Speaker 1: What's up. Welcome to the hold on. Let me turn
the we turned Smoky Soul Town. Let me turn Smoky
Soultown down. I got this serious, ex tim Fuck, what
is this? I've just entered Mexico. What is this forty?
Is it telling me to get on? What a pain
in the ass the fucking streets across the border. You
get into beautiful Rainosa with the confetti like garbage all
over the side of the road, and uh, and then
the roads just go haywire. There's like nine I gotta
pay attention to where I'm going. Oh look it's Clematis
Tramundi right on the side of the road there right now.
The border pisces me off. It's so you know, it
doesn't have to be like this, but it is a
militarized border. Anyway. Welcome to another episode of the Crime
Pays It pot and he doesn't podcast. That's a mangled
guard rail. Uh fuck, I'm driving to and away. I'm
driving to Monterey, Monterrey, and uh in the way, we'll
lay on. I'm giving a presentation at the Universe of Dad.
The Universa dot over there and Club de Puyos the
Chicken Club, and it should be fun. You know. It's
the first time I've had like an actual couple hours
to sit down and focus enough to do a podcast.
I got invited to South Texas Comic Con last weekend.
I don't know why. It's a little bit different of
an audience than I'm used to, you know, the full
grown adult and superhero costume thing, but it was cool.
It's like a different kind of nerd from science nerds,
and sometimes they overlap on the vent diagram. Damn. You know,
I should have started this podcast like ten minutes from now,
because it's traffic's a little hectic. Look, it's no trees
and a dusty road filled with billboards and fucking commercial detritus.
It's not the prettiest landscape I've seen. But you get
south of Rainosa and it really, like I said, really
brightens up. I said, Wow, you get undulating hills full
of Helieta the barreta as it's called citrus family root
tasting such a wonderful plant. Mike Heap just germinated some
from seed in his nursery, and that's a plant I'd
really love to get into cultivation, and like so many
plants in South Texas, it's much more abundant south of
the border, and it seems to do better south of
the border, where it grows at higher elevations, because most
of Mexico is above three or four thousand feet, and
South Texas is hotter than most places in Mexico unless
they're like on the coast. So anyway, but you know,
it should be a good time. My Spanish isn't perfect,
but apparently a lot of students at the university speak
English because they're better than most Americans. You know, we're
unilinguistic monoly linguistic here. But yeah, So anyway, Comic count
was fun and they gave me free passes, so I
got to like walk around and lurk and look at stuff.
It's an odd crowded times, not gonna lie, but it
was also cool. And I brought my daughter and she
loves Spider Man, which is great. You know, I'm glad
she's into Spider Man and not you know, a bunch
of like weird princess shit. Not that they would be wrong,
but I'm just saying I don't like how society in
doctrinates women to be you know, helpless and weak and
fixated on being pretty and uh, you know, it's kind
of cool that she's uh, you know, at least in
this regard defying that. We also fight a lot. We
wrestle a lot. I have her put on the boxing
gloves and beat me repeatedly. I got some muy type pads.
She you know, she she throws fists at the muy
type pads, teaching her how to punch, and I it's good.
They got her enrolled in jiu jitsu and shit anyway,
So but she had fun and she got to meet
Spider Man too. There was some dude dressed up as
Spider Man. He had like the David Bowie package thing
going on. You know, I ever see David Bowie's package
in the Labyrinth, you know, when he's wearing those tights.
Spider Man had the same thing. It was like it
was there was no obvious I don't know if the
dude was wearing a jockstripp or some but I appreciated
it because it wasn't an obvious. There wasn't an obvious. Uh.
I mean, there was a package there, but it wasn't
you know, it wasn't the you know what I mean,
It wasn't decipherable, which is good. I appreciate it. Great,
kids safe and so you know, and the dude was
fit too, so it actually looked like Spider Man. You know.
It wasn't like not saying anything about the valley, but
you know, it could be hard to find a fit
person in the valley, right, you get like a bully.
So it wasn't like a bowlying pin shaped Spider Man.
It was it was, uh, you know, accurate with the
comic books and whatnotod He's saying, yeah, really cool, and
it's kind of fucked up anyway, So we uh we
did that. And then I didn't think there would be
anybody at the At the event, it was like a
little creator stage thing. It was next to a room
with a bunch of dudes wrestling in it, you know,
like WWF style. They had the race and everything. I'm
telling you, Comic Con in South Texas gets wild, man
because it's so fucking hot. It's too hot to go
outside a lot of the time. I mean, I still
do it, but at least during the daylight hours. For
ten months out of the year, you shouldn't go outside
because you just sweat constantly. It's it's like it's it's
way more uncomfortable than southern Arizona. And uh and so
being that it's you know, its bread kind of an
indoor culture, and so the gaming and comic book thing
is really big here. And as someone who used to
be a purveyor of comic books when I was ten
or eleven, I actually worked at a comic book shop
shout out, shout out to Comics Galore in Lagrange, and
the dude would pay me in comics. It was like
totally child labor. I was like eleven years old with
like put comic books in sleeves and then he would
pay me in comics. But it was cool because it
gave me a sense of purpose, you know, much like
mowing launch does for you know, middle aged suburban men,
but you know, putting comic books and plastic sleeves is cooler.
And uh so that was but it was that was
my first job, and I was really into X Men
in Spider Man and all the Marvel comic shit. And
then that was before I got into punk rock. When
I got into punk rock, things change the punk rock
and vandalism and graffiti, then you know, kind of moved
to that, but it was a definite precursor and I
liked the art and I liked you know, I wouldn't
really might didn't have the attention span at eleven to
sit and read an entire comic book. But I would
read sections and then flip through them and collect them
and look at the pictures. And I had a bunch
of like the Marvel superheroes trading cards. Uh so, so
I you know, it was nice to like be back
around that culture a little bit, the comic book culture,
the nerd culture, a different kind of nerd. So that
was cool. And then Sunday we had this last Sunday
we had off, we got someone fucking get off my
ass and buck past. We had someone tailing Uh excuse me,
someone's tailing me. I wasn't going fast enough. I'm rubber
neck in the plant life Mexico. Like I always say, this,
Mexico's land is in such better shape once you get
out of the cities. It's in such better like it's
just not developed. There's they haven't like desecrated it with
BUCkies and gas stations and pawn shops and dollar generals.
But anyway, so, uh yeah, so we had a volunteer
day for this. These biking trails near the town I
lived in Mission, Texas, and there was you know, these
biking trails. It used to be a city dump. There's
like mountain bike trails there, which can you know, the
mountain bikers can be annoying, but they can also be
cool because sometimes those guys end up getting into plants,
and they also care about the trails as well. Every
once in a while you get some destruction happening if
they're cutting a new trail or not. But they generally
appreciate being outside. And I appreciate that they appreciate being
outside because again, we got this indoor culture down here
because of the heat and the lack of pedestrian and
bicycle structure. So only two hours and twenty minutes to
the way will Layonne. So anyway, so I've been going
to the spot for a while and there's you know,
there's occasionally rattlesnakes there. It's an old city dump, but
it's been reclaimed by native plants. The only invasives are
the buffalo grass and the guinea grass, both highly invasive
African grasses brought in by ranchers. I'm sure they are
like essential plants in Africa, that's like essential forage plants
for all the cool African wildlife, but here they're a
fucking scourge and they smother plant and they just create
these monocultures of shit. Like the misky will they'll grow
underneath the misky, the guinea grass will, especially buffalo grass
is not shade tolerant. Guinea grass is. Guinea grass has
a branching inflorescence, and then buffalo grass has an inflorescence
penictum that looks like a little pipe cleaner. Like it
doesn't branch, it's just the raceme of little flowers all
clustered together. It looks like literally like a like a
brush or a pipe cleaner of some kind. And they
both sucked. They're both highly vigorous grasses that outcompete all
the cool native cacti and other plants that we get.
So we went in. I was like, you know, I
was there one day and I was like, man, it'd
be so easy to just weed whack this shit because
it all died during the drought or it died back
to the roots. Be so easy to weed whack this shit.
Oh there's the Pemes plant and everyone's just parked out
on the median. Oh, Pemes, let's just shut out the pemes.
Is it the gas? Oh you look, they got a guess.
It's a guess. Okay. Anyway, so tons of cordia bus
the era everywhere to the Mexican Oli. Another Mexican plant
that put in. They produce a big I dug some
up that it volunteered in a vacant lot near my house.
And they've got a big, you know, swollen tap root,
and so I dug them up, cut the leaves off,
potted them up, and then they just form new leaves
and they get going. So I've got more trees for
gorilla planting. I also got permission to plant in front
of the Junior High, the local Junior High too. It
should be good. So I'm sure the city will hate
it because the city of Mission is backwards. It's like
total nineteen fifties. You know, they still love mowing and
kind of hate nature, and you know it's a it's depressing.
It's like a very nineteen fifties outlook. But it can
change slowly. So anyway, we got a bunch of people.
I just put some out on social media. It's like, man,
anybody who's local, come down. We'll weed whack the shit
out of this buffalo guinea grass. I'll get a I'll
pay for a dumpload of mulch. Really got to find
a hookup for some free mulch. Yes, I've tried chip drop.
It doesn't work done here. Yes, I've called the tree companies.
It's hit or miss. It's really really hard to get
woodchips down here. But the woodchips are essential because they'll
suppress any of the weed seeds like the buffalo grass
and guinea grass seeds that are surely built up in
the soil. Seed make and so will weed wag it
will if we have some cardboard. I normally don't do
the cardboard thing if it's like a private yard, but
in this case it makes sense to throw cardboard down
because we're not gonna be able to get out there
and do maintenance as much as you know. If it's
someone's front yard, they can just go pull grass whenever,
but they can quickly get out of hand if fits
at a spot that you're not visiting more than once
a week. So anyway, throw some cardboard down through the
mulch on top of it, and then start planting some
of the native shrubs that do well like the legumes that,
you know, build up a deep tap root system first
Sceniso lucophylum for testens, a plant you know, commonly called
Texas stage, even though it's got no relation to stage.
Can I beat this fucking oil taker to this lane closure? Yeah?
Are you go fuck off to the fuck up anyway?
Uh so? Uh yeah? So? And we did it in
like two hours. We had the twenty people working on there.
Two hours. We fixed it up and made it look
real nice. Lined the borders with misguait logs, cut back
all the buffalo there's a bunch of the misquiite branches.
We cut those back, use them as borders, you know,
to keep dogs out of the out of the from
pissing on the plants. And you know, hopefully nobody vandalizes anything.
They'll be nice, you know, they don't underestimate people's stupidity
and cruelty. But hopefully it doesn't happen, and and it'll
create a real nice place to go. But for me,
the selfish benefit for me is that now maybe people
might see what we're doing, People who are passing by,
like someone who's just going there to you know, lose
a couple of pounds going to run or you know,
some of the mountain bikers, and they'll start paying attention
to the native plants, which and that's what I want.
That's why it's fucking selfish. I want more people to
know what these are and appreciate them and uh and
appreciate what they got, you know. And there's there's fucking
tortoises here. There's diamondbags, there's indigo snakes. There's all kinds
of cool shit right at this spot. So we'll be
you know, and none of those things can really use
the buffalo grass, so we're creating more habitat for them
to the tortoises eat buffal I'm curious about that. Maybe
they maybe they'll eat a little bit of buffle. I
know they like a lot of the malvacious things. You know,
we get a lot of members of Malvasi, the Malvoidi
subfamily specifically, that are ruteral plants here that are native
weeds that just show up like melvas from americanum and
some of the small butilans and stuff. And I know
the tortoises like those, so you know, I always need
more tortoises. I was out at tord Scrub two days
ago free to have Alena from a pig trip. Thank
God I didn't see him on the trap camera. The
trap camera didn't go off, didn't let me know that
he was in there. And uh, I walked up to
the pig trip up and the poor little bastard was
in there. I would have felt terrible killing a havelena
because they can die from the heat. So but he
was okay. So I got on top of the trap
and let the thing out. He was really pissed off.
