Category: Cannabis
See Hemp Disconnected, A Psychological War for American Dependence Today at www.hotboxfilms.com
Beyond Words, Saturday Feb 12 @ Papa and Barkley in Eureka
My lifelong dream comes true at the Papa and Barkley Social Club at the South End of Eureka on Broadway on Saturday February 12. I have dreamed, since I was very young, of playing music in a comfortable public space that encouraged people to consume cannabis rather than alcohol.
I love cannabis, and have always preferred cannabis to alcohol. I think alcohol has had a negative influence on our culture, but I strongly believe that if we gather together in an environment that celebrates the symbiosis between music and cannabis, it will transform our culture in profound and positive ways.
This free event, sponsored by Papa and Barkley, called “Puffs for Non-Profits,” benefits the Ink People Center for the Arts. The cannabis dispensary will donate 10% of their total sales for the day to The Ink People Center for the Arts. I cannot say enough about the Ink People. When you find anything really cool going on in Humboldt County that showcases local artists, you can bet the Ink People are behind it. Besides that, the Ink People have helped me tremendously and I owe them a huge debt of gratitude. I love them, and I want them to keep doing what they do, so I hope you will come out and enjoy some of Humboldt’s finest with me.
I believe in the power of music to transform culture, and I believe in the power of the music I’m making now more than at any time in my life.
At Papa and Barkley’s Social Club I’ll be throwing down hot didgeridoo dance grooves with DJ Tim Stubbs,
Together we will levitate even the most couch-locked cannabis consumers into soaring rhythmic spasms of ecstasy.
Papa and Barkley has a nice outdoor space, with heaters, awnings, tables with umbrellas and heaters in the center, and plenty of seating.
Of course, they also have a terrific assortment of fine Humboldt County grown cannabis.
They don’t have a stage, but there’s wall to set up in front of, and some space to dance, and that’s all we need really, and we’ve never needed it more.
We need this now more than ever because we stand at a critical juncture in human history. We need a new vision of the world we want to live in, because our old world is gone. It’s been destroyed by the pandemic lockdown. Media hysteria is leading us down a blind alley. We need a new vision of a bright future where freedom, beauty and our boundless love for each other and all of nature shapes the future of humanity. To inspire that new vision, we need art, and that includes music. We need creativity of all kind, but before that, we need to shake off the fear.
We have all been traumatized, shell-shocked, and terrorized by the events of the last two years. We need to shake off that trauma. Natures way to relieve the residual stress, anxiety and tension stored in the nervous system after a traumatic experience, is to dance. Dancing helps your immune system fight off pathogens and coming together in groups helps our bodies maintain good immune defenses. Ecstatic dance feels good. We need to remember what it feels like to feel good, because we need a vision of the future inspired by what makes us feel good, rather than what scares us.
So please, come out to Papa and Barkley in Eureka on Saturday February 12. Get really high on top-flight herb, soak-in some dance beats infused with healing infrasound vibrations and do what feels good. We’ve been denied this basic necessity of life for too long. A lot of us have nearly forgotten how exhilarating a great party can be, and there is a whole lot of young people who have never experienced the magic that happens when live musicians connect with a live audience in a real place in real time. Please come out to help us bring that magic back to life for now and for the future.
Vax Nazis Suck, but Pink Floyd Rocks
Really, I don’t like to be the guy with the obtuse opinion, and I’ve got better things to do than spend my time explaining the obvious to a hostile audience in deep denial, but push has come to shove, and the vax nazis have gone on the offensive. Vaccine mandates and vaccine passports must be stopped. I cannot believe how many Democrats and liberals have fallen for the bullshit rhetoric about this pandemic and these experimental new drugs, and are willing to trade their own, and their neighbors, rights as citizens, and as sovereign human beings, for the life of livestock and lab rats. When I think of how many Americans died to secure and protect those rights through the years, just to watch you throw them away, for the false promise of protection from a disease that kills less than 1% of the people who catch it, I can’t just sit back and watch it happen. I have to say something.
When I see the media working diligently to turn neighbor against neighbor, as they tell us lies like: “This new wave of infection is driven by the unvaccinated.” and “the vaccine-hesitant are causing the virus to mutate” even though they have no science to back it up, and all common sense contradicts them, reminds me of the War on Drugs. Drug war lies ranged from: “marijuana makes colored men violent and rape white women.” and “marijuana makes Mexicans lazy and stupid.” to “crack cocaine is 100 times more addictive than powdered cocaine” and “the new marijuana is 40 times more dangerous than the old marijuana.”
