Rants about Tree Planting, the Urban Heat Island, Etc

<v Speaker 1>Scary here the preacher man, Danny the lous and sary
<v Speaker 1>of the President, the Sena on the House and Jerys.
<v Speaker 2>So Scott Buggy out me be please.
<v Speaker 1>Baby.
<v Speaker 2>He loved Scott bunny with me. Oh, I'm not I'm
<v Speaker 2>very skin I'm not my very ski that I kind
<v Speaker 2>of guy. And ar.
<v Speaker 1>Cherry Cheery swimmer.
<v Speaker 2>Chery, Jarry spread char shut stop Jerry's iberry.
<v Speaker 3>Oh it's such a catchy tune.
<v Speaker 2>You know, I didn't.
<v Speaker 3>I didn't. I mean, I guess I knew it would
<v Speaker 3>come this fast. It's coming on real fast. It's fascisms here, buddy,
<v Speaker 3>I think the most. The part that shocks me the
<v Speaker 3>most is that, you know, I thought, if we just
<v Speaker 3>got more more, more white people to talk about how
<v Speaker 3>they're privileged, maybe it would hold this back. You know,
<v Speaker 3>we just got more people to put pronouns in their emails,
<v Speaker 3>sign offs and do land acknowledgements. Maybe that would all
<v Speaker 3>that performative, feel good jerk off shit. I thought maybe
<v Speaker 3>that would Uh, I thought maybe that would hold back fascism.
<v Speaker 3>But apparently it wasn't. I didn't know I thought it
<v Speaker 3>would be. Apparently it wasn't enough. Now, yeah, we have
<v Speaker 3>secret police just shooting people and dragging them out of
<v Speaker 3>if you would just comply anyway, if you're not in
<v Speaker 3>the United States right now, I mean, the whole world's
<v Speaker 3>going to fucking shit. But you know whatever, I just
<v Speaker 3>had to put this stuff out there really quick for
<v Speaker 3>the people that always say, you know, the shut up
<v Speaker 3>and play equivalent that say just stick to botany. I
<v Speaker 3>just wanted to get them to stop listening. I'm just kidding.
<v Speaker 3>I'm just kidding. We could. We can agree to disagree,
<v Speaker 3>right There's there's always one or two of them, you know,
<v Speaker 3>there's always one or two.
<v Speaker 1>Uh.
<v Speaker 3>I got to piss off everybody, you know, even the
<v Speaker 3>people that generally like what I do, even the people
<v Speaker 3>that may agree with me on most things. That's my
<v Speaker 3>goal is to piss off everybody, because everybody's full of shit. Okay,
<v Speaker 3>That's that's all we need to say really about. Uh
<v Speaker 3>this isn't a political podcast, but that we do need
<v Speaker 3>to talk about how it's getting hot out there. I
<v Speaker 3>got one of those friends who said he converted all
<v Speaker 3>his feat into silver. He's one of those guys. He's
<v Speaker 3>gonna be living in a bunker. Love the dude, but
<v Speaker 3>he's gonna be living in a bunker soon. He's always
<v Speaker 3>got various dude takes. I met him in New York City, like, uh,
<v Speaker 3>twenty three years ago. Really solid guy. He did time
<v Speaker 3>in jail. Wait when I saw him, when he got
<v Speaker 3>out of jail, he was fucking stacked. I mean he
<v Speaker 3>was like the most swollen I've ever seen him. Jail
<v Speaker 3>was actually really good for him, but it was like
<v Speaker 3>and the being a bullshit charge. They pulled him off
<v Speaker 3>the street for having a knife and he had prior,
<v Speaker 3>so you know, that's he did six months for that.
<v Speaker 3>It wasn't even that long. That was almost twenty years ago.
<v Speaker 3>But anyway, Yeah, how you doing. It's good, it's good.
<v Speaker 3>Things are going really smooth out there. They're going really great. Oh,
<v Speaker 3>this fucking species of crazy apes is never gonna How
<v Speaker 3>do the sociopaths always get in power? Everywhere? Everywhere? It
<v Speaker 3>is it's the same, you know, And then the people
<v Speaker 3>that are you know, you want in power, they don't.
<v Speaker 3>They never know how to be hard. They're too soft.
<v Speaker 3>So then you always and the people that do know
<v Speaker 3>how to be hard always fucking psychopaths. So it's a
<v Speaker 3>it's a yeah, I don't know, man, you know, hold
<v Speaker 3>your loved ones tight. Okay, the last podcast. It's been
<v Speaker 3>a month. Sorry, I had to take a hiatus. It's
<v Speaker 3>been fucking I've been overwhelmed with shit. I need to
<v Speaker 3>start saying no to things. I get invited to do
<v Speaker 3>these webinars and presentations and stuff and h and I
<v Speaker 3>just even though they pay, I have to say no
<v Speaker 3>because I just I need a fucking relax. I don't
<v Speaker 3>know how to And I got to get off the
<v Speaker 3>fucking coffee too, I really do. I need to stop
<v Speaker 3>with the coffee. I need coffee to wake up in
<v Speaker 3>the morning. I'm too dependent on it. You know. I
<v Speaker 3>went on a lovely I went on a bike ride
<v Speaker 3>yesterday along the Guadalupe River in Comal County, Texas, and
<v Speaker 3>uh oh, it's so fuck It's so gorgeous down there.
<v Speaker 3>It's just Texas is just Mexico. You want to piss
<v Speaker 3>off some Texans, make sure to say make Texas Mexico again.
<v Speaker 3>It's you know, there's so much beautiful land in Mexico.
<v Speaker 3>Of course, there's litter everywhere, and it's heavily corrupt, but
<v Speaker 3>there's a lot of beautiful land there. Because they've they
<v Speaker 3>have not been able to you know, it's not all
<v Speaker 3>privately owned, so you can't just you know, maybe the
<v Speaker 3>older steward of the land passes away and then their
<v Speaker 3>children don't give a shit. Their attorneys or some horrible thing,
<v Speaker 3>no offense to any it. They're actually you probably full
<v Speaker 3>of attorneys. There's only a handful of them out there
<v Speaker 3>that are that aren't ship bags, you know, and my
<v Speaker 3>attorney is one of them. Right, But uh, you get
<v Speaker 3>to go into that fucking field, man, that's got to
<v Speaker 3>be just so dry and joyless that the only thing
<v Speaker 3>you have left is to just wish for money and
<v Speaker 3>try to get as much money as possible, and you're
<v Speaker 3>just this shell of a person. Uh yeah, I don't,
<v Speaker 3>I don't, I don't the attorney thing, I don't know.
<v Speaker 3>But anyway, but but uh, you know, it's uh the
<v Speaker 3>land and tell when it's all private, you know, then
<v Speaker 3>of course it's anything's up for sale. Everybody's a whoa,
<v Speaker 3>everybody's a whoa. So the temptation is just too great.
<v Speaker 3>You know, your dad wanted to preserve this land. Now
<v Speaker 3>you're gonna sell it, why the fuck not? And you're
<v Speaker 3>gonna cash in and uh and then so it just
<v Speaker 3>bit by bit, whereas if it's if there's BLM land
<v Speaker 3>or public land or forest service land or whatever, it'll
<v Speaker 3>get maybe hoard out to mining companies, et cetera. But
<v Speaker 3>you know it's not going to be sold off and
<v Speaker 3>turned into a data center or a Uh well, I
<v Speaker 3>can get turned into a soul from there's all kinds
<v Speaker 3>of the whole thing is you just you want to
<v Speaker 3>keep land public and in the collective, and you want
<v Speaker 3>to make room for the other life forms that exist there,
<v Speaker 3>right because it's part of the living machine that keeps
<v Speaker 3>the land alive. But that's far too much foresight for
<v Speaker 3>most humans today. What are we doing? It was Son,
<v Speaker 3>you know, when I was with Caesar, my friend, Uh
<v Speaker 3>Saysar and Uh, we were driving through where the fuck
<v Speaker 3>were we hit dollgo or something, and he just he
<v Speaker 3>just said, we're driving past all this. Uh just I
<v Speaker 3>forget what I think. Maybe it's on the outskirts of
<v Speaker 3>corrector I frege where the fuck we were? We were
<v Speaker 3>in a developed area, one of the like few heavily
<v Speaker 3>developed areas down there, because a lot of it's still agrarian.
<v Speaker 3>And he just looks around, He's like, what are we doing?
<v Speaker 3>And I knew immediately what he was talking about. He
<v Speaker 3>was figuratively speaking. He wasn't talking about what we were
<v Speaker 3>doing in the car. Of course, he wasn't talking about
<v Speaker 3>what are we doing today? It was like, what the
<v Speaker 3>fuck are we doing? Like it's a species, you know,
<v Speaker 3>And I was like, I know, brother, what are we doing?
<v Speaker 3>I don't think we know? What a fucking mess? Eight
<v Speaker 3>billion of us and going up. But last I spoke
<v Speaker 3>to you all out there, Welcome to an episode of
<v Speaker 3>the crime Pace Bunny Doesn't Podcast. By the way, last
<v Speaker 3>I spoke to you, I was in Hidalgo. We ended
<v Speaker 3>up going down to Wajaka and seeing Fukyria purpussii. What
<v Speaker 3>a fucking epic habitat growing on this karst on this
<v Speaker 3>like you know, hard limestone, Fukiria Purpussia. The tree okatillo,
<v Speaker 3>a totem pole, a photosynthetic green stemmed totem pole blooming
<v Speaker 3>with its white, presumably moth pollinated flowers, and these weird
<v Speaker 3>little anthra appendages. Did you know the Okatillo family his
<v Speaker 3>sister to the Flox family.
<v Speaker 2>Did you know that?
<v Speaker 3>Did you know? I don't think you knew that. I
<v Speaker 3>don't think you knew that you can download the angiosperm
<v Speaker 3>phylogeny poster. I think if you go to the crime
<v Speaker 3>pace website and on the tour page, there's on the
<v Speaker 3>KAO tour page at the bottom there's a coarse materials
<v Speaker 3>file folder you can download in the angiosperm phylogeny posters,
<v Speaker 3>and there it's a thirty eight megabyte PDF. And you
<v Speaker 3>can look at Fukiriac, the Fukyria family, the Ocatillo family,
<v Speaker 3>and see that it's sister to Polomonyac, to Flox family
<v Speaker 3>and the order Raic Cayley's, and you can really see it.
<v Speaker 3>I mean, if you look at like Cantua bucks of folio,
<v Speaker 3>which is one of the more basal members of the
<v Speaker 3>Flox family of Polomoniac, you can see the resemblance in
<v Speaker 3>the flowers between like Fukyia purpussii and.
<v Speaker 2>A.
<v Speaker 3>And this is Flox. Curiously enough, Robert Anthony Villa over
<v Speaker 3>there in Tucson messaged me to tell me that Fukyria,
<v Speaker 3>I guess, used to actually be in the genus Cantua.
<v Speaker 3>Is that true? Though, there we go, It's true Cantua
<v Speaker 3>fasciculata Fukyria fasciculatum now, but it's listed as a synonym
<v Speaker 3>on poo dot science dot q dot org plants at
<v Speaker 3>the World Online. So they were so similar in flower
<v Speaker 3>they were confused. They were confused to be in uh
<v Speaker 3>or was. It was thought to be synonymous with canto.
<v Speaker 3>At least this species was. It was described in nineteen
<v Speaker 3>o three, Is that right? Yeah, nineteen oh three, first
<v Speaker 3>publishing bulletin of the Tory Botanical Club.
<v Speaker 2>So there you go.
<v Speaker 3>But Canto is a fucking cool genus. I knew it
<v Speaker 3>because I used to grow some. I used to grow it.
<v Speaker 3>It's uh Andyan. It's from it's founder, from the Andes,
<v Speaker 3>you know, to Andy's Mountains. It's Andyan. And I used
<v Speaker 3>to grow it when I lived in a in a
<v Speaker 3>Bay Area and I had a couple that somebody had
<v Speaker 3>given me that I planted on Mendela Parkway, which I
<v Speaker 3>think now probably got removed and destroyed from the fucking
<v Speaker 3>real their God damn, that's spicy Karen Realtor who moved
<v Speaker 3>in and destroyed the illegal garden that I that I
<v Speaker 3>had right there on a I'm in Mendela Boulevard in Oakland.
<v Speaker 3>Some of it's still there. But she she had a
<v Speaker 3>heart on for me. She really wanted to just she
<v Speaker 3>I pissed her off. It's as I tend to do,
<v Speaker 3>especially with the Karen type. It's it really happens, you know,
<v Speaker 3>I was I was just doing. I've been begging the
<v Speaker 3>city I live in to plant to the city living
<v Speaker 3>in South Texas to plant street trees. And it's fucking
<v Speaker 3>this is going to be an ongoing, long battle. I
<v Speaker 3>can already tell, because they just hate trees. I put
<v Speaker 3>this post up saying that, you know, the people in
<v Speaker 3>South Tech, the dominant culture in South Texas, not everybody,
<v Speaker 3>it's a generalization, but the dominant cultural tenets are that
<v Speaker 3>nature's messy and it means snakes and uh and you know,
<v Speaker 3>just more like fear and alienation from nature, and you know,
<v Speaker 3>they hate it. It's just just referred to as monty.
<v Speaker 3>It's just garbage, scrub, Gotta get rid of it and uh.
<v Speaker 3>And like ninety nine percent of the people that live
<v Speaker 3>down there that comment out on the post, we're like, God,
<v Speaker 3>you're so right. And then there were like one or
<v Speaker 3>two who were like, no, it's not. They were just
<v Speaker 3>like complete denial, you know, like my Abolita has my
<v Speaker 3>my Abita has she has got she's got a potted euphorbia.
