Humboldt “Farmers” Go to Sacramento

Recently, a group of area dope yuppies visited the State Legislature in Sacramento to lobby lawmakers on behalf of local marijuana growers.

While addressing their representatives at the State House, these cannabis cultivators wore green T-shirts emblazoned with the words, “I am a Farmer,” which I suppose, served as their excuse for wearing T-shirts.

Surrounded by business suits and power ties, these alleged “farmers” explained how important prohibition-era profits have become, not just to them personally, but to the numerous BMW and Harley Davidson dealerships around the state, not to mention ski resorts, gun dealers and real estate agents in Costa Rica, to name a few. “Who else pays $200 a yard for dirt?” They asked, adding that “California’s cannabis cultivators are the ‘suckers of last resort’ who have kept the state’s economy moving forward by buying enormous amounts of stupid crap while the rest of the state just tightened their belts and suffered through the recession.”

They reminded lawmakers that local businesses in Humboldt County rely heavily on black market cannabis profits. First, a lot of Humboldt County “businesses” operate as “fronts.” These “fronts” allow cannabis cultivators to launder large sums of cash without actually serving anyone’s needs. The remainder of Humboldt County’s businesses pay exorbitant rent prices, because of the high demand for commercial space for indoor marijuana cultivation, and have trouble finding help, because people can’t afford a decent place to live because of the high demand for residential space for indoor marijuana cultivation. As a result, most Humboldt County businesses cater to drug dealers who can easily afford the ridiculously high prices, while they ignore the needs of the rest of the community. Despite the poor job they do of serving the community’s needs, these businesses all pay taxes.

Of course, meeting people’s needs is the last thing anyone at the State House cares about. At the CA State Legislature, it doesn’t matter if you are a lawmaker or a lobbyist, a department head or a dope yuppie dressed as a farmer, everyone wants something, and everything costs money. The State Legislature essentially acts as the pimp for the state of California. Anyone who wants to fuck the people or rape the environment, legally, in the State of California has to pay them for the privilege. The State House is where they negotiate the price and terms.

Marijuana prohibition was just such a deal, struck between powerful corporate interests and corrupt government officials, and they’ve screwed the American people with it for almost 80 years.  Today, the American people have had enough, and they demand change. Right now, state legislatures all over the country are wrestling with this one question: How can they preserve an economic system forged by the War on Drugs, while phasing out the criminal penalties for drug possession and sales.

It’s like the transition between the Vietnam War and Reagan’s Cold War. The public demanded an end to the Vietnam War, and the draft, but not an end to military spending. No one liked spending billions of dollars on nuclear weapons, but people weren’t rioting in the streets about it. The Cold War preserved the profits of military contractors who would have otherwise had to find productive work in a peacetime economy. The people still got fucked, but at least they stopped screaming and squirming so much.

That’s what’s going on in Sacramento right now. It makes sense that Humboldt County’s Drug War profiteers should join the negotiations. Cops, prison-guards, lawyers, and drug dealers all want to continue fucking us over, and now Wall St. investors want a piece of the action too. It’s a feeding frenzy for social parasites.

They all know that without a multi-billion dollar eradication  effort, the price of marijuana will drop to $0, as this hearty weed quickly colonizes every vacant lot, ditch and roadside in America.

Wouldn’t that be great? The time has come to make it happen. All we need are seeds. That’s why it is so important for everyone who cares about cannabis, and wants to see it free and legal, to grow seedy pot. To hell with the State House, and to hell with greedy dope yuppies.  We’ve waited for them long enough already. Now it is time to free the weed, and spread the seed, because we’re sick of the greed.

4/20, a CIA Plot Involving the Grateful Dead

It’s 4/20 again, Oh boy! I’m not big on celebrating 4/20 as a holiday. I mean, if somebody hands me a joint, any day of the year, I’ll happily smoke it, but as a holiday, 4/20 comes up a day late and a dollar short, if you ask me.

April 19th is the day to celebrate. Think about it. The psychedelic revolution was born on April 19 1943. April 19 is “Bicycle Day,” the day Albert Hoffman first discovered the psychoactive properties of LSD, and took his famous bike ride home from the Sandoz lab in Switzerland. Also, the Battle of Lexington and Concord took place on April 19, the first major battle in the American Revolution. April 19th is a day to remember that sometimes revolution is a good thing, and some things are worth fighting for. That’s something to celebrate.

What happened on April 20th that has anything at all to do with marijuana? Nothing. Nothing at all.