He was charging the trap and have Alena's make these
cute little noises with their teeth, this clicking sound. And
they could fuck you up too. They've got sharp teeth
and they'll charge you if you're too close. But I
was on top of the trap. I opened it and
told Louis to get back, and he just you know,
took him a while to figure out that the door
was open, and I wasn't gonna fuck with him, but
he eventually jetted out of there. So and then the pigs,
just the pigs, you know, we got another trap. We
got two or three traps of torn scrub. Now the
pigs weren't going in one. They were digging under it
and they're smart. I need like a remote control AR fifteen,
you know, and like a baited feeding station. That's really
the thing to do because the pigs can smell you,
you know, or like a land mine, maybe like a
baited you know, a land mine you can remote control
it will just blow it, blow it up or something.
It's amazing the damage they do. I don't I know,
I don't need to say it, but it looks like
land mines go off where they've blown or where they uh,
where the pigs show up. So uh but anyway, so
we're free to have Lena from a trap. And then
I saw like three or four tortoises in a span
of fifteen minutes. They always come out at dusk. They
don't come out during the heat of the day. God,
they're so fucking cute. Man. It's it'saw like a juvenile
and a three adults. No diamondbacks, which I expected would
be out too, but none. And then you know, there
was still a We still took it. We're still taking
a hit from the drought. Like stuff is not recovering
as quickly as possible. But again, it's amazing everything that
just you know, it looks like it's dead like Lipia oregonoides,
the Mexican oregano they call it. It's a verbon ac
member of urbon ac. It's a shrub. Smells incredible, really
drought tolerant too, Like it's definitely the plant like if
you plant it in a native garden, it needs full sun,
full heat, and you water it very sparingly, like only
when the soil is bone dry. But that you know,
we've got that on our at thorn scrub. It's pretty abundant.
And I thought they had just died from the drought.
I mean, there's a lot of drought deciduous stuff that
will come back, but I thought these had died from
the drought and they would re sprout from the base.
But instead it's they were re sprouting from the woody.
The woody shoots like two feet off the ground, which
was cool. So it was still at these It never
ceases to amaze me how robust and adapted these plants are,
right because I mean, resprouting from the ground is one tactic.
It's like an herbaceous perennial, you know, just like Illinois
prairie plants. But when you can re sprout from the
shoots way up top. You don't have to invest reinvest
all that energy into building woody branches and getting yourself
off the ground. So you know, obviously is a lot
more beneficial just re sprout from the shoots. And they
could do it, like so many of these plants can't.
Karwinsky it does it too. And these are mostly Mexican plants, right,
this is just the northern end of their range. I
can never stress enough how ridiculous geopolitical borders are in
the great span of time. I mean, even you look
at using the Rio Grande as a border, it's fucking
stupid because then you look at the you look at
a satellite map of where the river is now, and
you could see it changes course every hundred years. There's
where soakas and Oxbow Lakes everywhere. You know, it's not
a solid border, It'll change, it changes all the time.
It's a bunch of squiggly lines and old river channels.
So what are they doing here? They're doing some construction project.
And the way we'll I own, I think I'm in
time Alepis now. It's just as fucked for construction as
Texas is. Somebody's getting paid, somebody's getting contract there's probably
a cartel operated enterprise too, road construction. Why wouldn't they
go into it. It's a wonderful cartel's everywhere. It's in
the construction business, agriculture, farming. You know. The least of
what they do is drugs. But anyway, yeah, so, uh,
there's a fucked up power land. I think filled on
what happened. Oh somebody must have hit it. I think
somebody backed up into it with the backo. Yeah, it's
all right, No mane hit concata. Don't drift tired, don't
just don't do it right. Not me. I've got a
fucking leader, a green tea in my lab. I don't
have to take a league soon, which is hard when
the quota's got no shoulder. So uh anyway, but yeah,
so I was out of thorn scrub and the tortoises
were all out free to hobby from a trap. Went
and checked. There's not been any pig activity in the
last few days. We got one or two left to get.
I get all these people hitting me up asking if
they can hunt, and it's like, man, it doesn't really
make sense. It's not our property. It's you know, you
might be waiting out there for four days until you
see a pig, and if they smell you, they're certainly
not gonna come around. We need like pro hunters with
thermal scopes and probably dogs. You hunt them with dogs.
It's brutal, it's not pretty, but these are a highly
invasive species. Wow, there's a shit ton of sulfur butterflies everywhere.
Oh my god, how nice. More than we get in Texas.
Because Texas has destroyed all its land. It paves over everything.
Look at how green and verdant this is man ten
minutes outside of Rainosa. Fucking beautiful, the Ahito system. But
this is all communally owned agricultural land, which is what
the Ahiito system essentially is it. So you know, it
makes it very hard to be a shipback developer down here.
But uhh, it'll come one day. I'm sure you know.
The tumor grows, the human tumor grows. Oh smoky, Soul
Town had to stop the piss. This is a really
it's serious. Second, it's like six bucks a month. I
got this. It's supposed to be twenty five or some
obscene bullshit, but I they's offered me a deal. And
then after you know, a year they they count on
you forgetting that it, that you signed up for it,
and then they jacked the price back up to twenty
five bucks. I normally catch it a month and I write,
I call him and I say, I'm gonna cancel. I
don't want you know. Or now they've got it where
you can just do it online. And then every time
you say you're gonna cancel or you ask to cancel,
then they jacked the price back down. It's a strange
business model, but it works in seven bucks a month.
For satellite radio, I can listen to Smoke You Soul Down,
or you know, Willi's Willy's Road where they's road ass
this old country you know, or US. It's kind of
really the only channels we're listening to. Oh what I
Got there's an there's an Aussie station too, that's not
too bad. You like Asie, You like Assi. H got
a friend of mine back in Chicago. He's a good
you know, he's an old friend. He usually man is
a liquor store. Last time I went to go see him,
he was showing me all these pictures of guns here.
He's kind of he's a good guy. He's a little eccentric,
you know his values are good, though. Ah fuck, I
just got a butterfly, and god damn it, why are
they fly in the middle of the road. There's so
many of them. Got sulfurs, we got the white ones.
Don't know, get the fuck? I don't don't. But uh anyway, Yeah,
I went in there to buy a stogy and into
the liquor store, and I've seen mad and he's in there.
He's like, hey, how you doing. You know, He's like,
I just had a kid. He's you want to see
my guns? He's got all these handguns and shit. You know,
when someone's really opposed to guns, this, no matter what
their politics are, I think they're fucking weird. I'm sorry, right,
it's they're just an unfortunate reality or whatever, fortunate whatever
however you want to look at it. A gun is
just a tool. But you know, you cannot like him.
But when you're really appos like when you get pissed,
like I saw someone got pissed that. I made the
grown if Plants shirt with the AK forty seven on it,
which I thought was fucking hilarious, which is the point
of it. And then you know, I hate that shirt.
I hate it forget where I read it in a
comment somewhere. You got to stop reading comments. There's just
too much shit. But most of like eighty ninety percent
of them are nice, or people are just stoked on
what you do. And then there's always like I mean,
it's the fucking internet. So people are mentally ill and
alone and perpetually online and no one's going to therapy
because nobody could afford it, and so they take it
out and act out online. It's just the perfect venue.
It's like a funnel that funnels all the shit, you know,
from like nutjobs and just miserable people. And there's a
lot of miserable people in the current dystopia we're living in,
and so you just got accept that there's there's fucking
kooks everywhere. There's always someone who's got some shit they
want to pull out of their pants with their right
hand and smear on the wall, on your wall in
front of you. Just the way it goes. People are
just fucking nuts and miserable and uh. And then also
there's a lot of performance online too, because you can
hit this whole self curated you know, internet bio that's
not really you. You can pretend to be someone else,
and and everybody does it to a certain extent. Some
people do it a lot, but uh, it's all just
you know, human primate social dynamics anyway. Uh, but the
AK forty seven cheer was you know, I thought it
was funny. I thought it was a it's totally it's
like there's no core. First off, there's no correlation between
plants and guns second, which is hilarious. Second it's very aggressive,
which is also I mean, do I need to when
you explain the joke, you kill it right. But this
is I think that's why the style is. I think
a lot of people don't get my style. A lot
of the stiffs I've I've never met anyone that I
actually liked or respected who hated what I did. It's always, uh,
it's always people that seem like, oh yeah, that person
that makes sense, of course I hate what I do.
You know, I kind of Caucasian stiff, you know whatever,
just not fucking wealthy, wealthy background whatever. And then there's
people that are that are all of those things that
like what I do too. But I'm just saying when
it's always the people that always hate whatever I do,
it's always it's always a I can always guess what
kind of person that's going to be, or I'm not
surprised when I find out, you know. But anyway, speaking
to which Peter Raven just passed away rip renowned botanists.
He was actually a big supporter of Crime Phase And
my friend Crystal Ball in Mexico sent me a letter
that an email that Peter had written him two years ago,
you know, saying no, I'd love to come busy you
in Mexico. They were talking about some little Pezia species
he saw, and then he's like, I saw you on
you know, Crime Pays, And you know, I love joy.
I love what he's doing. Some people really don't like him.
But but you gotta remember Peter's in Missouri Botanical Garden,
which I've been on the shit list of some people
there for a very long time. Right, And you talk
about like a face that looks like a puckered butthole
figuratively speaking, you're talking about some of the higher ups
at Missouri Botanical Garden, right, just really like m you know,
just really they're not happy people. They're somebody, not everyone,
but I'm saying the people in question not happy people.
The kind of stiff, certainly very square their their territorial
about their field, and I can see how you know,
they wouldn't like something like crime pace. And there's a
lot of Helianthus annualis on the side of the road
right here. Always thought it was so funny it's the
same species. But when I ordered the cultivar, like the
Russian cultivar of of Helianthus anuis the plant just as
a cover crop, like literally cover crop shade to give
shade to my yard. When I first got established and
there was no cover there was no shade whatsoever. And
I was planting shit in the middle of July, so
you know, and I was hanging shade screens up and
almost bullshit, and you know, realize this is ridiculous. Why
don't I stop doing this with the tea post and
the shade screen shit and just use you know, an
annual sunflowers. They'll be gone by, and they'll be gone
in a few months. I'll just sow the seed directly
in the ground. They'll get big as fuck. So I
got one of those Russian cultivars with the dinner plate
sized flower heads. There's pelophoxia too. Oh, there's a lot
of interesting plants on the side. I'm waiting in traffic.
Now we got Thimafula, we got what is this with
Delia hispida? Oh there's oh god, damn it. What is
that highly drought tolerant, pink flowered MALVASI I can't melochia. Man,
I'm getting old. The genus names don't come so quick.
What is a checkpoint with the cops? And shit, let
me get the papers. You gotta have these vehicle permit papers.
It's a fucking pain in he asked to get. There
was nobody in the office yesterday when I went to
the board. You have to drive into Mexico with your car,
make an immediate you turn, pay a fee, get extorted.
The guy, one of the dudes who took my payment
for the permit thing, it was like, he's like, it's
fifteen bucks, and so of course he took eighteen and
I was like, what the fuck and he just like
looked at me and took the extra three and like
put him in his pocket. I was like, motherfucker, all right, whatever,
it's nothing to me. But I at the show, hold on,
I gotta put this down. I gotta explain to the
cops what I'm doing. Oh, they just wanted to sniff
on me. God, it never fucking annoying. It never ceases
to blow my mind. Whenever you're in Mexico and you
mentioned plants, the cops they always bring up drugs. It's
like the only thing they can think of, you know.
