Bring The Clippers to Humboldt!

Well, NBA Commissioner David Silver lowered the boom on L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling for the racist comments his sneaky, weird-looking girlfriend recorded in a conversation he thought was private. This raises one important question: Are all of the suits who run the NBA named after a white precious metal?

This also means that an NBA franchise will soon go up for sale. This is an unbelievable opportunity for Humboldt’s status seeking dope yuppies. Can you think of a better way for one of Humboldt’s successful entrepreneurs to gain prestige for themselves, and for their community, than by buying the L.A. Clippers, and bringing them to Humboldt? Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Really, where else but Humboldt does a team called “The Clippers” belong? Houston has it’s Oilers, Pittsburgh has it’s Steelers, and Nebraska has it’s Cornhuskers. Humboldt deserves it’s Clippers, and The Clippers deserve Humboldt.

I know that this would work out great. It just takes the right dope yuppie, or group of dope yuppies to put up the money to make it happen. It doesn’t take any brains or talent to own an NBA team. All it takes is money, and by golly we’ve got plenty of that here in Humboldt County.

Everyone knows that you haven’t really “made it,” unless you own your own NBA franchise. Face it, without that team, you’re just a low-life, sleaze-ball drug dealer, jerking off on a mattress full of cash, in a house full of toys, in the middle of nowhere. You need this team. Humboldt needs this team. Nothing would put Humboldt County “on the map” like our own NBA franchise. Imagine it.

The first time the Humboldt Clippers make the NBA Playoffs, the world will wake up and take notice. People in places like Chicago, Detroit, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Miami will know that Humboldt’s got game. Without that team, we’re just some hick backwater full of pea-brained yahoos riding around on ATVs.

Is that how you want people to think about Humboldt County? So quit wasting your money on $4 beers at parties for piss-ant local non-profits. You could be sipping single malt scotch, court-side at a Humboldt Clippers game. Surrounded by cheering fans, everyone would know that you were the one who transformed Humboldt County from a great place to catch Lyme Disease into a great place to catch “Clipper Fever.”

We’ll give The Clippers a total Humboldt makeover, and they really need it. How many NBA fans know the difference between a clippership, a friggate and a dinghy? What do boats have to do with basketball? …or L.A. for that matter? An L.A. Team should have an L.A. name, like The Quake, The Smog, or The Traffic. If they had to name the team after a boat, they should have called them “The Container-Ship Full of Chinese TVs.”

The Clippers were obviously meant for Humboldt, and here in Humboldt, we know what clippers are, what they do, and what they look like. We don’t really want the team to resemble clippers in any way, but clippers are an essential, but often overlooked and unappreciated part of Humboldt’s marijuana industry. Having a local NBA franchise named after them will help them take pride in their work, and recognize their contribution to the industry, without having to pay them any more money.

The Clippers mascot could have a ferocious pair of Wiss-Clips for a head with a big eye in the finger hole. His whole body would be a mass of shaggy buds. Call him “Snippy.”

We may not have the major population center, sports arena, or even the international airport, but Humboldt’s got heart. I know we would support an NBA franchise. I mean, I personally would never go to a Clippers game, but I know that a lot of people around here are into that crap.

I’m sure that lots of people around here would buy tickets to see the Humboldt Clippers play, because they have plenty of money, and nothing else to do with their lives. They’d buy T-shirts, jerseys, ball caps and hoodies with the Humboldt Clippers logo, because they don’t have any better taste than that, and you can bet that they’d attend the home games, getting shitfaced on overpriced beer while they yell and scream and jump up and down, just like they do at music concerts, because they have no manners. How much more support do you need than that?

Yes, Humboldt County is full of people who would make great sports fans. Look at them. They already put the word “Humboldt” on almost everything they own.

These are people crying out for a team to support. Bringing an NBA franchise to Humboldt County would give fulfillment and purpose to their otherwise meaningless lives.

 

Can you think of a better way that you could serve your community? Then go ahead and DO IT! Buy the L.A. Clippers and bring them to Humboldt!

I Help to Solve a Community Problem

The Garberville Redway Chamber of Commerce has graciously asked for letters from the community to help solve the problems we face here in Garberville. Eager, as I always am, to serve my community, how could I deny such a request?