What did happen on April 20th? What is the most significant thing to happen, in the whole history of civilization, on April 20? Adolf Hitler was born. Remember him? What a guy. He cast his shadow over the entire 20th Century, and remains an iconic symbol of pure evil to this day. That’s not something I want to celebrate.

Hitler’s birthday should be marked by a somber day to remember the horrible things the Nazis did, and to remember that people did those things. April 20 is a day to remember that at one time, Hitler was a baby, just like millions of other babies, and his mother loved him and took care of him and sent him to school, and he grew up to become Der Fuhrer of the Third Reich, and to instigate the most ghoulish bloodbath of a blood-soaked century. April 20th is a day to remember that any little baby can grow up to become another Hitler someday, and that’s something every perspective parent should think about.

Anyway, the fact that Adolf Hitler was born on on April 20th hangs like a pall over the entire day, making it unfit to celebrate. Unless, of course, you are a fascist. Fascists love to celebrate Hitler’s Birthday. If you ask me, fascists are behind the whole business of celebrating April 20th as some kind of pot holiday. I think the whole 420 phenomena is part of a CIA CoIntelPro disinformation campaign designed to derail the revolutionary elements of the cannabis counter-culture.

The whole 420 back-story seems pretty dubious. Supposedly, some Bay Area high-school kids concocted 420 as a code word for getting high, because it took exactly 4:20 seconds for them to walk to their favorite place to smoke herb. That doesn’t make sense because: A, Some kids are faster than others. B, Who times their walks like that? And C, Kids would compete to see who could get there faster, so 420 would eventually become 418, 415, or even 412. Within a few years, some particularly fast stoners would have whittled it down to 3:58.

Also, consider this: All over the country, people constantly coin new code-words for marijuana, ranging from “bass strings” to “turf.” all of these terms must enjoy a certain amount of popularity to be effective, but all of them lose their “cool” once you hear them on TV. Code-words, after all, have to be changed once the enemy has broken the code. 420 on the other hand just seems to get more popular the more banal it becomes. Speaking of things that get more popular the more banal they sound…

Look at where this story comes from. Apparently, some of these apocryphal 420 kids were friends of Phil Lesh, the bass player for the Grateful Dead. Supposedly, 420, as a code-word for marijuana, arose within the Grateful Dead subculture. That story doesn’t check-out either. If you saw the Dead back in the ’70s, you never heard the term 420, at least I don’t recall hearing it when I saw them back in ’78, when I saw them at Music Hall in Cleveland, a great venue that only seats 3,000 people, and the show didn’t sell out.

But a few years later, the Grateful Dead sure did. At the height of Reagan’s War on Drugs, suddenly, this washed-up Woodstock era band of drug-addled geezers had a smash hit on MTV. Next thing you know, the Grateful Dead were the biggest tour on the planet, selling-out stadiums and arenas all over the country, and all over the country, millions of drugged-up, hippied-out, middle-class white kids started calling marijuana, 420. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

I’ve never trusted the Grateful Dead since then, and I assumed they were a front for the CIA. Here’s why: First, they were the least revolutionary of the psychedelic rock bands. The Grateful Dead didn’t drop LSD in Nixon’s coffee machine, like Grace Slick did,

…and they didn’t set things on fire, like Jimi Hendrix did.

They just took drugs and played music. That made the Dead safe for consumption, in the eyes of the CIA. That’s why the CIA used the Grateful Dead to derail, demotivate and lobotomize the psychedelic revolution.

By combining pitifully low doses of LSD with excessive amounts of stoned-out bluegrass Americana music, the Grateful Dead turned America’s disaffected youth into mindless party animals incapable of original thought, let alone revolutionary action. The Grateful Dead offer nothing remotely revolutionary, original, or even interesting in their music. Instead, with the CIA’s help, they threw a huge wet blanket of blandness over the imagination of a whole generation.

The whole point of the Grateful Dead was to stop people from experimenting with music and drugs, and instead, make sure that whenever people found drugs, the CIA could drown them in a murky sea of rehashed country-western, bluegrass, folk-rock pap. The Grateful Dead Disneyfied the psychedelic experience, and Jerry Garcia was a stooge who, wittingly or unwittingly, helped the CIA control the minds of America’s youth.

Today, people all over America are celebrating Adolf Hitler’s Birthday by smoking a joint while they listen to dumb redneck music. That’s how effectively the CIA used the Grateful Dead to subdue and incapacitate the psychedelic revolution. You may think this theory sounds like delusional paranoia, but do you have a better explanation?

