High Protests

So, I get a phone call @ 6am this Saturday morning. I didn't even get to bed til 3 the 'night' before & I'm not the best person on that little sleep. It wasn't til I heard Chuck Treble on the other end that I really woke up. I was surprised to hear from him this early in the morning, being as he is one of the laziest people I've ever met when it comes to waking up @ a normal time, & worse of all he sounded alert, so something was off.

Turns out, there was to be a huge protest in our nation's capitol & Chuck's been waiting months for the gathering. His logic is that it's the only time a year that weed feels 100% legal since the cops can't really do much about 1,000+ people smoking in the street. I was intrigued. A few months back I had heard about the protest from Hype, but it slipped my mind while smoking trees, I suppose. Chuck really wanted to get an early start. He was so focused on punctuality that he drove from Newark to Philadelphia the night before to be further down the trail the next day. Apparently, he had to drop $100 on a hotel because his Philly connection flaked out on him. On the bright side, Chuck now has 10 new customers in the City of Brotherly Love. My man moved a whole brick in one night, that's talent.

I was out the door by 6:30. Philly's only an hour & a half from my apartment, but I got there in an hour flat somehow ... must have been speeding, who knows. I called Hype on the way & he told me he had already left for DC an hour or so ago, he was as excited as Chuck for the protest. He was just leaving from Williamsport after picking up Styles East, a PA rapper he met @ a freestyle battle in a club in Harrisburg, PA, & DJ Stretch, a radio personality we recently befriended from 104.5 The Buzz in Wellsboro, PA. He was still a good 2 & a half hours out of Philly since he got mixed up with a dickhead wigga kid who claimed to be able to 'get anything' until he was given a routine weed request, I hate that shit. So, Chuck & I decided to enjoy the city while we waited. Treb rolled up a beautiful honey blunt (where he got the honey I'll never know), which we smoked in the parking deck of the hotel parking lot he was staying at. Took almost 45 minutes to kill it. Afterwards, we took to the streets.

We chomped on some killer breakfast cheese steaks @ Geno's. It was fucking delicious. Funny that a cheese steak joint can be so famous. Not exactly sure why, I mean it's good, but it's just sliced up steak & cheese in a roll. I don't know. It was great nonetheless.

Chuck brought me to a small record store he knew of in this weird part of town. The place had an extensive collection of vinyls, even had some cassette tapes. The dude who owned the place was obsessed with Nashville Pussy posters. He didn't think much of their music, but he loved the posters. He had this one that said 'Nashville Pussy: Motorhead with Tits'. The simplest things end up being the funniest. This place was so awesome. I really wanted to buy every record in the store. Before we left, I bought me some gifts. I got a rare John Mayall record & a Hermon Hitson record & a Lloyd Barnes record for some smoked out samples & a Buzzcocks record to keep it eclectic. I was satisfied with my choices & extremely excited to chop them up & make some new beats with new material. Chuck was ecstatic about finally copping a copy of TWR Productions' 12" 'Those Who Rock/Coolin' record. He's all about those raw video game sound effects. It was like we were little kids in a candy store & we left with cavities. Good times. Great store.

An hour passed that felt like a minute. Chuck & I smoked two more blunts, but no honey this time. This weed was fantastic. I mean I could taste California. I could see mirages of those beautiful dispensaries with this shit. I know everyone thinks their girlfriend could be in an issue of Maxim, but this shit really could have been in High Times magazine. I could feel it nice & tight behind my eyeballs. Unfortunately, a security guard caught us smoking, but he agreed to keep his mouth shut if we smoked him up, which we were happy to do. This part of the story would be great if the guy wasn't a complete dickfuck. He was the Bogart poster boy & he bounced halfway through the blunt, with the blunt! Which is why we had to bust out 2nds, better than getting arrested before we were smoking herb outside the White House I guess.

... rewind just a bit, party. let me tell you this odd shit first-person style:

i'm in the car, stretch is riding shotty, and styles east hops noisily into the car. "ma fuckers!" he shouts. high-fives ensure, with me finally shutting them up with a ringy cell.7 am, the phone rings indiana jones style. it's party. i forgot to hit him up the night before about the trip to d.c. (as stretch put it, "don't assume he'll remember anything." haha!) but sure enough, party's awake and at it, and it's only seven in the am. i was pulling out of williamsport with stretch, and now styles. and now party's on the line asking if we left yet. "we're way ahead of you, picasspants!" styles shouts. he's as loud and big on the real as he is on the mic... the only cat who publicly recants 'the day he beat hype in a battle' (he didn't) whilst in the presence of yours truly. he's a first-class clown, but i can respect his frankness (if not, fallacies) a lot more than the shit these cats talk to their walls. we peace, but hang-up only after styles recounts his run-in with this dickhead 'rapper' (every one's a rapper) from williamsport:

"yo, we fuckin- we're at the W-groceries in williamsport--the home of the millionaires--and this fucking-" he rants on and on, painting the picture. it's how our crew tells stories; in segments and fragments, thots and pictures... you gotta paint the scene.

but in short, this eminem-looking cat comes limping gingerly up to me, stretch, and styles. "yo, ya'll riding dirty?" or some shit like that.

"what? stretch frowns. he's already looking for a fight, and we're not at the protest yet. stretch has a short fuse for such a mellow guy. claims he's got a "party temper."

