Trick or Treat

I don’t know about your town, but Trick-or-Treat has gotten unbelievably lame around here, so lame that teenagers wouldn’t be caught dead Trick-or-Treating anymore. I don’t blame them a bit. First, Trick-or-Treat now happens in broad daylight. No self-respecting Trick-orTreater ever goes out until after dark. These days, parents, in street clothes, lead their toddlers around the neighborhood dressed in licensed, store bought costumes, depicting trademarked TV superheroes and cartoon characters, in the middle of the afternoon.

Even the kids look perplexed. “Why do we do this?” They all seem to say. Why, indeed? All that’s left of Trick-or-Treat is the stuff you spend money on: corporate costumes, corporate candy, Chinese-made animatronic e-waste, inflatable plastic crap, and dollar store decorations, none of them scary. They’ve outlawed, or done away with, everything else. How did it come to this?

I blame the media. Any time someone got hurt or killed Trick-or-Treating, the Press made a big deal of it. Kid gets hit by a car on August 31, not news, but a kid in a costume gets hit by a car on October 31, big news. The media unnecessarily sensationalized Trick-or-Treat mishaps, like kids eating drugged candy, biting into apples with needles stuck in them, or getting hit by cars on dark roads. Widespread reports of these isolated incidents whipped the public into a frenzy that allowed churches, “do-gooders” and cops to chop the balls off of Halloween.

Trick-or-Treat is supposed to be dangerous…dangerous and scary, and it’s supposed to happen at night, in the dark. No flashlights, no reflective material, wearing mostly black, homemade costumes with identity concealing masks, we’d go door to door begging for candy, with the threat of real mischief. Trick-or-Treat meant “cough-up the sweet stuff or we’ll TP your house, leave a flaming bag of dog-do on your porch, or shmush a moldy rotten pumpkin on the windshield of your car.

Yes, Trick-or-Treat is all about aggressive panhandling after dark. That’s why we call it “Beggars Night”. Superheroes don’t beg. Cartoon characters don’t beg. Grotesque, deformed, diseased, and demented people beg. Scary-looking, dangerous and needy people beg. Drug-addicts, bums and street urchins beg. Proper Trick-or-Treat costumes reflect this.

When these hideous, pitiful creatures knock on your door, recoil in horror, give them a treat, and thank your lucky stars that you don’t share their fate. Or, scare them off by jumping out of the bushes in your own hideous costume, when they approach the door. But, if you refuse to answer the door, and offer no treats, you probably deserve whatever they do to you, because you were too much of a coward to face them directly.

I think its high time to reclaim “Beggars Night.” Begging, not prostitution, is the oldest profession. Like prostitution, begging will outlast us all. Begging is a part of life, it’s part of the fabric of our culture that won’t go away. On “Beggars Night” everyone can be a beggar, and everyone in your community will know how you treat the beggars who come to your door.

In this way “Beggars Night” teaches young people how to treat the unfortunate people who will ask them for help throughout their lives, and why its important not to turn your back on them. It seems that too many adults in this area never learned that lesson. While begging is shameful, its not nearly as shameful as it is to be uncharitable to strangers in need. Besides that, “Beggars Night” used to be a hell of a lot of fun!

LEC episode # 20 airs Sunday, October 30

Coming up at 9:30am on KMUD Community Radio (streaming and archived at http://www.kmud.org)

Living Earth Connection

The Living Earth Connection episode # 20 airs this Sunday, October 30. In this episode I present selections from The Ancestral Mind by Gregg Jacobs Ph.D..  Our Ancestral Mind is the preverbal, intuitive and unconscious emotional mind.  Our Thinking Mind is the rational, verbal and self conscious mind.  While Dr. Jacobs emphasis is on how these two aspects of our mind function, and how our overreliance on our Thinking Mind causes much of our ill health and unhappiness, there is also much to learn from these two forms of human consciousness, regarding the beliefs and actions that cause the ecological crisis. Please tune in on Sunday, October 30 at 9:30 a.m. PST to http://www.kmud.org.

