Riding Trains in Mexico, Contagious Native Plant Gardens,etc

Do me right, Just do you it? Oh fucking Charles brand I got
this night. I made a nice fucking soul mix. You got the fucking
Spinners on her. I got the Old Jays, all that ship, all
that good ship. I remember my fucking my old AA sponsor was a big
he was a big fucking Old Jays fan. Man, God, I miss
that guy. He's like this fifty year old black dude looked like he was
like twenty five. And this motherfucker would come, he'd come into meetings.
You know. When I was doing the meetings getting sober for the first fucking
year or two, it was integral. You know. Now, I was
never as shit my pants and drive drunk alcoholic, but I was certainly a
medicate so you don't have to deal with your feelings alcoholic. And this fucking
guy, I don't know what, but he like picked me. Man,
he was a good dude. He picked me. He's like, I'm gonna
sponsor this motherfucker. I could tell he's in need of some good shit anyway.
This motherfucker would come into meetings like fifteen minutes late, jutting in fucking
sashean, wearing like a white suit. He was cool. I think he
eventually got irritated with me after six or seven months, which is you know,
that's typical when you first getting sober. You know, that's a typical
thing. Those are hard times. You know, you do your work and
your steps, you're dealing with your bullshit. He eventually fucking maybe it was
a little bit longer, but you know, we're for a while. We
were going out to Denni's after meetings. You know, we get a crew
with five or six people going to doing AA in a fucking in Oakland.
Was nice because even people from all different walks of life. My boy pisces
me out people shit in AA. I'm like, man, fuck you,
you don't know what it's about. They're like, oh, it's Christian,
it's not Christian. It's just fucking it's non denomination. It's some spirituality,
and some spirituality is what we need in this fucking rotten, this rotten age,
this dark thing. I remember he told me once too, He's like,
he's like, I'm sober, and you know, I believe in in
a higher power and spirituality, but I still condone homicide. And I was
like, Jesus christ Man, what the fuck? And then he told me
some story because he was a contractor. He told me some story about I
think I think he has to share this shit. You don't care. He's
never gonna listen to this anyway. What a fucking solid dude. I would
be honored if he did, though, But I remember he told me some
story once about waiting outside of some dude's house who owed him money with a
fucking Samurai sword in his trunk. He had done a job for some guy
who was a contractor, and this guy owed him like twenty k stiffed him,
and he's like, you know, he's like, I'm used to be
a fucking pampy and he had a fucking cool life. Man, he was
a cool fucking guy, and now he had some good ass wisdom to eat,
some good words. You know, he's not gonna be like someone that.
I'm not shaming anyone, but that's eventually why I stopped going to meetings
after a while. But I retained my sobriety California so sobriety, you know,
California style sobriety, you know what I mean. But uh, but
he eventually stopped going to meetings because you know, you go to fucking who's
got an hour all the time, even though you need to do that when
you're first getting into it. I go to meetings and like there'd be some
like lady talking about her how she missed her cat or something, and know
if I feel for her total compassion, but like that's fucking I'm like,
I got, you know, serious shit that's going on other people of serious
shit that's going on. You know, I don't want to hear about the
waiting line too long at the airport and that you know, you're resentful of
whatever, you know, the shares it was hit or miss but uh,
but anyway, how you doing, how are you doing? You know?
I want to report that America's honeybee population has rocketed to an all time high.
Yay, yea, yay for the honey bees. The bees, Save
the bees, Save the honey bees. Fuck the honey bees. What about
the Macrotera Deantho farrula, the genus Zyla copa, the genus meliesodes, the
fucking long the longhorn bee. What about all the cool native bees with the
fucking turquoise metallic bodies and the cool fucking silver eyes and the long antenna.
Fuck the honey bees. They're just it's like feral cattle. Like I think
the America's cow population has reached seventy five million. That's terrific, that's great.
That's not you know, honey bees aren't nature quote unquote nature. We've
gone through this before. I don't like that word. Cows aren't nature.
Feral cats aren't nature. Feral cats are a fucking environmental skirtch don't even get
me started. Get rid of them, socialize them, put them in the
drink, whatever, and fucking you know what I mean humanly, but anyway,
you know, but the fucking honey the honey bee probably I'm seeing this
now is post climate. The US is at almost a million bee colonies colonies
in the past five years. We now have three point eight million, the
Census of Agriculture shows, you know, and down here in South Texas that's
uh fucking you know, the honey bees you get, the feral bee colonies
you get around here, they're all they're all those the African hybrids, so
they're super aggressive. They'll fucking they'll murk you, they'll kill you, they'll
fucking mob you. You get thirty feet close to a nest if they're flying
around flowers. You're fine, they're just pointing stuff. If they fucking you
get too close to a nest, like twenty feet, they'll start coming at
you with fucking sucks. We've got friends that are herpers, that are a
native. One of my friends, he's a reptile nerd. He gets too
close a fucking we're out. He's got like a well understood and healthy paranoia
of bees, Like if he sees bees, he's just bees. He fucking
runs. He had the direction that because they will come after you, it
is terrifying. That'd be a horrible way to go. A friend of mine
almost died getting mobbed by bees. He tripped over a log and got mobbed
by him. And I forget what the reasoning was why he survived. He
had been stung, he'd had a bunch of pre exposure to things because it's
some job he worked at, and I think supposedly that's what the doctor said.
That's the only reason he didn't. He didn't crow because he was just
covered in welts and he thought, you know, I remember he told me
too. He's like, I thought, this is it, this is how
I'm going, But uh, I don't know. M I've only I've seen
swarms before. I remember I was in West Texas too, there was a
swarm up there. I've seen swarms in Mohave in like a rock crack.
I didn't get close to it, but the one in West Texas, they
came at me anyway. Uh god, I was just I was fucking I
had to do like damage control for There's two friends, two friends I have
that don't they have some beef with each other, and it's it's not you
know, it's it's funny. I feel like, well, first off,
it's in it's related to cactus, the cactus community, and it's not much
of a community because they're all like half of them are fucking competing with each
other and jealous and fucking you know, and it's all men too. So
this is this is a really good illustration like male primate social dynamics, like
the fucking male rivalry, the beef, the stupid shit. There's some really
great people, there's a lot of people doing good work, but there's still
you know. It was like I remember when I was first getting into plants,
I was conifers were like that too. I was looking I was interested
in conifers from an evolutionary perspective, because there are these old, this old
lineage of plants that evolved Jurassic Triassic bound rate, at least the ones that
are alive today. I like thinking about, you know, other forms that
they were related to that didn't make it past the K T extinction or whatever,
the N Jurassic extinction. Whatever. But you know, it's a collector
community too. There's like a lot of weird kind offer collectors. And I
think, you know, with cactus, especially the collector thing, I knock
it all the time and I joke around and fuck with it and whatever,
but I mean, I really don't. I'm not hating on it. I
think that's good for getting people into this shit. It really is for getting
into like a higher form of just appreciating ecology and evolution and understanding what ecology
is this interwoven network of all these living things, and that the fucking things
that pollinate these things are just as important as these things themselves, and the
habitat is just important as these these prized plants themselves and all this stuff.
And it becomes dare I say it's spiritual after a certain point where you know
it's spiritually fulfilling. It's a it's the fucking world we live in is dark
and fucked up, and people again, we're primates, you know, we
still we're still beholding our behavior can be very beholden to these obsolete evolutionary impulses.
It's George Carlin put it. I think that was him. I don't
think that's an original mind. I've been saying it for ten years. I
don't think that's one of my originals. I think I think I got it
from George Carlin. They're in a fucking ranty head, which was so spot
on. So we've got this this primate neurochemistry that makes us feel certain things,
and we act in those behaviors if we lack self awareness or if we
just can't, you know, lack self control or lack the ability to zoom
out whatever, and uh and so you know, people end up talking shit
whatever. That was something I was I saw, and like I was saying,
I saw in the fucking contravert. I saw just like weird shit,
like not you know what weird behavior about shit. It's like you guys are
on the same team, like you what are you doing? Like focus on
positive stuff? Like well, how does this start. You feel like a
negative emotion in your brain and you're sitting alone thinking about this. You start
marinating on it, and then you get a grudge, and then it fucking
turns into something like don't think about that. Don't direct your attention elsewhere unless
someone's actually, you know, doing you wrong, you know, or find
a way to talk to them about that. Even better, if you really
is bothering you're like, communicate, Like so many people lack just elementary communication
skills, and I don't knock them forward because we're not taught that shit growing
up. We're not taught how to communicate or be up front in a diplomatic
way, or be upfront without blowing up. I used to fucking blow up
all the time. I was horrible. I was just fucking fuck you,
angry motherfucker. You know when in my twenties especially, it was an angry
motherfucker listening to punk rock getting fucking hammered. Uh you know. I mean
I always had like a positive site do. I had things I loved and
was interested in, but I would be beholden to the negative shit and still
on it. Anyway. My point is is I got kind of stuck in
the middle of this thing where I'm friends with one person and the others I'm
friends with the other person too, and the one person is really got kind
of a heart on that may have started off well intention but now seems like
a personal thing for this other person in their organization. And uh, and
they're both in the cactus community, which is so like my lens is so
much broader than the I love cact a c I love I love all fucking
plants and amerit climates, mainly because and I wrote about this in the book
too, which I wrote way too much. You're gonna have to cut a
bunch of shit. That's a whole other thing. We'll talk about that later.
