The Hemp Gardener

My aunt emailed me the other day to ask advice for a debate topic for one of her night school classes. I wrote her back suggesting the debate that has been on my mind this Summer, the legalization of hemp. She said her teacher had specifically told them not to write about cliché topics like that.

I can understand the teacher's stubbornness on the subject. I'm sure she's read lots of tired arguments; and I realized sending my suggestion that it wasn't exactly original. However I do feel like we are at another cross-roads in this amazingly long-winded prohibition. And of course I believe it should be legal.

Early this Summer I got a seedy bag of schwag. I was planting cilantro, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, marjoram, rosemary, eggplants, and other stuff. I couldn't resist planting the schwag too. I'd heard that it's actually easy to grow if you don't have to do it clandestinely. Hemp loves sun, needs lots of it.

I've got a high balcony so that's where I put it. It gets plenty of sun but not so visible to the neighborhood. Started with four plants and used a training technique that keeps them short and bushy so as to give them a low profile. I didn't know much about growing this stuff so I got online. Not hard to find chat groups on the subject and it wasn't long before I had a considerable wealth of knowledge on the sexual nature of hemp which is important stuff to know if one is producing hemp for certain reasons.

The main thing you got to know is how to identify a male plant because you want those out of there as soon as possible or they'll turn on the females and they'll go to seed. The male plants flower too which makes it confusing. But as it turns out male flowers have distinctive traits and look like little hairy balls where as the female has white furry bits and a V-shaped leafy bit. I started to get turned on and wanted to fuck my plants.

But I didn't. I got jealous though and ripped that male out of there and I was left with three. They're budding now. Bunch of hot bitches getting ready to turn me on.

Some days I sit on my porch staring at my ladies thinking how easy it is really to deal with this stuff and also how absurd it is that I am doing something illegal by having some leafy green plants in pots on my porch. That actually makes me mad as hell. I get excited about growing because it's fun. Thinking about going clandestine but that makes me angrier. I'm gonna go to all that trouble because of these friggin asinine laws?

We're at a crossroads though and I think we're gonna take the easy road home. I'm gonna keep doing what I'm doing and like so many things in this friggin country, wait for the country to catch up. Although catch-up isn't the right word. I feel like I'm waiting for the country to get its head out of its ass.

The Expanse of Constriction

I remember June 29th like it was yesterday. it wasn't yesterday, actually, because as it turns out June 29th was literally one day over seven weeks ago.

Why is that day important? I mean, aside from it being the second day of my 42nd year of life - a fact, I should add, that utterly baffles me considering my past bent for self-destruction - it marks the last time I made a post for this my little creative baby of the electronic underworld.

That's a side-effect of something I have battled to function under for the entirety of my creative life: writer's block.

As a kid I developed an early affinity for drawing, and right on the heels of this discovery was a more insidious one. As comfortable as I feel expressing myself with pens/pencils/ etc ... , I am equally at home being crushed beneath the weight of self-doubt and second-guessing.

Joy.

Eventually, working on art became something that unleashed its rewards a little too slowly for this attention span-deprived young fellow. I needed an outlet that could dole out rewards like a morphine drip, one button push at a time.

Playing music.

The molester down the road was plugged in to the parental gravy train. When you have an overgrown pituitary abnormality of a bullying closet-case son, I suppose it might be easy enough to try and fix the real issue by plying the beast with any and all manner of distraction. Anything, really, to keep him from unpleasantly acquainting himself to solo-swinging youngsters stealing the remaining minutes of a waning afternoon. The spare bedroom in his house, previously occupied be his feather-haired, Gloria Vanderbilt jeaned older sister, when given to his juvenile desires, became a wet dream of Farrah Fawcett and Loni Anderson posters, and damn near the best musical gear money could buy.

I was relegated to drums. In his fevered ego, drums did not warrant the player the buffet of pussy that would undoubtedly come his way the moment word got out that he could stumble his way through the opening chords of Cat Scratch Fever.

