the shoes/and the blues/got me arrested once - elbow

growing up in a small town comes with baggage... i mean, yeah, you can get caught up in a lot of shit in big towns, but it goes the other way too. Wow, we're going deep into the void tonight folks. Shut up. I've been sober for, ughghghhhh, two days. You hear me?! TWO FUCKING DAYS. No weed. No wine. No ether. Since I'm a firm believer that being sober can only lead to annoying statements such as, "you can be creative without drugs" i'm going to try and write something out... we'll see if it makes more sense than the other shit that's on the blog.

ok, from the top.... coming from a small town has a lot of baggage. To make matters more complicated that I can't even be from a small town, i have to be from the farming area 10 minutes outside of said small town. I realize now that there's far smaller towns with far more depressing facets, but at the time I was devastated to be growing up here. i love the nature, trees and silence of my parents place, but within my queer psyche i needed some more distractions. I appreciated what we had, but it all came back to the pressing need to get out and never come back save for holidays and funerals.
Perhaps one of the most fantastic stories that I heard stem from the term "dump weed".... Even my father laughs telling the story and thinks that it's a sin that this didn't get national attention.
Let's go back a bit to make a foundation.
My intense fear and loathing of the police is directly linked to my youth. Any po' po' north of Barrie seem to morph into moustache-faced pricks who'd rather freak the shit out of you than do things like, ya know, stop crack heads from robbing people or prevent people from getting swarmed in the park. Small town doesn't always equal no crime. So anyways, i entered into my teen years filled with a predisposed animosity for police after hearing stories of friends older brothers getting pinched and even better, someones' dad who was a naughty drunk indian and got beat up by cops using phone books.
The coffee shop/lounge that we loitered in was a top balcony that looked down to the counters and main seating area below. We were constantly chased out on a rail by cops who thought we were assholes for buying over-priced coffee and drinking it quietly while chatting. yes, we were quite the ribald pack of monsters in goodwill sweaters nodding stoned and laughing at the cops storming in with their big ol' smokey the bear-style hats.
fuckers.
If there's anything I appreciate about my teen years was the complete innocence i had to drugs. mushrooms and weed seem so tame compared to crystal meth and coke that other people I knew were doing... since my passion laid within smoking i was always on the look out for new outdoor strains. it was rare that we ever got a hold of hydro stuff and often we had to try and be careful of shit that people would douse in coke or more realistically, meth.
ANYWAYS.
I had been away at university and was back for a summer job. my dad came back from work and told me that the big story for tomorrow's paper was that the OPP had busted up an outdoor field of marijuana... 8 u-haul cube vans to be more accurate.
There were triumphant brown moustached cops infront of the garbage bags full of pot and other obligatory photos of plants stacked up high.
you might as well have told me that christmas was cancelled... this clearly was going to have a major impact on me getting high and my friends blossoming pot dealing venture. I should have known that capitalism will always triumph.
the cops were blown away at the volume they found and didn't know what to do with all of it. i mean, that is what you can only describe as a shit load of pot. Normally they have a pig roast and burn all of it, but the sheer volume would have made the entire town stoned for a week if they had lit it all up. Now what?
Dad said that they had been a little too cocky with the reporter and had been tooting their horns over the bust. The reported said that the cops were planning on burying it all out in the dump.
Dad: "Uh, they told you that?"
Reporter: "Yeah? So?"
Dad: "Don't you think it's a little, ya know, retarded to release that information?"
Reporter: "Not my problem. I'm just writiing what he told me."
Sure as shit I get the paper the next day and there's the weed bust story on the front page. It's pretty impressive since most of the time it's just some lame ass story about city council voting on a new parking meter or a fluff piece on The Stephen Leacock Home. And there it was, the quote from the cop saying that they were going to bury the whole thing out in the city dump. I shook my head and thanked the gods I had bought a criminal ammount of weed before I moved back for the summer. I figured I would be able to turn out hydro-grown shit for a premium and have enough to buy whatever inflated-priced weed I could get my hands on. Good. Good and great. Great and good.
I made some phone calls to see if anyone was flipping out about the bust and my usuall contacts seemed unphased and pretty much told me to stick my yuppie hydro up my ass.
odd. i had predicted that this would have been a sweet offer.
the next day my dad returned home clearly elated at something funny...
Turns out that the one cop who had been interviewed before had a follow up to the first story.
He had been doing a patrol the previous night and decided to do a drive by past the dump to make sure no one was dumping illegally. I can only descibe things how I would imagine them...
The cop saw something out of the corner of his eye as the cruiser drove past... He backed up and turned the car around to shine the spot light around and scanned past what must have been a dozen mullets and random assholes with garbage bags and shovels. I can see the scene unfolding... like a bad episode of COPS. Everyone froze like raccoons in headlights. Eyes wide open, mouths agape, hands clenched tightly around wooden handles.
Cop: "HEY! HEY! What the fuck are you all doing?!"
Everyone bolted like wild animals and all the cop could do was dart around trying to grab at everyone as they skittered away... which was pretty much all of them... and they all had minimum 3 bags each of the dump weed... running into the night hooting and hollering like heroes.
there's no need to mention that the cops were freaking about this. This incident would totally cross out any positive PR from the original bust and instead it devolved into an embarassing follow up story about skids with shovels making the fairly long trek out to the dump... and then finding all these other mullets out there doing the same thing. Did they all try and help each other? Were they chatting a little before they started? "Oh yeah fuckin' right mahn, dis is fuckin' killer! free fuckin' weed! dis is my cousin Gary and Willy.." and other miscellaneous small talk before digging into the earth and finding the bags.
i was thrilled that it had turned into a total fiasco and still patted my weed tin knowing that my shit hadn't been burried treasure at the local dump. Still, weed is weed right?
Well yeah... but....
go forward 2 weeks. my friend had met up with an old weekend party aquaintance when she was downtown and got invited over for a tea and smoke.
O: [hack! hack! hack!]
Mandy: "Sheee-it girl, are you new to smoking weed or what?"
o: [chahhhk! hock...bleh] "what in the hell is this?"
[passing on the left]
Mandy: "Smoke up! I've got tons of it."
O: "Mandy, it tastes fucking wierd."
Mandy: "Shut up.... you're just used to Toronto shit that's all."
O: "can you sell me some?"
Mandy: "Buddy, I can do you one better. You can fucking have some for free!"
Now this really aroused O's suspicions. None of our party friends were this generous, especially when it comes to drugs.
o: "For real? What's wrong with it?"
Mandy: "ok, you can't tell anyone..."
She reached under the couch and pulled out a Zellers bag that was knotted at the top. O could clearly see what was in it... namely a whole lot of weed.
Later on
O:"Dude come see this shit. It was like fucking halloween... she must have given me 2 handfuls."
j: "man, it smells off don't you think?"
O: "The leaves are kinda curling outwards. it's like outdoor but not ya dig?"
j: "Um... Dude..."
I realized that O didn't get the paper, nor did she give a shit about anything local going on beyond the next open mic nite.
yeah. You guess it. DUMP WEED. Holy shit it was terrible... I didn't even smoke it... because, wait for it... turns out that the cops were flipping the fuck out over the weed being stolen because it had all been sprayed with a herbicide to make it breakdown faster. GOO!! So everyone in town for months on end was seen smoking this shit and many many many of them weren't swayed by people begging them to throw it out since they might as well have been sucking on a toilet puck.
For 2 months I had to pretend I was trying to stop smoking weed in preparation for a urine test, when in reality I was terrified of being offered dump weed at a party and having to inform the host that they probably shouldn't have paid what they did for the weed.
the moral of the story is beware of cheap weed.