Speaker 1: Good afternoon, and welcome to the crime pace. But Bondany
doesn't podcast. Did anybody out there ruin Christmas? Did you
ruin Christmas? Did you have any unpleasant altercations with family members?
Was anybody lectured about lifestyle choices, lifestyle preferences, past failures,
personality flaws or idiosyncrasies? Is that what Christmas is for?
Did you feel bad about yourself? Because that happens a
lot on Christmas too. The holidays can be a very
traumatic and triggering time for many of us. And these
dysfunctional days, these dysfunctional families, these badges of honor that
we wear, okay, like past scars of emotional trammels which
we may have or may have not dealt with. But
I hope you feel good now, and we're gonna spend
an hour together, maybe a little bit longer, and you
can listen to me fucking rant. You can listen to
me talk about, you know, epic uticular wax again. You
can hear me go off on all different sorts of
tangents and stuff. They haven't they haven't. I haven't suffered
any consequences on this podcast yet, despite my constant shitting
on the advertisers, and there have been some really, really
bad ads. I'd like to mention I have prof I've
heard from multiple listeners. But remember, you could just sign
up for the fucking Patreon and then I don't have
to listen to you complain. Oh, I had to push
the I had to push the fast forward button and
fast forward fifteen seconds through a through a fucking terrible
You know, if you live in America, you should be
used to this now, anyway. I mean, really, our national
culture is advertising. It's we're so depoperate of any genuine
authentic culture here. Okay, the youth are coming up on
the TikTok viz. Everyone's looking for validation and credibility. There's
no authentic personalities anymore. We've squeezed the last bit of
authenticity out of the cities. We've turned them all into
you know, he's overpriced cupcake boutiques, dog grooming salons and
fucking you know, climbing gyms. No offense, that's you. You know.
I don't know what my listeners are. You know, all
over the place, we get listeners from right or left.
I don't care. I think it's probably mostly lefties. But
I'll talk to anybody about plants. I don't care, you know,
as long as you don't tell me about your politics
and get mad at me. If I don't, you know,
spout them. We could we could find room, I will say. Though.
You know, it's been a it's been a weird time
for me for Christmas. Okay, I got sick again. Actually
I didn't. I dodged a bullet. I had my first
time using one of those online how you pay forty
bucks and they write you a script. But I saw
the fucking flags on a horizon at a influenza, a
virus marching in in the form of my daughter coughing
on me about nine hundred times. Again. You know, she's
in school so that the parents can go to work.
This is why we have school. This is why we
have school. She already hates it. Five days a week
is too much. She liked it for the first three
or four days, well, three or four weeks, excuse me.
But then you know, I think five days of just
repeatedly having to go you know, seven am, they fucking
wake these kids up, brutal man, and I'm you know,
in the middle of doing all this other stuff. So yeah,
you know, I can't. It makes me feel bad. I
feel I feel deficient as a father. I should be
taking her out, you know, because especially in South Texas
and the shopping and retail slum that is South Texas,
it's uh, you know, highs in the eighties, which is
that's very chilly for us, you know, as opposed to
one hundred and five like it normally is. But I
saw the influenza a virus on the horizon. I gotcha.
I went to this online what was it? What was it?
I forget the name. I don't want to do promotion
for them anyway, all right, but uh I went It
was like an online you know, you right. I didn't
even have to talk to them, but anybody, no no
video calls. It was all you know, computer, computer health, telehealth.
And they wrote me a script for tamiflu and some
scissorup even though I didn't say I needed scissorp. They're
just trying to drug me. But it was cheap because
I don't have insurance. Nobody has insurance here, right, That's
why that guy got mrked because that, you know, the oligarchy,
it's never We're never gonna have health insurance. By the way,
either right, So you know, the oligarchy's never gonna allow it.
You think they're gonna put all these companies out of
business and give people free or affordable health insurance. You
could be paying eighty bucks a month to you know,
for like a government plan, but instead you're paying four
hundred dollars a month for a private plan, and then
you get to pay again when you actually have to
use it. I don't understand. He's bitch about this all
the time, and I'm sorry for doing it again. We
will talk about plants. But the Reagan ideas, the Reaganistic
ideas that government can't do it, government can't do you
want privatize, You're gonna privatize it, while the private sector
in there really like the pri it suck this. Yeah,
government bureaucracy is a pain in the ass. A lot
of government workers don't give a fuck. It's miserable. Okay,
but you got to pick your poison pal. You think
a private company. I mean, you guys already believe I
don't need to talk to you about this, but the
ethos is just fucking insane. Then we deal with this
twenty years ago. You know, this is why we need
some good class conscious fucking leftism without the identitarian shit,
you know, the identitarian politics. This is why I'm always
whining about words like, you know, colonialism and all this shit.
It's unless you're talking in a historical context, it doesn't
have reference for today. Colonialism is some it's some words
that the college kids came up with that's completely completely
lacks class consciousness, and people are so dumb. There's good
material there. When you talk about colonialism, you can really,
you know, you talk with someone who's intelligent and actually,
you know, isn't just using buzzwords. You can fucking take
it apart and talk about good stuff. But that's of
course not what happens in most of the dominant culture.
You know, people just take it as a as a
flag for race, for iudentitarianism, and that's just it just
misses the ball. Basically, you know, you need good class consciousness,
and I think that's why so many of us brought
felt brought together by Luigi. I almost ordered a candle
of that young man. I had somebody write me saying,
it's not okay, he still killed somebody. I know, I
know it's bad he killed somebody. Okay, I'm not saying
you should go kill someone. Though, my first sponsor in AA,
Norm said he did condone homicide, right, he was practiced
good recovery, but he but he condones homicide. And he
used to talk about the liquor store burrito of spirituality,
which is kind of like they did an authentic fake
spirituality that doesn't really fill the pot. That's like you
get a couple of the key ingredients. You could subsist
on it for a while, but it's not gonna it's
not gonna last. He was a wonderful man, you know.
It was like a fifty five year old black man,
looked like he was probably and he'd come in like
fifteen minutes late to a meeting wearing a fucking entirely
white suit, just totally fucking walking in like he's on
the place. I think he ended up dropping. I think
I annoyed the shit, But you know, that's what happens sometimes,
you know. Anyway, what was I talking about? Anyway, we're gonna,
we're gonna fucking we're gonna talk about uh peyote recovery
here in a second. But you know, the healthcare thing
really touched me. I do I still I feel I
just think it was a wonderful moment for us as Americans.
And if you're not in America, this is gonna be
hard for you to understand because our system is so broken.
As you know, right, I signed up for health insurance
because I come from a long line of Italians that
all get ass cancer, colon cancer. And granted it might
be from consuming too much red red meat in Buffalo Motzarel,
but just to be sure, I'm gonna get a colon
ascob even though I'm not the age yet, you know.
And I got a little fetish for people sticking you know,
tubes and cameras in my ass. So that's why I'm
gonna sign up get a colonoscopy. It's cheaper if I
just pay cash than if I use the insurance plan
that I just signed up for. I'm only gonna hold
onto the insurance for a month or two, and I'm
gonna get you know, get checked up, you know, get
fondled by a doctor, maybe get a prostate. I don't know,
I'm gonna get checked up on, get some blood work
all that. You know. I am prone. I got diabetes
predispositions supposedly according to my my genes, so I'm gonna
make sure to type two diabetes isn't setting in yet, right.
Do I get a lot of cardio? I do those kettlebells,
I do it, go bike ride. Used to run a lot,
but I haven't really been able to lately because of
knee issues. Well not knee issues. I think it's just
fucking it. So you gotta get good cardio, you know.
So I hopefully I am holding the diabetes off for
a little bit, but you never know. But I was really,
I was, really I felt proud, I will, especially when
Luigi turned out to be a handsome Italian. He was
He's a handsome Italian man, young man, right, and he wasn't.
He wasn't the he wasn't. I don't know what was
he Libertarian or some weird shit. I don't know who cares.
Right he had he was right on He was right
on one thing, Okay, not killing someone, but on on
airing aggrievance. Just viewed like that, airing a grievance, right,
And I guess the guy he murked to it, he
got in a DUI. Any good any good business sleeves right,
any good money worshiping business sleeves that's worth their salt
and runs a major company, especially you know, one that
is built on screwing people over has gotten a DUI
in the past. That's just a good. That's a good.
It's like an echelon. It's a chevron, right, it's a
chevron to put on your sleeve. You got a d ui,
you know, probably cheating on your wife, doing a lot
of blow. I don't know what you're doing. You know,
you go to church on Sunday though, right, for the optics,
that's all that matters. Anyway, he'd gotten the duy he'd
been I guess they were. I don't know. I'm not
trying to fucking I'm not trying to shit on the
dead too much. Right, I'll let you guys do that,
but I have to pretend to be you know, the
uh uh more morally righteous. Anyway. I really feel though,
for the you know, for the younger people that really
felt the heroin Luigi. You know, it's it's warming my
heart anyway. Uh I went on a bike ride. I
took the advantage of a Christmas holiday, right. My daughter
was pissed off. She stayed up too late, and then
we let her open presence. She didn't even really care
about it. You know, she's already becoming a nihilist and uh.
And then you know, we sent her home with ther
ma and she opened more presents there and then passed
out and took a nap. She still getting she was
still getting over the flu. Whereas I got that description
for tamaflu from the forty dollars telehealth thing, and then
the tamaflu prescription. I went to good RX, and it's
not a promotion for them either, but I'm just telling
you how to get the good hookup. And the tamaflu
was like twenty bucks. I started taking the Tama flu
before I even felt it. I never got sick, and
my daughter was coughing all over me. The flu will
fuck you up. It's one of the only things that's
ever sent me to the hospital, one of the only
viruses that's ever sent me to the hospital. I wasn't
able to breathe. I think there was twenty nineteen, yeah, anyway,
maybe it was twenty twenty. I can't remember. Yeah, it
was right before COVID broke out in twenty twenty. But anyway,
I took advantage of the Christmas holiday and the complete
lack of people on the streets here in South Texas,
which is my favorite thing about Christmas. It's the complete
lack of people. It's that day, it's the day after
Tomorrow feeling, you know, that apocalyptic feeling when the streets
are empty and quiet. And I went on a fucking
twelve mile bike ride, which was so nice. I used
to do that all the time, used to go on
long bike rides. I thought I'd never own a car.
I bought my first car when I was twenty six, No,
twenty five, I was a twenty four. I don't fucking know.
I bought my first car when I was in my
mid twenties, a Honda prelude off of a guy in
a parking lot in Sacramento who didn't care that I
didn't know how to drive stick shift. He taught me
on the spot. I killed the clutch two days later,
got it replaced, and then that prelude lasted me for
another two or three maybe four years, you know, gallivanting
around northern California between rail yards and hiking spots and
learning botany, my beginner years of learning botany. And then
I sold it back to the state through their buyback
program for like a grand so I made a hundred bucks.
I bought it for nine hundred, sold it for sold
it for a grand Oh god, the mocking birds there,
I see him going. They're really enjoying the fruits and
the Malviviscus arboreous, which is one of like five different
unrelated plants that's colloquially referred to as turks cap, another
stupid common name. It's more like a fez. Maybe, I
don't know, is that what it is? Why did he
even call it that? I guess the flowers look like
a fez, Is that true? I don't fucking know. This
is stupid, super common name. But I went on a
bike ride and it felt cut. I got some good
cardio in I didn't get killed. It's much too dangerous
and much of Texas to ride a bike because the
drivers are just so terrible and the trucks are so
big they can't even see you. They'll run you over.
They will crunch you right, just like you're a you know,
one of these dead palm fronds laying in from the
Washingtonia palms laying in the street, the cut right over.
You just snap your spine in half, not even look back.
