KYL Tour Rants 25

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to another episode of the Crime Page. But body
doesn't podcast me, and I'll just switch drivers. He's driving,
We're going through Iowa. We're going along the side of
the road. I'm rubber neck, you know. I think it
was a safety issue. Maybe I was making him nervous.
I can't blame him for because I was swerving a
little bit, trying to see all the Helianthus on the
side of the road. You know, mono cultures of corn

(00:23):
here in western i Well, we're heading towards black what's
it called black kettle?

Speaker 2 (00:27):
What broken kettle?

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Broken kettle? The pot calling the kettle black grasslands broken
kettle grasslands by the south of Court Dakota border, and
there is just it is just monocultures of feed corn.
Man you could see on a satellite image, because that's
how I'm trying to figure out where to go. They
really took everything when they came in here. They didn't leave.
They didn't leave shit except some little strips along the margins. Ooh,

(00:50):
they just what the Helianthus is? Really, it's either Maximilian
I or gross the saratus. I think it's Maximilian I. Anyway,
Seeing lens of sympio trichum fighters. I can't tell if
that's you know, an a fence. I can tell if
that's the native win or in face, if in lots
Andrew Pogan. But it's beautiful. You could almost get an
idea of what it must have been like five hundred

(01:11):
years ago before it was all annihilated. But uh, you know,
I guess the broken kettle there's they got a book.
They got a bison hurt when they put it back there.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
They got a bison in two thousand and eight.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Yeah, well, we were reading the paper by what Barry Shimmick,
Jeff what's his name, Jeff Shinnick, what's his name was?

Speaker 2 (01:28):
His name was like Boomhill.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
Something German guy. I don't know. Check, Oh he's check.
You probably wasn't that bad. Checks. You know they're over.
They're lighting their farts on fire, playing accordion and ship.
You know, real fun to go camping with. So uh anyway,
shut out to the Czechoslovakian so uh yeah, but it's
been a good show. It's been a good uh good
uh trip, so far, good tour. We were we did

(01:53):
Jimmy sit down. Oh maybe he's got a ship. Maybe
we should pull over up here. We have We've had
a good Yeah. I think he's got a ship. He know,
he's just fucking with Thois. They're just playing back there.
I don't know. We can get set five minutes. Had
a good tour and we played in Minneapolis and Saint
Paul last night. It was the show was in Saint
Paul at Bang Brewing. Like one hundred and seventy people
came out. One hundred and ninety gees. Oh yeah, it's

(02:16):
probably about two hundred people. And it pissed rain at
the end of it. And uh, the Bang brew the
brewing companies right by the the one of the train yards.
It was nice. It was fucking wonderful on Beyonce. No
neighbors around to complain, you know, real mellow vibe, Cuddy industrial.
You know what, there were little bunnies living in a

(02:36):
train yard. I stepped into the train yard for a
minute the piss and then took a gander around and
all the rusting iron and then and then we uh,
we did a two hour presentation about the prairie and
long killing and what a native plant is and how
it's not just some you know, some something that like
sniveling smarmy, wealthy Caucasians say to talk down to people.

(02:59):
There's actually a methodology to it. There's a point to it,
you know, all the things I rant about in this podcast,
the point that native plants evolved in a place. When
you use the native plants, you're basically using the tools
that came with the land. You're using the machinery that
came with the land, the living machinery. So but yeah,
it's good. It's I'm kind of amazed at how much
enthusiasm there is, and I'm kind of amazed that I

(03:20):
can get these motherfuckers to sit down for two hours.
I couldn't do it. And you know, everyone's coming out,
you know, the young, the old, different demographics. It's been
pretty fucking wonderful. And everyone's just very excited to talk
about embracing their own floras. So we're gonna do. I
think we got four or five shows left I'm doing.

(03:41):
I'm going back to Chicago for three days. I'm gonna
take a break because I'm kind of wiped out, and
you know, hang out with my mas. Celebrated birthday, take
her out to dinner or something. Hold a tour. I'm
doing a tour at Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago on Saturday.
What is it September twenty eighth. I think the twenty
seventh of twenty. I think it's the twenty eighth. Maybe

(04:03):
it's twenty seventh. I don't know. It's a twenty seventh. Yeah,
And I actually reached out to him and they okayed it.
I was gonna do it anyway even if they didn't
okay it, but somebody at the conservatory got back to
me and said, hey, we could do this is a
two pm it's free. All you gotta do is pay
admission to the conservatory if if you're a Chicago resident,
admission is free. But it's a great fucking conservatory. They've

(04:25):
got a lot of rare stuff. It's it's quite impressive,
and they do less of like the you know, rich
housewife style of botanical garden and more like the cool
educational stuff. And on that note, if you're in Saint
Paul area, be sure to check out CBS Conservatory. You
can look it up CBS Conservatory in Saint Paul and

(04:47):
Goyitner Avenue or Gore. I don't know. It's a goofy
sounding fucking road name, but it's a really cool conservatory
associated with the University of Minnesota Saint Paul, and they
have an outdoor cact this garden. They leave all the
shit outside, and they got kino series, like three different
akino serious species Escoparia vivipara, they got, i mean, all
the opuntias of course, but you know a lot of

(05:09):
you know, those are those cantolerate negative thirty degree temperatures.
It's a south facing garden up against the wall. That
probably helps retain heat in the summer on those rare
sunny days in the Minneapolis Saint Paul January or February months.
But but it's pretty cool. They did a good job
with it. It's a great I mean, you know, again,

(05:31):
we're moving away from this idea thotanic garden is like
a place for you know, rich old ladies, no fence
to them, you know, to go in and plant you know,
one hundred, one hundred, one hundred different tones of the
same colias species. We're going away from that, the show garden,
the display garden, more towards actually educating about people about
the living world, you know, based on geography and that

(05:53):
kind of thing. And that's what CBS Conservatory does. They
hit me up, and then someone invited me and I
was like, Eh, it sounds kind of cool, but you know,
I don't know. I'm kind of packed and overwhelmed, and
you know, the eighty D and if I'm not medicated,
it's fucking hard to sit down and focus. And then
I looked into it and I was like, holy shit.
They got a lot of rare stuff there. They've got
a whole ton of neotropical blueberries, you know, the epiphytic

(06:15):
ones with the woody ligno tuber. They've got all kinds
of cool desert plants. And they've got at least in
their display gardens, they've got everything group geographically. They've got
a Chile section, a New Caledonia section. You can go
there and see Amberilla trichopoda, the oldest, the oldest lineage
evangio sperm. You can go there and see all the

(06:35):
cool New Zealand podacarps. They've got a remove it's like
twenty feet tall. They got all kinds of cool erecarias
was I was kind of blown away, like this isn't
this is in the Twin Cities, and a nice horse. Look,
he's got a wonderful coach. You should have seen this one.
It didn't have bangs like the one we saw at
the heap farm. We stopped that. We saw a horse
with bangs. It was fucking hilarious anyway. But yeah, the

(07:02):
amount of stuff that, oh, they're growing fucking ro rigular dentata.
I couldn't believe that. The flypaper plant, right, one of
the few carnivorous plants that grows in dry soil from
South Africa, which I've seen in habitat rorigula. You know,
it's the gg Allen plant. Right. It doesn't eat the
It traps insects, but it doesn't eat them directly by

(07:23):
secreting enzymes. It instead relies on a species of assassin bug,
and the two different species of Rorigula each have their
own specific species of bug that lives on it and
can walk on the leaves without getting its legs stuck
and eats the insects that do get their legs stuck,
and then shits and the plant absorbs the shit. So

(07:45):
it's kind of gnarly, but it's also kind of hilarious.
And then now you're Granny, you know, if she's watching
the video I did on it, then she'll be looking up,
who's gg Allen and she'll have her mind blown, but
not for the better. So anyway, but they had ceilings
of that, which was fucking And I think it's crazy
because one species of Origula grows in wet soil, as

(08:05):
most carnivorous plants do. You know, it's the wet soils,
water logged anaerobic soils can become very acidic and the
nitrogen then becomes inaccessible to plants, and that thereby is
the selection pressure, the evolutionary pressure that then eventually selects
for carnivory. But and then the other species were originlar.

