feel-good way to spend some time: send a letter to a non-violent prisoner via the Last Prisoner Project. Among these sentences is Michael Thompson:
“Michael Thompson is serving a de facto life sentence in the now legalized state of Michigan for selling 3 pounds of marijuana to a police informant. During the 25 years he has spent imprisoned, his father, mother, and his only son have died. His mother’s final wish was that Thompson wouldn’t die in prison. He continues to fight for clemency from the Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.”
Three pounds of weed. Life sentence. In a state where it now legal to buy it from a dispensary. This is why cannabis will always be a social justice movement, where we can see the value in helping make a safer world and righting some wrongs.
On Hatemail and Love Letters in the Digital Age
This week I received my very first piece of misdirected hate in regards to my book, which means that I have truly arrived! It would have been a little more poetic if it was back in the old days when someone would have to hate you so much that it required sternly-worded, handwritten or typed “Letter to the Editor" for the OpEd section. There is a certain je ne sais quoi to hating something so much that you would print something out just to burn it. Or rather: waiting a week or two for consideration to have your words actually resonate.
Instead, this person just went out of their way to create an Instagram account expressly to tell me that my guide to “Easy Weekend Getaways in the Hudson Valley and Catskills” was responsible for whichever dipshits decided to go into the woods and start fires, and as a result, I should feel ashamed for that.
I think the punchline of my book is that not only did it come out amidst the most depressing and painful time in modern human history, but it is now canonized as a beautiful symbol of mutual disdain between New York City and New York State. Ne’er the ‘twain shall meet! Please stay tuned for my next book, "Sorry I Fucked Everything Up, But Have A Nice Day: The Carly Fisher Story" followed by “Am I Crazy or Bitch? Tales of a Woman On The Edge.”
In all seriousness, though, I actually am not really mad at this person at all. Bizarrely, I can understand because we share the same frustration. Right now, a lot of people are angry, sad, and misdirecting that energy at the people in their own lives who probably would serve as allies. I certainly have. It’s fucking embarrassing. It’s way easier to take it out on a stranger than confront the people in your life, and more importantly: yourself.
Recently, I had taken out some misdirected anger on a lot of people and realized that I was holding onto my ego. It reminded me of lessons I had forgotten from Pema Chodron’s “Living Beautifully: with Uncertainty and Change.” If you’re unfamiliar, she’s an American Buddhist nun in the lineage of Chögyam Trungpa, and among the most prolific spiritual advisors.
Time and perspective can truly do wonders. The problem? Very few people have that luxury. We now live in a nonstop world of text-based communications that feels like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up Hades just for it to fall back down again and again.
Text-based communications eradicate time, space and distance. It muddles emotion. Poetry and love letters do not resonate the same way in a text message as a handwritten gesture, which very few people send to each other anymore. Instead, we are more inclined to send immediate messages of hate, frustration and anger. Where text lives, how we absorb it, how much of it and when we choose to do so is challenging. We ghost and erase people. We dismiss them.
In a word: healing. Sometimes you just need to sit with grief, anger, and lick your wounds. I am doing that because I know that I am as guilty for cycling in the same levels of misdirected negativity, contempt, and self-righteousness while lacking the spiritual and intellectual resolve to rise above it. That’s the thing about cannabis, alcohol, and medicine. It doesn’t fix problems, it just helps make things easier to deal with (sometimes).
Among the worst parts about being an empath with psychic intuition is absorbing energy, which is why Pisces are among the most annoying of the Zodiac for that reason. We soak up emotions like a sponge, are constantly crying and flaking out on things. On a good day, we are beautiful little dreamers who want to see the beauty in the world.
On the worst days: we will drown the earth with the emotional weight of a tsunami carrying the collective pain and suffering of humanity. I try to stay on my good side, but the past few months have been hard.
Emotions are complex. The lady who took the time to make an Instagram account just to give me flack for my book wanted someone to blame for things that she saw as unjust in the world. So, she misdirected that frustration at me. And while I can laugh it off, just as I did above, it’s a perfect example of how we cycle abuse every day and don’t even think about it in the age of text-based communication.
Over the past year, I have had so many horrible miscommunications because no one would just make the time to talk. Everyone just canceled and deleted everyone, wrote them off as crazy, and sent them into the same trash pile as everyone else.
Ultimately, it did make me crazy. I couldn’t handle trying to weed out who cared enough and who didn’t because they were so personally aggrieved by a system intent on dividing and conquering that they could no longer see or hear the person in front of them.
I feel lucky. I appreciate so many of the things I used to worry about, and the people I took for granted. Leaving the door open to reconnect with the friends and lovers I have left behind in hopes they have evolved, too.
NOW! That’s What I Call Weed Witch Vol. 3
Chicken Soup for the Bad Bitches’ Soul: Rihanna, Cardi B, Trina, Missy Elliott, Ana Tijoux, Awkwafina, Foxy Brown, Lil’ Kim, Doja Cat, and more.
ASK A WEED WITCH
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