Dear Garberville Redway Cahamber of Commerce,

We have a serious problem here in Southern Humboldt with all of the low-lifes, sleaze-balls, drug addicts, drug dealers, criminals and mentally deficient creeps hanging around town. This has been a huge problem for as long as I can remember. I thought there was nothing I could do about it. After all, they own most of the land for miles around, run most of the businesses in town, and now they’ve even taken over the county government.

I think the main reason we have so many greedy, small-minded, scummy people around town has been the long-running War on Drugs. For many years, most people in America thought that marijuana was a dangerous drug, and that prohibition was the only way to keep it away from children. People are finally waking up to the fact that marijuana prohibition does not protect children from a dangerous drug, but instead, pointlessly destroys the lives of millions of Americans, including children.

Southern Humboldt, because of its remoteness and the privacy offered by densely wooded parcels on steep, rugged terrain, became popular with the kind of people who saw the War on Drugs as an opportunity. For more than 30 years, Southern Humboldt has attracted the kind of people who would rather profit from the suffering of millions, than stand up for what was right. These people callously and cynically game the system, while posing as upright law-abiding citizens. Many of them built comfortable, middle-class lives for themselves, completely subsidized by hard-working American taxpayers, and paid for in the blood, money, jail-time and anguish of victims of the War on Drugs.

The black-market does not attract America’s best and brightest, so much as it attracts America’s greediest bottom-feeders. This, I think, is the single biggest problem we face here in Southern Humboldt today. I can imagine that a lot of good people have moved away from our community because of the underworld takeover of Southern Humboldt, and I bet all of the clandestine activity around here turns off most prospective home-buyers, except of course, the greedy bottom-feeders, who instantly feel at home.

I can see why people would not feel comfortable with drug-dealers as neighbors. In most of America, one drug-house in a neighborhood can dramatically reduce the desirability of that neighborhood to prospective buyers. Who, besides a drug dealer, wants to move into a neighborhood where every house on the road is a drug-house, and into a town where most of the traffic is drug traffic?

So, we have a real problem. The black-market marijuana industry has turned SoHum into a scum magnet. The more scum we attract, the more repulsive our community becomes to decent people who would make good neighbors. It’s a death spiral. This is how communities become drug ghettos.

We have a high crime rate, epidemic drug addiction and suicide rates, rampant poverty and homelessness, all of the problems you would expect to find in an inner-city drug ghetto. Sure, there seems to be plenty of money around, and the people who live here look like honest middle-class Americans, but you don’t have to talk to them long before you realize that the fashionable clothes and late model cars are just a thin veil over rotten garbage.

Like rotten garbage, the whole situation in town smells worst towards the end of Summer, when an influx of part-time transient scum run afoul of our entrenched local scum. As a result, we have lots of scummy people being scummy to each other all over town. It’s as pathetic as it is silly, but the fact is, all of these scummy people need each other to do the scummy work they all came here to do.

It takes 12-16 hrs of manual labor to trim every single pound of marijuana. Southern Humboldt’s entrenched local scum grow millions of pounds of marijuana every year. There’s no way local people could trim it all. The annual influx of migrant laborers is just another unsavory aspect of the whole unsavory black-market marijuana industry, for which Southern Humboldt is justifiably famous, but unjustifiably proud (and even more unjustifiably, rich).

I think the only real solution to this whole wretched problem would be a collapse in the price of marijuana, brought about by abolishing marijuana prohibition. As long as the black-market in marijuana flourishes, this infection will continue to fester. The clandestine marijuana industry self-selects for greed, dishonesty, opportunism, and indifference to others, and no amount of economic benefits derived from that industry can make up for the impact that so many scummy people have on this small rural community. The sooner we starve the clandestine marijuana industry out of Southern Humboldt with cheap, mass-produced, legal marijuana, the sooner we can get rid of the parasites, traitors, and general scum that clandestine, black-market, criminal activity, invariably attracts.