(08:28):
Then Tata grows in very dry soils with protellas and
you know rocky quartzite soils, et cetera, including Roybos the
tea that member of the legging family that that is
that is used for Roybos tea, like the wild phenotype
grows with this, at least it did when I saw
it in in the what was it the Northern Cape,

(08:50):
Western Cape? It was Western Cape. But so one grows
in dry, one grows in wet, and I guess they
had an adult rorigula, but they confused it with the
wet growing ones, so they had a water logged. They're
a little you know, their little ponds, a little like
a wetland section with with the cape droceras in there.
Oh they got a Western Australia section. This was fucking
mind blowing, man, what they can do with these four

(09:13):
greenhouses they got. But anyway, so I guess they killed
the other ro regula and but they got ceilings of it.
So they're growing those. And now someone's just got to
smuggle the assassin bug in their ass, you know, a
little tube or something. I don't know, just an idea
anybody out there. But yeah, so that was really that
was fucking wonderful. This I was haven't I was just

(09:33):
I could again, I couldn't believe this is in the
Twin Cities like such an asset. You want to study bodany,
you're not just limited and you're living there in those
dark winters. You get this seasonal effective disorder, right, which
causes depression and anxiety. I'm up serious, man, am I
You know I used to joke about this stuff, but
I we we were up in Morris and you weren't

(09:54):
feeling fummed that one you were out there, but I was.
It was vibing me out. We were in Morris, Minnesota
for two days, right, you know, so would have been
under ice ten thousand years ago. I mean all of
the area would have been under rice ten thousand years ago.
But up in Morris, the Knights felt a little different,
the little cooler, the sun was a little lower, and
it was all a mono culture of corn and shit too.
It was kind of bleak. I felt bleak, right, I

(10:15):
was getting seasonal effective disorder over the weekend. But we
were staying at that hotel. Well, you liked it, you
liked it up there.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
I just I just walked around.

Speaker 1 (10:24):
Really yeah, he just did a bunch of walking and
he was outside I was, you know, but anyway, could
have just also been the hotel that the school put
us up at. But anyway, but you get that seasonal
effective disorder, you head down to CBS Conservatory and I
guess they just opened it up. Yeah, really nice guy,
Adam and then Jennifer, who studies a dry tropical forests

(10:49):
tuck us in there. It was crazy the shit they have, man,
there's so much. They got a public section and then
a section that's not open to the public. But I guess,
you know, if you charm them. Uh, you know, disarm them,
and we're just disarmingly nice. They let you back there
and check out all kinds of cool orchids. Yeah, the
tropical neotropical blueberries have gotta will leave me. And the

(11:10):
billis all kinds of It's a fucking living museum. It's
so so cool to see. And they got spherro sperm
and bucks of folium two that pendant dependent blueberry. Oh,
I think he's got a ship. Maybe we gotta stop.
We're gonna put the I'm gonna put this down for say,
we're gonna let Jimmy have to take a ship. You know,
he's a nine month old little healer puppy. Okay, I
think he I think he shipped or pissed or something.

(11:31):
I think he just had to piss. I don't know
what he was doing. We got a fly hold on.
I think it went down by the Okay, you gotta
roll the windows all the way down there. We go
get a all right, yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:42):
Does that sound for you? The sound for you?

Speaker 1 (11:45):
So we're getting We're getting undulations in the in the
terrain as we burrow west through Western I towards the
pot calling the Kettle black grasslands with no what is
it broken kettle broken kettle grasslands, which is a nature
conservancy property. A nature conservancy, you could almost forgive them
for sending metric fuck tons of mailers, uh, you know,

(12:07):
begging for money every year because they do conserve a
lot of land. It's just if some of this stuff
they won't let you access, which I understand, but you know,
the permitting process could be a real pain in the ass,
especially in place like the Davis Mountains. So uh but regardless,
this is not we're going. It's we're going from the
flat plains, uh, you know, getting some undulations as we

(12:27):
approach the lowest hills, and uh, I think we're hopefully
you know, pencil them in grand To Florists has already bloomed.
It'll probably be and see, but it'll be a good
thing to document. I like taking money shots anyway. I've
been having real problems with my fucking camera. Do a
bunch of lenses broke fucking I've busted two Nikon one
oh five millimeter macro lenses in the last god damn it,

(12:51):
two months. And the Nikon people are cunts. No offense
to them, some of them, I mean the people worked
are some of them are very kind, but it causes
a shit ton to get these things for It's enough
to make me say, fuck this. I might maybe I
also try to switch to Olympus, you know, because the
photos are so important. I document something, take a bunch
of money shots. It's it's like the next best thing
to an orburium specimen for me. I use it for reference.

(13:13):
I might reference it, you know, a couple of times
a year for the next ten years if I'm you know,
doing something on the genus or the family or whatever.
So well, these helianthis are really nice. But but yeah, anyway.

Speaker 3 (13:26):
So.

Speaker 1 (13:28):
We're gonna take a little break before we hit Omaha
and check out what's here right on the Iowa south
Dakota border. What is the Missouri River? Missouri River, Yeah,
Missouri River.

Speaker 2 (13:38):
Hurtling towards the Missouri River valley.

Speaker 1 (13:41):
But go ahead.

Speaker 3 (13:42):
I was gonna say, we just hit all these undulations.
Do you think it's the lost the only.

Speaker 1 (13:50):
The garlic Eolian loas So that's a you know, windblown
sediments is the glaciers were grinding to the north and
grinding all a rock and a stone and grind and
then it to shipped like very fine particles in some cases.
And then the river or the Missouri River would come
and deposited on the banks. And during these times of
massive glacial melt, and it's all this stuff will get

(14:13):
piled up on the river banks. And then uh, and
then you know, during the winters when glaciers would freeze
up again and the flow would decrease, the river flow
would decrease, then you've got these piles of sediment that
then these you know, it gets windy as fucking the
winter and very dry and in the in this region.
And so then this this westerly winds would blow this

(14:34):
ship to the east and deposit it in these massive
loes hills, which it was saying it was mostly silica.
It was mostly small, small particles. Is quite different from
the carious glaves.

Speaker 2 (14:48):
They call it glacial flower. Glacial that's what they called it,
glacial flower.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
Right. And you know, you look at a map of
Eyewall and it's all been destroyed and carved up into squares,
much like Brazil is doing with much of the Amazon today.
You know, it's a massive, fucking, uh, massively foolish maneuver,
just pureanthropist centrist if you know, what a death cult.
They talk about this before, But but you look at
the western border of the Great State of i Will,

(15:15):
and you can see it hasn't been fucked yet. And
so that's why these little there's. It's actually like a
somewhat contiguous parcel of land. It's not just nature conservatives
like two or three other prairie preserves there. But you know,
I'm not gonna lie. If I lived there, I might
I might think about getting addicted the bills or something.
It's not the most enthralling landscape. It is a monoculture
of crops, mostly going to feed cows and pigs, of

(15:39):
which the smell would indicate there is definitely fact three
farming going on here. It does smell like shit. It
smelled like halatosis a few miles back. I was impressed, Like,
you know, if you talked like an old whino, I
no offense to the whino. But you know, being that
I would be out twenty years ago, paint the graffiti.
You're just getting into trouble in whatever city I'd be in,

(16:00):
and uh, the wee hours, I'd end up talking to winos,
oftentimes for amusement. They get that smell of halatosis breadth right,
it's a mixture of perhaps alcohol and alcoholism and the
maybe food that's not being probably digestive, mixed with like food.
This you know, I'm sure they're not flossing is never
met any homeless alcoholics have been practicing good dental health.

(16:21):
And so you get the halatosais smell let's go. It
smelled like a little waist back. I think there was
just all this shit from the animal agriculture piling up,
you know.

Speaker 2 (16:29):
Which you think we're in the loas right now?

Speaker 1 (16:31):
It might be I don't know. I don't know. Can
you farm on the lost? Farming on loss? Probably kind
of shit? Oh we're close, we're close to South Dakota. Yeah.
What do they have to do to keep these this
fucking corn going every year? Jesus christ Man?

Speaker 2 (16:47):
Brutal irrigation?

Speaker 1 (16:48):
This is when do you get the where do you
get the cowshit with the peafest? And it wasn't that
burning a lot of farmers here? I think that, I know,
I saw a couple of articles about that. You get
the forever chemicals? How does how do the forever chemicals
get into the cowshit? And then they're using that as
manure to what is Jimmy doing? What are you doing?

Speaker 3 (17:07):
No?

Speaker 1 (17:07):
What is he doing?

Speaker 4 (17:08):
On?