Once I moved away from that neighborhood, I knew that drums were not a reality for me; and plus I already had an acoustic. Eventually I was given a Gibson Melody Maker and a Fender Princeton amp by a clueless uncle merely glad to unload the stuff that had gathered dust in a dark corner of his parents house long after he had joined the country club and sampled the joys of the "good life."

Thus began a love/hate affair with the guitar. I literally played one several hours a day, almost every single day, for many years. I joined a number of bands, recorded and released several albums, and easily pissed away the most creative years of my life agonizing over what wasn't working and why.

Then came the cold grip of my old friend. After literally two-and-a-half decades of fairly consistent playing ... nothing, or damn near nothing.

I pick it up now and I get angry. I begin to pick and I don't want to hear it. I force myself to play every few months, force myself to keep at it until it feels comfortable once more, and then put it back and don't care when I do it again.

I revisit both art and guitar here and there, easily more art than guitar nowadays, but neither one still keeps me in its thrall.

So what now? I am like a supremely fucked up ascetic in a number of ways. I will die without a form of creative expression, but it has become increasingly less desirable for me to entertain the idea of expending massive amounts of personal energy in order to give it away.

Why should I give it to you? You don't deserve it - one, and you don't really want it anyway - two. Copping out?

Maybe.

So I am writing a post because I want to write a post, because I have to move forward, like a goddamn shark, or I can't dredge the oxygen out of this ocean bottom that I call home. Yeah, that and I have to write this post because if I don't I'll write a post about cheese, or Yo Gabba Gabba, or whatever else it was I solicited and consequently got back in ugly spades.

And yeah, I am more than a little partial to the Unspeakable, but she's got a point. A post on the Juggalos is easily something I could see myself waking up to in the very near future. Because some things are so inexcusably bad, so unremittingly horrific, their endless litany of agonies lay out before you like a conga line populated entirely by one-legged, gassy, she-males, their rocks splayed through the sequined sides of their moistened leotards like a synthetic-diamond dealer on the very farthest edge of town; and things like that, well they need to be preserved. I am the taxidermist of your nightmares.

Here I am, ripe for the taking.

Pancakes' Post

Author: Frankie Pancakes

I’m Frank, and I have lousy luck with men. I’m a girl, not that that significantly changes the story. This topic is usually the stuff of comedy routines, but I’m choosing to tell you the singularly most unfunny one, because I’m still scratching my head about it.

I truly do have cracker-jack skills at picking them, and it helps to be colorblind to the particular scarlet shade of relationship red flags. Pretty much a life-long theme; my first boyfriend wasn’t my “first”; my first wasn’t a boyfriend; my object of affectionate obsession wished he had been my first. Quite a bit of boy drama for this awkward late bloomer. College was fun, too. There was the classmate with the little gherkin (he holds the record), the freakishly tall TA with the dick that was too big. I broke up with the sensitive guy who responded to my expressed opinions with “you’re cute” and demanded to know when I was going to be in love with him. (This month’s no good for me, how do you feel about never?) I’ve been dumped on Valentine’s Day by a guy claiming anxiety attacks, blamed for being uncommunicative by a spaz who would bait me into arguments just to upset me for his entertainment. His saliva stank. Seriously, it festered on my pillows, I couldn’t sleep. I was dumped by a 50 year old self-help addict who gave me an ultimatum to seek professional help for clinical depression. The basis for his “diagnosis”? I have a lot of stuff in my apartment. He was crap in bed. Three How to Have Sex books, and he didn’t have a clue. And his cat peed on my side of his bed, and he didn’t feel like changing the sheets, too tired. I cannot make this up.

Lat summer I met a guy at a bar. Sounds bad, but hear me out. Friend of mine bartends on Sundays, super sweet guy, and I felt like hanging out with him for a couple of hours. It is not in my nature to just go to bars by myself, my social anxiety and loathing of strangers prevents it. Bartender is a movie geek, and always has something cool in the dvd players. Another patron at the end of the bar was picking at his laptop and talking with Bartender, and eventually I joined the conversation. Patron stepped out to smoke, and we kept talking when he came back in. He asked me to continue the conversation outside for his next cigarette. Pleasant enough, plenty of common tastes in music and movies. Gainfully employed, homeowner, dogs, actually not sounding like a loser. First red flag was hoisted when he mentioned the pending finalization of his second divorce. Didn’t see it.