This vaccine obsession should remind you of the War on Drugs too. The government lies. Don’t ever forget that, and when the government lies big like this, and the media falls in line, lock step, like they are now, you can bet it is a war, and you can bet that this war is not about what they tell you it is about. In all my life, I have never seen the government mobilize this kind of media dominance for anything except war (and those wars have never been about what they said they were about): The War on Drugs (protect Americas youth), the first Persian Gulf Way (liberating Kuwait from a bloodthirsty Saddam),9/11 and the War on Terror (Find Osama bin Laden), and the Invasion of Iraq (Saddam’s WMDs).
The War on Drugs. Do you remember that bullshit? Mandatory minimum sentences, drug testing in the workplace, zero tolerance, paraquat, CAMP, DARE, gang warfare, prison overcrowding, crack babies, millions dead, tens of millions arrested, millions more lives ruined, and three generations of activists had to devote their lives to walking this insanity back, and we are not even close yet. I want to remind you of the War on Drugs so that you remember just how out-of-hand things can get, if you let yourself believe that the government has your best interest at heart when it pulls shit like this.
This vaccine hysteria has gotten way out of hand. If you are one of those people who is beginning to turn on your jab-resistant peers, you really need to check yourself. I know that you hear the same story from every single trusted media outlet you turn to, and the story they tell is very simple: “Everyone must get vaccinated or we’ll never be able to take our masks off, or go to a concert or have a party again.” You can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t take a couple of jabs in the arm to make everything all better again, especially since everyone says the vaccines are “safe and effective.”
I’m sorry folks, but when was the last time you heard a drug commercial in the media that didn’t have a long list of side-effects read at auctioneer speed at the end of it. What makes you think these “vaccines” are any different? The CDC’s VAERS program reports over 10,000 deaths following the vaccine, and hundreds of thousands of severe reactions, some with long-term, disabling conditions like paralysis. I would feel awful if that happened to someone I had encouraged to take the jab over their own reservations, and so would you. The media, on the other hand, doesn’t mind lying to you at all, and doesn’t care whether you live or die. They are just weapons in a war, and this is another war against us all, just like the War on Drugs, only in reverse.
In the War on Drugs, they lied to us about drugs to get us to stop taking them; today they’re lying to us about drugs to get us to take them, and if that doesn’t work they’ll make it hard to get a job, go to school, get a license, travel, and they will do their level best to stigmatize you and turn your friends and family against you. Since the truth is not on their side, these coercive measures are the only way to get people to comply, but it will breed resentments. These lies will break-up families, destroy friendships, and tear at the fabric of our society, and those are intentional objectives in this kind of war.
It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time, not that long ago, when most Americans had no experience with cannabis, let alone LSD. Back then, people believed whatever bullshit the government told them about these drugs because neither they, nor anyone they knew, had ever seen, let alone tried them. After this indoctrination, however, they sure didn’t want their kids getting involved in anything so sordid as illegal drugs, and they were on the lookout for signs of drug use in their neighborhood.
When they finally did catch their own kids with cannabis, they did just what the government told them to do. They called the cops, on their own kids. Later, in the DARE program, they got kids to rat on their parents and friends, for smoking weed, and then the government destroyed their lives. Millions of lives were lost or destroyed because gullible Americans believed the bullshit they saw on TV. They turned on people in their own community. They turned on their friends, and they turned on family, because they believed what they saw on TV.
This lead to bitter resentments, estrangement, and rebellion. Families suffered, communities foundered, and a counter-culture emerged that rejected this intolerant mainstream ideology, and proudly celebrated cannabis and psychedelics. Within that counter-culture that celebrated cannabis and psychedelics, there emerged a new kind of music that defied all the accepted norms of pop music. This music just didn’t make sense unless you were high on drugs, Hendrix’s feedback, the Dead’s Space, and Zappa’s Freak Out immediately come to mind. On the other side of the world, Syd Barrett’s notorious consumption habits and subsequent collapse, as well as his Zippo-lighter slide-guitar on Astronomy Domini forever marked Pink Floyd as counter-cultural celebrants of psychedelics.