They won't even know, right, worst drivers of many places
I've seen I've been, and it's just dangerous. There's no
bike lanes. They're not used to driving. They're mad at
you for being out there because this is a car slum. Okay,
this is an all American car slum. It's a fucking
royal dump. Okay. We're all about ambulance chasing, car dealerships,
muscle cars, parking lot princesses. You know, trucks that oversized
trucks that you don't dent or scratch because you don't
actually use them for work. We're about uh, we're about shopping.
We're about parking lots. We're about being forced to drive over.
We're about metabolic diseases. We're about heart disease. We're about obesity. Right,
that's the natural, that's the national culture down here, and
we're proud of it. Right. So anyway, I took a
fucking it was nice. It was a wonderful you know,
an hour I was out there, went down by the
border wall, just getting fucking dystopic. This is why you
really have to embrace some sort of nihilist catastrophism as
your spirituality. And we're an eco based nihilist catastrophist. We
pray to the plants, we findel the plants, right, we
hug trees. We also condone homicide. And we have you know,
no respect whatsoever for most of human infrastructure, modern human infrastructure.
We're very kind to people. We're happy to teach people.
We're happy, we smile, we shake hands, we say yes sir,
we opened doors for people. But in the end we
hope all of it collapses under its own weight, shortsightedness
and selfishness, right and and and it's, uh, you know,
we just kind of shrug our shoulders when it happens.
It's a it's a eco based nihilist. Catastrophism is more
of what I am. So that's why, you know, I
just I think there's a little bit of politics in
there too, but I try not to share them. Very
class conscious need a class consciousness more than anything. Uh So, Anyway,
we were out at Thorn Scrub two days ago. We
got the Javier got a brush hog and we had
to go clear some stuff land that had already been disturbed.
But the blackbrush in the Guahil, the Senegelia balandroy, all
these spiny legs come back. I like the first to
recolonize disturbed land. There's also a shit ton of buffalo grass.
So we're considering maybe getting a cow, which I never
thought i'd do because I kind of hate cows. Nothing
personal against them, I hate the phenomenon of cattle right
because it's you know, overall, you don't want to be
eating that stuff more than once a month. It's just
not healthy for you. That's my opinion. To each their own,
I don't care. You could stuff your face with donuts
and fucking waterburger. I don't give a shit what you do.
I just you know, I can't. I feel nauseated when
I look at that stuff. I feel like I want
to puke. I feel very uncomfortable watching people eat that shit,
any of it, right, But to east their own, I
don't judge. But we thought about getting maybe getting a
cow and naming him. You know, we'll give him a name,
just the resident cow he claimed the bag exemption. And
then that cow will also take care of the buffalo grass.
He'll gnaw it down, he or she. It could be
a they, then could be a non binary cow. I
don't care. We'll get it in there. It's gonna I'm
gonna resist every urge to put a party hat on it, okay,
because I think they look good, and probably think any animal.
You put a party hat on an animal, just a
paper one. It's cute and I don't know, you know,
I don't know where I'm going with this, but I
just think it'd be nice to have a cow get
the egg exemption. We got to drill a well so
it has water. We'll name it Marty or some shit
and uh, and we'll make sure it lives a happy
life all by itself. Knocking down buffalo grass, maybe we'll
get another one. You know, I never thought i'd become
a cattle men cattle person, but you know that fucking
that buffalo grass. I don't think they're gonna go in
and disturb much of the thorn scrub, right, but we
do have a bad pig problem, so we're gonna have
to get a pig kraal two. I reached out to
a friend to handle it. He volunteered to come with
AR fifteen's and his friend and shoot the pigs, which
I'm absolutely not going to let him do because I
think I think that sounds it's just the recipe for
blowing up the spot. One of the nearby land owners
also freaks me out. He's a very, very socially conservative
man who sounds like he sounds like the mortician in
Big Lebowski. You know, he's got that the most moderately
pretty reciptacle just just reeks of creep them. I'm sure
he's not listening to this podcast, so he won't be offended.
He won't have room to get offended. But the guy
really bummed me out, and he was just super controlling
and nuts. There's an easement we have to go through
to get get through his land. I maintained to completely
polite demeanor with him all the all the while just
being revolted. You know, this guy reminds me of like
it's just horrible relatives that I wish I wasn't related
to that I may have had to deal with fifteen
years ago before they passed. You know. So there's that,
Uh all the other some of the other nearby landowners
sound cool, all right, you know, to a certain degree.
But the pigs are a problem, and so we're gonna
they were ripping up. They were going there's a wonderful
elfin forest of blackbrush. I don't know if it's a
climax community ecologically down here, I don't know what the
climax would be. I'd imagine more of the climax communities
would be the low growing miscuit. You know, it forms
a nice canopy. There's a kindo series any acanthus, these
clumps of the hedgehog cacti for any of those that
aren't familiar, wonderful when they flower barren soils. Minimal buffalo
grass incursion because it can't it can't get in there
and it can't grow in the shit in the shade.
It's not tolerant to the shade. But uh, they're still
in I can't believe there's still fucking introducing buffalo grass
for ranching. The ranchers did this. I blame the ranchers.
Buffalo grass is ruining ecosystems all over the world. Australia.
I believe it's native to South A guy might be wrong,
but you know, either way, this this beautiful elfin forest
of black brush. We were in there with five or
six heads, five y six people. Uh you know, Ken
King was out there too. He was actually wearing shoes
this time. I was proud of him. He was wearing sandals.
He was wearing tevas, but he was still out there.
Uh and uh, you know, beautiful wonderful layer of duff
on the ground and Mammalaria spherica all over the place
that had been uprooted by the pigs. There was lots
of you know, pig damage. Uh. They're horrible, horrible and
you could smell them too. You could smell where they'd been.
There's there, they've been there recently. So I think, uh,
you know, I went on wanted these sights for a
pig trap and there was you know, here these rednecks
talking about that trap. Is I can't that that's the
most ingenious design I've ever seen. Man. There's a three
thousand dollars this thing costs. But it's the most ingenious
design I've ever seen. Man. It's it's ye know, I
can't believe nobody thought of them before. And you just
get them. It's a corral so they can keep going
in and then they get trapped in there, and then
you just come by and level them all out. For
any animal lovers, I'm sorry, but they're an invasive species
and they're extremely destructive to habitat. So it's you know,
it's the way it's got to go right. Then you
bring your friend who's got an AR fifteen and he
just levels them right. Because we're we're crazy primates too.
We've got to do our part right. We're part of
the food chain. So yeah, man, it was, but god,
it's bad. There's there's I guess there's like a three
or four hundred pound one that's been caught in the
wildlife cameras. But these things are real, real bad. Oh God,
can you imagine what? Then you got to take them,
load them up in a truck, probably take four or
five people to do it, and then take them off
to get butcher, donate it whatever. I don't know, but
it's there. They're really reckon habitat and they're trampling the
bio crust through this wonderful black bio crust, which is
one of the things I want to get a species
idea on if we can get you know, soil biologies
down there. I guess I could just collect them and
send samples. But this crust that forms this nice biocrust
that's no doubt enriching the soil and also acting as
a germination bed for many seedlings, especially the cacti Mammalaria
hider eye, Mammalaria sphiica, kindo serious penth the lofus, et cetera.
And there it's just you could see everywhere it's just
been trampled and crushed, and the deer do it a
little bit, but it's mostly the pigs. I guess there's
bobcats there too. I'd love for there to be oslots ocelots,
however you pronounced that maybe a jag arundi, which are
very rare wild cats that look like I don't know
they got those rounded ears. Beautiful animals though, but there's
a lot of work to do. But I'm just happy
that we got it and we had the you know,
now we've actually got a road, and we the road
was already there but had been completely overgrown. The property
had been neglected. That's probably where the pigs moved in
because there wasn't a lot of sign of people. But
we're gonna be raising money for a well and then
getting a stock tank, and then trying to raise money
to build like a cement pad with a shade structure,
and then on that we're going to try to get
the next step eventually, hopefully before I croak, whenever that is,
will be a two story building and it'll be a
goddamn bonifid research for stillity. We'll be able to host
people up in the top, you know, hope, have researchers come,
have a place to stay, be like a little bunk house.
Get solar on there. It'll be really nice. And then
we're gonna be replanting a dozen or so different species
of cacti. Most of the other stuff seems to be
good at establishing itself. There was Carlo Ridia. What is
the species this linear aar Folia I forget which no
part of folia I think was that it? Yeah, Carlolridia
part of a flora, not part of a folio, not
part of leaves, part of flowers. Carlo Ridi is a
cool genus. There's I've seen three species. It's in a
can't they see. It's got very distinct fruits that look
like a bellows mechanism, you know, like the that you
used to fan the flames of a fire. You know,
it blows air out. They've got that kind of elongated
teardrop shape. Just saw Carlo Ridia linear a folio on
a ranch in southern Brewster County in West Texas, but
part of flora is the one that's out here and
in New Mexico. So I saw that out there, we
saw parthenium and canum. Is that the one that's guay
What is guayule. It's a parthenium species that I saw
some tire companies trying to make natural rubber out of
sustainable natural rubber. They got some farm in Arizona. Now,
Guayule is Parthenium argentatum, which I've seen in West Texas
but not here. But we had parthenium and kanam and
there's Trixus everywhere too, which I guess was smoked. It
was ethno botanically important as a a for the leaves.
Smoking the leaves to the coyle Tecans, probably the lepon Apache,
which is one of the dominant tribes down here, one
of the most common. And then I think cole Tecan
was just a term for it was like a clusterfuck
term that the Spanish gave to the people that lived
in the borderlands. Yeah, the tribes down here in South Texas.
Comanche a feared tribe that dominated the southern plains and
played a significant role in Texas front theory history. The
Comanche were skilled horsemen who migrated with markt style, but
they were relative newcomers. From what I understand. The Karanka
was the tribe that lived along the off of Mexico
and southern Texas. Can you fucking imagine how beautiful that
must have been? And I'm not saying it's success pool
now filled with commercial detritus and you know, the the
effluent from the oil industry. I'm not certainly not saying that,
but God, it must have been fucking paradise all of
North America. Really, it really was the cole Tecans, a
nomadic hunter gatherer group that roam the coast and inland
of South Texas. The coal Tecans also settled in areas
of Mexico. I think that, I think that encompasses Lepona Paschi.
I got her one of those DNA tests. She's like,
what is she like seventeen percent and then she's like
forty percent Italian forty percent? She should only be she
should be less than that, because I'm only I'm only
fifty percent. But I think her ma, I think her
ma'sma was Spanish indigenous and then had some Italian in
her as well, and maybe Portuguese. I don't know. All
that's all that's stuff. We also have down here in
South Texas. The Caddoscados c A D. D O S
a matriarchal society of farmers and villagers who built earthen
mounds for religious ceremonies. And bar Man, That's who I
would probably be lurking with. That was probably that was
probably cool. That was probably a cool society to be in.
You know, I'm not so much into the war and stuff, right,
it seems like they have a short life span, right
the submit a Comanche's no offense, right, Quanta Parker, all
of them, you know, did a lot of wonderful things.
I'm just saying, I don't want to end up, you know,
shot or you know, studded with arrows, which happens, tends
to have. Those things tend to happen in warring societies.
The Kaiwa an allyo To Comanche who migrated to Texas
from Montana, Missouri. And the Kickapoo, a federally recognized tribe
with the reservation on the Rio Grande in Maverick County. Shit,
where's Maverick County? There's so many fucking counties in Texas.
Oh jesus. Uh. The state culture of ambulance chasing and uh,
just perpetually driving. Now you took this beautiful land and
you turned it in to car dealership's ambulance chasing billboards
and uh and what a burger and some people like
that and that's okay, that's okay. But but anyway, so
this we're we're out at thorn Scrub. We got the brushog.
