Trip Report: Space Gems Vibrant Focus Enhanced with Lion's Mane and THE ODYSSEY
maybe a new series, maybe will never happen again
The night before last I went to the Aero Theatre to see THE ODYSSEY in 70mm alone. This was not by design—I tried to get multiple people, namely Gabby and Alex, to see THE ODYSSEY with me, but they both declined. This is especially notable in the case of Alex, who goes to see a lot of movies across a lot of genres (conversely, when I asked Gabby if she knew who Christopher Nolan was, she said “he’s that old guy,” looked something up on her phone, then added, “nevermind”), and is generally willing to come down to Santa Monica for whatever film. Even she, however, could not generate the desire necessary to sit through three hours of Christopher Nolan’s take on Homer’s epic poem, composed circa 800 B.C., and who could fault her?
Before I went to the Aero last night, I made a stop at Goat Global Westwood to pick up some edibles. When I am not trying to game the First Time Discount system (fairly ubiquitous across Los Angeles dispensaries), Goat Global Westwood is my go-to. I’m still learning about the legal weed market here—I left New York state right when I’d finally settled on some favorite brands (MFNY, Ayrloom, Rolling Green)—but I find they’re the nearest spot that consistently sells fresh, high quality cannabis products across the board. I’ve only bought flower from them before, so I did some edible research before heading to the shop.
The only edibles I have otherwise bought since moving back to California are “delights” from Rose Los Angeles. These “delights” are small-batch flower rosin (read: rosin means concentrated cannabis—pure, strong THC, baby) candies in the style of Turkish Delights that are delivered directly to your door. They are my edibles of choice, but I finished a box (Chokeberry Yuzu Peppercorn) recently and, unwisely, failed to immediately re-up. This is how I found myself in the position of needing to buy edibles from an actual storefront mere hours before I needed them, and is how I learned about Space Gems, an edible that is similar in style to Rose Delights (small-batch gummies, solventless rosin, weed from northern California), but use ice water hash, instead of pressing the rosin out of the flower directly.
Like many weed companies, Space Gems doesn’t offer a ton of “sativa effect” options. We get it—you all want your weed to help you “relax.” I, however, am an intellectual, and am only interested in the most “sativa effect” weed available. Indicas, on the whole, make me feel weird—a vague buzz in the chest, some brain fog, and that’s it. Yes, I know, it’s probably time I started learning about terpenes. I’m increasingly encountering literature about how sativa/indica binaries don’t make sense and we all need to be categorizing our weed using terpenes, actually. Fine. I’ll get back to you on the terpenes situation.
With that disclaimer aside: I usually go for strains labeled “sativa” because they most often provide the sort of weed experience I am looking for: to put it in Leafly-friendly terms, I want to feel Creative, Euphoric, Joyful, Giggly and/or Energetic. A good “sativa effect” is almost psychedelic; it’s the pleasure of feeling my thoughts warp and twist without committing to an hours-long acid trip where I can’t figure out how to text or turn on the stove.
I’m considering starting an informal Substack series where I try different weed products while doing various activities around Los Angeles. I like doing stuff in public stoned and I think it would be good for me psychologically to do some low-stakes writing where I let myself go long and risk being boring. The series would speak to the quality of both the weed product and the activity but would ultimately not really serve as reviews of either on their own because they are, necessarily, reviews of the weed product and activity combined. Anyway, that’s how this first one is going to go, which may be the only one of said-series if publishing this flops for me emotionally.
I don’t know anything about Lion’s Mane. Normally I avoid weed products that are “enhanced” by extras like these, but in this case, I was on a deadline and they were the only sativa-ish Space Gems Goat Global had stocked. I didn’t expect that they’d replace Rose as my go-to edible brand, but I skimmed some Reddit reviews and figured they were worth a try, especially given the exigent circumstances of having bought non-refundable tickets to THE ODYSSEY in advance.
I ate one gummy (5mg THC)—I can’t say I noticed a distinct Sweet Cherry Lemonade flavor, but I thought they tasted good, like those sour belts I’ve only ever bought from gas stations. Again, this is something I don’t honestly care about with weed—as long as it’s not fucking disgusting, it doesn’t matter to me what an edible tastes like. It’s a bit stressful to me, even, when edibles taste too good, because I then have to actively resist the urge to eat more of them as The Munchies set in (I capitalize the term because when I get The Munchies, it’s serious), which requires a degree of vigilance that I don’t want to be part of the high.