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Drug Dealers I Have Known

One of the things I despise most about the War on Drugs is the people you have to associate with to find weed on the black market. I’ve spent a lot of time in my life hanging out with people I would have rather not known, in order to buy pot. When I was in high school, I used to get weed from a guy who lived in a run down farmhouse behind a gas station. He seemed like a cool guy, and I wanted to like him. I thought the colorful bantam chickens that ran around the yard, and that he cared for, made him more endearing.

At the time, I thought cock fighting was as arcane and anachronistic as bear-baiting. Then, one time, I visited his place, and he made me wait, to watch him spar two roosters. He put the two roosters on the ground in the corner of the barn. They immediately became aggressive and attacked each other in a flurry of feathers and kicks. Within a couple of minutes, one of the roosters had punctured the other rooster’s lung with a kick of his hind foot spur. The injured rooster coughed and spat blood.

The guy separated the two birds before the injured bird died, but not before killing my buzz, and my appetite. This was the only guy I knew who sold weed at the time. The last time I visited him, he had the ugliest dog I had ever seen, chained to a tree in the front yard. The dog barked ferociously. He told me it was a “pit bull.” I had never seen one before. I hoped I would never see one again. By this time, he still sold weed, but was more into coke, and he was the first person to offer to sell me cocaine.

After high school, I got my own place, a room, in Akron OH, near Akron U, and started my first cannabis garden. I’ve mostly grown my own weed ever since, but, like most people, I’ve had to move several times, or for other reasons found it impractical to grow at times.

For a while, I bought weed from an older biker in Akron. His place was almost a drive-through. You had to get out of your car and go knock on the door, but once you stepped inside it was strictly business. You told him what you wanted, gave him your money, and he pointed you towards a microwave oven, in which sat a bowl of quarter-ounce bags of weed.

I wanted to like the guy, because he had weed, but his priorities were all wrong, from my perspective. He had a brand new big TV, front and center, but only a shitty stereo, in the corner, and no good records. Artwork on the wall featured almost naked, unnaturally top-heavy women posing on unnaturally clean machines. This, despite the fact that he shared the home with his wife and school age daughter. It seemed like a pitiful situation to me. He had a brand new Harley, while I walked to work to my job as a busboy, and I gave him at least a quarter of my weekly earnings for a while. Still, I felt sorry for the guy.

There was a time when I got weed from gaunt, hollow, hard-looking man who visited my home. He would invariably arrive wearing a long-sleeve flannel shirt, unbuttoned, and would use one hand to hold the bottom of the T-shirt he wore underneath, up, forming a pouch over his sunken belly. He’d come in, look around furtively, sit down, and then open up that pouch into his lap, revealing a jumble of prescription bottles, plastic baggies and cash.

He always seemed disorganized and paranoid, and tried to up-sell me on narcotics and coke. He told me how fun they were. I never felt tempted. He seemed to like those drugs himself, and to me, he did not look well, and he did not seem fun. I remember being eager for him to leave. He seemed to think the cops were after him, and I sure didn’t want them to find him in my place.

Then, for a little while, I got weed from a guy who lived with his wife and three kids, in a two-bedroom apartment in a subsidized housing project. We hung out in one of the bedrooms, which had been converted into a sick, hip-hop recording studio fully decorated in Gangsta. One room, packed full of high-tech gadgets and dripping with bling, abject poverty crying in the next room. It creeped me out.

 

Not everyone I got weed from was that bad, but those are the memorable ones. Mostly, the pot dealers I knew were simply more acquisitive, materialistic and conventional than I am. They like weighing things on scales, and measure values in grams, ounces and pounds. I feel silly performing weird religious rites over a commodity, so I hardly ever weigh the pot I grow and I value other things, like character, hard work, and creative originality more than stuff.

