My Favorite Strains: Blue Dream

A Strain-ge Experience: My Blue Dream

Blue Dream is one of my absolute favorite and consistently satisfying strains of marijuana. Just Google “Blue Dream” and you’ll find many sites reviewing the strain; I’m linking this older review simply because it covers the sciencey part of it rather well.

For me to try and pretend that I understand much about the strain’s lineage or how it was grown would be an exercise in bullshitting that I just don’t feel like putting either of us through, so I will simply talk about a recent experience I had while delightfully stoned on Blue Dream, that left me feeling and thinking many things, not least of which was, “Damn, that’s some good weed.”

I was sitting on a park bench sipping an iced tea, when I heard a scuffle in the shrubbery across the path, about 6 feet away. After some more noise, a rat came limping out of the underbrush. It was unable to use it’s right left leg at all and each step it took forced it to lay its chest on the ground to move forward. As you may remember from my bumblebee article, I don’t enjoy the sight of anything suffering, no matter how base and disgusting the creature may be (city rats are pretty foul). Hell, the other day I even stopped to pluck a caterpillar out of what was about to turn into an ant war party. My urge was to try and help the rat, but what could I really do but let the circle of life go on unimpeded? Wasn’t the death of the wounded and weak as natural as a sunrise in the animal kingdom.

Now I am conscious of my role in the Butterfly Effect, what did I change by rescuing the caterpillar? What would I change by helping the rat? Then the other side of the equation rings as well. What could I have done by not helping? Anyway, that took an unintentional existential turn. So this rat goes chest-stepping along when suddenly two crows land, flanking the wounded rodent. The crows didn’t really even touch the rat, they just walked alongside it, slowly, occasionally squawking if their prisoner stepped out of line. It looked to me that this poor rat was being goaded out into the gladiators arena, a spectacle for the carrion birds to caw and sup their blood-lust. Or the rat was like Aslan being marched to the stone table, the crows the befouled minions of the Ice Queen.

In the end, I did nothing to help the rat and I still feel a little bad about it. Sort of like when vultures show up when someone is walking in the desert, there is just a sad finality to falling into our place in the corporeal void. It seems the universe believes in balance, too. A couple of days after the rat, I saw a wounded crow, unable to fly and waiting for whatever may come its way. After I saw the hurt crow, some of the guilt subsided and I felt again in tune with the vicissitudes of existence.

Understanding the rhythm of creation does little to shrink the crushing sadness of loss and fear that are inherent to the human ego. As Keats says in “Ode to a Nightingale,” “where but to think is sorrow.” Yet as I patiently wait for my own pair of black-winged escorts to take me from this life, Blue Dream sure goes a long way to take off the edge and helps me to remember to laugh at all that cannot be changed, which is just about everything.

Did I mention that I smoked Blue Dream before I wrote this?

Check out other posts from Weedist’s My Favorite Strains series!