Sunday Night at the Weed Dispensary

 Sunday Night at the Weed Dispensary

“I think I have to drive to the Indian Reservation,” Dean moaned, sipping a lime green can of bubbly water. “I’m out of weed.” That the realization occurred on a Sunday made it all the more somber. 

“Maybe you should try the dispensary in Brooklyn Center,” Kylie suggested, looking up from her paperback. They sat in coffee-colored wicker chairs on the balcony, reading while the sunset turned the Northeast Minneapolis skyline pink on one of the last warm days of the season. Thousands of little yellow leaves on the locust trees rustled gently in the breeze. A black squirrel clambered up one of the trunks below them. 

“They actually opened one?”

“I think it opened a couple weeks ago. My sister went. She said the prices are a little high.”

“Well, the prices are high at the Indian Reservation,” he mused. “This would save me hours.”

He picked up his phone, which laid face down on top of his hardcover copy of Tonight in Jungleland, entered the passcode to his iPhone, and opened Google Maps. “What’s it called?”

“I think Rise -- Brooklyn Center?”

“Oh it’s a Rise,” he gushed; he typed the name in and found the dispensary page. “I used to go to a Rise all the time in Michigan.” He read the details underneath the title of the business. “Rise Brooklyn Park,” he corrected her. “They’re open until 8. Can we go tonight?”

“What time is it now?” Kylie inquired. 

“Time to get a watch,” he retorted before answering, “almost six.”

“We could go tonight,” she agreed.

“I’ll buy you a pack of gummies if you drive me,” he begged.

“Okay. Just let me finish this chapter.”

In a matter of minutes he opened up his laptop, found the Rise -- Brooklyn Park website, reviewed the various prices for different strands of flower and different varieties of edibles, and finally placed an online order for 28 grams of Apple Cobbler, a 20.2% THC Hybrid at a cost of $220, plus two tins of lemon lime gummies at a price of $20 a pop. Minutes later he received an email alert on his phone from “Jane” indicating that his online order was ready for pickup. 

Via 94-West, they drove from Northeast Minneapolis to Brooklyn Park. It took about 20 minutes. When they passed the Welcome to Brooklyn Park sign on the side of the road, Dean gasped, "Wow, I can't believe they don't advertise it as the home of Fulton Reed." When Kyle failed to respond, he added, "Mighty Ducks, you know?"

"I know who Fulton Reed is," she contended.

"I think Fulton Reed is the one from Brooklyn Park," he stammered, second-guessing himself. Quickly he typed it into the search box on his phone, surprised at his own uncertainty as it pertained to a subject matter he considered himself an expert in.  "Wow," he stammered. "Fulton Reed is actually from Stillwater, Minnesota. That's where Ms. Norah is from. Lester Averman is the one from Brooklyn Park." 

"Huh," she shrugged. 

"Still," he persisted with feigned outrage "No love for Lester Averman, huh?"

They arrived at 7:00ish. By then it was already dark out, but not too cold, a pleasant October evening of 50 degrees, with most of the leaves turned yellow but still clinging to the trees. Kylie pulled into a parking space outside the front of the Rise dispensary, which looked like it used to be a Pizza Hut. It had the same squat shape with the triangular shaped roof and windows around the sides. From the passenger seat, he saw in the front window a black man punching digits into one of the ATM machines that faced the parking lot. The black man stood out to Dean because he wore a Jason Voorhees jersey, with the hockey masked killer’s face glaring out from the front of the blood red jersey. He also wore a khaki bucket hat and sunglasses. 

Dean exited the car, leaving Kylie in the driver’s seat, where she sat scrolling on her phone while listening to music from the Current at a soft volume. He entered the dispensary front doors to the checkpoint desk, where two twenty-something women struggled to combat technical difficulties with both of their iPads. Dean handed his driver’s license to one of them, explaining that he had a local address, if it mattered, and that he just hadn’t bothered to register for a Minnesota license despite living here for more than three years. One of the girls cleared him without a word. She pressed a button that automatically unlocked a door to the left, allowing him to enter the greater sales room. He entered. To his left were the ATM kiosks, to his right the marble sales counters and digital registers, with stanchions and stanchion ropes creating a theme park-style line in between. He zigzagged through the stanchion walkway and stopped to wait, the only one in line. Another twenty-something woman, perhaps college-age, called him over after she completed a previous transaction with an unremarkable white man. 

“What can I do for you?” she said with a smile that expressed that unique combination of pep and utter misanthropy worn exclusively by service industry employees. He always empathized with them. She wore a name tag that said her name was Karmella.

“Hi, I have an online order to pickup for Dean Halverson,” he tried to say kindly. 