Speaker 1 (17:10):
Okay, he's in there there. Oh look it's a kiddie park.
They got tubes in there, so uh. Anyway, but yeah,
it's a rough area, and you know, but at least
if you've got these little prairie preserves, there's something to
go to for good medicine. As a I just remember,
you know, I wasn't into this shit as a teenager,
and I just imagine like growing up out here, it's

(17:30):
gotta be fucking rough. What do you what do you do?
It's just nothing but corn and no native habitat left.
You know, I would you know, if it was like
six hundred years ago, you could like hang with the
Lakota and be fucking, you know, galloping across the land
doing whatever, hunting whatever, chasing a bison hertz. Now it's
like you're stuck in a car going to Mickey D's

(17:51):
and fucking coming home to play call of duty and
add on the basement because there's nothing. I don't know,
I don't know, it's my I'm sure, I'm I'm a
pigeonholing here. It just seems like a bland landscape. But
you know, see see these monocultures everywhere. Western Australia's got
a bunch of monocultures of fucking wheat and whatever else.
So shut up to Matt Berger who's in Western Australia

(18:11):
right now documenting some of the some of the cool
plants like the fire dependent Potocarpus druey enis. However you
pronounce a d r o u e y e n s.
I don't know anyway. I saw it when I was
out there because it's uh, it's Australian spring right now.
And he also saw some fucking wild psychiad sheriff woody

(18:33):
on intergram. Uh, if you so feel inclined to see
what he's observing. Oh, he's seeing a bunch of cool
trigger plants and stylidiums do with the you know, you
touch them and the fucking trigger moves the the column
moves forward and dapts the pollinator in the head with
the pollen rild fucking genus stylidiums. The trigger plants which

(18:54):
have had a radiation in Western Australia. They're in the
sunflower order as the Rayli's really cool looking, unique looking flowers.
So anyway, So, uh, we were just in a few
days ago. We stayed in beautiful o'claire, Wisconsin, and uh,
you know, we we fucking we had done a show
in Milwaukee that night. We stayed up for four hours,

(19:15):
drove the whole I drove the whole night. We were
listening to the Spooks podcast So Scary, which we were
listening to, you know, getting all spoo driving through these
Wisconsin foggy roads at night, you know, in a in
proper Midwest Halloween ambiance. And then we got to Eclaire.
Stayed at a friend's house and his friend has a
hemp farm, and I've known that for a while, but

(19:38):
when we woke up and saw all these different phenotypes
of of non THHC very low THC cannabis that he had,
it was kind of I was. I was kind of
I thought it was kind of cool. He's growing a
bunch of different cult of VARs what the potheads called strains.
You know, I should do like a botany class for

(20:00):
potheads and to use like the correct terminology and explanations
of how this stuff is bread, what a phenotype is,
what cultivars are, how seed feminization works, which is a
really fascinate. I didn't know much about it until last week.
But anyway, so these he's this is my friend is
growing all these It's just a one man operation. It's like,
I guess this dad helps him. His dad, who is

(20:22):
not into pot at all, helps him bring this stuff
in in the winter and dryest or in fall. When
they what's he chewing ones, He's just oh, he's a
bad boy. Hey, leave it alone. You're a bad boy.
And uh so anyway, so but he's just doing it.
He does it all himself. It's I mean, it's fucking
cold weed for a reason. It grows very easily. He

(20:43):
just plants it in rows and then he goes in
and mows in between the rows to keep the grass down,
and he starts. All of it is seed grown. It's
not clones, but it's again it's a cult of var
So those alleles that code for that specific uh uh
if you want to call it phenotype or ecotype general
phenotype of plant, those alleles are all reinforced within that

(21:08):
population because it's just been they find this cultivar, they
get it to produce seed. The seed is genetically different,
but only slightly from the parent at least compared to
another cultivar, and so so they breed those and just
keep reinforcing back, cross breeding whatever until it's a stable enough.
Oh what is that shit down there? It is fucking cool.

(21:28):
It's some sort of synisio on a base of its
highway ramp. But they reinforce these alleles within a population
so that it comes true to seed and doesn't need
to be cloned. It comes relatively true to seed. You'll
still get phenotypic diversity. There might be some recessive alleles that,
you know, every one out of one hundred plants brings
out a different kind of or ends up with a

(21:51):
you know, morphologically a little bit inconsistent, But for the
most part, that's what they do. And then they get it.
You know, since weed is dioecious, since cannabis is one
of the you know, few angiosperms that produces only male
or female plants, then they use that they feminize the seed. Basically,

(22:11):
what that means is they get a female plant to
produce male sex organs, but because it's a female plant
producing male sex organs, it's only producing x X pollen
chromosome or pollen with XX chromosomes. No X y chromosomes,
and so that most of that pollen when it fertilizes
an ovule and another female plant is going to produce

(22:35):
mostly female female seedlings. There might be one, and he
says he's got to go in and pull one out
of every you know, one out of one hundred, one
out of five hundred. I think he's only grown four
hundred plants, but you know it's but you still gotta
go and you gotta pull a male out every once
in a while, but for the most part, you know,
there's a they're all female. And the benefit to that
over cloning, at least, I think, is like, yeah, you'll

(22:57):
get some phenotypic diversity. They're not your get some slight inconsistencies,
but you know, you're you're there's still enough diversity, genetic
diversity between each plant so that some might be somewhat
more resistant to a disease or an insect if they
come out. And it was cool seeing seeing what they

(23:18):
the different cult of varsiy had. What was the one
he hit buck Nasty with the Purple Nasty. It had
purple buds. So what that means is that there's more
anthocyanin pigments, more protective anto scion in pigments in the
purple buds in those buds, which I think confers adaptation
to things like fungal pathogens i et. Mold and insects,

(23:40):
and also to cold. I know there was a study
done on tomatoes where the more the leaves with more anthocyanins,
and I believe the the flowers with more anthocyin and
pigments were more resistant to fungal attacks because remember anthocyanins
or beta lanes in the case of any plant from
the carryophylelees, because carriphylelles doesn't produce antho syonince it produces

(24:04):
betlanes all but the two families to those are protective pigments.
They're stressed pigments, right, That's why you know, like right
now we're looking at the leaves changing. The chlorophyll's gone,
the anthosyonins where they're all along, but since the chlorophyll
is being degraded due to lower light levels and cold temperatures,

(24:25):
mostly what's coming out of the carotenoids and the anthocyanin pigments.
So and then a lot of evergreen trees like junipers
Virginiana eastern red cedar will turn red in the winter
and response to cold temperatures because those anthocyanin pigments, again
are protective. And it's the same thing that you know,
very cold tolerant cac dieci put the humu fusit. Do

(24:49):
you know they flush pink? You see those things in January.
They're all shriveled in pink. They don't, you know, shriveled
in pink, A big, tiny pink cac. Well there's kind
of an obviously moren I guess, like good dan, but anyway,
but it was It's cool because you know, my friend
is not a bondanist, and he's not in He doesn't
know well, he doesn't even I think, know the terminology

(25:10):
for a lot of this stuff. He just likes growing.
He just likes growing plants. And that's what I like seeing,
is just seeing the human bond, the primate bond with
with the living world in any form, right, whether it's
some fucking old daego growing tomatoes or someone growing you
know the weed rows that the few weed rows that

(25:30):
are humble and kind of well, there's a lot of
them are kind, but there a lot of them don't
tend to be humble, you know, bonding with the with
their pot plants whatever, you know, And of course that's
the gateway to getting a broader lens in a living
world as well, you know, use that as a hook
to get people in and get him in the door
and then start start telling them about evolution and ecology

(25:50):
and a whole fucking living world, the living web. So
but it was great, man from an evolutionary perspective, studying
things like phenotypic diversity and how that phenotypic diversity and
phenotypic variation as a result of genetic recombination aka sex,

(26:11):
you know, and then seeing using that as a precursor
to how basically the raw material that natural selection then
selects from. You know, that is what I'm interested in,
like seeing, you know, Like I did that video on
my friend Jerrel Jirel. I always fuck up her name.
She's Filipino. She's grown a whole bunch of astrophytem mysterious.

(26:33):
She's just in love with them, doesn't know why, she
just thinks they're beautiful. And so she grows a bunch
of different cultivars, things that were bred by humans in
a greenhouse, a bunch of different basically phenotypes that were
bred by humans in a greenhouse, and she she's got
all kinds. I mean, they're so different. They're all the

(26:54):
same species, but they look like different plants, like different
species of plants. It's fucking a while, and you could
see within one lineage, one species, how much diversity is possible,
And then that gives you an idea of Okay, I
can see how how new species evolve, new ecotypes evolve, whatever,
you know. And I bet if you could show this

(27:16):
to some of the creationists, maybe you could. Maybe you
could turn them, you know, from being strict science denilists.
Maybe then they could, you know, put their energy into
trying to make science work with their religion or something
instead of doing all this goofy mental gymnastics bullshit. Though
I do have to admit I had a great time
at the Creationist Museum in Glen Rose, Texas. It was
fucking hilarious. You know, someone actually took the time to

(27:39):
encase a hammer and rock, you know, and say that
it was a fossil hammer and showed I don't really
know the angle there, but it was amusing. And they
got some creepy paintings that looked like they'd be on
a fucking swingers club, you know, mural on the bar
of inside a swingers club of Adam and Eve. It
was very, very u discomforting to stand in front of

(28:02):
him look at but that made it all the more hilarious.
And then there was like a ninety year old woman
behind the desk taking admission. Needless to say, we didn't
pay no offense. Sorry, we'll get you next thing. But anyway,
was that four or five years ago? I went to
the Creationist Museum if you get a chance, go in
right beautiful Glen Rose, Texas. And it's right near the

(28:25):
Dinosaur Footprint State Park, which I think is part of
why they did that. I think, yeah, well they did
it on purpose. I think because the so, you know,
a state park, a government funded institution talking about the
existants of dinosaurs, somehow they took as an affront of
their religion. So that's why they they're like, well, fuck you,

(28:45):
we're gonna do this. You know, it's like when you
put a pregnancy information center next to an abortion click,
you know, same angle as Wiley fucks. So oh look
there's the lowestells. Fuck. What's that up there on the
top that said Yukka. We got two hundred foot walk.
We're in a river valley. This ship must flood. Oh
you get a flood through here. This is a floodplaine.