Pink Floyd has several “songs” that really don’t make much sense unless you are really high, and I love them for that. I feel that this kind of music connects to something primal within us. There are no lyrics that you can write that can liberate us from this culture, but there’s a feeling in this music that is deeper than words, and when you tap into that feeling, it tells a whole other story. Roger Waters once described this song as “a poignant appraisal of the contemporary social situation” I’d say that’s more true now than ever. Here’s my cover of the Pink Floyd song “One of These Days” played on electric bass, tin can violin, Omnichord and voice. I hope you like it!
Top 10 “Dick Moves” by the NCJ in 2020
Using the term “dick move” as a synonym for “an act of obnoxious behavior” seems to me as insensitive as using the term “pussy” as a synonym for “coward.” or “blonde” as a synonym for “dumb,” but as a “woke,” “new-age” guy, I understand that I am responsible for genocide, slavery and misogyny, as well as their aftermath, and that considering the millions of people I’ve personally killed, raped and tortured through the eons, it seems a bit petty of me to complain about the mere verbal denigration of my genitals, so I won’t. Besides, I know that a lot of you really love “dick” and some of you aren’t getting enough of it because of the lockdown, so no offense taken. However, in the recent piece titled “Top 10 Dick Moves of 2020” the North Coast Journal continued its own maddening pattern of obnoxiousness. You could say it “triggered” me. In response, I offer my own “Top 10 Dick Moves” list of small, vile things the NCJ did in 2020 that pissed me off.
Let’s start with “dick move” number 10: Fear-Mongering, the NCJ continues to sensationalize this disease as a “killer virus” when the CDC’s own numbers tell us that, for the vast majority of us, Covid-19 is no more deadly than the flu. The NCJ has ramped up the fear so much that they can’t believe that the state would relax restrictions in the face of our current outbreak, but the graph in the article tells the whole story: While the number of positive tests continues to soar, almost no one dies of this disease except the very old and the very sick.
Even the state can’t deny it any longer, but the NCJ can, even though the picture does not lie. Suicides are up. Drug overdoses are up. Assaults, domestic violence and child abuse are all on the rise while poverty, homelessness, and unemployment have gone through the roof, but does the NCJ tell us those stories. No. Instead we get wall-to-wall, red-letter fear-mongering about the “killer virus.”
People dying in nursing homes is not front page news. People die in nursing homes all the time. The average life expectancy of a nursing home patient is about 11 months. There’s a place in a newspaper for people who die in nursing homes. It’s called “Obituaries.” The story about nursing home patients dying of a new form of viral pneumonia, rather than the more common, bacterial pneumonia, belongs in a medical journal, but there’s probably space for a synopsis in the “health and lifestyle” section. Turning an obituary into a cover story is distortion. Distortion: “dick move” number 9.
“Dick move” number 8: Hypocrisy. Remember how even handed the NCJ was when it came to the needle-exchange program. It didn’t matter that it has been scientifically proven that needle exchange programs save lives, and that all your best doctors strongly recommend these harm-reduction efforts. Any deranged alcoholic who staggered into a city council meeting to rant about “degenerate junkies” and complain about needle litter was described in the NCJ as a “community member” with “legitimate concerns” and quoted sympathetically. The NCJ didn’t run an editorial telling people to “Just pick up the damn needle and throw it away yourself, and while you are at it, why don’t you pick up the beer bottles and cigarette butts too.”
I would have thought that a courageous stand for a local paper, and I would have been proud of the NCJ for making it. Meanwhile, back in reality, I see no courage or even-handedness when it comes to Covid-19 coverage in the NCJ, just “dick move” number 7: Pushing Compliance Instead of Reporting the News. “Just wear the damn mask!” Unbelievable! We are not your children. Don’t condescend to us. If you don’t have the balls to cover a big story like this with some skepticism and objectivity, then don’t.
Really, please don’t bother covering this story because you aren’t helping matters any. Look, nobody expects you to be anything but a fluffy entertainment weekly, and you could do a lot of good as a fluffy entertainment weekly. Forget about news and use the column inches for lavish coverage of our local art scene. Art matters, especially at times like these, because art speaks to the heart, as well as the intellect, and it asks aesthetic questions, rather than logical ones. Art can change the way people see the world and every great movement of humanity, begins in an artistic expression, but art can only change the world if people experience it, which brings me to NCJ “dick move” number 6: Lame-ass Coverage of the Arts.
