the-thought-police
01-02-2015, 12:37 PM
1st, welcome back to my computer screen guys. Holy crap was that a busy season for me. I'm still a little in shock. Late nights, early mornings. Had a wonderful giftmas with the kids though. And for me all bills were payed early, so HAZZAH! Anyways...
Intro: The old guy
Back when I was your age, we didn't have any of this fancy glass stuff you guys have, we had METAL!, and we liked it! You could take it apart, and customize it. If you wanted to smoke through water, it was acrylic. I think graphix was the big name in that industry. Where I lived, Phoenix, there were these late night commercials that had lots of girls in bikini's, and they would shout "TRAILS"!, and it would echo, and this was the biggest head shop chain in Phoenix in the late '80's and early '90's. There was one close'ish to where I lived, so I frequented it. Going in there, there was never a glass piece to be seen. Just cases upon cases of metal and acrylic pipes and water pipes. There were signs everywhere, and attitudes to go with, that made you feel like if you said the word "bong", the secret service would come crashing through the windows on ropes and immediately shut the place down.
My friend, Ryan, had gotten a glass piece at a rainbow gathering he'd gone to however, and it was a wonderful piece, and had a great story of how he got it directly from the blower, but it seemed that nobody else I knew had a glass pipe. One by one, slowly, as other friends started getting them, each one kind of had a story to go with it, aside from, "I bought it at a head shop". Back then, glass pipes were rather rare accoutrements people bought at festivals, or gatherings, or Grateful Dead or Phish concerts. They had not quite become the massive industry they are today. As a result of this, the idea of a glass piece became attached to the idea of it having a story, to me, I do so love stories. As time went by, more and more glass did start showing up in head shops, but the idea of getting one as kind of a keepsake of one of my many adventures stuck with me, and I did not want to just go into a retail location and buy one, I wanted a story to tell.
This will be my story of how I got my first glass piece. It is long. I may have to finish it in more than one sitting.
The Situation
My friend Ryan, my brother Joel, and I, were kind of road dogs. We loved going on long adventures elsewhere. It didn't usually matter, but having a destination was always nice. Thinking back, it may have been mostly me, partly Ryan, and my brother coming in last in regards to the desire to go on adventures. Either way, we had an idea.
Ryan was the Phish fan, and Joel and I kind of followed his lead on that one. We were both avid musicians who played multiple instruments, so concerts were always fun, and Phish concerts particularly more so due to the sub culture that followed them around. So, when we found out that Phish was going to be having a huge festival for the 1999/2000 new years eve/new years day, in the middle of the Florida Everglades on Seminole (hope I spelled that right) land, that lasted for 3 days, we all agreed, we needed to get there. This was going to be a problem since none of us had a car. Never stopped us before though, if we put our heads together, we'd be able to come up with something, and we had many months to do so, because we bought our tickets very early.
The Plan
OK, so maybe we weren't that smart, because the plan we came up with when we put our heads together was, I kid you not, to train hop our way there.
I'm gonna give you a moment to let that sink in.
We were gonna be hobo's, so we could go to a fish concert. I'm gonna slowly slink back a bit here and say, this one was mostly Ryan's idea, but Joel and I had nothing, so we went with it. Joel sounded hesitant, but I being such the adventurist actually really wanted to. Ryan knew a dude who had done this, I had met him once or twice, his name was Sid. Sid looked like an '80's punk, and spoke in a raspy batman like voice. Sure, seemed legit. We gave Ryan the go ahead to set it up, and we all made plans together.
We went to the army surplus store and got ourselves cheap backpacks and MRE's, and canteens, and simple stuff like that. Sleeping bags, small tents. Enough to carry on our backs. Ryan got to know the train lines and schedules, and planned a meeting with Sid. Sid told us to pick him up at his apartment, where we met his girlfriend. His one legged girlfriend, who'd lost her leg in a train hopping accident. He said he'd already been on, but she fell under, so he jumped back off, and there she was, with half her leg cut off. Then he said, "OK, let's go to the tracks".
We did, we went to the tracks, and trains were going by slowly enough. I don't remember what Sid called them, but the train yard security, he said to watch out for them. He said to try to get an open box car but if it's not too cold other car types will work too. He pointed them out but I forgot all the names now. Which ones to stay away from, etc... We even hopped on a few and road them for a few dozen yards or so to practice hopping on and off.
This was the plan. It was not a very good plan, and we all knew it, but it was the only plan we had.