(29:07):
Can you see that? Yeah, the lowest hills. We gotta
get up there somehow. Oh, i wa Iwa, Iowa. But
uh yeah, some of it. We're in a small portion
of the Iowa landscape that was never destroyed for a
monocrop corn agriculture. Yeah, we are in a straight We're

(29:28):
in a straight floodplaine. Now on what highway is this?
This is Highway twenty nine, sou Falls, Iowa. Oh yeah,
look at that. These road cuts are fucking nice. It's
a beige Sioux City. It's a beige. Looks like a
very fine particle.

Speaker 3 (29:46):
Though.

Speaker 1 (29:46):
You gotta some statue up there already statue and it
didn't look like some creepy religious shit that's oppressive. So anyway,
so we hanging on a hemp farm and all this
ship's legal. He's got to get some guy that comes
by who's USDA licensed, takes a branch off one of
his plants and gets it tested for total THHC compliance.

(30:10):
Make sure it's, you know, below the point five percent.
They're point three percent you know, by weight or by
volume or whatever the hell they measure. And I think
that's all a product of the USDA Farm Bill in
twenty eighteen. But he's legally growing up, you know, and
this is all It's just for smoking. It's like smokable flour.
And I posted again, I always got to talk about

(30:32):
this because this is just the anthropology of today is
viewed through the toilet of social media. But I posted
a photo a video on this because I thought it
was fascinating and I knew it was going to be
like this because all the weed videos are like this.
You get all the weed bro lords commenting. There are
a couple of people that comment that know their shit
and know what they're talking on. There's a bunch of
people who are angry that it doesn't have THHC in

(30:53):
it and then talking shit in it for that or there.
They're they've got some you know, quack science nonsense and
start muttering about strains whatever. It's kind of funny. It's
kind of a music. I don't I don't take offense
to what I kind of enjoy reading it, but but yeah, anyway,
it was. It was a fascinating thing to see and
I would love to get some seed. But you know,

(31:14):
that's the thing. It's like the you know, the cops
don't know. I mean, I guess it's been decriminalized in
enough places, including Texas. Texas just had their third failure
on banning or regulating any THHC product, which again I
don't really I don't use THHC, but I certainly like it,
like being around people at are stone more than I
like being around people that are drunk. Yeah, we're getting

(31:34):
reports that the redneck energy here in Sioux City I
was intense. It definitely definitely saw We saw some you know,
primate mail displays of chest pounding and ship at the
fucking Casey's General Store gas station. We just thought that
right now.

Speaker 5 (31:51):
Whole giant, like f fours trailer. I don't know how
it was like a clown car of testosteroned up redneckt.

Speaker 1 (32:02):
Yeah, but all those dudes would be out of shape
walking up a you know, fucking hundred hundred hundred flight
of stairs, you know, hundreds hundred stairs set.

Speaker 3 (32:10):
They did come out of there with a great number
of roller grill items.

Speaker 1 (32:15):
That's fucking.

Speaker 2 (32:18):
Chicken sandwiches.

Speaker 1 (32:20):
God damn, what's the life expectancy there on that and
a diet like that Jesus Christ and then what Jimmy
just dated some nasty ship too. Yet I saw him
get into something. I went and looked at it and
it was, you know, whatever it was, it was gone,
but the maggots that had also been eating it were
still there in the grass with all the other dogs. Yeah,
he's gonna puke in the car, so we're gonna It's okay,

(32:42):
we'll be there. But anyway, so but there was I
had a nice time at the hemp farm and seeing
you know, Luke and all his you know, he grew
like forty individuals of every different cultivar. Some didn't do
so well. The ones that had the purple buds the
anthosis really seem to do well. It was I was
astonished at how many people commented on the video what

(33:04):
about mold, Like what do you do about rain? It's like,
what I mean, it's a plant that rain's good for it.
When you think, why would you protect it from rain?
And then I realized, oh, they've been growing. You know,
these dudes are used to growing indoor pot which is
basically like a poodle. It's like in all these in
some of these indoor strains of pot they've got far
too much THHC in them. They just put you into

(33:27):
a fucking coma and make it, make it half mentally retarded.
That's not for anyone that gets traded by at arword.
I'm using it in the proper terminology. Also, we have
bigger fucking issues now to worry about than someone using
the arword. It's a fucking move past it for credit.
But anyway, Uh, you know, these these these cultivars that

(33:47):
have been developed that are so thhc rice that they
just make you comatose. A lot of them are just
they're so sticky, and they've got such an excess of
those glandular trichombs. Uh that Yeah, they mold super easily.
It's it's exactly, it's like breeding a poodle from a wolf,
this thing that would never exist in nature. Oh that
was a nice rock cut we just went by. Was

(34:09):
like lows mixed with limestone talus. But anyways, yeah, so
these some of these ridiculous strengths, you know, they can
only be grown indoors or cult of ars. Excuse me,
that's the better terminology for them. These these high THHC
super sticky, dense bud cultivars can only be grown indoors
because they're so susceptible to mold with how glandular and

(34:31):
sticky they are that they would just rot if they
got rained on, which I mean, if you've got a
plant that can't get rained on, that kind of gives
you an indication. You know, you're working with a very
special It's you know, it wasn't meant to exist. Maybe
I don't know. And that's the thing. I mean, it's
I don't I can't understand wanting the highest you know,

(34:53):
bud with that much THHC in it to cannabis with
that much thccen and it just seems got no idea anyone.
But it seems that you do a lot of pot.
You like the but do you like the high thhd pat.

Speaker 2 (35:07):
You know, I use it for like adhd mets.

Speaker 3 (35:09):
So the speedier it is, the more paranoia it induced,
the better it is for me.

Speaker 1 (35:14):
The more that somethful. But to each their own, it's good.
You know, some people have a place for that. But
I would I would like you know, I think I
would want to lower amount. And some people do want
a lower amount, you know, they want, and that's what
this hemp flower is for. I guess. I guess it's
like the the NA equivalent of pat. You know. It's

(35:35):
like some people want to like the taste of an
i pa, but they don't want to get hammered, and
so that's why they might drink an athletic or something.
What is that the Nature Center? It's so this is
all this river looks good. Well that's low man. That
thing must yeah, it must fud occasionally. That's like thirty
forty feet below the surface, you know, blow to blow

(35:57):
to Roda level. All this stuff here is Stone State Park.
This is actual limestone bedrock. That's not even lows. It's
kind of cool. I wonder what that's how old? That is?

Speaker 2 (36:10):
Some kind of floodplain over here? Kind of laugh.

Speaker 1 (36:14):
Yeah, that's a wide that's a broad expanse. It's nice
to see the little crumbs of the landscape. They weren't destroyed.
But anyway, so I thought it was a funny common
It was like, you know, uh, what do you do
when it rains? Well, it's you know, it's a plant.
It needs rain. So you know, I don't know who
you think it evolved. I mean it wasn't the irrigation,

(36:34):
you know, over the twelve million year however, old cannabis
is since it last yeared a common ancestor with hops.
You know, it's they weren't getting tub irrigation out there.
They weren't growing it hydroponically in a warehouse in East Oakland, buddies.
So but also that's what the anto signs so for,
so those anto sign and pegment, so that was kind

(36:55):
of cool to see. You know, it's definitely some of
these plants, these different cultivars, all the same species, different cultivars,
different phenotypes, same way you might encounter an ecotype or
a population of of something like a sorgastrum. The tans
which Indian grass is the common name, some goofy name,
I don't know. You know, that looks different morphologically different

(37:17):
from the population you're used to because it grows five
hundred miles away in a slightly different climate. You could
tell it's the same species, but it just looks kind
of different. That's what's going on here. These cultivars have
just been all the traits have been reinforced through sustained
breeding and also back cross breeding, et cetera. But you
know it was cool to see these different cultivars. Some

(37:39):
were not doing that well. They weren't very robust plants,
they were kind of weak, and then others were doing
great in the warmth and humidity of Wisconsin. And then
of course, you know they all have different harvest times too, right,
that are generally spread out over six weeks. So you know,
like Luke, he lives in Mexico, in San Luis Poto

(38:00):
c But he's got to come back to do to
do harvest. He's going to be there for the whole
time too, because different cultivars are you know, becoming maturing
at different times, becoming ready at different times. But I
think I think he's still in the initial processes. I
think he's been doing this for five to ten years,
so he's in the you know, I'm sure some cultivars

(38:24):
that he's growing now, after testing them out, he's going
to see that he doesn't want them next year. They're
not as robust there. Maybe they might do better in
a more arid climate, because that's where cannabis evolved. That
evolved on the step the steppe of Southeast Asia and
relatively dry climates. I was going to have this guy,

(38:44):
I forget his name on he's on to social media,
but he's in Pakistan and Thailand and works with the
quote land race the wild ancestors of cannabis that are
still being actively cultivated outdoors. Much different, you know, much

(39:05):
different from their American counterparts, you know, where due to
the drug war, things were grown inside and they've been
you know, hybridized in bread for different characteristics. So but yeah,
it's some of those plants are just beautiful too. I
mean I'm not even a pont guy, but just the
coloration on some of these plants as gorgeous. And they're monsters.

