Cultivation with intent to distribute

Dreamer. Drifter. Lolligager were the words that described me best as a teen. I blame it on my drug use. Excuse it away with a joke that I only have two brain cells left and they don't get along. With every joint a little voice in the back of my head whispered a wives' tale that every hit deleted brain cells as efficiently as my backspace button deletes the awful sentences I write. Case and point:
My room was deplorable, clothes scattered everywhere, an intricate system where each pile represented a degree of dirtiness from soiled to slightly smelly. Surface space was sparce. Dust piled high. The room stank of cat piss from the abandoned cat my sister brought home. He resided in the attic ajacent to my room and emerged every night to defecate under my desk. Mold spawned in patches from the food I discarded. The shades were forever drawn. Dank slathered the walls making it hard to discern their actual color.
It was early spring. I rolled a joint. Some seeds must have fallen on the rug, into some primordial ooze, because they sprouted. The next day three spaghetti looking strands squiggled in between the grooves of my shag carpet.
I gathered them with the fervor of a god, feeling omnipotent, the giver of life, and scurried to the backyard where I knew there were clay pots and dirt. I gingerly set the sprouts on the picnic table and scurried to the garden and filled one of the pots with topsoil. In complete darkness I submerged the ends of each sprout in a finger sized hole and cradled the pot while I carried it back to my room. The next morning I woke to the nourishing rays of sunlight bathing my sprouts. I was elated.
I needed a bigger pot for the rest of the seeds I fished out of the cellophane baggie of weed. I planted five more in a giant fish bowl and set them in the backyard to bake.
I thought briefly of what Mom would do when she saw them. The pot seeds were hers, from the buds I plucked from her stash. Her silence was assured in the threat of me saying out loud what we all knew when her bedroom door was shut and the sweet smells of sinsemellia wafted through the kitchen. Mom was getting baked again, time to make cookies.
In no time I had plants with thick green leaves, like the ones I saw pictures of in High Times Magazine. I never read the articles. I just looked at the cool pictures. But mine looked more like sticks than plush bushes. I cradled them and carried them across the street to my neighbor, a body shop mechanic with a master's degree in botany.

"You have to separate the males from the females," he said while shooting me a look that exposed me as a fraud for trying to pass them off as exotic posies.
"How do I tell?" I asked while lifting the leave of the tallest one, looking for little green testicles.
Another look, this one exposing me as a dumbass, "The females flower. And you can't let them. If they flower, they die." he said while traipsing off to wrestle the venus fly trap he fed with Miracle Gro, the one capable of eating small children.
"How do I stop it from flowering?" I shouted.
"Prune it," and he was gone, Indiana Jones style, machetti in hand.

So while I looked up what prune meant in the set of encyclopedias I plagiarized school papers from I decided to consult the High Times Magazine.
In the question and answer section someone asked, 'I heard my urine is good for my plants. Is this true?'
The editors answered yes with a lengthy explanation that I ignored. I pruned the females, extraced the males, set them aside to dry out, and stood over the remaing females like a pervert getting ready to deliver a golden shower.
I put head to pillow dreaming of plentiful, red veined buds. Not only was I going to be a self sufficent stoner, but I was going to get rich off of whatever I didn't smoke.
Dreamer, Drifter, Lolligager woke the next morning to the sight of my freshly pruned females wilted and brown. Some of them were speckled in black spots. They looked like they contracted the plague.
I revisited the article and read it through. The words 1 part per 100 jumped out. One teaspoon of nitrogen rich urine to each gallon of water.
As I smoked the microwave dried leaves, a headache rumbling like storm clouds in the reccesses of my head, I crossed off botanist from the list of potential careers. All that was left was space cowboy, or writer.