I been a memberin today. I was thinking about April 20th 1999. I recall it particularly well, and since the main function of my blog seems to be personal recollection I'll jot down a bit here. I'm also undertaking the task of recording my first trip to New York, but it's in depth so it may not be up and about today.
I was fresh dropped out of college in April of 1999. I lived with my brother in a small house in Hays, Kansas. We had a nice close circle of friends, and a we all enjoyed smoking lots of grass. Our house was a nice comfortable place for us to gather, smoke, play music, listen to music and watch movies. Or just drink multiple 30 packs of Keystone Light.
April 20th is a bit of a pot celebration day because it's 4/20, or 420. 4:20 has always been known amongst folks I know in the know as time to toke up, I'm not sure exactly why, but I'm online so I'll do the research just now and come back to let you know all about it. I'm so very kind. Done! After my bit of writing is done you can read all about it from snopes.com, without even bothering to go there. I'm really a nice person.
So you have my brother and I who have a house and friends and we smoke pot and then April 20th comes along. Being my first April 20th without school to get in the way I decided I would celebrate the day in high style and invite folks over to smoke the grass. Devin had some classes but he joined in on the fun when obligations were completed.
Joe, who played guitar in my band at the time was still a young high school age fellow, but a deviant at heart, he decided he'd ditch school in order to help me celebrate. Good lad. I was a bit of a sleeper in at this point, so Joe arriving just after his first class was to be my wake and bake wake up call. He showed around 10:00 am and yelled me out of bed. UG! Such a tough life I led at the time. Being forced out of bed to smoke the pot SO early in the morning.
Joe and I were really tight pals, we had been through a couple of bands together, as well as cross country runners. I admired Joe's guitar playing, still do. He learned me things, I keep relearning.
So Joe wakes me up and as we had planned, we prepared for a visit to Green Vista Point.
GVP for those really in the know. GVP was a closet in my bedroom. It was a strange closet. It ran the entire length of one wall of my bedroom. On the left there was a normal door which opened into what was basically a normal closet that ran from floor to ceiling and had space to hang clothes, but to the right of that door was a door that was only half a door, and it's bottom started about 6 feet from the floor. This door led into another section of the same closet. The elevated floor space in the smaller part of the closet was exactly the size of a twin bed. With great effort I was actually able to get a mattress up into the small space. A black shower curtain was used to make a canopy over the left side of the closet, this was meant to separate the area where the clothes hang from the area with the mattress that would become Green Vista Point. The GVP side of the canopy as well as the walls on the GVP side were then decorated with glow in the dark stars and sparse black light paint. Two black lights we installed, to complete the hippy feelin'. The center piece of GVP was then added, on top a small shelf two feet from the ceiling on the far right wall I placed an old stereo and two speakers. When completed Green Vista Point was not a a sensory deprivation chamber, as I had first considered, but a sensory overload chamber. I spent many hours with good friends, good pot and good music, listening that strange closet.
It was tradition then when one of us purchased a new album that the first listen or an early listen would be of the album, from start to finish, stoned out of our minds and watching the glowing lights in the dark of Green Vista Point.
Minds wandering, talking if needed, mainly just listening. GVP, shaped the way I listened to and thought about music in many ways. I really miss having that space.
To get back to our story in process, about April 20th. I fell asleep with the bong in my hand in GVP that morning, so Joe woke me again. I don't even recall what we were listening too. It doesn't matter. I was thinking when I started this post that it was about that day, but I guess it wasn't. I do recall going into green vista point with something like 8 people later in the day. When we came out we turned on the TV to see the horrific image of some poor dead kid laying on the street. Sitting there in stoned sympathy trying to figure out what was going on in the next state over. Some stupid fucking kids, too young to realize that high school is such a small nearly insignificant part of life, taking guns to their fellows and then themselves.
So that is what I was doing 7 years ago. If it's true that cells regenerate every 7 years then I guess I've changed completely since then. Luckily I don't really feel I have. I'm going to see if I can find out weather that 7 year cell thing is true or not.
No handy snopes.com entry for that one. I'll let it go.
Here's the bit about 420:
Claim: '420' entered drug parlance as a term signifying the time to light up a joint.
Status: True.