The fucking hydraulic tubes come off of it, blow hydraulic
fluid everywhere. It's because it was a rental and the
guy that works there apparently he didn't put it on
the right way. I don't know, but we had to
take it back. The dude didn't want to give a refund.
He was like, yeah, it just fucking blows the mind
some of the shit that you encounter. Didn't want to
give a refund. How he talked him into a refund
because it was completely not our fault, and then had
to go back the next day brush hog it again.
We're gonna have to scrape it. But the thing I'm
excited for the most is just doing ecological studies documenting
with photos. That's probably gonna be the most important. They're
gonna be taking notes, documenting with photos, marking GPS locations.
You know, if like a plant's been dug up and replanted,
like dug up by pigs, because that's what the pigs do.
They dig up the they dig up the cac die.
They eat the roots and then leave them there to die.
And you know, if it's winter, the cact this probably
has a couple months to live, depending on how big
it is before it completely croaks. If it's summer, that
thing will be toasted. It'll burn through all its energy
stores within two to three weeks if it's in full sun.
If it's in shade, it can have a little bit longer.
But but those energy stores are what's gonna you know,
the roots completely die. Those energy stores are what's going
to be important for it to generate new roots. And
then you got to go in and shoot the pigs.
So I need to get better guns. I've only got
like a little twenty two handgun. You know. I used
to have a mosin the goat, but tweakers stole it
when I lived in Northern California. It was in a
storage room. We had to take it away. Okay, I
had a Mosen the Gaunt. It's an antique Russian sniper rifle.
It'll blow holes in box card doors. Very fun to shoot.
But and I'm not a gun nut. I just like
playing with them sometimes, all right, And since I don't
drink anymore, I feel a lot more safe and ethically
sound doing so. But I had a mos in the
gun that got ganked by tweakers, like he's bound to
happen in northern California. We'll blow holes in box card doors.
It was very, very fun to shoot large bullets. But
aside from that, I just have a twenty two. You know.
We had to take the mosen Neganta out of the
house because a friend that was living there at the
time was suicidal. Now he was always threatening suicide. I
don't think he actually would have done it. I love
the man, but you know, he's in now to like
his tenth or eleventh year of alcoholism. I had to
distance myself, as you sometimes have to do with addict
their alcoholic friends. I still retain a place in my
heart for him, but you're not going to change people.
You can only do so much. But anyway, we had
to take the gun out of the house, you know,
because he was threatening suicide. Not directly with that gun,
but uh, you know, he was just depressed. He would
get emotional. I kind of called his bluff. Again. I
love this man, but let's be honest there, right. You know,
there's some friends you worry about popping themselves. This was
not one of them, right, But and that was you know,
and then it was it was taken. It was gracefully
taken in the dead of night by some of the
metamphetamine addicts and enthusiasts of northern California, Sisku County, California,
Wonderful County which I hope to return to. Learned botany.
There cut my teeth, Iliam the bakery Hespero ciprus baker
eye Juniperus occidentalis, which has the mild hint of cat
urine and it's resin resinous foliage. So anyway, but you know,
you get a large caliber fire arm, you pick it.
You know on your side, you can open carry when
you're out there. Okay, I had a friend get attacked
by faroh pigs. He runs the nursery. He's a gentle man.
He's a gentleman, somewhat frail, not frail, he's just you know,
he's he's fit. He's he's a fit. You know, he's
not eating tacos like the rest of us here. And
he got attacked, he got chased down, they fucked up
one of his dogs, and now he packs heat, right,
because you got to for the pigs. It's the main
reason for the pigs. I carry a knife in case
I ever get attacked by a stray pitbull or I
got to pull one off one of my dogs, because
there's a lot of loose dogs around here. You know,
this podcast is sounding it's sounding a little rough round
the edges. I'm sorry. I'm sorry about that. We have
some sensitive listeners out there. But I carry a knife,
a nice leatherman or a gerber which is cheaper and
more affordable, but requires a little bit more maintenance in
the form of turning the screws because they come undone.
The things were probably made in China, and that's one
of the main reasons why I do it. In case
you have to, you know, uh, you know, take a
pit bull off of one of your dogs or your
child or something. Right. I hope I never do. I've
met so many wonderful pitpulls, met some very scary ones
too that with definitely mal cats and kids if they
could so, but studying the land out there is one
of the things I'm most excited about. And studying that
goddamn biocrust was one of the things I was most
excited about. But that's not going to happen now because
the pigs with their little cloven feet are trampling. The
pigs have cloven feet. I don't know. I don't even
know what that means. I think it just means it's bifurcated.
Is that what it means. Yeah, it just means it's bifurcated.
They're cute little piggy feet. They're cute. Can you say
cute little piggy feet? If you're about to shoot them?
I wouldn't you know if you could, if you were
able to get one of those little ones, that'd be
a cute animal on a birthday head you could. You
could adopt a cute little pig and take it, take
it with you, and you know, domesticate it, domestimicate it,
and turn it into you know, a really cute little animal.
I mean, you imagine a thing in a vest with
a little Santa's little help her had like an elf right.
They tell me that's not cute. You take it to
the mall on the holidays where they still exist, and
you you just let it go nuts, right, You're just
chasing a pig throughout, and then you just claim it's
not your fault when security's you know, trying to I
don't know what would happen. Let it run loose. If
it's only semi domestic and you take it to a
mall and it's in a Santa's little helper hat, that
would be ideal, so that it's still kind of scared
of you. It's not used to people yet, it's just
running around. You're chasing through the food court. Security is
getting involved, right, and you're they won't even you know,
they don't even know it's yours. It might not be
fun for the pig, but if it's a cute little thing,
maybe someone else will adopt it. You know, there was
a pig at a house, uh, a couple blocks away
from where my daughter daughter's grandmother lives. Oh, look at
this little hummingbird's hanging out in the Amelia patents. What
is it? Which species is it? What do we get
done into buff bellies? But tell me that wouldn't be cute, right,
A little pig chasing a pig through a mall on
the holidays, you know, making a big scene, and it's
in an elf costume, completely feral, right, you'd have to
get it in the elf costume. You might have to
anesthetize that are, you know, shoot it with one of
those downers, you know, the darts, right, so you could
dress it up, because it's not going to let you
dress it up if it's fully feral. But then you
just let it go and it'd be a good holiday
season pig chase in a mall. I had to go
to a mall here in McCallen a while ago. It
made me feel dead on the inside. It made me
feel terrible. I see the commercial infrastructure in the region
where I'm forced to live due to family reasons, and
I want to die. It's a real feeling I have.
I look at the billboards for ambulance chasers. Right, there's
a couple that I know their names now. I've seen
the billboards so many times. There's so many billboards for
personal injury attorneys that I hate myself because I've actually
seen them. I wish I had the self discipline to
avoid it, to tune it out the same way that
a Buddhist monk who sets himself on fire at noon
self immolates, is able to tune out the pain. I
wish I was able to do that with the things
I have to be exposed to down here. The money, worship,
the materialism, the car dealerships, the muscle cars, the parking lot,
princess trucks. Right, but I'm not able to. I suck
it all in right, like a bad fart in an elevator, right,
like you're standing next to one of the most vile
human beings that you've ever encountered in an elevator. Pick up,
like any family law attorney CEO. Oh right, like you're
standing next to Brian Thompson. Let's pick a different CEO,
because Brian Thompson's sad. I don't want to I don't
want to say bad about the dead. Let's let's pick.
Let's pick Steve Nelson, CEO of NAW Okay, that's that's
great for our purposes. Right here, Say you're standing next
to Steve Nelson and elevator and he farts out this
horrible smell of like try tip and whatever sirloin, you know,
some very rich steak that he consumed the night before,
and you're just sitting there this we're doing a metaphor
right now. Okay, you're just sitting there taking a big
breath in, just inhaling this in. It's poison, right, That's
what I'm doing spiritually when I'm in the commercial infrastructure
of South Texas, or the I thirty five corridor between
San Antonio and Austin, which is also some of the
that's some of the most hideous mileage you can encounter anywhere,
and not only in the United States but in North America.
Right it's it's one of the most hideous commercial corridors ever.
Just a god forbidden fucking Travis. What's been done to
that land. It's if I go to Hell, that's gonna
be one of the versions of hell. Is I'm just
going to be trapped in a fucking car going back
and forth surrounded by shitheads on the I thirty five
quarridor between San Antonio and Austin. That's what's happening when
you're there, You're sucking all that in. When I am right,
maybe you too, but you don't know it. But I
certainly am, and as good as I feel when I'm
on a limestone hilltop in West Texas, or in the
Mojave Desert, in Death Valley, in a Panament range, or
in the Sahado of Mina gjerais Brazil. Looking at Wonderlichia mirabolis. Okay,
wonderful grows on these quartzite sands. It looks like a candelaboratory.
It's a remember the sunflower family ast racy pollinated by bats,
big artichoke style flowers, the size of a grapefruit. All right,
wooly as hell. Because it's in a very dry area. Right,
You're at like twenty degrees latitude north. You have a
wet season. You've got a very dry season, but it's
hot all the time. Right, That's I feel so good
when I'm in these these and there's lithophytic orchids on
on the rocks, and cool of the lozias, the resurrection
plant that the resurrection monocot, and the screw pine family or
Panda nales and the screw pint order. Right, these wonderful landscapes,
I feel the exact opposite as good as I feel there,
I feel just as bad, conversely, reciprocally, when I'm in
in these horrible commercial landscapes, that America has only been
able to build because it's got so much open land
and a complete lack of foresight and and no culture
beyond just consumerism and selling shit and using farming people
as consumers. That's our national culture, right, really pathetic. We
don't even have healthcare, we don't even but we just
we farm people's consumers. That's what I feel. I'm sucking
in the fart of Steve Nelson in a closed elevator
and he's just letting them go. He's just we got
thirty more floors to go. The elevators moving really slow.
Hasn't been serviced in a year and a half. Okay,
I don't know what's up. The police need to be
greased or something, but it's going really slow and he's
just cutting them the whole time, and I'm just sucking
in that poison. That's how bad I feel when I'm
in a commercial landscape, right, because it means so much
more to me. Like I see a billboard for a
politician with a mustache and a cowboy hat talking about
border security, and then I start thinking about bamboozled Latinos right,
who have forsaken the indigenous side and are fully embracing
the Spanish side. It's more complicated than that. I'm generalizing,
but that's where I go with it. It's very dark.
I see the ambulance chasers. I think about money worship,
I think about lowest common denominator practices. I think about
these are the people that are, you know, dominating the
culture right our national culture in this country that's killing,
you know, everything, killing the land that I love. We're
destroying these beautiful fucking museums and libraries of evolution to
support shit that on its own merit is terrible and
needs to be destroyed. And that's where I go with that.
I just go to it. So I need to find
a way. What I'm saying is I need to find
a meditation to go through so that when I'm looking
at these sleeves, bags and this culture of death, I
don't I'm not filled with hate, you know, I'm filled
with with non attachment. I let it go and I
just realize it's all poison. I don't excuse it, but
you know, I realize that people are lost and we
have a fundamental disconnection to the life around us, and
it's not you know, you could be negative and call
it what it is, but at the same time, have
compassion for your fellow primates and realize that, you know,
maybe there's a chance they'll come around sometime, you know,
if they're accidentally dosed with assid or something, or have
some fucking miracle of self enlightenment, which probably won't happen. Okay, anyway,
speaking of death cults, we were out in you know,
some of the land that's been getting destroyed, looking at peyoti's.
We were on a private ranch a few days ago
looking at a peyote that had been shaded out by
It was being shaded out by buffalgrass, by invasive buffalo grass.