It's it's bumming me out, like I have to just like get sued
by my publisher and publish the full seventy thousand words I wrote instead of the
thirty thousand they want later on. You know, I don't know if you
stand it up on libjen do is I in pdf form? I don't know.
You know, it's a little note saying, if you want to donate
five books for this read donated the fucking whatever, that would be nice.
Shoot by his own publisher anyway, By write about you know, getting into
plants from arid climates and why, and that was something you know, my
friend Lily was always asking me. I was like, why do you like
dry sites? Why do you like arid plants? And I was like,
because you see the coolest adaptations in plants that have been so you know,
evolutionarily tormented and stressed and been through these intense selection pressures. Right, whether
it's herbivores or whether it's you know, long periods of drought that kill ninety
five percent of a population or or whatever it's, you know, you see
the coolest adaptations. And that was a good lens. Arid plants were a
good lens for me understanding how natural selection works and how things evolve and how
you know, different things can take shape, and how that environment itself acts
is like a the environment itself acts the same way that a human hand would
if it was if a person was trying to grow like a heat tolerant form
of tomatoes, you know, like if someone was trying you know, because
tomatoes don't do that well at hot human climates because they grow at fucking seven
thousand feet in the dry out of Comma desert, there were there were fucking
Slanum the ancestors of wild tomatoes or the answers of domestic domestic tomatoes. The
wild ancestors of domestic tomatoes Slanum pinellii and Solanum chilants. And I think there's
one other species. My friend Boris studies them. He's at University of Chicago.
They were growing with brown ingie at candelars, a fucking huge tree cac
this, a columnar coc this. It looks like a fucking candelabra. So
cool. Plenty of plenty of brown Injia, money shots going in a book.
But there was one of the wild progenitors of domestic tomatoes there, Slanum
chilans, and one thousand feet lower was Solinum pinellia. And this is like
eight thousand feet in the fucking Andes and like barren environment, Like when you
start to get higher, you start to see plants, but like five thousand
feet in Andies, there's fucking nothing. It is insane. The northern Andes,
like northern Chile, well not northern adies, northern Chile, excuse me,
you know it was just fucking it was insane anyways. But the same
way, so tomatoes don't do good at hot human environments, but because their
metabolism is adjusted the cool nights and the cool the knights are cooler there and
the habitat they evolved in because there's no humidity, there's no humidity to hold
that. You know, water holds heat right, air doesn't. So it
could be ninety degrees during the day and then it cools off to god knows
what at night, and it's generally a very cool, dry night, and
so you know, temperature is lower at night. Their metabolisms depending on temperature.
So you bring them to a spot where it's like it'll be ninety five
during the day, one hundred degrees during the day and then it doesn't get
below eighty at night, and it's human as a nutsack, part of my
French, you know. But and they're not going to do that well,
and they don't. I'm sure there's some varieties because tomatoes have been in you
know, and domestication long enough that someone's probably bred one. But they don't
do that well in heat. So, you know, say someone's trying to
breed a heat tolerant tomato, they would grow a thousand seedlings, subject them
to the environmental stress, in this case heat and humidity and warm nights,
and let all of them die and see which ones survive. And the ones
that survive they would then keep reading those and so on and keep subjecting them
to the same environmental stress of high temperatures and humidity. And that's the same
thing that the environment does with any stress, and so plants end up evolving
to it. Individuals don't evolve populations, do. It's what we say,
right. Individuals don't evolve populations as a whole do. That's the key thing
to understanding evolution. But uh so I was into you know, arid plants
through through that that lends so anyway, I was stuck in the middle of
So I'm not even part of like the whole cactus community. I'm interested in
the family. I'm not a collector. I'm not I don't want the responsibility.
I just I like growing native shit, like having a yard that's fucking
diverse. I don't want a bunch of fancy shitting pots that I have to
worry about. And I want to just get shit in the ground and whatever.
And because I'll leave town for two weeks, I don't want to feel
bad if it dies or whatever. But but plenty of people are into that,
and that's fucking cool. I think that's cool, you know, it's
and that can be the gateway to understanding habitat and getting more interested in other
plants that grow sympatrically with the plant you're interested in. I mean, everyone
starts somewhere. Why are you interested in this one plant? What is it
about it that gets you? Will your lens? You know, will you
just stick with this thing? Or will you're you're will you crave more?
Will you want to learn? What? What else it grows with? And
what the habitat's like and why the habitat is the way that it is.
Is it dry because there's a fucking rain shadow from a mountain range that got
lifted up. Why the mountain range get lifted up? Oh, because there's
this a fucking subducting oceanic plate to the west that's causing this uplift and this
volcanism whatever. But anyway, I got, you know, and I the
point is, I got stuck in the middle of this thing, and I
like both these people. And that's what sucks, because I don't know,
you know, I just kind of ignored it it first because I was like,
I don't want to get involved. I don't want to fucking you know,
that's their beef. But finally I was like, you know what,
both these people are doing good stuff and this is stupid. This is fucking
high school shit. People are you know, people are talking about each other
and it's all social media shit. And another friend got told not to interact
with them because it might ruin his reputation, which is that's fucking whack.
Like that, if you want me to not like someone, first off,
you have a vested interest in me not liking someone, that's a fucking red
flag. If I don't like someone, I might say, yeah, I
don't really care for them, all right, guys, a jealous hater,
whatever, But I'm not gonna fucking go out of my way to make sure
you don't like them too. It's fucking weird and it's transparently jealous and it's
just kind of low behavior, you know. And I'm not saying that's what
anybody was doing, but it's certainly when anything starts leaning that way comes up
on my radars. All right, this is a little fucking weird. Like
it's one thing to say, you know, I think about like my friend
allan if he don't even think he's got a problem with most people anybody,
But there's certainly people who have had problems with him, because everyone has a
fucking issue with something, and especially there's just fucking hairs all around and so,
and he doesn't shit on anybody like I'll ask him like, well,
what happened with that guy? And he saying, I don't know. He
just doesn't like me. He doesn't he doesn't like try to convince me that
this person's bad or that I should fucking hate this person, because that's not
who he is. And it'd be fucking weird if if he did do that,
I'd be like, whoa, that's not like you, you know,
and I don't want to be like that either. But anyway, so one
person was saying this, One of these two parties was saying this to a
third party that I'm also friends with, and that fucking weirded me out.
And I just got to the point where I was like, all right,
this is this is getting too much. Why don't we just put this on
the fucking table instead of acting like fucking high school kids, We'll act like
adults and talk about this instead of you know, whatever, and it started.
The original accusations were all these guys are supporting poachers and and blah blah,
and and it's and that's and I'm used to that too. Like I've
said before, when when people in the cactus community, God, it sounds
so corny to say that, you know, have beef with each other,
and they all are. It's all like male shit. It's all like half
of them are, Like, it's all men like fucking arguing with it.
Not everybody, but it's a lot of fucking males who get weird. It's
male primate shit, just like the fucking chimps. Like someone is doing well,
the other person's got an issue with it. They want to fucking hate
they don't, you know, it's so weird. It's so humans can be
so cool and support of each other, and they can also do this this
monkey brain shit, you know. And and I'm well aware of it.
Like I saw the same thing with the fucking Coniference. People trying to take
each other down. People jealous of what someone's done, or jealous of someone's
notoriety or feels slighted, and rather than talk to them about it, they
just hold a grudge for fucking years and it turns into some stupid beef and
it's all transparent. It's all male primate shit. It's male primate obsolutely evolution
or impulse's territoriality, whatever fuck you want to call a rivalry, jelsey whatever.
So I just, you know, I was like, let's just talk
about this. So I called one and I was like, hey, man,
I'm friends with this other person. I like him. I really like
him. He does good stuff, and he's saying all this stuff. I
want to know, is it true? Are you guys doing this? Has
this happened? You know? And everyone's had fucking old planes. You talk
to some of these old collector nerds, like I'm talking about like fifty sixty
years old, you know who. I'm not friends with many of them,
but I've been. I remember I was in a greenhouse two months ago in
Arizona, and this is like I didn't even know he was a well known
uh he was a well known grower, propagated or whatever. But I was
in his greenhouse and he would just I'd be like, where is this plank
coming? Be like, oh, that was taken from habitat in the seventies.