I didn’t think so.

That’s Entertainment

Awhile ago, I agreed to help a friend fix his washing machine. I’ve never fixed a washing machine before, but I was happy to lend a hand. As it turns out, a washing machine is a rather complicated mechanical contraption, and we found ourselves stumped by an inaccessible fastener. As we stood there scratching our heads, trying to solve this problem, my friend had a brilliant idea. “Hey,” he said, “Let’s go smoke a joint and watch a video.”

That sounded like a great idea to me. As we filled the air with great frothy clouds of sweet cannabis smoke, my friend input the make and model of his washing machine into the search engine at Youtube, looking for a “how-to” video that would show us how to replace the agitator dogs on his Kenmore. That’s how I discovered this:

I don’t blame you for not watching it all the way through, but **SPOILER ALERT** there is no surprise ending. That video is a one-camera, 29 minute close-up of an open washing machine, going through one complete cycle. That’s it. No music. No special effects. No narration. I can’t even imagine what you would say to narrate a video like that: “Will you look at that! Someone has turned the knob on that ’86 Kenmore and water has begun spraying into the agitator drum. Get ready for a great show because it looks like someone is going to do some laundry.”

I would have never imagined that doing laundry could become a spectator sport. I mean, I would rather watch someone do laundry, than do laundry myself, but I’d rather not watch, or do, laundry, unless I had to, because I find it dull and tedious. Until the moment I saw that video, I thought that most people agreed with me about that. Apparently, I have no idea what constitutes entertainment these days, because Youtube tells me that that video has been watched more than 60,000 times.  62,290 views to be precise, at the time of this post.

I don’t know whether 60,000 people watched this video once, or 10,000 people watched it six times each.  Either way, I find this statistic very disturbing.

What kind of drugs do you have to take to stare at an open washing machine for a half-hour? Where can I get some? I’ll try them, whatever they are, because I just don’t get it.

I mean, I’ve seen some stupid TV shows, but this makes Duck Dynasty look like Masterpiece Theater by comparison, and it’s not just this one video. I’ve since discovered that this isn’t even the most popular open washing machine video on Youtube.

(over 190,000 views)

In fact, you can watch open washing machine videos all day, day after day, and never have to see the same washing machine video twice. The Kenmore Washing Machine Youtube Channel has 23 different videos to watch. The SpeedQueen Channel has 54 videos, and the Whirlpool Channel tops them all with 133 different videos of open washing machines, going through their wash and rinse cycle.

Who watches these things? Autistic children? Nostalgic old ladies in nursing homes? Laundry fetishists? Please tell me. What is the appeal?

Look, I’m a musician. I’ve been making music for more than 30 years. I’ve made movies and TV shows, and I currently produce three radio shows, not to mention this blog. I pour my life into my work, because I respect my audience, and I believe in the transformative power of art. Meanwhile, people watch this.

That is a nine-hour video of washing machine noise, that has been watched over 360,000 times!  What does that do to people? Is this brain-washing? It can’t be healthy, but this is what people want. What are you going to do? I don’t know about you, but I’m going out to shoot some long videos of paint drying.

Two SoHums

The bluffs between Redway and Garberville have been closed for a few weeks now. This two mile stretch of road hugs a sheer cliff of crumbly sandstone which descends precipitously into the churning waters of the Eel River below. With this narrow pass closed to all traffic save kayaks and canoes, these two tiny towns, Redway, and Garberville, which once orbited each other like binary stars, now face separation and isolation.

More than just a major inconvenience for everyone in Southern Humboldt, this severed link may forever mark a division point in SoHum culture. Evolutionary biology and island bio-geography can tell us a lot about what happens to populations and cultures who become isolated from each other. They tell us that subtle differences within connected populations, can lead to marked differences between closely related, but isolated populations.

Today, the subtle cultural differences between Eastern Southern Humboldt, including Garberville, and everything that drains into it down the Alder Point Rd, and Western Southern Humboldt, including Redway, and whatever hasn’t already fallen into the ocean West of it, seem small. For instance, people from Eastern Southern Humboldt are more likely to push a junk car over a steep cliff, whereas people in Western Southern Humboldt generally set fire to junk cars along the roadside. Over time, however, and in isolation, these minute differences often evolve into distinguishing characteristics. Unless the bluffs are repaired soon, the difference between East and West SoHum may become as stark as the difference between North and South Korea.