Later he asked for my info, and I thought, why not - at least I will have made a friend. We danced around our mutual interest for a week, then met for drinks and wound up cuddling at his place. Second red flag snapped in the wind as he told me he was “broken” and he didn’t understand why I liked him. Overlooked it. I thought, he’s just hurting from his marriage failing, I’d be worried if it wasn’t affecting him. The next two weeks were pretty great, lots of nookie, watching movies in bed, him telling me he was falling for me, that I felt like home to him, that he was broken and was going to break my heart.

The Sunday evening after his divorce was finalized, I called him and he told me to come over. He was drunker than I had ever seen him. He sat me down on the couch and told me he was tired of living with pain (he had a couple of cracked ribs from a collision with another player on his kickball team, and had refused to see a doctor), and the pain from being broken, he was committed to his damage. He looked me in the eye and said he was going to kill himself and there was nothing I could do or say to stop him.

There is a particular warmth to the adrenaline surge you get when the floor drops out from under you, and when it swirls and eddies with the haze of being utterly gobsmacked, it makes your ears buzz, or at least my ears, anyway. I knew he had it in him, I had caressed the vertical scar on his right forearm. Thus began 36 hours of crying, arguing, begging, explaining, reasoning; he told me about his first attempt, being found in the back yard by a friend after opening his veins. He told me about the second time, when he had put the gun in his mouth as he sat in the garage, and the new ammo didn’t fire. He told me the neighbors had his gun, but would give it to him if he asked. He told me I could have his house, and his dogs (they liked me, and he didn’t want his ex to have them). He told me, and this is the most unfathomable, that his closest friends were okay with it. In what warped universe are “friends” okay with someone’s unnecessary suicide, so much so that they are willing to “be there when I do it”? I followed him around, somewhere in there we slept, he called in sick to work, we went to my place and watched a video. He told me not to worry, he wasn’t going to do it now. That was his idea of reassurance. Stop worrying, I won’t do it now. Sometime, just not right now.

I lived with this for a week, no one else knew. How could I tell them? What should I say to my parents, my friends? I lied to them, things were dandy. He kept putting me at ease, not now, later. He continued to torment me. Maybe he’d do it after he served as best man at his buddy’s wedding ( the one who was “okay with it”). Maybe he’d do it on his birthday. Maybe he’d grab a trooper’s weapon at his job. He continued drinking himself into a stupor on weekends, forbidding me to contact him. I finally called Bartender, hating to involve him, but now knowing how to proceed. He told me to call the cops next time he threatened. Then I really did it. I contacted his friend, the suicide supporter. Sent him a message telling him I didn’t know what else to do, that I was not okay with what I was hearing. Got the call that night. Livid. Who did I think I was? How dare I involve his friends in this? (But...you already involved them, they’re so okay with it they’re ready to witness your exit, remember? What the hell.) I was cut off, no more contact, ever. Stunned again, staring at the phone. Did that just happen?

Within a day he was requesting my friendship again, calling me. I was unconvinced. And I finally let my friends know. Lee told me it was emotional abuse, what he was doing, and I felt that adrenaline squirt again. I may lack in self esteem, but never thought it so severe that I might open myself to abuse. Shit. I composed a missive explaining to him how fucked up he was to do that to me, that I had done nothing to deserve it other than enter his life, and he didn’t defend himself.

This is the dumbest part. This is where you lose any shred of respect you may have tenuously held for me. We stayed in contact. I wanted to know. I wanted him to be okay. I cared. I am an idiot. He led me to believe he would get healthy, he was in therapy, he told me the dogs missed me. He kept me at a distance, telling me he couldn’t face me knowing what he had put me through. But anytime I pressed for a little more contact, he would lash out in a serious overreaction, if I couldn’t respect his boundaries, we’d have to reevaluate our friendship, blah blah. He bit my head off a few more times, in between sending me little app gifts on facebook. Then I got the email one morning, “check your messages” on myspace. He was sorry, he didn’t mean for it to happen, she was just a friend at first, but he was in love. In love. I told him fuck you for doing this during the week so it affected my work.