<v Speaker 3>She's got a you know, she got a she got
<v Speaker 3>crape myrtles on the site of her driveway. She don't
<v Speaker 3>hate nature, she loves it. She she loves plants. I
<v Speaker 3>love plants. I love plants, right, you love you love plants? Right?
<v Speaker 3>Like what what plants?
<v Speaker 2>Like?
<v Speaker 3>The horticultural bullshit to get some fucking petunias and then
<v Speaker 3>you see actual thorn scrub that evolved in the on
<v Speaker 3>the land where you live, and you shit your pants
<v Speaker 3>and start crying and freak out and want to bulldoze it.
<v Speaker 3>That's what goes on right South Texas more than anywhere else.
<v Speaker 3>It's just such a it's so weird, and it's it's
<v Speaker 3>probably like the ugliest, like the the current human landscape
<v Speaker 3>of South texch this is probably one of the ugliest
<v Speaker 3>I've seen anywhere. Maybe Florida could, I think like the
<v Speaker 3>Orlando area could probably compete with it. But it's like
<v Speaker 3>they and they've really but you know what they love Lately,
<v Speaker 3>what's been going on the cultural leaders, the the uh
<v Speaker 3>stewards of the culture down there, the political leaders which
<v Speaker 3>are all just kind of shills for developers and business interests,
<v Speaker 3>and shit. That's all like local city politicians are right,
<v Speaker 3>they're mostly just they're not They don't work for the
<v Speaker 3>people and the citizens. They're mostly shills for business, you know,
<v Speaker 3>Chamber of commerce, for construction, interest developers, businesses that want
<v Speaker 3>to move there. That's where they get the tax money
<v Speaker 3>from that. Then they put in their own pockets somehow
<v Speaker 3>or use for campaign donations. Very little of it actually
<v Speaker 3>goes back to the citizenry, but you know, order to
<v Speaker 3>improve the material lives as a citizenry. But actually that's
<v Speaker 3>not true. They just built the little park for the
<v Speaker 3>kiddies in there where I live. That was nice. It
<v Speaker 3>must have cost a few million. Yeah, so you know,
<v Speaker 3>of course, you gotta be in hyperbolic. You gotta take
<v Speaker 3>it with a grain of salt. I'm a little full
<v Speaker 3>of shit too. I'm just a little anger. But but yet,
<v Speaker 3>but that you know that they they've really been into
<v Speaker 3>these led billboards lately, that is the big thing. Those
<v Speaker 3>are going up everywhere, so we can ruin the night sky.
<v Speaker 3>We can just more like mental and visual pollution and garbage.
<v Speaker 3>And again I bring this up. You think about growing
<v Speaker 3>up in a place where these are the tenants. It's
<v Speaker 3>all just commercialism and pavement. And you wonder why there's
<v Speaker 3>mental health crisises. You wonder why people are assholes. You
<v Speaker 3>wonder why everybody's miserable. You wonder why people lead unfulfilling lives,
<v Speaker 3>and uh, when you really get down to it, are
<v Speaker 3>unhappy and want to die, which I think is just
<v Speaker 3>what is a Willy's I'm at Willy's house. The fucking
<v Speaker 3>fridge is going on, and know what's going on? You
<v Speaker 3>got these? You got these? You get these? L E
<v Speaker 3>L G F it what is this thing that's what
<v Speaker 3>made a little beeping sound? Anyway, you know, this is
<v Speaker 3>why it's COVID was so good. It just shut everything down.
<v Speaker 3>I really shut the fuck up for you know, the
<v Speaker 3>mild people got to experience happiness for a while. And
<v Speaker 3>then half the country, well the whole country went nuts.
<v Speaker 3>Half the country went nuts one way and it's still
<v Speaker 3>wearing masks outside, and then the other country went nuts
<v Speaker 3>the other way, and you know, just totally started shitting
<v Speaker 3>on the entire idea of vaccines of any kind. And
<v Speaker 3>I'm just basic courteous, courteous behavior. So you know, the
<v Speaker 3>courteous behavior was somehow i'mpinging on the freedom the whole.
<v Speaker 3>What I'm trying to say is that the whole United
<v Speaker 3>States culture right now is just a toxic soup, and
<v Speaker 3>it's You're just much better off just trying to go
<v Speaker 3>into nature quote unquote in nature the living world as
<v Speaker 3>much as possible, and learn about that. Teach yourself a skill.
<v Speaker 3>Young people write me and I ask what should I
<v Speaker 3>do to get into Bondie. I said, you don't really
<v Speaker 3>want to waste money going to these expensive universities. Go
<v Speaker 3>to community college if you really need to get some
<v Speaker 3>Take a geology class, get it, you know, establish the
<v Speaker 3>geologic time scale. We should teach children that in first grade.
<v Speaker 3>And then you know, get get the basic classes down,
<v Speaker 3>science classes, shit like that, and uh, don't waste time
<v Speaker 3>on philosophy. Well, my philosophy can be I guess nice.
<v Speaker 3>You maybe take one philosophy class, you know, but you
<v Speaker 3>want to do it a community college where it's cheap.
<v Speaker 3>You just want to have the material in front of
<v Speaker 3>you and be forced to sit down and look at it.
<v Speaker 3>Make sure you stay off the social media because it's
<v Speaker 3>addictive as fucking it will ruin you, or at least
<v Speaker 3>heavily heavily mitigate the effects. Of it, you know, keep
<v Speaker 3>it to a keep it to a very mild amount,
<v Speaker 3>and then uh, you know, go and get it get
<v Speaker 3>like uh, you know, electricians are making a lot of
<v Speaker 3>money right now, learn to do learn a trade, right,
<v Speaker 3>and you should do something like electricity is cool to
<v Speaker 3>learn about. That would be a good thing to learn about,
<v Speaker 3>very useful skill. Or go into welding, right, but always
<v Speaker 3>keep your foot in the outer world of you know,
<v Speaker 3>teaching yourself botany or geology or physics or whatever the fuck, like,
<v Speaker 3>make sure you keep training your mind right, exercise your mind. Fucker. Anyway,
<v Speaker 3>So back to uh, where where did we last leave?
<v Speaker 3>You had dog, But we went to Wahawka after that
<v Speaker 3>found some wonderful uh early Cretaceous fossils, fern fossils coming
<v Speaker 3>out of this sleep eroding hillside the main road between
<v Speaker 3>the main highway between uh Puebla and Wahaca that ends
<v Speaker 3>up going through no Chistlan. That is that's just the
<v Speaker 3>fucking that's that's where a good stuff is, you know.
<v Speaker 3>And of course this limestone is just incredible and all
<v Speaker 3>this stuff is endemic to limestone. I saw trixis pringly eye.
<v Speaker 3>Another trixis species yellow flowered member of the astracy. You
<v Speaker 3>know what, the smelly leaves smells really good. Trixis is
<v Speaker 3>a great plant. Trixis inula we get up here, and
<v Speaker 3>Trixis californica in central and southern Texas. And then there
<v Speaker 3>Wasnahwatlia hypoluca formerly goch Nadia, which is a tree member
<v Speaker 3>of the sunflower family as Tracey, but the ecotype down
<v Speaker 3>are in Wahaka. I mean this was growing with Fulkyia purpussii.
<v Speaker 3>Fukyria purpussi I was growing with Fukia purpussii, and it
<v Speaker 3>it looked like a much different ecotype. The thing that
<v Speaker 3>struck me so much about the thing that struck me
<v Speaker 3>about so much of Mexico is that so many of
<v Speaker 3>the South Texas members of the flora like Karwinsky, Humboltiana,
<v Speaker 3>Cordia basierra Senegelia berlandi raye and Nhualia hypoluca, Jatropha dioeca,
<v Speaker 3>on and on and on and on. What was it?
<v Speaker 3>Cobralinia was down there too, of course, so many of these.
<v Speaker 3>I want to see that rare Cobralinea that grows in Bolivia.
<v Speaker 3>There's a rare one. I think it's Cobralinea Hala canta. Anyway,
<v Speaker 3>you know cobralinea from the mustard order, Brasickele's you know,
<v Speaker 3>you know, you know Jimmy Nosas, he used to work
<v Speaker 3>down at the car wash over there. It was just
<v Speaker 3>the front that he had down Aaron Melrose Park. But
<v Speaker 3>the thing that struck me was that so many of
<v Speaker 3>these floristic associates, these species that you see in South
<v Speaker 3>Texas also grew down all the way down to Ojaca.
<v Speaker 3>Most of them were certainly in Hidalgo, but a few
<v Speaker 3>went all the way down to Ojaca. Oh, Mandavilla. There
<v Speaker 3>was a mandavilla species I think was mandavilla Joajakana. And
<v Speaker 3>we get mandavilla andanu genosa and Mandevilla hypoluca in West
<v Speaker 3>Texas and mandevilla. Oh god, what's the other one. There's
<v Speaker 3>another one Patty Manning used to grow. But anyway, all
<v Speaker 3>these plants you know, grow in Mexico to their Mexican
<v Speaker 3>plants that basically make it into Texas and Texas is
<v Speaker 3>really Mexico. I'm going to just start referring to Texas
<v Speaker 3>as Mega Mexico. It's that Jersey Zerdowski quote which I'll
<v Speaker 3>read to you here in a little bit. But so
<v Speaker 3>many of these plants were growing in Mexico, but they
<v Speaker 3>looked ten times healthier in Mexico because they're growing at
<v Speaker 3>five six thousand feet elevation. And it makes me think
<v Speaker 3>like maybe they were only in the only reason that
<v Speaker 3>they were in Texas to begin with, it was because
<v Speaker 3>of the place is scene cooling. You know, you had
<v Speaker 3>how many, how a few hundred thousand years of cooler,
<v Speaker 3>drier temperatures and glaciers up north. The whole time the
<v Speaker 3>glaciers were up north, it was of course cooler and drier.
<v Speaker 3>I mean it was cooler and wetter in Texas. I
<v Speaker 3>don't know, it was milder climate in Texas certainly, and
<v Speaker 3>then before that, like two million years ago, it was
<v Speaker 3>probably more like lowland tropical flora in South Texas. And
<v Speaker 3>it really makes me curious to know, like what was
<v Speaker 3>what was the flora of Texas like two million years
<v Speaker 3>ago before the place is seen cooling? You know, what
<v Speaker 3>was it? Like, what what are the what are the
<v Speaker 3>microfossils the pollen fossils from from uh that layer reveal
<v Speaker 3>what was growing here back then? Because I feel like
<v Speaker 3>a lot of the stuff that like you look at
<v Speaker 3>Senegelia berlandier I, like we get it at Thorn Scrubs Sanctuary,
<v Speaker 3>tops out at two feet and it looks and it's
<v Speaker 3>leafless half the year because it's so dry. But then
<v Speaker 3>you go to Hidalgo where you also have a dry
<v Speaker 3>season and there are cacti and there's you know, it
<v Speaker 3>was growing with mortillo cactus there, but you've also got
<v Speaker 3>a wet season as well, and it's milder. It's like
<v Speaker 3>it's much cooler. And you're at six thousand feet elevation,
<v Speaker 3>so right there with the elevation, just because the air
<v Speaker 3>is there, that's always gonna make for a milder climate
<v Speaker 3>to begin with. And then the Senegelia air is yeah,
<v Speaker 3>it's like the guahillo there is got a main trunk.
<v Speaker 3>It's more robust, it's more vivid green. It looks healthy
<v Speaker 3>as fuck. It almost looks like a different species. But
<v Speaker 3>then you see it flowering and you see those little
<v Speaker 3>fruits that it's got the legumepos it's split apart, and
<v Speaker 3>you're like, oh shit, this is yeah, this is just guahio.
<v Speaker 3>But this is a healthy guahio. I'm not used to
<v Speaker 3>seeing them perpetually stressed, like you see them in Texas,
<v Speaker 3>and you'll see, you know, in Texas, they'll grow and
<v Speaker 3>they'll get lush, but they're always growing as like a
<v Speaker 3>multi stemmed vase shape to like fifteen feet and then
<v Speaker 3>they die back during the really hot dry spells because
<v Speaker 3>we're lower and hotter and drier. And yeah, it's wild shit, man,
<v Speaker 3>it's wild to tough to think about, but I get
<v Speaker 3>so curious it makes you want to read more axel Rod.