I got it someone gave it to me. He was just straight up
tell me he didn't take them. But he would tell me straight up,
you know, and it's like, okay, well right on. It sucks,
but I'm also kind of I understand why it happened, and especially living
in Texas where so much habitat gets destroyed. I know people here who've cut
the dug native plants and kept them in a garden, and if in their
case they weren't trying to sell them any but in their case, I'm glad
that they did, because the fucking you know what, the fucking habitat was
destroyed later and it was cleared and turned into fucking rangeland with tons of buffalo
grass and some little mc mansion on it. So somebody from McCallan or fucking
San Antonio or wherever can go try their hand. They're ranching their ten acres,
you know, become a fucking I don't know what, put it on
Instagram or something, you know, too much money. A lot of rich
freaks in Texas, like I've said, rich freaky motherfuckers and texts everywhere,
but especially I mean California's got rich freaks into but especially in Texas. But
so I approached the the I approached the suspected guilty party and just said something
to them, and I was like, look, man, it's because it's
hard for me to believe they'd be dumb enough to if they might have bought
old plants or gotten plants or whatever. You know, it would be hard
for me to believe that they would still be doing that. If they did
it in the first I guess there was somebody who had been working for them
who they later fired, who was jacking money from them too, and is
actually working with this other known poacher who I don't know out of the fucking
I don't know what the deal is, but it's all this personal beef shit.
But you know, and they were like, no, man, we
we haven't. This is what's happened. We've probably, you know, we've
probably had plants come through that were taking twenty years ago from habitat, whether
you know, pack of podiums or whatever. But you know, we don't
do that now, like, and we're not even really we like still sell
plants online, but we're kind of most of our money comes from like the
landscape shit that we do. And all this sudden, you know, and
they promote good shit too, like they do. They've got like solid ideologies
they put out there that I support that I think are cool and uh,
and they're doing good and they're getting like the younger generation of people into plants,
like getting them out of the death colt. Like you don't have to
be into smoking pot and playing video games and fucking whatever shit people are into
these days. I don't know, you know, but there's a lot of
fucking dead end row just culturally speaking, I feel like plants save me from
it. They zoom me out of my fucking myopic human bullshit. And you
know, I did the same thing. I started with like a narrow interest
and then got into this. Now I'm fucking obsessed with all this other wild
shit. I'm like trying to learn insects and bees and major orders of insects
and got into the geology and whatever anyway, and they do good stuff.
So I just was like, look, man, you know, and the
important thing is just don't fucking hate. Don't keep it in the hate.
Talk about this and if someone refuses to listen, then that's that's all you
can do, you know. And I had a similar I had a similar
thing, actually, happened with me. I let me tell you little story,
which is this. It's fucking weird, man, It's really weird.
It's like the only case I've pished a lot of people. I've pished a
lot of people off in my time by being loud MoU some deservingly so,
some like very few I feel regretful about, at least my hand. And
it's some of it, you know, but some of I fucked up,
was a dick whatever. But this particular case was one of the only cases
where like, I've looked around at what I could have done to upset this
person and I can't. I just can't find it. And it's like still
five years later, this person is still fucking bitter. And it came up
because I got and again it's in this cactus this whole cactus community thing.
It came up for me because I got word from like two or three different,
three different people friends that this person was voluntarily basically given fucking you know,
Ted talks like unsolicited Ted talks about what a piece of shit I am
is trying to like, you know, if it it feels canceling, it's
like the same, And I think that's what that's why my radar was picked
about. You know when I initially heard this stuff because the evidence I was
given wasn't that much. When this one party was trying to, I guess
cancel, the other party is known poachers, and I looked at it and
I was like, I don't know, man, I need something more.
Like this isn't like they got an old plant that was in a fucking that's
already been like in making the rounds. It's been in greenhouse over the last
twenty years, and like, I mean, yeah, that sucks, but
like I don't like, did they get a box of fucking like poach kopiapoa
from Chile or are they fucking like what do they? You know what I
mean? I just need more. And I'm not gonna just I'm not gonna
hate on someone because you don't want me to like them, Like that's fucking
whack and like that actually starts to piss me. And this person wasn't doing
that. But when people do do that to me, they're like, you
shouldn't like this person because I'm like, no, it's fuck, that's not
that's not how you don't tell me. Let me make the decision for myself.
You don't fucking threaten me with like social ostracization for associating with someone that's
fucking that's creepy and it's weird. You know. It's like with canceling,
Like remember when like canceling started fifteen, fifteen, twenty years maybe fifteen years
ago. It's like it was selected for genuine fucking monsters, you know,
and then it eventually it turned into just like I don't like this person,
and I don't want you to like them either, and it just you know,
whatever reason I can fine, and it was it's like fucking hell.
And you know, again, I think the left really embraced that. I
didn't see the right doing that, but they got their own weird shit.
They're they're taking up on weird fucking behavioral causes, accusing everyone and their mother
of pedophilia or fucking whatever. But anyway, but the left, this is
the something I saw on like leftist circles, and it was so it just
got so transparent to me. I remember like one of my one of my
old roommates, tried to cancel her fucking you know, her partner from because
he ended up not wanting a relationship with her and then having a fucking you
know, and then his girlfriend moved in. They were roommates and they were
banging, which is always bad. You shouldn't do that, it's bad.
And then he ended up moving his girlfriend into his room for two months because
she couldn't find a place to live, and it drove this other person nuts
and suddenly she started accusing him of abuse and shit. And then you listen
to the abuse and you're like, ah, I mean I didn't. And
he's like a fucking wreck and it's ruining his life and she's like, ah,
you can tell she's like getting off on it and shit, and it's
like, you know, or I remember another time, another fucking roommate,
she tried canceling her girlfriend over some shit, you know, and it was
just it's fucking weird. It's weird. It's like, keep it to go
talk to a therapist. Deal with that. You know. If you want
me to not like someone, show me the fucking receipts and mention it casually.
Don't fucking push it. And then maybe, you know, don't make
it seem like you're if you have a vested interest in me not liking someone
or someone else not liking someone, it's fucking weird. You gotta talk to
a therapist. And I'm not saying that what was happening, but but still
so anyway, uh so, I just I talked to him and I was
like, listen, man, you gotta just I don't know, reach out
to him, to this other party and try to communicate, be civil,
be nice. But but uh you know, it's also might be the case
that it's not genuine. And maybe it's not and maybe it's like some weird
beef and you know, but if if the interests are actually changing behavior and
he's worried about you guys looting shit from habitat, then that's a constructive conversation
needs to be had. It's not just shitting on someone because you guys are
obviously doing good work and do you know and that you guys promote all this
shit like anti poaching shit all the time, like what you know. I
don't know anyway, but for me it was weird because, yeah, like
I said, this one case, this was five years ago, is this
happened, I'll share this with you, And it's the only case where I
haven't. I'm like, I it just seems like fucking genuine jealousy in hatred
and uh, we were me and me and my friend Sheriff Woody Matt Berger
went down to Chile and there was a guy down there who was acquaintances with
at the time. He's not Chilean, but he was doing eco tours or
whatever doing tour and he's you know, I said, hey, you got
good spots. He's going to be around me, we can meet up,
hangout, and and he's like, yeah, sure you can come come with
me, you know, he like invited us to go with him, and
he was all excited, but he was also at the time hosting. He
was hit some rich guy, uh from overseas that he was hosting who's going
to show plants to And anyway, we met, We met up with them.
It's a good trip, hung out for I think four or five days,
but I ended up getting into it with his client because his client didn't
want to see. First off, his client found out we weren't paying,
that we were just friends of this guy and so and I kind of felt
bad. I was like, man, you pay your pain to go on
this trip, like this probably sucks for you. But then his client was
kind of a dick too. His client didn't want to see anything except cacti.
He had his whole laundry list of shit he wanted to check out.
Speed, he wanted to check out. You know, we're seeing you know,
chucky raga, you know, this basal member of the sunflower family,
which is only in South America. All these cool fucking plants, amazing plants,
and I want to stop and see everything. We're checking out the ecology.
We're taking photos of all this stuff, you know, uh plants that
we knew. And California there's a lot of amphatropical plants with anphatropical distributions.