And that was it. No more contact. And I really didn’t feel like getting out and running that risk. I got sick, and lost some weight, and then began walking every day, for miles, walking away from that nightmare. Haven’t run into him around town yet. Pretty sure I’d throw up if he spoke to me. Not a lot of interest since then, one fella this spring, but it didn’t end well. I know you’re shocked. It appears that the menfolk of this planet can fly more red flags than an Olympics opening ceremony, and I’ll still be willing to give ‘em a chance. I’m such a slow learner.

Norilsk

Amongst the many "extreme" places on earth inhabited by people, there is one that has recently culled my imagination, albeit in an arbitrary way. I was reading a book review about an account of the Gulags in the Soviet Union that looked interesting. Admittedly, I never pursued the publication but the review did mention the Russian city of Norilsk in Siberia which is located inside the Arctic Circle. It is a mining city where the raw ore of nickel, palladium and other precious metals are extracted and refined. Like oil and other vital resources, these metals, once refined are extremely valuable, ending up finally as super conductors for circuits found in almost any electronic device you can think of. That is obviously why Norilsk continues to exist in such a harsh environment. Built on the backs of forced labor for its massive nickel deposits and metals such as platinum and copper. Norilsk is the northern most city in the world with a population over 100,000. The city also happens to be in the top ten most polluted on Earth. Combine these factors with the extended darkness of the polar night and you have the makings for one miserable place.
The mining and refining workers also must endure a very dangerous work place where extreme temperatures and polluted air are the norm. Here is a promotional clip produced by Norilsk Nickel, the central mining company in the area. Notice the subtle (or not so subtle) proletariat propaganda of the narrator. They not only give their hearts for nickel but also their backs and lungs.




Settled during the 1930's by the forced labor of prisoners under the Communist Gulag penal system that was spread throughout Siberia, prisoners were forced to work in the mines up until 1979. Now, Norilsk is a "closed" city, presumably due the value of the ore extraction on a grand scale and shady nature of Norilsk Nickel’s owners. So, here’s the city as depicted in what is most likely the hottest day of the year. On the surface, it doesn’t seem like that bad of a place to live. Of course, you’ve got row after row of Soviet era apartment blocks which make up the bulk of the drab architecture here.

Now here are some photos of the city during the winter time. Riding the bus never looked so much fun. Ugh.



A factory worker in Norilsk has a life expectancy on average of ten years less than other factory workers in Russia. The smelting facilities belch byproducts into the sky through enormous smoke stacks. The air usually wreaks of sulfur and the snow is often yellow or black. The first video did show some foliage but that’s probably about it. Not much grows in the way of vegetation in or around Norilsk, probably because the slag is literally dumped into the environment all around the factories. Here’s a beautiful summer drive through what looks to be the outskirts of the city.



Even though the Berlin Wall fell years ago, the sense of collectivism appears alive and well. Many of the businesses in the city are owned by Norilsk Nickel so the money earned is cycled through the company and generations have lived, worked, and died in and around the factories. Many pensioners leave when they retire but most don’t earn enough to move partly due to the city’s isolation. The official tourist website proclaims,"Be sure to visit in early spring, when wild flowers and cherry trees go into full bloom. The sight is awe inspiring to the point of collapsing in tears of joy.". I have a hard time believing that when thousands of square kilometers of forest have been decimated by acid rain and black snow.
Without this becoming a Wiki article with video, I will conclude: This could have been a blog post about any number of depressing mining towns or any far off exotic locations but the dynamics of a place like Norilsk are hard to ignore. I also detachedly sense a fortitude amongst the people who not only founded it in the harshest of conditions but in the people who continue to endure there. Because the city is "closed", not many visitors make it to Norilsk. This lack of foreign contact only mystifies the place for me. If I had the opportunity to visit this Siberian outpost, I would in an instant. And then leave shortly thereafter.

Bonus with Pink Floyd soundtrack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He5jdAvuL7A

And this: http://www.polarwebcam.com/