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