To be fair, I did, for a little while, get weed from a delightful, and inspiring guy I knew in Boston. I don’t consider him a drug dealer, because I had to give him money, up-front, before he could go and get weed for me. He was a classically trained musician, who had played oboe in the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra for a while. When I knew him, he made his living by busking in the Boston T, playing dixieland jazz on the saxophone.

He was an old guy, when I knew him, but I found him delightful company, and we always had plenty to talk about. He was spry, witty, and animated, and loved to paint. He always impressed me with his sensitivity, intelligence, and compassion. He was a fantastic player who loved what he did. Still is, and does, I hope. His band occasionally played fancy shindigs for the Boston elite. “Squares” he called them, really. He’s the kind of guy that made marijuana famous, and he’s as good as it gets on the black market.

I bought California sinsemilla from all of these people. This is what the black market looks like, and if you grow weed, these are your distributors. It’s ugly, and it’s dangerous, and it’s not exactly the kind of place you want your kids to hang out. There is nothing cool about being a drug dealer, and most of the drug dealers I have known, have not been very cool people. We need safe access to marijuana at prices that put the black market out of business. It’s time to legalize marijuana and end this creepshow once and for all.

I Call Them “Dope Yuppies”

I got a phone call during my engineering shift at KMUD last Friday. “Did I hear you say your name is John Hardin?” the caller asked.

“Yes.” I replied.

“Are you the John Hardin who calls pot farmers ‘maggots’?”

“I don’t think I ever called them ‘maggots.’” I responded, but I did let him know that I am the “Hardin” who writes for LoCO. That seemed to satisfy his curiosity. I imagine that if I stayed on the line, he would have shared his opinion of my writing, but I had buttons to push and cards to read so I kept the call short. I don’t think he was a fan.

I’ve said a lot of things about growers, but I don’t think I ever called them “maggots.” I can understand why growers might feel like maggots after reading my column, but I don’t think I’ve ever called them that directly. I could be wrong. It’s all out there. If you can find it, I’ll admit it, but I don’t think so.

 

I know that a lot of people around here don’t like hearing what I have to say. I skim the comments. I even get hate mail on occasion. None of it bothers me. I don’t respond to the comments at LoCO because they pay me to write; they don’t pay me to bicker. Besides, the people who object most vociferously to my work, rarely make points worth responding to. They call me names, accuse me of saying things I did not say, and then they drop the “H” bomb.

“Stop the Hate!” or “What’s with the Hate?” or “Why does LoCO publish Hardin’s Hate Speech?” If I hate anything, I hate prohibition. I hate the War on Drugs. I hate it for how it has effected me, and for what it has done to my friends. I hate the War on Drugs for the economic injustice of it, as well as the criminal injustice of it. I hate the War on Drugs for what it’s done to the American people, and to people around the world. I hate the War on Drugs for what it has done to this country, and I hate what the War on Drugs has done to this community.

I was out there with Jack Herer, in 1990, selling The Emperor Wears No Clothes on the streets of Boston. I helped organize the first Boston Cannabis Freedom Rally that year, and founded Mass Grass, the Newsletter of the Massachusetts Cannabis Reform Coalition. I love marijuana, and I think cannabis prohibition is a crime against humanity. OK, I admit it. I hate. I hate the War on Drugs. I hate the War on Drugs almost as much as I love marijuana, but the critique I offer is valid.

I understand that the War on Drugs has been good to some of you, and that many, if not most of you, can scarcely imagine a world without it. I understand, and I sympathize. I tell the truth about the War on Drugs, and sometimes the truth hurts. I might say it in the most provocative and insensitive way possible, but it’s still the truth. That’s what makes it sing, and that’s what makes it sting.

I know that a lot of dope yuppies don’t like to be reminded that it’s not beautiful marijuana, but the ugly injustice of the War on Drugs that puts money in their pockets. I know they’d rather be called “farmers” than “drug dealers,” and that they would appreciate some respect, but I think that there are entirely too many people sucking up to them as it is.