You know, they're they're on the west coast North America, and then they're
in Chile. Two from migration patterns of birds. So we're seeing all this
stuff and this guy. At one point we had stopped to look at some
got incredible fucking spot. There was like an Oreo sirius uh luka trechis,
which is this old man cactus, and then next to it was a chulky
raga, this hummingbird pony at Chicki raga, like thirteen thousand feet in a
Chilean andes near the Bolivian border. And I was just losing my shit because
I've been obsessed with this whole subfamily of Astorraci, the sunflower family for a
while, and you know, DNA, this subfamily had just been separated out
from the rest of Astaraci because when the DNA was analyzed, it's the sub
family is called barnadizioid, And when a DNA was analyzed, it was realized
that this this subfamily didn't have this like twenty one thousand base pair you know,
ATCG twenty one thousand base pair inversion in their DNA that the rest I
forget whether it was chloroplasd DNA or mitochonder. I think it was Chlorapa that
the rest of the sunflower family had, which is a huge family. It's
not every fucking kind of except Antarctica, and so, you know, second
biggest family after orchid family. And so I was like, this is fucking
cool. This is like a basal early branch and member of a sunflower family,
this fucking early lineage. It's hum it's spiny as fuck. It doesn't
look like anything you would consider a sunflower at all in leaf until you see
the flower and you see a capitulum with individual florets in it and these long
styles poking out and holy fuck, that's so cool, like you could see
and it's it's I think that family is only in South America. Barnadizioidy that's
a phylum, chuky Raga, Barnadija. All these cool fucking plants. They're
all spined too, so they had something, you know, in their evolutionary
history that caused them to evolve spines, like actual spines like you would see
in a fucking keg's like long one inch long, woody spines and they're all
woody shrubs, the fucking cool. So and and I got back in a
car and this guy was fucking huffing and puffing, not the guy who later
got mad at me, but his client. And I was like, look,
motherfucker, like what what do you? We're here to see all this
shit too, Like this is fucking how do you? How are you not
interested in this? And I gave him the whole fucking ramp. But if
it was stupid of me, because he's fucking paying, it doesn't matter if
this guy, you know, came on the fucking tour to get a leg
show because he had a foot fetish, you know, and go sniff some
fucking rocks. It doesn't matter. He's paying for it, we're not paying.
Fuck off, Like, let's get out of here. And I don't
want to ruin it for my friend either, you know, because he's or
what I thought was my friend, who I thought was my friend at the
time. He's ad a five year grudge A gets me, it turns out,
and so anyway, I got a little heated. The guy fucking backed
off, and then I felt bad. We settled it, and then I
was like, yo, we gotta go. We gotta I told my friend,
CAUSEI friend, I was like, we gotta just dip out. This
isn't gonna work. We're gonna rent their own van and just and and and
dip out because this is your work. This is you know, your job.
I don't want to fuck it up for you. I know, I
got a mouth on me. You gotta make money. So so we left
so and you know, and he he had said, like, just throw
me some gas money. Whatever said. We threw him some gas money,
and we left. We had a great fucking trip. We were driving around
Chile and this shitty fucked up beater van that still had scars on the fucking
doors from from where someone had pried the doors. Chile is is chill.
I mean, it's you'll get there's a lot of property crying, but it's
not You're not gonna get fucking violently mugged or shot. You know. It's
way safer than the US or Mexico. And so anyway, so all's good.
We dip out and it's you know, it's still like it, no
hint at anything wrong. Three months later, I get an email from this
dude and he's like he was I think it was longer. It was like
five months later. And this guy does good stuff. He sees really cool
habitats, photographs really cool things, travels all over South America, Mexico,
whatever. And I get an email from this guy and he's like he's like,
hey, you know, I uh uh. This is my accent,
of course, but he's like, you know, I I I really was
mad at you for a while and I blocked you. But I realized you're
a good person. You're doing good stuff, and I was like, what
the fuck was like, what the fuck you blocked me? I didn't even
notice what were you mad at me about? Like I figured it was something
because I talked shit to his client, almost got in a fight with his
client or something. You know. I was like that, well, that
would be a valid reason. I could see that. I could see I'm
sorry, you know, but it wasn't about that. He's like, you
didn't you didn't promote my eco tourism business, and you know you you said,
you know. I remember in a Facebook comment someone asked you if you
use guides and you didn't. You said you didn't use guides and that they
often don't know anything, and I was like, yeah, I was talking
about like and I was in that specific comment was a reference to I had
gone to LCLO Biosphere Reserve, amazing fucking spot and tom aleap Is it's super
hot because tom aleip is like the hottest state in Mexico for cartel activity,
and so you know, you go up to LCLO Biosphere Reserve and it was
awesome. I went there with my kids, mom, and we were just
we were just documenting no one had been there in five years because it had
been so tim Aleapas has been so fucking hot. And we got stopped by
some crooked cop coming back, and like everyone we talked to was like,
haha, yeah, we'd had some trouble here, but things have mellowed out.
You know, they kind of did that like oh shucks, like we
know it's we know it's got a reputation. It's being a little dicey.
And so anyway, so they they made us, you know, get this
guy, which you have to do. I get it's how it gets money
back to the townspeople and whatever. It's good. And so we paid this
dude, and so you know, he just kind of follows you around.
He's like supposed to leave you. We just follows you around and they won't
let you in without him. You got to you gotta do it, like
okay, cool. But he didn't know anything about this, and so I
had mentioned I was like, yeah, he was kind of you know.
I gave up after ten minutes like asking him shit in Spanish about well we're
looking at He didn't know what it was. I couldn't say anything. I
was like, all right, whatever, it's all good. This guy can
just roll with us and we'll just do our own thing. And so I'd
made a Facebook comment, like I didn't even use Facebook anymore, aside from
the crime pace page. I don't have like a personal Facebook page I regularly
check, and so this guy he read that comment. He was all pissed
off. And even then that comment was like a month prior to him say
anything about it. And I was like, what is this guy like?
Just talk to me, just communicate, like why are you so fucking mad?
But I didn't think anything. I was like, okay, I wasn't
mad. I was like, all right, well cool, I'm glad you're
not mad anymore. I'm sorry if I have set you whatever. And so
we're all good and uh and he follows me again, he follows me on
the Instagram. And so two months go by, two or three months and
like he had made some fucking weird comment again after he said everything was fine.
So I just messaged him and I was like, yo, you still
so, like are you salty about someone? Are you salty about it?
He's like, you didn't you know I you didn't buy that book you said
you wanted off me that I you know it was a thirty dollars book and
I'm trying to make money and you didn't. Uh what the fuck? Ah?
He's like, you didn't give me enough gas money. We gave you
gas money me and fucking would he both give you gas money? We time
I talked to Man about this, I was like, did we fucking we
gave him gas? Man? It was again, we gave him like ninety
bucks. He's like, uh, you know, for four days, and
it's like in Chile, it's like gas is like fucking half the cost here
of what it is here. I was like, you know, I don't
know what he's fucking upset about. Like he didn't he didn't pay anything for
us. We didn't fucking burn them. And he was like, and then
I took you to this one spot that I found, and you didn't,
you know, you didn't give me any credit for it. And I was
like, what the fuck what am I supposed to do? You didn't find
the fucking it's on a fucking satellite map, like you took us there.
Like I take people to spots all the time. I don't expect them to
like rub my nuts and get my fucking name tattooed on their foot because,
you know, because I showed them a spot, like I just want them
to appreciate it and be excited. So anyway, it was like, you
know, he said, all this shit, all these grievances and I was
like, wait, why did you why did you write me two months ago?
And like attempt to squash the beef, and then you're just opening up
again, like what is this about? You know? And it clearly at
some point it became readily obvious to me that this guy, whatever he's complaining
about, it's that's not what it's what the issue is, like, it's
something else, Like it's some weird fucking as I said before, some weird
like rivalry, some fucking some jealousy, which is so hard for me to
believe because like that's really like jealousy, Like why do you just be friends
with people like work with them, like people do good stuff? Like what
do you you know? Like a jealousy is just such a fucking weird It's
so foreign to me. You know. Whenever I felt it in myself,
I'm like, oh, you know, and it's been a long time,
it's been h you hat Another friend who was like a another friend who was
a well known artist, and he saw another friend of ours getting notoriety and
you know, doing fucking gallery shows whatever, some graffiti guy, and he
got he started like talking shit in him, like wa, wait, what
are you talking? I don't know. This guy's a really good guy.
Like he's not like you're jealous. It's okay, but like cap that shit
right now, Like, don't listen to that that fucking little voice inside you're
like, let that go. This guy didn't do anything to you. He's
a good guy. Just stop. Like it's bitterness, it's gross, fucking
resent. Let it go. And so that's what i'd have tied from this
guy. So, you know, but I told him to go fuck himself.
I should have been nice. I should have been like, listen,
man, this sounds like you're jealous or there's some weird shit. I don't
know what I can do to help you, aside from apologize send you thirty
bucks for a fucking book. I told you to grab me at the fucking
bookstore that I didn't end up getting because we didn't go to that southern part
of Chile or whatever. You know. Had you said I know it was
gonna be an issue, I would have gladly done. I'm really sorry.
