the roach clip is kind of interesting, now that you mention it. I had a roach clip but i think it was just a clip left over from when we were into shooting estes model rockets, the little clips that held the igniter to the scarily powerful little engines
. The roach clip is a relic from a time when people were a bit poorer, and less wasteful, the 70s version of depression era thriftiness. smoking down to the very very end of the joint without burning your fingers,
heck, I remember inhaling hot embers trying to get the last tiny bit of joint, or saving roaches for a rainy day and making another joint out of old burnt tarry roaches. a little 35mm film canister filled with roaches.
now where are the 35mm film canisters filled with roaches, I ask you? WHERE ARE THEY???
the answer is they are no more, just as no one insulates their walls with newspaper like they did in the 30s.
Now, our decadent society has become so utterly wealthy and extravagant that they don’t generally try to extract every last tiny bit of smoke from a roach. I recall a guy on 8th street a few blocks from my house selling weed to kids—probably an offense for which he could’ve gotten lot of jail time.
wait, no, he was on 9th st. where is he today? i hope he’s well, Bless his soul, serving that desperate market a t great personal risk to himself, helping us establish ourselves as little pseudo nonconformists.
We paid him $5.00 for a little tiny bag, I guess a joint or two? Crappy weed. Brown and dry and seeds. Nice little manila mini envelope though, I can remember its small fatness, the beauty of holding that illicit little parcel…well worth 5 bucks.
I can see minimum wage was $2.30 then, adjusted for inflation about 9.50. so I guess that was a 20.00 plus baggie at todays minimum wage! expensive, but, our options were very very limited in 7th grade, until some people’s older brothers hooked us up.
I should’ve just gone in to the candy store there and put all the money into comic books. What a waste.
But yeah, if it was 20 bucks, for that little bitty bag it’d be worth getting a 30 cent roach clip to get every last bit of Mexican brick weed goodness out of that little bitty joint.
Kids today, they don’t understand the value of things; they go their weed delivered to their homes off billboard signs they call, get special deals for new customers, probably get a half ounce of 10x better weed for that price. these kids dont know what it was like to struggle for that one skinny joint, spoiled brats. no searching for a connection; just buy it like it was starbucks coffee.
Probably just toss their roaches in the garbage; sad really, the loss of the roach clip. also, it’s pretty common now for joint to have little premade cardboard quasi filters, so you wouldnt burn your fingers anyway, so probably no one would actually buy a roach clip. but back in the good old days, who used filters? never heard of such a thing.
Maybe the roach clip could make a comeback, like spats, or penny farthing bicycles. The definitive cinematic roach clip scene is of course in the big Lebowski where he’s doing a J to unwind in the tub, listening to his tape of whale calls:
there he is with his roach clip, until the nihilists come with their aggressive marmot to ruin his life and perhaps unman him…. so retro, debonair, like a long cigarette holder.
“Hey, this is a private residence, man!”
it was so fun to smoke that little highly illegal bag of weed. so boring and pointless now. the good old days of overpriced shitty weed, roach clips, and so little entertainment around in retrospect it was awesome. im glad i grew up then.
As Charles bukowski said I’d rather drive from l.a. to nyc in reverse than do that again, but it was beautiful man