I love Southern Humboldt, and think it is a great place to live, not because of the people who live here, but because of the lack thereof. I wholeheartedly support anything we can do to make Southern Humboldt appear less attractive. I appreciate the Garberville Redway Chamber of Commerce for being so hostile and repulsive to people visiting our town, and our local business community for being so insensitive to the needs of young travelers.

Between the unfriendly signs, lack of services, exorbitant prices and open hostility, no one in their right mind would mistake Garberville for a nice place to live. Now if we can just starve out the dope yuppies, and the business owners who cater to them, we can get back to the quiet, peaceful, rural lifestyle we all came here to enjoy.

Celebrating Three Years of Stoned Thinking at lygsbtd

Today we celebrate the biting social criticism, the outside-the-box perspective and the occasional joke that you’ve come to know as Like You’ve Got Something Better To Do. For the last 156 weeks, I’ve brought you Humboldt County’s funniest, most irreverent and intellectually challenging blog. I realize I don’t have a lot of competition in those areas, but it’s nice to be the big fish in a very small pond. I just hope some dope yuppie doesn’t decide to drain it, to water his marijuana crop.

Speaking of marijuana, which we never stop doing here in Humboldt County, if marijuana is a consciousness expanding drug, how do you explain all of the small minded people in Humboldt County? Yes, we have plenty of marijuana around here, but not nearly enough stoned ideas.

Anywhere else, people spend enormous amounts of money on small quantities of marijuana, just so they can think stoned thoughts. Here, we have plenty of marijuana, and all people think about is money. That’s why lygsbtd is so vital to this community. Without stoned ideas, Humboldt County is just West Virginia with pot farms instead of coal mines.

Here at lygsbtd, I know that marijuana is for getting high, not for getting rich. No one gets rich from marijuana; people get rich from prohibition. While drug-war profiteers drain salmon streams and destroy habitat just to squeeze a few more drops of blood from prohibition as it heaves its last dying gasp, I use marijuana as fertilizer, to raise a bumper crop of stoned ideas, because stoned ideas have the power to change the world. That’s why I started lygsbtd, wayyyy back in May of 2011.

Stoned ideas matter. Stoned ideas matter, because stoned ideas are natural ideas. Stoned ideas tell the truth because stoned ideas are too stoned to lie. You don’t learn stoned ideas in school. You don’t get stoned ideas from advertizing, and you sure won’t hear stoned ideas from politicians. You might find stoned ideas in books, hear them in music or read them in blogs like this one, but you’ll only recognize a stoned idea if you are stoned enough yourself.

On the auspicious occasion of the third anniversary of this blog Like You’ve Got Something Better To Do, I hereby renew my sacred vow to keep stoned ideas alive, and I ask you, Dear Reader to do the same. These days, our minds face a constant assault from toxic, synthetic corporate concepts, pop-media junk thoughts and stale old-fashioned prejudices. Only by vigorously thinking stoned thoughts can we protect ourselves from developing a crippling thought disorder, like Beatlemania, Libertarianism, or Christianity.

We need stoned thoughts, and we need each other. Every time you read one of these posts, stoned thinking grows stronger. Every time you read a post at lygsbtd, the forces of darkness diminish. Every sentence you read here liberates a consciousness from the slavery of corporate brainwashing. Thank you Dear Reader for making this blog a beacon of stoned thinking, shining unto the world.

Every week, thousands of you, from all over the English speaking world, park your browsers at this URL. Even though you can’t be bothered to leave a comment, or even click the goddamned “like” button, I know from my statistics that you are out there, staring silently, impassively, like rubbernecking gawkers at a bad traffic accident, looking for blood.

…And I give it to you. Every week I open this vein. Every week I pour myself out for you, because I know thirst. I know what it is like to search for stoned ideas, for kindred spirits, for signs of life among the ruins of our shattered culture. I know how barren, vapid and desolate the internet is. I know that you need this blog, and cling to it the way a drowning man clings to a life preserver.

That’s why I never miss a week.  I see the impact that lygsbtd has on people’s lives. For instance:

1. Two years in a row, lygsbtd has ranked in the top 5 blogs in Humboldt County in the North Coast Journal’s “Best of Humboldt” readers poll.
2. Posts from this blog have been republished in such diverse outlets as Fifth Estate Magazine, Vermont Progressives, Thai Style Living and Lost Coast Outpost.
3. If you “google” lygsbtd, you’ll find at least 9 pages of web results that reference this blog.

