I haven’t posted anything here at EH (well, I care) for quite some time now. This is for two reasons. The first I address in the regularly scheduled and ever expanding piece this post is preempting. The second is because I’ve been visiting my brother out of state for the better part of last week.
I have two brothers that I grew up with (there’s a third that I haven’t met in person, more on him at a later date) and this trip to visit my brother Rich has been in the planning and replanning stage for the better part of a year. It has been far too long since I’ve seen him and while it’s been very good to see him, it has also been bittersweet.
He’s sick, you see.
I won’t mention the name of his illness for it’s not something I’ve asked him if it was alright for me to say publicly, but I can say that his condition is currently incurable, progressive in nature, and ultimately fatal. Fortunately for him, his wife is a registered nurse and the best possible person to care for him, which she does with an attention to detail we should all be so lucky to receive.
But this post isn’t about my brother or our relationship. I bring it up because it is necessary background information for something that happened yesterday between myself and my brother’s neighbor. Allow me to continue – because of the nature of my brother’s illness, he is allowed a certain amount of cannabis to help alleviate his symptoms, cannabis that he’s also permitted to convert into hashish for the purpose of making food. Did I mention my brother is also an award winning chef? He’s already taught me how to make beef wellington (sans cannabis) and a few other dishes (also sans cannabis) since I’ve been here, much to the delight of my wife.
Yesterday I learned how to make hash. Not the kind with potatoes and corned beef. Specifically, I learned how to make hash with my brother’s neighbor. Now, the production of hashish, at least my brother’s method, is a laborious and tedious process that is also rather time consuming. This happens to be true for the acquisition of most things worthwhile with the possible exception of children.
As you can imagine, there is a detailed list of things you need in order to make hash, pretty much no matter which method you choose.
The first thing you need is permission from the state you happen to live in. (Ok, this is optional, but I’m a law abiding citizen officer.)
The second thing you need is the raw cannabis that will be converted into hash.
The third thing you need is the gear that makes such a conversion possible – in this case, five gallon buckets, ice, water, a drill with a specific attachment, and a series of bags whose bottoms are made of successively smaller screens.
The final thing you need is a place to work you don’t mind getting messy, if it comes to that (and it did). This is where my brother’s neighbor comes into the story.
My brother is a good neighbor. He makes it a point to be a good neighbor. Like me, his default position involves good manners and a desire to be someone anyone would want to live next door. Rich is very good at this. He cooks for people (did I mention he’s an award winning chef?), he loans them his vehicle and tools, takes care of their animals, and does his level best to be helpful without being intrusive.
Needless to say, his neighbors are very fond of him. Including his Trump supporting neighbor. The neighbor I got to spend over 3 hours sitting next to over a bucket filled with water and ice.
Now, the fact that my brother and his neighbor are neighbors with a great deal of mutual good will towards each other (you don’t just let anyone make hash in your house) doesn’t obviate the fact that this neighbor actively supports the layer of scum that rests atop sewage known as Donald Trump. Did I mention my brother’s wife is black? I think this is the only reason why I would. You know, Trump and a significant portion of his supporters being who they are.
My brother and I share conclusions when it comes to the incoming bowel movement that is our new government and warned me of his neighbor’s political tastes before I even met him. He needn’t have bothered. It would have been apparent to me within moments.
There’s a Trump uniform, you see. Not everyone who plays for the Trump team wears the same uniform, as there is more than one. This uniform is a favorite among the demographic of 60+ year old white males with an education that ended during or with high school. Ball cap, beard past his neckline, tshirt with an old flannel shirt over that, and jeans. Clothes aren’t the indicator though. Minus the baseball hat and beard, I have dressed the same way. No, it’s the clothes in tandem with a certain shine to the eyes and a manner of speaking. Ignorance has a certain cadence. Much like the Peanuts character Pig Pen, uneducated people steeped in Fox News carry a nimbus around them which is clearly visible when the light shines a certain way.
Because I’d been forewarned and I’m not the kind of asshole who is going to cause potential problems for my brother and then fly away, I resolved to be on my best behavior when I was introduced to, let’s call him David.
Not only that, I resolved to charm the fuck out of him.
Normally, my inclination is to not speak much with people I don’t know or particularly care for. This is especially true when I’m in public. That doesn’t mean I don’t like to talk. I think anyone who has gotten this far could probably deduce that. In fact, if I like you, I can be downright loquacious.
I gave David the full treatment: Unfeigned interest combined with questions both initial and follow up that are natural to ask when meeting someone for the first time. Or in other words, I got him to talk about himself and what he cares about. Which unsurprisingly was the sorts of things not just Trump supporters care for: sports, hunting (ok, maybe that one is more of a conservative pursuit than a liberal one), his dog, family. I sought common ground (we both like Bill Murray movies) and made him laugh when I was trying to make him laugh.