<v Speaker 3>You know, I got a couple of his books, uh,
<v Speaker 3>you know, Daniel Axelrod. I got the Miocene Flora of
<v Speaker 3>Western Nevada and Origins of the California flora. And you
<v Speaker 3>got to look that guy up. He wrote a couple
<v Speaker 3>of good books about you know, and he was a
<v Speaker 3>paleobotanist before anything else. But he was really interested in
<v Speaker 3>exploring where axel Rod was really interested in exploring, you know,
<v Speaker 3>how landscapes change over time. And of course the landscape
<v Speaker 3>is composed of nothing else but the plant species. Sure
<v Speaker 3>there's animals too. We don't have any interesting This is
<v Speaker 3>a fucking bodany podcast. I don't have any interested in animals. Okay,
<v Speaker 3>what do I look like a furry Hey you sick
<v Speaker 3>fuck I'm uh you know, my interest is in the
<v Speaker 3>base of the whole fucking pyramid, the plants, the connection
<v Speaker 3>to the sun, and so plants compose these landscapes, and
<v Speaker 3>they of course change and shift over time. So you know,
<v Speaker 3>I was thinking, I was walking through this, you know,
<v Speaker 3>bleak typical, like bleak Texas Strip Mall. We were going
<v Speaker 3>to Hbos had to get dog food and I was
<v Speaker 3>looking at they had a senna planted. I forget which
<v Speaker 3>senate was, but it was a Mexican senate and I
<v Speaker 3>was like, oh, this is a native sena and Willie
<v Speaker 3>was like, no, it's it's not a non native. Well
<v Speaker 3>where's it from. He's like, oh, it's from Mexico. And
<v Speaker 3>that's that's that's basically a native, you know, like the
<v Speaker 3>distribution may have shifted southward for a few hundred thousand years,
<v Speaker 3>but it'll be back here. If humans weren't here, it
<v Speaker 3>would be back here anyway. Mexico. Again, Texas is just
<v Speaker 3>part of Mexico Floristically. Don't think like a human, right
<v Speaker 3>some some presumably more of it on the conservative side
<v Speaker 3>of the political spectrum. Some person wrote me in response
<v Speaker 3>to a Mega Mexico quote, and they were like, well,
<v Speaker 3>it's why aren't they call American plants? Everybody. This has
<v Speaker 3>nothing to do with recent and I mean last few
<v Speaker 3>thousand years geopolitical designations. This is these lineages have been
<v Speaker 3>around for exponentially longer. Quit thinking like a human right,
<v Speaker 3>zoom out more. Come on, this is nothing. This, this
<v Speaker 3>shouldn't even be a point of contention. If we're on
<v Speaker 3>the same pager, you shouldn't even make this a fucking,
<v Speaker 3>you know, political thing. That'd be fucking small minded and stupid.
<v Speaker 3>You're looking at two too recent of a timeline. And
<v Speaker 3>so with that we'll go into this Jersey Risadowski, he
<v Speaker 3>was a I think he was Polish, and then he
<v Speaker 3>was actually in the Holocaust and then moved to Mexico
<v Speaker 3>at a very young age and became one. He became
<v Speaker 3>the first and foremost botanist of Mexico. And he just
<v Speaker 3>passed away a year or two ago. Rest in peace.
<v Speaker 3>What a fuck. I would have loved to have met
<v Speaker 3>that guy. God damn man, and I had lurked around you, noam,
<v Speaker 3>I've looked around Nam plenty of times. The Science building,
<v Speaker 3>you know, I bought a couple floras. I bought Flora
<v Speaker 3>of the Way of will I own and Flora of Baja.
<v Speaker 3>Uh there or a checklist. Excuse me? They were I
<v Speaker 3>think it was a catatogo. But I never met I
<v Speaker 3>never met the mister Szardowski. I think I'm still pronouncing
<v Speaker 3>his name wrong. I used to pronounce it Risadowski. I
<v Speaker 3>don't know how. I don't know how you pronounced it.
<v Speaker 3>You know, there was always a problem growing up in
<v Speaker 3>Chicago with the check and Polish last names. There is
<v Speaker 3>you couldna have somebody's fucking the vorjak. We had missed
<v Speaker 3>the vorjak. She was a music teacher. She's probably dead now,
<v Speaker 3>all right, p missed the vorjak too. She used to
<v Speaker 3>beat my ass. You know, not really, but you know
<v Speaker 3>it felt like it. She could be a real you know,
<v Speaker 3>she was a real tough cookie man. You don't know,
<v Speaker 3>fucking around in music class. I'm probably sure that. I'm yeah,
<v Speaker 3>I probably did a lot of fucking around. But anyway,
<v Speaker 3>let's read this Jersey rigid Zardowski quote. On the other hand,
<v Speaker 3>it's important to remember that the geographic distribution of organisms
<v Speaker 3>generally ignores the political divisions of the planet's crust, and
<v Speaker 3>is instead frequently linked to the delimitation of natural regions
<v Speaker 3>defined by physiographic, climatic, edaphic, et cetera conditions. To be
<v Speaker 3>consistent with such circumstances and to account for many true endemisms,
<v Speaker 3>it will be necessary in this chapter to extend the
<v Speaker 3>country's borders, and thus the term Mega Mexico will be
<v Speaker 3>used when including parts of the arid zones of Sonora, Chihuahua,
<v Speaker 3>and Tamalipus, which belonged to the United States of America,
<v Speaker 3>the term Mega Mexico two when covering the Central American
<v Speaker 3>territory as far north as Nicaragua Semi Colon, and the
<v Speaker 3>term Mega Mexico three to include both areas Jersey Zardowski Diversitied,
<v Speaker 3>Jorgenes de la Flora, Fanarogamica del Mexico, dew Mexico Mexico.
<v Speaker 3>Excuse me, so, what a fucking I've read that? That
<v Speaker 3>fucking because I always say that, you know, the plants
<v Speaker 3>don't give a shit about human ape ideas of political borders,
<v Speaker 3>and so the more you travel and the better lens
<v Speaker 3>you get on, the better and broader lens you get on.
<v Speaker 3>The floristic composition to the landscape you live on. The
<v Speaker 3>more enlightened you become about how things may or may
<v Speaker 3>not have looked. Yeah, five hundred thousand, a million, two million,
<v Speaker 3>ten million, it's a little far back ten million, but
<v Speaker 3>two you know, two million years ago, and how things
<v Speaker 3>change and how how they respond to geology and climate
<v Speaker 3>and uh you know, uh oor a graphic uplift, et cetera,
<v Speaker 3>not just thorographic but orogenic uplift, So the building of
<v Speaker 3>mountain ranges as well, not just the rain shadows. It's
<v Speaker 3>amazing that so many people still don't realize, so many
<v Speaker 3>United States people still don't realize that basically all of
<v Speaker 3>Mexico is at elevation is a four thousand feet or above,
<v Speaker 3>often six seven thousand feet, right, most of Mexico's at
<v Speaker 3>six thousand feet. The hot dryer areas are three or
<v Speaker 3>four thousand feet. Three thousand feet is really fucking hot
<v Speaker 3>in Mexico. Four thousand feet's a little milder, but you're
<v Speaker 3>still gonna see a lot of the cool you know
<v Speaker 3>cacti that you know, small cacti, cactoid cacti. And then
<v Speaker 3>even it's six thousand feet, you're gonna see a lot
<v Speaker 3>of the columnars still and it can be pretty dry,
<v Speaker 3>you know. And so it's six thousand feet but you're
<v Speaker 3>fucking eighteen twenty degrees latitude, so you're still really close
<v Speaker 3>to the equator, really warm. So, uh, it's elevation. You
<v Speaker 3>got to think about that elevation, man. And most of
<v Speaker 3>Mexico is that elevation. Because you've got the Sierra Madre
<v Speaker 3>on the west and the Sierra Madre on the east,
<v Speaker 3>two different mountain ranges, and you got the Trans Mexican
<v Speaker 3>Volcanic Belt to the south. You got a whole bunch
<v Speaker 3>of tectonic stuff going on, you know, compressional forces that
<v Speaker 3>uplifted the central Mexican plateau and then of course built
<v Speaker 3>the mountain ranges on either side, the uh Serra Madre
<v Speaker 3>Occidental is generally volcanic, Cia Madre or thala is generally limestone,
<v Speaker 3>and then the trans Mexican volcanic. But you know, we
<v Speaker 3>found some wonderful fucking obsidian last time I was, you know,
<v Speaker 3>I loaded my bag up with rocks, nice obsidian popping
<v Speaker 3>out of the fucking roadside. It was. It wasn't like
<v Speaker 3>a fresh obsidian pible. You can find in northern California
<v Speaker 3>where you could tell like, oh wow, this came out
<v Speaker 3>in the last few thousand years, like ten or twenty
<v Speaker 3>thousand years. Like, no, this stuff was older. This is
<v Speaker 3>like last five hundred thousand years. It was buried in mud,
<v Speaker 3>in red mud, basically degraded pummice, degraded tiny pummus gravels.
<v Speaker 3>And so I brought a bunch home to Brink to
<v Speaker 3>give out the people, you know, to give to give
<v Speaker 3>to friends. But god damn man, such so much interesting
<v Speaker 3>flora down there, and still haven't seen such a lanthis,
<v Speaker 3>which is another monotypic genus and family in the Brassicicles.
<v Speaker 3>You should go back and listen to that Brassiclees podcast,
<v Speaker 3>the Must Order podcast I did with my friend Mackenzie Maybury,
<v Speaker 3>doctor Mackenzie Maybury, about because brass Achilles has a lot
<v Speaker 3>of monotypic families in it. It's fucking weird. Cobralinea, such
<v Speaker 3>a lanthis, Tiganophyton. You know what's going on over there?
<v Speaker 3>You get these evolutionary jumps where suddenly something so so
<v Speaker 3>new and so different from what came before evolves that
<v Speaker 3>it goes into its own family and then it but
<v Speaker 3>it never really speciates. So is it new or is
<v Speaker 3>it just is it that new that hasn't had time
<v Speaker 3>to speciate yet, or it just has not there was
<v Speaker 3>no evolutionary push for new species to develop, or it's
<v Speaker 3>always just stayed so localized and hasn't been subjected to isolation.
<v Speaker 3>Obviously in the case of cobralinear that's not true. Well,
<v Speaker 3>Cobralinia has got a couple. I think there's two species
<v Speaker 3>now with that Bolivian one. But it was used to
<v Speaker 3>be clumped. It used to be lumped in with Cobralineus spinosa,
<v Speaker 3>which is fun stuff to think about. I love thinking,
<v Speaker 3>but much more pleasant to think about this kind of
<v Speaker 3>shit than about you know, what's going on in the
<v Speaker 3>human world right now?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, you know.
<v Speaker 3>Don't don't watch too many videos of ice kidnapping people
<v Speaker 3>and beating the shit out of people on your phone
<v Speaker 3>because it's I did that. I did yesterday and it
<v Speaker 3>just bummed me out. Oh I don't need this stuff.
<v Speaker 3>I know what they're doing out there. I don't need
<v Speaker 3>to see it. There's nothing I can do about it
<v Speaker 3>from here. I got to just take a fucking break
<v Speaker 3>from it because it's it's fucking me up. Anyway, let's
<v Speaker 3>do a little reading list. We'll do get to some
<v Speaker 3>of the books I've been It had been in my
<v Speaker 3>bookshelf Lately got the service Burry Abundance and Reciprocity in
<v Speaker 3>a Natural World by Robin wall Kimer. You know which
<v Speaker 3>is you know the amount of people that have told
<v Speaker 3>me to read Brading Sweet Grass, It's at the point
<v Speaker 3>now where I can't I shut down when they tell me.
<v Speaker 3>But but you know, obviously Robin kimerra has done a
<v Speaker 3>lot of wonderful work, and she's gotten a lot of
<v Speaker 3>people jazzed to the living world. And and you know
<v Speaker 3>this book. A friend got this for me. I'm like
<v Speaker 3>ten pages into it. You know, I read like a
<v Speaker 3>typical add a typical add case. But but I'm it's
<v Speaker 3>really stoked to read this one. It's a short one,
<v Speaker 3>it's only what is it like one hundred It's a easy,
<v Speaker 3>easy read. And I've seen some really wonderful interviews with
<v Speaker 3>her where she says she calls it the same thing
<v Speaker 3>I do, the living world. So you know, I would
<v Speaker 3>love to get her on the podcast sometime, but I'm
<v Speaker 3>sure she probably wouldn't touch me with a ten foot poll.
<v Speaker 3>She got a very soft voice. You know, she's a
<v Speaker 3>little bit very different in demeanor than me. But that's okay.
<v Speaker 3>We're reaching different target audiences in mine is much smaller
<v Speaker 3>so but anyway, but that's a good one. The service
<v Speaker 3>bury Abundance and Reciprocity in a natural World, Misskeuith. This
<v Speaker 3>is an old one that was published in twenty eighteen,
<v Speaker 3>and Arboreal Love Affair by Gary Paul Neban. I think
<v Speaker 3>he's the guy. Is that the guy that wrote the
<v Speaker 3>Desert Smells Like Rain? Is that him? I think it's
<v Speaker 3>the same guy based out of Tucson. Cited to read
<v Speaker 3>this too because a lot of people hate mesquit, at
<v Speaker 3>least in Texas. And then I went back to one
<v Speaker 3>of my old favorites by my favorite author that there
<v Speaker 3>ever was Nelson Algren, who actually spent five months in
<v Speaker 3>the Brewster County Jail in the early nineteen thirties for
<v Speaker 3>stealing a typewriter from Suell Ross College. Good for him.
<v Speaker 3>The Texas Stories of Nelson Algren, edited with an introduction
<v Speaker 3>by Bettina Drew. This is a dark book. It's dark literature,
<v Speaker 3>but it's real and it's good and it's you know,
<v Speaker 3>I guess he was fucking right. He was riding freight
<v Speaker 3>trains around the thirties, ended up in Texas and then
<v Speaker 3>had a lot to say about it, which how could
<v Speaker 3>you not? And then somebody sent this book to me,
<v Speaker 3>which I'm stoked to read too, Salt Lakes in Unnatural
<v Speaker 3>History by Caroline Tracy, which there's a number of what
<v Speaker 3>the fuck, it's a number of saltlate. It's not just
<v Speaker 3>about the Great Salt Lake in Utah, of course, that's
<v Speaker 3>where that's chapter one. But you know, she's covered a
<v Speaker 3>whole bunch of different stuff in here. She got Walker Lake, Nevada,
<v Speaker 3>Owens Lake, California, Lake Texcoco from Estadade, Mexico. She got
<v Speaker 3>Zuni Salt Lake in New Mexico. She got Lake Mackay,
<v Speaker 3>Mackay somewhere in the Western Australia, Northern Territory. Wouldn't that
<v Speaker 3>be nice to be in Western Australia right now, far
<v Speaker 3>away from all this stuff that's going on here right
<v Speaker 3>now in the US. She got the Salton Sea. Oh,
<v Speaker 3>she goes to Kazakhstan. She's talking about the Aral Sea.