The NCJ discontinued Colin Yeo’s column “the Setlist,” the only column devoted to the local music scene, early in the pandemic. Musicians are among the hardest hit by the lockdown, and they need the attention of the press now more than ever, but in the NCJ, Theresa Frankovich, Ian Hoffman and Anthony Fauci are rock stars, so who needs noisy peasants or their arcane caterwauling.
The NCJ’s dismal coverage of the arts motivated me to write them a letter a couple of months ago after their annual “Best of” issue included eight categories for “Best Cannabis” but only one for “Best Artist,” which reminds me of NCJ “dick move” number 5: Pandering to Advertisers. I’m sure their “Best of” issue is not the only example of advertiser influence in editorial decisions and content. When you see all of those ads for cannabis dispensaries in the NCJ, you need to remember that Humboldt’s cannabis industry does not give money to anyone who doesn’t serve them.
The cannabis industry knows how to leverage the most out of their advertising dollar. They know that the more anxious people get about Covid-19, the more weed they smoke, and the less they worry about environmental destruction in the forest. Anti-drug propaganda used to tell us that marijuana causes laziness. I think there’s some truth in it so far as the NCJ is concerned. The steady flow of cannabis advertising dollars and the spectacle of Covid-19 allows the NCJ to print page after page of whatever is being spoon-fed to them by “official sources” without having to care about what’s going on in the rest of our local economy, let alone cover it.
That’s NCJ “dick move” number 4: Journalistic Laziness, and NCJ “dick move” number 3: Failure to Cover Impacts of the Lockdown on Our Local Community. It gladdened my heart to read that Siren’s Song had the courage to defy lockdown orders and host live entertainment. I think they could have had a lot of good reasons to do that, and I would have appreciated it if the NCJ would have helped us understand theirs, rather than denigrate them as they did in their own “dick moves” column.
Which brings us to “dick move” number 2: Dehumanize Anyone Who Disagrees With You. By dismissing a local business owner’s courageous attempt to save his business, the livelihoods of his employees, and the very foundation of democracy, as a “dick move,” and disparaging every side of the story except the official one as “conspiracy theories” the NCJ has forsaken any illusions they may hold about themselves (or that we may hold about them), as “Guardians of Democracy.” Instead, In this year of “dick moves” their crowning achievement of transforming a liberal entertainment weekly into a mouthpiece for authoritarian propaganda, practically overnight, tops my list as the NCJ’s number 1 “dick move” of 2020.
I am not afraid of Covid-19. Either I will catch it, or I won’t. If I catch it, I will either die, or I won’t. That’s life. I do fear, however, that that we will look back at this pandemic, the way Germans look back on the Reichstag fire of 1933. It was a bad thing, but the response to it unleashed something so much worse. At this critical juncture in history we need courageous hard-nosed journalists who aren’t afraid to challenge the voice of authority. I guess we won’t have any of that from the NCJ.
I don’t think anyone denies that we find ourselves in the midst of a great tragedy. The great tragedy of our time, however, will not just be the death toll from Covid-19. The great tragedy of our time will be that we abandoned our neighbors, our principles and our civil liberties, for an empty promise of security, because we are a nation of blonde pussies.
Not Fit to Read or Burn
I appreciate free newspapers. I pick them up religiously, regardless of the subject matter because I need kindling. I need to find three or four papers every week, just to have enough dry tinder to get through the rainy season, and it’s getting harder to find enough now that the Redwood Times has ceased publication, and the NCJ has gotten so much thinner.
I read them too. If I can find anything remotely interesting in them. I also look at the ads, and I feel a warm sense of appreciation for the companies that help me get my wood-stove going on a cold rainy morning.
Lately, I have found a lot of new publications about cannabis, and the lameness of these publications amazes me. Sensi, Emerald, Skunk, Leaf, the list goes on, I’ve picked up dozens of these rags by now and found nothing redeeming about any of them. I love cannabis. I’m a lifelong fan, a true enthusiast, a connoisseur even, but I have found nothing worth reading in any of these publications. Since they are all printed on glossy paper, they don’t even make good kindling.
