Cleaner Smoking

I think a great thing about pot is that I can use it to make mundane tasks fun. The vacuum sounds louder. Driving is smooth sailing. Just moving in repetitive ways can be fun if my body is relaxed enough. Getting to the point of being relaxed and capable of doing stuff can be a tough balancing act. It is often far too easy to just take one more hit and then – stuck on the couch.

One of the routine tasks that I had to do the other day was one of my least favorite, cleaning my piece. Not only does it leave my hands smelly and sticky, it takes time and effort and caution to do correctly. The worst part – not being able to smoke the piece for several hours while it dries.

As things happen, it was late and I was bored. I decided that I was tired of working hard to pull hits and wanted to clean Littlefoot. The significantly details about Littlefoot as far as cleaning goes – a big chamber, a long pipe, and thin glassed. Littlefoot, like in The Land Before Time, is a brontosaurus. The shotgun is the tail and the mouthpiece is...the mouth. More details on this piece, and others, later

Cleaning bowls is tough. Making sure the water is the right temperature, the right chemicals and tools need to be available. For a long time I used only Bling, a combo of liquid and sediments that worked well with smaller pieces. As my collection of gear grew, so did my resources. Pipe cleaners were used for a while, toothpicks became a staple for scraping resin, I tried using salt as an additional scrub.

Typically, when I clean Littlefoot, I run hot water through him and then use some Bling. Once some of the resin has softened, I'll use toothpicks to start picking away resin from the bowl or mouthpiece. I will let the bowl fill with water, plugging all holes, and then shake loose anything that I can. I'll drain, add an abrasive like salt or Bling, refill with water, and shake again, repeating as necessary. I also use rubbing alcohol to clean bowls and it works really well to freshen scents. Sometimes, if I have a large enough container or a small enough bowl, I will fill that with a solution and shake that with the piece inside of it.

One problem that routinely develops as a result of Littlefoot's shape is that salt drains down into his feet and doesn't easily come out. In addition, his legs are hourglass shaped. I usually have to rock sediment out of him using water to lubricate the process. This time, instead of salt, I tried using baking soda as my scrubbing agent. The results were similar but left a strange aftertaste.

After 20 or so minutes of cleaning, I usually have resin on my hands and Littlefoot is only looking marginally cleaner. The souls of his feet stay dark and the top of the chamber stays dirty because the water level doesn't rise enough. His tail and neck stay pretty clean, but he gets dirty again at the mouth. The underside of the bowl has dingle-berries that are parallel to the glass and impossible to remove.

Why I don't boil bowls: One time my friend, I'll call him Simple Matt, offered to clean my bowl Snackpack by boiling it along with his. At the time, I was a relatively new smoker and had no techniques for cleaning developed yet. Well, he got stoned and forgot to remove the bowls from the uncovered pot of water. After maybe 20 minutes the water had evaporated and the bowls were simply sitting on a very hot surface. To make matters even worse, in his frantic scramble to remove the bowls from the empty but hot pot, Snackpack was dropped, splitting in two.

What do you think is the best way to clean pieces, whether they be bowls, bongs, pipes, steamrollers, slides, one-hitter, or anything else you have. Any recommended products or processes?

Good luck and smoke well.

-XY

Drug Tests and Work

With new jobs and opportunities often come drug tests. Though many of us that get high don't do it at work, or are at least sober for most of the work day, we are still required to be clean for annual testing or pre-employment testing.

The last time I had a test for a potential new job, I spent weeks chugging cranberry juice, spent $50 on a drink from GNC, bought home drug tests for urine, and then got the news - this test was going to be a hair test. Fuck. I had just gotten a buzz cut, so I knew that the hair wouldn't be coming off of my head. Since I didn't know where they would take hair from, I couldn't even get the allegedly cleansing shampoo. I couldn't even find a home hair drug test. They ended up taking my armpit hair, and I failed that test. I didn't have any 'medical explanation' for pot being in my system, so I ended up applying somewhere else.

I used to go high to my old retail job all the time, and it was typically great. Except for that one time I had to worm my way through a cluster of managers. Without saying where I worked, I think that the red shirts helped hide my sometimes bloodshot eyes. One of my bosses from this job, Todd, told me he used to sell pot "by the handful" when at Grateful Dead concerts. This company also had a drug test policy, but that was only for starting employment and when you got hurt on the job. When I first started there I was young enough that I had not yet started smoking. .

While I worked in retail, I also worked in a hotel. There was a woman there, Karin, who told me how her son used to grow pot at home when he was still alive, and how she helped her son hide it from the dad, who sounded like a control freak. Whilst Karin could not smoke anymore because of her heart, she was tolerant of me smoking and often would let me go out to my car for smoke breaks. This job was 8 hours of standing at a counter and just checking people in and out. Being high made an otherwise depressingly boring job better. Since this was a hotel, I could even hunt down the breakfast bar foods for munchies. I used to take an empty duffel bag and fill it with pop tarts and cinnamon buns for late nomage. When I started working at the hotel I had just started smoking, and asked about the drug test policy in my employment contract. My boss just looked at me and asked, "what drug test?" That was a total green light for my activities.

At the same time I worked at the hotel and in retail, I also worked at Wawa. If you are unfamiliar with the Wawa brand, I'm sorry for you. It's an awesome convenience store with a deli and sandwiches and frozen treats and bagels. In the summer there is Hoagiefest, my 2nd favorite holiday after Christmas. Hoagiefest uses very retro 1970s style advertising and is quite pleasing to the eye. When I worked there I hadn't started smoking yet, but was amazed at some of my toking coworkers. They used to go into the walk in freezer and blaze at work. Without ever bring caught. Sadly, our manager got fired and so did our favorites assistant managers, so those habits had to change. But that didn't stop them from adding liquor to the unlimited free sodas we were allowed to have.

Now there is a new job on the horizon. This is a salaried! job with, I'm assuming, a lot more pressure then retail or hospitality have. When the job was first posted online, it didn't mention anything about drug testing, just criminal and child abuse testing. Fast-forward one month to interview time, then to job offer. Along with the job offer came news that a new industry standard came out about 25 days prior: mandatory drug testing for new hires. So began the cycle of cleaning up and researching new methods at passing tests. We looked at Niacin (I can't take this because of my cholesterol medication), cranberry pills, vitamins to increase metabolism, and of course, stopped smoking. Amazingly enough, now that we are sober, we can remember to take the pills. The downside is, we started drinking again. We enjoy drinks once in a while, but twice in the same week we are going out to the bars. Before this, I went to the bar twice in the last six months. Another downside is that these pills are impacting liver function. We went out, and our body got rid of everything except for the pure alcohol. Which was thrown up the following morning. After only 1 beer! (but it was almost 10% alcohol).

This test is only for one of us, but the other is stopping as well as a show of support and solidarity. Lucky for me, it's easy to take a stop smoking when I'm busy and out of the home 12+ hours a day. One of our new traditions is eating toaster strudel from Pilsbury and using the icing to write custom message instead of just covering the top. When applying for jobs, we wrote "JOB" on top. When I needed a good grade for class, we wrote "A+" on top. And they both worked. Below is our newest strudel icing, and hopefully this one works too.

This is the closest that I have come to believing in folk medicine, and it has me wondering what else might work. Voodoo maybe? We've combed forums looking for information and hints for passing tests, but it's tough to separate fact from fiction. It's the internet - who knows what's true!? So this is where you, our readers come in. What's your preferred method of passing tests? How long do you think it takes for the THC to get out of your system? Any hints or tricks that you know work or don't?

Wish us luck!
-XY


And before I forget to mention it, using another person's urine or fake pee just creeps me the fuck out.