The Change of Plans
This part is rather fuzzy in my memory I must say, but I'm just gonna sum it up by saying, yeah we totally all chickened out. I guess nobody wanted to get their legs cut off for a Phish concert.
What we ended up doing was a bit different. Ryan some how borrowed a car from his mother, had to drive it to California to borrow another car from his brother and replace it with the one he borrowed from his mother, then swinging back through Phoenix on their way to Florida picked up a mutual friend named Grady, and him, Joel, and Ryan took that car to the Phish concert. I didn't want to do that. For some reason, I felt like going at it alone. It could have been the falling out I had with Ryan, from which we never did recover. Or it could have been that all three of them had done heavier drugs than I really wanted to be around. It could have been a lot of things. Whatever it was, I took a Greyhound bus to Naples, Florida and decided to hitch hike the rest of the way down Alligator Alley to the concert, alone. So that's what I did, so beginning my journey.
The Trip There
The trip there was fairly uneventful. I met a guy with dreads who did these fascinating paintings, with rich bright colors in kind of an ancient Egyptian theme but also modern looking at the same time. Like brightly colored Egyptian steam punk, so to speak.
Crossing into and out of Texas sucked, what with the drug sniffing dogs and all. They found one dudes stash, and merely took it, let him get back on the bus. It was funny too, because the entire bus knew what was going on, and the entire bus cheered for him when they saw him get back on. Guy said they said, "it wasn't enough to bust him for", and let him go. Whew.
I met a ton of hippies on their way to the concert as well, but most interestingly, I met a 16 year old kid whose parents had just died in a car accident. I got the sense this was very fresh for him. I stayed with him until his stop. He was going to New Orleans to seek out work on a fishing boat. I don't remember where he got on, but our entire relationship wasn't even a day. We got off at several stops, and hung out together, and I sat near him the whole time. At one point in time, he'd spent his last $20 on lottery tickets, which had I seen I'd surely have advised against, but he doubled his money. He got them out of a machine, but asked me to cash them in for him since he wasn't 18, which I happily obliged. With some of that, he bought one of those cheap microwavable soups that come in a styrofoam cup with a peal off lid. Upon finishing it he began fidgeting and ripped apart the styrofoam cup into tiny little pieces, and discovered that they stick to the fuzzy wall of the bus next to him, and kind of made mosaic like patterns with the ripped up pieces of it, then fell asleep. He got off a few stops later, others got on, the trip continued.
A super skinny goth dude got on, who oddly enough did push ups at every stop. I don't remember where he got off.
By the time we got to Naples, tons of hippies were getting off the bus, so hitch hiking was going to be competitive, or so I thought. As it turns out, Alligator Alley connects Naples on the West side of Florida, the one facing the gulf, to Fort Lauderdale just off the Atlantic. Well tons of hippies were driving through from each direction as well, so getting rides was easier than I figured.
A group of us crossed to the other side of the road and started walking down towards the toll booth to Alligator Alley. We stopped I'd say about a half a mile away from the toll booth to start sticking our thumbs out. It was then that the first officer of the law I'd encounter on my trip pulled up in a squad car. He said to us in a real authoritative voice, "you guys'll have better luck if you move closer to the toll booths where people have to slow down anyways", and he drove away. Not that his advice mattered, several other cars saw us being harassed by the police and swooped in to offer us rides right then and there. I ended up in a grey minivan, with about 4 other people from my group. Perspective can be funny. The cop rescued us just by being there to make people think we were in danger because of him.
It didn't take long before traffic came to a dead stop, and I mean a dead stop. I feel sorry for anybody who had to use Alligator Alley to commute to work that day for whatever reason. It seemed like it would normally be such a quick drive, so straight, so flat. Not this day though, people were driving up the shoulder to try to get ahead, up until other people started purposefully driving slow on the shoulder to keep it fair. A new make shift traffic lane, created to be misused and then almost instantaneously policed, both by the phish fans themselves. Traffic in both lanes slowed so much that those of us who didn't have cars again gained an advantage. People started walking. I kicked it in the minivan with the others. I was tired of walking already, with all my gear. From the bus stop to the toll booth was enough for me.
We got to the gates later in the day, were assigned our slots to set up camp (it was cool, they had it all partitioned off with makeshift street names, and slots for people to set up camps like little neighborhoods). Though the four of us from the van and the driver would be camping right next to each other, we'd not see each other for the rest of the time. It was so vast, so many things to do, we did not run into each other after setting up our camps and going our separate ways to find whatever we went there to find. Me, I was looking for a glass pipe....