All of these magazines have the same format: big color ads for cannabis products, interspersed with profiles of people in the industry and one-sided reviews of the advertised products. Could this industry possibly get any more self-absorbed? Could they possibly show more indifference to the interests of their customers? When these people brag about their idyllic little farm in the forest, or show off their their fancy new dispensary, they seem to forget who pays for it all.
Cannabis entrepreneurs should remember that the people who buy their products mostly live in rented apartments and work at high-stress, low-paying jobs, yet still pay ridiculously high prices for cannabis, especially if they buy at a dispensary. Do you think they really care that they are supporting “small family farms,” “community values” or “stoner owners.” Listen, we have enough trouble supporting ourselves these days, and we’re tired of watching other people get rich off of the money we spend on weed.
There are really only two reactions a cannabis consumer will have when they see page after page of stories about unremarkable white people enjoying relative affluence through their cannabis business:
1. “Wow, these people all seem to be making pretty good money, maybe I should get into the cannabis industry.” or
2. “Fuck these people! How much longer do we have to wait for Walmart, Inbev, or RJR to figure out how to grow pot efficiently and sell it at a low enough price that they will put these bloodsuckers out of business for good?”
Neither of these reactions, it seems to me, really helps your brand. Showing off your wealth and ego in a glossy color magazine, that doesn’t even make good kindling, let alone reading material, doesn’t make me want to buy your products.
Lets face facts: Farming is boring. Farming is literally as boring as watching grass grow. Sure, there’s an art to growing good weed, and farmers love to talk about it endlessly, but the rest of us, not so much. I can tell the quality of the product in one toke. I don’t need to read about who made it or how. I know how you made it. I know that producing marijuana is dull work. That’s why I pay you to do it for me. Magazines like these just remind me that I still pay too much.
Why Do I Do It?
You might wonder why I do this. Why do I go so far out on a limb to artfully present an opinion that I know will be wildly unpopular? Some people speculate that I do it for the attention. Although I appreciate an audience, I don’t really care about drawing attention to myself. What matters to me is drawing attention to the things that people learn to overlook. People learn to overlook things when those things do not fit within their cultural mythology.
Whether it’s our local myth about the benign benevolence of the marijuana industry, our national myth of American Exceptionalism and the American Dream, or the greater cultural myth of civilization that tells us that there is a technological solution to every technological problem, the myths of our culture have become a threat to our survival, and the sooner we realize it, the better it will be for all of us. I understand the power of cultural myths, and I know how they can blind us to what’s happening right in front of our eyes. At times like these we need to see clearly and think carefully. Outdated cultural myths interfere with that by lying to us about what is real, and distracting us from what is possible.
Entirely too many people still believe our dominant cultural myths, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Cultural myths act like a security blanket, and an auto-pilot. They give us our default settings about what to believe, how to interpret the world around us, and strategies for thriving in it. Most people rarely think about the cultural myths they inherited, and these myths tend to perpetuate themselves because people constantly repeat and reinforce them. People constantly repeat and reinforce these cultural myths because they constitute all of the safe things to say in a conversation.
You can always say: “It’s so great to live here in the heart of the cannabis community, in the greatest nation on Earth, and we’re so lucky to live at a time when technology has put the whole world at our fingertips.” You can say stuff like that all day long, and practically everyone will agree with you and no one will ever question you about it. You’ll never be at a loss for words, and you’ll be telling people exactly what they want to hear.
The problem is that none of it is true anymore. The Marijuana industry is a blood-soaked ripoff, the US has become the most brutal fascist regime on the planet, and technology has driven us over a cliff, environmentally. 20-30 years ago, some of those myths were still true, or at least half-true, and the jury was still out on others, but today, those myths are all lies, and the sooner we realize it, the better. We’ll never solve problems we can’t face, which is why I draw attention to the inconsistencies that betray our cultural bankruptcy.
People take great comfort in those myths, and in the fact that they are so widely shared, despite the overwhelming evidence against them. People do not like having their bubbles bust. They would rather just complain to each other about why things don’t seem to work out the way they are supposed to. When I make a point, somebody’s myth gets deflated, and that makes them angry, at me. I don’t benefit from that anger in any way, but those myths threaten us all.