Today, the differences are subtle, but noticeable. In Garberville, for example, when someone sees someone else passed out on the sidewalk, they call the Sheriff. They say: “There’s someone passed out cold on the sidewalk in Garberville. Isn’t that illegal? Can you come down here and arrest them?”

Whereas is Redway, if someone comes across the same scene, an unconscious person in the sidewalk, they would call an ambulance and say something like: “Hey man, there’s, like, somebody laying here unconscious on the sidewalk. I just thought that this kinda seems like one of those health-things that you guys help out with.”

Over time, these subtle differences may become magnified. In the future, Garberville may get 35% of the electricity it uses from the alcoholics it incinerates, while everyone in Redway will get CPR certified, but hope they never have to use it because they were pretty high when they took the course.

Another subtle difference between G,ville and R,town has to do with self image. Garberville is a much more image conscious town than Redway. I think there are about five guys in Garberville, including the Jehovah’s Witnesses who wear a sport-coat and tie. Karen Miclette and her crew at Karen Miclette Insurance always dress professionally, as do the people at the banks and credit unions. When you add them all up, that’s a whole bunch of people in uncomfortable shoes and stiff scratchy collars, wondering why the rest of us can’t make more of an effort to look presentable when we’re in town.

Besides the people who “dress for success” around town, there are quite a few people who have an idea about what Garberville, and specifically, people in Garberville should look like, and they put a lot of effort into keeping up appearances.

Redway, by contrast, just makes itself comfortable. The polyester uniforms worn by the employees at the Shell station might be the most formal attire you’ll see on your visit to Redway, where most people can’t even keep their ass-crack covered.

In the future, Garberville might have hidden cameras all over town, and big screen monitors on the back-side of street signs. When you pass one of them, you will see the least flattering picture they took of you with a caption like, “Do you see what you’d look like on TV?” or “What would your mother say if she saw you dressed like that?”

Eventually, bouncers will come and escort you to the the edge of town. Meanwhile, Redway will look like a clothing optional retirement community with lots and lots of dogs.

These are just a few of the ways that long-term closure of the bluffs between Redway and Garberville could negatively effect our unique SoHum culture. We need each other, East and West, to survive, and thrive as one whole community. Redwood Drive must be repaired, now, before it is too late.

This Spring, Just Leave The Dirt Alone for a Change

Here’s a novel idea for my neighbors in Humboldt County this Spring: It is OK to just leave the dirt on the ground. You don’t need to dig it up. You don’t need to plant anything in it. Something will grow there. You don’t have to worry about what it is. Just leave the fucking dirt alone for a change.

You don’t have to water it. You don’t have to fence it. You don’t have to feed it a special blend of organic nutrients. Just leave it alone. Too much gardening has a dulling effect on the mind. That’s why farmers are so fucking boring. Do something different this year. Cultivate an interesting personality. Cultivate an unusual hobby, like whelk racing, amateur rhinoplasty or squirrel-suit diving,

or better yet, cultivate an original idea for a change. When was the last time you had one of those? Well here’s one for you: The dirt on the ground is just fine as it is. Leave it alone.

Don’t get me wrong. I like gardens, if they’re small. I mean real small.

I have a three foot by four foot cactus garden that I love dearly. I might give it as much as 50 gallons of water in an entire year. It takes up about a half-hour of my time, maybe once a month, but that’s plenty. It never seems like a burden. I get all the benefits of nurturing living plants, and I get to enjoy some exotic greenery around my home. What more can you ask of a garden? Really, there’s more to life than gardening.

Besides, there’s no shortage of greenery around my home. Like most of us here in Humboldt County, I’m surrounded by green. I’m 50ft deep in green. Green I got, and all of it producing food. I get pelted with acorns every Fall, I’ve got more huckleberry bushes than I’ve got time to pick, not to mention madrone berries, manzanita berries and wild raspberries to name a few. Everywhere I look, it’s all green, and it’s all producing food. Why would I want to cut that down, dig it up and replace it with Lima beans, Brussels sprouts, and hours and hours of backbreaking work in the hot sun?

Contrary to popular belief. Gardens are not attractive. I’ve never seen a garden that looked better than anyplace that has been left alone for twenty years. I find vegetable gardens especially ugly. They look like desolate wastelands all winter, and then all Summer they look like a rag-tag army of plants, all lined up in straight rows, and as the season wears on, they start taking casualties, as they get eaten, either by the people who planted them, or by nature’s guerrilla army of insects, rodents, lagomorphs and ungulates in their relentless battle to reclaim the stolen territory. By the end of the season, everything is dead, and the field is full of corpses. Every vegetable garden is just another battle in a long ugly war, and gardeners are not the “good guys” in this war.