(39:26):
They're like six eight feet tall. I'd be curious to
see what a hemp farm that grows for fiber looks like.
And I wish that was more normalized, because hemp fiber
is some of the most comfortable natural fiber you can wear.
I had a Hemp shirt once I got in a
thrift store in Vancouver, like twenty years ago, and you
can't get a Hemp shirt now for anything less than

(39:47):
like forty bucks. Right, it's some Gucci shit. It's I'm
not gonna pay forty bucks for a fucking T shirt,
but god damn, it's a wonderful material, just more durable,
and it breathes much better than cotton. If I had it,
I wouldn't make all my clothes out of help. But
it's so fucking comfortable if I had the choice. Uh,

(40:09):
And it's you know, I think you definitely, you know,
per acre, you probably get much more fiber out of
an acre of Hampton you do out of an acre
of cotton, because cotton you're just using basically the fruit
of the cotton plant. The uh, the material that is
that the seed is in Wisconsin, within the fruit, the dry
capsule fruit. So but you know William Randolph first, the

(40:32):
whole all the shit that went down one hundred years ago,
you know, that fucking pig. It's it's why, it's why
you can't get a nice hemp shirt at the thrift
store here. Right. Maybe one day, maybe in forty years,
if we're all still around, all just got a you know,
we're doing an anal RV game. You just got an
anal singer. He kind of you know, you see an RV.
Put the word anal in front of it, because every

(40:53):
RV's got its own. Oh, there's a new dent in
the windshield. Every RV's got its own nickname. So you
put you put anal in front of it. What are
some other ones? Aintal? What anal adventurer at the Yeah,
there you go, anal adventure.

Speaker 2 (41:07):
What else anal backcountry?

Speaker 1 (41:09):
Anal? Oh, there's an RV model called the back country. Yeah,
the Zinger anal Zinger is pretty good, though I didn't
know that. When you know, when you see d r
v's and you gotta play the uh, the anal r V. Anyway,
we just left the Lowest Hills loss, he kept saying, loss.
And now we're back in the mono cultures of corn,

(41:29):
of fucking toxic corn, toxic nze. But uh, you know,
I was impressed with the Lost Hills. We've seen a
bison herd. You can't actually get on the land there.
It's maintained for the bison and surrounded by an electric fence,
but it's funny for you. It's cool to see him.
And I guess some prairie rattlesnakes there, which I was
hoping we would see, but last we did not. Some

(41:52):
beautiful specimens of a morphicinesssis though the lead plant and
uh and then just you know, dominated by grass. It's
just Andrew Pogon Garardier, A big blue stem and sore
gas from the tans Indian grass, but some wonderful waves
and ocean of of those grass species. And then you
know a Morphaknissan's popping up here and there I went

(42:12):
out a long a morpha canissants could live for it.
I bet it's long lived since the fucking deep road down.
I bet it's long lift. What a great plant, and
more dominant here where it's drier and further west than
it is in the prairies of say, eastern Illinois or
northern Illinois. There's a couple only a few places where
I see it, and it's not super dominant there. And

(42:34):
those prairies are super you know, super wet compared to here.
I mean, you're growing on top of the lost hills,
and you know it's gonna be it's gonna be. Only
a few things can There was fucking yucca growing there,
so that gives you an indication of how dry and
hot and exposed it was. And then after that we
broke for a road cut, a nice road, well, it

(42:55):
was a river cut. The road was at the base
of it. It's where the big Sioux River just north
with the big Sioux River and the Missouri River heaving
their confluence, and it was wonderful pieces of shale. I
could see the darker gray pieces of shale. And then
on top of that was the younger stratum was like

(43:16):
a beige color. And that was where a bunch of
cool ninety million year old bivelve fossils were homage to
the western interior seaway. What's going on, We're back here.
It took a little break. Now we're driving past the
hordes of helianthis, maximil and I I think there's like
six species of Helianthus in the area as I observed

(43:38):
on Ainan. We're back driving south, say, hi, ol we
you know, we had a nice show in fucking Lincoln
last night, very wonderful venue, witch is Brew. Yeah, it
felt like someplace you'd go to see a punk show
in the late nineties. You know, they had the black
lights and stuff. They had a disco ball, a large room,

(44:01):
one hundred people packed in there. It was a fucking
you know, it was a great great spot. It was,
you know, the beautiful view from the back of the
building by the fires, a beautiful view of like a
scrap metal pile with like the Nebraska State Capitol, you know,
backed right up to Salt Creek. It was a you know,
you know, you play, you do a show in a

(44:23):
place like that, you're not gonna get like a cunty
email from some uh some wealthy woman from the suburbs afterwards,
who's gonna write you and say, I mean literally starting
off the email saying well, I don't even really think you.
I don't even really like you that much, but my
husband seems to think you've got things that are worth
listening to. A great way to start an email, lady,

(44:45):
Oh shit, when I'm supposed to say that, there's tons
of different men. It wasn't Meredith. It was Melanie. No, no, no,
it could have been. It was Brittany Becky. I think
she her name was Becky at heart, but no offense
to anybody named beck use cool but uh anyway, so yeah,
it was Uh that was a first for me. I
guess she think somebody went to the Saint Paul show

(45:06):
and she was really upset that I don't know, I
don't know she's she had to wait in the rain
for ten minutes or something. It was like, I didn't
you know, it's not my fucking venue. I don't know, Ada,
I'm sorry. I apologize, and then called me an eco
fascist and told me that I'm just doing this. It's
a scam. I'm just, I just, I just I'm just
doing it so I can get a free ticket to

(45:26):
travel around, drive around the Midwest, or some ship. He's
got these, you know, he had a We went to
this late night burrito spot last night. He's really gashing.
It's a considerate thing to do. But anyway, so we're
We're headed to Indian Cave State Park, which I'm rather

(45:46):
excited to check out. You know, the the the fucking
what's left of the flora here in the natural landscape
is pretty amazing. It's been. Nebraska's really nice. I want
to go to the sand Bunch of great people came
out to the show last night. I met a couple
who turned what what had you know, formerly been two

(46:08):
thousand acres of monocrop agriculture, turned it back into prairie.
They were in the drier part of the state, near
the sand Hills. Yeah, a bunch of fun people, you know,
young people that were super stoked, old people that were
just you know, some of them knew their shits. Some
of them didn't, but they were all equally enthusiastic and
friendly as shit and and just excited to be there.

(46:32):
And then, you know, the fucking presentation runs almost two hours,
which I ended up feeling like a punisher for. But
it's you try to like make it a dialogue and
get people loose and so they're not just sitting there
listening to some poor bastard ramp and punish them. But
it's it's a good show. I mean, it seems like
it's a good crowd. At least the most people are

(46:53):
pretty into it, you know. So, but I always feel
bad because I can't sit still. I feel, you know,
apologizing profusely. I'm fucking punishing you, guys. I'm sorry. No, no,
we like it. It's okay. And then the amount of people
that stay for Q and A after there's always kind
of mind blowing too. It's like, fuck, don't you guys
want to get up? I feel like I should break
it up with like a stretch, you know, let's through

(47:15):
three minutes of stretches, guys, everybody stand up, get your
circulation flowing. Whatever. But but yeah, anyway, so yeah, we
also got to stay. You know, our original spot to
stay fell through. So I just put out an open call,
which you know on on on inter sham. You know,
does anyone in the Omaha Lincoln area have the ability

(47:38):
to put us up? You know, Me and Alan two dogs,
and I was like, this is this is a fucking
tall order. It's probably not gonna happen. But someone came
through who turned out to be a monarch, a monarch
biologist and an entomologist that spent ten years living in Correctro,
Mexico studying the monarch migration down there. She was fucking

(48:01):
she was a really cool lad, like really dope post
we you know. She had all these beautiful like Wahakan
style uh block prints on her on her wall, like framed, framed,
all this cool art, you know, like twenty four thirty
six inches, like big pieces of stuff. I don't even

(48:23):
ever looked at a lot of that, the block printing
and lithography coming out of Mexico, but it's fucking beautiful
some of it. It's it's really gorgeous. And you know,
if you ever go to Wahaka City or something, you'll
see a lot of that. There's some wonderful artists coming
out coming out of uh Wahaka especially, I mean all
throughout Mexicos. Some great art, but it's you know, they

(48:45):
they're it's basically like relief relief carving, so like they
you know, most of like they take a block and
most of it prints black and then they're cutting out
the negative space is the white areas. But it it's
really most of it is really fucking beautiful. We had
a lot of good art, so that was it was.