The Festival
It lasted three days, and I got there while the sun was up but later in the afternoon on the first day. I had a map, and the grounds were huge. I tried to keep this map, but have lost it in my many travels since. I occupied one tiny little section on this map, which in real life was huge. I walked around for three days, and only touched about a fourth of the grounds. I would need this map to find my way home, each and every time.
First and foremost, I was hungry, so I ventured to the food court area. There were tons of venders, but this was also a Phish concert, so there were tons of people set up right in front of their camp sites selling food too. This is what I ate first, I saved my MRE's for when I was out of money. There was also a Phish concert that night, so I attended that, but not being much of a Phish fan I left early, and wandered the grounds more.
I did rather enjoy the first part of the concert though. They had the Seminole chief come and play the first two songs, along with Phish. He apparently played acoustic guitar and sang. They were both simple folksy songs, saying welcome and asking simply that we respect the land and their customs and be safe and stuff.
After I left the concert grounds, as I wandered, one thing became very apparent on that first night. Everybody assumed everybody else would bring weed to sell, so nobody brought any weed. Word traveled quickly of this market shortage, this dryness. I gave up my search early, and decided to start anew the next day.
The second day was slightly more successful, slightly. I wondered about, here and there. People selling tie died shirts, different foods from eggs to ganja goo balls, there was a plate of free mushrooms labeled free mushrooms. Alas, I am allergic, so I did not take any. I went to the main area that surrounded the food court, and bought a Phish T-shirt. Wandered further on to the foresty area where there was a drum circle going on, and listened for a bit.
The beating of the drums started to sound almost like white noise, white noise with a heart beat, up until one drummer did a fill very loudly, which another drummer on the other side of the circle responded to in kind. They passed the fill back and forth like this, almost like they were having a conversation, and both shined loud and clear through the steady heart like beat of the rest of the drummers. I moved on.
As I walked the random street like areas they had set up, a guy passed me and flashed me a glass piece that was for sale, so I stopped him. It was an inside out, with reversals, mushroom marbles, and a color carb, all in an abstract corn cob like shape. It was wonderful, it came loaded with kind, and it was $80. That was a lot of money for me, I didn't have much, but seeing as how I've always been very good at being bad with money, I used this special power of irresponsibility of mine to purchase that pipe, and immediately took it home to my tent and smoked it up. Mmmmmmmmm
I ate an MRE right away to quell my munchies. My last one. They're not the most delicious things in the world, but it helped and gave me lots and lots of energy. So, knowing my brother, Ryan, and Grady were all there, I strapped my guitar on and started randomly walking around the makeshift streets playing songs I knew they'd recognize as me playing, hoping to catch them in ear shot. I did this for the rest of the night, and wandered far and near in search of them, but did not find them.
The third day I don't remember much. The sound and site of slow moving pot heads having been neglected of their pot for three days while wandering around aimlessly desperately calling "who's got my nugs, who's got my nugs", gave the impression of a zompiepocalyptic world, but instead of brains they just wanted to smoke a bowl. I stayed mostly inside my tent, and survived this desiccation long enough to make it to the midnight new years eve/new years day changeover concert, which I admit, I mostly missed.
I had bought some acid that turned out to be bunk, which was an extra bummer because I was right underneath the fireworks display and that would have been truly spectacular. I remember, Phish road out on a giant river boat from behind the crowd, that opened up into a giant hot dog, which they then road to the stage. It was ridiculous. When they started playing, I think they opened up with Eric Claptons "After Midnight", fireworks filled the sky right above my head, and they were very loud and bright. Seeing as how I wasn't tripping though, I got angry at the random hippie that scammed me, then tired, and ended up calling it a night early again.
So that is it, that is how I got my first glass piece, and I still have it. It was only a few months later that I met a house full of glassblowers, who I showed it to and they all drooled over it. The fanciest one of them, Chad, stared at it for the longest, wanting to be able to do that. After starting a relationship with another member of that household and her starting to teach me how to blow glass, it became my target piece, the one I decided if I could do, I'd be good. Despite the fact that nobody I knew, knew how to do that, I have long since succeeded in replicating it to my liking, and I did feel accomplished when I did it.
