Buying Weed in 2024

One day in Amenia, I'd been doing the routine management of my alcoholism-autism-general disorder of life -- enduring some uninterrupted hours of sobriety, the usual walking singing coffee drinking cigarette smoking -- plus of course holding lots of doors open for clean old ladies and writing my notes & poems as quick as I can when they allow their shoulders to be used as desktops. 

And on this day of quiet joy it occured to me that the bong & marijuana accessory shop might also sell marijuana. (I am originally a weedsmoker from the 90s: Things were, to put it mildly, very, very different back then.) 

When I learned I could buy my pot in eighths from them at both a discount and a convenience from my former provider, a modest unicorn entered my day, and everything was better. 

Some weeks later, I forget how many, the owner's relocated to Pleasant Valley. So, I bought my weed from there. 

There were mostly three people who ran the store at that point. 2 kids in their early-twenties and a whitehaired man maybe in his forties or fifties. 

I often sensed the girl, who had small breasts and tattooed legs and wore flirty-adjacent clothes, had feelings for me. At 41, I'm exercising more caution than I used to. 

I'd go there about once a week, purchase however many grams I could afford, make banter and so forth, and leave without any new phone numbers and my dick in my pants. 

Months came and went and somehow the store owners ended up on the wrong side of the law. This took the form of the local authorities taping-up the front of the building with the black/yellow notices typically associated with crime scenes, car accidents. There was the stiff language of proletariat-princes informing the general public that MARIJUANA had been CONFISCATED from this building...like some entitled jerkoff's attempt at humor or pride, equally failing at both.... 

There happened to be one other store in the plaza and I saw there were people working in there and so I tried to get a sense of what exactly transpired and if the store was going to reopen in the future. 

The man I spoke with wasn't sure. He said they were doing deliveries now though. I started calling once a week and arranging to get my recreational medicines that way. (Again, I was a teenager in the 90s: the idea of handling this sort of thing over the internet and the phone and the like was as distant as actual angels and faeries and unicorns) and at some point, after establishing some familiarity with the girl on the phone, passing a message through the young man/kid who made the deliveries, I thought I'd try making a small pass at the girl directly via a thank-you text message with a sultry use of the word 'gratitude'. 

The girl's alleged father texted me back... It wasn't nice... I've since typed-up some of his choice sends. Here's one:  THEIR SIDE: Times OK, I tried calling you four times. This is J the owner the girl with the sexy voice is my daughter. How about next time you make an order I deliver it to you and you can tell me how sexy my fucking voice is disrespect her once more brother and it's gonna be a problem and I hope you fucking understand this. This phone is not for you to get your kicks off. Do you understand me and if you don't, I can meet you somewhere and we could talk like this like men. 

They continued sending their menus to my phone and I thought enough time had passed we could simply resume normal business...and then later in the day, after I'd bought my weed elsewhere, one of the delivery-drivers informed me I'd been blocked on the girl/parent's phone.

And that's...when I decided none of it was worth the hassle. 

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