Its not hate mail!
It's not hate mail! CB

A person named Phil recently wrote to The Stranger to let us know that he would never pick up another issue of our dirty, danky, bimonthly city zine because we've become "a rag just featuring pot stories and tonnes [sic] of pot ads." While Phil may have missed that our High-Brr-Nation issue was a special issue devoted to surviving Seattle's winter with weed, other readers were not as offended by our ode to the green aphrodisiac. Today, I received the sweetest letter I've ever been sent from a reader, all about the glorious shittiness of Seattle and how it's best appreciated while stoned—a sentiment I share.

February 3, 2018

Apologies for the flowery card... I am very high right now and couldn't locate an appropriate card/envelope set for a basic ~fan~ letter. I don't apologize for the LOVE stamp—I have a ton of them that I'll keep using until the orange dick-in-chief is in chains or dead.

I'm writing to thank you for the wonderful article, "Smoke a Bowl and Go for a Walk," from the January 17th issue of The Stranger.

I have been in love with the shittiness of Seattle since the '70s, when my mom and her boyfriend would bring my sister and I over here from the Tri-Cities. It was going to be my home someday, I knew. When I finally arrived I continued my love and wandered over hill and dale of the urbanscape. My love of marijuana developed later, in college, where it helped me focus my whirling brain into a semblance of a know-it-all, tireless academic. Undergrad moved to grad and a PhD. Whoopee.

So it was when I returned to the PNW and moved into Seattle proper that the two great tastes of shittiness and "shit," in the Cheech & Chong sense, blended for me so nicely—just as you put it in your article.

My overworld music on these strolls consists of Jean Michael Jarre's "Oxygene," Yes (Fragile album), and any Led Zeppelin my fingers can find. "Can't Find My Way Home" is also a mainstay/must-play.

Anyway, thanks for the great read. Nice to know there are more wanderers out there.

(Whoa. My penmanship really went to shit there.)

Thank you, stoner! While I didn't grow up in the Tri-Cities, I did grow up on a pastor's farm in rural Idaho. When I was a kid, my mom once described Seattle as a "dreary place filled with drug addicts and strippers," and, looking out over the poop-filled cow fields that stretched before us, I secretly thought, "That sounds magical." I still think Seattle is magical, and the city's stoners and strippers have become my new family. I wouldn't trade Seattle weed walks for anything.

P.S. It would be very remiss of me to post all this touchy-feely weed-love without mentioning an uncomfortable dank fact:


Seattle is erasing pot possession convictions, but will Washington follow?