“Dean Halverson?” the black guy in the Jason Voorhees jersey exclaimed in a voice of feigned bewilderment; until now Dean hadn’t realized that he was at the register right next to him. “Did we go to school together?” At this, the saleswoman in front of Dean looked up with an expression of perplexion and concern.

On cue, Dean laughed and retorted, “I don’t know, man, but I love that jersey. I saw that jersey from the car and I was like, wow.” 

“Hey, I’m just kidding,” the man chuckled. “And thank you.”

“Freddy Krueger, right?” the brunette saleswoman interjected. In addition to two earrings on each of her ears, she wore a nose ring and an eyebrow stud. On her arm was a tattoo with a phrase written in cursive that Dean couldn’t make out, with her hands in motion. Dean and the man in the Jason Voorhees jersey both shook their heads.

“Michael Meyers?”

“Jason,” Dean jumped in to help. 

“Jason Voorhees,” the man in the Jason Voorhees jersey finished, smiling. 

“Yeah I just love those movies,” Dean smiled. 

“I’ll be right back with your order,” Karmella said with a swish of her body. He tried not to, at first, then stared at her butt, curvy in black jeans, as she walked away. 

“Where you from in Michigan, if you don’t mind me asking?” the man in the Jason jersey inquired, using a discreet voice now. 

“Metro Detroit area,” Dean answered. “The suburbs.”

“So you down with ICP?” Again the man in the Jason jersey laughed. 

“Insane Clown Posse,” Dean thought, nodding, attempting a joking tone. “Right, you know it.”

“I got some cousins in Detroit, if you know what I mean,” he lowered his sunglasses so that his eyes were visible for the first time. “But tell me, what’d you get here?”

“An ounce of something,” Dean replied. “What strand was it? Ah. . . Apple Cobbler. That’s it.”

“How much that run you?”

“220, I think, for the flower. A little steep. I also got some gummies.”

At this point Karmella, the sales clerk, returns with Dean’s ID and a brown paper bag. She placed it on the marble counter between them. Dean took it and thanked her. 

“That’s a lot bro. Why pay that?”

Karmella looked up, concerned that a customer was criticizing prices at her place of business right in front of her.

“Hey,” Dean interjected, trying to cut the tension, I’m just happy I don’t have to drive to Michigan or to the Indian reservation. I been driving two hours to the reservation for weed.”

“But why?” the man in the Jason jersey persisted. “But why?” he implored. 

“Gotta get weed,” Dean shrugged, to which Karmella the sales clerk nodded her head. “Yeah,” she asserted with empathetic eyes. She asked Dean if he wanted to sign up for the rewards program. The man in the Jason jersey, finished with his transaction, departed the store. Karmella asked, “do you think you’ll shop here a lot?” “Oh yeah, I’ll sign up,” he acquiesced. He never acquiesced, but for some reason he did tonight. 

“What are your plans the rest of the night?” Karmella inquired. Dean wondered if she was flirting with him or just doing her job. It seemed they both felt a relief now that the other customer had exited the store. 

“Well, I’ll probably watch some scary movies,” Dean replied. “Test out this weed,” he added, nodding towards the brown paper bag. 

“What kind of scary movies are you into?” Karmella inquired. 

“I love the Halloween franchise. Just watched Halloween H20. And, of course, the Friday the 13th movies.”

“Nightmare Before Christmas?” she asked. “Or no?”

“Oh yeah,” Dean said. In his head he thought, I used to watch that movie all the time with a girl I knew at Michigan, while we were both drunk, after a night out, but he said nothing of this. This memory, perhaps, ended their conversation. He took his brown paper bag, turned to see the two people in line behind him, then beelined to the exit.

His socialization meter dipped towards empty. To his dismay, he then saw the man in the Jason jersey again, standing outside the open front door of his Aerostar van, two parking spots to their right. 

“Hey c’mere, man,” he said, motioning Dean over. “I wanna show you something.”

Briefly considering the prospect of his own abduction, and finding comfort in the likelihood of a security camera nearby, in addition to Kylie’s ongoing surveillance, Dean advanced towards the van. “Check this out,” the man said, turning his hulking frame to allow Dean to see the front seat, where the man opened up a large clear trash bag overflowing with balls of marijuana, thousands of soft, loamy green and purplish balls of weed. Dean estimated the man had at least 12 ounces of the stuff. If it was meant to impress Dean, it didn’t. 

“Lemme give you my number, man,” the man in the Jason jersey insists. “In case you ever need anything. So you don’t have to be drivin’ out to Michigan or none, if you know what I’m saying. I can meet you right here. Just give me a text.”