I was like, they ask me what I'm doing. I'm like,
I'm going to going Tonuiva Leona to give a presentation
on plant us and they're like, oh, marijuana a y
huesca noa no plant's silvestrece plant Us nativas. Then I
pointed a fucking monte all around this moron, and I'm like,
you got fucking cool plants all around you, Like everything here,
you know, is native and restricted to this habitat. Type
said the words tom aleapin thorn scrub. He looked at
me like I was fucking I do would I don't know.
I didn't say tom aleapan thorn scrub in Spanish, though
maybe I should have fucking more. And then they look
they look at the the papers and everything, and they don't.
You know, in Mexico could be very conservative too, right,
So like I don't have my shirt tucked in and
my hair gelled over and I don't have any hair.
I gotta shave my head after I gave myself a
fucked up haircut in the Philippines. You know, that's really
why I did it. I was too it was too hot.
I tried cut my hair back a little bit. I
just fucked it up because I didn't have a right razor.
So I was like, ah, fuck it, I'll just cut
the Oh, we'll get this rock exposure. Ah, lovely God,
there's just cool shit growing everywhere here. There's buffalo and guinea,
but everything else is native anyway, so this fucking you know,
I don't look all clean cutting shit like a good
Catholic boy, right, I like, I only cosplay Catholics. Sometimes
it's not real. Oh, there's fucking self for butterflies everywhere,
undulating hills of tom a leap and thornscrub. It's amazing
how many kids from South Texas. You know, Mexicans have
never been to this side of the border to look
at the plants here. Right, It's just it's the borderlands.
The politics are so fucked up, the cartel shit, the
militarized border on the US side. It's so infuriating, man,
it doesn't need to be like this. But anyway, and
so these cops are just yeah, they looked me over
and they see they were trying to see if there
was a reason to extort me. I showed them the
flyer for the gig I'm speaking at, and then they
still brought up drugs because that's all they can think of,
and they're, you know, measley cop brains, and uh yeah,
and then they just let me go. They to me
in my way, But it was fucking annoying. It's like, really, drugs,
Like do you think everything's a fucking drug? Like that's
all you got to do is just did more drug
war shit. And of course, you know, the US started
the drug war. Now the US is trying to you know,
the US obviously lost the drug war too, so they're
starting to ease up. But meanwhile, all these other countries
all over the world, because they were sucking the US
as nuts, all got involved on you know, anti drug
bullshit too, and it just created this fucking this atmosphere
where every citizen is a potential enemy and the cops
have an impossible job and rather than going after real crime,
everything is drugs. I'm killing so many butterflies, right, now
it is sad. The grill of my truck's gonna look
like it's papered with confetti. But uh, anyway, yeah, so
onwards towards uh Monterey. There's a lot of phrases in Monterey.
It's like a very white culture there. That's bizarre, right,
It's not like you go to Wahaka and people are
fucking like proudly nate of indigenous ship. It's like Monterrey's
got a very a very Spanish white culture. Phrases. You
know what the code freight, it's like the Spanish word
for strawberry slash yuppie. You know, the friely shits, right,
the fancy labs, the fucking candy asses, the uh, you know, phrases.
You know, you know what a phrase is, right, strawberry,
perfect word for it too, a very descriptive, perfect metaphor. Yeah,
God damn that the habitat just that looks amazing around me. Oh,
there wasn't the risk of getting extorted by the cops
or kidnapped by a cartel. I would love to just
pull over and get into it. It's you know, he's
pretty chill. But anyway, so what the fuck was I
talking about? Oh yeah, so Peter Raven passed away. Who really,
you know, the thing like the things I'm always talking about,
like every plants, the product of the habitat that comes from.
He was famous for that, you know, co evolution paper
did with Paul Irlik about you know, coevolution of butterflies,
of lepidopterne, lepidopteranes and plants. And then he wrote a
book too, called Driven by Nature. It's like an autobiography.
Grew up in San Francisco. I first heard of Peter
Raven because there's an arkdolstaphalo species named after him. But
he was, you know, a really nice He was on
the podcast twice and I really, you know, a really
influential botanist. Good dude. Too good for Missouri Botanical Garden,
at least where it is now. I'm just shitting on
them repeatedly. I'm sorry, they just they fucking pissed me off.
They're a bunch of fucking cunts. The HR Department, the
fucking top administrators fired two friends of mine, you know,
replacing cool plants in their in their desert house with
horticultural atrocity to attract rich donors. They're all about that shit.
They're all about the right. They just the fucking h
you know, it's just it's wild, man, it's they're still
stuck in this antiquated East Coast botanical gardens style, and
it's so hard to snap snap people out of that. Right,
I say to the East Coast because a lot of
botanic gardens in the East Coast are like that. They're
like this English Victorian garden. You know, it's where all
the horticultural bullshit comes out of the weeping plant, the
fastigia plant, the cultivars, the showy gardens, the show gardens.
I said, I can always get ship whenever I do
that voice. It's my fucking caring voice. And there's always
some you know, self flagellating, guilty Caucasian personally, it's the
really problematic voice to do that. Anyway, Fuck you. Hopefully
hopefully I've driven those people off from this podcast. Right,
we live in different worlds, pal, you live in a
bubble all right, I'm getting extorted by Mexican cops down here.
What are you doing? Fuck face you fucking anyway, Sorry,
I get a little the fat. I don't need to
be defensive like that. Everyone's trying the best they can't.
You know, everyone's got their own story. They're trying the
best they can. Not everyone's had bad ascid trips. They
can a bus at two am, on a fridge at Chicago,
went the night, or been to jail for a little spell.
You know, think experiences like that tend to be good
for people. Maybe some of these you know, candy asses
can go get some of it anyway. But Peter Raven
had done a lot in this book is pretty good too.
It's Driven by Nature is pretty interesting. Born in San
Francisco at a time, you know, into San Francisco that
no longer exists. God, I would have loved to see
it back then. I mean getting into botany pre uh
pre inin at and smartphones and and all that shit
that gets. You know, that's really influenced. And I think
it's good. I think all that's good. But I'm just
saying back in the day, it wasn't you know, you
didn't just have iinat and you couldn't take photos so readily.
You had to really, you know, go out and collect stuff.
You had to go out and collect plants and really
study them in habitat. I mean, you couldn't even take
photos man, you know, well you you could, but with
a you know, a traditional film camera. I think about
that all the time because photos are so essential to
the study of bondy these days. There it's just such
an easy way to collect data and reference material, to
look at what plant? You know, what you what you saw?
What what species? It is, the photos of the habitat,
et cetera. You didn't have any of that back in
the forties and fifties. Man, it was it was just
really you know, collecting or barium vouchers, line drawings, whatever.
I mean. There were challenges, definite challenges. Oh look at
these undulating hills of grain of all these wonderful plants.
Much less of a heat island on this side of
the border too, because you know, it hasn't been turned
into parking lots, so I'm sure that affects the local climate.
Maybe that's the reason that things look a little bit
better as wild. Even if you're in like Tucson or
southern Arizona, the menu you cross the border into Sonora,
the landscape just in my experience always looks more vivid
and alive. You know, I should go back and listen
to that episode of the podcast with Peter Raven as
much as I hate the sound of my own voice,
at least on a podcast, right, But there were two.
There was I forget what the first one. I think
the first one was just a straight up interview with him,
and the second one was we were talking about the
diversification and explosion of angiosperms in the early Cretaceous. And
that one he didn't seem too keet in. He wasn't
very He wasn't really he wasn't really into it. He
wasn't feeling it. I think he was a little maybe
he was a little angry or tired, he was grumpy.
I don't know, but I should go back, and they
were like from twenty twenty one or twenty twenty two.
You can go back that far and listen. When I
switched the podcast over to iHeart Radio. You know, that's
the company that's responds for all the shitty adds you
here when you listen to this, unless you're in the
Patreon where for five bucks a month you could listen
add free. Thank you for all the Patreons supporters too.
I needed to do I need to do more for
you guys. But but yeah, anyway, when I transferred to
iHeart Radio. They left out some of the older podcasts.
I don't know why. Maybe it's for the better though,
because it was really, you know, some of them are
really and you know, as far as I mean, I
do disjointed rants well now, but back then, holy shit,
they were just it was it was off the chain.
Some of them are just like a pinball machine. The
train of thought is just like a pinball, you know,
just all over the place. But yeah, that was a
it was a good interview. With the first Peter Raven
interview or the first episode I did with it was
pretty good. It's pretty interesting, interesting fellow. You know, I
think the thing with some of these cops, the Mexican cops,
depending on where the trams he throws out are worse
like the local ones. Then the state cops can can
be grew up as fuck. I think that's who I
just saw. But I think, you know, people getting nervous.
It's hard not to be nervous when you're around these
fucking idiots, and I think they they can detect your
level of nervousness and that like turns them on, like
they get a dopamine shot because it's obvious control thing,
especially if you're male. You know, male human primates are
geared more towards that, especially depending on what culture you
come from. And so I think they get off on
knowing someone's afraid of them, and then it immediately they
start fucking with you. But every time I'm like getting
stopped by Mexican state cops or going through a checkpoint,
they always ask about drugs, probably because they see the
tattoos and whatever. I don't know, but you know, or
they say something that they you know, they they ask
you where you're going, You tell them where you're going,
they repeat it back to you, like in this kind
of Oh it's so fucking dirty and gross. Gross man,
it's just like they're so sleepsy and corrupt. Not all,
I'm sure not all, but fuck it's that's the culture,
at least among the state cops. Federalites see maybe a
little bit more chill, I don't know. And the transitos
are real slimy. The cops in Mexico are the worse.
They're fucking Oh. So you not only gotta worry about
occasional cartel shit, you also have to worry about the
pigs to the cops. To excuse me, I call these
caps pigs, because they are they really are they that's
just face it. They're fucking dirty and corrupt, and there
are a lot of more assholes anyway, A little slow,
a little fast, excuse me? So uh, I just stopped
the photograph of Malochia tomentosa that was growing in a
in a sea of plastic bottled garbage. But it's just little,
it's just little bits of litter. But then there's none
of the big litter, Like the developments are anywhere near
as abundant here as they are in the US. Right US,
there's not a lot of little litter, you know, like
trash and plastic coverage, but there's a lot of big litter,
my dollar generals, pawn shops, shopping plazas, giant roads, that
kind of thing. I gotta come back Saturday or Sunday.
But man I you know, I got half of mine
to just keep going. Drive down to Wahaka Prowebla or something.
There's a lot of plants I want to see. There
was an interesting number of malpiggy ac that has fruits
that have these like inch long red tricombs on them
that looks fucking wild. I mean the fruit, the tri
coombs I guess are red for wind dispersal and maybe
to attract birds that then picked them up out of
curiosity and dropped them. It began with an l. There's
only like two observations of an I naturalist. My friend
Gabrielle was down then where was it correct throal maybe
and seen it. He's seen it down there. I couldn't
place it was. It was really fantastic, look at small
tree and then it turned out. I asked my friend
Mark Olsen, who teaches at UNAM, and he looked it
up and was able to You know, he knows the
florist so well. But it's amazing. How just you need
more people in Mexico use an I net, You know,
you need more community scientists, just people who aren't necessarily
going to school for this shit but do it because
it fills the void in their soul and makes them
feel better about the contemporary state of modern civilization, right,
which is what botany is good medicine for. Right, every
time you feel like puke, and figuratively or spiritually speaking,
go out and look at some fucking plants or some birds,
or some reptiles or whatever, fungi, whatever the fuck you know,
just get the fuck out. Get out of the human world. This,
you know, brutal, short term loss, long term gain. The
short term gain long term loss paradigm that we have
is a civilization, right now. Get away from all the
dumb shit, the social performativeness, the social hierarchies, all this
grotesque shit, the sociopaths that want money and power. Get
away from all that. Go look at the living world. No,
it doesn't matter what aspect of the living world you're looking.