Most of our big problems, as a community, as a nation and as a culture, became big problems due to our continued belief in these outdated cultural myths. We will not solve our problems with the same kind of thinking that created them. I try to look at the world from a different perspective, from one that shows the worst side of our dominant cultural myths, and encourages us to consider other possibilities. If we hope to meet the challenges of our time, as a community, across the country, and around the world, we need to remove those cultural blinders and look at what is really happening, with clear eyes, and to consider every possibility.
The “Impacts” of Murder Mountain
I see that the Humboldt Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research will hold a conference to discuss the “impacts” of the Netflix mini-series Murder Mountain on Humboldt County. If you didn’t already know that the HIIMR exists purely to white-wash the marijuana industry, this should convince you. The six-part docudrama, Murder Mountain tells the story of Garrett Rodriquez, who’s young life was snuffed-out on a marijuana farm in the Rancho Sequoia subdivision near Alder Point, and the remarkable recovery of his body by the, now infamous, “Alder Point 8.”
Locals have called the Rancho Sequoia subdivision “Murder Mountain” for as long as I’ve lived here. That maze of ten-acre parcels, littered with burned out cars, ramshackle shacks, and bullet riddled “No Trespassing” signs held became known as “Murder Mountain” because the only time you heard about Rancho Sequoia was on the news, when someone got killed there, and it happened often enough that you couldn’t help but notice.
I enjoyed the TV series, Murder Mountain. I’m sure I never would have watched it, except for the fact that I played one of the “Alder Point 8” in the fuzzy recreation scenes. Still, I live here in SoHum, and I think they portrayed our community pretty fairly, even sympathetically. I thought the filmmakers gave our community the benefit of the doubt whenever they could, but now we step forward, ourselves, to remove the last veil.
The fact that people here, especially people in the marijuana industry, have gotten much more upset about the TV series, Murder Mountain, than they ever did about the disappearance and murder of Garrett Rodriquez, speaks volumes about the marijuana industry, and our community. The very fact that the HIIMR will hold a conference to discuss the impacts of the TV series, instead of a conference on the impacts of the ongoing legacy of violence within the marijuana industry, plainly and chillingly demonstrates the callous narcissism of Humboldt’s marijuana industry, reflected in the HIIMR.
Garrett Rodriquez was neither the first, nor the last, worker murdered on a Southern Humboldt pot farm. At least four people, reported to have been working in the marijuana industry, were murdered in Southern Humboldt in 2018 alone. None of those murders have been solved. That doesn’t count the missing persons cases, solved SoHum murders, murders in other parts of the county, or murders that happened before or since 2018. There are a lot of Garrett Rodriquezes out there, and potentially many more Murder Mountains to come.
The HIIMR should take note: Dead people count as measurable impacts. So do bereaved families, widows, and orphans. Murderers that walk our streets with impunity impact our community. The poisonous relationship between our community and law enforcement impacts our community. A culture that treats Drug War refugees and honest working people as disposable, impacts our community. Trauma, desensitization and learned indifference to violence resulting from overexposure, impacts our community. Those are just a few of the ways that violence within the marijuana industry impacts our community.
By comparison, no one died making Murder Mountain, and nobody killed anyone to see it. I can attest to the fact that everyone who worked on Murder Mountain got paid promptly and fairly. That’s more than I can say about the marijuana industry. How can we possibly measure the minuscule impacts of a TV show, against the unstudied background of marijuana related violence in our community.
Studying the real violence and murder in the marijuana industry might help us put Murder Mountain into perspective. TV shows like Murder Mountain amount to little more than a sidebar in the long story of how the marijuana industry made murder commonplace in our community and fueled our notoriety for it.
Studying the impacts of real violence and murder within the marijuana industry could greatly benefit our community. We might even find a way to protect workers, save lives and rehabilitate the industry. Any cultural change begins with awareness, and making our community aware of the real impacts of the violence that we have come to accept as normal, just might shock us enough to bring us to our senses.
As a community, we have brushed too many Garrett Rodriquezes under the rug. Instead, we save our indignation for anyone who dares to criticize the marijuana industry, regardless of how accurately. Somehow, in our community, we have come to care more about venerating the mythology of Humboldt County’s marijuana industry than we do about the lives of its victims, or the violence it brings to our community. The high rate of violence in this community, and the indifference we show to it, still amazes me, and it’s uglier than anything we see in Murder Mountain.