Origins: Odd
terms sneak into our language every now and then, and this is one of the oddest. Everyone who considers himself in the know about the drug subculture has heard that '420' has something to do with illegal drug use, but when you press them, they never seem to know why, or even what the term supposedly signifies.
It's both more and less than people make it out to be. '420' began its sub-rosa linguistic career in 1971 as a bit of slang casually used by a group of high school kids at San Rafael High School in California. '420' (always pronounced "four-twenty," never "four hundred and twenty") came to be an accepted part of the argot within that group of about a dozen pot smokers, beginning as a reminder of the time they planned to meet to light up, 4:20 p.m. Keep in mind this wasn't a general call to all dope smokers everywhere to toke up at twenty past four every day; it was twelve kids who'd made a date to meet near a certain statue. It's thus incorrect to deem that '420' originated as a national or international dope-smoking time, even though the term began as a reference to a particular time of day.
These days '420' is used as a generic way of declaring one likes to use marijuana or just as a term for the substance itself. Its earliest connotation of having to do with the time a certain group of students congregated to smoke wacky tobaccy is unknown to the overwhelming majority of those who now employ the term. Indeed, most instead believe one or more of the many spurious explanations that have since grown up about this much abused short form:
420 is the penal code section for marijuana use in California.
Nope. Section 420 of the California penal code refers to obstructing entry on public land. The penal codes of other states list different entries for 420, but none of them matches anything having to do with marijuana.
However, on 1 January 2004 the Governor of California signed that state's Senate Bill 420 which regulates marijuana used for medical purposes. This bill comes years after the term '420' was associated with marijuana and indeed its number likely was chosen because of the existing pop culture connection. This is the tail wagging the dog, not the other way around.
It's the Los Angeles or New York police radio code for marijuana smoking in progress.
It's not the police radio code for anything, let alone that.
It's the number of chemical compounds in marijuana.
The number of chemical compounds in marijuana is 315, according to the folks at High Times magazine.
April 20 is the date that Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, or Janis Joplin died.
Though these performers were strongly identified with drug use during their brief lifetimes and the emerging drug culture after their demises, none of them kicked the bucket on April 20. Morrison died on July 3, Hendrix on September 18, and Joplin on October 4.
The 20th of April is the best time to plant marijuana.
There's no one "best time" -- that answer would change from one part of the country to another, or even one country to another.
Albert Hofmann took the first deliberate LSD trip at 4:20 on 19 April 1943.
This was indeed the case his lab notes back this up. But this wasn't the source of "420," just an oddball coincidence. (For the pedants out there, Hofmann's first LSD trip, which was accidental, took place on 16 April 1943.)
It's the code you send to your drug dealer's pager.
Yeah, right. All drug dealers recognize a '420' page as "Please be waiting on the corner with my baggie of wildwood weed."
When the Grateful Dead toured, they always stayed in Room 420.
Untrue, says Grateful Dead Productions spokesman Dennis McNally.
Spurious etymologies and uncertain definition aside, '420' has slipped into a position of semi-respectability within the English lexicon. Various free-wheeling cities annually celebrate "hemp fests" on April 20. There's a 4:20 record label in California, and a band called 4:20. Atlanta's Sweetwater Brewing Co. sells its 420 Pale Ale in supermarkets and opens its doors to the public at 4:20 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays. New York's 420 Tours sells low-cost travel packages to the Netherlands and Jamaica. Highway 420 Radio broadcasts "music for the chemically enhanced." And in 2001, the forReal.org web site of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Center for Substance Abuse Prevention put out a public service document titled, "It's 4:20 Do You Know Where Your Teen Is?"
420s are routinely slipped into popular movies and television shows. In Fast Times at Ridgemont High the score of the football game was 42-0. Most of the clocks in Pulp Fiction are set to 4:20 (but not all when the kid receives the watch it's set at 9:00). And there are many other instances, so keep your eyes peeled.
However, as amusing as it is to tie 420 to pot smoking and hunt for it in popular movies, the number has its dark side. Hitler was born on 20 April 1889, and the massacre of 13 victims at Columbine High School in Colorado took place on 20 April 1999.
Barbara "4 and 20 blackbirds" Mikkelson
Last updated: 19 April 2005
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