About this poster

"'Mooch' is a conglomeration of multiple weed experiences I had back in art school. There's plenty to tell but I’ll stick to the main two that keep coming back to me some 30 years later. In essence “Mooch” is my ode to all the closet (and outdoor) growers out there who kept the dream alive for so many years and helped push our society towards a more rational and healthy way of looking at cannabis. Kudos to all of you!

#1 - Back in art school we used to buy weed off a guy named Mooch. Mooch was nothing spectacular, your typical longhaired stoner, a dime a dozen back in the mid 90s with grunge taking off and Jerry still rocking. He lived on the first floor of the dorms so we’d climb through his window instead of having to walk down what seemed like an incredibly long hallway so he could “buzz us in”, lol. Honestly I didn't know Mooch all that well, no real hanging out or anything, just grab an eighth and be on our way. What made Mooch so special and the reason I often think of him when burning one was what he kept in his closet - his pet iguana. This thing was a dinosaur, I had never seen - nevermind interacted with, a reptile of this size. So going to Mooch’s place was about as awesome as it got for me. We’d not only get to buy some crappy weed (almost all weed was crappy back then) but I’d get to commune with this super chill beast who wanted nothing more than to bask in his light and eat an occasional leafy green. Obviously it made quite an impression on me and weed will forever have this odd connection to giant iguanas in my mind.

#2 - Also back in art school my friends and I were out one afternoon sitting on a picnic table smoking a joint. My buddy looks down between his legs and notices a not so small pot plant growing underneath the picnic table, we lost our collective shit. Again, this is the mid 90’s, weed is very very illegal in all aspects and it certainly wasn't normal to just stumble across random plants on campus. What happened next may be one of the stupider things I’ve done in my life, that night my friends and I decided to go “liberate” the plant. We dressed in black (yeah I know) went out under the cover of darkness, dug up the plant and rushed it back to our dorm room. That’s where our plan ended, we had no grow lights, no bat guano, hell we didn't even have a pot to put it in, but we had a marijuana plant - it was ours. It sat in that closet for about two days before we realized that not only do we have no idea what we’re doing but we were also risking likely expulsion if we were to get caught with this Charlie Brown looking plant in our dorm closet. So unceremoniously the plant was vacated from the premises and I had my very first experience with growing weed." - AJ