Instead of whining about what those mean filmmakers did to us with their TV show, perhaps we should recognize Murder Mountain as the wake-up call we needed.
Watching Murder Mountain
I finally got to see Murder Mountain, the Netflix docudrama miniseries about the disappearance of Garrett Rodriquez and the subsequent recovery of his body by the “Alder Point 8.” The film crew was in town for most of last year putting it together, and they hired me off the street to act in it, so of course I was excited to see myself on TV.
I enjoyed Murder Mountain. I thought they did a great job, and it includes some of the best images of Southern Humboldt’s natural beauty that I’ve ever seen. The series seemed quite slow getting started. I’m sure they could have told the story in two hours, and they included quite a lot of really boring footage of cannabis farms, but they also included lot about this community and it’s history. The series paints a broad portrait of Southern Humboldt, and a cannabis industry in transition, as the backdrop for the Garrett Rodriquez story. Every picture hides much more than it shows, but I am impressed by how deeply they explored this community and how well they told the story. I thought they told it accurately, with sensitivity and more than enough context. Most of the people I watched Murder Mountain with also seemed favorably impressed.
Of course, anytime anyone writes or produces media about the ugly sordid shit that really goes on around here, the knee-jerk reaction of locals is: “How dare those ‘yellow journalist’ outsiders come here to tell sensationalized stories about the bad stuff that happens around here!” According to these people, no one, except people born and raised here, have the right to report on anything that happens here, but when you ask those truly local locals, they all tell the same story: “It’s beautiful here. The people are cool, and everything is groovy. Now mind your own business!” Whether it’s a piece of investigative journalism about human sex trafficking, an expose about environmental destruction wrought by the marijuana industry, or my opinion column, for that matter, whether or not they’ve read it or seen it, a lot of people around here will automatically tell you that it is all just “sensationalized Hollywood bullshit.”
It surprised me that I didn’t hear more of that about Murder Mountain. I think a lot of people actually recognized that the producers of Murder Mountain went out of their way to get the story straight, and to present it in context. Murder Mountain sure doesn’t make us look good, but it tells the truth. Murder Mountain shows us a side of Southern Humboldt that usually remains hidden, and that no one around here wants to face, in a way that is hard to deny.
This time, it’s the Sheriff’s Department that is crying foul, and warning us about “sensationalized Hollywood bullshit.” They feel they were misrepresented in Murder Mountain. They claim that the filmmakers tricked them into believing that the show was going to be about the marijuana industry, not about Garrett Rodriquez.
Sorry guys. I don’t buy it. I will admit that Murder Mountain does not make the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department look good, but it’s the fact that Garrett Rodriquez’s murderer remains at large despite the community’s heroic efforts to recover his body, that casts a pall over the HCSD, not the documentary treatment. More than anyone else, Sheriff Honsal and his deputies, who must have all signed release forms, should know that anything you say, in front of a camera, with a microphone hidden in your shirt, will be recorded and used against you in the court of public opinion. If Murder Mountain embarrasses the HCSD, it’s not because of what they said on camera, it’s because of what they failed to do when they weren’t.
We should also note, however, that the disappearance of Garrett Rodriquez, or the dozens of other people who have gone missing, or been found murdered here in Humboldt County, did not prompt much public outcry, locally. We didn’t have rooms full of angry citizens demanding that the HCSD get to the bottom of this prolonged rash of cannabis industry related homicides and disappearances that happen around here all the time. We didn’t have any public meetings about that problem at all.
No, it wasn’t until a skinny kid from Fortuna shimmied underneath a locked security door and stole some bongs from a head-shop in town, that the folks of Southern Humboldt got up off their asses and filled the gymnasium of the Redway School. Those angry townsfolk didn’t complain about unsolved murders or disappearances in the hills, they complained about poor people smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, and generally looking ugly in front of their businesses in town, so you can’t completely blame the Sheriff’s Department for prioritizing their resources accordingly.
Despite all of the self-delusional happy-talk we like to tell ourselves about our community and the cannabis industry, Murder Mountain offers us an honest mirror that reveals how our community looks to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, it’s not such a pretty picture, but that’s not the photographer’s fault.
