Hempfest by any other name

As I write this, it is 8 p.m. on Sunday. Peace is upon the land. Hempfest has ended. The vendor stalls have been dismantled, the lousy bands are no longer blaring their lousy music, speakers are no longer ranting their Carrie Nation rants about the perils of gin (or whatever: when I walked through the other evening, that did seem to be the rant – but I’d had a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, so maybe I was just being paranoid), and the contact-high miasma of pot is beginning to dissipate.

Ah, Hempfest.

Oh, now they’re calling it the Freedom Rally, but Hempfest by any other name has been going on for nearly 30 years now.

I recall walking through Boston Common during one of the early editions, buoyed by the thought that the young folks were becoming politically engaged. It was about the environment, I was quite sure. And then I took in a lungful of pure Boston Common air, started reading some of the signs, and caught on. Oh.

Not that there’s anything wrong with MJ.

I, in fact, was one of the majority of voters who, last November, voted to legalize it here in the Commonwealth.

The promised pot shops haven’t opened yet, but I think they’ll be coming next year. When they do, maybe I’ll make some marijuana brownies for old time sake. Or take a toke down memory lane.

Not that I was ever much of a pot head, but I well remember how proud I was when I graduated from twirling the tobacco out of a cigarette and stuffing it with weed – a complete amateur act – to perfecting rolling it on my own in a ZigZag. I remember how fun (and scary) it was - you could get kicked off campus for having a beer in your room, for God’s sake – to light up in the dorm, and activity that involved wetting a towel and shoving it in the crack of the door; fully opening the window in the dead of winter; and sitting with a couple of friends on the window ledge with our heads out the window. And I recall nearly breaking a tooth on a pan of frozen Sara Lee Brownies –when you have munchies, there’s no time to wait for these suckers to thaw.

No, I wasn’t a regular user – more an occasional, social indulger.

Still, unlike Bill Clinton, I did inhale. (What was the point of not inhaling?)

So I’m not going to go all prude-y tsk tsk about Hempfest.

But as an aging curmudgeon who lives in the hood – within ear shot of the bad blasting music – I’m happy it’s over. And I really don’t think that this needs to consume three days of our public space and time. Didn’t this used to be a one-day event?

Anyway, coming back from an early dinner on Saturday evening, I decided to forge my way through the Hempfest crowd rather than skirt the Common.

So I got to meander my way through the completely stoned crowds, take in all the food vendors – most of which seemed to be roast meat or vegan delights: have the munchies demands changed over the decades, and take note of the assorted tawdry on display.

Those tie-dyed Grateful Dead shirts sure haven’t changed much over the last 50 years, that I’ll say. Bandanas are still in style. And, apparently, mean people still do suck. (Good to see that some things stay the same…)

What has seemed to have changed is the bong technology and design. Am I imaging things, or were there actually bongs with attached gas masks on offer at Hempfest? I can’t be entirely sure, as I wasn’t stopping, just letting myself be carried along with the crowd, letting myself take an occasional whiff-een, and wondering whether I still have The Harder They Come CD around somewhere. (Answer: YES! Make that JA! I had to look around a bit, as it was misfiled. Jimmy Cliff should have been between Johnny Cash and Nat King Cole, not after Nat King Cole. But, as the song says, “you can get it if you really want.” Great album, by the way.)

I was one of the few over-30’s in the crowd. A couple of geezer hippies were there reliving their tie-dyed youth. Or maybe they were still living it, as it didn’t look like they’d ever left. And then there were Mom and Pop tourist, saucer-eyed, trying to figure out just what craziness they’d wandered in on. This wasn’t the Minnesota State Fair, for sure.

I made it home safely, of course, put my left-over chicken in the fridge and popped open a can of Polar raspberry lime seltzer. Who says getting older isn’t exciting?

There is, of course, more news to be had on the weed front.

As I read in yesterday’s Boston Globe, Weedmaps:

…one of the country’s larger and more established marijuana firms, is going all-in on Massachusetts and its new recreational pot market.

The California company, which sells software to licensed cannabis operators and publishes a popular online directory of dispensaries for consumers, is finalizing a lease for a downtown Boston office to accommodate its sales and lobbying team. (Source: Boston Globe)

With all the commotion about whether Boston is going to break its neck trying to get Amazon to build big here, here’s Weedmaps sneaking in the back door and even joining the Chamber of Commerce. (And who wouldn’t want to see that crowd one toke over the line, sweet Mary.)

Even more than raising an eyebrow about their joining the C of C, after all my years in the software biz, it never would have occurred to me that there’s specialized software for the cannabis industry. Far out, man! Or is it groovy? Of just plain oh wow?

Its initial presence in Boston will be modest: about 10 people. Eventually, Weedmaps may recruit some of the Boston area’s copious programming and analytical talent to help advance an ambitious big-data project that seeks to match different cannabis strains with various subjective effects felt by users.

Big data? Different strains? Ah, when I was a girl, we just had sensimilla or not…