Anyway, I ate the gummy and got in the car and drove to Montana Avenue. I parked a few blocks north of the theater; on my walk down the hill I narrowly avoided head-on collisions with two different people texting-while-walking and I overheard a woman tell another woman she was “taking two years off to be with the baby.” Classic Montana Avenue.1
I entered the Aero lobby still feeling totally sober. Friendly teens were working concessions as an older security guard in a clean, blue uniform looked on. The Aero is one of the rare theaters I’ve been to in LA that doesn’t have assigned seats, and I was surprised to see much of the theater was already full, even with the film’s advertised start time still twenty-ish minutes away. At first I picked an aisle seat in the middle of the (otherwise empty) left-hand section of the theater, but quickly moved to a seat in the center section—dead-center and, in my opinion, unnaturally close. Not my typical preference, but it seemed in the spirit of what Christopher Nolan intended for his audiences. It might’ve been a little bit of that familiar self-destructive drug urge on my part, too.
Growing up, my father insisted we only sit on the left-hand side of the theater for movies, with him in the aisle seat. It was never explained to me why we did this, but that is how it was done. Soon after I chose my center seat, though, two young girls (high school age? middle school?) sat directly to my right and I realized I had perhaps bit off more than I could chew with the choice. It’s not so much a problem with close quarters in general—I’m fine with a B seat on an airplane—but with close quarters at the movies. I’m an emotive viewer of movies. Even alone, I emote; not in a loud or even verbal way, but I will certainly make faces and do things with my hands. The real issue, though, is I don’t know how to behave in the dead-center, near-middle section of a movie theater—I don’t know the etiquette, I don’t have the muscle memory, it’s not how I was raised. And when you’re stoned and alone in a public place, clear rules of etiquette, muscle memory, and the like are absolutely essential to getting through the experience and/or having a fun time.
I had finished most of my Barq’s Root Beer and about half my popcorn when the movie started. A TIME OF APPARENT MAGIC… appeared onscreen; this is when it occurred to me that I was already high. Somehow this is how it always happens with me and weed—I “wake up” to the high, in a sense, rather than feel it coming on consciously; the high pulls me under and then at some point later I emerge into a new state of awareness, an awareness that the high is beginning, or, more accurately, has already begun. This is a speedier onset that I am used to—the high made itself known to me about an hour after consumption, whereas usually with the Delights I’d say the onset time is closer to an hour and a half.
I knew I was already high when A TIME OF APPARENT MAGIC… appeared onscreen because I laughed out loud. I think I laughed because I found the font childish—sans serif, blocky letters, robin’s egg blue—and also because I couldn’t imagine how Christopher Nolan and Co. expected this message to enhance anyone’s viewing experience. I’ve come to think what’s bad about THE ODYSSEY is mostly distilled here, in these first few seconds of the movie—are we meant to understand apparent in the sense that the magic of Odysseyus’s world is abundant and obvious, or that it is only a magical world from a certain perspective? Why won’t Christopher Nolan give us clearer prompts on how to make sense of his movie?—but I wasn’t thinking all of this just yet.
By the time Tom Holland came on the screen, I was uncomfortably high. I would call this an “edgy” high—I find myself batting away familiar intrusive thoughts like I can consciously stop my own heart beating with my mind, and then I scratch or press on the skin above my heart compulsively while I try to mentally latch onto something else. I get twitchy; I shift around in my seat more than usual (the very old seats at the Aero didn’t help). I also started to feel more aware of the chronic pain in my neck, so I started stretching out a little, being careful not to inadvertently invade the space of the teenage girl to my right. I soon realized, though, that she was moving around a lot too: every few minutes she put her hands over her ears.