It's get the fuck out. Go look at the living world,
and almost more importantly, record it, right like get photographs,
use ain at pay attention, study it, learn the names,
learn the pay attention to the ecologies. Pay attention to
the way that plants behave. You know, a plant psychology
is really just how it plants behavior is really just
a psychology and its habit and how it interacts with
things around it. Right, the habitat. Pay attention to the
connection between the habitat and the plants. The habitat literally
breeds the plants the same way that humans have bred crops.
You know, and I say this all the time, it's
my fucking analogy I use. I'm sorry if you're hearing
it againfort in nineteenth time to deal with it. You know,
broccoli col robbie call of flower, Brussels sprouts, all the
same species, bread by people, bread by people, tinkering with
different phenotypes, phenotypic variation, and then you know, establishing it
in a population so that all members of the population
then then display that those phenotypic trades. Right, same thing
they've done with pugs and great things in chihawa's from
the same species as dog. Right, That's what habitats do
to plants. There are so many traits, evolutionarily convergent traits,
that is, things that unrelated plants end up evolving independently,
and they display these traits not as a result of
shared inheritance, but because of the adaptive benefit of those traits. Right,
much like wings for birds and bats, you know, or
fins for sharks and dolphins. To use really easy analogies, right,
there's like the thorn scrub here. I just I was
watering some shit in my yard and I got the
seeds of Corstetia ax hilarius. This shrub to like six
feet in the bean family. I got the seeds. The
fruit's wet. They look like little brown bean pods and
they started exploding. You get them wet a couple seconds
after they start exploding and shooting seed everywhere. Right, that's
a great example of explosive to Hissians, especially in response
to them getting wet, you know, as if after a rain,
just like Ruellia does, right, which is in they can't
they see you get Rouellia seeds wet, they start snap
cracking and snap cracking and popping and shooting seeds everywhere,
and they do it after a rain, which that's also
makes sense that they're not dropping the seeds on the
ground where they can be preyed upon by rodents and
other insects more easily. Instead, the seeds remain protected by
the fruit that they're in by the ovary and only
get thrown on the ground during a rain when the
soil is going to be wet and they can germinate anyway.
But then, of course there's plenty of plants from the
tamalaf and thorn scrub borderlands plant habitat that are explosively
the Hissian even without rain. They just once they get
mature enough. Plenty of members of eupour Ba C. The
rubber and points study of family. Do that Adelia a
ci croton also from the leggan family, throw stem in Mexicana,
make a Mexican Mexican holdback. Stupid name. I don't know
where that comes from. It's a great tree, it's great
native plant gardens, fast growing, good cover. I mean, there's
a shit ton of plants to do this, right, Like
a duel weed up in the Midwest does that in
patients Capensis right, explosive to hissians, right, But it's especially
common among plants in the thorn scrub and especially you
know ones that they get wet and it causes them
to shoot their seed. It's it's you know, you see
the same thing the zigzag branching habit in New Zealand plants, right,
the branching habit the divericate branching. If you want to
look it up, look up divaricating branching or divericate branching
in New Zealand plants and you'll get a ton of
articles on it. Thought to be a response to predation
by MOA's giant flightless birds that are now extinct, that
were driven extinct by the Maori, but upon Anesians who
first hit you know who first landed on New Zealand
in twelve or thirteen hundred, right, But New Zealand didn't
have any large mammals. That just had large flightless birds.
They brows differently than mammals do, and so the plants
there evolved a different defense mechanism, namely creating this cage
like structure with their branches right long, comparatively long distance
between leaf notes, short fascicled leaves and this zigzag branching.
Really really cool heteroblasty among some of the plants in
New Zealand as well. You know, different juvenile and adult leaves.
The juvenile leaves tend to be more armed. Some of
the pseudopanax and the ginsing family Araliac do that really well,
bizarre fucking genus Pseudopanax man. Some of them are really
really cool looking. You know, fire seeds that germinate response
to the chemicals and smoke, like you see in plants
from the California Flora Province, the fire dependent areas of
the California Floristic Province, or the fire dependent areas of
South Africa, et cetera. These are all traits you know,
you study plants in a habitat long enough, you start
noticing traits that have evolved, or traits that you start
seeing traits appear in unrelated lineages of plants. It's fucking incredible.
Now you can literally see how the landscape is breeding
these things into the plants. Right. It's just that that
list of circumstances in that plant habitat selects for different
traits among the plants that grow their right. Plants and
swamps plants and alpine areas like alpine areas of Tasmania
or of the Atacama Desert, where you're at fifteen thousand
feet low latitude of fifteen thousand feet up, you get
a lot of cushion plants, leaf frozets, plants that don't
get very tall, that kind of thing. Right. Azarella compact
the one of the most bizarre plants in the world,
carrot family abac. It's just a bunch of leaf rosett's
I'll smush together and what ends up looking like a
in some cases ten foot wide lump of green green carpet,
like leathery green carpet that just covers rocks and can
live for two thousand years. Right, really fascinating stuff. And
the habitat is the context of everything. Areocarpus phisseratus looks
like a living rock because it grows in a barren desert,
the Chiuahua desert, with a bunch of limestone talus all
over the ground right in that thick cuticle, That thick
waxy layer that makes it look like a living rock's
beneficial both in the sense that it provides camouflage, but
also in the sense that it limits the amount of
damaging intense ultraviolet that can get in, and it limits
the amount of moisture that can be transpired lost through
the stomata. Got the fucking stomata. Jim Masseth, Professor emeritus
at the at UT Austin, showed me a microscope slide
he'd taken the cuticle and the epidermal tissue of Aerocarbus physeratus,
showing these deep pits in this really thick cuticle, like
two hundred and fifty micrometer deep cuticle that you know.
He showed how how hard this these deep pits where
the stomata are, you know, how it looks like a
like you're looking at like a street layer of like
a sewer, like a sewer tunnel right, like a sewer,
a sewer a hole in the ground for a sewer, right,
It's like it goes really deep through this cuticle, and
that of course limits the amount of moisture that can
be lost through those stoemains. Because these things grow out
in the barren open And when you see him dying
in the West Texas desert, you can it gives you
an idea of how bad the drought must have been. Man,
here is some amazing conglomerate formation on top of the sandstone. Oh,
beautiful road cuts. Continuations of the geologic strata layers that
we get in South Texas, like sandstone down below, like
you see in the Roma bluffs above the Rio Grande,
and then that goliad gravel stuff up top. I didn't
see any cata hula formation. Maybe there was keta hula
formation there. Anyway, Uh, got another hour and a half
to drive. I have to stop and piss again. I drink,
I drink these forties of green tea. I gotta take
it easy, you know, maybe it's a it's a diuretic.
You know, it really makes you have to piss a lot.
I don't want to. I don't like paying for the
public toilets here. Oh wait, I gotta pay the fucking tolls.
Hold on a minute. A land clearance that looks terrible.
Oh just went over an amazing little river by General
Brown heneral Bravo. It's little town. Am I in tom
alip is still? Or am I in the way? I
don't know either way. It looked fucking amazing down there.
God damn it. Wish I had time to go. I
gotta stop star, I gotta stop agreen adu see, I
got events, I got events booked up this whole fucking summer.
Kolowe asked me to speak at their native plant thing
in North Carolina. Someone's gonna get banned, someone's gonna get
canceled for inviting me, you know, especially some of those
young college kids. Bless their hearts. Some are good, some
are really amped up, you know, on uh on uh.
You know, they think I'm problematic. They got they and
I don't like the fact that it make fun of
never mind, you know, everybody wants easy answers to the
world's problems, and it's so easy to just paarrot things
that you say online. And it's gonna make fun of
people for anyway. Uh So, you know, someone's gonna get
canceled for inviting me to Klowe. They asked me to
be the plenary speaker. You know, this is a good
heads up. Maybe you want to let them know, Let
the let the speakers at Callowe Native Plant Conference know
that I'm problematic and uh and uh infringing on academic territory,
and let them know that. I don't know, you know
that way, but that way it'll free up my schedule.
In July June, I'm not going on tour. And then
we're doing this. I have to go help lead this
tour for Costa Rica with some mycology people, Alan Rockefeller,
et cetera. That'll be fun. And then but I'm showing
about a fifteenth and I guess that's things sold out already.
Costa Rica is so nice. It is weird, though. You
go to the airport and it's all it's all fucking grigos.
It's bizarre. It's unnerving a little bit. But at least
a lot of stuff is protected down there due to
the eco tourism. How many shamanistics how many? You know?
How many come? Mostly? D say Honky shaman, cost D
say quantos, Honky Immensustan in Costa Rica Muchos de Macierro's God,
its the right lane is all fucked up from the trucks.
And then, uh, what, August, I'm gonna be in Denver.
That'll be fun. I've been ignoring emails about what I'm
supposed to do in Denver for the last week. They're
really sweet. I just I get anxiety, you know. I
open my email inbox and I just don't want to
look at anything, and then it just makes me feel
terrible and like I am, you know, going to work,
and then I have to. I just want to go
lay down behind my couch. I don't have a couch,
but if I did, I will go lay down behind
it on the floor and just have a panic attack,
because that's what happens when I look at my email inbox.
I just don't. I just don't respond to a lot
of things because I can't. It's just too much. It's
like too much. My fucking bandwidth was exceeded months ago.
I need to go on some sort of holistic retreat.
Put the phone down, you know, so I can't manipulate
my behavior and piss me off or make me feel
bad or depress me and and just don't get distracted.
It's really fucked my attention spend just you know, allow
myself time to just beat bored and daydream. Still you
should do this too, And and just you know, not
speak for a week or so. I don't, fuck, I
don't think I could do that, honestly, not run my mouth.
You know hard it is for me to not start
singing to the dogs or you know, doing the whole
terrest things start. You know, there's like a different Turet's
feature of them of the month every so often. You know,
it's easier, you know, you know, hey, cock boy or whatever.
You just shit, I'll just say, you know, just to
just to break up the silence. I don't think I
could do a silent retreat for ten days. How do
you do that? You have to put duct tape over
my mouth or some shit. I would have to get
my mouth stitch shut with those dissolvable stitches in order
to get me to shut the fuck up for ten days.
I can't do it. I really can't. It's hard, you know,
Oh God. Anyway, I guess it's better than being a
mute or something, you know, or being so shy to
the point of being unable to talk, right, you gotta
lose some people up and then what am I doing
September or September I'm going to the aeroid conference in Miami.
I need to start saying no, man, no, I'm not
gonna do this. No, I can't go speak. Or if
if you want me to go speak, you gotta pay
like decent, right, not like these. You gotta just charge
more money or something, which sucks too. But I just
don't have any fucking time right. I would much rather
be looking at plants, going to cool places than than
doing presentations. It can be fun, but just need a
fucking break, man. You know what, if I'm gonna see
any more tinky winky cops, that's what they always remind
me of. The cop them, the little transititos and you know,
uh uh it' stopped all the state cops AND's gonna
always remind me to tinky winkies, remember that from what
was that? The what was that? Kids show? The tinky winky? What?
What was it? Well? What the fuck? I can't remember
the goddamn name. I'm glad I can't remember the tinky winky.