(49:06):
It was a very just inviting home, you know, very
nice and she was cool, good conversation. We've talked about
different uh you know, she knows the plants, they're really well.
We talked about different different elements of the monarch migration,
you know, the whole four generations thing, which I didn't
know about. And then you know, just talking about the

(49:28):
forest that they go to at Michia Khan, those ABIs
religiosa forests, the fir forests up in nine thousand feet.
So yeah, it was we lucked out with that one.
You know, you never know who you're gonna get. Sometimes
it's cool people. Maybe it's you know, someone who's a
little you know, has their ticks or whatever. You know,

(49:49):
figuratively speaking, the nervous ticks you never know. But yeah,
that that that ended up being great. So now we're
headed to Kansas City, just following the path the floodplain
of the Missouri River as it is. You got to
look at it. I mean this, this happened to me
when I was studying, not studying, but when I was
doing videos and Cape Girardo, uh last right on the

(50:12):
banks of the Mississippi, Cape Girardo, Missouri last the last year,
and just looking at a relief map, a topographic map
of the Missouri River floodplain, and just seeing how it's
carved out. You know, the river is only so big,
but it's carved out this channel that's ten times as
wide over the last however, many millions of years. And

(50:35):
then seeing just you know, you can see you can
literally see old channels that may have been used by
the river, you know, five six million years ago and
carved out the relief you know, because you see like
this hilly terrain that suddenly got a flat spot on it.
But meanwhile the river is like six or seven miles
to the east. Now the present channel is you know,
all that the fluvial geology really cool. Get to see.

(51:01):
And so that's kind of what I was looking at
in the area that we're headed through today. You know,
you've got these remnant grasslands on the sides of the road,
all the andropoga and the big blue stem, the sorgastrum,
the Indian grass and uh and then just you know,
monocrop agriculture beyond that on the private property, private property,

(51:23):
soybeams and corn all the bullshit. But you know, next
to the between the private property and the road, you've
got these these margins of remnant prairie. You know, Baptisia,
all the heli antis of course everywhere, Sylphium lesciniatum, really
interesting stuff, the morphic kanescence and the dryer, more sun
exposed sites. And then I think lots of corner stramundi eye,

(51:47):
lots of the dagwoods. You know, the dogwoods only get
I guess they how tall can they get? The ones
I see are only like five or six feet tall,
But they do form a thicket if they're not checked
by fire or you know, by alternatively, by grazing bison.
I supposed to where the bison keeping the dogwoods in check.
I assume that bison heard we saw it. Broken kettle

(52:10):
was fucking great too. I found out they were pure.
There was no cattle mixed in. So if you get
a chance to see that. The broken kettle grasslands on
the Iowa South Dakota border, just no north of Sioux
Falls or was it Sioux City, it's Seouex City, sue
something right where right where the Little Sioux River and

(52:31):
the Missouri River come together, just just north of there.
The whole area is fucking cool, at least on the
Iowa side, probably on the South Dakota side too. Greetings
from scenic Osceola, Iowa. As we departed the Lakeside Casino Motel,
was that the name that was? Yeah, we were. You know,
you go in there at midnight. You're checked in by
this like chubby gamer guy and it's kind of endearing.

(52:54):
And he got mad when I asked what the extra
thirteen dollars charge was about, but he was still Yeah.
I felt safe with him.

Speaker 2 (53:01):
He had a beautiful ponytail.

Speaker 1 (53:03):
And then leaving today, you know I was out walking Jimmy.
I didn't have a leash on him, and uh, you
know they had the dog policy get one in. I
actually sneaked two in I've got the all of papers,
so it's they can't fuck with you. And then I
seen this lady. I walked five inches into the lobby
and I saw the lady that was working, and I

(53:25):
I got scared. I turned around an owl. You had
a similar You had a similar I mean, what was
it for you? You had a similar reaction that was
just a haircut or what exactly?

Speaker 2 (53:34):
I walked in and I was like, how bad could
this be? Was Jolly talking about?

Speaker 3 (53:39):
I walked in and I just see I just see
like the floating Texas perm above the computer monitor, and
I'm like, oh.

Speaker 1 (53:47):
Yeah, it's terrifying. You see that and you're just you know,
you're in for trouble. It's like, it's what did you
compare it to smuff the dragon? Smogg What was it?

Speaker 2 (53:55):
It said?

Speaker 3 (53:56):
She's like smugged the dragon from the hobbit where we
just have to get out quietly.

Speaker 1 (54:00):
She was sleeping, but she wish she can sense your
presence again.

Speaker 3 (54:04):
You must you mustn't take a towel, pillow or moist towel.

Speaker 1 (54:10):
I didn't even I didn't even interact with that. I
just left the key cards on the fucking you know,
for mica table or the particle board table and so anyway,
but they had nice accommodations. It was now we're in
the tender Midwest.

Speaker 3 (54:23):
What I liked is that the room didn't smell like
the lobby that was the That was what I was.
It had that depressing casino smell of like old fried
food and cigarettes, but like they hadn't smoked inside in
ten years.

Speaker 2 (54:36):
But they didn't clean anything.

Speaker 1 (54:38):
Yeah, it's a fucking that carpet. Really, it's like a
packet that you could just like seal the the scent
in there. But uh, you know, now we're in the
tender part of the Midwest, the the the Iowa corridor
where we're going, well, we're going with the Rock Island tonight.
I didn't know bermuda grass can survive the temperatures of

(54:58):
Kansas City, which is when we played. Well we did
last night. We did Kansas City last night. It was
a really nice time. Fucking two hundred and thirty people
came out or something like that.

Speaker 2 (55:08):
It was like two fifty almost.

Speaker 1 (55:10):
Yeah, it was a nice pack It was a nice setup.
It was a big room and they had a nice
led screen for the presentation. I don't think anybody left
pouting in the middle either I'm not gonna We're not
gonna get another another email like we did from Meredith
from shout out to Meredith from Saint Paul predisposed to

(55:33):
not like you. It was like she shpit on a
paper plate and handed it to me. It was very kind.

Speaker 3 (55:38):
We did do our best to accommodate everyone at the
slightly oversold the venue wheel.

Speaker 2 (55:44):
They said it could accommodate everyone. You know, we asked,
I asked, I said the email. I got a paper trail.
I said, is.

Speaker 3 (55:50):
It gonna be okay if we do capacity in your
in your place?

Speaker 2 (55:55):
And they said it's fine. They said it's fine. I said, okay.

Speaker 1 (55:58):
Meredith wrote me though, and it was not fine.

Speaker 3 (56:01):
I was trying to head everybody off with the basket
benches for everybody, gets seats for everybody, make sure people
were accommodated. But did it for her? I think it
was a smattering of rain. It was an indoor outdoor show.

Speaker 1 (56:13):
I mean, I think she told me she didn't like
me to begin.

Speaker 2 (56:16):
With her husband along, that's right, and she did.

Speaker 3 (56:19):
She didn't tell you to go fuck yourself fuck, which
I mean is cas She's kind of engaging in.

Speaker 2 (56:25):
A crime pas discourse, which is it's interesting.

Speaker 1 (56:29):
You know, I didn't take it as an insult. I
was flattered. I was a lady. You put a lot
of energy into writing me this nasty email. Thank you.
I'm flattered.

Speaker 2 (56:38):
And the response, you know, your response was right in line.
I think it's what she was looking for, right.

Speaker 1 (56:43):
It was a It was a It was a gentle
response compared to what it could have been. We just
but we just collected a bunch of thismanthis scene which
you know, leaving the Lakeside casino. It was cool because
you know there's they've got those. You know, it's the
whole landscapes fucking bleak. It's just an impermeable, massive surface

(57:04):
of asphalt that I'm sure acts like a funnel when
it rains, and you know, probably causes some flooding. They've
probably had that. I can't imagine how that pans out
because it's all slopes towards towards the building. You've got
like a football field size coating of impermeable asphalt. But
you know, and then just all the car infrastructure and bullshit,

(57:24):
and you know, the lifestyle of metabolic diseases but then,
you know, and they had this like retention pond ravine thing,
and instead of mowing the whole thing, you know, it
was probably one hundred feet two hundred feet across. Instead
of mowing the whole thing, they left strips of what
was native prairie plants like the Sylphium porfoliate and the
cup plant and milkweeds. Does manthis heliopsis, all that shit

(57:47):
and it's all going to seed right now, being that
it's late September. So I was out there collecting shit
for the thing we're doing in Rock Island. Then I
collecting seeds in a little bay. But you know, that's
like something you'd see in Texas, and they would fucking
mow the whole thing and there they left that. I
was kind of impressed. I guess maybe they realized the
pragmatism of it. If you mow that shit now, it's

(58:08):
you're gonna get a lot more sloped fucking land, subsidence
and flooding. And you know, all those roots help hold
the soil together and also make it more porous so
it can absorb water. But uh, you know, down in Texas,
we don't think like that. It's it's that's asking too
much to fucking use a little bit of intellect to
think how the keeping the native vegetation might keep the

(58:31):
land together. They just then they just fucking left the mow.
It gives it in thousands with a sense of purpose.
So anyway, now we're continuing to barrel north towards beautiful
Des Moines, and we're gonna we decided we're gonna stop
at the hitching post bar and grill, what the fuck
is the name of this town?