<v Speaker 3>She got. Chapter three is on an arrow Sea in Kazakhstan,
<v Speaker 3>definitely don't want to be in that region right now,
<v Speaker 3>no offense. It's like the cradle of civilization. That's where
<v Speaker 3>all this fucking nightmare started. No thank you, but I'll
<v Speaker 3>be happy to read about it. Mono Lake, California. So
<v Speaker 3>it's about It's about briny lakes, often in very arid
<v Speaker 3>agents because that's where you get briny lake because you
<v Speaker 3>get water weathering, chemically weathering the rocks and then washing
<v Speaker 3>into a basin or bowl and then evaporating and leaving
<v Speaker 3>behind precipitating out all its minerals, evaporating before it can
<v Speaker 3>carry those minerals out to the season, so you get
<v Speaker 3>all the salt lakes and stuff, right you ever you
<v Speaker 3>ever go down to Owens Lake. I don't know why
<v Speaker 3>I'm getting I don't know why I'm getting turned up
<v Speaker 3>right now. I'm sorry it is that was that problematic?
<v Speaker 3>How aggressive I just spoke to you just now. I'm
<v Speaker 3>really really sorry. God made it a point to never
<v Speaker 3>spend more than five minutes around people that talk like that. Okay,
<v Speaker 3>here we go, keep going, Let's keep going, and now
<v Speaker 3>let's move on to other writer subjects. And I need
<v Speaker 3>to be careful talking about this because I've already been
<v Speaker 3>threatened with the defamation lawsuit for bringing it up. But
<v Speaker 3>a very dear friend of mine, a man who I
<v Speaker 3>respect immensely, was diagnosed with something akin to dementia recently,
<v Speaker 3>and he had, prior to this established him and his
<v Speaker 3>wife had both established a twenty two hundred acre preserve
<v Speaker 3>in the West Texas Desert with incredible plant diversity on it.
<v Speaker 3>And before his wife passed away, who was an amazing woman,
<v Speaker 3>really really cool, kind loving and very intelligent woman, she
<v Speaker 3>passed in I believe April of last year. You know,
<v Speaker 3>they had this preserve that they had essentially set up
<v Speaker 3>and that he had willed to a nonprofit conservation institute.
<v Speaker 3>And I had been basically told I could go there
<v Speaker 3>whenever to study the plants there and keep track of them,
<v Speaker 3>et cetera. Now, the amount of plants on this property
<v Speaker 3>and plant species in this property, how rich of a
<v Speaker 3>site it was is hard to describe. And you know,
<v Speaker 3>it's one of those places that, like God, you thank
<v Speaker 3>God it's protected, or at least I thought it was.
<v Speaker 3>I don't have access to it anymore because because he
<v Speaker 3>is unreachable, his daughter moved him out of the home.
<v Speaker 3>He was living in after his wife died, and has
<v Speaker 3>now made herself put herself in charge of the property
<v Speaker 3>and is denying access to myself and possibly to other researchers.
<v Speaker 3>I don't know. I gotta be careful what I say,
<v Speaker 3>because defamation is only the case if you're saying things
<v Speaker 3>that are untrue. If you're saying things that are true
<v Speaker 3>and actually happen, then it's not defamation. But she's really
<v Speaker 3>mad at me. She's very spicy, she wears a lot
<v Speaker 3>of eyeliner. She looks she doesn't look like a very
<v Speaker 3>happy person. I've met her before in person. We got
<v Speaker 3>along fine, and then, you know, after two months of
<v Speaker 3>repeatedly asking her for access and informing her that I
<v Speaker 3>priorly prior to that had access and her just ghosting
<v Speaker 3>me and ignoring me, she finally responded and then threatened
<v Speaker 3>me with a defamation lawsuit and said I forget what
<v Speaker 3>else she said, But she was not kind, you know.
<v Speaker 3>She did spoken like a true attorney, which really goes
<v Speaker 3>back to my prior what I had said before about
<v Speaker 3>attorneys in general. And so another friend of mine, who
<v Speaker 3>is a researcher who had access to it but also
<v Speaker 3>lives two thousand miles away, and this woman knows that
<v Speaker 3>asked her for access, and she said he could visit
<v Speaker 3>to do research there. I was, for instance, I was
<v Speaker 3>going to write a paper on West Texas and South
<v Speaker 3>Texas ecotypes with the same species, of which there are
<v Speaker 3>many joe tropadiaheca Sydney Attenuafoia, the Lafara, et cetera. But
<v Speaker 3>she also, yeah, so she said he could have access,
<v Speaker 3>but she also knows he's two thousand miles away, and
<v Speaker 3>you know, whereas I'm only a few hours away, and
<v Speaker 3>it would be much more likely I go there, and
<v Speaker 3>and you know, he may not even make it out.
<v Speaker 3>So she said, you know, but she also said you
<v Speaker 3>could bring just don't bring Joey. And so anyway, she
<v Speaker 3>lives in fucking Houston er So I don't know what
<v Speaker 3>she's doing. She's doing lawyer stuff, you know, just I
<v Speaker 3>don't know. I don't know what what it is. I
<v Speaker 3>don't know what it is. But anyway, we had it out,
<v Speaker 3>me and her. We had it out on words. I
<v Speaker 3>told her, I hope she seeks therapy, and that if
<v Speaker 3>she does try to sell the land, which was against
<v Speaker 3>her father's wishes, I'll make sure everybody knows. Again, I
<v Speaker 3>gotta be real. I had to consult with my attorney
<v Speaker 3>here on this because she, you know, she seems like
<v Speaker 3>the kind of you know, you get thirty years of
<v Speaker 3>emotional trauma that hasn't been dealt with, because that's just
<v Speaker 3>the state everyone here deals, you know, is like that.
<v Speaker 3>I think Texas in the South in general, people don't
<v Speaker 3>go to therapy because they think it's for pussies or
<v Speaker 3>it's some admitting some kind of weakness. So everyone just
<v Speaker 3>you know, gets more consecutively fucking nuts every year that
<v Speaker 3>they refuse to deal with all the bullshit that's afflict
<v Speaker 3>their lives, and bullshit's afflicted all of our lives. How
<v Speaker 3>could it not, you know? So But anyway, but that's
<v Speaker 3>the Texas, that's the Texas state things. I'm making a
<v Speaker 3>generalization here. There's some very wonderful people here, of course,
<v Speaker 3>but I like making generalizations. They're fun and they're funny,
<v Speaker 3>and you can't have fun Joe stereotypes without generalizations. But
<v Speaker 3>that said, she doesn't. She don't want me to. There
<v Speaker 3>no more needless to say. And she was never involved
<v Speaker 3>in any of the conservation stuff so far as I know.
<v Speaker 3>She doesn't know anything about plants. She has no science
<v Speaker 3>background in this, and so you know, I was kept
<v Speaker 3>asking can I go there to check on plants? Can
<v Speaker 3>I go there? And she didn't respond once or twice
<v Speaker 3>in that kind of like phony Texas. You know, we
<v Speaker 3>already had them in checking out thank you. Well, no,
<v Speaker 3>I'm not checking on it for you. I'm checking on
<v Speaker 3>it for myself and this community of botanists and biologists
<v Speaker 3>that had a lot invested in this land in terms
<v Speaker 3>of the work we're doing in research and also just spiritually.
<v Speaker 3>You know, separating human beings from land that they love
<v Speaker 3>is one of the worst things that human beings have
<v Speaker 3>historically done to each other throughout the ages. This is
<v Speaker 3>a very common thing that humans do to each other. Right, No,
<v Speaker 3>you can't come here anymore, you can't act this. You
<v Speaker 3>have to move. You can't be here. You know, you're
<v Speaker 3>forcing people off basically, And so you know, that's essentially
<v Speaker 3>what happened. And her father, who is a friend of mine,
<v Speaker 3>of course I can't reach no one can check on him,
<v Speaker 3>knowing none of his old friends can see how he's doing.
<v Speaker 3>We've been barred from communicating him, not intentionally probably, but
<v Speaker 3>you know there's we don't even know where he is.
<v Speaker 3>So but he's being very well taken care of. I
<v Speaker 3>presume I would, I think so. But but the land,
<v Speaker 3>you know, the land, there were, for instance, there were
<v Speaker 3>people poaching on the land seven months ago, and I
<v Speaker 3>told this woman about it. We had a phone call.
<v Speaker 3>I told her that there was poaching going on, and
<v Speaker 3>she ended up during the phone call there was only
<v Speaker 3>she was really happy to talk to me then, so
<v Speaker 3>I told her what was going on and what I knew,
<v Speaker 3>and said, you got to have someone out there, you
<v Speaker 3>got to get what trap cameras or something, but we
<v Speaker 3>know this has been going on. And then actually during
<v Speaker 3>that call, she's still blowing up at me. I think
<v Speaker 3>it was not directed at me, but she was screaming
<v Speaker 3>at me about someone else. And that's when I first
<v Speaker 3>realized the red flag. This woman's a loose cannon. There's
<v Speaker 3>obviously like a lot of dark shit going going again,
<v Speaker 3>fucking things therapy could work, wonders, I don't know, but
<v Speaker 3>but you know, I was like I had to calmer
<v Speaker 3>down and be like, hey, listen, I'm trying to help
<v Speaker 3>you out. You don't need to talk to me like this, right,
<v Speaker 3>Like people love your father and are taking care of
<v Speaker 3>him and were taking care of him. And in my mind,
<v Speaker 3>I'm like, who the fuck are You've met you once
<v Speaker 3>before in the last three years, three or four years,
<v Speaker 3>I've been working with your father and visiting him and whatever.
<v Speaker 3>So anyway, be that what it may. But you know,
<v Speaker 3>we'll see. I don't know what's gonna happen to the preserve.
<v Speaker 3>I hope it gets preserved. I know there had been talk.
<v Speaker 3>I had been told by someone else that she was
<v Speaker 3>talking about selling it. I can't verify if that's true
<v Speaker 3>or not. I've been told by two or three people
<v Speaker 3>that she was thinking about selling it. I hope she
<v Speaker 3>wouldn't do that, and that she and back and forth
<v Speaker 3>between wanting to sell it and wanting to honor her
<v Speaker 3>father's legacy, father's legacy, whatever that means. And and I
<v Speaker 3>don't know, I don't know. We'll see what happens. We'll
<v Speaker 3>see what happens. But it's definitely it was fucking with me, man.
<v Speaker 3>It was a really dark, uh you know period a
<v Speaker 3>month ago. Bumm me out for a series of days
<v Speaker 3>because I I loved going to that property. I loved
<v Speaker 3>there were so many there were really cool. Not the
<v Speaker 3>Lena species, this desert fern there was, I mean, the
<v Speaker 3>Lofafa population was cool, of course, whatever. But it was
<v Speaker 3>an archaeological site, you know, and and it's it was,
<v Speaker 3>and it was a preserve. It was meant for research
<v Speaker 3>and education and for people to enjoy and uh, you know,
<v Speaker 3>our friends wife's ashes were spread there and in so
<v Speaker 3>many so much land in West Texas is just owned
<v Speaker 3>by these rich freaks who have no interest in letting
<v Speaker 3>people on, who have no interest in preserving the plants there.
<v Speaker 3>It's just, you know, they don't really care about it.
<v Speaker 3>And so this was such a valuable asset to the
<v Speaker 3>community of people that are invested in plant science out
<v Speaker 3>there and invested in research. And then to suddenly just
<v Speaker 3>be ghosted and locked out. It's a fucking tragedy. Man,
<v Speaker 3>It's horrible. And then to have it beyond the board
<v Speaker 3>that it might be, so I don't know if it's
<v Speaker 3>going to again. I have to be careful what I'm saying.
<v Speaker 3>Because she threatened me with some defamation likes. She really
<v Speaker 3>went off. She didn't respond me for two months, then
<v Speaker 3>wrote me some passive aggressive, fake you know, like Southern
<v Speaker 3>style bullshit. The reply. It was a sentence. And then
<v Speaker 3>when I said, when I responded to that, I said,
<v Speaker 3>why aren't you letting researchers? And then she really went
<v Speaker 3>off and she wrote boll she had a many novella.
<v Speaker 3>She wrote me like a fucking she wrote me a
<v Speaker 3>good couple of paragraphs, you know, just going off, just
<v Speaker 3>really angry, you know. And then I just I just
<v Speaker 3>was all right, well here we are, right, and you know,
<v Speaker 3>there's probably maybe I could have been more tactical I
<v Speaker 3>actually but I don't think so there's nothing I could
<v Speaker 3>have done. I could have just I could have been
<v Speaker 3>more the you know, the fake smiley Southern Texas shit,
<v Speaker 3>angle of Texas shit, you know, yeah, like the you know,
<v Speaker 3>the passive aggressive ship. I could have been like that,
<v Speaker 3>but that's not me. I don't like doing that. That
<v Speaker 3>feels fake and phony. So, you know, I don't know,
<v Speaker 3>she's never met a spiny Italian before from Chicago. Again,
<v Speaker 3>I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what
<v Speaker 3>this woman's world experience or life experiences. But I'll say
<v Speaker 3>she don't seem very happy, and I have compassion for
<v Speaker 3>her for that. But for Fox's sake, and I let
<v Speaker 3>people on that land. You know, I trust your father's instinct.