God damn it, I can't remember the name. It was
like a PBS. I was infuriating. It was an infuriating
kids show and it would you know, just just fucking
stupid too. It was just like stupid, like it was
just I felt like it made kids dumber. Whatever, whatever,
tinky winky caids. Someone tell me what you know? What
don't I don't want to know. Don't remind me. But
that's what I was thinking, like I wanted to see
any more cops. They get so excited. I let the cop.
This cop got really excited when he saw I had
my uh, giant ass backpack. It's like a waterproof chromebag.
It's a fucking ripoff of what it is. Chrome charges
too much money. Now fuck them. You can find a different,
a different bad company. Go with them. I just go
with Chrome because it's what I used to use when
I used to when I was a bike messenger twenty
years ago. But he saw the giant backpack in the
in the shotgun seat and he got all excited. I mean,
this cops eyes lit up like a four year old
child's eyes on Christmas morning. He was so excited. He
was convinced there head to be drugs in there. You
know you got a guy with neck tattoos in a
filthy truck. It's all fucked up on the sides, pinstriped
with you know, uh, scratches from the monte, from the shrubs,
from the thorn scrub. And there's a backpack. And what
could be in that backpack? Holy shit, I don't believe
that it's just a sketchbook, a computer, you know, a
couple changes of socks and a couple of shirts. Right,
it's gotta be drugs. I bet he's got a brick
of cocaine in there and he's bringing it southing to eat.
Fucking moron, what do you think? Hat? You have, fucking jerkop?
You think I'm bringing drugs into Mexico? God damn it.
I just I hate that. You know, when will the
cops in Mexico stop doing that everything's everybody's got drugs
thing and don't incentivize them, when when you getrvs around
cops right instead of just you know, treating them or
assuming you know that they're just like the working class
slabs that they are, which is that's fine, you know,
that's fine in this case they're kind of class traders.
But whatever, you know, and it's just I'm talking about
Mexican cops. I'm talking about it. It's different in the States, right,
The cops in the States are a little bit different,
and you know, they're nowhere near as obnoxious. Is this shit.
The Mexican cops are reported repugnantly corrupt, like just exceedingly corrupt.
But when you act nervous around them, you incentivize the
broken system because they feed off fear. They love that.
That's like a power thing for him. It gives them
a little stiffy, right, God, I fucking hate the cops.
Remember when Andrew Callan Channel five News was doing. He
was interviewing all these migrants crossing the border, and it was,
you know a lot of people like from Central Africa
would come to Mexico and then cross there. And he
was interviewing some of the migrants come from Central Africa
and he was they were they're all just like man,
the cops in Mexico were the worst. The cops are
just fucking horrible. They're worse than the criminals. I mean,
the cops are criminals, but they're worse than the criminals
then like cartel, because they just shake you the fuck
down and they just they're just such fucking dirtbags. And
it's one thing to do that when you're a criminal.
It's nothing to do when you supposedly have the law
behind you and you know you can get away with it.
You know, your chicken shit fucking pisces me off, so
fucking ugh. You know anyway, I got distracted. Sorry, I
mean there's always time for corrupt cop hatred to be spewed.
Oh look at this Monthay, look at this beautiful thorn
scrub four five feet tall, extends for miles in ocean
of green. So lovely. Whereas astrophytem could put them aduci
the astrophytum that was only described twenty years ago looks
nothing like any of the other astrophytum species. Looks like
an octopus. Where is it? I was hoping the ones
that I have would produce seed this year, but I
don't think they cross pollinated. I don't know. Need more
more native bees, need more of the native cactus bees.
Some of the macroterras were what's the case with's diodesia?
What's the goblin bee? Ow? There's so many cool native
bees in South Texas. Hi. Welcome to another episode of
Tony's House Tricks podcast. Today we're listening to Jake Antonio
The Groove that Never Stops. Okay, it's kind of sensual,
kind of mystic. He uses a bit of synth and uh.
You know, sometimes when you're coming back from Mexico, you
might end up catching some counterfeit gas. You might just
end up with some counterfeit gas in it. Take might
make your engine misfire, you know, make some weird cranks
and clugs. You never know. But the minute you get
back over the border, you fill up with reg you gas,
and you'll be fine. It'll remedue the situation perfectly. You know.
It's just what they do on her sometimes you see
it's a it's a big operation. You know, Cartel got
involved in the gas business and so they you know,
they actually break into the tubes and uh, and they'll
go make their own gas, you know, they make little
mixtures and stuff. Anyway, I'm coming back, Uh it's Saturday.
I can't wait to get uh harassed by the not harassed,
just poked. They just poked. But what are you doing?
You know, what are you doing on? Are you getting drugs?
And then I don't have to go sit in the
fucking line at the border, and I guess the cartel
was doing some roadblock stuff and Rainosa, but I'm not
going through Rainos so proper. We're going going around it. So, uh,
you know, they I guess that the Mexican government captured
some some higher up in the cartel. I think there's
the Gulf Cartel. Instead of throwing a temper tantrum and
blocking off roads in downtown, Reino says, it's just it's
just standard Ferris is what happened anyway, at a wonderful time,
and I'm actually just why are they doing this. They're
making parts of Nuevo Leone look like Texas with the
fucking freeways, you know, one hundred feet in the sky. God,
good luck. Just they the whole city of Monterrey just
held hostage by cars. Anyway, Finally got to see miro
Spermum sussinum in habitat, which is pleasant because Arroyo sweetwood
as it's known, which has been in cultivation in Texas
for like twenty or thirty years now, and it's a
fucking great Let me turn this goddamn music off. That
was kind of a joke, right, So I like house
it's got a time in a place, but you get it.
You know, you gotta put it in the back background sometimes.
But yeah, Royo Sweetwood, it's a beautiful fucking tree. It's
fabody subfamily, beautiful white pea flowers that smell really really pleasant.
And we've seen it growing in a sarroyo at fifteen
hundred feet with Brocelia liciniata and Senegalia righty I And
there was even already a knackwa there bradge in ac,
which is a common South Texas plant. It's a volunteer
all throughout South Texas. You know, it pops up everywhere
and all the garden beds and shit because the birds
eat the berries and shit out the seats. How do
I get back on a freeway? Now? It should be fun.
The show was good. Bunch of people came out to it.
They were like fifty five people that came out to
hear me speak, even though not all of them spoke English,
and my Spanish is not perfect, so but it was
fucking awesome. It was really, it was really fun. A
lot of a lot of cool people came through hangout.
We went to last and Suela Park in which is
like this little canyon in Monterrey. South of Monterrey, it's
like the gateway to the Sierra Madre. I guess well,
I stake a canyon got all fucked up in the
flood they had two years ago, so you can't get
in there. There's no more getting in there to see
Alba Pelousa Pelosa. Al gave Albo Pelosa. At least not driving.
You're gonna have to part of the Some of them
roads got taken out massive flood, but they needed it.
But yeah, the show was great. It was really fun.
And uh, and my friend Carlos came out as Tikim
everybody knows as Tiki. Well, I hadn't seen in a
long time. Great to see him. He's like probably one
of the best bodanists in Nuevo Leone. This is how
I fucking get on and god damn it, what a
pain in the ass. I think this is how you
do it. I don't know. These roads are a fuck,
They're a clusterfuck. But yeah, so I saw him and uh,
he brought his wife out to who's great. She studies
native bees. She's I've been hearing about her for a while.
She studies native bees, and uh, this looks thoroughly fucking confusing.
God damn it. Let me put this down for a
minute so I can out. There we go and a
big sign for Reinosa. Here we go, beautiful Reinosa. I
never that's beautiful Reynosa. Taste the flavors of Reynosa from
the burning garbage dump? Where is that point source of pollution?
Every night in my town, I can smell burning plastic
and they do it at night, dude, they don't do
it during to day. I wonder where it comes from.
Is it coming from Reinosa it smells like burning garbage
or is it a factory on the American side. Either way,
it's totally sketchy and it's probably illegal, and I hope
they get caught at some point because they're poisoning the
entire town that I live in. Anyway, Yeah, so, but anyway,
back to mural spermum. Right, it's knowing this plant for
a few years like I have, and loving it, and
they're growing it from seed. We sell ceilings at Limestone,
Tortoise Nursery and Segein. It's planted throughout Austin. I've got
some in my yard. The tree in my yard is
finally flowering, and it's just such a fucking dope plant.
And to finally see it and habit that you know,
is very special, right, and it's get some context for it.
It's like learning the story of a of a friend,
or like meeting a friend's family or something like that.
Well anyway, yeah, so it was it was really cool
to see that fucking plant. The one I saw was big, too,
bigger than any I've seen in Texas. It was like
two feet across. It was growing on the edge of
this washed You know, they're ripe peri and they grow
in the desert, but they're right period they're growing. It
was growing in a dry arroyo bed filled with all
these gravels, and it was seemed like a bit pretty
big floodplain too. It was grown with jug lands microcarpo
with the little walnut which we get in West Texas too.
Had a bunch of West Texas flora there, like shit
you don't see in in the Rio Grand Valley because
it's it's too hot there. So it's it's really point
helps me point out, like you know, there, helps me
realize how unique the area where I live is, the
Rio Grand Valley is hot as fuck. It's hotter than
most of the places you'll see here in Mexico, just
because of how low it is, I suppose, and probably
because it's been turned into a heat island, because you know,
it's there's so much development there, so much. There's more
development in Texas than Mexico. You come to Mexico, the
fucking land is in such better shape. It's amazing. Saw
Ariocarpus trigonus before we went to the arroyo where miro
Spermum was growing. That was cool too. Didn't expect that.
We were driving by some habitat and some undulating hills
and a bunch of scrub and it just looked incredible.
So I stopped and there was Timopla microporoides there, which
is another West Texas plant, and then Ariocarpus trigonus too.
But it looked like donkeys in NIBBLDNA, right, there was
donkey shit. Ever, I know it was the fucking donkeys.
The donkeys do a lot of damage, right, they're cutest shit,
especially when you put them in little hats and stuff,
but they do do a lot of damage to the flora.
And there was a kind of serious Pitchyi a different
subspecies though, and one of the cantas enters berg Mannii,
one of the cactusnerds, identified it for me on Ininett, right.
You know the cactus ands. They go on there every
day and they get alerts and they just bliss their hearts.
It's good for him to, you know, because it's I
wouldn't know what this was. I don't. It would take
me forever to key this stuff out. Way you just
go through a checklist like anyway, It's not the point.
It was incredible habitat. It was limestone substrate, felt a
lot like West Texas, but with elements of the South
Texas flora in there. Cremerio ramosissima was abundant. That hemi
parasitic plant that is, you know, gets about two feet tall.
There was Callandra conferta there as well, which is another
great plant that my buddy Matt Kaufman grew, and I
think I collected seeds from some of the populations in
South Texas. In South Texas, it only grows in rocky
areas like on some of the goliad gravels and conglomerates.
Doesn't like deep soils because it'll get outcompeted by things
that get taller than it. It's a mimosoid legome. It's
got really cool flowers that things should be in way
more common and cultivating. All this shit should be way
more common in cultivation. There's such fantastic plants underappreciated, and
they're underappreciated because the horticultural atrocity culture that I'm always
making fun of. That was big too. That was like
a big thing, I think because that ship is so
abundant in Mexico too. You know, the obwellita plants right,
the like Spanish colonial garden style that every people who
came to the talk I did a couple of days
ago at University of Nuevo Leone. You know we're saying
that too. They were laughing at it. Carlos was even like,
you know, that's what you said is dangerous because it
attacks the power structures of you know, ship that I
don't know. I should have asked them to actually explain
that a little bit more. But yeah, I mean that's
you know, that's the ship that people in authority love, right,
the horticultural atrocities, everything neat uniform lines. Uh you know,
when you of course you grow up being in doctrinated
and brainwashed thinking that's what plants are supposed to look like.