At one time, it was heroic to grow weed out here. Today, it’s heroic not to. Today, we need more heroes in this community, and we aren’t going to grow more heroes by glorifying drug dealers and sucking up to them. We grow more heroes by telling the truth about the War on Drugs. We grow more heroes when we call drug dealers on their bullshit, and we grow more heroes when we honor honest working people with a decent living.

However legalization shakes out, we’ll feel it here, and we can expect significant economic fallout. Competition in the cannabis industry will continue to drive down prices, and profit margins. Lower margins lead to consolidation, consolidation leads to layoffs and unemployment. Even if the legal cannabis industry makes Humboldt its home, it will certainly employ fewer people than it does now, and most of those people will work at fairly modest pay scales.

I don’t think I’ve ever called growers “maggots.” I might have said they seem like maggots. I might have said something like, “Growers infest these forested hills the way maggots infest an infected wound on a dying animal.” I might have said something like that, and if I haven’t said it before I’m sayin’ it now. Either way, I say it because it needs to be said.

This community faces serious problems and imminent rapid change that threatens our way of life, our quality of life, and our community. Unless we can face reality, we will never solve anything. We’ll just keep pointing fingers, getting frustrated, and acting ugly, like we’ve done for years, to no avail. This stuff all needs to be said, and I figure, if it needs to be said, I might as well say it.

When You Complain About the Poor, It Says More Than You Realize

I keep hearing middle-class people complain about the poor. It’s so embarrassing. If I heard you complain about poor people, you should know that my assessment of your intelligence dropped about forty points. Complaining about poor people only makes you look like a jerk. There’s no way around it, and the poorer the people around you are, the uglier it looks. Save yourself the humiliation.

Complaining about the poor reveals more about you than you might realize. Complaining about the poor makes you look stupid because it shows that you don’t understand how our system works. If you are going to embrace our capitalist system, and enjoy the accouterments of the American middle-class lifestyle, it’s about time you saw some of the displaced refugees who lost their home to your money. If you can’t stand to see poor people enduring miserable conditions all around you, maybe you aren’t cut out for the middle-class after all. Taking offense to the poverty around you reveals how little you know about our economic system and advertises the small-minded, self-centered ignorance of the complainer.

Small-minded, self-centered ignorance is actually a pretty broad-spectrum problem for the middle-class, and it works against them in so many ways. I mean, if the middle-class didn’t live such a stupid, wasteful and destructive lifestyle, and behave so much like sheep, mindlessly consuming everything in sight, wherever they’re led, more bright young people might want to be like them. Lately, the middle-class has become so stupid and repulsive that a lot of people, I think, perhaps most people, would rather live on the streets, or even commit slow suicide with drugs and alcohol than become like them.

If the middle-class were populated with more bright, intelligent, curious, thoughtful people, more bright young people might aspire to be like them, and be more willing to subject themselves to the discipline it takes to become one. When the middle-class project their greed, their stinginess and their resentments, it shows off that small-minded, self-centered ignorance in the most repulsive possible light. That’s what happens when middle-class people complain about the poor. Bright young people start to realize how stupid and/or crazy the middle-class really is.

Hearing middle-class people complain about the poor should remind us all that the middle-class has more mental problems than those poor souls who inhabited the Palco Marsh for so many years. The middle-class have no idea what is going on around them, and their lives are completely out-of-control. The middle-class consume far more drugs than the poor. The middle-class consume far more of everything than the poor, yet they constantly cry for more. It’s pathological.

 

The American middle-class lifestyle is a kind of psychosis. The middle-class is a kind of communicable mental illness, and the people who suffer from it tend to conform to each other and relate to mainstream media, more than they do to reality. Conformity matters to them. Because they live in an alternative universe made mostly of media, and rarely have unmediated encounters with reality, the middle-class look to each other to reinforce their shared hallucination.

