My buddy T-Res came over for an afternoon of fun and frolic. We were supposed to chill for awhile then see the new Star Trek movie, but product testing intervened…

Awhile back, a really nice fellow named Jimmy from Head Shop Headquarters (a top head shop in Texas) contacted me, and he sent me some glass goodies to try out. I was a bit burned out from doing a couple of big product review articles one after the other, so I wanted to calm down before writing this next one. He sent me (and a shoutout to the careful product packing person, who’s clearly an expert (w)rapper) some weird test-tube looking thing, plus another item that I thought looked like a Gemini capsule with a handle and T-Res thought was a butt plug, but we were both wrong.

The test tube was actually a “glass blunt” from Grav Labs, and I never heard of that concept before, but I figured blunts have to be passed, so I waited until my buddy was here so we could try it together. And I don’t get to see him often enough because he is way busy with real life.

The space capsule was a Helix steamroller pipe. I admit I didn’t recognize it because all of the steamrollers I’ve ever smoked out of before were made from toilet paper rolls and aluminum foil, and this thing was so slick I never would have guessed. It has a carb at the end, but it also has some carefully engineered little holes in the body so that when you take a hit, the smoke freaking *swirls* like crazy, insuring that you’re always getting some air mixed in so it’s not super harsh. The full pipe is 6.5″ long, and it’s 4.5″ from your mouth to the bowl, so it’s perfect for people like me with long hair that otherwise get it or their noses burned with short spoon pipes.

Now if you’ve been following my blog for any length of time, you know I talk a lot about vaporizers and edibles and capsules to avoid smoking for health reasons, but I do change things up a bit every once in awhile. For years, I took a nightly dose of cannabutter, usually on bread or crackers, for my insomnia, but then I was told I was developing diabetes, so the bread habit had to go. I switched to capsules at night, but found the timing was sometimes off. So I tried smoking very small amounts, because this way I could wait till the last minute and still get high enough to go to sleep with just two or three tokes.

Lately, almost all that smoking has been through this Helix thing. It’s ridiculously easy to clean. It’s straight, so you can just blow through it to get 90% of the ashes and such out, and a small amount of 91% ISO, sometimes with Q-tips, does the rest. Plus those swirls. The bowl is small compared to most pipes, but it’s plenty for me and you can even microdose from it. And it’s the only steamroller I’ve ever seen that you can actually put down without it rolling off the table.

Blunt Talk

I decided to try the glass blunt with some Mars OG. Jimmy said you just kind of shove some weed in the end. I figured this was no time to get all grindy because we’d just inhale powder, so I just pulled off a piece of bud and kind of shoved it in the end. Then I lit it, pretty much just like a cigarette or joint. OK, so that’s why it’s called a glass blunt.

I’ve never smoked an actual blunt (which are literally cigars made with tobacco leaves and stuffed with weed), but in terms of pipes, it probably doesn’t get much harsher than inhaling through 3″ of glass straight down your gullet. But I can see how something like this would be ideal for portable use, especially when you factor in the slide design, which means you can stuff a pretty wild amount of weed into this thing (although nowhere near as much as an actual blunt). Just pull the slide out as much as you need to put in the weed!

Protip: if you’re microdosing or otherwise don’t need to smoke a lot of weed, you can just pull the main part out, use that alone, and have less to clean. There’s a hard-to-see glass “stop” that prevents you pushing too much into the end or getting too many particles into your lungs. And hold it semi-vertically, like a chillum, so nothing falls out.

So we both had a few hits from this and decided it was time to try the Helix together. At this point, I was definitely high, so I was enjoying watching the smoke swirl around while T-Res was hitting it. He had filled it with his own private mixture. I think he said it was Blue Dream with Northern Lights and maybe White Widow. I had at least 4 or 5 hits off this magic weed. Big mistake.

Two Is For High, Six Is Too High

OK, so that’s enough smoking, time for lunch! Felicity had made sure there was plenty of food, and here I was at the table looking at all of it. Then I was laying down on the floor, in exactly the same place as last time I overdid it at home. Not really a coincidence, because I figure the paramedics could easily get to me from either entrance in that particular spot. Although T-Res was there last time this happened too…maybe he gets me higher.

But apart from the fact that I was suddenly feeling faint, I didn’t have any of the scary semi-nausea I used to get at such times, or even much in the way of anxiety. If I passed out, I passed out…I wasn’t going into paranoid worries about my heart or health or anything the way I used to do. Not sure if it’s because I wasn’t dehydrated, or I’m better at controlling my thoughts, or because I had some calming indica from Mars. But it was much less worrying than any of those other times.

This was around 2 PM, and we had planned to leave for the Star Trek movie around 3. Nope, not in good enough shape to go to the movies…or even stand up. I crawled on all fours though, and was able to at least sit up and watch TV and turn T-Res on to Angie Tribeca, a very entertaining TV show which is just about the best kind of thing to watch when you’re this high. Think Airplane! crossed with Sledge Hammer! Is that enough exclamation marks for you?!?!?!?

OK, we even missed the 4:20 show, because we had a mini binge in Tribeca land. And eventually T-Res went off to wherever T-Res went off to, and Felicity was now too high off her capsules to drive or cook, so I took us out for Chinese food. I could finally drive, because it was like 8 PM. Yes, it took me that long.

So damn this glass is good.

(Update: if you order anything from Head Shop Headquarters, use the code BC15 and save 15%!)