And I had gone in probably I think it was
back in March, maybe December of twenty three, and I
took the buffalo grass away. I cut it back because
this thing was getting shaded out. Any cactus that's getting
you know, they need a little bit of shade here
in this heat, like they need a nurse plant. They
don't want to get completely shaded out. So I took
in this buffalo grass was completely shading this thing out.
It was beginning to get ediolated, you know, where it
looks like a like a nipple that's been tugged on
too hard, like really weird stretching, really weird looking cactus
stretching for light, not get enough light. And of course
peyote or any of these cacti that have that beautiful
blue glaucus texture which is caused by that wax, that
epic uticular wax. Those basically just lipid molecules, long chain
fatty acids produced by the epidermis, which I did not know.
I thought they had to regenerate from the apical maris them.
They're actually produced by the epidermal tissue. Be familiar. Go
refer to that Tissue System's podcast and I make that
public I don't know, but it's on the Patreon too.
The slide presentation for it, the three types of you know,
we go through parentama, colin kama sclerinicuma, you know, epidermal tissue,
vascular tissue, et cetera. The Tissue Systems podcast. I think
it was back in October November. But anyway, the epidermis
is what generates the cuticle, which all land plants have,
except for like the filmy ferns and some that are
from really humid environment. Aquatic plants don't have cuticle because
they don't need it. You don't need a cue. The
purpose of the cuticle is to steal the leaf and
the stem off and the fruit whatever the epidermal tissue.
You seal the epidermal tissue off from the atmosphere so
it doesn't lose moisture. Cuticle is also kind of waxy
molecules produced by the epidermal tissue, So the epidermis produces
the wax for the cuticle and for the really you know,
really hardy, ultraviolent resistant succulents produces that the epicuticular wax
and farina as well. And farina is actually not the
same as epicarticular wax. I've been referring to it as that,
but farina is more like a powder which you'll sometimes
see on specimens of Dudleia or other plants, and some
cacti will get so much epicicuticular wax that it looks
like like a ferina. Actually, you know what, I think?
Farina is actually produced by tri if I'm correct. Let
me look this up. Yeah, correct, there we go. Furina,
a powdery white wax coating found on certain plants like succulents,
is produced by specialized glandular tricombs, and I think some
of those cool caylanthoid ferns produce furina as well. Now
you know what I forget. You'll have to refer to
that Michael Wyndham podcast about kylanthoids. When was that back
in April or March. But you know, Natholina or gyracosma,
I think I think they produce ferina. It might be
something I don't know. I don't know. I'm sorry, I'm
really sorry. But either way, in the case of cacti,
that epic particular wax is produced by the epidermal tissue,
and tricombs are also produced. They are part of the
epidermal tissue. Tricombs are part of the epidermis. The hairs
are part of the epidermis. So the point that I'm
getting at is to recover from sunburn. Because these plants
have been growing in the shade. They were dark green.
They didn't have that epicuticular wax because they didn't need it.
If they had that epicuticular wax and they were growing
in the shade, they wouldn't be able to get any light.
They would starve. So the plant can regulate. The epidermis
can apparently regulate how much epicuticular wax is produced, and
it must be being removed somehow as well, because if
a plant's growing in shade, it'll reduce the amount of
epicuticular wax, or at least the new growth that is
produced at the apical maritime in the center of the
paoti plant will come out with less epicarticular wax. I
don't know. Can epicuticular wax that blue color, that white
stuff that gives payoti plants their blue color. Does it
eventually slough off? I would assume so, because that's what
we ended up seeing on these plants that we visited
last week, was that they I got a photo in March.
I did a video oness It came out today. I
put it on a fucking Instagram, which I don't even
really like using that much anymore. But this thing looked
like a buttole it looked like a burnt puckering button,
not even puckering. It was very tight, you know, it
was very like this. I'm sorry for going there. You know.
It's like we've you know, you all been there. You
have some you know, you eat something bad, your stomach's upset,
you just die, you know. But it was this plant
had been burned. This payoty plant had been burned, that
had this burnt tissue. And I'll remind you that sunburn,
the effects of ultraviolet radiation on plant epidermal tissue are
drastically increased with temperature. So a plant may not sunburn
at seventy five degrees, if it's in full sun at
one hundred and five, it will absolutely can't take anything
but morning sun before the day heats up. So that's
why east facing in a really hot climate like in
the Sun Belt, for certain plants, east facing is best
because they get morning sun and then by the hot afternoon,
the morning is really cooler. By the hot afternoon, they're
in the shade. But I thought it was really wonderful
to see because my initial assumption had been that this
thing is only the sunburn is going to create scar
tissue and it's going to have to regenerate from the
apical maris then, but that was clearly not the case.
All the aerials were basically in the same place. They'd
only moved a little bit, right. The thing had plumped
up a little bit more, but that was it. It
plumped up a little bit more, and you know it
wasn't all sucked in. I mean that was another result
of the shade. I think was that it was it
was well. When it got sunburned, it kind of the
tissue contracted towards the center, but the sunburn was completely gone,
and it looked like a healthy, you know, chalky blue
peyote plant. And then of course looking into it more
and I talked to Jim Moss South about this too.
I said, what do you think he didn't even know?
I don't think he had he had done it. I
talked to him when I originally, you know, was beginning
this quasi experiment in March. So what do you think's
gonna happen? So I don't know. That's a good thing.
That's a good thing to to uh make a record of.
But the the epicarticular wax was produced, there was minimal
new growth out of the appical maris. Them haven't gotten
a lot of rain. It's only been eight months. These
things grow extremely slowly. There was minimal new growth out
of the applical maris teme unless the aerials had, you know,
unless these were new aeroals like the next subsequent series
of aeroals had been produced, and they just coincidentally happened
to be in the exact same spot that they were.
The old ones were eight months ago, the old ones
that would now be at the perimeter of this teme,
because they remember. These paoties grow from the center out right,
like the way that like a hose would gush, it
moves out right, or like a fountain, a fountain in
a bleak office park. You know, they got those founds
that of the waters and smell like shit from all
the geese, you know, that ship in the retention pond,
and like a bleak office park. That's I'm sorry, that's
just where I go to when I start thinking about this.
They got a fountain and it's you know, it's a
circular tube, a circular tube, and it shoots out water
in all directions, you know, towards the perimeter. That's like
the way that the applical maris them of the payotes grow.
But that's not what happened. This was just generated new
epic particular wax. And I've seen that on other plants
too that got sunburned. So it's really interesting. I wonder
now I want to burn more plants. I've got, like
you know, some some trikes. Somebody gave me some tricho serious.
I want to you know, shade them for a couple
of months, expose them to the hot sun in the summer,
and then you know, take a sharpie and draw around
it and see what happens. Right, Because if that's another
thing you could you could do is draw on if
you have a payote or a tricho serious, put some
permanent marker on it, you know, on one of the lobes,
and see what happens to it in eight months, right,
if it if the permanent marker has worn off, meaning
that the the the cells or the epicarticular wax that
it was drawn on had been shed or not. If
you want to read more about this stuff, there's some
really there's some really good information at web dot bioside
dot u Texas dot edu forward slash mass Seth. It's
web dot bioside that you Texas that Edu Moss Deth
Jim Moss Seth has done an invaluable amount of research
on cactus anatomy and physiology. And cactus I love because
they're the iconic desert plant and they've they're just bare bones,
just a stem. I mean, you really know, leaves you know,
spines are technically leaves or leaf bud scales, but it's
all the same tissue. It's leaf tissue. Spines are dead
at maturity. It's tissue. It's dead and maturity. And he's
got a you know, there's a shit ton of good
stuff on his website, mas Seth Research Cacti. Can also
just google Maseth Research Cacti. He's got stuff on epidermis cortex,
which is parentalma tissue, which is the storage. It's the
mass of the cacti. That's the cactus that stores water
and carbohydrates, et cetera, and has the cortical bundles in it,
which makes cactus grafting so easy. Spines poisons alkaloids i e.
Mescaline and some of the milk produced by Mammalaria's wood.
So it's got secondary growth in there. You normally don't
think of the secondary growth and cacti because they seem
so soft, at least the epidermist does. But they've produced
true wood. They have lateral maristems, secondary growth, roots, succulents.
The roots are really interesting. The ability to dye root
cells to die and then just generate new ones. You know,
the root cells die and times of extreme drought and
then they could generate new ones apical maristimes. All kinds
of nice stuff on there. But yeah, I was I
was stoked to see that it was, you know, and
I was stoked to see that I was wrong that
these things can basically heal from sunburn. Now, if that
epidermal tissue dies, I would presume that the paradorm, the
secondary growth, the lateral maris them beneath, would just produce
cork tissue. Cork tissue is also dead at maturity and
not photosynthetic. Right, It's analogous to tree bark. Uh. But
I would imagine that's what happens if the epi. If
it's the sunburn, it is so bad that the epidermal
tissue dies. But I think there probably doesn't happen. I
think that natural selection has probably figured out a way
to prevent that, because if the epidermal tissue dies, you fucked.
I mean, you can't photosynthesize anymore. But I think in
most cases of summer and the epidermal tissue is not
dead anyway. Another nice observation I made last week was
there's a spot here. It's the only places where the
rock wall loving plant. You NIGHTI Lobata grows. And when
I say rock wall, I mean natural rock walls, not
human not human constructed like cement walls. But that'd be
a great spot to sow some seeds, which I actually
tried doing. And also, uh, this plant has adapted to
human cities, to growing out of rock walls and buildings,
primarily abandoned buildings that suffer serious neglect because no one's
gonna rip them off in places like Saltia Saltio, excuse me,
Saltio Cohuelia, Mexico, which is where I noticed it was
fucking everywhere. Growing also with Brokelia liciniata, another Chihuahua desert plant,
but you NIGHTI Lobata. Velcro leaf family Lois sa c
Mentzelia is another wonderful genus and his family along with
quite a quite a cadre of South American stinging species,
genera and species. And they've got the you know, velcro
leaf because they got those little barber hairs. I'll stick
to your shirt whatever. It's very it's very very fun,
very cute. You know. Blaze men Zellia, the blazing star
Menzelia lavicolis in northern California was one was a plant
that I think was the first species that became familiar
with in this family so many years ago, growing in
volcanic outcroppings in Siskyou County and elsewhere. Huge flowers, many stamens,
lots of staminodes as well, and then little capsule fruits
with many seeds in them, and quite a bit of
mucilage as well, which is probably how they're able to
tolerate such harsh and dry conditions where they grow. They
like full sun exposure. But NAIGHTI Lobata was growing at
this little shrine basically a rock shelter, a natural rock
shelter composed of conglomerate cobbles cemented together with kalichi on
this small hill down here in South Texas, and there's
a little shrine. They got Saint Jude. I thought it
was the Christ. No, it was Saint Jude, you know,
certainly looking more pale than he was in real life.
In the painting. They got a little painting there, you know,
lots of plastic flowers, all this stuff. You know that
I will eat us go there and prey and everything,
and then litter as well. But uh, but they mean well,
but anyway, Yeah, so there was. But this plant was
just having a fucking banger year. And it's under the
rock shelter too. Only spot that it grows in the United States,
mostly Mexico, mostly grows in this I've also seen it
in the siah Madre near Monterrey and beautiful washteaka Canyon
right by the damn you nighty Lobata And that's the
habitat that it's evolved with over the last however, many
millions of years. Is growing out of You always see
it growing out of rock. Was almost never see it
growing out of soil. I've grown it in soil before.
It doesn't last long. I've gotten seed. The seeds are
fucking tiny, like a fruit will have you know, probably
nine hundred tiny seeds in it, barely big than orchid seeds,
like they're dust. But you could see with tiny seeds
like that, how it would so easily adhere to a
rocky surface if that rocky surface was covered in fog
or do any kind of condensation. That's where it terminates,
and fog is mostly which is probably nourishing these things,
because again they're under the rock shelter. They're not getting
any rain. You know, this little shrine is under the
rock shelter. All the good rock shelters have been taken
and turned into religious shrines. It's such a drag. You know.