The more middle-class people interact with each other, exclusively, the more vivid their hallucination becomes, and the further from reality they get. The further from reality they get, the less they are able to deal with the demands of the real world. When the middle-class express consternation, frustration and aggravation about the poor, we need to remember that they live in an alien world where their actions have no consequences, the government protects everyone, and corporations are our friends. The middle-class inhabit an expensive, destructive, fantasy, and they have gotten so far lost in this fantasy that reality has become offensive to them. At times, they even lash out at it. Do not kid yourself, the middle-class are sick, dangerous, drug-addicted people, and something must be done about them before they destroy everything.

These days, most intelligent people recognize the American middle-class lifestyle for the apocalyptic plague that it is. Anyone with any brains can tell you that the American middle-class lifestyle is killing the planet. Even the American middle-class knows it, but they don’t care. They are so strung-out on that hallucination that they don’t even care if it kills us all. They’re like, “Well, if you can save the planet without inconveniencing me in any way, then go for it, but otherwise, fuck it.”

So, bright young people look at the middle-class and think that only an idiot would live like that. Scientists look at the middle-class and say “We have to stop living like that, and no one should never live like that again.” Nonetheless, the middle-class still insist that everyone live like them, and they intend to punish anyone who tries to live differently. How crazy is that?

We can solve problems. We can’t make people smarter, or less crazy, or less prone to addiction, but we could relieve stress, reduce harm, and create the kind of situation that would spawn innovative solutions that work, if only the middle-class could just face reality. The problem is, the longer they go without facing reality, the uglier reality gets, and the uglier reality gets, the harder it is to face.

I don’t think it makes sense to complain about the poor. The poor are doing the best they can with the limited options available to them. The middle-class on the other hand, have options and resources at their disposal, but are too stupid and/or crazy to escape their mass, ecocidal, psychosis. I’m not sure we can reach the middle-class with ideas anymore. They might be too far gone, but it’s the middle-class that needs to change. If they’re smart, they’ll make that change when reality looks them in the eye. If not, they’ll make that change when reality smacks them in the face. Either way, they’ll change.

Landlords Threaten Last Bastion of Hippie Culture in SoHum

The more they try to beautify this town, the uglier it gets. The people with money in Garberville think they can cover up injustice with a fancy new facade, and blot out dysfunction with a fresh coat of paint, but the more they try to cover it up and push it away, the more their ugliness sticks out like a sore thumb. We see it in the hideous orange fence that surrounds the Town Square, excluding everyone from our central commons, and now we see more of it in actions taken against Tigerlilly Books.

Tigerlilly Books, also known as Paul’s Bookstore, at the North End of Garberville is the last surviving hippie business in Garberville. Paul Encimer has been a pillar of this community for decades, and few people have done more to serve the community than he has. In fact, that’s why landlords Childs, Hodges, and Sinoway and their Manager Jenny Edwards say they are evicting him.

In the “Two Week Notice” dated 9/23/16, they claim that Paul is in violation of his lease because “the premises are being used to store and distribute goods other than books.” Further, they demand that he “must not store food, clothing, or items/provisions other than those that relate to a bookstore and not to distribute such items from the premises.” Paul, and his recently deceased wife Kathy, have, for decades, helped match donations to needs in this community, through their bookstore,

…and Paul still maintains a community free box in front of his store. If you have extra coats, blankets, tents or sleeping bags, Paul knows who needs them. Apparently, charity is grounds for eviction in Garberville.

By far the biggest distribution of food that happens at Paul’s Bookstore is the, once-a-month, Mountain People’s Food Buying Club. Members of the club order food from a catalog, at wholesale prices, and once a month, a truck unloads a pallet of groceries in front of the bookstore. The whole club helps unload it and sort it all out. This cooperative community grocery project rose out of the ashes of the long defunct Co-op in Ruby Valley, which Paul was also involved with. The Co-op in Ruby Valley was a central hub of back-to-the-land, hippie culture, back in the day, and when the Co-op went under, that culture retreated to Paul’s Bookstore. Paul doesn’t just run a bookstore, he keeps that culture alive.