“Defnitely,” Dean agreed, already opening his contacts icon on his phone to add a new one. “My name is Dean, by the way, if you didn’t already get that.” 

“Dean, my name’s Willie,” the man in the Jason jersey replied. 

“Alright, I’m ready, what’s your number?”

Willie gave him the number, one with a local area code, and Dean dutifully entered it into his phone, saving the contact. “I’ll send you a text so you have my number,” Dean instructed, anxious to get away, a feeling that had less to do with discomfort than it did his naturally introverted tendencies. “I appreciate it.”

“Wait up,” Willie called as Dean started walking back towards Kylie’s car. “I gotta give you a reason to call me. A sample.” With that, Willie reached into his trash bag of weed, dug out a handful of loamy green nuggets, and dropped them into the brown paper bag, which Dean held open. They fell onto the other contents within the brown paper bag. “Thanks man,” Dean beamed. 

With that, he returned to Kylie, eager to to retell the story of his encounter with Willie. He opened the car door. “Crucified Son” by Charlie Crockett played on 89.3 The Current.

The Locusts Have No King

 "The locusts have no king, and lice will multiply forever. The poet must be born, and live, and sweat, and suffer, and change, and grow, yet somehow maintain the changeless selfhood of his soul's integrity among all the crawling fashions of this world of lice. The poet lives, and dies, and is immortal; but the eternal trifler of all complexions never dies. The eternal trifler comes and goes, sucks blood of living men, if filled and emptied with the surfeit of each changing fashion. He gorges and disgorges, and is never fed. There is no nurture in him, and he draws no nurture from the food he feeds on. There is no heart, no soul, no blood, no living faith in him: the eternal trifler simply swallows and remains."

Thomas Wolfe

You Can't Go Home Again

Walk Off Twinnies

 

75 on a pleasant mid-September Friday night, the end of a week which saw JJ McCarthy burst into the national spotlight in dazzling fashion. Last homestand of the year for the Minnesota Twins. Kody Clemens, son of the great pitcher, hits three homers. Then the Diamondbacks score four in the 9th to take an 8-6 lead, at which point heartbreak feels imminent for the beleaguered Twinnies. In the bottom half of the 9th, the Twins load the bases with no outs. They tie it via a bases-loaded walk. Luke Keaschall, hitting an absurd .320 as a rookie, hits the sacrifice fly to walk it off for Minnesota. We walked home afterward, crossing the Mississippi River via bridge, the water pitch black far below, the big Grain Belt Beer billboard lit up in fluorescent green and red lights, flashing. 

 

claw marks

 

A Midsummer Night's Camp

 Rice Lake & Cannon Lake

Sunday, July 13, 2025

Yesterday the baby shower for Kara’s friends Mary and Paul wore me out. So much so that we skipped Movies in the Park night, Angels in the Outfield at McRae Park. Instead, we watched it at home, smoking a bowl at sundown and eating Lucky Charms during the movie. Skipping Angels in the Outfield at the park convinced me to book a campsite for Sunday night, a prospect I’d been considering for a couple of days: the summer days run away like thoroughbreds at the racetrack, so carpe fuckin’ diem. 

I napped this morning until one in the afternoon, then promptly packed up for camp. Realized, disconsolately, that I left my radio at my apartment, so I drove there before getting on 1-35 S. Stop-and-go traffic the whole way made me rethink the whole trip. City traffic makes me want to put tinfoil on the windows and shut myself in. I smoked a cig after grabbing the radio to calm my nerves. It worked. I said the hell with it, let’s just go. 

That instinct was confirmed by way of a shirtless hiker about my age who just walked by. 

“You don’t happen to have a map, do ya?” he asked. 

“No I don’t,” I lied. 

“I’m doing the Hiking Club. I think I’m on the right trail.”

“This is only my second time here, so I don’t think I can be of much help to you.”

“I’m hiking every state park in Minnesota,” he offered. “Been camping since May 11.”

“Wow. Good for you,” I applauded. 

“Thanks. You gotta live, ya know?”

“Yeah,” I answered, dumbfounded.

Carpe diem, I thought. I was laying out in the sun on the black and white checkerboard pattern blanket (“Roseville Schools” writing on it), writing in my journal, listening to a country station, reading Roger Kahn’s Boys of Summer, a memoir. 

If I were reviewing state parks, I’d say the one major flaw with the cart-in sites at Rice Lake State Park is their close proximity to a major hiking trail – one apparently a part of the Hiking Club trail system. Indeed, an older couple followed the shirtless man not long after our conversation. They passed again shortly thereafter, going in the direction from which they’d originally come. All this suggested the trail gets significant use, so camping so close to the trail feels a little unsettling and invasive, especially for cart-in sites, which, in my experience at Minnesota State Parks, are usually situated in spots of solitude (hence why I prefer them). I have not encountered any hikers since 5:30 p.m., though, so hopefully night will provide my desired solitude. 