<v Speaker 3>That's not your land, it's your father's, et cetera. So
<v Speaker 3>my god, damn man, that's a that's a bummercoda. It
<v Speaker 3>was such such an amazing sight. But again, you know,
<v Speaker 3>you want the good stuff, you just got to go
<v Speaker 3>to Mexico where you don't have to deal with this ship.
<v Speaker 3>Maybe you have to deal with some cartel stuff, but
<v Speaker 3>the cartel just the whole the whole country now, and
<v Speaker 3>they're not even working. I mean, drugs are like the
<v Speaker 3>least of what they do. It's more like a Sopranos
<v Speaker 3>style operation where they're so embedded in government they're perforcing
<v Speaker 3>protection money out of people. It's not nice, but it's
<v Speaker 3>it is what it is, and it's just something you
<v Speaker 3>got to work with. But there's a lot of good
<v Speaker 3>ship down there, and the land is generally in better shape.
<v Speaker 3>I should say, it's not so much that it's in
<v Speaker 3>better shape, it's that it's there's more of it. Well,
<v Speaker 3>it is a better shape. It's not developed, and you know,
<v Speaker 3>it's the thing. I think, the thing that struck me
<v Speaker 3>the most about Texas is that when everything's private, you know,
<v Speaker 3>anything can be sold. Everybody's a hula. There's no there's
<v Speaker 3>no protection. Whereas when you got public land, it can
<v Speaker 3>they can still come for it, namely the government working
<v Speaker 3>for corporate interest can still come for it, mine it,
<v Speaker 3>log the shit out of it. Whatever. But there's going
<v Speaker 3>to be a lot more pushback, you know, because it's public.
<v Speaker 3>If if someone tries to build a development, then you know,
<v Speaker 3>when someone builds a development, that's gone for good. You
<v Speaker 3>take trees or you mine it. I mean, you can
<v Speaker 3>still fuck it up, but it's not gone for good.
<v Speaker 3>You develop it, it's you cover it in concrete, it's
<v Speaker 3>gone for good. God damn, it's just so bleak. I mean,
<v Speaker 3>people don't realize how they're getting severed from their own
<v Speaker 3>land there. They're getting alienated and and pushed off of
<v Speaker 3>their own land. They have no act. Even just if
<v Speaker 3>you're just driving by a nice looking juniper woodland that's
<v Speaker 3>got got a couple of madrones in it, some Texas madrones,
<v Speaker 3>some oaks, even that you're benefiting from it. That's soothing
<v Speaker 3>to be around, even if you can't directly go walk
<v Speaker 3>for it when it's fucking gone, when it's just a
<v Speaker 3>parking lot with some shitty horticultural atrocities. And it's always
<v Speaker 3>horticultural atrocities that they plant in these places. And some trees,
<v Speaker 3>you know, some uh you know, a lot of parking lot,
<v Speaker 3>a lot of parking lots, some glass steel. Uh, you know,
<v Speaker 3>these these horrific buildings that just kind of denude your
<v Speaker 3>soul of any life. Get back to work. Fucko, that's
<v Speaker 3>what they say. Get back to work.
<v Speaker 2>Uh.
<v Speaker 3>You know, it's it's horrible. It's it kill It smothers you,
<v Speaker 3>It kills your soul. You're not really alive. And so
<v Speaker 3>that is why. In other news, I had a little
<v Speaker 3>win today. I had a little win. I went in
<v Speaker 3>to city hall in my town and I got the
<v Speaker 3>guy's name who's been basically saying no to all my
<v Speaker 3>requests the plant street trees and just talk to them directly,
<v Speaker 3>and was, you know, disarmingly nice. And uh. I was
<v Speaker 3>fucking nervous going in there to talk to this guy,
<v Speaker 3>because so much of my fucking emotional well being goes
<v Speaker 3>on not having is based on having plants around me.
<v Speaker 3>In an other way, because I live in a really
<v Speaker 3>depressing area. It's really fucking bleak. It's culturally bleak here
<v Speaker 3>it's lonely, it's isolating. It's hard that there's no one
<v Speaker 3>to have an intellectual conversation with. There's not a lot
<v Speaker 3>of education. There's a lot of obedience and fear. And
<v Speaker 3>you know, there's good things about it too that I
<v Speaker 3>could say I have. You'd have to give me a
<v Speaker 3>minute to come up with some but I'm sure there's
<v Speaker 3>good things. But there's a lot of dark shit. You know,
<v Speaker 3>it's a fucking it's a car slom. You know, it's
<v Speaker 3>dangerous to go for a bike ride or a walk.
<v Speaker 3>I mean, I almost got hit by some three hundred
<v Speaker 3>pound woman talking on his cell phone the other day
<v Speaker 3>who made a really soft curve and then she looked
<v Speaker 3>at me like I was the asshole for being in
<v Speaker 3>her way. You know that kind of thing. I'm sure
<v Speaker 3>that's like this in a lot of America. But I
<v Speaker 3>went in and I just begged the guy that was nice,
<v Speaker 3>you know, I turned it down. Tony Santoro was put away,
<v Speaker 3>and Joey came out, you know, the sensitive guy beneath
<v Speaker 3>all the spines, and I just said, hey man, I'm
<v Speaker 3>sorry to bother you before you going off to lunch,
<v Speaker 3>told him who I was, what I do. I mean,
<v Speaker 3>I used to like to keep a low profile where
<v Speaker 3>I am because I just it's my shit. I don't
<v Speaker 3>want these suits and stuff knowing who I am. But
<v Speaker 3>I just told him who I what I do? You know,
<v Speaker 3>educator got a YouTube channel, artist, all this, you know, author,
<v Speaker 3>all this shit, and just said, you know, I just
<v Speaker 3>want to plant one tree. And I showed him a
<v Speaker 3>photo on a tablet. I had my little drawing tablet
<v Speaker 3>with me. I took a photo, said. I showed him
<v Speaker 3>a picture of the bleak parking lot of cr the street,
<v Speaker 3>and I just said, you know, this is what I
<v Speaker 3>won't look out. This is what I look out at
<v Speaker 3>every day, and I just want to plant a single
<v Speaker 3>tree there. You know, this thing heats up in the summertime.
<v Speaker 3>I tried to explain the heat island to them. I've
<v Speaker 3>noticed when you explain heat islands to people, and I
<v Speaker 3>was trying to explain it to some cops last night
<v Speaker 3>because some lady in my neighborhood. This is how fucking
<v Speaker 3>bleak it is where I lived. Second time I've had
<v Speaker 3>the cops called on me for planting trees on city
<v Speaker 3>property between the sidewalk and the street. This is the
<v Speaker 3>second time it's happened. I mean, and the people are
<v Speaker 3>just so afraid they don't even go out and talk
<v Speaker 3>to you. They just just call the cops. It's fucking pathetic.
<v Speaker 3>But anyway, you know, and so I said, this, all
<v Speaker 3>this concrete and asphalt, it goes about eight inches deep.
<v Speaker 3>It's got a high heat capacity, it heats up in
<v Speaker 3>the sun. Blah blah blah. My whole spiel the same
<v Speaker 3>thing I say into presentations, you know, and is at
<v Speaker 3>some point. I mean I normally notice about six seconds
<v Speaker 3>into this their eyes glaze over and they have no
<v Speaker 3>interest in going any further. But they get the point,
<v Speaker 3>and you explain how it makes the whole area of
<v Speaker 3>fifteen degrees hotter. I had a little diagram or the
<v Speaker 3>heat island. That the heat island thing. It's such basic logic,
<v Speaker 3>but it escapes people. I mean, if you stand and
<v Speaker 3>that's what I told him for myself, if you walk
<v Speaker 3>out on that parking lot at nine pm on a
<v Speaker 3>July night, after the sun goes down, you can feel
<v Speaker 3>the heat coming up at you. You're on it's like
<v Speaker 3>you're on a space heater. The sun's down, so there's
<v Speaker 3>no heat coming at you. From above or from the side.
<v Speaker 3>It's just coming at you from below. It's because this
<v Speaker 3>thing has been charged up with thermal energy and is
<v Speaker 3>now radiating that heat back into the atmosphere. And it
<v Speaker 3>continues to do this till midnight or one am, until
<v Speaker 3>you know, it finally cools off and the sun comes up.
<v Speaker 3>And so I just said, if you just shade it
<v Speaker 3>a little bit, you just prevent the sun from hitting
<v Speaker 3>it a little bit, you're not charging that heat battery
<v Speaker 3>as much. But by this point, I don't think he
<v Speaker 3>was listening anymore, and he'd already I could see he
<v Speaker 3>had already agreed to let me plant this one tree,
<v Speaker 3>which I was so fucking thankful for. You know, these
<v Speaker 3>little winds. It made it. It eased the pain of
<v Speaker 3>having to deal with the cops last night, got in
<v Speaker 3>the cop. I mean again, I just blow people's minds
<v Speaker 3>down here. I got neck tattoos. Yet I'm educated. I'm
<v Speaker 3>still a jackass, don't get me wrong, you know, on
<v Speaker 3>a scale, but compared to a lot of people down here,
<v Speaker 3>got a little bit of education on me. And uh,
<v Speaker 3>you know, and I could speak eloquently about this, and
<v Speaker 3>I told Mama, you know, I'm bodanist et cetera, all
<v Speaker 3>this stuff, and he just he just said, okay, well,
<v Speaker 3>just make sure you don't go on her property. Blah
<v Speaker 3>blah blah. This is the thing. This it goes a
<v Speaker 3>little bit deeper. It's actually because the lady that the
<v Speaker 3>lady that called the cops to me was really nice.
<v Speaker 3>But her, her mom, the Aboa leader, was not very nice.
<v Speaker 3>She was she was you know, she scaled at me.
<v Speaker 3>I waved at her as I was going back to
<v Speaker 3>plant the second plant the tree the second time in
<v Speaker 3>the same spot after she ripped out all the shit
<v Speaker 3>I planted there first. And this is a bleak stretcher
<v Speaker 3>of a city property. It is like there's nothing there.
<v Speaker 3>It's just in the summer, it's hot as balls. And
<v Speaker 3>so this time I went to stake it and I
<v Speaker 3>put you know, I used the good I used the medicine.
<v Speaker 3>I used the every Abbo leader's achilles heels. He might
<v Speaker 3>fucking hate me, and that's fine, she's probably miserable, but
<v Speaker 3>I put a candle in front of it. I went
<v Speaker 3>down to the Catholic church where they got all the
<v Speaker 3>animals and stuff, because there's a Catholic church here to
<v Speaker 3>I guess the fodder is an animal lover. You know.
<v Speaker 3>They used to have this spitting lama in front of it,
<v Speaker 3>and the lama actually spit at me once. It was
<v Speaker 3>very cute. He was a dick. He was actually kind
<v Speaker 3>of a dick. And I don't know where he went.
<v Speaker 3>He's gone now, so hopefully they took his ass somewhere.
<v Speaker 3>Ou I don't know where they put him. But he
<v Speaker 3>wasn't a nice lama, and he had some bad well,
<v Speaker 3>come to think of it, I have you know, I
<v Speaker 3>feel sympathy for him because he had some fucked up teeth.
<v Speaker 3>That's that was a thing. This lama had some real
<v Speaker 3>fucked up teeth and so maybe he was self conscious
<v Speaker 3>about that. But either way, you know, it's it's a
<v Speaker 3>nice church. It's an old church. They got the animals
<v Speaker 3>in there, they got they always got way too many dogs,
<v Speaker 3>and uh, you go in there and it's like wood everywhere.
<v Speaker 3>It's a beautiful building. Okay, he's someone who was raised Catholic,
<v Speaker 3>but is not anymore, you know, due to the numerous
<v Speaker 3>conflicts that his science tends to have with religion, but
<v Speaker 3>that it needn't have. You know, I'm just not killing
<v Speaker 3>it anyway, I went in there. I got a five
<v Speaker 3>dollar candle, five dollar roseary. I put it on the tree.
<v Speaker 3>I told the lady that it's blessed, uh, And then
<v Speaker 3>I went. I went out of town. I was up
<v Speaker 3>and just up in Austin. Went to go drop some
<v Speaker 3>shit off my friend Willie's house, get some stuff, get
<v Speaker 3>some plants, check on some shit. And then I came
<v Speaker 3>back down and the candle was gone, and someone had
<v Speaker 3>done a horrific pruning job on the tree, but they
<v Speaker 3>didn't rip it out. So then I went I knocked
<v Speaker 3>on the lady's door again, just walked the sidewalk up
<v Speaker 3>to her door and knocked on the door. This time,
<v Speaker 3>she didn't come out. The previous time she'd come out.
<v Speaker 3>This is the woman who's maybe my age, but her
<v Speaker 3>abbelieve her grandma's the one that her mother is the
<v Speaker 3>one that hates me, and that this was for. And
<v Speaker 3>this lady was actually amenable to having a tree. But
<v Speaker 3>she's like, I just got to convince my mom. And
<v Speaker 3>so I was like, okay, well, I'm just gonna do
<v Speaker 3>it again. I told her I was doing it. She
<v Speaker 3>just kind of okay. And anyway, so this time she
<v Speaker 3>wouldn't come out. She just spoke to me through the
<v Speaker 3>fucking ring doorbell, and I could tell immediately. I'm like,
<v Speaker 3>I'm already fucked. She's terrified, she's freaked out. I mean,
<v Speaker 3>I already blow people's minds being down here because I don't.