I could send you thirty bucks whatever. I mean, that's what I should
have done. I should have been but I was defensive and fucking you know,
because I grew up fighting and being attacked my whole life. I told
him to go fuck himself whatever, and this is but this is still five
years ago, four years ago, because the original events transpired five years ago
and by the time he was actually planning about it, it had been almost
a year. So anyway, but then I hear from like two or three
different sources that this guy is still going off and talking about what a piece
of shit I am. And and you know, I'll fucking use people,
and I don't compensate that, you know, all this shit. And it's
like the people, I assume he was saying that, the people who don't
know me, which kind of bums me out because it's like, you know,
let them make their own decision about me if they meet me whatever,
it's you know, but when you talk to people that know me, now,
it's just stupid because it's going to get back to me. It's fucking
dumb, and it's going to get back to me. And sure enough it
did, and so I was like, fuck, I got kind of upset.
I was like, fuck this motherfucker man, what is this? What
is this issue? So I finally like, look, you know what,
this is stupid. I don't want to just talk shit back. I don't
want to. I don't want to fucking bad mouth him. I don't want
to shit on him. I don't want to make I'm not trying to make
him feel bad. I don't get anything out of that. I'm just gonna
fucking write him. I'm gonna write him a polite message. And so that's
right that. I was like, Listen, we got the same interest,
we got the same goals. We want the same things. We want people
to appreciate plants, we want I assume it's what he wants, want people
to be excited about them. We want, you know, people to get
educated and excited about these things and love them and have reverence for them.
And we're both dads too. Why don't you just let it go? Like
I don't know this is it's been five years, dog, Like it's been
five years. Why are you still upset? Like what can I do for
you right now? Like? What can I do? And you know what,
I talk to a friend of mine about this too, I stud I
fucking write him. She's like, no, I don't write him, don't
fucking write you not get listening. But I'm naive me. I still wrote
him. Sure I should listen to my friends. Should have listen to my
friend. You know, she's a fighty one too, which is good,
you know, I like fucking like friends like that. She's got some fucking
she's a fighty and she does fucking muay Thai and also she's a fighter,
so anyway, and she knew better. Maybe a little bit of a cynic
too, but anyway, I wrote him and he just yeah, he just
you didn't hear any of it. He didn't listen to it. He wrote
me back. He's like still going on about the fucking book and the gas
money. He didn't say anything about the spot he supposedly was so kind to
show me and Woody he didn't say anything about the fuck out oh promoting his
eco tourism business. I think because that sounds kind of fucking corny. Maybe
he's over there he's embarrassed. I don't know. I don't know, but
but he just didn't listen to any of it, and he's like, you
know, I And then he did this thing too, which is like,
man, don't don't lie to me about like I know you're lying. He
was like, I the only reason I talked about it was because the only
reason I talked about it was because people asked me I'd ever bring your name
up? And I was like, motherfucker everyone who told me. I had
three different people tell me you like you, you fucking gave them an unsolicited,
forty five minute ted talk about what a piece of what a piece of
shit? I am like, you know, like one of my other friends
was like, yeah, he just kept going. Man. I didn't ask
him. I was like, kinda, I kind of wish he would stop,
you know. It felt kind of weird, so you know, I
it's just anyway. And I was like, oh, you know what.
I I fucking wrote him a response. I was like, look, man,
you deserve the same respect as anybody else, and I'm gonna give that
to you. I'm not gonna shit talk to you. I'm not gonna but
this. This sucks. It feels bad. I don't like hearing it.
You have better shit to focus on and pour your energy into, and so
do I. And I don't know what I can do for you aside from
apologize which again I'm sorry, and and tell you you know, uh,
I'm you know. And he didn't even bring up the fact I got in
a fight with his or I almost got in a fight with his client,
like that was that would be like a valid thing, which I was a
bad boy. I understood that was stupid. That was fucking stupid. I
should have just left then. I should have been like, without saying anything
to his friend, it's just been like, look, we gotta get the
fuck out of here, in which we did. And when we did,
our the trip was fine. It was fucking great, you know when he
was fun traveling with him too, for through the first three days, the
fourth days, when I got into his client, we decided to dip out
on the fifth. But you know, but uh, you know, so
I just wrote up some shit backs. Look, make you just stop,
like just stop. It's not a good look. It sucks. I don't
like it. I don't like the way it feels. I don't want to
do the same to you can just let it go. And that was it
and he never fucking wrote back. So but it was funny. He wrote
me back like immediately, like fucking immediately after I the first email I sent
them, like within thirty minutes. I was like, Jesus Christ, holy
shit, he's been sitting on this for fucking five years. Five years,
goddamn So and he's it sucks too because he's doing good stuff. I like,
you know, the photos I see of him, the fucking the shit
he's seen, the travel all over South America doing documenting good stuff. He
should write a fucking book with all the photos he's got, you know,
but uh, or put a book together. But you know, I just
yeah, Anyway, the point is there's nothing, there's nothing you can do.
It's it's you know, sometimes this shit's legit, sometimes it's personal.
And I think that's what a lot of people in the quote unquote kick thus
community do, is you know, they try to accuse each other this shit,
and it's it could be to sift through what's legit and what's bullshit.
And I think it's started. I think in this case, the case of
my two friends, it started out is legit, but now it's turned into
like weird. It feels a little I get some maybe a little bit of
a fixation and that that kind of sucks. But I just wish they would
just handle it like adults, like civil adults, and and not you know,
the bad mouthing on the internet. It's just fucking fucking bad. Look,
man, I don't know, and I've certainly done my fair share back
and forth with people, but it feels icky. I don't want to do
that. So anyway, moving right along, so hopefully they settle it out.
But yeah, moving moving right along. Shave the bees, shave,
save the hoodie bees. So anyway, in other news, this is kind
of cool. I uh so, I killed my friends lawn a couple of
blocks, so I needed a project that ran out of space on my own
yard for planting a lot of natives. In a window of when you can
plant you know the wind and have a good success rate is starting to close.
Here in South Texas, it starts to get fucking hot. But it's
a little bit cooler this time of the year than it was last year.
I remember last year we were doing the border wall rescue. We were out
there in fucking Star County. It was like God, I remember we spent
we spent a twelve hour day digging plants in front of bulldozers and blessed the
bulldozer operators too. They're just working class. They's trying to make money and
they were being very tolerant of us being out there. But we were out
there for twelve hours and it was fucking like ninety eight degrees already. It
was fucking brutal. God, it sucked. And you come home and you
got that. You take your fucking pants off and they're like sticky, you
know, like that kind of shit. Oh God, but I do lock
the way that jeans feel when they stick to my my like the way my
trousers feel when they stick to my legs a little bit. Who gives me
all tingly? So uh so it's a little bit cooler now. So we're
you know, I I we put a bunch of in the ground. We
fucking marked this lawn. We went in, I did a video on it.
We went with the side cutter from Home Desk, but he went and
got it. I just ran it for thirty minutes. Rip a fucking lawn
up in thirty minutes. The lawn was the mixture of Saint Augustine, which
is really common down here, and Bermuda grass, which is a fucking nightmare
to get rid of. And it's like one of the only reasons I've become
such a fucking advocate of small, specific targeted applications of glycystate, bermuda and
buffalo. And so anyway, uh we ripped up the fucking grass flipped it
over, so the grass that was in there would die. But you know,
we went down like I don't know, we went down like an inch
two inches, because you can adjust the depth at which the blade removes disembowels
the side from the earth. And I think even if we've gone deeper,
it wouldn't matter, Like, are you gonna fuck up your whole You're gonna
like dig fucking three inches out of your front yard just to kill bermuda?
No? Uh, I guess we could try try that sometime. But anyway,
the bermuda came right back because there were the stolens and a little bits
of root, those roots, those stolens not roots, but you know,
the those lateral roots, those underground stems that grass the bermuda grass sends out
had you know, they just came right back. They germany it right back.
So that's when I went in with the fucking glife of State. Later
on, after I'd planted stuff and just I took one of those you know,
yard signs for a politician. You could use any sign, you know,
like those we buy houses signs that people put on the corners of the
intersections. Sometimes they get the wire holder, Go snag one of that,
Go steal one of that. That's that's got to feel good to steal.
You're taken from some predatory real estate company or house flipper or some use that.
Use it, you know, put it up in front of the plant
you're trying to keep. Like if for me was Sydney at tenuifolia skelton leaf
GoldenEye, remarkable member astrac a really cool woody shrub grows here in the thorn
scrub where it's humid, and also grows in the fucking Chihuahua desert of Kohuila.
But uh, but put that up in front of planet trying to save
spray the shit in front of it. The bermuda grass. If there's some
bermuda grass that you can't get because it's too close to the planet, trying
to save fuck it just you know, don't worry. Worry about it later
you rip it up by hand. But did that did the bermuda with glyph
essates small applications, none got on the ground. That all got on the
fucking h the duff beneath or on the plant itself. And then it breaks
down and you know, rates variant how long it takes to break down whatever.
