Hear/Say

Yesterday, I visited Seattle’s 2010 HEMP-FEST. It’s the best people-watching you get outside of folk-life; even so, the folks are much more extreme.

Walking down Elliott, the daunting line into Olympic Sculpture Park stretched for blocks and was thick six people wide. The Chan bros. and me decided to skip the line and walk to the northern entrance, across the train-tracks next to the silos.

Elliott was lined with little camper vans, havens blacked- out by makeshift curtains clenched in the window cracks and historic buildup of stickers. Dogs everywhere; pit bulls, puppies, bulldogs, dirty-mouthed children with elephant ears squeezed between their fat fingers and tender gums, their face powdered with jam and sugar. There was a boat docked under the silo arm that reached above the sea; not a boat, a ship– and it echoed whatever reggae music bumped at the stage decorated with a huge sculpture of a blunt (someone went “Dude, I swear that boat is playing music”). Tye-dye shirts, being worn, being sold (“I live off tye dye, man”), celebrated with leis of pot leaves twisted into bushel-like bracelets or waving lazily around slightly sweaty necks.

The sidewalk constantly thick with people and movement, of turning heads and the pulsing rhythm of festival life– but the atmosphere is relaxed; people don’t mind the bustle as much; most people are looking for semi-covert areas to smoke the pack of joints they rolled on the way over, looking for their hook-ups, their friends who promised them a good time; perhaps make some new friends in order to have a good time.

There are some who have too much of a good time; we passed a boy that looked sheet-white and stood stock still as both his friends grabbed him and murmured calmly while their fingers pressed savagely into the back of his arm; ten minutes later we were down the park but heard sirens…

Funnily enough, internal conflict was found in young pot smokers against 1) the younger pot smokers (“Those girls are like, 15!!!!”) and 2) families; particularly the women-and-her-child (boys: “yeah, I wouldn’t bring my family here”). I saw a young boy– definitely younger than 15– cheekishly wriggle up and ask “hey, can I bum a cigarette?”

The Chan bros. met up with their greater group of dude-friends, one of which was celebrating his birthday. They all chipped in to buy a spectacular bong for him– olive green with the clear bowels of the bong displaying ten tubes, what they called “splash shields”; people stopped him on the street and asked to see him “rip it”. The magnificence had a gold label near the lip, a giant RX designed into RelaX… while the wet grey blanket named Scott whimpered in the corner, because the social mingling with the trophy of a bong made him increasingly late to pick his parents up at the airport. And he was their ride in.

Read here for more information on 1068, legalizing medical marijuana in Washington state.

Graceee