Speaker 2 (58:47):
Beautiful?

Speaker 1 (58:48):
I ow Bevington. We vote against their own interests in Bevington,
and so we made that choice. Can I help you
boas it might be one of those plays. I remember
I got off a freight train in East Saint Louis
annoy once when it was fucking two thousand and one
or something. I was with her two friends and uh,
we walked into uh, this cuddy ass podunk town in Ashley, Illinois.

(59:12):
It was I think it was Ashley. It was Ashley,
east of East Saint Louis, like a probably what was
a very racist town east of East Saint Louis, And
we walked into this, uh I think it was, you know,
Knights of Columbus or one of those you know, you
got all these VFW you know where all these old
guys got one foot in the grave, and they're sitting
around the bar drinking on a Sunday afternoon. And we
walked in. And the minute we walked in, every fucking head,

(59:38):
every pasty head and that that joint turned around and
looked at us, and one of them goes gonna hilp
you boas like kind of a fucking movie, like you know,
you could like hear the banjo TwinGo bound and then
and then the bartender told us that the law doesn't
take kindly to drifters around here. She asked us where
we were. It was like, yeah, it was like, what

(59:59):
the fuck is it? Did you guys write this? Did
you know we were coming and you got it? You
all got together and wrote a script here?

Speaker 2 (01:00:06):
Or what was she plas with a bart She was yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:00:10):
She was actually yeah. It was like she was the
only woman in the joint and it was all these
old bastards. I'm sure they're all that now, this fucking
twenty four years ago.

Speaker 2 (01:00:17):
You know, we don't take Kylie.

Speaker 1 (01:00:19):
We vote against their own interests in Ashley, Illinois. But
last night at the show somebody. I didn't catch her name,
but somebody came up and brought us a paw pop
pie which which was delicious. And yeah, we saw her
al saw her boyfriend eating it, dude, so we knew
it wasn't poison.

Speaker 3 (01:00:38):
I said, I don't know if she did it subconsciously,
but she had two slices.

Speaker 2 (01:00:42):
She gave one to me, sick. Could you give this
to Choi at the merch table? And then she gave
she had another one.

Speaker 3 (01:00:46):
She gave it to her boyfriend who she met there,
and he ate it in front of me. I don't
know if they arranged it that way so I could
see that it was indikee sick.

Speaker 1 (01:00:53):
But that's a good you know what, That would be appreciated.
That would be a good strategy if you did want
to poison someone, make two slices that looked identical. One's
got tomain or some ship in it and the other
is you know, merit. That's what Meredith is gonna do
to me. Now, She's just gonna show up with a
fucking pie with a bunch of rat poison, a bunch
of decon.

Speaker 3 (01:01:14):
Joey is sweating a lot back in the back. The
other delicious item. The other delicious item was a precimons.

Speaker 1 (01:01:23):
Oh yeah, crazy Diosporos Virginiana. And they were no longer
astronchint either. They were. They were very sweet. We kept
the seeds and.

Speaker 3 (01:01:32):
We were drying out here on the dash and get
some of these gold through food forests.

Speaker 1 (01:01:39):
Had a little food forests. When's the last time did
you hear the words food forest at any any point?
I didn't hear him at any point in the last
They very nice food forest. Food forest. It's like a
face like a forest, but he's like he's made out
of food. Dude, He's like, you got friends with a
food forest?

Speaker 2 (01:01:57):
I got I got some friends with what kind of food?

Speaker 6 (01:02:00):
You know?

Speaker 2 (01:02:00):
It's just like a orchard with other plants?

Speaker 1 (01:02:02):
Yeah yeah yeah, what's they're like empty lot downtown or something.
Oh yeah, it's nice and er they just have they
just have fruit trees.

Speaker 2 (01:02:12):
Yeah, they have fruit trees in a garden.

Speaker 1 (01:02:14):
You know, do they call it? I do they self
identify as a food forest.

Speaker 2 (01:02:18):
But I mean that's essentially what.

Speaker 1 (01:02:20):
But they're not self identifying as a food forest. That
doesn't make me want to gag, Like if it's it's
just the fucking fruit trees in their backyard. It's nice.
That's just a pragmatic thing, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, they're
not like going on rants about how they're planting edible
food forests of like you know, half invasive bullshit around
you know what I mean. It's it's different, you know,

(01:02:41):
so it's different. It's that's not as a pry. But
and after eighty four hours of grueling work over three weeks,
I have one half pound of a corn flower. Sorry,
oh the corcus I got. I collected a bunch of
corcous mule and bergie acorns yesterday. That's a fast growing

(01:03:01):
fucking possibility. Place sells them. They grow fast as fuck.
And I realized that I don't know mulen Bergie. I
would take Chicago. That'd be because you don't really see
it too much around the Chicago, or at least I haven't.
But that'd be a nice you know, you want to
do like a prairie oak savannah recreation somewhere in a
fucking park or you know, empty lots somewhere in it.
So you got to get some quirks mula burgie ice seedlings. Yeah,

(01:03:25):
that was the one we saw at the Ares yesterday. Yeah,
the Ioway Reservation. We had a friend that lives on
the Ioway Reservation, so we stopped and kicked it with
him for an hour and then and then blazed further stuff.
Oh yeah, we had an Indian cave spot was real
nice too, was cool.

Speaker 6 (01:03:43):
Yeah, depressing story, like historic human inhabited cave and it
was on private land and the state was trying to
imminent was trying to buy it for years.

Speaker 3 (01:03:55):
Finally imminent domain that like in the forties or fifties,
and then out of spite, the owner fucking dynamited a bulldozed.

Speaker 2 (01:04:02):
It's like the ancient human sight.

Speaker 1 (01:04:05):
That fucking bitter honky. He's like, well, I got damn
stitch not getting this. I'm not gonna get I'm not
gonna hand it over in nass. Condition got to ruin
it first.

Speaker 2 (01:04:14):
You're gonna take You're gonna take my land away. I'm
gonna take away human heritage sat for.

Speaker 1 (01:04:19):
You, right. Yeah. It's like it's like kind of like
when you know, as you're rent in a house from
someone and a landlord burns, you see you knock holes
in the drywall and stuff meeting there or something, you know,
seal it up. Oh god, yeah, but and all the yeah,
I was hoping we would see it timber rattlesnake because
there's you know, there there's little pockets of them left

(01:04:41):
where the the the death cult hasn't exterminated all of them,
but that sadly had gone on there too. I guess
there was a quarry at one point and they they
came upon a rattlesnake. Then that was just had you know,
tons of them in there, and they they murked all
of them. And then you know, they're so rare now
that they put tracking devices on them and and uh

(01:05:02):
and monitor where they go. But they're they're seeing like
once a year, so who the fuck knows. But it
was cool. It was like a sandstone, nice sandstone bag
of Pelea Atropapuria was growing there, a member of the
kylanthoid subfamily. Cool, little the coffee fern they call it.
So I collected some spores of that. Try to get
those going on a little in a topper. And oh,

(01:05:23):
we're here at the hitching post. We'll get back to
you after we after we get out of this place,
probably with some gastro intestinal distress. Here we go. Ah shit,
I'm losing my voice. So the hitching post turned out
not to be too bad. They had it listed on
a on the receipt as a fountain Pop. I got
a fountain soda. They called it fountain pop. We're back
in the Midwest. What'd you think of that? There wasn't

(01:05:45):
it was like a bar slash, like a comfortably grimy
vibe to it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:05:50):
It was a very small town Bevington or Bevington, very
small Yeah, small town diner bar.

Speaker 2 (01:05:58):
It was great there. Maybe with three people.

Speaker 1 (01:06:00):
Yeah, you know, maybe one of them was drunk. I
don't know. Maybe you've been in there for quite a while.
I don't know. But anyway, now we're barreling towards Neil
Smith Prairie. What is this? But they got bison there,
they got bison.

Speaker 3 (01:06:13):
They got Elk's the largest prairie restoration.

Speaker 2 (01:06:17):
In the state Iowa.