You end up hating nature and thinking it's messy. So yeah,
it was cool. It was cool. And then I brought
some merch too, but but I couldn't. I can't sell
them for what I sell them for in the States,
you know, so Tray Santos pacils what I was selling
his shirts for, which is like seventeen bucks, which is
like I make like four dollars off of it. But
that's okay. It's Mexico, right, It's different. It's it's it's unequal.
It's an uneven distribution of wealth in terms of what
people make and shit. So and I was just happy
to get good stuff out there. And then I was selling
stickers for like twenty paesels each like a buck something.
But I should have brought them some books. But the
whole fucking thing was fun, man, it was. It was
so cool, and there were a lot of people that
came out and they were apt and and you know,
people want to get your pictures, the pictures taking with you,
which used to weird me out and not weird me out,
but it would make me f I don't take compliments.
Well right, so I would be like okay, and then
you know, but it doesn't anymore. I'm like whatever, man,
it was just fucking fun. I really wish I was
more fluent than Spanish though, and I will be at
some point, but you know, to the point to be
able to talk shit and run my mouth during videos
like I do in English, that would be, uh, that
would be really nice to do, just because I think,
I guess so many people tell me the videos get
them into plants, and and you need a lot more
people in Mexico into plants, right, like people that aren't
in academia. You need more people use an eye naturalist
and and just getting amped about the flora here because
Mexico has such fucking incredibly cool plants and their habitat
is in such better shape than the United States. Right.
To get a habitat like this, you have to go
to the west, the western United States, where where there's
public land. In the East, it's all been fucked, right.
You gotta smack, you gotta uh smattering of national parks,
but everything's private, everything's been fucked. It's an orgy of
development and greed. It's a tumorous mindset it's gonna eat everything. Oh,
zebra painted highway pillars. I wonder what that's about. That's
that's nice. So yeah, so I got to see miro spermum.
It was fucking great again. If I can describe the
habitat for you, it's these rounded cobbles everywhere, rounded gray
limestone cobbles, you know, weathered out of the surrounding mountains
at some point in the last few million years and
then deposited here. It's dry. It was a broad floodplain,
probably like one hundred yards across, but it was dense.
It was dense woodland boske like mimosoid bosque, uh in
the in between or like filling the whole floodplain. Right,
So you know it gets floods, but only infrequently, but
probably they fucking roar when they come through because a
lot of these boulders each way, like a you know,
a kilo or two, maybe maybe half a kilo, I
don't know, not boulders, cobbles, you know, So to be
deposited there, it must take a big flood. But you
know it's it's not a running stream. It's dry. So
but yes, a galia righty eye Jue Glenn's microcarpa. There
was even leather stem jo Tropha diaheca just growing up
amidst the cobbles bunch of Tritax procumbins, which is, you know,
an invasive weed basically everywhere that's not Central America. Triex
is the cool genus, though, goddamn, there are some cool
tritex out there, like Tritex candidissima, the gypsum endemic and
san Luis poto c and Tridex Mexicana I think is
another one. Then there's a Tritex waja kana I forget.
I don't know, man, maybe I'm fucking those up. Go
to my iad if you want to see what other
species of Tritex there are as through ac and uh yeah,
and so this, you know, to see the fucking habitat
of this rare plant. I don't know why it's so rare,
probably just because it's riparian and you know, humans tend
to fuck up creeks a lot. I don't know, but
it's in cultivation in Texas, and that's a plant they
should definitely sell at home, despot, just because it's so
fucking beautiful and it smells so good. And you I
feel like you can get nor means, you know, people
that aren't into bodany or native plants, you feel like
you get into you can get them into a royal sweetwood.
So we usually can get them to appreciate it. It's
such a beautiful tree. It looks kind of like a
locust tree without the spines. And then it's got this
does flowers as fuck. They smell good, so good they
smell anyway. But the interesting thing that the habitat we
stopped that before we went to see the royal sweetwood
was you know, we're there. I just saw there some
cool scrub and there was like mafola and cremeria. There
was Salvia tex aana there too. The habitat we stopped
at there climbing up that was you know, I was like,
let's go to the hill. Go up these hills because
it probably changes a little bit. It's a little bit drier.
We're gonna see a different composition of plants. And sure enough,
you get up there and there was fucking manahat Subspacatta. Shit,
did I go the wrong way? What a fucking pain
in the ass. What's going on here? Oh damn it? Oops?
I think I went the wrong way. Oh, hold on,
I did go wrong way. Let me put this down.
That's a fucking panting ass. You know this. Google Maps
just sucks so much. I used to be so good
at navigating. That's a beautiful monazuma Cyprus woodland. Oh, it's
all draped in Spanish moss, got mountains in the background.
Going over this bridge that just went like twenty minutes
out of the way. Well it's gonna end up twenty minutes.
I missed the I missed the curve because it didn't
notify me. Right, But anyway, but yet, so God, there's
the habitat here that lant is just so nice. So
Manahat subspacata that grows in one place. I've only seen
a single plant in the Corpus Christie area growing with
Kama Crista gregy ie that other weird you know, park
Fridge Peak. We get Cama Crista fisiculada in the States
and it's more of like an herb. But but this
thing is a shrub Cama crista greggy, and that that
grows with Mannahat subspecata, and it was grown with it
here too, And they grow at this one little area
in Corpus Christie and those are the only places in
Texas that they grow, like right kind of near Lake
Corpus Christie off Boat Ramp Road and some you know,
some jagavhones. It's there's private property signs up everywhere. You
got a trespass if you want to go look at it.
But it's so curious to me. It's like, why did
these all these same plants out Here's a pemix. I
gotta get guess. Anyway, all these same plants, Uh, you know,
do you see occurring together here also occur together over there?
Was there at one point the continuous distribution or was
it just a dispersal event, just chance dispersal of the
same flora. It really makes you wonder, you know, and
how far back does it go? Like does did this
this divergence happen between these two populations? Yeah, it was
really cool. I did not expect to see manahat subspecatta there,
which is again an extremely rare plant. It's a rare
plant in the Waveling Own. It's even more rare in Texas.
Manahat is the genus of the plant known as yuca,
which gets eaten for its edible, tuberous roots. That's Mannahat esculenta.
And this, uh yeah, Manahat subspectata is a little bit more.
I don't know if you get I don't think you
can eat. It's probably toxic or something. But I'm seeing
this waiting line. It shouldn't be too painful, mildly painful.
We'll see you. You know, the magna. But there's this
guy with a stick around the back of his chilic.
It says, yo yo, love tigers, d grays. It's nice.
I wonder what he is. That a slang words it
like cougar's. He's saying he loves cougars to each their
own pal right to each their own. Anyway, Mannahat subspeccata
growing with with komara. God fuck, everything was flowering too.
There was a really pretty line um there, really pretty
flax with those bright orange flowers. It was just gore.
Just everything was lit up, man right, and they got
got some rain. So yeah, anyway, that was cool. So
the man A substiticated was flowering. It was fruit and
got some nice money shots, some good pictures of it.
Then then there was neo Pringlia integrafolio, which is a
plant that should really be in cultivation in Texas. I
don't know why it doesn't get into South Texas at all.
I feel like there must have been a population there
at some point because the habit it's not that far away.
In the habitat is so similar. This is a tree
that's in the family Salea Casey. It's in the willow family,
and it's it's cool. I would love to grow it.
It loves full sun, it grows in the scrub, It's
tough as nails, and it occurs throughout Mexico. I wonder
at some point did it occur in South Texas and
the thorn scrubs somewhere then it got destroyed. It's like,
you know, it's like helliada parvafoyia, which does occur in Texas,
and it's also a small tree and is also much
more common in the same habitat throughout Mexico. Why do
we have hell but not the neo pringlea? So anyway, Yeah,
so lots of fascinating shit. I saw hesperallo too. I
think it was if it was funifera or a hybrid
between Funifera and parvifolia. You know, Hesperallo is uh. They
look like a cross between philiferous yucca and a small agave,
and then they get a big flower stock with a
companiulate bell shaped flower. There was a Gave univitata there.
There was a kind of a gave striata, which is
common throughout Mexico. I've grown that before. Really prone to rot,
very thin leaves. It's a beautiful plant, very poky, but
it doesn't have spines on the leaf margins like the
genus of Gave. It does. Used to be lumped into
the genus of Gave. They're closely related. They came out
on either side of Manfreda and a phylogeny I guess. Anyway, Yeah,
SA saw a bunch of good shit. You know, most
of it occurs in Texas, some of it doesn't. Some
of the cact there. There was Cora phanta robust that.
There was neo Lloydia canoidia, another cool cactus that was flowering.
Now it's coaching Maya conoidiah, calle Andra conferdo, really cool,
little Euphorbia. Damn, I'm gonna I didn't even get to
this stuff we saw in the canyon yesterday. It was
like the canyon we were in yesterday felt like the east.
Excuse me, it felt like the East coast. It felt
like it felt like a you know, like a forest
in Alabama, Georgia or something. Right, very music, very wet,
tons and tons of really interesting stuff. Saw uh there,
well we'll talk about that. And minute I saw a Stophelia,
which is order Eric Kelly's the bladder pott. It's called
Stephilia premlea, which is another rare one bunch of rare
endemics in that little canyon. There were a bunch of
people out too, enjoying it, you know, like families out
and ship. It's really a nice little little arroyo there,
not a royal. It's like a creek. It's lots of
platinus and uh, you know, sycamores and other stuff. Anyway,
let's stay focused there. I'm trying to stay focused. So this, uh,
these hills, these xeric scrubland hills were fucking fantastic. And
then we went in Soull the Miura sperm moment. Goddamn,
it was so cool. We were so lucky to be
there at at uh at that time too, like just
the phenology was perfect, that was flowering and just couldn't stop. Man,
I just you get into it out there, and god
damn it, you just it's like pure dopamine rush seeing
all this cool shit. The other thing that was that
was interesting was, you know what we went out to
eat yesterday, went on out to like the Mexican equivalent
of it, Denny. So I forget the name pizzazz or
pad plazas, I forget the name of the spot. Anyway,
we went out there stuffed our faces. I really can't
wait to get back to my vegetable steamer where I
can just eat broccoli and fish all day, right, so
I can eat healthy. It's bad enough I live in
Texas because Texas poisons you there. You know, there's no
walking infrastructure. You're forced to drive everywhere, and the food
is all fucking cheese and you know, just just beefy, meaty,
fucking shove it down your gullet, you know, horrible stuff right,
like colon cancer on a plate. But uh but uh yeah,
So I want to get back to my little basic
I've I've been steaming a lot of broccoli. Throw some
fucking soy sauce on there, cauliflower, the veggies, Maybe get
some salmon, some tilapia, et cetera. Carrots do a lot
of steam care. I got this fucking vegetable steamer. It
changed my life. Man, it's really did. It's so easy, right,
you just you just fill it up and uh and
like not like a calendar, because that's a pain in
the ass. I like it. There's it's its own appliance, right,
and then it's easy to clean too. And you can
cook anything in there, right, cook some Uh. You know,
my daughter likes to eat hot dogs. I cook her
hot dogs. Okay, we're getting distracted. So we went out
to eat, and you know, we were talking about all
the history, like Mexican Revolution, the Ahito system, why the
land here is in such better shape. You know, there's
more litter, but there's less development, whereas in the United
States there's less litter but there's one hundred times more development.
But and so yeah, we were you know, I guess
I didn't know who was it. Zapata or you know
it was Pancho Villa was a fucking nut job. He
was a real psycho. I guess I didn't know that
he was kind of an asshole. Zapata was pretty cool.
