Packing my bag for a five-day artist residency in Southwest Washington meant warm clothes, my laptop, and weed. Making art and smoking weed are intrinsically connected for me, and while I can do each separately, I feel like I reach mental homeostasis when they come together. On this creativity-centered trip, Burnwell’s Mental Glue pre-roll turned out to be as important as my toothbrush. This joint served exactly the two purposes I needed it to: helping me clear my head for creative output and keeping me social for the down times when my accompanying friend and I were not focused on our work.

“Because it had a pretty high THC content—over 25%—we felt a strong and heavy high come on quickly.”

I pulled it out of my luggage as soon as we opened the door to the vintage RV trailer we’d be calling home for the week. The goal of the residency was to write every night and smoke weed the rest of those waking hours. We stood outside in the damp air and stared at a sky full of stars we never get to see back in Seattle. I took the first puff of the joint before passing it to my fellow artist-in-residence. It had a sweet, floral scent and tasted like a bouquet of slightly pungent berries. Because it had a pretty high THC content—over 25%—we felt a strong and heavy high come on quickly.

Full disclosure: I’d tried it earlier the same weekend to test it out. It made me feel giddy and chatty, and I managed to carry the positive feelings with me through various social engagements. But on this second occasion, having switched to the more relaxed setting of a near-empty resort in a coastal town that’s dead in the winter, I felt the calming vibes hit me harder. I quickly realized it’s a strain that better serves you on nights when you want to relax, less so when you want to focus on a project.

Mental Glue is a hybrid pre-roll that combines Mental Floss and Gorilla Glue strains. I attribute the heady feeling I had to both the Mental Floss portion of this hybrid and the fact that my friend indulged my mental rabbit holes and rambling conversations. I can easily say the Gorilla Glue and physical exhaustion that comes from a long drive left me feeling sluggish and uninspired to do anything but chill.

One of my anxieties about smoking weed with other people is that I’ll sound like a rambling stoner. I’m talking about the kind of situation where you very passionately talk about a subject, shaking your fist animatedly, and then get to the end of your rant and don’t know why you started it in the first place. That feeling cropped up a lot while smoking this flower. It felt like my friend and I couldn’t hold a cohesive conversation. Despite having a lot of philosophic musings we wanted to shared, we had a hard time communicating them.

“I felt most in sync with this hybrid pre-roll when I was staring at the stars and not talking much at all.”

It’s a strange sensation when you combine mental euphoria and physical sluggishness, but that is in essence what happens when you combine Mental Floss and Gorilla Glue. It’s sort of like having a lot of great ideas without the follow-through to actually bring them to life in any coherent way. I love a good smoke and chat sesh, especially when it involves passing a joint while trading stories. But I want my heady cannabis to also be a social lubricant (asking for a lot, I know), and that didn’t quite happen with the Mental Glue. I felt most in sync with this hybrid pre-roll when I was staring at the stars and not talking much at all. We also had a record player in our RV, and the sound seemed especially colorful while smoking this strain, so it certainly has its purpose.

Despite never feeling traditionally productive while smoking Burnwell’s Mental Glue, I learned something more valuable. Not all weed is designed for getting work done; in fact, it says a lot about how far we’ve come from cannabis’s roots to expect it to. When my friend and I gave up trying to write or watch something, we ended up talking about art and weed and everything else that came to our minds. I forget sometimes that talking is part of the art-making process as well even if it doesn’t feel directly related to any end-product. This pre-roll may not have aided me in the moment of making art, but it acted as a support for everything else, which is arguably just as important.