This blog matters, and because this blog matters to you, it matters to me.

So, as we move into the fourth year of lygsbtd, let’s make a mountain of this molehill.

Email your favorite lygsbtd post to a friend who may not have discovered it yet. Share a lygsbtd post on fb.

Tweet about something you read here.

Don’t just passively consume this blog…

…become a Like You’ve Got Something Better To Do activist.

Stop sitting on the sidelines gawking at the destruction,

and help stoned thinking go viral.

Share these stoned ideas and help change the world.

Like you’ve got something better to do.

I Weigh-In on the Humboldt County DA Race

Everyone should already know that justice is a joke here in Humboldt County, so I thought a look at this year’s crop of District Attorney candidates might be good for a laugh. Personally, I’m just glad to see our current D. A. Paul Gallegos step down. Hand-picked, and financed by Humboldt County’s dope yuppies, Paul Gallegos seems like the kind of D. A. that organized crime would support.

Paul Gallegos always struck me as a showboat. Whenever I saw Paul Gallegos in the halls of the county courthouse, I expected to see a camera crew following him around. He always dressed “to the nines,” bearing this feckless expression that makes him look like they hired him to fill the suit. He looks more like a TV anchorman than a District Attorney. I have no idea whether he’s any good at his job, but I doubt that he is, because I don’t trust anyone who devotes that much energy to their appearance.

No, the County of Humboldt has never charged me with a crime, so I have no experience with the criminal justice system here, but I do enjoy a good civil lawsuit every once in a while. As a result, I spent a fair amount of time at the county courthouse in Eureka back when all of the current candidates haunted it’s hallowed halls. Lawyers do more of their work in the hallways of the courthouse, than they do in actual courtrooms, so I had the opportunity to watch them all, in action.

Visiting the county courthouse always reminds me of why I live in the country: florescent lights, tile floors, people who smell like dryer sheets, people who just smell, women wearing make-up and high-heels, men wearing dry-cleaned suits, cops, and an endless parade of humanity who go there to have their souls crushed. No one looks happy. No one looks healthy. No one looks like they want to be there. “This is what civilization is all about,” I remind myself, “an oppressive, artificial environment full of bad vibes.”

I pity the people who work in that environment, especially the clerks, secretaries, and court reporters, but also the commissioners, officers and department heads who work in all of the county offices, and even the lawyers, prosecutors, judges and County Supervisors. A lot of people would call those good, high-paying jobs, or at least relatively secure jobs with decent benefits, but go to the courthouse and look into their eyes. Do these people look happy to you? In the long run, how and where you spend your day matters a hell of a lot more than how much money you make, and security = death.

Good-looking people are few and far between at the courthouse. Interns and entry-level office help tend to look the best, but they go downhill fast in that environment. In that environment, the eyes grow hungry for a pleasing form, and anything less than grotesque will do. In the courthouse, Elan Firpo looks pretty good.

Anywhere else, she’s just another mom in a minivan, but if the D. A.’s race were a beauty contest, Elan Firpo would win, hands down.

Here in SoHum, Elan Firpo seems to be winning the yard sign vote, and the Firpo signs seem to occupy the same places that previously sported Gallegos signs. In an area so dependent on criminal activity, it seems that many people around here prefer an ornamental District Attorney.

Personally, I wouldn’t vote for an attractive D. A. Jobs don’t come any uglier than that of District Attorney. The D. A. deals with murderers, rapists, child molesters, wife beaters, and every other low-life sleaze-ball in the county, and needs to know every little detail of their grisly crimes. Being immersed like that, in the worst of the worst, takes it’s toll. A few years of that could turn Elle McFerson into Angela Merkle. No one wants to see that happen to a pretty face.

I’m not saying that a woman couldn’t handle the D. A. position, or that Elan Firpo is not qualified for the job; I’m saying that no one should take the job of D. A. unless they’re already ugly, and have proven that they know how to handle it.