The Catholics really got you know, they got an early
edge on its continent and took all the good rock shelters,
at least the easily accessible ones been turned into religious shrines.
But anyway, this thing, so it's mostly getting fog. You know,
there's morning fog. It's very humid here. We're still you know,
like an hour and a half from the Gulf, maybe
two hours from the gulf, so still sufficiently humid. Which
is surprising that so many people that come down here
to visit the cactus gardens of South Texas there's liking
in all the blackbrush. It's that humid. Mornings can be
really foggy. You've also got the Rio Grande two miles
south of here of this area, and so these little
plants are just they're having just a banger year. It's
exceptionally dry right now. It's basically a drought, no rain whatsoever.
None of the parcels that I've been to, none of
the plants look happy. They're all wilting. Croton insigness looks
wonderful when it's wilting too, like the natural drought state.
It's perfectly fine, it's just wilting. It'll pop back to
life when it gets some little bit of moisture, which
hopefully is soon. It's like fucking eighty five degrees here
on Christmas too, which is amazing. It really tells you
how hot, how hot it is. It's cumulative heat throughout
the near year, not just individually hot days. But what
was remarkable to see on Yuke NIGHTI lebada and I've
seen this and so many other rock wall loving plants
like paridally or oh god, what is it? There's another faciita,
there's a facilia. There's some really wonderful rock wall loving
plants on the limestone in the Mojave desert. Right, Salvia
funaria is another one, right Funeral mountain sage Mortonia utah
insists out there. But I've seen this since some of
the like the rock wall loving plants, they are bacious
ones that kind of drape over the rocks. Is the
peduncles that hold the fruits after the flower is done,
will reflex back towards the rock wall turn around so
that they can self sew when that dry capsule fruit opens,
and that's what this eukenite was doing. It's amazing, and
this is why it's thriving on this rock wall. This
is why it's so abundant, because think about it, if
it didn't reflect back that you know, this thing is
draping off the rock, maybe it would drop seeds further down,
you know. But these it's you know, probably a foot
foot and a half a foot to eighteen inches off
of the rock wall, and so it's just casting seeds
out into the open. These things can't grow in soil
because they'll get out competed by other plants. Right. That's
one of the benefits of growing in a rock walls
that you can outcompete anything else. Nothing can grow on
the rock wall. Very few things can grow on rock walls.
Most plants need soil. So if you've monopolized that niche
of a nearly vertical rocky substrate that lacks soil, especially
on a porous rock like limestone, I feel like there's
many more rock wall loving plants on limestone than on
something like rhyolite, which is volcanic, because limestone is so porous.
And seems to hold water so good. But then once
you're on the rock wall, whenever it does rain, it's
going to act like a funnel and it's going to
run down that rock wall into the crack that you're
growing out of. And you got easy source to water.
You can outcompete other plants. Your hairs are probably cut,
your leaves are probably covered in hairs. It's in this
case barbed tricombs, so you're not losing a lot of
moisture from your leaves, You're reflecting some sunlight whatever. But
this was fucking wild to see that this is basically
a self sewing plant. It's so odd for the fruits
of any plant to do that. The curve back towards
the substrate really really bizarre. And Isaac Lickteror had told
me that he's seen this in perridally too. Perrotyle p
r I T y l E. The rock daisies, the
genus of rock daisies and the sunflower family, asked Racy.
So I was stoked to see that. I've never noticed
it before. And again, this plant is it's one of
the plants I'm writing about in my book because it's
colonized urban environments so well, like Salteo, Mexico. Wonderful city Salteo.
It was really cool to see how it was thriving there.
I saw astro lipis growing out of some of the
And it's like a dense city too. It's like a
you know, large pedestrian and large amount of pedestrian traffic.
Dense cities, really nice buildings closer, like the kind of
city that's great to walk around in, you know what
I mean. And there was fucking youuke NIGHTI lobata every
where astro leapis. It must have been into Jerema or
Sinuata everywhere, and uh yeah, man, it was I should
do anig naturalist search. What species an astro leapis? Was
it that I saw growing in downtown Salteo. Okay, there's
four species that come up on a naturalists Coachee census,
which is a very narrow one. The fronds are narrow,
very easy to distinguish. I think that's the one. I
just did a drawing off. That's nice. That a nice drawing.
I draw these things on butcher paper, get them scanned,
then I can hack the prints for you know, twenty
bucks each. Whatever depends on how big they are get
him scanned a nice thick paper. Astra Alepis coachy census sinuata.
Is it that you know what that looks like a myriopters?
I can't tell. Fuck look at the key and floor
of North America for astro Alypis. Jesus Christ have fun
with that sinuata into Jerema and coachy census. But it's
mostly oh in crassi Folia supposedly, which is very hairy
at acxial surfaces to the leaves to the upper sides.
But yeah, I don't know anyway. Uh, but it was
a fucking great great to see, great city to walk around.
And we went to a little Serape museum we did.
This is like two years ago. I was there. And
then Berkelia Le Siniata growing out of the fucking uh
the overhanging on one of these little shops. So in
other news being that it cooled off so much down here,
meaning it's you know, highs and eighties instead of one hundred.
We've been planting this public garden which a friend of
mine started. His famili's lived there for like you know,
twenty thirty years. Uh. It started on this parcel of
property across from his house. He had a coma centeroxalon selestrinum,
edible fruit down here, edible fruit producing my of sapotasi
down here, and a couple other you know, pollinator plants.
We ended up taking a little bit more expanding it.
We went the Heap's nursery, got a bunch of plugs,
all the important shrubs, the trixis, the leucophyllum, the skeleton leaf,
you know, Sidney at tenu Afolio as the raci, got
a bunch of good stuff, got you know, planted a
bunch of agave offsets, which we can move later in
a year or two. Right now, we're just trying to
get that ground covered and protected from the sun because
it's so goddamn hot it'll bake the moisture right out
of it and make it increasingly stressful for anything that's
growing there. Right and then of course there's this positive
feedback effect the more shit that you have growing in
close proximity to each other, not in the even spacing
with the lines and all that demented shit. These archaic
horticulture ideas that everybody wants to do, it seems like,
you know, before they actually go out and experience what
nature is actually like the denture you make it, it becomes
this positive feedback loop where the plants create their own microclimate.
They retain more humid that suddenly the ground isn't getting
baked by the sun anymore. You should also be mulching
as well. We get a truckload of mulch dumped from
one like the Compost Center and in McCallen, which was
like I think it was like one hundred bucks for
like six cubic yards. I mean, it's best that you
can get it for free, but we don't got that
stuff down here. Chip drop doesn't work down here. You
gotta like, you gotta know, like it's so cuddy. You
gotta know an arborist or something. There was an arborist
I used to know who would give us free mulch.
But there, you know, it's it's hit or miss with them.
So anyway, but it's been good. It's been good planting it,
you know. One of them, the tective Master Naturalists. Somebody
wrote me, I think I upset them because I was
making fun of Master Naturalists the Master Gardener programs, And
I'm sorry, but I just think it's I think it's
kind of a sham. At least the Master Naturalist things are.
I'm glad they exist. They're like a boy Scouts program,
you know, they wouldn't. They're not for degenerates like me, right,
the autodtex But and anybody who's in like the Master
Nationalist program, I'm sorry, no offense. This is you. We
could agree to disagree. Don't get offended. But anybody who's
in the Master Nationalists program is always so excited to
tell you about it too. And it weirds me out
because I don't care. It doesn't. It's weird. It's a
weird thing, you know. But anyway, one of the Master
Naturalists ripped out a fucking ebony that was growing. I
don't know why they left all the Bermuda grass. They
ripped out a fucking ebony that had been It was
like an ebony tree Texas ebony ebn apsis a bottle
that had been repeatedly mowed, you know, just by the
city that maintains the area for the last five years.
But it would always come back. So and I've seen
a lot of plants do this, like shrubs and trees
miskeat same thing. You can mow it, it'll just reas
brought from the rootstock. The rootstock gets increasingly big or huge,
but it'll stay mode, you know, it'll survive that way,
and it just becomes like this perpetually bond sied thing.
You stop mowing it, boom, it's got this big rootstock,
all this energy stored up. It could shoot up become
a tree right away. Would have been great to have,
but the master Naturalists ripped it out with their paid expertise.
Paying someone to teach you how to experience and learn
about nature, all right, and you still destroy native plants
that would be beneficial for for this fucking public garden
that I've especially, like I've been busting my ass, like
planting shit and trying to fucking you know. So that
was depressing. But you got to keep the master Naturalists
away from the garden. They're good. You want their signs
in front, you know, so the city doesn't fuck with you.
It makes you look, you know, more on the square side,
you know, because if they see me, then they're like, oh,
this this fucking guy. But you get the Master Naturalist program.
It's like the Fraternal Order of Police sticker on the
back of a hippie van makes the city think you're okay,
you want that little sign that says that the pollinator
garden or whatever to fuck, you know, and but you're
really trying to recreate habitat, and you know, fight these
deranged horticultural ideas about how nature is messy. Oh it
looks messy. We don't want it. It's messy. See that's
the kind of shit way that makes me want to
puke to these ideas are nature being messy. We don't
want that treat because it's messy. The fuck? What do
you think? What do you think landscaping looks like? You
think it looks like the fucking the setting of Minecraft.
It's like sixty four bit video game landscaping. You think
it's supposed to be neat, the even spacing, the fucking lines,
You deranged pervert. Huh. You need to be treated, You
need to be dosed. You need to go go to
a therapist. Where does this shit come from? It comes
from from archaic European nineteenth century European ideals about how
a landscape should look. It's as fucked up as the lawn.
It's just deranged. Is the lawn planting things in lines?
Even uniformity? You fucking sickos, you sick fucks. Ah, I'll
pay for your therapy, just kidding. I won't, but you
know I don't have the money. But if I did, well,
if I did, I still wouldn't pay for your therapy.
I'd probably just slip you some acid in your coffee
and take you out through a wonderful, you know, parcel
of actual living habitat so you can experience it and
see how you've been led astray and doctrinated by the
fucked up society you grew up. And I'm so sorry.
I am so sorry for being so I get so
turned up. And that's not the Holiday spirit. It's not
what the Holiday spirit's about. The Holiday spirit says more CEOs.
That's what the Holiday spirit says, says, we need more
CEOs to sacrifice to uh, to our God, to our
son God. Huh more CEOs dot com. They're all scared now,
they're fucking they're scared. They're quivering in their boots. Holy shit.
You see a united people right dropping all this identitarian shit,
all the left right rhetoric and coming together to fight
back against the extremely grotesquely wealthy and the oligarchs. That's
not what they want. But again, this is America. Will be,
will be, will be squelched soon, squelched and squashed. But anyway,
this planting, this fucking public garden is therapeutic, all right.
It's a wonderful, fucking it's it feels so good. It
makes me feel so much less homicidal, right because I'm
trying to recreate the places that make me feel less homicidal,
that make me feel like I don't have to look
at the billboards and the fucking ambulance chasers and the
smiling politicians with the shit eating grins, et cetera. You know,
that's what I'm I'm I'm I'm creating my own antidote
to the poison around me. That's why I do this.
So you create a nice little garden. Six months, year
goes by. Suddenly you've got spiny lizards and all the
fucking native and knowles, probably the cuban ones too, some
other stuff you got. You know, the life is coming back.
You got cool birds, butterflies, cool fucking moss. At night,
the bats are hanging out. Maybe you see a snake.
