Finding myself in Colorado
Almost exactly one month ago, on August 27, 2015, L and I took the redeye from Laguardia Airport to DIA and we made the move out to Colorado. Four months earlier, we had taken the same redeye to Denver during 420 and the Denver Cannabis Cup for the second year in a row. We had just gotten back from our honeymoon in Chile. Two months before that trip, we had gotten married. Now, one month after the move, the dust is settling, the apartment is unboxed, unpacked, L’s laboratory is up and running (in the background as we speak, pumping CO2 at 3200 psi), and fall has arrived.
I’m thinking about beginnings, and the funny thing about beginning is that you always find yourself already begun. That funny thing about time. Now, I find myself asking to begin. To begin what I set out to do, to begin the life I’ve always wanted to live, to begin writing again at 28 years old.
To begin, what the hell am I doing in Colorado, and how the hell did I get here?
A year ago I was still in New York, and L and I had just celebrated our one year. I was still bartending, pursuing acting, and had just begun another training session with SITI Company with their Conservatory artists. I wanted to put up a show, write a script, act in small student films, do plays. At the same time, I wanted to support L in pursuing his cannabis dreams. I knew that was his passion for as long as I’ve known him. The second time he took me out to dinner at Atlantic Grill, the day after he brought me to Shaolin (Staten Island, where he grew up) to teach me how to drive stick in his Mustang, he had given me two Dragon Moons, a weed-infused hard candy he made. He was passionate about the plant, but never put it into action. I saw so much of myself and my wasting-by-the-wayside dreams in his life. I planned out a weed-infused birthday dinner for him in October, and he continued to work on a business plan for the concentrate business he wanted to start. It was a slow start, but it was during these months he read and put together copious amounts of notes on the CO2 extraction process, notes that I am still working through deciphering to this day.
At around the same time as his birthday dinner, dubbed “Happy Meal” by one of the chefs we hired to collaborate on the menu and cook the dinner, I was cast in a small play produced by a new theatre company formed by recent NYU grads. As happy as I was to be back on the stage, the experience was clouded by some of the most terrifying and violent fights L and I have had in our often rollercoaster of a relationship. The play, An Infinite Ache, was an intimate, two-person play--a love story. It bothered L to an insane degree that I accepted the role, and it really drove him mad that I refused to back out of it. I, on the other hand, was stubborn to my own insane degree on my right to be in it. Looking back on it, I know he was hurt that I was so stubborn even in light of seeing the torment it put him through. We struggled through that November, an eerie calm for two days, then an explosive fight before the next rehearsal.
After that debacle, I stopped auditioning and he went to therapy. I had to find another way to act. We recommitted to our relationship, but we reached another nadir as the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve. As we found ourselves alone on the couch at midnight, tears down my eyes, while the rest of the world was celebrating, we made a promise that by next year, we would be somewhere different, somewhere better. We had to get out of New York, at least for a while.
Our plans began to take on more shape in the new year. L at that time had three different versions of the business plan that he had three different people help him with, and I had been very hands-off up until then. During one of the coldest NYC winters we had for a while, I read the three versions and began to pore over the notes he had made in the prior months, to begin to understand what it was he wanted to do--what was this supercritical carbon dioxide extraction that he wanted to do so badly, and what the hell was a psi? I quickly found myself deep in a rabbit hole of dab culture.
I spent days on the C710LORADO and Cannabis Extracts subreddits, reading Gray Wolf posts on thcfarmer forums and Skunkpharm Research, on Apex and Eden Labs and the myriad concentrate company websites. I got deep into the marijuana laws and business news and documentaries. We got in touch with a dispensary owner we met the previous year we had gone to Denver for 420 (my first, his second), and hired him as a consultant. I tried to piece together the three different versions, and we enlisted the help of his youngest brother, the Dartmouth business grad who was in Seattle working for Amazon. I knew I was in over my head having gone to school for creative writing and theatre, but to my surprise, the business and the industry fascinated me. First and foremost was L’s passion for it that slowly poured into me. Cannabis, like for so many others, literally saved his life (more on that later in another post). Secondly, it was from an ideological standpoint. For the first time, I felt a generational movement, a call-to-arms, to stand up for a right that needed to be heard. The argument to end the War on Drugs and decriminalize and rehumanize the system was like picking up where the protests that happened in the 60s trailed off. It cut through so much bullshit in the world today. Thirdly, it was empowering to engage with capitalism, and to engage it on my terms with the full force and idealism of my youth.
This was also the time when I proposed to L. I think he was looking over me, and we were discussing the business, and I said, if we’re going to do this, we might as well get married. I realized in the tiniest moment of clarity that our lives would be irrevocably linked if we did what we wanted to do. He had a bemused look on his face, and replied, yeah? Ok. (pause.) When?
We wanted the wedding to be on our terms, no fireworks or frills. The white dress and wedding bells didn’t interest me. The whole thing was like dressing up for Halloween. We had our parents meet, went to City Hall, threw an intimate dinner for our family at a tiny LES restaurant called Louie and Chan (with the perfect white dress and the tiniest of wedding bells), went on a lavish adventure to San Pedro de Atacama and Patagonia, and came back straight to work.
For me, the fireworks were coming.
