To the 5g, 7g, 11.14g, 1.2oz, and microblunt guys...I'm sorry to have to do this, but you forced my hand...

The year was 2007. The twentieth day of the fourth month. A houseful of stoner bros attending the University of California, Santa Cruz, a magical redwooded wonderland where hippies frolic and weed flows like water. The joint was massive, a cartoonish statement of extravagant excess. A quarter pound of the finest herb, kief, bubble hash, and hash oil we could gather, all rolled in the mythical paper from the Cheech and Chong Big Bambu LP. The monstrosity came your way in the roto. You held it up with two hands, put the cardboard toilet paper roll crutch to your lips, and gasped the smoke in-

We planned for weeks. This was to be the grand jewel of our already preposterous 4/20 preparations: full box of swisher sweets all rolled into blunts, carefully rolled and stacked back into the box; pipes, bubblers, and bongs all cleaned and immaculate; baking cannabutter and bud brownies that reeked up the house for weeks afterwards. All of it just an appetizer for the coming abomination, the QPJ.

The biggest dealers in our extended friend group were brought together in a meeting of the minds like the dreadlocked Council of Elrond at Rivendell. The contributions from each were discussed at length, the final projected weight growing with each mischievous grin and twinkled eye. A quarter pound - four ounces - one hundred and fourteen grams. Surely this was too much? We'd be wasteful idiots, half of it would escape into the air, you can only get so stoned in a single sesh, so on and so forth. In the end, the pull to go farther than we ever thought possible, the comical grandiosity of it, the sheer amount of flexing that would be achieved, won out against all reason.

The Big Bambu LP was one of the many treasures I had received upon pillaging my father's record collection - the fact that the paper was still in the record (and remarkably intact) was a miracle in itself, given how big of a stoner my dad is/was. The weed took hours to grind, resulting in dozens of sore hands, strained wrists, and gunked-up sharpstones. It was obvious that a huge crutch would be needed if this thing had any chance of smoking right. This too was carefully constructed using a toilet paper roll with a couple pieces of paper folded inside to give it structure and act as a bit of a screen. Myself and two bros (yes, that's six hands total) were chosen by committee to be the honored rollers, as we were considered to have the best bars you see. Two hands held the top of the paper while four did the tucking, twisting it slightly to achieve a conical design. The mechanics were remarkably similar to rolling a regular-sized joint, in a way maybe easier given the paper was thicker than your typical zig zag. On the other hand, the Big Bambu paper did not have adhesive. Not to worry, we've got plenty of hash oil (this was the most advanced concentrate tech available at the time, dabs hadn't been invented yet) stocked up for the big day, obvious solution to our sealing issue (what, you thought we were going to lick the whole thing together!??). We packed it down with a hammer and twisted the top to keep the precious payload safe until the big day.

We chose to host a close circle of trusted friends at our college house instead of risk bringing the juggernaut to the UCSC Meadow where the main festivities were being held. Fifteen or twenty of us total, starting at 4:20pm of course. It took two hands to hold, ever so carefully, so the masterpiece wouldn't bend and break at the hilt. The lighting of the thing itself was a ridiculous process, the entire crew holding lighters and torches while the smoker huffed and puffed as if playing a didgeridoo. While the mechanics of rolling it were familiar, the mechanics of smoking it was a different story. We take for granted how helpful the physics of "drawing" in are for smoking a normal sized joint - not so for the QPJ. Trying to draw in using your mouth like normal didn't do shit for this thing. You quickly realized with horror that you needed to just take a huge gasping breath of smoke to hit it properly, without the ability for the smoke to cool in your mouth, straight into your deepest most unprotected cilia.

We all had born-again virgin lungs that day. The heat impact on the lungs was staggering - picture how destroyed your lungs were the first time you took a too-big bong hit with your friend's older brother in high school and multiply that by 1000. The room was fully boxed immediately, with smoke so thick we could hardly see each other. After the first couple people in the roto the thing was burning beautifully, with a massive cherry burning the size of your head. After recovering from the shock of the first hit, the thing you noticed when it came your way again was the taste. Oh my fucking god the sweet blast of nectarous and succulent terp nirvana. Going into it, I had just assumed that the flavor would be overwhelmed by the mixture of so many strains and burning too hot, but nuh uh. This was an orgasmic smorgasbord of complementary terpene profiles, beautifully accented by the included concentrates, and with so much god damned volume that your taste buds were unmistakably awash in it.

It quickly became obvious that there was no way in hell we were going to finish this thing in one sitting. About 1/2 - 2/3rds of the way through, the cherry fell out (thankfully) onto our giant hookah (ash) tray, landing with a volcanic explosion of ash and burning innards. While the remainder of the joint was still in fine shape, we took that as a sign to stop, partially due to the cherry but mainly because we were all unfathomably blasted out of our gourds at that point. Like I'm talking bad case of the scaries stoned. Like super paranoid and borderline un-fun stoned, paranoia which was unfortunately sent into the stratosphere when one of our friends showed up a bit late and proudly proclaimed "holy shit dudes I could smell that thing all the way down at Safeway" (a few blocks away). But then we thought, hey, Safeway, that's a great idea, and went to go pick up as many munchies as we could carry back to the crib. I don't remember much else at that point except the food being amazing and us all sitting on the couches in the living room laughing at how catatonically baked we all looked. Oh, also, one of our friends passed out and we rolled him up into a giant joint shape in a white blanket and pretended to smoke him haha. The hulking husk of the roach was later cannibalized, providing deliciously resinous fodder for normal J's for weeks to come.

And so ends the tale of the QPJ. I was seeing the progression of ever-growing joints on here, then I saw a comment from u/kidneyboy79 saying that he "...won't be impressed until I see someone roll up the paper from Cheech and Chong's Big Bambu album", and I knew what had to be done. I've posted some of these photos before, so this is technically a partial repost? But that was like 10+ years ago and I couldn't find the post on google or in my account history (maybe I used a burner account?), so hopefully y'all will forgive me. Thanks for reading.