Yes, THE ODYSSEY is loud. I got used to it after a while but I don’t think the loudness achieved anything that using a normal volume wouldn’t have achieved. The truth is, THE ODYSSEY is genuinely immersive during its loudest scenes anyway—the monsters, the battles, the ship on that wine-dark sea—because the novelty factor of seeing these ancient whatevers depicted with the most sophisticated special effects known to man is just that high. I didn’t go to see THE ODYSSEY because I wanted to listen to sad Matt Damon with a sad white beard squint at sad Charlize Theron. I went to see THE ODYSSEY because I wanted to see Christopher Nolan’s Cyclops (scary? Kind of, right?); Christopher Nolan’s Scylla (HADES II did it better); Christopher Nolan’s Charybdis (I know, it’s supposed to just be a whirlpool… but come on!!).
One afternoon last year I got high and wrote down in my journal “weed makes you think in metaphors,” which is one of my favorite fake-deep ideas of all time, so funny that I can’t believe I myself authored it. What I really meant, I think, is this: what’s fun about being high—and what you forget at your own peril—is that whatever you focus on seems to bear symbolic resonance. It’s not so much like you’re presented with the truest, most accurate metaphor possible for a given thing—more like you feel like you’re seeing the symbolic potential of the thing anew.
Let me try again: When you’re stoned, anything can mean anything. You apply significance to stuff generously and indiscriminately. The part of your brain that decides what to interpret literally vs. metaphorically semi-collapses—when you’re stoned, it’s kind of all metaphor, all the time. Anything and nothing can be a metaphor. This is a confusing state of mind in which to watch THE ODYSSEY, because it’s difficult to track what the movie itself wants you to read metaphorically. Some of the dialogue is shockingly bad—but maybe it’s supposed to be bad, I found myself thinking, then tried retroactively reinterpreting it: It’s not that the dialogue is bad, it’s that the dialogue is only good if you appreciate it beyond its literal meaning. Hunting's nothing but fighting with stealth, Matt Damon says assuredly. It’s got to be a metaphor, I assure the teenage girl next to me2, but she is still covering her ears.
Pretty much the main thing I was excited for about THE ODYSSEY was the depiction of the sirens. I would say me and my fellow siren-heads out there got totally shafted on the siren front. What is the value of not letting us hear the siren song, of choosing not to let us see the fucking sirens or hear the siren song? We’re meant to imagine it in the privacy of our own minds…? We all have a siren song to specific to our siren selves…? Fine, but I maintain this was a (non)decision made out of fear. Christopher Nolan did not want to “get the siren song wrong,” so instead he left it to the audience to fill in the blank. This is not why we go to see THE ODYSSEY by Christopher Nolan. It is why we read Homer’s THE ODYSSEY. Or, to argue this point from another angle, why we go to see LOST IN TRANSLATION.
I think the psychologically fun part of the Space Gems high burned off after the first hour of the movie, which meant I spent the rest of the movie waiting for the lingering physical anxiety from ingesting so much THC to fade. 5mg is usually too strong a dose for me to take in one sitting, but I do it with a 5mg Rose delight sometimes because the peak of the high is just that fun. The level of bliss I reached with the Space Gem gummy was simply not worth the edginess. If the Lion’s Mane had any impact, I wasn’t able to track it, but I also didn’t know which effects to look out for.
When I exited the theater, it was 10:30pm, when it is illegal to be out on Montana Avenue, so I hurried to my car and drove off. I was not even a little high when I started driving, which is an appropriate edible timeline, I think—nearly four hours after consumption—but I still went home and had a small bowl of ice cream with crumbled grocery store cookies on top before bed, so, you know. Something was still happening there.
Do I regret seeing THE ODYSSEY stoned on 5mg of Space Gems? Probably, yeah. 2.5mg would have been more appropriate for the situation. The movie was too loud; I didn’t know Zendaya was supposed to be Athena until the credits rolled; I burned through my concessions too fast. I think next time I try a Space Gem3, I will bite a gummy in half and just head to the beach.
If there’s a weed product and/or LA-based activity you want me to review, let me know in the comments and maybe I will do it. Thanks for reading, this was long.
Despite the Aero being one of the only actually cool things to do on Montana Avenue, I had never been to the theater before (I am usually on Montana Avenue for patently uncool reasons, like getting Pinkberry or dropping my gravity blanket off for dry cleaning).
Of course I didn’t do this
I bought a pack of 20 gummies, and I’m not one to waste weed products, but I’ll likely go back to flower rosin stuff after I finish these.