Restless, after encountering a snake at the picnic area, I started a fire a little early – maybe 6:45. A nice breeze is blowing off the lake, swishing through the thick cattails and blowing the fire in a single direction consistently. I put a can of Hormel chili and a baked potato wrapped in tin foil on the campfire grill. Finally, a good song on the radio: Steve Winwood’s “Back in the High Life Again.” Around 7:45 I finally found a sports talk radio station, a Fox Sports affiliate out of Rochester. I smoked multiple bowls and cigarettes as I waited for the sun to set and for the potato to soften. Highly recommend the peanut butter cookies from Kwikery, the Kwik Trip bakery. 

Sundown indicates my view of the lake is south. An orange sun sinking around a peachy pink sky. Fireflies flickering, making me feel alive and nostalgic. Little black birds, hundreds of them, move as a collective unit, swooping en masse from one treetop to another along the shore, their individual wings, so miniscule, somehow making a great collective Draculean swoosh sound. Red-breasted robins continue to poke around camp past sunset. A single splash in the water suggests the lake is closer in proximity than I thought. 

Monday, July 14, 2025

6:00 a.m.: Got the KFAN morning show, listening to that while smoking a bowl in the tent. The low overnight was 60, and I only felt faintly cold in the morning hours. I got up once at six and retreated to the comfort of the tent for a bit longer. It felt good to lie and sleep on the ground, to reconnect with the earth and get in touch with childhood summers. I suppose that’s what I’m seeking for purposes of writing. Meat Sauce gave dinosaur facts on KFAN, complained that the new NCAA Football video game was too difficult. 

Hiked back to the car for my coffee mug, then started a fire back at camp to boil water for campfire coffee. While I waited for it to boil, I smoked some more and packed up camp. Before I departed the park completely, I drove around to the other side where the main campgrounds were located. I found them sparsely populated, as expected on a Monday morning. I parked and walked to the modern restroom facility, where I washed my hands and face. From a distance you could hear the building fan hum like an insect of the summer night. Inside it was dank and musty, with two stalls and a single urinal, next to which, in a corner of the plaster cement wall, lived a family of daddy long legs’, some in their webs, all in various sizes so that there looked to be a dad, mom, son, daughter, and so on. Around the area I found nowhere to sit in the sun – Rice Lake State Park is a rather small and compact state park – so I hit the road to Owatonna, a town located 8 miles to the west. I stopped at a Circle K/Holiday station there, used the bathroom, bought coffee, a sandwich, and water. The coffee I got was S’mores flavored, fittingly. On a whim I detoured to Faribault, outside of which I found a nice lakeside park right on Cannon Lake, home to more swans than I’ve ever seen in one place. 

A public beach on one end, a boat launch on the opposite end, this park is narrow, hugging the curving shore of Cannon Lake and sandwiched in between the lakeshore and the two-lane country road that ran parallel to it. Heavy July heat like honey or molasses. I sat and read in the sun, wrote some more, even listened to some of my Willa Cather audiobook. Two white butterflies frolicked above patches of yellow and white wildflowers, the tips of which reached upwards of three and a half feet in full summer maturity. A hundred geese literally blocked off the beach when I arrived – later, a truck drove them off – so I chose a spot in the grass next to the covered picnic area. I also toured the metal fishing dock. 

Big trucks rumbled by on the nearby country highway. On a grassy hill on the far side of the road, two dozen or so cows fight for a spot in a solitary prism of shade, crowding together there. For a moment I thought myself a character in a Stephen King novel, an outsider just arrived at some Podunk blue-collar town in Maine. In other words, back in the high life again.

White Noise

 

"The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers. They walk in a fragmented trance, stop and go, clusters of well-dressed figures frozen in the aisles, trying to figure out the pattern, discern the underlying logic, trying to remember where they'd seen the Cream of Wheat. They see no reason for it, find no sense in it. The scouring pads are with the hand soap now, the condiments are scattered. The older the man or woman, the more carefully dressed and groomed. Men in Sansabelt slacks and bright knit shirts. Women with a powdered and fussy look, a self-conscious air, prepared for some anxious event. They turn into the wrong aisle, peer along the shelves, sometimes stop abruptly, causing other carts to run into them. Only the generic food is where it was, white packages plainly labeled. The men consult lists, the women do not. There is a sense of wandering now, an aimless and haunted mood, sweet-tempered people taken to the edge. They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn't matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of our age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead."

Don DeLillo

White Noise