But and then the microbes. You weaken the bermuda grass with the glyce
state, the microbes and the soil pathogens and shit will go for it anyway.
So killed the bermuda, and UH had to go back, you know,
two or three times because not all of it died, there were little
pieces, you know. But and you want to do it, and it's
a hot sunny day. So I went and did that, and it all
died. And now they're fucking yard is taken off. It's looking good.
It looks like a war zone for two or three months. And that's what
you got to You got to impress that upon people who do this. And
I'm telling you this because I want you to go do it. I want
you to go fucking I want you to go out there and advocate for this
stuff, for planting native plant gardens and killing lawns. It's fucking fun.
And it's not just because, oh it saves water. It's because it's fucking
spiritually rewarding. It cures your spiritual malady. To go sit in a garden
you planet a year later and look at all the cool fucking lizards and little
beetles and caterpillars and shit coming through. It's nice. It's a soothing fucking
thing. And it's awesome too. You turn your yard into a fucking classroom
alt you learn so much about the life around you and the native ecosystem around
you. Put shit up on in at ininn at your own fucking yard.
I ain't at all the cool bugs that come through, you know, all
the cool birds whatever. You know, I'll create a log book just obscure
location. So if you get into midnight creepers, they're not gonna know where
you live. Come, you know, sniff your undies and look in your
window or nothing, you know, rub one out in your bushes. You
shouldn't say that. What I always got to go there anyway. Ah,
anyway, so I just starting to look good now. It still looks like
a war zone. Little oh, and I used the steaks too. I
got bamboo steaks, went and found a bamboo bush, cut a bunch of
shit, cut into three inch sections, got a nice fucking heavy mallet hammer
hammered steaks into the ground because you need something to hold visual gravity while this
stuff is growing. Because ideally you're planting small, you plant too big,
you get more of a chance of failure. If you know, if it's
been in a pot for fucking ten years, it's all root bound whatever.
So I like the plant like one gallon pots sometimes tubes. You put a
steak next to it so it holds more visual gravity, so you know,
if your friend comes over and he's hammered, he doesn't step on it.
A fucking dog doesn't. Isn't gonna go trampling through it. Dogs might be
inclanned to piss on it. But you can put up logs whatever, and
then you do the hard escape. Go get some rocks from the side of
the fucking freeway, from a quarry, Get some dead logs. Those they're
great for the beatles. You get the fucking get the lugs for the beatles.
You see a down tree, go chain saw it up, bring the
logs back, start building habitat and make a little lizard hotel with the log
pile. Whatever you do to hard escape, and put the logs up in
front of the plants too, so that that holds visual gravity. Shit's not
gonna get You can shield the ground from getting cooked in the sun. Whatever,
But of course it depends where I am. It's so fucking hot.
If you live in the temper latitudes, you don't have to worry about this
too much. But it's like, did this and it's coming back. The
yard's coming back. It looks fucking good. Now. My friend's even stoked,
and he's like, he doesn't give a fuck about this kind of shit.
He's like a poker guy. He like plays poker and smokes cigars and
hangs out with his kids, and you know, he's like, he doesn't
give care about any this shit. You think he's like semi he's like a
semi conservative Mexican. You know, you didn't care about this. He's not
trying to get in touch with nature, you know, but he's fucking enjoying
it. He's getting into it. That's how you do it. You get
people into it, all right. You don't fucking you know, you ignore
the bullshit you disagree on, and you start nudging them and rubbing their nose,
not rubbing their nose, but waving little sense of the good shit,
you know, the spiritual maladies, the fucking shit that cures the spiritual maladies.
Wave that in front of their noose. I instead, he shouldn't fucked
up, he shouldn't do that. Lines the lines are. I mean,
I talk a lot of shit on lines, but you know what I mean,
I'd always joke around too with people who I'm trying to commence. No,
it's fine, you like your line. It's not just not for me.
I kind of hate ones, but you know whatever, I don't care.
But the point is you don't shame him. You get him sniffing on
it, and you show them how cool it is. And sure enough that's
what started to happen. Now, this dude, I walk down will I
walked down the street because I always go walk to dogs by his house,
and I've seen this guy and I noticed they got a fucking huge burr oak
tree, which I'm surprised they can even keep alive. Down here. This
is a fucking Chihuahua desert. This is where the Chiuauai Desert starts with a
gulf. The Gulf of Mexico transitions the humid gulf transitions to the Chihuahua Desert.
Right two hours from the Gulf of Mexico are the peote gardens and the
astrophightum gardens and all this other shit. You know, So in a buroa
is there's like a Chicago tree beautiful trees. Beautiful fucking trees. Those oaks
savannahs, Oh my god, they're a fucking divine place to spend any amount
of time. And those oak savannahs at the margins of the prairies, but
they don't belong down here. And I think the only reason that this thing
is growing is because they're irrigating and they were. That thing's gonna die when
they stop, when they plant the natives. But in another house down which
also just asked me to get to start playing native in his yard, he's
got an oak tree that's dying. And it's dying because he just bought the
house. He stopped watering his lawn. It's a burrow Quirkus macrocarpa. And
this is like twenty six degrees latitude. Man, this is like subtropical.
I'm surprised he's burrows. The god, they're gorgeous trees. But it's already
starting to die. So it's got a bunch of diebacks. So and they're
like, we don't know what's wrong. We don't know, you know,
he the neighbor was saying this to me, I don't know why it's dying,
Like it's dying because we live in the desert. There's like fucking yucca
on South Padre Island. Man, there's like barrel cacti, amato cactus,
hamadic canthus on South Padre Island. You know, world of frat boys go
to poison themselves with alcohol and try to date rape people. There's there's fucking
yuccas, which is you know, I had a bad impression of South Padre
when I first went there because I just thought it was like those girls going
wild videos and you know, generally repugnant people. But uh, it's actually
a pretty fucking It's amazing. Man. It is such a diverse, cool,
fucking ecosystem there, and it's always like twenty degrees cooler there than it
is here in you know, August and July or whatever. So anyway,
so, uh, you know, I was like, it's it's a desert.
That's why it's dying. You stop watering, like you know, and
I'm it just always makes me sad. It's like people, don't you know,
People are so disconnected from any sense of place, Like you live in
a desert. We live in a desert. There's some amazing stuff here.
It's a wonderful spot to live. There's high diverse almost everything, and uh
and people don't know it and they're missing out on it. And so anyway,
so that's why I'm so anti I doing this. So anyway, this
one, this one house with the big baroque, he's planting all this stuff
under it, and I was I stopped and saw it. I was like,
wait, these are natives? What the fuck like that? Why is
he playing natives? I mean, I'm stoked, but I just never see
it here. And I talked to him and he was like this old Chicago
hippie man. And he's like he's like, yeah, we just were trying
to zer escape. We like the native plants. And I was like,
man, good on you. That's so cool. That's fucking great, you
know whatever. And and I told him the you know, the baroque might
die when you stop watering, but uh but uh that's great because these will
need more sun anyway. And so then this other house, you know,
down the street with the dead the dying baroque, reached out to me and
I was like, look, man, it's how we'll do it. Like
it's gonna He's like, you know about this, I'm like yeah, He's
like, can I Harry him like, you can hire me, but you
know I I'll work cheap. I'm I'm gonna take three month to do it,
and you have to be okay with it looking like a war zone for
three to five months. And that's just what we do. And then you
got to just listen to me. When I say, like we need moult.
You get a truckload of multch. Get a truckload of multch. When
I say, you know, when I show you how to like glyphosate the
fucking bermuda grass, uh, just do it. Like we'll rip a bunch
of it up and then when it comes back, you just spot apply glycostate
to the new sprouts and then let it die. And then we got a
mulch. And then like there's a very good there's a very easy method for
doing this. But you got to you gotta follow all the steps, you
know. So if you're down, and if you're down, with me just
coming by you. I'll show up for an hour one day, plant some
stuff, show up for twenty minutes the next plant some stuff, check on
stuff. You're cool with that, I'll do it. He's like, yeah,
sure, go ahead. It's like all right, here we go.
So I'm starting on a cellar yard now too, So it's three yards now
that are slowly turning back in to native plants and native habitat. And if
everybody did this, because this is how it starts, it's like contagious.