 

Besides being THE place to pick up a book, meet the cool people in town, and catch up on the latest gossip, Paul’s Bookstore has cultural and historical significance. For a short time, after the rednecks killed the Indians and cut down all of the trees, but before the dope yuppies sucked the salmon streams dry, a bunch of idealistic young people, called “hippies,” inspired by new ideas and psychedelic drugs, moved out here to escape the rat race, and to learn to live differently. Those back-to-the-land hippies gave us alternative energy, owner-built homes, composting toilets, organic farming and California sinsemilla. Paul cultivates the last surviving remnant population of “back-to-the-land” hippies in SoHum, at his bookstore in Garberville.

The achievements born from this brief flowering of a creative counterculture stand in stark contrast to the long, dark history of violence, exploitation, and stupidity that otherwise characterize the history of white settlement in this area.

For this reason alone, we should preserve hippie culture wherever we find it, but we’ve been told, time and time again, that hippie culture is the key to our economic future as well. Will we ever learn? Today, hippie culture has all but vanished from the hills, but it still survives at Paul’s Bookstore in Garberville, at least for now.

Paul’s bookstore keeps hippie culture alive, and reminds us of what community looks like. Not only does Paul keep his shelves stocked with the ideas that shape hippie thinking, he also lives up to the ideals of hippie culture. He has opposed every war since Vietnam. He still has the sea turtle costume he wore in the “Battle for Seattle” WTO Protest, and he has chained himself down inside his congressman’s office. Paul has organized free meals, and run emergency shelters. Paul is a fountain of knowledge about hippie culture, community organizing and non-violent resistance, and he’s all too eager to share that knowledge with anyone who’ll listen.

Today, the dope yuppies circle him like sharks. Drug dealers dominate the local culture now, and they bring an entirely different set of values from those of the hippies. Drug dealers don’t care about community. That’s why they became drug dealers in the first place. Drug dealers only care about making money, and drug dealers like to show off their money.

 

 

Drug dealers care a lot about their “image” because they can’t talk too much about what they do for a living, and because dealing drugs is a pretty low-status job. So, drug dealers use their money to appear wealthy and sophisticated, and to draw attention away from the the very sleazy nature of their business. It’s the same way with strip clubs and pornography. The marque reads: “Entertainment for the Discerning Gentleman,” only because the sign reading “Live Nude Girls” brought in enough money to renovate the club. They didn’t change what they did for a living, they just changed their image.

Now that a new cadre of greedy, image-conscious, dope yuppies have taken to laundering their money through Garberville’s downtown, they’ve declared war on anyone who doesn’t have the look they’re looking for. They’ve made it clear that they don’t want no commie food club or hippie free box in their town, and they sure as hell don’t want anyone to give food, warm clothes, sleeping bags or tents to people who need them. They want to get as far away from the “hippie” look as possible, and Paul just doesn’t fit into their sharp new upscale image of Downtown Garberville.

It’s not enough that Sohum’s drug dealers exterminate charity in their own heart, they insist on sterilizing the whole town. When they say, “Oh, I’m sorry, we don’t have any services for poor people down here in SoHum,” they say it like it’s a strange coincidence. They should say “We’re greedy pricks here in SoHum. We don’t share, and we like to bully people. If we find you asleep, anywhere in this town, we just might beat you to death with a stick, just for kicks. Not only that, if anyone in this town tries to help you, we will crush them. That’s how little we care and how much we want you gone.”

You can’t build real prosperity from greed, injustice and exploitation, and you can’t escape the poverty created by the War on Drugs. The profits of prohibition are cursed. The skeletons hidden behind the new faux-stone facade going up downtown, and the bodies buried under the Garberville Town Square will haunt this town for generations. Paul’s bookstore on the other hand, stands as a shining beacon of hippie culture, in a vast, dark, violent sea of predators and bottom-feeders. As a community, we can’t afford to lose it.