A Plant Can Break Your Heart
I love cannabis, and I love being around cannabis plants, but it only takes a few to make me happy. If I only have a few, I enjoy every minute I spend with them. Farming, even cannabis farming, amounts to a lot of tedious, backbreaking work in the hot sun. That I don’t need, but a little patch of my own suits me nicely. When you love plants, and spend time around them, they communicate with you and you build a relationship with them. I think this is especially true of cannabis. I know that a lot of people around here understand this and have cultivated a deep spiritual relationship with the cannabis plant, so this will not be news to them.
When you spend time around cannabis plants, they communicate with you. When they pop out of their shells they crawl around like babies and grab onto everything. Once they get a good grip, they stand up and become little seed-leaf toddlers, and then before long, Kapow! Cannabis plants explode with growth in their vegetative stage. You can feel that energy and vitality if you spend time around them then, and I think that amazing vibrancy and biodynamic growth inspires a lot of young growers to make a career of cannabis.
I’ve seen a lot of disaffected young people who previously showed very little interest in anything, become very excited about their cannabis crop. They build a relationship with the plant and feel the power it exudes. They see its rapid, exponential growth, feel that vigor in the air, and pretty soon they start to believe that they can “make it big” with cannabis. That’s just one way that cannabis communicates with people in general, but cannabis plants also have individual personalities, and right now I want to tell you about a cannabis plant that broke my heart.
She began as the only viable seed from the previous year’s harvest. As a seedling, she grew more vigorously all of the other store bought seeds I planted. By the time I transferred them to 6” pots, I had a few seeds I had started, a few clones, and her. She was still ahead of the rest of the class. When it came time to transplant them to big pots to grow full-term in the sunshine, she had peers, but she still stood out, so she got the largest pot in the best location.
She loved the sun and immediately got huge. By August, she had grown to about 6ft tall, but her girth swelled to 8ft across. She was enormous and beautiful and just beginning to flower. As the summer wore on, she matured spectacularly. Flowering cannabis plants are sexy. They get all sparkly, so they have a twinkle in their eye, and that sweet seductive aroma just calls out to you, and before long, it becomes overwhelming and you start to fear it will attract unwanted attention. By September she was covered with huge, heavy, stinky, sticky buds. As Fall wore on, the buds added highlights of purple and the crystals became so thick that the whole plant looked glazed, the way trees get when the rain freezes on them.
The question of when to harvest is always tricky. It is tempting to harvest early, just because it smells and looks so good, but buds get a lot heavier in those final days. However, as the buds get heavier, denser and fatter, they also get more and more likely to attract mold, so you watch your plants carefully as you countdown to harvest, and you pay close attention to the weather. An early rainstorm or the first sign of mold usually motivates me to harvest, but that year the weather cooperated, and while some other plants developed mold, she showed no sign of it. She just kept getting stickier, stinkier and heavier.
I don’t think I ever let a plant mature that completely before, but one morning, late in October I approached her and I was not at all prepared for what I saw and felt. She was crestfallen. She had given up, and the defeat destroyed her. I could see it; I could feel it. She had done everything that she could to snare some pollen. She had grown big, fast. She made millions of sparkly sticky flowers, and when that didn’t work she made millions more.
She was her mother’s only daughter. She should have had thousands of sisters, but she was the only one, and all she wanted from life was to produce millions of sons and daughters of her own. She knew she had not produced a single seed, and she was exhausted. She had done everything she could do, and she had failed. I could feel her anguish and it broke my heart. I felt awful. I cut her down, dismembered her and hung her up to dry.
She was my best plant, and her flowers grew bountiful and huge, but I felt ashamed of what I had done to her. I felt ashamed of having tortured her in that way, and it seemed an unnecessary cruelty. I felt ashamed that a relationship that I found so gleefully delightful, was so deeply unsatisfying for her. It didn’t stop me from smoking her, and she produced some of the finest cannabis flower I have ever smoked, but the taste was bitter-sweet. I’ve never felt quite the same about sinsemilla since then.
Since then, I like finding seeds in my weed, and I’d like to find more of them. Seeds tell you that your pot comes from happy plants, and each of those beans is a little bundle of cannabis happiness for you to spread around. Seedy weed is happy weed, and happy weed, makes people happy. It may not make you rich, but it will make you happy.
Like You've Got Something Better To Do 