That’s why I don’t have a vegetable garden, and that’s why I don’t want to hear about your vegetable garden. I don’t want to know what you do to get rid of Japanese beetles. I don’t want to know what you do to stop gophers.

I want Japanese beetles. I want gophers, and deer, and rabbits. If I see an animal in my yard. I want to watch it, maybe take a picture of it, maybe even shoot it and cook it for dinner. The last thing I want to do is chase it away. These animals are my neighbors, and I don’t want to have conflicts with my neighbors over broccoli.

If you were smart, you’d plant just enough of a vegetable garden to attract deer, and then, the first time you see a deer in your garden, shoot it, dress it and eat it. You’d get more food out of one deer than you’ll get out of your whole garden. Really, if you subtract all of the calories you burn working in your garden, from the total calories in the food that you eat from your vegetable garden, you’ll be lucky to break even, but if you throw a few seeds on the ground and sit on the front porch with a rifle in your lap all summer, you’ll put some real food on the table with a fraction of the effort.

I realize that here in Humboldt County, gardening has become a cornerstone of our rural lifestyle, and that it won’t be easy to give it up. Around here, if people simply gave up gardening, their lives would revolve entirely around reckless driving, violent crime and drug abuse. People really need to find something better to do with their time.

That requires imagination, and thought, so dust off your imagination, and tune up your thought process and find something better to do this year. I know that it seems like gardening is the most wholesome thing you do with your time, but in reality, gardening destroys the environment and enslaves humanity. When you work in the garden, you do the devil’s work.

Think about it. Over 100 species of plant and animal go extinct every day. Rhinos, orangutans, manatees, wolves, kit foxes and coho salmon all teeter on the brink of extinction. Who is pushing them over the edge? Farmers and gardeners, that’s who. And what are they replacing all of those wild animals with? Lima beans, or some equally repulsive vegetable like Brussels sprouts.

Who wouldn’t rather eat a big fat rhino steak, which would still be plentiful if farmers hadn’t run them off all of the arable land, rather than a bowl of Lima beans, for dinner. No one in their right mind would ever eat a Lima bean if farmers hadn’t already destroyed most of the world’s natural habitat, and replaced it with their gross and disgusting vegetables.

As if digging up Mother Earth weren’t bad enough, gardeners then fill these open wounds with the most foul-smelling stuff they can find. They actually buy the filthy crap they sweep out of commercial chicken coops, and then bury it in the ground. They bring in truckloads of cow manure, boatloads of rotting fish guts and they pay people to go spelunking for 5,000 year old bat shit. Then they expect us to eat the Lima beans they grow in this filth. The next time you bite into a Lima bean, remember that that pasty, nauseating green goo is made of chicken poop, cow pies, and fossilized bat-shit. Mmmm, mmm, no wonder they taste so good. You might as well eat out of the toilet.

As if Lima beans aren’t bad enough, now they’ve got these new, upscale, yuppie Lima beans. They call them Fava beans. Fava beans taste every bit as disgusting as Lima beans, but they’re even bigger and grosser than regular Limas. As a kid, I was forced to eat Lima beans, against my will. I learned to eat them by swallowing them individually, like pills, with a glass of water. I could not stand to chew them. I still can’t. Fava beans are too big to swallow like pills. You will choke to death on them if you try. Fava beans give you no choice but to chew them, which is sick and cruel.

Do you remember the scene in Silence of the Lamb where Anthony Hopkins says: “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.” Personally, I like liver. I’ve never eaten a human liver before, but I’d give it a try. I don’t mind a glass of wine on occasion, but the fact that he intentionally ate fava beans, in any context, totally grossed me out. Those beans have forever prejudiced me against psychopathic cannibals.

All kidding aside, this issue is serious. 38% of the Earth’s land mass has already been stripped of rhinos and orangutans, and planted in Lima beans. Most of the land that’s left is barren desert, tundra, salt flats, inaccessible mountain peaks, or steep, unstable forest-land situated over major seismic faults. All of the wild animals in the world now have to live in these inhospitable places, because greedy Lima bean farmers have taken over all of the good real-estate.

It’s time to take a stand, and to stand up for wild animals.  You might want to be one yourself someday.

Say NO to Lima beans, and leave the fucking dirt alone for a change this year.