Everybody did this. Suddenly you see huge upswings in the population of all the
cool fucking insects, all the cool beetles, and the dragonflies and the moths
and the butterflies and the fucking birds that eat the moth caterpillars, and you
just get so much more life. And then the mosquitoes start, the populations
start going down because the things that eat them show up and you live in
them, you know, you end up living. You go from living in
this fucking depressing, spiritually empty, fucking lawn landscape to like a robust,
you know, thriving twenty degrees cooler at night after the sunsets landscape. You
know, you can directly change, You could directly influence the things around you,
you know, And it's just by being a loudmouth and by being kind
and just fucking generally stoked and planting native plants and ecology and the and paying
attention to the fucking interwoven the Interwoven Network hash tag interwovennetwork dot com of living
things of life, you know, having a reverence for life. And when
the fucking home Depot finally stops selling all those like this is so sadistic to
me, they even sell these. When home Depot stops selling those giant bug
fuggers, those insect fuggers, then you know, because there's no demand for
them anymore, and you know shit's working. You know you've made the change,
which, uh, I think we're quite quite a ways off from that.
You're fucking fuck home Depot by the way, no offense and just I
don't think they're they're not going to advertise on this tool. What a of
the advertisers you guys have heard on this podcast so far, how terrible?
I don't care. I mean, everyone can you guys can all fast forward
through the fucking ads, right, I mean why people will write me being
like do you know that there was an ad for something? Now? I
don't know, and I don't care, Like, fuck them. I just
take their money, and fucking you know, they take their Money's what allows
me to keep doing this, you know, and then and talking to you
Fox and sharing whatever shit I know on this one minuscule, narrow subject.
You know, I don't know much about anything else, but I know a
lot about this kind of shit. So uh, I don't know. But
just fast forward through. Why you listen to that? Why you listen today?
Anyway? You know, why do you want to listen to that?
It doesn't sound nice? God, I just saw the most amazing, kind
of serious penthalofus, like a seven foot six or seven foot spread on this
plant, this huge fucking colony in Chihuahua Woods Preserve, which is now I
think they renamed it something that I don't like the name of. I don't
know why they did that, marketing failure, but uh, but it's owned
by the Butterfly Center. It's a really cool spot. The Butterfly Center is
a fucking great spot too. If you come down to South Texas, go
check it out. What are you doing for your CLI? You're gonna go.
You're gonna go see the Are you in a pant? The totality over
there? Where's the path the totality? Use it going through Ohio? Are
people in Ohio mad that they live in Ohio? No? I don't think
so. God, I'm right. This book has driving me fucking out.
I haven't worked on it at all. Today I got to I spent eight
hours. It just sucks, man, it sucks. They spent eight hours
inside when there's so much nice shit going on outside, you know. But
uh, I've got to start because I gotta go get my daughter in a
couple hours. But god, it's gonna be good. The fucking I'm working
on the South Africa section now, like there's I'm going through thousands and thousands
of photos. I just finished the Dominican Republic yesterday. Cloud forests and lowland
deserts. I'm gonna be I've got a lot of parts of Chile in.
It's gonna break my heart because so much shit is gonna have to get cut.
I think it's I think I'm limited to two hundred and forty four pages.
I think I got the publisher to increase the size. They were only
gonna do five and a half by seven and a quarter, which is fucking
tiny, and I think I got I'm gonna change at the six and a
half by nine and a half. I don't know, but this thing's driving
me nuts. It's fucking all consuming, and I gotta write another book,
which pre is gonna prevent me from leaving the country. I might go to
Brazil for two weeks in July, but aside from that, I'm stuck in
a country and I'm just I'm going to like four or five different American cities
doing good old train track botany, which is what the book is gonna be
about. And uh, I'm fucking stuck to do it because it's there's a
lot of leeway. And I told the publisher too, because I got kind
of roped into doing this. I told him too. I'm like, you
notice is gonna be all over the place, right, Like this is gonna
be written kind of like the way I do I would do a video,
Like this isn't gonna be like some you know, professional voice, you know
of like scientific data on what enables plants to grow in these fucked up areas.
And it's gonna be my observations and the same thing that that you know
I do in a video. And you're cool with that, that's fine,
but like I'm not. God, There's just there's a lot. There's so
many crappy books, man, There's so many boring books that feel kind of
forced and feel like they just lack any passion or or vibrants to them,
you know, or vivaciousness. It's just like, you know, I don't
know. There's certain points when I've been writing the last the last bit,
very few, but certain points where I felt like I was doing fucking homework.
That suck. And if you're if you're if you're hitting that where it
feels like it's fucking homework, then that sucks. You gotta stop, you
gotta feel good, you gotta get stuck. They get dopamine shots. Looking
at all these plants again and remembering these habitats like I was, remember this
one spot in a Dominican republic where god, it was this cloud forest near
the Haitian border. It was like eight thousand feet up seven or eight thousand
feet just a credible wet forest, wet chili forest. Pinus oxidenttalis was a
dominant pine. The ground was covered in thuff. There was you know a
number of really cool back rist species, the fucking composites there, like the
members of ast racy that grew there were just fucking insane, like so many
cool plants. And you know, those islands have been biogeographical stepping stones between
North America and South America for fucking millions of years. You got to think,
especially when sea levels were lower like those were, that was essentially a
land bridge between what is that Venezuela and Florida. And so some of the
some of the some of the first exposure I had to lineages that I later
saw in Brazil was in the Dominican Republic and the cloud forests up there.
But I was in this one spot and I just remember it as God.
It was like these I think it was karst, these karsed hills, you
know, like dog toothcarts, like limestone that weathers due to acidic rainwater weathering
it chemically weathering it into like these tooth shapes. And uh, agave intermixeda
was there just like this high elevation of gave. I've got one here.
South Texas fucking hates it. It's too hot for it. It sucks.
Its metabolism just slows down. It's not really it's not really growing anymore.
But uh, but a gove intermixed it was there like these big, just
giant green bowls like of agave, like three feet across. You know.
In the shady understory, the light understory of pinas soxx on Ontalis, and
I just remember hearing this bird. It sounded like a it sounds spooky.
It sounded more pleasing than that. It wasn't. But it was like this
long drawn out call that didn't sound it would, you know, it would
last for like fifteen seconds and it didn't really change pitch. It was such
a beautiful call. I wish I could have remembered what in some of the
videos I did there. I think I captured it like one of the Cloud
Force of Dominican one of the Cloud Forces of the Dominican Republic videos, but
I haven't gone back to look at which video it is or whatever. But
uh, man, it was. It was. It was such an amazing
little spot and it was a really beat up dirt road to get up there,
and you can tell not a lot of people were going up there.
And man, yeah, right out of Haitian border. What a fucking amazing
spot. Haites all fucked up. I think I got a friend who's still
there. She's in jack mel God damn. That's sad. Anyway, Uh,
I think I had more stuff to talk about, but I think maybe
I'll leave it there, save for the next time I didn't even mean to
do a podcast today. I got shit to do. But uh, oh,
you know what I did want to tell This is a funny story.
I don't know why I thought about it, and it's kind of irrelevant everything
else we're talking about, but I remember something brought this up my minding other
day. I remember riding trains in Mexico illegally, riding freight trains. We
were going south. It was like two thousand and five and and I was.
I was with my guy Sean and this other dude, Logan, and
I remember we were going. We crossed at Laredo. We went and we
met up in Houston, took a bus to Corpus Christy, caught a train
from Corpus Christy West little short line railroad to Laredo. We saw the Selena's
statue of Corpus Christie, always a you gotta go pay homage to Selena.
And then we crossed on foot at Laredo into Nuevo Laredo, which seems insane
now it's like two thousand and five and uh, and we fucking we went
to the main crossing. Then we went to the main yard and it was
fucking hectic there. Man like the workers in Mexico. You know, they
do shit that railroad workers in the United States would never do. Like they're
climbing on cars or walking along the fucking roofs. There's no there's no like
worker injury laws that one's gonna file a lawsuit against faroh Mix or whatever the
fucking railroad company is down there. If they get hurt, you get hurt,
you're fuck. It's just down your own whatever. You know, there's
no there's no wink wink, nudge nudge. I fell down the stairs.
Let me see the employer, which honestly would be perfectly fine in the case
of Class one railroad companies in the US like Union Pacific or BNS stuff.
They're all fucking dirty, you know, corporate horror whatever. But anyway,
uh so, these workers are just they're having a fucking blast because there's no
rules down there. You know, there's no safety rules. They're able to
just you know, climb on equipment, swing around. They're whistling. Shit.
We go up to this brakeman in a yard in Laredo and I asked
them in Spanish, I said, you know where we're trying to catch trains
for the South, Where will we do that? And he just fucking this
dude smiles and starts kind of chuckling, and he's like he's just saying,
like for the South, you want to go to the South. And he's
got gold fronts in this dude, Braakman's wearing gold fronts. I was like,
Jesus, it's like this. I mean, this guy's not connected.
Fuck me man. Oh god. He was either like secure yard security or
a brave I don't know, but he was, you know, kind of
like it's like, you gringos want to go south? All right? He
told he's like the Crossing. You gotta go to the Last Crusades, you
know, or El Cruise or whatever. And uh and so, uh we
go to the we go to the fucking we go to the crossing, and
we get on a fucking page. It's called a pig and a bucket.