Pancho Villa was a fucking jerk, like a rapist and shit,
I guess so it makes you wonder when you know
next time you eat it a Takorea it's named Pancho Villa, right,
have a little apprehension. Surprise they didn't cancel him down there.
We were talking about how Mexicans don't have the aversion
to the word retard like the Wolk identity politics thing. Again,
no one uses retard to make fun of people that
are mentally disabled, right, You use it for people that
are acting goody. No one would actually make fun of
someone that's mentally disabled. Maybe some kids, because kids can
be cruel, right. But what got me into using it
was the fact that the fucking people you know that
are so annoying, like the Karins and shit, I'm sorry
if this is you, we can just agree to disagree.
But the people that lead it actually like those kinds
of people who look like they already always shit their pants,
generally Caucasian, you know this, constantly pouting mmm, like it's
I the fact that they always had an avert. I
nemver used to say the word retard. When I saw
them having an aversion to it, then I wanted to
use them more. Was like, well, fuck you You're an
annoying plot right now. You make me wanted to You're
like the one that you're the You're the kind of
people that helped get trumpelicted because you were so fucking
insufferable without everything and you have no sense of humor
and your fucking whatever. You know, I've rant about this
all the time. I'm sorry. Really got to break into
it though, a little bit. Guys me nuts. We talked
about that, how there's nothing akin to that in Mexican culture.
And then I was surprised too because I let out
a couple f bombs during a presentation. I can't help it.
I worked for the fucking roil out of fifteen years
and sometimes you just see such stupid shit, especially if
you're talking about modern horticulture, that you gotta let it out.
You know, you get inflamed a little bit. And I
felt bad because I thought that, you know, Mexico is
generally a more socially conservative country. In some ways, it's
very much more liberal and progressive and other Holy fuck,
fucking settle down. Buddy's ship heading a jeep just blazed
by me like one hundred and twenty miles per hour.
What is that in kilometers pro I don't know anyway,
and so, uh, you know, so I thought I was
gonna offend more people there with the F bombs, but uh,
they were like, no, man, like we cursal the Mexican's
curse all the time, Like we as a society curse
all of the time. You know, the China, there's ching goons,
always letting shit out, and uh and it's you know,
people curse on TV here, like dropping F bombs the
Mexican equivalent of an F bomb on TV here. So
so you're fine. And so I was saying, oh, wow,
that's interesting, that's cool to know, okay, and they were like, yeah,
I don't you know, because they were saying, I read
the comments on your videos sometimes and there's people, you know,
they'd say they get offended, and it always looks like
the kind of person that would be offended, you know
that you say that you swear, and like that's so
foreign to me to us here in Mexic because people
don't really do that. You know, people don't really get
offended at swear words. They're not like slurs, you know.
So it is, it is. It's an American thing, like
both the work identity politics. Of course you get a
little bit of that in Mexican City. But and then
of course the well certainly the right wing version of
that nut job, where as American too. But that being
offended it as swear words, right, like it's it's so
that that is so fucking weird to me, and you
don't you be offended it. I can understand being offended
at slurs, right, except retard, which is not a slur,
despite what some fucking Karen's gonna think. It's an able.
It's a slurry shot. That fuck up, shut up, shut up.
I just just do you you want to like police
other people and feel good about it, That's what it is.
Be honest about at least a God damn, I got
another toll to go through. So uh so, Yeah, that
was an enlightening conversation that we just talked about Mexican history,
which is just so fascinating to me. The haciendas, the
fucking the ruling class, the overlords that were taking land
away from people. Imagine if that had happened in the
United States, right, it should have really should have. Yeah,
it was funny. I wanted to go get the stogies
last night because you can get Cuban cigars here. And
I like cigars. I know it's fucking corny. I'm like
a you know, pre emergent old man, but just fucking
let me be and so uh and you know, because
you don't get that. I used to smoke cigarettes and
I quit like fifteen years ago, thank god. But damn,
it's so nice to be able to just puff on
a cigar because you don't take it into your lungs.
You still just you know, absorbing it through the blood
vessels in your mouth, and you also taste it. And
it's nice when you have a nice one. So I
wanted to get a Cuban so we went to this.
We went to this by all the cigar stores were
in the rich area of Monterey, you know San Pedro too,
which is like car dealerships. You imagine everyone have to
people to live there. Fucking plastic surgeons too, because that's
really big down here. You know mar al Lago face,
You get your lips slapped around, get some shit injected
to them. They take fat from your ass and put
it in your cheeks. What do they do? What's the
life of a plastic surgeon in Monterrey? Like I wonder right,
how does it differ from the life of a plastic
surgeon in fucking Miami or god, what a what a
weird world we live in? What a weird world? Oh,
it's so funny. It's it's really when you see like
a good plastic surgery face, like a good fucking you
know what I mean, Like someone who's like it just
looks good, not in a good way good, it looks
good in a bad way, like it's funny, like they
look like a lizard, like a just so ridiculous. It's
it's hilarious, like it's it's a it's it is. It's
an enjoyable thing to think about. For me, at least,
I think it's fucking hilarious. Ok So yeah, But so
we were driving through San Pedro owners all these like
car dealerships. They get the you know BYD dealerships, the
electric cars you can't sell in the US because it
competes with Tesla and and uh, you know, a bunch
of fancy ship. It was a fancy neighborhood. It's like
on the other side of this little mountain had some
curb cool murals on this giant wall on either side
of the mountain too. But so we go. We yeah,
we get these these stogies, and it was like in
this like kind of wretched mall. It was super frace
of super fancy, but it was like six bucks for
a decent cigar. So it was nice. It was nice
to indulge. And I'm glad that Adrian was down to
try it too, so I got a photo of him later.
He looked like a fucking general. He was wearing like
this green army shirt, like buttoned down army shirt in
a little head and he was smoking a stogy. It
was funny. I was like, man, you look like some
sort of fucking like Cuban general. Right now? Is this
the right way? Yeah? Right now? So there we go.
God damn it. Kuota not Libra, not not the Libramento.
We want the toll road and get they're faster. But
the river that goes through Montterrey, the Rio Santa Catarina,
is it's a beauty. I mean it could be a
fucking beautiful river. It could be like a bike path
and like running path and nature trails and shit. And
I guess they used to have golf courses there and
go karts and it all got destroyed. Twenty years ago
in an epic flood. But you know it could be
like a wonderful spot, and I guess there are groups
working to restore it into a wonderful spot, to fill
with native plants, with some of the cool flora. And
it's right there. You know, you have at the gateway
to the to the mountains. Right which the mountains are
these horizontal beds of limestone that have been flipped up
nearly vertically. Look at it on a map, man, I mean,
look at it on like Google terrain layer and you'll
see what I'm talking about. All these fold thrust belts,
incredible geology, These these these horizontal bedding planes flipped up
at like eighty degree angles that have basically made it
possible for all these rock wall plants to evolve their
like a gave albo palosa, which was just described twenty
years ago, and all the you know, the hanging gardens
of Nuevo Leone, the hanging gardens of Monterrey, Mexico. There's
a ton of Moretonia gregy guy there too, which is
a plant we only get very sparingly in South Texas.
But you know, the I guess the municipality goes in
and it's the same stupid shit they do where I live,
where they clear out all the vegetation of the river
because they think that it's gonna clog the river. It's messy,
And it's like these really archaic views on plant life
that I'm all too used to seeing, especially where I live.
That if you know, if we don't clear this stuff
out and cut it down and remove it and just
have a barren, bleak, fucking waterway that's dry most of
the year anyway, if we don't do that, then when
it floods, it's gonna it's gonna clog. It's gonna quote
clog up, right, Like, well, what did it do in
the last fucking the last you know, however many millions
of years did it clog up? Then No, it's fucking fine, Like,
don't worry about it, just stop fucking with it, right,
things could be so nice, But you think there's just
no sense behind any of this shit. So I think
I think there's a group. I would love to learn
more about them. I forget, I forget the name of them,
But there's a group working to restore that river. And
and you know, because that's where you need plant life
the most. Man, that's where you need you need native
plant life the most is around cities, or you need
them where the people are so that people can be
exposed to them and appreciate them instead of just having
these you know, abject shitholes of concrete and cars. Like
the car thing in Monterey is insane. Cities just held
hostage by cars, right, like, just just not much public
translit I think they got a monorail and maybe an
aerial subway, but but there's just cars everywhere. It's all
for it's all car shit, and so you know, so
if you have to if you want to get somewhere,
you've got to be in a car. And then the
fucking ariage just thinks it's polluted as shit. Everybody drives
like assholes. It's just a mess. Cars turn people into
assholes anyway. Right, you're behind this glass. You just want
to go, go, go, get out of my way. You're upset,
you're isolated from people, Like people behave ways in cars
that they would never behave if they were just you know,
walking next to someone you know, or sitting next to
them on a subway whatever. So it's weird and they're
still I mean, they just want to be like Texas
too so much, you know, so they're found the same
mono rays doing this and they're building the same shit
that Texas is building. Right, Like if you drive through
San Antonio, you see all these just never ending infrastructure
projects for roads and freeways. It's like, man, at what
point do we just start building things differently? And then
you know, at what point is the amount of land
that you've seated over to cars? Does it just is?
It is? It just doesn't make any sense. I mean,
it's just you've you've lost You've seated so much space
to cars. There's barely enough for people anymore, you know,
or for infrastructure, Like what could that space be used
for if you took all of all the cars away,
or or you know, made spaces that were made neighborhoods
that you couldn't drive to the park on the outside
of it and it was built for walking and public
transit and shit. So I don't know. I ran about
this stuff all the time, I know, but god damn,
it's just we're gonna look back on this and the
way that we have cars and cities throughout the West.
We're gonna look back on this in one hundred years
if we haven't gone extinct, and you know, we're gonna
look back on the same way we look at you know,
the fact that he used to be able to smoke
on an airplane. It's the same thing. It's just fucking insane.
It's irrational. It's it's it's there's so many people doing theory.
It's good, but there's so many people doing it that
it gets it's highly inefficient. All right, So anyway, let's
talk about let's talk about the uh the canyon we
went to yesterday because that was phenomenal last Ansuela and
we had like a little group hike we arranged. I
just posted it on social media. We mentioned it the
day before and then I posted on social media and
we had it out there, and you know, it's it's
this basically found this streambed that goes into the mountains,
into the nooks and crannies of the mountains. Again, look
at the Sierra Madre, the northern Sierra Madre, and it's
just all these folds and all these little nooks and
crannies for plants to grow in, and you know, a
much milder, more music habitat than the surrounding opened Xeric
Xeric Lands. There was a cool Arisima in there too,
which is a terrestrial aerid you get throughout eastern North America.
I think this was Arissima kelsicola. It looked like Dracontium,
but I guess it's it's different enough that it was
actually placed in its own beacies in the I think
last year, in twenty twenty five. But by far one
of my favorites that I saw there was Colubrina greggy
I same genus as Colubrina texana, which is known as
the hog plum and throughout South Texas. But this thing
was a fucking tree and just covered you know, red
buckthorpe family ram nascy. So you got the stamens alternating
with the petals alternating with the sepals, but the the
nectar discs on these flowers. The flowers were a little
bit smaller than a marble, maybe about I don't know,
seven millimeters across, but the nectar discs were glistening that
were filled with nectar, and the leaves were huge. It's obviously,
you know, because hog plum Colabrina texana is like a
sandsheet plant built for the heat. It's got a cool
zigzag leaf branching structure. But this thing was like a
small tree, just a careally cool plant be really cool
to grow in Texas. It probably did at one point
a long long time ago, pre certainly pre Europeans, probably
pre almost sapiens in the New World. And so that
was really fucking wild to see because I saw him
like this is a goddamn buckthorn. The flowers and the
leaf shape, the leaves kind of the venation kind of
looks like se and know this leaves. But it was
huge and was growing in this arroyo. I saw sin
Bechia there as well, which is you know only today
only grows in San Benito, home of the Freddy Fender
water Tower, the water tower with the Freddy Friender mua
on the outside. You know Texas tornadoes, you know, you
know Freddy Fender. And and that's the last I mean,
that's the last population in the United States. There used
to be another one that got destroyed. I guess it's
Citrus family rutasi. It's a beautiful tree. I've got a
few of them in my yard. I've planted a few out.