That is it in regards to how I obtained my first glass piece, but the rest of the story of getting back home is rather entertaining, so I'm gonna add that part as well, later. Still much work to do, and I've gotta get back to it.
Hope you all have been well.
Intro: The old guy
Back when I was your age, we didn't have any of this fancy glass stuff you guys have, we had METAL!, and we liked it! You could take it apart, and customize it. If you wanted to smoke through water, it was acrylic. I think graphix was the big name in that industry. Where I lived, Phoenix, there were these late night commercials that had lots of girls in bikini's, and they would shout "TRAILS"!, and it would echo, and this was the biggest head shop chain in Phoenix in the late '80's and early '90's. There was one close'ish to where I lived, so I frequented it. Going in there, there was never a glass piece to be seen. Just cases upon cases of metal and acrylic pipes and water pipes. There were signs everywhere, and attitudes to go with, that made you feel like if you said the word "bong", the secret service would come crashing through the windows on ropes and immediately shut the place down.
My friend, Ryan, had gotten a glass piece at a rainbow gathering he'd gone to however, and it was a wonderful piece, and had a great story of how he got it directly from the blower, but it seemed that nobody else I knew had a glass pipe. One by one, slowly, as other friends started getting them, each one kind of had a story to go with it, aside from, "I bought it at a head shop". Back then, glass pipes were rather rare accoutrements people bought at festivals, or gatherings, or Grateful Dead or Phish concerts. They had not quite become the massive industry they are today. As a result of this, the idea of a glass piece became attached to the idea of it having a story, to me, I do so love stories. As time went by, more and more glass did start showing up in head shops, but the idea of getting one as kind of a keepsake of one of my many adventures stuck with me, and I did not want to just go into a retail location and buy one, I wanted a story to tell.
This will be my story of how I got my first glass piece. It is long. I may have to finish it in more than one sitting.
The Situation
My friend Ryan, my brother Joel, and I, were kind of road dogs. We loved going on long adventures elsewhere. It didn't usually matter, but having a destination was always nice. Thinking back, it may have been mostly me, partly Ryan, and my brother coming in last in regards to the desire to go on adventures. Either way, we had an idea.
Ryan was the Phish fan, and Joel and I kind of followed his lead on that one. We were both avid musicians who played multiple instruments, so concerts were always fun, and Phish concerts particularly more so due to the sub culture that followed them around. So, when we found out that Phish was going to be having a huge festival for the 1999/2000 new years eve/new years day, in the middle of the Florida Everglades on Seminole (hope I spelled that right) land, that lasted for 3 days, we all agreed, we needed to get there. This was going to be a problem since none of us had a car. Never stopped us before though, if we put our heads together, we'd be able to come up with something, and we had many months to do so, because we bought our tickets very early.
The Plan
OK, so maybe we weren't that smart, because the plan we came up with when we put our heads together was, I kid you not, to train hop our way there.
I'm gonna give you a moment to let that sink in.
We were gonna be hobo's, so we could go to a fish concert. I'm gonna slowly slink back a bit here and say, this one was mostly Ryan's idea, but Joel and I had nothing, so we went with it. Joel sounded hesitant, but I being such the adventurist actually really wanted to. Ryan knew a dude who had done this, I had met him once or twice, his name was Sid. Sid looked like an '80's punk, and spoke in a raspy batman like voice. Sure, seemed legit. We gave Ryan the go ahead to set it up, and we all made plans together.
We went to the army surplus store and got ourselves cheap backpacks and MRE's, and canteens, and simple stuff like that. Sleeping bags, small tents. Enough to carry on our backs. Ryan got to know the train lines and schedules, and planned a meeting with Sid. Sid told us to pick him up at his apartment, where we met his girlfriend. His one legged girlfriend, who'd lost her leg in a train hopping accident. He said he'd already been on, but she fell under, so he jumped back off, and there she was, with half her leg cut off. Then he said, "OK, let's go to the tracks".
We did, we went to the tracks, and trains were going by slowly enough. I don't remember what Sid called them, but the train yard security, he said to watch out for them. He said to try to get an open box car but if it's not too cold other car types will work too. He pointed them out but I forgot all the names now. Which ones to stay away from, etc... We even hopped on a few and road them for a few dozen yards or so to practice hopping on and off.
This was the plan. It was not a very good plan, and we all knew it, but it was the only plan we had.
The Change of Plans
This part is rather fuzzy in my memory I must say, but I'm just gonna sum it up by saying, yeah we totally all chickened out. I guess nobody wanted to get their legs cut off for a Phish concert.