It's like a piggyback. Piggyback is when you got like a flatbed railcar and
you put a truck trailer on top of it. You see us all the
time. I don't know if you still do. I haven't seen it rolling
through West Texas in a while, but uh, it used to be really
common and then a pig and a bucket is when you take a well car,
it's like a it's literally like a bowl shaped car that they put a
container in railcar that they put a container in, like a shipping container,
but instead they would put instead of a container, they would put a fucking
truck trailer in this thing. And so you get down in there, you
climb under the axles of the truck trailer and you're safe. You're fucking you
can hide out in that little pig and a bucket. Uh. The bucket's
got a floor to some parts of it, and you're you're hidden. And
so we got on this train. We rode south. We got we got
stopped. Thing. It was somewhere like you know, early morning, next
morning. We got on a night next morning in the morning. I think
we're the only people going south too, because everybody's going north, you know,
it's like Central Americans going north. And we got on, uh,
we got stopped. We get this train stopped and sided out to let another
train pass, and these security guards came up and ay they were talking to
us and they're like, yo, you gotta get off. We're like,
oh no, no, we just you know, we did the whole like
I'm stupid and I can't speak Spanish thing, and and they're like, uh
ah right, what are they just? They just said fuck it whatever.
And then they're like, hey, you want to buy some Paoti and we're
like, nah no. They were trying to sell us payoti, which I
thought was just bullshit, you know, But then it turns out like,
oh now we knowing now, like there probably was paoti there. This is
that whole area, that whole line is like rife with paoti, you know,
south of Monterey, and uh we were, yeah, we were waste
out of the Monterey at this point. We were like in the Sierra Madre
Oriental, like on the west side of it, so it was dry.
And finally, so the train gets up again and then you know, we
ride for six hours, trains going, kept stopping and siding out, letting
trains bad. And I think the fastest it was going at any point was
only like fifty miles peror anyway, which isn't that fast for And then it's
the terrain is you know, grade, it's hilly and shit too, so
it's curving and they got to slow down for the curve, like twenty mile
per hour. Anyway, that night, we get to this little town called
Vanegas and these kids are the security guard. They're like nineteen, and they
stop and they look over the edge of this bucket that we're in and they're
like, you gotta get off. We're like, ah, no, we
did the whole thing, like no, no at the end or no at
the endough you know, uh uh you know uh mia spanol. No,
it's we went on. And they're like, yeah, get the fuck up,
like no, you get off, like we know we're not buying it.
And there we was just like, yeah, you gotta get off.
And they didn't try to sell us payote and they tried nothing. You got
to get off. So we get off and we're like fuck man. And
these they were nice. They were totally nice and polite. They're like no,
nope, nope, and they were like nineteen. It was like one
guy was like nineteen, the other kids were like sixteen. Like holy shit,
all right, so I guess we're getting off here. And so we
get off and we are in the middle of it's like fucking it's high and
dry and cold and it's January and the fucking you know, it's chilly.
Man. I mean, it's Venegas is like high high elevation. I think
it was like three or four thousand feet. Most of Mexico is is high
elevation, or at least higher than sea level here. You know, it's
it's a fucking the whole area, The whole country is basically uplifted except near
the coasts. And uh, you know, Mexico City is like seven thousand
foot elevations. Anyway, We're like, well, I guess we're spending the
fucking night here tonight. We're just gonna go cowboy camp in the h you
know, get some cardboard and roll out a sleeping bag and uh and camp
in the fucking bush. And so I had this little crack box with me.
It was like a you know, crack box, like a radio,
like a little battery powered radio. This is before iPhones, is before I
fucking hate Apple too. By the way, I get Android, you get
that, you know, anyway, but any opportunity to ship on Apple.
But it was before cell phones and all this shit. You know, we're
widespreads before any of that shit. So I would I had like a little
thrift store tape player with a radio in it that would carry around. I
had some tapes and stuff, and uh, and so I put the radio
on and we're in the middle of a fucking desert and I see this dude
walk by. He's like this fucking sixty year old man carrying a giant machete
and having like a big Clint Eastwood looking cloak, a serape, you know,
And I'm like, man, where the fuck are we? We are
like cuddy as fun, We are cutty as fucking There was creosote. I
didn't know it at the time, but I know it now. It was
creosode everywhere and this desert no trees, and so we're like, shit,
man, all right, well, I guess we're gonna sleep here. You
know, it's gonna be fucking cool. We just cowboy camp, roll out
of fucking sleeping bag. And it was actually really beautiful. I would I
would definitely have appreciated it more now than I did then. But uh,
and so I turned the radio on and I'm going through the channels. I
can't find anything. And the first thing, the only thing I'd come across
it wasn't even in Spanish, it wasn't some weird Christian radio. It was
fucking Frank Sinatra. Singing New York, New York, and if we just
still started laughing, I was like, what the fuck, it's like,
I guess the love that I guess they liked this shit down here. It
was the only thing. And it was like a you could tell the tower
was close too, because it was a uh a broad, it was a
long, it was a loud signal. You know, it wasn't crispy at
all. So I just started fucking laughing. Man, it was crazy.
And then the next day, man, we had we spent the whole day
in Venegas. We had to fucking do some. We had to pull some
like gorilla activity to try to get back on that train and get out of
there. And they had I realized, now they that's where they have a
thousand mile inspection, Like because the Car Department was going by on ATV.
They inspect the breaks. You know, this is the shit that class won.
Railroad companies and the United States are cutting now. They're cutting all these
jobs and that's why events like East Palestine, Ohio, that massive toxic spill
happens, because you know, Norfolk Southern had cut the fucking did a whole
podcast episode on railroads totally unrelated to botany with a friend of mine who runs
the group Railroad Workers United. Listen to it. It's from early twenty twenty
three. I think it was like February twenty twenty three. But anyway,
so yeah, so the car department was going by and they won't really report
you, but they're not going to be your friends necessarily. You you don't
know. Used to be a lot of workers just didn't care and they would,
you know, hook the train bums or hoboes up or whatever. But
not so much anymore, and I think a lot of people are just pairing
of Anyway, we were worried about these same kids, man, these these
really nice but super gung hole kids kicking us off. So eventually we fucking
made it on the on another railcar, and we you know, we were
we had the high God, I can't still can't believe we did. It
was such an ord deal man. We had to wait twenty four hours in
Van Vegas, San Louis Poto c State, and then we got on fucking
chili night. It was winter night in the high Sierra Madre. And then
the next morning the train had entered a I think it went through Sam Miguel
Day in it at the time where all the gringoes and ex pats live.
It's like at Artie Town, you know, but lower elevation, warm,
tropical feeling. Whatever. It was like, you know, it's like,
oh God, we made it out of Venegas anyway, and we had a
great fucking rest of the trip too. It was that was crazy, crazy,
fucking fun trip. Went through you know, went through Irra Puato,
we went through Guadalajara. Talked to some of the tramps in the Guadalajara yard.
Uh, these kids that were hanging out there, A bunch of Guatemalans
are waiting to go north and the fucking local kids that were hanging out with
them and ended up going to Manzanillo and Kalema. It was a it was
a fucking wild ass trip. It was cool. It was a fun.
I don't know what got me thinking about that. I don't know why I'm
telling you about it, but I figure a good story is a good story.
So uh, anyway, I wonder what happened if you tried that.
Now. I had a friend I knew a guy who actually rode trains Mexico
like six years ago. He talked about the cartel, getting up, you
know, getting up and looking at his tattoos, like you know, holding
everybody up on the train. They were looking for somebody. They were looking.
They end up looking at his tattoos, you know, trying to see
if he had any any gang tattoos. And shit, he didn't. He's
not a he's not a gangster. He's just some fucking nerd. But uh,
but uh, they were like vetting him. Man, they were looking
for someone. I don't know. It's weird. It's hairy down there now,
man, it's sad and it got really hairy. But anyway, and
so you got to go to see a lot of good plants though. Anyway,
all right, well that's all I got for now. If you ordered
stickers or any of that stuff, I send most of them out. If
you haven't gotten him yet, send me an email. Keep it short.
The short you can keep the emails, the more chance you have of me
responding. And uh, I think that's it. I think that's it.
So anyway, and if you've got to promise somebody, just reach out to
them and be kind and communicate, and that's all you could do. And
if they don't accept it, and just fucking you know whatever. That's all
you can that's all you can do, at least you tried. But uh,
but definitely don't go around trying to get other people to not like them.
Everybody's just trying here, right, every world just trying here in this
fucking age of mass extinction and uh tumor sprawl and whatever the shit. M
there's always more stuff I want to talk about. I can't fucking remember what
it was. Maybe I start writing stuff honest time. Anyway, that's all
I got. I have a g rest of your day. Go fuck yoursel by