<v Speaker 3>I'm so culturally different. I don't look like any It's
<v Speaker 3>very bizarre. It's not Mexican, it's Tejano. It's the Tejano area.
<v Speaker 3>It's a very different vibe. There's a long history of
<v Speaker 3>you know, repression and some really nasty shit that happened
<v Speaker 3>here one hundred years ago from the Texas Rangers. So
<v Speaker 3>people are you know that shit still reverberates today. But
<v Speaker 3>it's a very nineteen fifties vibe, very very conservative nineteen
<v Speaker 3>fifties vibe here, you know. Just to give you some
<v Speaker 3>some some just to accentuate how weird it is. You know,
<v Speaker 3>there was a giant latinos for Trump's signed near my
<v Speaker 3>house last year, so that kind of gives you a
<v Speaker 3>feel of what it's. What the vibe is, right, it's
<v Speaker 3>not like a lot of but this isn't Pilsen. It's
<v Speaker 3>not little village in Chicago. It's not East La. It's
<v Speaker 3>not East Oakland. It's a very very different vibe culturally speaking,
<v Speaker 3>very very different, right, very whitewashed, very bay. He's very nice,
<v Speaker 3>neat and clean. People are really nice or can be.
<v Speaker 3>And there's some good people here, but overall it's a
<v Speaker 3>very very I have a friend who grew up here.
<v Speaker 3>She's like sixty now. It's old, lesbian, wonderful woman. And
<v Speaker 3>she said, I got the fuck out of Mission forty
<v Speaker 3>five years ago because just how what the vibe is.
<v Speaker 3>It's just a bleak. It just feels bleak there. I
<v Speaker 3>can't stand it. It's very nineteen fifties. It's you know,
<v Speaker 3>and she's someone you could actually have a conversation with,
<v Speaker 3>like an intelligent conversation, but otherwise it's it could be
<v Speaker 3>very alienating here. So and I said, anyway, so this
<v Speaker 3>lady I already knew, like I'm screwed. She's freaked out.
<v Speaker 3>And I just said, can I just get the candle back?
<v Speaker 3>Because I was going to go put it back, you know,
<v Speaker 3>if anything is protection against the people that might want
<v Speaker 3>to take the tree out, you know, which is a
<v Speaker 3>vibe here. It's messy. I don't want so I asked
<v Speaker 3>for the candle. She said I don't have it, and
<v Speaker 3>I said okay, And I said, well, I'm sorry. I
<v Speaker 3>didn't mean to freak you out. I apologize to moher lawn.
<v Speaker 3>I said, I'm all your lawn for you, if you want,
<v Speaker 3>for you, if you want, just so you know, I
<v Speaker 3>feel bad about this. She said no, it's okay. And
<v Speaker 3>so that was that. And then you know, three hours later,
<v Speaker 3>I'm walking to my house and I see the cops
<v Speaker 3>roll up and their lights go on the bright ones,
<v Speaker 3>and I'm like shit, you know, because seeing cops roll
<v Speaker 3>bys whatever, And sometimes if I see him rolling by,
<v Speaker 3>I'll ask him what's up? You know, you're looking for
<v Speaker 3>some of some kids breaking into cars or something, which
<v Speaker 3>happens like once in a blue moon here because there's
<v Speaker 3>no crime. But uh, but this time, yeah, they roll
<v Speaker 3>up its shirt and they just they did that, you know,
<v Speaker 3>the official cops stance, like the Kimbo hot cops stance,
<v Speaker 3>and just you know, when you do, you realize when
<v Speaker 3>you're talking to someone like you talk to a cop,
<v Speaker 3>you know, you stop and roll up to him and
<v Speaker 3>ask him a question. He doesn't talk to you like this, right,
<v Speaker 3>They only talk to you like this when they're stopping
<v Speaker 3>you and questioning you, and it just you just realize
<v Speaker 3>this motherfucker's not listening to anything. I'd say, like, I'm
<v Speaker 3>already suspect you're already. So I'm just like, okay, man, Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>so I just talked to him, and I I plan
<v Speaker 3>on a tree. You know, I put a candle there
<v Speaker 3>because she ripped it out the first time. You know,
<v Speaker 3>this is the kind of beef. This is something like
<v Speaker 3>I've really entered into the realm of like old fucking
<v Speaker 3>Italian wing nut, which is fine, That's I'm totally fine
<v Speaker 3>with that. Please late on if it means I get
<v Speaker 3>to make my fucking neighborhood look less bleak and less
<v Speaker 3>filled with concrete an asphalt, and maybe take the heat
<v Speaker 3>island down a little bit. You know, someone, it's one
<v Speaker 3>hundred and five degrees for eight months. You know it's
<v Speaker 3>not as brutal. Fine, I don't care. I mean, it
<v Speaker 3>gives a shit what people think. Yet everyone's full of shit,
<v Speaker 3>everyone's nuts. So uh so so anyway, uh you know
<v Speaker 3>I'm saying so I said, yeah, that's why I went.
<v Speaker 3>He's like, well, did you hop the fence? I mean
<v Speaker 3>not eve't hap the fence. I walked the sidewalk up
<v Speaker 3>to her front door, like the same I've had like
<v Speaker 3>solar salesmen, and the Jehovah's witness is due to my
<v Speaker 3>front yard. He goes, well, this is your official notice that, sir,
<v Speaker 3>this is your official notice that. If you do that again,
<v Speaker 3>you will be arrested for trespassing. Said, I have no
<v Speaker 3>interest in going. There's no reason for me to talk
<v Speaker 3>to this this person again. I just you know, it's
<v Speaker 3>public property. She's messing with her grandma, her mother was
<v Speaker 3>messing with it, et cetera. And it's weird too because
<v Speaker 3>you know, everyone else on my block I'm pretty cool with,
<v Speaker 3>and I've planted shit for everybody around. I'm like pushing
<v Speaker 3>it off, you know, aggressively pushing it off. But most
<v Speaker 3>people you don't have to be aggressive with it because
<v Speaker 3>they actually want trees around and none. Of course, you
<v Speaker 3>gotta go back and maintain it, make sure it doesn't
<v Speaker 3>look like shit, you know, make sure the stiffs are
<v Speaker 3>gonna be okay with it. And so anyway, So yeah,
<v Speaker 3>so that was where we were at, and I was
<v Speaker 3>just so bummed. I'm like, god, dam it was the
<v Speaker 3>second time this has happened, you know, And it's always
<v Speaker 3>the same person. It's like the same lame, just just
<v Speaker 3>totally repressed, just fucking no fun, just scared of everything,
<v Speaker 3>you know, wholesome vanilla, just nineteen fifties ass shit. It
<v Speaker 3>was so crazy, and I felt really terrible that she
<v Speaker 3>was obviously scared, but also part of me was like,
<v Speaker 3>what the fuck? Oh that was the other thing too.
<v Speaker 3>I said, okay, well, is your mom okay with the tree?
<v Speaker 3>When I was talking to her, she was talking me
<v Speaker 3>through that when she was talking to me through the
<v Speaker 3>ring speaker, says your mom okay with the tree? And
<v Speaker 3>she said uh. And she thought I was talking about
<v Speaker 3>the candle and the stuff that I put there so
<v Speaker 3>that I tore it off, the app will leave it.
<v Speaker 3>She said, well, I you know, we think that you were.
<v Speaker 3>We were worried it was for me, like like I
<v Speaker 3>cursed her or something. I was like, no, no, no,
<v Speaker 3>miss no, no no, it's just to protect the tree.
<v Speaker 3>And it's all it was for, you know, And because
<v Speaker 3>it was fucking hilarious. But I can't tell her that.
<v Speaker 3>I can't tell her it was part of a gag too,
<v Speaker 3>you know. And then I told her I was Catholic,
<v Speaker 3>which I'm not, but you know, was raised Catholic. I was,
<v Speaker 3>you know, I have the mental scars to show it
<v Speaker 3>and anyway. So but she didn't, she didn't give a shit,
<v Speaker 3>you know, she just she was still free. She was
<v Speaker 3>so spooked and free. I'm telling you, man, It's so
<v Speaker 3>if I wore like Dockers and tucked in my shirt
<v Speaker 3>and had a you know, they didn't have any tattoos,
<v Speaker 3>maybe I'd be more successful with this shit done here.
<v Speaker 3>People would probably still be fun, but they wouldn't be
<v Speaker 3>freaked out. So, because people are freaked out, my only,
<v Speaker 3>my only, in my only. The only way I can
<v Speaker 3>get that get myself out of this prejudgment they have
<v Speaker 3>where they're like, oh you look like a criminal or
<v Speaker 3>scary whatever, is to just disarm them with humor and
<v Speaker 3>just being an extraverted, extroverted the loudmouth daygo, you know,
<v Speaker 3>and be really friendly. That's all that's all I could do. Otherwise,
<v Speaker 3>the affort one, look, you know, I'm fucked. They think
<v Speaker 3>it's they're scared because people a lot a lot of
<v Speaker 3>people here have never left here. You know, it's probably
<v Speaker 3>be like a small town in Iowa or somewhere else,
<v Speaker 3>you know, it's the same thing. So uh anyway, but yeah,
<v Speaker 3>so I went in today and just caught the guy
<v Speaker 3>at lunch, the city manager, and just said, hey, man,
<v Speaker 3>I'm trying to get this tree in the ground. Can
<v Speaker 3>you help me out. I just want to plant this one.
<v Speaker 3>Things you want to just plant this one. I was like, well,
<v Speaker 3>I would take two if you could give me two,
<v Speaker 3>but I'll just take one. I mean whatever, you you know,
<v Speaker 3>I'll I'll plant it, I'll stake it, I'll make sure
<v Speaker 3>it's pruned, mulched everything. You guys won't have to do
<v Speaker 3>anything right and if you need anything, you need me
<v Speaker 3>to do anything just right, you know. So he said okay,
<v Speaker 3>and so that this is this little battle in the
<v Speaker 3>ongoing and never ending fight to keep they just get
<v Speaker 3>more fucking trees planted. It just it's it got. It
<v Speaker 3>looks so ugly where I live. Man, It's just it's
<v Speaker 3>And the thing that's really been killed me is those
<v Speaker 3>fucking led billboards have been going up lately. They're really
<v Speaker 3>bright led billboards, you know, Like, what kind of motherfucker
<v Speaker 3>doesn't want to see the night sky? Like Jesus Christ, man,
<v Speaker 3>are you have what's you're sick. What happened? He said,
<v Speaker 3>the paint chips. When you were a kid were eating
<v Speaker 3>paint chips. Have you just been so indoctrinate? I mean,
<v Speaker 3>you've never seen what actual quote nature is. And it
<v Speaker 3>was funny because I posted something about this about the
<v Speaker 3>abuelitas and uh abulita someone who's giving me shift for that,
<v Speaker 3>and people will connect your correct your pronunciation is there
<v Speaker 3>to get kicked in the nuts, just as simple as it,
<v Speaker 3>all right, if not literal nuts, figurative. But people were saying, oh, my,
<v Speaker 3>Maya Belita, she she loves plants. You know, I don't
<v Speaker 3>know what you're talking about. And I was like, well,
<v Speaker 3>it depends on where you are, may if you're in
<v Speaker 3>La or something. Yeah, but down here in Texas, culture
<v Speaker 3>is a lot more repressed. It's a lot more fucked up,
<v Speaker 3>you know, it's a lot more backwards nineteen fifty style.
<v Speaker 3>And just because your your grandma likes you know, she's
<v Speaker 3>got like a potted euphorbia and a plumeria maybe if
<v Speaker 3>you're lucky, probably not. She probably got great myrtles and
<v Speaker 3>onlyand there. Just because she's got that, that doesn't mean
<v Speaker 3>she likes nature. She might like horticultural garbage. Plenty of
<v Speaker 3>old women, do you know, old white ladies in fucking
<v Speaker 3>Nebraska or wherever. It doesn't mean you know, but it
<v Speaker 3>doesn't mean. It doesn't mean that she she likes ecology
<v Speaker 3>and native plants and nature has any insight into that.
<v Speaker 3>Because to most people down here, and most people really
<v Speaker 3>anywhere you go in the world, if they're descended from
<v Speaker 3>this European culture, they they you the native plants, there's
<v Speaker 3>just scrubby bullshit. There's stuff it doesn't flower or it
<v Speaker 3>only I mean, every plant flowers. They don't know that though,
<v Speaker 3>because they don't see it. It's not bread intentionally for
<v Speaker 3>its flowers. It's not bread that bread to be showy,
<v Speaker 3>like the fucking horticultural petunias you might see in a
<v Speaker 3>home desperate garden center, you know, or a lows right,
<v Speaker 3>none of those plants you see in the home deepot
<v Speaker 3>garden center, by the way, almost none of them are
<v Speaker 3>the actual plants you'd find in nature. Like the same way,
<v Speaker 3>if you go to like a go to buy a dog,
<v Speaker 3>you're not gonna be buying a wolf. You're gonna be
<v Speaker 3>buying a human bread cultivar of a wolf, which is
<v Speaker 3>what pugs and poodles and great things. Are so all
<v Speaker 3>this shit, I mean, this is this is how the
<v Speaker 3>horticultural industry works. Everything is bread. It's bread. It's bread
<v Speaker 3>for a fastigity growth habit or for variegated leaves or
<v Speaker 3>for color. You know, all this shit and the stuff
<v Speaker 3>that I see, and I just want to wretch. I'm like,
<v Speaker 3>that's not nature. I want to be around the actual
<v Speaker 3>living world. This is garbage. This is some whack fox
<v Speaker 3>interpretation of nature. This is not This is not the
<v Speaker 3>actual living world that I know. This isn't there's not
<v Speaker 3>even an interpretation of nature. It's just again, plants as beauty,
<v Speaker 3>plants as beautiful as they're interpreted, probably by someone. Very
<v Speaker 3>few of my listeners and very certainly not me can
<v Speaker 3>relate to right people who can't relate to it. What
<v Speaker 3>do I have in common with some you know, old
<v Speaker 3>grant he doesn't give a shit about the living world,
<v Speaker 3>and no offense to the herbster. She's got other wonderful attributes,
<v Speaker 3>you know, or some rich housewife. Because it's normally like
<v Speaker 3>do you look at like the gardening club people, that's
<v Speaker 3>normally what it is, right, I'm not a gardener I don't.