What we ended up doing was a bit different. Ryan some how borrowed a car from his mother, had to drive it to California to borrow another car from his brother and replace it with the one he borrowed from his mother, then swinging back through Phoenix on their way to Florida picked up a mutual friend named Grady, and him, Joel, and Ryan took that car to the Phish concert. I didn't want to do that. For some reason, I felt like going at it alone. It could have been the falling out I had with Ryan, from which we never did recover. Or it could have been that all three of them had done heavier drugs than I really wanted to be around. It could have been a lot of things. Whatever it was, I took a Greyhound bus to Naples, Florida and decided to hitch hike the rest of the way down Alligator Alley to the concert, alone. So that's what I did, so beginning my journey.
The Trip There
The trip there was fairly uneventful. I met a guy with dreads who did these fascinating paintings, with rich bright colors in kind of an ancient Egyptian theme but also modern looking at the same time. Like brightly colored Egyptian steam punk, so to speak.
Crossing into and out of Texas sucked, what with the drug sniffing dogs and all. They found one dudes stash, and merely took it, let him get back on the bus. It was funny too, because the entire bus knew what was going on, and the entire bus cheered for him when they saw him get back on. Guy said they said, "it wasn't enough to bust him for", and let him go. Whew.
I met a ton of hippies on their way to the concert as well, but most interestingly, I met a 16 year old kid whose parents had just died in a car accident. I got the sense this was very fresh for him. I stayed with him until his stop. He was going to New Orleans to seek out work on a fishing boat. I don't remember where he got on, but our entire relationship wasn't even a day. We got off at several stops, and hung out together, and I sat near him the whole time. At one point in time, he'd spent his last $20 on lottery tickets, which had I seen I'd surely have advised against, but he doubled his money. He got them out of a machine, but asked me to cash them in for him since he wasn't 18, which I happily obliged. With some of that, he bought one of those cheap microwavable soups that come in a styrofoam cup with a peal off lid. Upon finishing it he began fidgeting and ripped apart the styrofoam cup into tiny little pieces, and discovered that they stick to the fuzzy wall of the bus next to him, and kind of made mosaic like patterns with the ripped up pieces of it, then fell asleep. He got off a few stops later, others got on, the trip continued.
A super skinny goth dude got on, who oddly enough did push ups at every stop. I don't remember where he got off.
By the time we got to Naples, tons of hippies were getting off the bus, so hitch hiking was going to be competitive, or so I thought. As it turns out, Alligator Alley connects Naples on the West side of Florida, the one facing the gulf, to Fort Lauderdale just off the Atlantic. Well tons of hippies were driving through from each direction as well, so getting rides was easier than I figured.
A group of us crossed to the other side of the road and started walking down towards the toll booth to Alligator Alley. We stopped I'd say about a half a mile away from the toll booth to start sticking our thumbs out. It was then that the first officer of the law I'd encounter on my trip pulled up in a squad car. He said to us in a real authoritative voice, "you guys'll have better luck if you move closer to the toll booths where people have to slow down anyways", and he drove away. Not that his advice mattered, several other cars saw us being harassed by the police and swooped in to offer us rides right then and there. I ended up in a grey minivan, with about 4 other people from my group. Perspective can be funny. The cop rescued us just by being there to make people think we were in danger because of him.
It didn't take long before traffic came to a dead stop, and I mean a dead stop. I feel sorry for anybody who had to use Alligator Alley to commute to work that day for whatever reason. It seemed like it would normally be such a quick drive, so straight, so flat. Not this day though, people were driving up the shoulder to try to get ahead, up until other people started purposefully driving slow on the shoulder to keep it fair. A new make shift traffic lane, created to be misused and then almost instantaneously policed, both by the phish fans themselves. Traffic in both lanes slowed so much that those of us who didn't have cars again gained an advantage. People started walking. I kicked it in the minivan with the others. I was tired of walking already, with all my gear. From the bus stop to the toll booth was enough for me.
We got to the gates later in the day, were assigned our slots to set up camp (it was cool, they had it all partitioned off with makeshift street names, and slots for people to set up camps like little neighborhoods). Though the four of us from the van and the driver would be camping right next to each other, we'd not see each other for the rest of the time. It was so vast, so many things to do, we did not run into each other after setting up our camps and going our separate ways to find whatever we went there to find. Me, I was looking for a glass pipe....