If you see a snake, you've really made it. Gulf
Coast toads, you're automatically learning more about the land around
you and the life that evolved there. Right, you're getting
a zoomed out perspective on the land and the life
form around you, and you're interacting with it. It feels
really nice. It becomes psychedelic in to itself. But you
start planning shitting lines with even uniform spacing, and that's
when the trip goes bad. That's when you start seeing
the elements of the society that make you want a
puke in the first place. Coming back right, Yes, when
you start realizing this is this is what brought us
the lawn, this is why there's so many fucking parking
lots and malls and commercial centers. Even spacing and uniform
I'm not talking about just doing pragmatic things like keeping
branches out of walkways and removing hazardous trees and shit
like that. I'm talking about they're really shit. The uniform lines,
the OCD, the fucking sense of control and authority, the fixation,
That's what I'm talking about. I don't want that stuff
near me. You keep it away, okay. In other news,
my friend Gabriel and Jeremy Spath from Hidden A gave
nursery wonderful breeder of agaves. Okay, the Boutiqua gaves. He
does the fucking hybrids, the tissue culture. Wonderful man. I
love him uh and gabriel U Diaz daily and Fante fucked.
I didn't suck up his name. I don't know anyway.
I love Gabrielle too. But they were down there. They
were in Pueblo Wahaka border. I had serious fomo seeing
the shit they're posting. Earlier this month. Fukiria purpussii the
bottle tree, another species of okatillo, which anybody who's taken
a little waltz throughout the American Southwest is familiar with.
Fukiria the genus, as well as the twelve species in
a family, Fukiria si, fukiir Fuck your order Eric Kley's
order of blueberries, Fukiria purpussii or purpose i, however you
want to pronounce it, that don't matter. It's Latin. It's
a dead language. Again. Fuck anybody who's going to really
mess with you on pronunciation of Latin. It's fucking insane,
all right. Anyway, this thing was going off. White flowers
kind of implies moth pollination but apparently they're generalists too,
because I was told there were butterflies and bees all
over this thing growing on the limestone, the weathered limestone
at twenty degrees latitude near the Wajaka Puebla border, and
I had serious fomo was about the fucking cry. I
didn't know they flowered in December in the dry season.
It's like when things are finally starting to really dry out,
maybe get a little rain. In Mexico late summer, early fall.
I was supposed to beat on there, but I chose
to teach school instead. The students told me I was
a good teacher. Maybe they were lying. Okay, some of
the athletes tapered off. They didn't last. You take general botany,
and fuck you take general botany as a prerequisite. Right,
I'm here. Who's this guy? Right? Who's this guy that
shows him we got fucking neck tattoos? You know, he's
cursing a lot. He seems really turned up. He comes
in with his bottles. He's drinking his forty ounce bottles
of loose leaf green tea. Okay, one day he came in.
It was a clear jar. Looked like he was drinking piss.
He's drinking Topo Chico like a madman, and he's cursing,
and then he says, you know, if he finds out
any of us snitched on him for cursing too much,
he's gonna fail us. All right, This is what the
students had to deal with. But still they told me
I was a good teacher, and I was very thankful
for that. I didn't even memorize a lot of their names, though,
all right, wish I should have. I was bad, but
I wanted them to learn. I chose to teach instead
of going down to Wahaka, all right and looking at
looking at cool reptiles in Chiappus driving to Chiapas. I
was supposed to drive down there with my friend Caesar,
whose apartment I filmed in Mexico City. He had a
massive rattlesnake on his hardwood floor in his apartment in
Mexico City. We filmed the video on it. He's trying
to breed these things to reintroduce them to habitat. I
don't know how that's gonna go, but it's a noble
thing that he's trying. And I think he just likes snakes.
But a definite uh, you know, dedicated conservationist and biologist.
I was supposed to go with him to see Fukiria
purpose I really want to see. I'm really interested in
the pollination biology of these things. It's a fucking bottle tree.
It's got photosynthetic stem one of the some of the ocatillos,
I mean, even on ocatillo. Sometimes you'll see a little
bit of green in those stems. Okatia, of course, is
multiple stemmed. This is a single stemmed Okatio relative from
a dry deciduous thorn forest and the Oajaca Puebla border.
Tons of endemic rare plants, tons of columnar cacti agave oteroi, ogave,
agave titanoa are down there. I was so fucking crushed.
I was happy for them, I was very happy for them.
But at the same time, you know, I wanted a
chance to commune, commune with those plants, to kiss the
bark of Fokyria Purpussia. I've got one that i'm slowly
killing that I got from eric at East Austin succulents,
and I need to repot it. I don't know what
it needs, if anybody has any. It's so fucking hot
down here, but I think I probably got into organic
of a soil because these things grow on like bare rock.
I mean, really the thing to figure out how to
care for a plant, you got to go down and
you got to see it and habitat where it grows.
And these things are growing on nearly bare rock, a
lot of them barely any soil. But they look amazing.
And this is a rare plant. You know. He said
there was a I talked to gob really said there
was a forest of these fucking things. You know, I
could have been down there with them. That we go
for ice cream after we go to soft server. Theres
a little piena. They got a soft served machine. You
get an ice cream cone, right, even though you get
the you're prone to the diabetes. You're a little nervous
about that. You eat a fucking ice cream cone, but
you're enjoying these cast of plants, these members of the
living world, all right, the living world that you worship.
But uh yeah, man, fucking the photos he sent me
were fucking nuts, white tube flowers. I don't think there's
what is what is on iin atrist for Curio Propussia.
Oh my god, this thing's amazing. Those lance lit hair
like leaves, green leaves on these these stems, these branching
stems that shoot everywhere. What clusters of white flowers. What
a remarkable beast, a product of natural selection and a
calcareous soils, remnants of the Western interior seaway the Cretaceous ocean.
God damn. Look that's like pure white rock. These things
are growing out of and during the dry season it's
just empty. But Mexico has not fucked its land anywhere
like the United States has. The United States has done
such a good job of destroying so much of its
land and building some of the absolute dumbest shit. Mexico
has not done that. Will it come one day, I
don't know. It depends how bad consumer capitalism. Oh agave
Macroacanta is right there, dude, Look at this fucking limestone.
It's like karst. It's like karst. It's like dog tooth karst,
like I haven't seen since the Dominican Republic. Also some
incredible habitat. Just don't go touching Comocladia, the genus Coma Cladia,
because it's in the Anacardi a c the poison oak family,
and you're gonna get an ass rash like you wouldn't believe.
God forbid, you're really gonna be regretting it. Coma cladia
and fucking constelia manila formis a tree? Oh, puncha a tree,
prickly pair. Oh here's a nice money shot. Who took
this nice money shot of the flowers? Yeah they look
like okatillo flowers all right, a branching panicle. But they're white,
which implies to me moth pollination, but probably butterfly too,
since they don't close up at night. You know, they're
not like evening primrose, you know flowers where they open.
They open at six pm and then they shut during
a day. One of the students with this class I taught,
I took the students on a field trip, dragged their
asses up this hill to go look at plants, and
there was a what was it? Was it? I think
it was manda villa, which is another moth polinated plant
at the Shuahua Desert. And I said, yeah, the buds
were still clothes. And one of the students said, what's
up are these? Is this gonna flower? Yeah, i'll be
fly would be opening at like six pm. He said,
how do you know that? I said, because I don't
six pm is about right before dusk that they open
right before dust. They're moth pollinated, and they all all
the moth poliny plants smell the same. They got the
same floral chemistry, the same floral scent signature. Wow, these
fucking things are just this is really something else, man,
this these fucking flowers. I'm so interested in the pollination biology. Now, Oh,
look at that beautiful trunk with the fucking God damn it,
look at that thing. I gotta draw this. This is
my next plant I gotta draw. That's one of the
main reasons I want to go down there and get photos.
Fukiria PURPUSSI have those beautiful green trunks and the tiny stems.
A bottle tree, A true bottle tree, reminiscent of the
moringa that I saw in the Mibia. You know, this
is these sarco coalescent plants which you'll see on like
uh you know boojump trees, which are Fukyia columnaris in Baha. Right,
this is a that was Maringa of valefolia. How many
how many Maringa species are there? That was all, but
that Maringo of Lafoia was also a bottle tree looks
like a bottle and it's probably dropped deciduous too, and
almost from the leaves, the maringos look like they would
be in Fabaesi in the pea family. They got this
pinnate leaves, but they're actually uh, they're actually uh, you know,
related to brassicas. So I'm not familiar. I just know
the ones that the you know, the i willita is
growing the gardens down here because it's you know, like
in residential gardens, because it's a medicinal plant and as
you can use it in salads and shit, you put
it in smooth you do it. It's just a superfood.
They were trying to market as a superfood. But I'm
not really familiar with the genus or the lineage. I'm
very curious about it. So much good stuff on the
African continent. One day I'll botanized, I ran without getting
kidnapped and use this leverage, you know, on like a
political called prisoner swapping scheme with the US. Yeah, don't
get mad at me from my country since all right, okay,
you know Iran used to be what a wonderful what
a wonderful place that must have been in like the
fifties and sixties, just so culturally risked on the fucking US,
the US, the United States couldn't couldn't let that happen.
They couldn't let that. They had they had what happened.
They overthrew it install the US friendly guy who is terrible,
and then their religious nuts kicked him out and took
over fucking horrible. Lots of great Iranian botanists though I
follow him on Twitter and uh and what else? They
got the integram, now they got the inter gram. Lots
of Iranian botanists on Instagram, and an x Ex's Eloton
calls it Elton. In other news, the verdict is in
on germinating seeds of Texas Mountain Laurel. Another incredibly stupid name,
stupid common name for a plant, all right. Used to
be Sephoras sacuna flora. Now it's dermatto phylum secunda florum.
Just call it dermatophylum. But it's no relation to laurel.
It doesn't necessarily grow in mountains. It's got nothing to
do with the mountain. It's a fucking misleading, stupid name,
all right. If you can, if you can remember Texas
mount Laurel, you could remember Dermatto phylum. Just remember the
name dermatto phylum phylum is leaf dermato. What does dermato
mean dermos some something have to do with skin. I
don't know anyway. Mescal beans, all right, the plant, the
plant that the compound mescaline was named after. It was
confused with peyote in the early twentieth century, late nineteenth century,
you know, when the Hockey Death Cult was trying to
persecute natives, they often confused it with peote. The mescal beans,
those hard red seeds, all right, beautiful plant smells kind
of like grape soda when it blooms. Nice shrub. You
got Dermatophylum arizonicum, which is somewhat rare. It's in uh
northwestern Arizona. You've also got the westernmost locales and ecotypes
of Dermatophylum secunda fluorum, which are probably a little bit
more pubescent, that grow in southeastern Arizona. Someone actually emailed
me with info about that. And even some of the
ecotypes in West Texas are harry. You get a pubestance
on them. But then you go to like you know,
Edwards Plateau, Austin area, and even down here in South Texas,
and they have glabrous leaves. But anyway, the seeds, it's
a great fucking plant. It takes a long time to
grow nitrogen fixing as it's a legum. Not all legumes,
but many of them. They harbor that nitrogen fixing Rhizobium bacteria.
And the seed is like a bright red, very hard.
You know it's toxic too. You don't want to be
eating this stuff, but I'm see if you ate one,
you probably just shit it out because the seed coat
is so hard. I was taking a a uh, what
is it called? What's the fucking the dremmal? I was
taking a dremal, same thing I used to cut Jack's
nails because he doesn't since he's so old, he doesn't
run on the concrete with me anymore on the bike,
so he doesn't. You know. That used to be like
a natural nail trimmer for him. It doesn't do it anymore,
so I gotta cut him. Use the dremmal for that.
I also use it for scarifying seeds. Very hard seed
coat here. You just get it a little bit, just
scarfight it a little bit, because you don't want to
crack him in like a crusher or anything, because you'll
crush the fucking embryo too, but uh, scarfighted them, soaked
them for a while. That didn't seem to do anything.