I avoided politics, religion, and comments that might evoke either.
At one point David said to Rich, “I like your brother, you should bring him over more often.”
Success.
Too successful I guess because he offered Rich the opportunity to get his hash made while simultaneously teaching me how. Because it is a labor intensive and time consuming process that has the added benefit of hash at the end, my brother was thrilled at the idea.
It works like this: In a five gallon drum insert the bag with the finest screen inside. Inside that bag place each successively larger gauge mesh bag inside the one which proceeds it. The idea is to nest them like those dolls found in both Vladimir Putin’s country and soon on top of the oval office desk. Then fill the bucket half full with ice. Next pour inside the cannabis. Now almost fill the rest of the bucket with ice. Finally, fill the bucket with water.
The process involves using a drill with a special attachment to stir the ice/weed/ice/water mixture into slurry and then allowing it to rest. Care has to be taken not to let the drill attachment hit the bottom or the sides of the bucket. There’s also the speed of the drill to be careful of, so as not to slosh the contents overboard while still being fast enough to begin breaking down the ice. After that, you remove each bag allowing as much water as possible to drain back into the bucket.
The first bag you pull always contains the slurry, which is immediately set aside. All the other bags are then drained in turn and each of the filters are scraped onto a place to dry. This is your hash. As you get deeper into the bucket, each bag yields a finer and more potent grade of material.
This takes more time than you would think. The screens on the bottom of each bag except the first one pulled out are extremely fine and draining takes longer the deeper into the bucket you go and the screens get finer. Once you pull a bag, you have to hold that bag over the bucket without letting the screen back into the bucket. The bags are wet, cold, and heavy. You can understand why my brother was excited about me doing it.
This brings us to David and I companionably sitting over buckets filled with a slurry of ice, water, and weed. Most of the time we sat in silence listening to classic rock while we minded our respective drills.
My continued policy of avoiding politics and being as affable as possible yielded a surprising result.
Brown Sugar by the Rolling Stones was playing when out of the blue David says, “I’m almost positive you’re a liberal and hate Trump. But if you don’t mind my saying so, I have a few opinions.”
I told him I was a guest in his house and I would be a poor guest if he thought he needed to censor himself in any way in his own home. So he began with, “Ok, well, hear me out and wait for me to finish before you answer.” I told him that was a great idea.
What followed was the litany of grievances, some true and some imagined, about Hillary Clinton, trade, the state of blue collar labor, Obama, and how Trump’s election was a good thing because if nothing else it upends the status quo. He did not use the words status quo.
As agreed, I sat in silence as he spoke. This was a good thing because it allowed me to do two things.
It gave me time to accurately assess that all of his information came from Fox News. This is important because I’ve learned that you cannot combat Fox News and the people who only watch Fox News with reasoned arguments using facts as your evidence. It just doesn’t work. The second thing it allowed me to do was formulate a response that spoke to his concerns without directly contradicting what he perceives as true.
So I said, “There’s a lot of truth in what you said. It’s true that the middle class has gotten screwed. It’s true that globalization has decimated manufacturing and allowed cheap labor to lure businesses out of America. It’s true that politicians are politicians. But the truth is like, well, it’s like making hash.”
“Think about it. The first bag holds everything. The water, ice and weed. It’s mashed all together mixed so thoroughly you can’t get the good stuff, the hash, without putting it through a beating and then filtering it so only the good stuff is left. The world is like the first bag, the truth is there but you have to work for it, you have to filter out the untruth until only the good stuff remains.”
“The truth you get from the second bag is what you get if you only watch Fox News or MSNBC. It’s truth is the basest sort. Still mixed up with a lot of impurities. Some would say the hash you get from this screen is not even worth making into edibles. The truth you get from the third and fourth bags gets harder and harder to get to and takes more of an effort. The payoff is worth it though.”
David said, “So you’re saying that liberal truth is the fourth bag and conservative truth is the second bag?”
“No,” I answered, “I’m saying that if you don’t put in the effort you can’t get past the first bag. When it comes to filtering for the truth, each bag is an order of magnitude harder to sift than the bag before it. The hardest part? Not letting what you want to be true color your perception of what is true.”
And then I stopped talking.
And so did he.
The subject changed because there was a mishap with my first bag during the sifting process. It didn’t want to drain because the mesh was clogged, causing slurry to spill over the sides and contaminating my second bag.
Much like our current state of affairs.
You might be interested to know that my first time making hash turned out to be a stunning success. David and my brother were both impressed by the yields of every screen I scraped.
I’m not under any illusions that my attempt to strain David will yield similar results. I do believe the effort must be made.
