O asked, “How can you tell the male from the female plants?”

“The stamens look like balls,” Ben said.

“Well, there you go.”

“We choose a male plant,” Ben explained, “take its pollen, and pollinate the female plant.”

“I might need a few minutes to myself here,” O said.

O found it highly amusing that Ben created an Isle of Lesbos-a virtual Women’s Prison Movie-marijuana farm. She also took a certain neo-feminist pride that the most powerful, juicy, THC-laden buds came from the females.

Anyway, Ben used the seed produced by the pollinated female to create what is known in genetics as the F1 hybrid. Then he grew that plant, took its seed, and bred it back with the parent plant.

“With the parent?” O asked.

“Yup.”

“ Iiiiiccck,” O answered. “That’s, like, incest.”

“Not like. Is.”

“Cue the banjo.”

She came to refer to Ben’s marijuana crop as “L.A.”

Not “Los Angeles.”

“Lesbian Appalachia.”

19

Ben kept inbreeding like a European royal family, generation after generation, until he produced not a Tea Party member or a drooling pink-eyed idiot, but a female plant whose fecund buds veritably dripped (okay, not really) with THC.

Tetrahydrocannabinol.

Aka delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol.

Aka dronabinol.

The main psychoactive substance in marijuana.

(For the blazers out there-it’s why you’re too high right now to understand “psychoactive substance.”)

Ben the Mad Botanist didn’t produce a Porsche, he produced a Lamborghini.

Not a Rolex but a Patek.

If Ben’s blend were a horse, it would be Secretariat.

A mountain, Everest.

Michael Jordan.

Tiger Woods

(before).

The max.

The ult.