<v Speaker 3>I'm not a gardener at all. I like fucking plants.
<v Speaker 3>I like studying plants science, I like ecology. I like
<v Speaker 3>all the other relationships that these plants have with with
<v Speaker 3>fungi and with cool insects and with birds. And I
<v Speaker 3>like the context that they that they evolved. And I
<v Speaker 3>don't care about variegated leaves and pretty flowers and dumb
<v Speaker 3>shit like that. Right to me, it's dumb to maybe
<v Speaker 3>not too teaches, Oh we could agree to disagree. I
<v Speaker 3>think it's fucking stupid. Don't care about the fucking flowers.
<v Speaker 2>Right.
<v Speaker 3>The beauty to me is in the whole context. It's
<v Speaker 3>in the ecosystem, it's in the ecology. Right. It's very Leopoldian,
<v Speaker 3>Can you say that after Eldo Leopold? Right? Because I
<v Speaker 3>got what happened to me, and I was maybe lucky?
<v Speaker 3>Is that so young? I was, you know, so induced
<v Speaker 3>with vomiting it looking at the human world around me,
<v Speaker 3>and so nauseated by it. It was so filled with
<v Speaker 3>phoniness and wealth worship and all this stupid shit that
<v Speaker 3>I turned to quote nature, I e. The real world,
<v Speaker 3>the living world as an escape. And so that's what
<v Speaker 3>I want I don't want I don't want it as
<v Speaker 3>it's been processed by some demented human focks interpretation of
<v Speaker 3>what beauty is and then sold back to me. I
<v Speaker 3>want the real thing. That's where the freedom is. There's
<v Speaker 3>no freedom in the home despot garden center. Yeah, that's cute.
<v Speaker 3>That's cute that you know your granny's got a pot
<v Speaker 3>with a fucking plumeria in it or something. I don't care, right,
<v Speaker 3>I want to saw it down the crape myrtles. I
<v Speaker 3>don't care about the roses. Fuck the roses, right, the
<v Speaker 3>wild rosa, the genus. That's cool, I'll do that. I
<v Speaker 3>don't care about the fucking horticultural stuff. Get away from me,
<v Speaker 3>all right. That stuff pains my eyes, it kills my soul.
<v Speaker 3>I want nothing to do with it. So that's cool.
<v Speaker 3>Your your avolita likes plants, right, that's a completely different
<v Speaker 3>thing from what I'm talking about, and certainly for a
<v Speaker 3>street tree. We're talking about plants as infrastructure, right, We're
<v Speaker 3>talking about shade planting a tepewahe which is gonna grow
<v Speaker 3>fast as hell and produce a wonderful light shade on
<v Speaker 3>this otherwise very hot Barren Street. That's using plants as infrastructure.
<v Speaker 3>It's not. I'm not planting it because it's pretty and
<v Speaker 3>it flowers all the time. I don't give a shit, right,
<v Speaker 3>I mean, when they flower, it's pretty cool. They get
<v Speaker 3>the you know, they are memosoids. They are memosoids, memosoid
<v Speaker 3>E subfamily of the legian family. So they got the
<v Speaker 3>little white powder puff flowers that are mostly consistent, mostly
<v Speaker 3>consists of filaments, and the corollas and kalas is the
<v Speaker 3>perianth is very small, right, like any member of the
<v Speaker 3>mimosoid family, whether it's you know, ebony, texas eBones or
<v Speaker 3>mistkeats or Caliandra or whatever. Erythrostemas and say sell penioidy
<v Speaker 3>also very beautif flowers. But uh, anyway, you know what
<v Speaker 3>I mean, plants is infrastructure to help flooding, to reduce
<v Speaker 3>the heat island effect, to create habitat for cool birds,
<v Speaker 3>to humanize the landscape, so it's a place you actually
<v Speaker 3>want to be instead of a concrete shithole. Right. And
<v Speaker 3>then meanwhile, this lady on the other you know, this
<v Speaker 3>sold lady on the other corner, you know, I offered
<v Speaker 3>her a tree. I was just trying to She's got again,
<v Speaker 3>bleak stretch of hell strip in front of her house.
<v Speaker 3>He said, ma'am, do you want a tree? Would you
<v Speaker 3>careful a plant a tree there? She said, no, I'm
<v Speaker 3>actually thinking about cutting that one down. Oh the fuck?
<v Speaker 3>She points to an oak tree, beautiful oak tree that's
<v Speaker 3>giving her a lot of shade to miss. If you
<v Speaker 3>do that, you're gonna make the whole corner of this
<v Speaker 3>block fifteen degrees hotter come July. There's no shade. I mean,
<v Speaker 3>you have no other shade. You live in a brick house.
<v Speaker 3>It's just gonna get baked, right, You're just twelve hours
<v Speaker 3>of solar radiation, just scorching the shit out of this
<v Speaker 3>little brick house with a tin roof all day. You
<v Speaker 3>know what, do you want to pay more for air conditioning?
<v Speaker 3>I mean, do you want Do you like it when
<v Speaker 3>it's when you're sweat in your living room? I mean,
<v Speaker 3>what what is? What do you want? Man? I was nice.
<v Speaker 3>I didn't say that, but I was like, if you're
<v Speaker 3>just gonna make it hotter, you know, it's like, well,
<v Speaker 3>it drops the acorns like, so you sweep them up.
<v Speaker 3>I'll sweep him for you. You know? Is that the
<v Speaker 3>is that the issue here. Then a guy in the
<v Speaker 3>other corner just just butchered the shit out of his knoquas.
<v Speaker 3>They look like fucking turkey legs sticking out of the ground. Now,
<v Speaker 3>I mean, brutal man. What the fuck those are knoquas too?
<v Speaker 3>All the parrots. Yeah, we get these parrots coming up
<v Speaker 3>from Mexico. They would hit those anoquas and get the
<v Speaker 3>fruits off it. And that's a nice guy. That's a
<v Speaker 3>good guy. I've planted a bunch of shit for him
<v Speaker 3>in his yard. Cool of gaves some soda, bunch of
<v Speaker 3>native cacti. You know, it's an uphill battle. I need
<v Speaker 3>to just I need to do, like what the Buddhist is,
<v Speaker 3>just disconnect. I don't give a fuck. Just don't fuck
<v Speaker 3>with my yard. Everything else around me is garbage, its shit.
<v Speaker 3>I'm just not gonna look at it, and I'm just
<v Speaker 3>gonna focus on my shit because I get distracted right
<v Speaker 3>with what's right in front of me. So I got
<v Speaker 3>to drive by a bleak hell strip that's roasting in
<v Speaker 3>the sun, and then I want to go in there
<v Speaker 3>and fuck with it, which I can now do with
<v Speaker 3>one tree. So you know, it's if you gotta the
<v Speaker 3>little you gotta take the little battles, right, the little winds.
<v Speaker 3>It's a little wind get the cops called on you
<v Speaker 3>one night for trying to make the neighborhood more livable,
<v Speaker 3>and then the next day you're actually able to get
<v Speaker 3>permission to plant the tree. Now, I'll plant this tree
<v Speaker 3>and it will be official, but I guarantee someone in
<v Speaker 3>the neighborhood will probably still come by and rip it out,
<v Speaker 3>so I have to like protect it with chicken wires.
<v Speaker 3>Somehow I got too teposts I'm gonna put on the
<v Speaker 3>other side. I mean, it's really it's an uphill battle
<v Speaker 3>down here in South Texas. Looks like they want it
<v Speaker 3>to look ugly and hot all the time. Anyway, I'm big.
<v Speaker 3>Some ladies coming from the news, I'm gonna talk there.
<v Speaker 3>Let me turn this fucking let these settings down. I
<v Speaker 3>just it's a struggle for me to get these things
<v Speaker 3>pumped out, these podcasts pumped down. Now, it's a pain
<v Speaker 3>of the ass. Where I can find elucid two hours
<v Speaker 3>to sit down and talk. Oh it might be too low,
<v Speaker 3>God damn it. Anyway, some ladies coming from the news
<v Speaker 3>to talk to me about the tree planning that I've
<v Speaker 3>been doing, and the fact that you know, the city
<v Speaker 3>hates trees, and we'll, you know, so hopefully we'll see
<v Speaker 3>some positive I have to tone it down a little
<v Speaker 3>bit because you know, some of the squares are catching
<v Speaker 3>catching wind at this now, and I don't want to
<v Speaker 3>offend the square community too much because then that won't
<v Speaker 3>that'll make it harder for me to get this shit done.
<v Speaker 3>I just want to get fucking trees playing around here,
<v Speaker 3>you know. But uh, you know, they hear me, you know,
<v Speaker 3>my sense of humor, of the cristness, it's gonna it's gonna.
<v Speaker 3>I'm gonna have to water it down, you know, tugging
<v Speaker 3>in that shirt, tuck in this shirt and get a
<v Speaker 3>little clean cut. I couldn't if I tried anyway. You
<v Speaker 3>don't like it when it's messy, do you. I can't
<v Speaker 3>wait to talk to this lady and tell her how
<v Speaker 3>messy the plants are, how much I don't like I
<v Speaker 3>hate them. They drop this stuff on the sidewalks and
<v Speaker 3>it's so messy, and there's there's always something to complain about.
<v Speaker 3>You talk to some of these people. The people have
<v Speaker 3>noticed that always it's always the same person, like a
<v Speaker 3>different incarnation to the same person. The people that hate
<v Speaker 3>street trees, they're always complaining about the mess or there's
<v Speaker 3>always some fucking lame reason why they don't. You know,
<v Speaker 3>they require maintenance. It's not a fucking seven forty seven.
<v Speaker 3>What maintenance does it require? What does it require? What
<v Speaker 3>are you gonna do? Huh? You have to go and
<v Speaker 3>polish it once a week. You just go and come on, man,
<v Speaker 3>you've prune some branches, you fucking you know, once a
<v Speaker 3>year in a store. Maybe you take a branch off
<v Speaker 3>when it gets big. That's this street tree. It's wild.
<v Speaker 3>But even just explaining the urban heat island, like watching
<v Speaker 3>that Cops Eyes Wander, you know, when it was just like, okay,
<v Speaker 3>this isn't this isn't working anyway. Yeah, so it's been
<v Speaker 3>it's good. It's getting good. Uh, it's getting good coverage.
<v Speaker 3>And so maybe explaining the heat island to people, I mean,
<v Speaker 3>it's just the fact that the pavement becomes a space
<v Speaker 3>heater after the sun goes down, that it just becomes
<v Speaker 3>it becomes too hot and it continues. Rare. I looked
<v Speaker 3>it up and the math is actually pretty startling. I mean,
<v Speaker 3>one hundred and forty one degrees fahrenheit, probably one hundred
<v Speaker 3>sixty one down here on like a July or or
<v Speaker 3>August day, So for for one hundred and forty one
<v Speaker 3>degree fahrenheit stretch of payment, and again it's probably much
<v Speaker 3>hotter than that down here in July the surface of
<v Speaker 3>some of these massive stretches of asphalt. So one hundred
<v Speaker 3>and forty one degrees fahnheit. It's not like a cup
<v Speaker 3>of coffee. It doesn't cool that quickly. Okay. It's got
<v Speaker 3>a very high heat capacity and a very high thermal inertia. Okay,
<v Speaker 3>these are physics terms, so you could you could look
<v Speaker 3>this up. It can take upwards of ten to twelve
<v Speaker 3>hours for it to cool down to within ten degrees
<v Speaker 3>fahrenheit of the ambient temperature, which you know at six
<v Speaker 3>in the morning here right before the five in the morning,
<v Speaker 3>before the sun comes up in July, it doesn't get
<v Speaker 3>It'll maybe get to eighty degrees fahrenheit. So you add
<v Speaker 3>this up over a number of days, weeks, months, and
<v Speaker 3>you know, you get it never cools off, so that
<v Speaker 3>the heat just starts only building and building and building.
<v Speaker 3>Next day, it'll be next week, it'll be a cup.
<v Speaker 3>It'll only cool down to a couple degrees, it'll cool
<v Speaker 3>to a couple degrees warmer, and then the next the
<v Speaker 3>next couple of weeks a couple degrees cooler than that,
<v Speaker 3>and it just it never cools off. And just explaining
<v Speaker 3>this to people, it's just it takes a minute. But
<v Speaker 3>when you get them to start thinking about it in
<v Speaker 3>this way, you realize every new stretch of pavement, asphalt, concrete, brick, building,
<v Speaker 3>cinder block, whatever you build, it needs to be seen
<v Speaker 3>for what it is. If it's not shaded somehow by
<v Speaker 3>a pergola structure or a street tree, it just becomes
<v Speaker 3>a space heater. It's just a space heater, and it
<v Speaker 3>makes everything ten times hotter than it would otherwise be.