All the seeds sank, and then I scarfighted some. I
sewed some in a pot for a control. I'm guessing
the scarfight seeds should come up with him the next month,
and the others might take upwards of a year or two,
because again it's the bacteria, and I would presume bacteria
and fung you have to eat that seed coat and
degrade it first. But everyone I've spoken to is said,
scarifications what you need, so you know, just for shits
that giggles. I like to grow stuff in big pots
and then separate it later, like a big flower, longitudinal
flower box, and you put a top dressing of gravel
on it. I use. I like to use more volume
of soil. The more volume of soil, the longer it's
gonna take for that thing to dry out. The more
forgiving it is. If I don't, you know, water for
one day, because where I live it's so fucking hot
during the summer, some of these pots will dry out
within thirty minutes, even in there a shade cloth. It's
just so fucking hot, and the Knights don't get cooler
than eighty two degrees, so intense heat. Right, But I've
been having a lot of luck germinating stuff. Germinated a
bunch of Liatris punctata, recently germinated aria agonam harass a folium,
hoping I can keep them going. That top dressing of
pea gravel is really important, and I noticed this after
seeing how it acts as like a natural rocky mulch,
and then I don't know what else it is, man,
But seeing that decomposed granite and that Plano prairie garden
video where that guy that lives in Plano, horrible suburban
area like real, you know, just the reek of spiritual
death everywhere. Wonderful guy. But he created this his yard
is just fucking amazing. He's created this haven. I almost
damned near Kraib when I first saw the lyatreus blooming
in his yard and the monarchs were coming through migration,
you know, the monarch migration and route south. It was
such a beautiful sight. And he keeps it all orderly
and tidy and shit, so the city doesn't fuck with him.
But he put decomposed granite everywhere just did this all himself,
didn't hire any landscapers, was just dumping repeated car loads
full of decomposed granite, and he would just get all
these cool plants, all these natives volunteering from the seed
that was produced from the few plants he planted. And
I've seen that in other yards too, the decomposed granite,
that bedding of gravel is so good for germinating shit,
and you really don't want again. It makes sense too,
because when you've got these pots and the soil is
just exposed, there's no dressing on it, they really fucking bake,
you know, they dry out too quick. Whereas if that
dressing of pea gravel prevents the sun, it prevents the
soil beneath it from evaporating moisture too quick. And especially
for things like little cacti, they just pop up, you know,
they grow in between the gravel. You don't want it
super thick. You just want one layer with spacing in between,
because stuff still got to pop out, right, But it
really does wonders. I've heard this from multiple sources. Now,
So this is this is the way I'm growing everything,
sowing natives in those long seventeen inch long flower boxes
with a nice mixture of ocean forest by fox farm,
maybe with a little bit of pumpice in there, maybe
a little bit of sand. But again, you got to
make sure it's not the clumping sand. If it's the
sand that stays clumped together, you know, like it's got
too many clay particles in it stays clumped together when
it's dry, you fuck don't use that stuff. Go to
a golf course, steal some nice, non clumping sand. I
get mine from a pile dumped in a parking lot
of a golf course. They don't mind. It's just a
five gallon bucket. Every once in a while, you know,
they're they're gonna complain, you know, you say, I'll say
I did. I'll do something for him. You know, you
guys don't mind. I talked to the guy said, it's fine.
One of those things, right. We're not talking about rolling
up there with a bucket, you know, like a multiple
buckets in like a tub and fill in the back
of a pickup truck. THO. I wouldn't be opposed that.
We're not talking about doing that. I'm just saying, you
know what I mean. But the germinating is really pleasant then,
and of course I always use spider Farmer lights Spider Farmer.
I guess sun blastered too, but those LEDs the hot
shit really wonderful, bright enough, you know. And then you
increase humidity if you're indoors too. If you're doing this indoors,
you need to increase humidity, cover them, use a bag
or like a little clear humidity. Though, but I'm growing
outside and there's so much ambient humidity anyway. I got
a little mister system I rigged up for all the
mammalaria and thelocactus and other stuff I'm growing, because again,
even though it's still so hot here, even in the winter,
it's still eighty five, you know. And then I'll turn
the mister system off if we're gonna get like a
week of like sixty degree temperatures or fifty degree temperatures,
which we might get in January February. Very easy, you know,
to just murk an entire seedling collection. But yeah, most
of this stuff is gonna go in native plant gardens
or to thorn Scrub Sanctuary. When we actually have it
set up and have controlled the pig problem, we're probably
gonna have to get some hog panel and fence some
areas off because the fucking I mean, even if you
get all of them, there's still gonna be more. There's
so many goddamn pigs in the brush here in the
South Texas brush. I tell you, though, you can really
become a master of soil mixing, all right. You could
experiment with all your different ingredients. It's all soil is.
It's just organics and minerals. It's a mixture of both
in different ratios. Then you got to think about porous spaces,
grain size, drainage, and nutrients and that kind of stuff.
Where I'd been fucking out with biochar like I mentioned. Okay,
another good source of the material for the organics is
like the bottom of a huge woodship pile. If you
have any of those in a municipal yard that you
have access to or can sneak into, the stuff on
the bottom is going to be really well decomposed in compost,
so you can put composts in there too. But I
always have trouble with composts. It gets fucking nasty, it
takes forever. It's too hot where I live to use earthworms,
so we get soldier fly larvae. Those are the big
dec composers, you know, but just become your own master
of a mixing soil creating substrates to gross shit in
biochar good for drainage, good, uh, you know, for making
the soil less dense, more puffy. You should be able
to feel in your hand, you know, stick your hand
into a into a big tub of soil that you
just mixed and feel how it feels. Right. You could
use pine barque finds too. We use those soil conditioner
and we get them at a place down here in
South Texas. I think it's just pine bark finds right.
It's resistant to rot, so it doesn't cultivate the fungus
because a lot of fungi that are pathogenic to plants
and cause damping off and rots start off as being
saparotrophic and just decomposing dead material and then they move
to living later on. But if you've got you know,
organic material that's resistant to fungi, you know, it's it's
it serves a little better. Even juniper bark, juniper bits,
any organic materials. Stay away from cocoa corlough because sometimes
that shit has salt in it, you know. But anyway, anyway,
so yesterday was really nice too. I went out to
South Texas, went herping with some reptile nerves. I know.
Found twelve Lampropeltis aulata, the toma leap and milk snakes,
six giant indigo snakes. Beautiful, all right, the enemies of rattlesnakes.
I would have liked to find rattlesnakes too, but we
were not in dry areas. We were in more humid
areas with a lot of undergrowth Bicellia farnesiana, the huisace,
lots of misky Prosopis glandulosa are now it's now Tuma glandulosa.
Basically the elements of the native landscape that were able
to come back in and recognize once all the land
had been scraped away. Because all the land has been
disturbed and scraped away here in South Texas, there's a
couple patches, a couple crumbs, but mirror crumbs compared to
what once was. I mean, when you know, when the
death cult came in, it really took everything. They didn't
leave anything, not even fucking margins. There's margins on the uh,
you know, on this agriculture where things can get on,
but even that is disturbed. I saw Heteranthra limosa. Is
it limosa or linos? I forget, but either way it's
an aquatic. So these were all ephemeral wetlands. We were
closer to the coast, closer to the gulf, and so
you know, I'm sure this area seeing that plant, since
that's an aquatic, very cool aquatic, very cool uh staining morphology,
very cool flower morphology. The whole genus heteranth is pretty dope.
And it said it's in Comaaliniales. It's in pontadiri ace
uh in the order Comaliniales. Comaalinealies, of course, is the
namesake order of Comalinaes, the family which is a family
of plants filled with monocots that have very fucking weird
flower morphology, Like you know, some of these, some of
the Comalinas and trati Scotti has got those feeder anthers
that have that are just big yellow and showy, and
then the bees are attracted to those. And then when
they go for the feeder anthras which are above the
sickle shaped anthers in the style, then those sickle shaped
ants anthers dust the bees abdom and the underside of
the bees adom with pollen et cetera. So they've got
you know, dimorphic anthras. Some some species of Comolina and
Tretiscenta have trimorphic anthors, three different anthra types, three different
stamen types. So it's a fucking cool family. I mean,
I love seeing Casey Williams got me into Heteranthra because
I was when I was doing the aquatic videos with them,
we saw Heteranthra A Dubia and then he had just
collected Heterantheum Heteranthram mexicana for the herbarium, which I think
Mexican is an annual. But it's super rare, really cool species.
And I'm such a fiend for flower morphology. I really am,
especially flowers that have cool puzzle like morphology. You know,
like I say so many times, in pop culture, our
opinions of flowers have been ruined by the fucking greeting
card industry and Valentine's Day and all this shit that
the representation of flowers, and you know, pop culture that's
rooted in European or Eurasian histories. Whereas you get away
from all that corny shit and you get into the
actual pollination biology and pollination ecology and what these plants
are doing to dupe insects into pollinating them, insects, birds,
and even wind in some cases. Then it gets really interesting.
Every flower is a puzzle. You start looking at some
of the orchids that are duping horny male insects into
pollinating them without offering any reward, just having these you know,
fancy labellums, these fancy shaped labellums that act like a
look like a goddamn fly fishing lure you talk about,
you know, the cape bfly in South Africa. And Gorteria
diffusa Gorteria difusa, really cool orange member of the composite family,
the sunflower family ast racy it it's got those lgules
that are embossed and black and resemble female beeflies. That's
when the flower shit gets interesting. I love I love
looking at that. I love trying to figure out what
pollinates this thing, how does this evolve? Every flower is
a fucking puzzle. But anyway, so that was that was
really nice to see. The huisace the Vicelia farnesiana legume family,
it's a spiny legume. It's a pioneer species, first to
colonize disturbed land. I imagine it's invasive as hell on
the African continent or Australia, probably India too, but here
it's native and it smells really good. It's a huge,
you know, source of food for pollinators, great habitat for
birds and sprouts like a fucking weed, and it's one
of the few things that's able to outcompete the invasive grasses.
There's like four different species of invasive grass, guinea grass,
bermuda grass, Johnson grass, buffalo grass, all this invasive shit
from from Africa basically that have co evolved with large megafauna.
So I'm exploring these disturbed landscapes and those are the
type types of landscapes where you look for snakes whatever
snakes are able to still exist, uh in these human
dominated even though it's still just low density. It's mostly agriculture,
these human dominated landscapes, and so you know, all the
herpers go out and put ten out for for the reptiles,
right because that's what they're creating habitat you put. My
biogeography textbook just came in a Biogeography Biological Diversity Across
Space and Time, fifth Edition by Mark V. Lomolino. This
is niceyeat, I got I got in PDF form. I
think I got the fourth edition, but uh, this is
this is you always gotta have a hard copy, especially
when you're going to be teaching this ship. Oh they
got photos, they got diagrams in a western interior seaway.
It's nice. The breakup of Pangaea. This, that's nice. Biogeography,
Chapter seven right there, Speciation and extinction, How life evolves,
how it moves. Why does certain things occur where they do,
and why does every different continent have its own continental
biome with little ecosystems. There's hundreds of little ecosystems in between.
What's the living skin of the earth. And don't pay
attention to that. Just go shopping and drink yourself to
numb your feelings from the spiritual emptiness and pain that
you feel in the American consumer death cult landscape trademark
hashtag Live, Laugh, Love anyway, So this all the cool
reptiles live on the margins that these agricultural fields will
go out and create little basically habitat to go see that.
My fear comes when the tumor grows. The human tumor grows,
and is happening already in place like Fort Worth. The
agriculture is not now on the chopping block to get
turned into housing. It doesn't matter that these places won't
be livable in forty years because there's no water and
there's increasing summer heat. Don't think about that. And also
you're building shitholes too. I mean you can't. There's no walking,
there's no you have to You're trapped in a car.