The Festival
It lasted three days, and I got there while the sun was up but later in the afternoon on the first day. I had a map, and the grounds were huge. I tried to keep this map, but have lost it in my many travels since. I occupied one tiny little section on this map, which in real life was huge. I walked around for three days, and only touched about a fourth of the grounds. I would need this map to find my way home, each and every time.
First and foremost, I was hungry, so I ventured to the food court area. There were tons of venders, but this was also a Phish concert, so there were tons of people set up right in front of their camp sites selling food too. This is what I ate first, I saved my MRE's for when I was out of money. There was also a Phish concert that night, so I attended that, but not being much of a Phish fan I left early, and wandered the grounds more.
I did rather enjoy the first part of the concert though. They had the Seminole chief come and play the first two songs, along with Phish. He apparently played acoustic guitar and sang. They were both simple folksy songs, saying welcome and asking simply that we respect the land and their customs and be safe and stuff.
After I left the concert grounds, as I wandered, one thing became very apparent on that first night. Everybody assumed everybody else would bring weed to sell, so nobody brought any weed. Word traveled quickly of this market shortage, this dryness. I gave up my search early, and decided to start anew the next day.
The second day was slightly more successful, slightly. I wondered about, here and there. People selling tie died shirts, different foods from eggs to ganja goo balls, there was a plate of free mushrooms labeled free mushrooms. Alas, I am allergic, so I did not take any. I went to the main area that surrounded the food court, and bought a Phish T-shirt. Wandered further on to the foresty area where there was a drum circle going on, and listened for a bit.
The beating of the drums started to sound almost like white noise, white noise with a heart beat, up until one drummer did a fill very loudly, which another drummer on the other side of the circle responded to in kind. They passed the fill back and forth like this, almost like they were having a conversation, and both shined loud and clear through the steady heart like beat of the rest of the drummers. I moved on.
As I walked the random street like areas they had set up, a guy passed me and flashed me a glass piece that was for sale, so I stopped him. It was an inside out, with reversals, mushroom marbles, and a color carb, all in an abstract corn cob like shape. It was wonderful, it came loaded with kind, and it was $80. That was a lot of money for me, I didn't have much, but seeing as how I've always been very good at being bad with money, I used this special power of irresponsibility of mine to purchase that pipe, and immediately took it home to my tent and smoked it up. Mmmmmmmmm
I ate an MRE right away to quell my munchies. My last one. They're not the most delicious things in the world, but it helped and gave me lots and lots of energy. So, knowing my brother, Ryan, and Grady were all there, I strapped my guitar on and started randomly walking around the makeshift streets playing songs I knew they'd recognize as me playing, hoping to catch them in ear shot. I did this for the rest of the night, and wandered far and near in search of them, but did not find them.
The third day I don't remember much. The sound and site of slow moving pot heads having been neglected of their pot for three days while wandering around aimlessly desperately calling "who's got my nugs, who's got my nugs", gave the impression of a zompiepocalyptic world, but instead of brains they just wanted to smoke a bowl. I stayed mostly inside my tent, and survived this desiccation long enough to make it to the midnight new years eve/new years day changeover concert, which I admit, I mostly missed.
I had bought some acid that turned out to be bunk, which was an extra bummer because I was right underneath the fireworks display and that would have been truly spectacular. I remember, Phish road out on a giant river boat from behind the crowd, that opened up into a giant hot dog, which they then road to the stage. It was ridiculous. When they started playing, I think they opened up with Eric Claptons "After Midnight", fireworks filled the sky right above my head, and they were very loud and bright. Seeing as how I wasn't tripping though, I got angry at the random hippie that scammed me, then tired, and ended up calling it a night early again.
So that is it, that is how I got my first glass piece, and I still have it. It was only a few months later that I met a house full of glassblowers, who I showed it to and they all drooled over it. The fanciest one of them, Chad, stared at it for the longest, wanting to be able to do that. After starting a relationship with another member of that household and her starting to teach me how to blow glass, it became my target piece, the one I decided if I could do, I'd be good. Despite the fact that nobody I knew, knew how to do that, I have long since succeeded in replicating it to my liking, and I did feel accomplished when I did it.
That is it in regards to how I obtained my first glass piece, but the rest of the story of getting back home is rather entertaining, so I'm gonna add that part as well, later. Still much work to do, and I've gotta get back to it.
Hope you all have been well.