<v Speaker 3>It's nuts. Man's crazy, this doesn't I mean, what's crazy
<v Speaker 3>to me is that this doesn't. Well, I guess people
<v Speaker 3>don't really go outside, especially down here, so in the
<v Speaker 3>summer everyone's in an air conditioning, air conditioned vehicle, so
<v Speaker 3>people don't realize. I mean, you see these stretches. First off,
<v Speaker 3>there's not many sidewalks where there is a sidewalk, the
<v Speaker 3>there's nothing shading them, and you never see anybody walking
<v Speaker 3>on them. The fattest city in America, the fattest city
<v Speaker 3>in North America. Excuse me, we're talking about the whole
<v Speaker 3>conton was a documentary that just came out on YouTube
<v Speaker 3>that a friend of mine, Don Here sent me three
<v Speaker 3>weeks ago. He said, look, the Rio Grand Valley's blowing
<v Speaker 3>up for all the wrong reasons figuratively and literally. Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>but check it out, the fattest city in North America.
<v Speaker 3>I thought it was something like it's some Turkish YouTuber.
<v Speaker 3>I don't know. God damn man, he really hit the
<v Speaker 3>nail on the head with the region. But it doesn't
<v Speaker 3>have to be like this. So I'm doing my part
<v Speaker 3>to change it. Just you know, just just trying to
<v Speaker 3>be as kind as possible, holding my tongue. That's why
<v Speaker 3>I'm hoping people listen to this fucking podcast. Any of
<v Speaker 3>the city officials don't listen to this, you know, I
<v Speaker 3>don't want to hear me shitting on this because I
<v Speaker 3>speak in ways I could speak to you guys, but
<v Speaker 3>you know I wouldn't. I wouldn't speak to the municipal
<v Speaker 3>officials like this, or even the Apple leader who called
<v Speaker 3>the cops on me for planting trees a few days ago.
<v Speaker 3>You know so or or the guy across the street
<v Speaker 3>that called the cops of me for planting trees a
<v Speaker 3>year and a half ago. So you know, it's a
<v Speaker 3>bit by bit and there's a there's a lot of
<v Speaker 3>people here that are starting to catch on, which is cool.
<v Speaker 3>There's like a growing native plant movement. So you know, again,
<v Speaker 3>I tell people all the time, not doing this for beautification.
<v Speaker 3>Gotta hate the fucking we're beautification shit, what does that mean?
<v Speaker 3>What does that mean? That means different things, different people.
<v Speaker 3>I'm not doing it. I'm not an environmentalist. I'm not
<v Speaker 3>an environmentalist at all. It's a corneass term. It's outdated.
<v Speaker 3>I'm anti extinction. I'm anti habitat loss, that's all I am.
<v Speaker 3>I'm habitat I'm anti shitting where you eat. I'm anti
<v Speaker 3>destroying your own home. I'm anti committing arson on your
<v Speaker 3>own property, which is what our species is doing right now,
<v Speaker 3>especially in Texas with the crazy development here. That's only
<v Speaker 3>I'm not an I'm not an environmentalist, not a gardener.
<v Speaker 3>I don't give a shit about beauty as anything. This
<v Speaker 3>is plants, is infrastructure. It's just purely pragmatic. Anyway. In
<v Speaker 3>other news, I went to thorn scrub the last couple
<v Speaker 3>of days. Brought some cactus nerds down there that wanted
<v Speaker 3>to see payoti. They had never seen payoti for the
<v Speaker 3>first time, or they'd never seen payoti before, so they
<v Speaker 3>got to see payote for the first time. And I
<v Speaker 3>showed him some of the old clumps and the grandpa's
<v Speaker 3>and I saw where a pig had just destroyed a
<v Speaker 3>massive clump that was probably like eight inches off the ground.
<v Speaker 3>You know, West Texas and in Kohela, the payote mostly
<v Speaker 3>grows well that's not true. That's not true, and sin
<v Speaker 3>Lewis potoc will find clumps. But in West Texas at
<v Speaker 3>least most of the payoti grows recessed into the ground.
<v Speaker 3>We're barely getting above the ground. But you know here
<v Speaker 3>in South Texas it grows underneath the black brush and
<v Speaker 3>it can form these little mounds and so and very
<v Speaker 3>few of them are left, most of them have been destroyed.
<v Speaker 3>But but I, you know, the pigs had just I
<v Speaker 3>guess with their snout, they just just knocked it over
<v Speaker 3>and uprooted it and didn't really eat. Maybe they ate
<v Speaker 3>a little bit of the roots, but the clumps were
<v Speaker 3>still there. So I just put it back in the ground,
<v Speaker 3>which that alone is illegal. Like the fact I put
<v Speaker 3>it back in the same spot is technically it technically illegal.
<v Speaker 3>It's technically illegal. Match off fuck the laws around this stuff.
<v Speaker 3>So anyway, my friend Benny has been rescuing peyote from
<v Speaker 3>destruction and then having Native people that come down because
<v Speaker 3>his wife is a license to payotero native people that
<v Speaker 3>come down, He's been having them plant it, and he
<v Speaker 3>films them doing it, you know, so that way no
<v Speaker 3>one can give him ship for it. Then you take
<v Speaker 3>Now if if some you know, gung Ho City or
<v Speaker 3>I guess it would be some of the da someone
<v Speaker 3>will you know, stick up their asteris to mess with him.
<v Speaker 3>They can't because it's it's the native doing it. You're
<v Speaker 3>gonna tell a native you got to go to tell
<v Speaker 3>someone whose ancestor has been here thirty thousand years that
<v Speaker 3>they can't replant this plant in the ground that was
<v Speaker 3>you know, destroyed. Fucking nuts. Anyway, So I think what
<v Speaker 3>we're gonna do now, because it's it'd be really hard
<v Speaker 3>to cage this area or especially to fence it off
<v Speaker 3>the fence. You have to clear, you have to clear
<v Speaker 3>like a roadside strips so they can get in there
<v Speaker 3>with the skids there and then stretch the fence out.
<v Speaker 3>I mean, it's possible to do without a skids deer,
<v Speaker 3>but man, it's a fucking pain in the ass. And
<v Speaker 3>we did that last year trying to fence off some
<v Speaker 3>of these areas from pigs. But I think what we're
<v Speaker 3>gonna do now is get rebar cut it with an
<v Speaker 3>angle grinder to like two foot sections and hammer it
<v Speaker 3>in around some of these clumps like it's a little cage,
<v Speaker 3>and that will, uh, that will hopefully prevent the pigs
<v Speaker 3>from destroying this stuff and knocking it over because it's
<v Speaker 3>it's crazy, man, these fucking hogs. I understand why they
<v Speaker 3>hunt them from helicopters. I said this a million times.
<v Speaker 3>I got two AR fifteen's. I'm packing heat when I
<v Speaker 3>go out there all the time, pistols sidearm all this
<v Speaker 3>shit because I these fucking picks. I hate these pigs
<v Speaker 3>so much. God, I hate them, right, and we had
<v Speaker 3>we got cameras all over the place, and they're not
<v Speaker 3>going in the pig trap. I think maybe because I
<v Speaker 3>have like a shade cloth over it, so I need
<v Speaker 3>to take that off. But uh, the haveilinas are like
<v Speaker 3>half the size of these pigs. Man, the pigs, they're massive.
<v Speaker 3>We saw this three hundred pound hog. Giant nuts on
<v Speaker 3>it too. Oh it's so gross. Uh like those truck
<v Speaker 3>nuts that those fucking empty headed uh you know, double
<v Speaker 3>digit IQ morons half on the back of their four
<v Speaker 3>it up one fifties sometimes, you know, you know, you see,
<v Speaker 3>you don't see truck nuts too much anymore. I don't
<v Speaker 3>see him right here. Maybe if you're in the South.
<v Speaker 3>Maybe it's a Southern thing. I don't see him aroun here,
<v Speaker 3>Texas is a little you know, I don't think it
<v Speaker 3>would fly here. It's a little prude. Maybe in Arizona.
<v Speaker 3>I guess it depends where you are and how dumb
<v Speaker 3>the populace is, or what the proportion of idiots in
<v Speaker 3>the populace is. I should say that, but uh, but yeah, anyway,
<v Speaker 3>this but this thing, you know, the have alinas are
<v Speaker 3>like a fraction of the size of these things. I
<v Speaker 3>can't wait to get them. I'm gonna get them. I
<v Speaker 3>can't wait. We got bobcats out there, too, so hopefully
<v Speaker 3>the bobcats will get some of the rabbits, rattlesnakes, road runners,
<v Speaker 3>all kinds of nice stuff. Man. So it's so pleasant
<v Speaker 3>out there, but in two or three months it'll be
<v Speaker 3>too hot to really go out there. I mean, I
<v Speaker 3>still go out there, but I'm not going to be
<v Speaker 3>taking people out there because if you've never experienced the
<v Speaker 3>heat this heat before, it's fucking brutal. Right, Like, when
<v Speaker 3>I go during the summer, I'll leave. I'll show up
<v Speaker 3>at like five PM, so I'm only there for a
<v Speaker 3>couple hours before the sun goes down and it starts
<v Speaker 3>cooling off, so or you got to show up early
<v Speaker 3>in the morning. But yeah, we're gonna be using rebar.
<v Speaker 3>You know what is it? Like a ten foot section
<v Speaker 3>of rebar is like eight bucks probably was cheaper a
<v Speaker 3>couple of years ago, but then cut that up with
<v Speaker 3>an angle grinder, just hammer it in with like a
<v Speaker 3>mini sledge, you know. So hopefully they'll keep some of
<v Speaker 3>the pigs off. The rabbits and rats will gnaw on
<v Speaker 3>it too a little bit, but they're not gonna take
<v Speaker 3>it down like the pigs will. Anyway, I'm going to
<v Speaker 3>Ecuador on February first. We got another Costa Rica trip
<v Speaker 3>at tour that Alan and Mandy are setting up. I
<v Speaker 3>believe that's in early June, which is dope. That'll be
<v Speaker 3>like in all the high elevation forests of Costa Rica.
<v Speaker 3>And then February twenty eighth, I'll be in Saint Louis
<v Speaker 3>speaking to some group I signed up for way too
<v Speaker 3>much shit. I forget we all all this stuff. I
<v Speaker 3>gotta start saying no. I'll be at the International Aeroid
<v Speaker 3>Society Conference in September in Miami, and in May, I
<v Speaker 3>will be where the hell am I going to May,
<v Speaker 3>North Carolina? The International cock card Ever Plant authiity, I'm
<v Speaker 3>just kidding. I'm just joking. The International Carnivorous Plant Society
<v Speaker 3>made up will be there. You know. I'll be showing
<v Speaker 3>pictures of Eastern and Western Hemisphere carnivores, pictures I'd taken
<v Speaker 3>over the last few last six years. Fucking eight, god
<v Speaker 3>damn it. Oh man. You know, Jack's getting old. He's
<v Speaker 3>getting real old. He's been pissing inside and just oh man,
<v Speaker 3>I honestly I wish he would just go in his sleep,
<v Speaker 3>because it's so hard watching a dog fall apart like this.
<v Speaker 3>He's sixteen. I'm gonna see if he can make it
<v Speaker 3>to the big one seven ten years old in May
<v Speaker 3>and uh, my buddy Drew is gonna be house sitting
<v Speaker 3>for me while I'm gone and hanging out with them.
<v Speaker 3>And oh god, it's never easy, is it? It sucks?
<v Speaker 3>Got he was He's still like, I think he's got cataracts.
<v Speaker 3>But you know, I just fucking putting dogs down. I've
<v Speaker 3>never had to do it before. This will be the
<v Speaker 3>first time. I don't know what. I can't do it.
<v Speaker 3>I can't do it. I can't put him down. That's
<v Speaker 3>why he's just gonna have to. I hope he like goes.
<v Speaker 3>I hope he goes on his own. You know, I
<v Speaker 3>don't know where's they got like a dog cove working?
<v Speaker 3>Is there a I guess it's just a vet, right,
<v Speaker 3>I guess there's not a dog. He's co working, still alive.
<v Speaker 3>I don't know. Anyway, This is where my mind goes. Anyway,
<v Speaker 3>I got shit to do and I can't. I can
<v Speaker 3>never get enough time. I'm fucking losing my mind. If
<v Speaker 3>you emailed me and I didn't get back to you,
<v Speaker 3>I'm sorry. Uh been selling stickers or prints all that shit. Anyway.
<v Speaker 3>Oh yeah, I'm getting the first hard copy of Concrete
<v Speaker 3>Botany next week. There are two weeks from now. I
<v Speaker 3>forget when, I don't know, but the book will be
<v Speaker 3>out in April and then we're going on tour. Me
<v Speaker 3>and I will be going on tour last two weeks
<v Speaker 3>at April, so we're gonna be going through El Paso,
<v Speaker 3>Las Cruses, Tucson, Phoenix in LA. So, if you live
<v Speaker 3>in one of those places or nearby and you got
<v Speaker 3>a venue that's got one hundred to one hundred and
<v Speaker 3>fifty person capacity, hit me up, let me know we'll
<v Speaker 3>set something up. Thanks a lot, everybody else, have aggressive day.
<v Speaker 3>Go fuck yourseluf By. Sorry for the lack of podcasts.
<v Speaker 3>The last few weeks have been busy. All right, That's
<v Speaker 3>all I got. Take care, go fuckus by