Your whole life is trapped in a car. It's a
it's a dreadfully spiritually, you know, empty lifestyle. There's no
bonding with the living world. There's no going outside. It's
just the only reason you go outside is to mow
your lawn if you have one, or go to walk
to your car and then drive somewhere else. So these
are you might as well be on the service of Mars.
But it's going to come at some point and this
agriculture will be on the chopping block and these these
marginal spaces will too, so and I would have loved
to see all these That's what I kept thinking the
whole time I was there. I was like, this, we're
seeing a fraction of the native flora that is left
over because a lot of stuff was not able to
cling to the edge of it existence on these margins
or be able to thrive in disturbance once the landscape
had been bulldozed and grated and plowed. So we're seeing
a fraction of what was here. I wonder, you know,
in the species that are more ruteral, like fast, you know,
able to thrive in disturbance, grow fast, produce tons of seed.
What about the stuff that wasn't What about the longer
lived doesn't produce as much seed? What about that stuff
like the climb, the stuff you would see in a
climax setting, an ecological climax community, right, Like, what about
that stuff? We'll never know unless there were records kept,
you know, from one hundred and fifty two hundred years ago.
So you know, bitch said, it's a's a paucity of
what's there. But again, just you know, you got to
find a way to philosophically deal with this if you care.
A lot of people don't. Just you know, just buy
a pair of new shoes and stare at tik tok
more and fucking you know, have a cocktail in the
evening to forget how much you hate your life. I'm sorry,
you know, I always go there I always do. But
there's an answer. It's just it's the living world and
its art, and it's science, and it's learning, and it's
mental exercise, and it's taking a fucking walk outside and
getting off the internet and stopping, you know, stopping the
shit posting and fighting with people anyway, Okay, So it was. Yeah,
it was a really fucking wonderful experience to see indigo snakes,
of course, predators of rattlesnakes so friendly. We saw mostly
young ones, but they can get upwards his six feet
long for reports of seven foot long ones. They look
scary as hell, but they're friendly. They never bite you.
There was a king snake, milk snake, excuse me, lampropeltasanulata
that we encountered. Most were docile and chill. One kept
biting A friend of a friend had his six year
old son with him and one kept He was holding
this really aggressive one and it kept biting him. It
doesn't do anything, of course, they're not venomous. They barely
have teeth. What you know, when I looked at his
hand afterwards where it had bit him, this thing was
pissed off. It didn't want to be bothered. It was
an older milksnck. You know, they get they get just
like us. They get a little cranky in their old age, right,
Jack doesn't. My dog, he's fifteen, he's a senior citizen.
Now he's got a very low tolerance compared to what
he used to have. But this, this milksneck was biting
this kid. And I looked and it would just look
like a scrape like it was. The teeth were nothing.
It was very funny. And then he was you know,
he was like, why would you do? Then you started
crying a little bit, and and then I was like, oh,
it's good. It's yeah, it looks good. You're fine. It's
you know, don't worry about it. You're tough, You'll be fine.
I know it's a little alarming when they bite you.
I got bit by a lizard I had when I
was a kid, but I was also being a shit
and you know, a little shit that a little shit
ass and messing with it. But so I deserved it.
But he was fine, and I said, yeah, it it
looks good. You know. It says you got to wear
those scars with pride. And also it'll heal in three days,
it'll be gone in like two days, it's nothing, so
and then he was like a two minutes later he
was looking under rocks for early pollis and laughing and stuff.
So it was always always nice to bring the kids
out to go snaking. So anyway, so that was a
fucking god. It was such a nice day. My daughter
got to hold an indigo snake and was really into it.
And then, you know, but she's got a low tolerance
for the heat. It was still it's here. It's late
this summer. It's still like I think it got up
to like eighty four eighty five yesterday, perfect weather, but
you know, humid. And then we got a little closer
to the Gulf. I saw a rare plant, Neptunia plena.
It's an aquatic mimosa crazy. It's an aquatic mimosa relative
mimosidi subfamily of the pea family for basy and yeah,
I had never seen it before. I saw this thing
growing with a bunch of what is that polygonacy thing?
I always I just fucking forgot the genus. There's a
lot of wheaty species. This might have been a native one,
but I saw it growing in this you know, I
was on the margins of this wetland and it was
growing out in the center and so I was like, fuck,
I just walked out boots and all, you know, into
like twenty four inches of water, go look at this plant,
because there was none growing anywhere else. And I was stoked.
I was like, this is a fucking mimosa. It's got
mimosa relative, it's mimo soidy. It looks almost like a
nel tuma or something. It's got those you know, powder
puff yellow in fluorescence flowers, pinnate leaves, and then it
had these kind of like glands, these almost looking like
extra floral nectaries at the petioles, which Ken King told
me was the key break between what a Neptunia pubescents
and Neptunia plana. And so this was a new county record,
or actually I think it was in it's the first
eye naturalist observation in the United States. I think I'm
pretty sure it's much further south. But it was an
aquatic mimosoid. It really cool to see. So I made
a collection. I'll be putting that in the r barium,
and uh, it's gonna be fucking ninety today in South
Texas a day before New Year's one of the most
you know, unpleasant holidays. For me, if there's really a
time to like hide, it's it's on New Year's you know,
people are shooting off firecrackers, getting hammered. Many DUIs will
be uh will be given out handed out over the
New Year's Eve holiday, right, many people will be waking
up in the drunk tank on New Year's Day. Right.
It's alcohol is what makes the whole system flow smoothly.
It's what makes people tolerate things that they shouldn't. Also
causes them to say things that make them think they're
more important than their Not all, not everybody, right, just
the majority of human beings. That's the majority of human beings. Ah,
there's few people that don't get dumber on alcohol. You
may not be an alcoholic, but it's certainly gonna make
you do stupid shit. So anyway, I don't know, maybe
I'll drive up the fucking thorn scrub or something. I
don't I don't know, I need to. I fucking hate
New Years Jesus Christ want to be away from it all.
But uh, I hope you have a good New Year's
and I hope you have a wonderful time doing whatever
you're doing over there right. I know, in the northern latitudes,
it's not chili, it's not too chilly, and there probably
won't be snow for most of you. But uh, you know,
because snow's becoming a thing of the past. But there's
something you can do. But I just I think what
was really cool for me yesterday was to see a
landscape that I well, I was just with these herpers
these these reptile nerds. To see a landscape that I
would normally not be botanizing in because it looks barren
and devoid of diversity, but then finding approaching it instead
of looking for rare plant species or focusing on a
plant species, looking at it from the perspective of studying
ecosystem dynamics and the perspective of looking at what's been
able to survive the human bullshit, the bulldozing the agriculture,
the fucking spraying of all the herbicides and pesticides and
other garbage because it's mostly cotton fields here, and kind
of looking at it from that perspective where this land
has been there for a long time, it was once
more diverse and covered with this this probably what was
a very cool ecosystem that's gone now, But then there's
these little pieces that are able to survive, and and
studying what is able to survive and then kind of
trying to figure out why, like what makes the plant
able to tolerate the human bullshit and the constant disturbance
and the grating and being able to grow on the
margins of of of agricultural fields. And you know what
human impacts even like feral pigs and feral cats. You know,
I hope they all, you know, end up as fertilizer,
every one of them, all the feral pigs, allll of
feral cats. Turn them into the fertilizer, or bring them
into your home, give them a home. If they're cold,
you're cold. If they're hot, you're hot. No, if you're hot,
there you know what I mean, bring them inside. But
take a feral you know what you know you don't
want it to be turned into fertilizer. Give it a home, right,
be the change you wish to see in the world.
Bring somebody's horrible spraying, mean intact with big balls, feral
cats or feral pigs into your home and give them
a nice cuddly place so that the because every life
is precious and we need to save everything despite the
damage they're doing to other life forms and the degradation
they're causing on habitats. Right, bring them into your home,
be be the change you wish to see in the world.
But those are of course human impacts, and it's it's
you know, having the outlook I have now, having the philosophy,
the perspective on the land around me, which I didn't
have when I was coming up. I had no context
for it. I mean, even the herpers I was with yesterday,
like I was in a spot that I could tell
this is all obviously second growth, Like this is not
what the land looked like. It's vicelia and misky species,
but this is not what the land looked like. It's
so it's a massive understory of invasive guinea grass which
didn't even exist here one hundred and fifty years ago.
He probably even one hundred years ago, Johnson grass, all
this other shit, these invasive grasses like these, we are
seeing a fraction of the native plant species that were
here one hundred and fifty years ago, Like this is
not It might be look somewhat native or natural, it's not.
This is all second growth. This is stuff that's come
back to recolonize disturbed land, you know, and I like
they were saying, Wow, this is what it must have
looked like. It's like, now I don't this is very
clearly not like you want to see what it looks like.
Go to like the crumbs of fish and wildlife land
that are left when which are still filled with a
number of invasive species. Go to those crumbs of fish
and wildlife land, these crumbs of habitat, and then you'll
get an idea of what was here, a better idea.
There's still going to be plenty of plant species that
are probably gone, that have been extirpated, made locally extinct.
But going back to these landscapes with that perspective and mind,
and also keeping in mind so that I don't get
depressed about it. This is a blink of an eye
on geologic time. We are living in the mass extinction.
But also you know, we're either going We're gonna get
what's coming to us, and then either change is a
result of it, right, just like an alcoholic or a
fucking addict, like know one changes willingly. They hit rock bottom.
They it gets so bad and they either die or
they fucking go in recovery. You know that we're the
same way as a civilization. That's what's gonna happen to us.
And I keep that perspective. It's still a blink of
an eye that you know, there's still joy and fucking
creativity and all these wonderful things about humans and people
and living in the world that are worth embracing. It's
I don't you know, it doesn't need to be this horrible, empty,
depressing thing. Right. You certainly need humor, and you certainly
need a little bit of perspective, but it doesn't need
to be that bad. But I like going into these
landscapes and looking at them from that these are disturbed landscapes.
We're looking at the ecology of disturbed landscape. We're looking
at the plant species that grow here, and uh, we're
going to study what's actually living. And then there's also,
of course restoration, because these plants that used to grow here,
they're not extinct, they're just extirpated. There's the possibility of
restoration should we ever get our shit together as a civilization,
as a society, the possibility of restoration will always be there, right,
But we need to bring awareness to these things. Right
to their existence by studying them, appreciating them, growing them.
That's the key fucking point to this. That's how you
bring it. That's how you bring it back eventually or
at least you know, keep little pockets of it alive
to act as seed banks whatever, right, And that's what
these kids are with. These guys are doing with the snakes,
providing habitat for them. So you know, I don't know
there's other species that have been so lucky, like the
Texas horned lizard, et cetera. But you know it's all connected,
So study it from that perspective. Even in like urban
shithole community, there's go find a power line easement. There's
got to be some cool shit there, you know, convince
other people to kill their lawn and plan nate of
all that thing. But there's still there's still got to
be irrigation ditches, power line easement. It's places you're not
supposed to go, where you could get maybe get a
criminal trespass miss to meet it for doing. Just keep
it and that's fine. Just keep in mind you're not
doing anything wrong. You're not. It might be against thought,
it's not wrong, it's not ethically wrong. Go fucking hang
out in these spots and see what's growing there. And
if people get mad at you for doing it, just
explain to them you know what you're doing. Or get mad,
stay pull out, and then they keep doing it. You know,
as long as you can get away with it, don't
get caught next time. All right, On that note, it's
time for me to dip out. I got a bunch
of shit to do. I gotta finish working on this book,
and the book is coincidentally about some of the things
I just talked about. So on that note, have a
good rest of your day, evening, afternoon, whatever, Go fuck
yourself by