I don’t remember what Maggie Fleming looks like, but with over 120 jury trials under her belt, I can imagine. Maggie Fleming also gets points with me for her writing. Of the three candidates who managed to get a blurb in my sample ballot, Maggie Fleming did the best job of writing hers.

I don’t think well of people who can’t write. I figure that if you can’t write well, you probably don’t think very well either. I imagine that writing skills, knowing how to convey information clearly, articulately, and gracefully, helps greatly when presenting a case before the jury, and I’ll bet Maggie Fleming does a great job of that.

I’ve seen a few of Maggie Fleming’s signs, mostly on property belonging to “old money,” the ranchers, descendents of the original settlers, and the people who made Roger Rodoni an unbeatable force for so many years. Although these days, I feel nostalgic for our old cowboy County Supervisor, I still don’t trust the political machine that got him elected.

I’m suspicious of Allan Dollison for other reasons. I don’t know why, but every time I see Allan Dollison, he reminds me of someone involved in the JFK assassination. I don’t know whether he looks like someone in the Zapruder Film, someone on the Warren Commission or maybe one of the actors in the Oliver Stone movie, but he always reminds me of the assassination of President John F Kennedy. I know that President Kennedy was long dead before Allan Dollison was even born, but I still don’t trust him.

Allan Dollison is proud to have served in the Iraq War. No one should be proud to have served in the Iraq War. I realize that people take pride in serving their country, and that the military builds certain skills, but the Iraq War was the biggest crime against humanity of the 21st Century, at least so far. Participating in it is nothing to be proud of. Allan Dollison promises to shake up the D. A.’s office, but I just can’t get behind an admitted war criminal with connections to the JFK assassination.

Which brings me to the fourth, final, and my personal favorite candidate for District Attorney, based on my personal experience at the courthouse, Arnie Klein. If you think of the 2nd floor of the county courthouse as a coral reef ecosystem: lawyers are dolphins, their clients are tuna, and the court reporters, clerks, and secretaries are angelfish. In this scenario, the judges would be large groupers, each ensconced in their own little cave, while the cops are barracudas constantly circling the scene. The criminal defendants, on the other hand, are just chum. If you imagine the Humboldt County courthouse that way, Arnie Klein was the big shark.

In reality, the courthouse is nothing like a coral reef ecosystem. There’s nothing natural about a courthouse, and nothing about it nourishes life. Quite the contrary. The courthouse is a place of dispute, violation, and punishment, and it consumes the lives of those who inhabit it.

You can immediately see what working at the courthouse has done to Armie Klein’s face. The guy has more wrinkles than a relief map of the King Range.  Arnie Klein doesn’t just look like he’s been to hell and back, he looks like that’s his daily commute. That’s what a District Attorney should look like.

I understand that Arnie Klein has been sick. That doesn’t surprise me a bit. If he gets the D. A. job, I bet it will kill him. That’s OK. Arnie Klein probably wishes he were dead already, and his family has got to be sick of looking at him.

From watching Arnie Klein in action, it became clear to me that he loved his job, and was very good at it, despite the toll it took on him. Arnie clearly belongs at the courthouse. When he dies, they should stuff him and mount him on a pedestal in the hallway on the second floor.

I can’t tell you about Arnie’s writing ability, because he failed to get a blurb in my sample ballot. I had to look for his ad in Savage Henry to make sure I spelled his name correctly. Apparently, Arnie believes he can win the D. A.’s race solely on the strength of his popularity with illiterates. That might seem like a bold strategy, but not that many people in Humboldt County read, and those that do, tend to ask embarrassing questions, so it’s best to ignore them anyway.

After hearing him on Ed Denson’s KMUD radio show, I worry that Arnie Klein has more personality and charisma than the entire Board of Supervisors put together. He might be able to rally enough public support to pressure the supervisors to pump up his budget, at the expense of social programs for the poor. Social programs, even the few that remain, do far more to protect the property owning public than any amount of money spent on new Deputy D. A.s. I’m sure Arnie doesn’t see it that way, but don’t forget, Arnie is a shark, and all he sees is chum.

Well, chum, that’s my take on the 2014 Humboldt County District Attorney’s race.