"i cop you some shit if ya'll need," wigs says.

stretch frowns at me, i shake my head, no. styles gives us the "ah, come on guys!" look. "you got trees?" styles blurts out. i shake my head again, and stretch mutters, motherfucker.

what ensues next is how assholes get shot. or mugged. or both. the great white hope hops into the backseat of our ride. now 4-deep full, we take his directions down south street, then onto fourth.

at the command, "right here," we stop next to a bum. the bum staggers to his feet and hands styles a bag.

styles goes, "what the fuck is this shit?" i turn to see a bag of powder thrown into a bums face. it explodes like baby powder all over the man's old face. antiquing an antique bum trying to push some sort of dumby dope shit on my crew. hilarious. i screw the wheels to the tires and we're out. styles stiff-elbows slim shady out of the back door. he rolls one complete rolls before his back comes to a jarring cold-stop on the curb. the once-and-now-three passengers laugh our asses off, and stretch throws a one-finger salute out the back window.

"that's two-hundred" some-odd-bucks the bum yells!

"fuck you!" styles shouts, already a block away, "we don't do drugs, asshole!"

this is where styles' animated recollection of the non-existent bag o'trees comes to it's conclusion, the whole car-full laughing their asses off again, and now party cracking up on the other end of the line. i take the phone and tell party we'll be in Philly in a couple of hours. then, it's off to DC.

after the comic-intermission, the road-silence kicks in. everybody in my car is off somewhere else, visiting each country villa with a glance of passing house and trees. i'm thinking about prohibition. marijuana prohibition, in particular. but prohibition in general. what does any kind of prohibition mean for a "free" society? can we not control ourselves. must we be controlled by others, uncle sam like our one bastard parents? alcohol prohibition didn't work. well, it worked to create the mob, bootlegging, people like al capone. the birdman of alcatraz. so it worked, in a sense, just not the way it was supposed to. and what of cannabis? did its prohibition work? ...i don't know anybody who smokes weed. or wait--who doesn't smoke weed. well, shit, you say, that's just because you know a lot of shady cats. true, i do know them. but it's actually because "some 25 million americans have smoked marijuana in the past year" (norml.org). well, weed is a drug. and alcohol is... well, a drug. and "according to the prestigious european medical journal, the lancet, "the smoking of cannabis, even long-term, is not harmful to health. ... It would be reasonable to judge cannabis as less of a threat ... than alcohol or tobacco" (norml.org).

we knew the facts. we all had studied up for years.

so there we were, about to embark on our first cannabis journey. and not in amsterdam (we wish), and not in cali or colorado, canada or maine, or even rhode island... no we were heading to a peaceful gathering of a peaceful pipe-potting people, right smack dab in our nation's fine capitol. unbelievable!

party continues:

Hype & crew arrived @ Philly a little after 10:30am. Everyone hopped out of his car completely blasted & eyes like Christmas, so basically we were all in the same state of mind. We didn't waste much time, just a few cigarettes & a odd conversation about the career of Michael Jackson. 3 sticks deep, we decided to bounce, so Chuck, Hype, Styles, Stretch & myself got into my busted trunked Corolla & headed down to the District.

The drive was crazy, with way too many blunts to count & endless freestyles over some old, unused Wine Thieves instrumentals I keep in my car for such an occasion. 495 South was a bitch & matters got worse as the traffic creeped it's way towards Delaware. Not the best state I've ever passed through. And shit became horrific on 95 South when it became a 20 mile parking lot & we had 70 miles to be on it. It hurt, so we smoked. We finally crossed into Maryland & made a stop in Baltimore to fill up on some gas. Chuck & Styles got into a minor scuffle with some kids @ the Exxon. From what I could hear from inside the car, a group of fruity fucks were listening to Styles freestyling on his way back to the pump from the convenient store & called him out for wearing a Phillies hat, I guess these kids were serious Orioles fans. After some weird trash talk from the shitheads about baseball stats, Chuck & Styles battled 2 other kids from the original guy's crew. Chuck got a little carried away with his insults & a fight ensued. It was hilarious watching these other assholes step to Treb & East, but everyone had to split when a lady shouted out that she had called the cops. So we got our gas & beef jerky real quick & fled.

It took about 3 & a half hours to get to DC, the traffic was a joke the rest of the way down & made the trip so much longer than it needed to be. On the positive, I saw another record shop as soon as we hit the capitol. This place wasn't as interesting as the Philly store though. The selection was low & there was nowhere to listen to the records. I did however purchase my first copy of Miles Davis' 'Bitches Brew'. An obvious choice for sampling, but I just really wanted to listen to the 1969 classic that turned jazz on its ear. Plus, it would be fun to sample a record like that because I'd have to chop it so nice that it was unrecognizable, so I think I'm gonna flip this thing.

The rest of DC was pretty cool. We didn't do much site seeing, just smoked a lot of trees & headed towards the protest. Hype & I brought some copies of the 'Sex & Co.' EP & a boom box to rock it on. We met quite a few people, but I'm starting to doubt that anyone will remember too much given the situation. The whole experience was rather surreal. It was odd watching cops circle the area but make zero arrests. It took me 2 or 3 blunts to fully get used to it. And after that I still wasn't too used to it, just more paranoid. Somehow, you get past it though. It's almost as if you have the protection of this huge stoner wall surrounding you. Crazy.

The people we met down there were out of this world.

out of this world, hype seconds. in fact, hype continues, i think some of the people will remember our brief intersection of worlds at our nation's capitol. some twenty or thirty people were gathered by the ass-busted corolla at one point in high afternoon. freestyles and demo exchanges took place, friendly battles ensued that recalled a time of hip hop old... we were all free that day... free to rhyme, free to battle, free to fight (for rights and otherwise), and free to toke one across that line. it was lincoln's woodstock.

can't wait til next year!

peace to our brothers and sisters!