They take a while to get going. They actually kind
of tend to like sun but they like some water too,
they like some moisture too, and so that I didn't
expect to see that in this little canyon either. It's wild,
and so that again it gives me context. It's like, yeah,
this is where it's growing today, but it used to
grow in South Texas at some point, probably during the
Pleistocene when it was a milder climate down there, you know,
whereas now it's so hot, and so these things are
just kind of left over. It's it's thinking about that.
Shit is so cool. It's like, what you know that
the David Axelrod I was always talking about. It wasn't
hold on Daniel with David. I always getting confused. Daniel Axlerod,
excuse me. He wrote Origins of the California Flora. He
was a botanist that passed away in nineteen ninety eight.
It did a lot of work in California. But he
was always writing about distributions of these plants, and you know,
he was a paleobotanist. I think that was his man.
I think he was a paleobotanist, but basically trying to
reconstruct distributions of plants and climates and really taking this
kind of broad scale view on the whole landscape, which
I think is just so fucking fascinating, man, you know,
and he was. He would wrote papers about like the
the Miocene flora of western Nevada, which you know, Western
Nevada now is super dry, but twelve million years ago
there were redwoods growing there. Let me beat this, We
beat this, car, I gotta get up there. It's so
cool to see the landscape change where we are right
now we're at lower elevation mont Rays at like thirteen
hundred feet. Now we're dropping down, getting more into the
undulating you know, tom a leap and thorn scrub, which
is generally speaking hot as balls. God, it's just in
such good shape, man, Just like just oceans of green
with no development. So different from what most of South Texas,
but most of the Rio Graham Valley has become. So
nice to see. God, just a bummerers, a lot of
cartel activity here. They saw, you know, what are you
gonna do? So you're gonna get kidnapped? Maybe wait it
might head now you'll be fine. So uh So, anyway,
so these this little canyon, there was all kinds of
cool shit in there. It was like a two miles in,
two miles out, but you can go a lot deeper.
There was about Hindia there too, that was quite abundant,
a native about Hinia. And then there was like blackbrush.
It's it was so wild to see blackbrush growing with
poison ivy, Like there's poison ivy in there, which we
don't really get in the valley. I've only seen it
one place in South Texas. But it's abundant. There was
you know, moist enough for it. And then in the
low the areas by the streams, Oh yeah, we saw
fucking kowates too. They're like little neotropical raccoons and they
were really like really adapted to people, Like they were
really comfortable around people. You could tell people Proba been
feeding them. It was fucking nuts to see such cool
little critters. So yeah, but there was Xantha somma robust them,
which is an aeroid like terrestrial aeroid that I was
surprised to see. I thought it was the invasive what's
the thing that grows around Austin is a alocascia. It's
like an aquatic aquatic aeroid that's invasive around Austin the
Austin area. But Xantha soma, you know, was a bunch
of this stuff should be reintroduced on the other side
of the border, right, because the way the climate's going,
it's gonna have to migrate north at some point, and
the less freezes that you get, the warm though warmer
it gets, some of this stuff should really be being
grown up there. It's again, nothing, nothing reinforces how pointless
geopolitical borders are. Like studying plant life, right, Texas plants
are all Mexican plants. That's the same habitat. It's it's
these plants and this land. They're way older than these
silly geopolitical borders that humans take. So seriously, God, people
could be fucking depressing. Can't thing? Can't human society just
be a fucking drag. It's really really just just fucking
silly and stupid and just full of shit. And anyway,
so uh, they're all kinds of cool millipedes out yesterday
and the canyon too, something that really surprised me. Oh
and tons of cool ferns too, I like anemias. There
was tectaria heracically a folia, tons of oak diversity there, Quircus, polymorpha,
crotons everywhere. But something that really surprised me was I
saw what looked like mex amount of Philippines, which is
a plant that I love. I've grown a bunch of it.
I got a couple in my yard, just a farm
set off of it gets like five six feet tall.
It's more of a thorn scrub plant. But I saw
a relative of it, baits Amalva violasia, which turned out
to be really rare. It has much larger purple you know,
showy ass flowers, larger leaves. It's basically a more music
adapted version of Maximova Philippies. And it's a microandemic too.
It's only known from this little canyon. It doesn't grow
very it grows in very few other places, which is
exciting to see. It's I got. This thing is like
so localized. You know, it probably grows in a couple
other places throughout the Sierra Madre. But you know, it
was so cool. At the end of the trail too.
You can look above the tree line. You go kind
of up on this ridge a little bit and you
can see this just this massive monolith of limestone, just
covered in brahea palms and yuccas and all kinds of
cool shit. You know pines. God, just these giant like
flat you know, sheer, sheer faced rock walls on this
this giant brick of uplifted limestone, remnants of the Western
Interior seaway. So anyway, so there was bits of Maalva,
bits of Malva violasia. There was some red buds there,
so Ursus canadensis Eastern red buds. What was the There
was Morris rubra another. I'm telling you a lot of
ship that you see and it felt like, you know,
it felt like Alabama Georgia border, like northern Alabama Georgia border,
like those humid forests there. Yeah, Staphilea FRINGLEI was cool
to see the bladder pod, which again i've seen Staphilea.
I for hear what species it was of staph Alea
that I saw, but in Alabama border. Eric Hayley's it's
in staphaly Ace it's own family. There was saw this
really beautiful vine Cannavalia septantia analysis. It was a beautiful
pink flower or superinnate large apoleonaceous that is p flower
from the Faboides subfamily, so banner wings and keel. But
it was flipped over. It was huge, it was pink
had a twisted keel. That'd be a dope vine to grow. Goddamn,
it would be really cool to grow one of those.
But there were no seeds saw that there. I mean,
I'm gonna leave There's gonna be stuff I leave out
because there's so much cool cool ship and Missia Zygo maris,
which was another Favid you know with yellow flowered favorite.
This wasn't in It wasn't in flower, but really unique
leaves right like really it was an herb probably herbaceous perennial,
probably has a big root in the ground, but this
thing was like rubbery leaves, no hairs on them, growing
in the understory of this forest on the side of
a creek that was filled with all the cool aquatic beetles.
Vike Ethia mexicana was fucking great to see too. I
think Barton Springs Nursery in Austin used to sell that,
probably for too much money, but anyway, that's none of
my business. But it's you know, that's a composite. It
looks like a kind of like a sunflower. Man, it's
just the dyc but it's got these really really cool
long recurved eries. The bracts on the side of the
flower head, on the side of the involkar, and it's bizarre.
I don't think it's you know, closely related. There might
be one other species in the genus may maybe not
even I first saw it at U. C. Berkeley in
the botanic garden there. It's the best botanic garden in
a country by far, like a science botanic garden, a
living museum of Earth's plant life. Right, it's not a
show garden. But that was when I first became familiar
with it. But again, to see it, you know, flowering
and habitat on the edge of a limestone creek with
you know, in the understory of oaks and sycamores and
all kinds of other cool shit and something else. So
it's just so nice to be Oh yeah, there was
acer granted than Tatum two big big tooth maple, which
is I think I think I've seen that in the
Southwest as well. I've seen that in Arizona. I don't know,
but you get it in Texas as well. Maple's normally
like a lot of water. It was crazy. It's always
weird to see them in Xeric areas. But again, this
is like a little refugia a little canyon right, it's
like a much more humid than the surrounding lowlands. The
funck else that we have. You have a bunch of
crotons phidal lacca. There was a mimo Phytum cardiophylum, which
is baragin ac little blue flowered baragein ace seed them
palm rise. There was some Pepperomia's packer at koelnsis Selena
sirius spinulosis was everywhere, which that used to occur in
South Texas too. I think it's been wiped out except
for cultivation. It gets a huge, you know, night blooming
moth plinated flower on it. I got some in my yard,
really easy to grow from cutting. But but it likes
it humid. It's it's likes it. It's a humid loving
plant that likes a lot of water. It likes growing
in the shade, likes growing, you know, up a tree.
I planted some of my buddy on Brace's yard and
it's like twenty feet up this oak tree. Now it's
a fucking dope plant. It's really cool, you know. Sure
some with your friends. There was jug lance molus everywhere
as well. A wooly walnut jug lance molus, which I've
seen in the Wava laone before. I don't think that
gets into Texas at all. But it smells the flowers
smell fucking incredible under the flowers, the leaves. Excuse me,
it's really pleasant smelling walnut lithough spermum nel sonya with
white flowers. God damn it. I keep hitting these fucking butterflies.
Such a drag. It's beautiful sulfur butterflies. And Uh Randia
leida virans, which the genus Randia uh is ruby ac.
It's the coffee family we get. I think it's Randia
ab cordata in in South Texas, but like closer to
the gulf, it likes the more humid and it's much
more spiny. And this is more of like a music shrubs.
They've got the kind of spines. It's got thorns, you know,
the branches taper uh and become taper into a point.
But it wasn't this was this was you know, more
more humid adapted, more music grows in miud of their
climate growing in the understory. Saw that when we when
we saw the pack of coates mobbing up on people,
not mobbing up they were looking for handouts here, know
these fucking coates they're looking They're always looking for handouts.
But overall, just a ton of diversity. Man, it was.
It was really really wonderful. It's in this little king
there was shited ton of people around. Whatever. It was
still a great time, right E Gavarious simulans I saw
there as well. Yeah it was Bohemia macrantha, which Bohemia
has always got showy flowers, but the ones that get
planted in South Texas are always the ones from Asia
when Mexico has so many cool ones. All right, I'm
back in Texas. Just that was an easy crossing, real brief.
It wasn't too bad. It wasn't even painful. Only put
me mildly painful. Part was having to return the vehicle
permit and all that bullshit the migration forms. It just
fucking pointless bureaucracy. H I love that part when you're
going over the back, over the bridge though the arms
Wilds Bridge, and you go buy all these like these,
You go by like six or seven dead billboards. It's
just a frame. There's nothing up on him anymore. Looks
very post apocalyptic. Over the flood plain of the Rio Grand.
It's some beautiful scenery, post apocalyptic. Like you know, we
always love seeing dead billboards, right, much better than seeing
ones that are actively being used, especially the led ones.
But uh yeah, it's a fucking beautiful day outside, like
cloudy and cloudy with a little bit of blue sky,
and uh it's perfect temperature. And here hopefully you got
something out today. Back to the dystopia, the commercial dystopia
of the Rio Grand Valley. But ooh, a big big
cluster of the white phenotype of Solanum eliegnafolium. So all right,
till next time, have aggress your day, go fund yourself.
Oh yeah, I'll be going on tour in the Southwest
starting May twenty seventh. May twenty seventh of being Alpine,
Texas doing a signing at Front Street Books, and then
we're going to La and then we're going San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson.
Trying to book Alos CRUs show Las Cruse in Las
Cruse de New Mexico. And we couldn't line up in
a Paslo show though I don't know why. Well we
didn't really try too hard, but we couldn't find a venue.
If you want dates, go to the crimepace website and
it's under events all right, that's all. I gotta have
a guess to day. Go fuck yourself by