Speaker 1 (01:06:19):
I want I need to create a directory on a
crime pays website that lists you know, I got the
Native Plant nursery director. I need to create like a
plant list for each region, you know, like ten species
to put in a fucking native plant yard or to
you know, seeds to spread your shit that gets established
relatively easily, and then I need like a natural spaces

(01:06:42):
list as well. You know, so if you live somewhere
and you want to know where to go to look
for what's growing, what's native little what fragments of the forgotten,
remnant ecology looks like, you can go go check it out,
you know, just putting stuff on a map for people,
like a state by state listing. Oh, really is beautiful
here at Neil Smith Wildlife Refuge. They said the visitor

(01:07:06):
center was shut down due to storm damage. I'm guessing
the real reasons budget cuts. But it's just an ocean
of tall grass prairie here, very wonderful, all the you know,
or sore gas from the tans Andrew Pogan gerardi i, Vernonia, Mazurka,
Heliopsis Helianthus grossus seratus, all the morphakanessans. There was a

(01:07:31):
bunch of Baptisia. It's a very soothing landscape, very pleasant
to just come out here and just walk around. Ooh,
Camba Christ. You don't see too much of that in
the Chicago area. But you know, this is good medicine.
Being out here is good medicine. So that when you're
out in the fucking brutal, bleak suburban strip mall. Hell

(01:07:52):
you got you got an antidote partially, and you know,
thinking about that, that's part of the presentation that I
give talking about how ugly the uh, the American consumer
landscape is, and it occupies so much of the surface area. Now,
if it's not mono if it's not monocrop agriculture or
or cities, it's it's that suburban sprawl garbage. And can

(01:08:17):
you imagine what it's like to have that be all?
You know, that's your world. Your entire world has been
spent in that that setting, with that scenery, you know,
the mode turf grass around the retention ponds of the
strip mall and all the bleak plastic signs in consumer
businesses and being trapped in a fucking car everywhere you go,

(01:08:39):
and the only alternative you have to that, especially if
you're you know, a young man for instance, Uh, I
mean anyone really, but this applies to the young man.
You'll see. My angle here is fucking video games off
in first person shooter shit. And so you see that
all the mass shootings that we're getting, and of course
this is a very nuanced topic. It's very complicated it

(01:09:00):
can't be summed up by the results of my little
sachet around a fucking prairie in the middle of Iowa.
But you start seeing this repetition of these personalities. You know,
they're not even political, they're like a a political they're
poking fun at politics. They're edged lords. They spend their
lives in basements playing video games or in chat rooms

(01:09:24):
or whatever. And you can't blame them their products of
their environment. There's no reason to go outside when it
looks like much of them, when it looks like what
much of America looks like, fucking hideous landscapes. I mean,
in this presentation that I've been given the last few days,
I'm literally just showing drone shots of bleak parking centers
and strip malls throughout America. Could be anywhere, could be

(01:09:47):
anywhere in the United States, it's hard to tell. The
biggest thing that kind of give away where you might
be are the plants they're using, or maybe mountains in
the background. And there's no plants in much of these
landscapes anyway, except for some you know, sporadic street trees
between the parking lots and the thoroughfares, And so you

(01:10:08):
think about that. That's a landscape, and then that's one
landscape you live in. You got no connection to the
living world outside of you, no connection to quote nature,
the real world, anything to fill that void. Okay, the
things that we've been relating to for most of our
three hundred thousand years as a species. You suddenly have

(01:10:28):
no access to all those wild lands, the living in
the connected web. All you know is the bleak consumer farm.
And that's all it is. It's a farm. They're fucking
farming people, the bleak consumer farm. And then the world
of screens, and you see why a lot of people
are going fucking nuts. Okay, it's just like taking a

(01:10:50):
you know, when they take a chimp out of the
forest and they throw it in a fucking cage in
the zoo. You know, it's a little diorama. It's a
little you know, they got some paint the African savannah
or the jungle on the wall, and then it's a
glass window for spectators to come look at you, and
they give you some toys and some ropes to cling
on and climb around on. And it's it. And you

(01:11:15):
can see the fucking mental health that even an animal
gets put into when that's all it knows. And then
it starts to click. While a lot of these guys
are just in horrible fucking shape, these young men. I mean,
it's no mystery if you think it's if you think
it's not tied to how bleak so much of America looks.

(01:11:36):
And then the only antroo the only, the only answer
to that, The only other option is the world of
screens and being an edge lord and talking shit and
chat rooms and filling your head with whatever garbage culture
the screen in front of you throws out at you,
garbage in, garbage out, and then just perpetual video games,

(01:11:58):
because these video games are set up where you spend
hours of your life. It's not just like play for
half an hour, put it down, It's fucking hours of
your day. Does all that seem like a recipe for
a healthy psychological state, a healthy emotional state? I would
I wouldn't think so. It doesn't sound like it. You
gotta be you gotta be a fucking dummy to think that's, oh,

(01:12:18):
let's bediza, to think that that's that's good for your
mental health. It's just humanity has never lived like this.
This is totally new to us, and it's it's freaking
many of us out, it's driving many of us off
the fucking wall. And then you add, you know, any

(01:12:39):
of these nut jobs can And then I say that
with compassion for many of them. Obviously not the people
that shot up a fucking school, but even them, they're victims, right.
But you see many of these people, these young men
who are in horrible psychological, emotional mental states, have ready
access to firearms. You could see it. Just you're just

(01:13:00):
setting yourself up, you know. I don't suggest even we
take guns away because people are gonna get gun There's
so many fucking guns in this country. There's you're never
gonna they're everywhere. Okay, there's more, there's how many, how
many times as many guns as people. It would seem
much more appropriate if the mental state wasn't as fucking

(01:13:21):
nuts like this. I mean, you can argue about gun
control all you want. The fact is society's still riding
from the inside out, and it's directly tied to how
much we've alienated and isolated ourselves from the living world
around us. It's a recipe for a lot of brutal shit,
and so here we are. So for me, that's man
that seems like my biggest reason, or the most compelling

(01:13:42):
reason to get out of this fucking to get out
of this place, more than any It's not you know,
the creeping fascism and the political dystopia of the government.
It's what's happening to the populace. They're just gonna go nuts.
There's no stopping it. However, the fucking mental health in
this country is insane, and everybody seems clueless as to why, right,

(01:14:06):
I mean not everybody, but uh, who's this caterpillar on
this big bluestem. That's fucking interesting? What is it? Oh? Shit,
got to get a photo of that. But you know,
people talk about mental health. We gotta we gotta improve
mental health access. Yeah, you could just try to address
the problem that's causing it, alienation from the living world,
Living in one of the bleakest landscapes, the most bleak

(01:14:28):
landscape of any First world country, this shopping landscape. Being
trapped in a car driving from parking lot to parking lot,
two or three hours, sometimes a lot more spent in
the car every day. What do you think that does
to you? And then the only alternative is to if
you want physical activity, go sit go go go to

(01:14:50):
the gym for an hour, smell off, gassing plastic, listen
to terrible music and the sound of meatheads grunting and
people trying to cruise and check each other out. Whatever, Right,
Don't go outside on an outdoor run. Don't go for
a fucking bike ride. There's nowhere safe to do it.
Don't go for a hike anywhere, because there's no public
land for you to go hiking at. What little land

(01:15:12):
there might be that's publicly accessible at least in place
like Texas, you have to pay to get into. Don't
change any of that. Just, you know, just fucking medicate people.
It's a dark prescription. There's you know, there's gonna be
a lot more mass shootings. There's gonna be a lot
more people freaking out. No, not even no political motives

(01:15:34):
at all except nihilism and just being an edgelord. And
you see where it comes from. I mean, to me,
it stick clicks. That makes sense. If I didn't have
this shit, maybe maybe I'd be losing my mind to
who knows. But I don't see the problem being addressed
anytime soon. And I don't see the optics or the

(01:15:54):
layout of the American landscape changing anytime soon. Either it's
just gonna be more sprawl, more shopping centers, more parking lots,
more mega highways, less walkable communities, just spending your life
staring at screens or trapped in a car in a
parking lot, or going to your job, working your ass

(01:16:16):
off and still not being able to afford healthcare or education.
You're gonna get a lot of I think you're gonna
probably start seeing a lot of American refugees, people dipping out,
people leaving, and who could blame them? There's just this,
what's this country got to offer anymore? You know, you

(01:16:37):
work a shit job for two little money, you still
can't have healthcare, education, and the landscape has been turned
into a massive shopping mall, just endless suburban sprawl, which
is not only bad for your physical health because it's
just made walking obsolete, but it's bad for your mental
and emotional health too. And it's the same landscape that's
creating a lot of these fucking walking loose cannons that

(01:16:58):
are shooting up public places. They're victims of the shit too.
Oh right, it's a couple of days later, I took
a break, and I'm getting backed. You know. We just
finished the tour two days ago and the last day
we were in Rock Island. We were at this spot
called Rostocks, which is like a I think they have
punk shows there. Maybe I don't know, but we were

(01:17:21):
it's like a little cafe. It's in Rock Island, Beautiful
Rock Island, the quad Cities right there on the Mississippi River.
It's so nice being on these fucking, these fucking rivers,
you know, and be sure to look at the map
in terrain view every once in a while to be
reminded of where the floodplain is and where the river
has flowed as it's meandered and changed course over the

(01:17:42):
last few million years, both the Missouri and the Mississippi rivers.
It's that fluvial geology. There's like that spot in Cape Girardo,
Missouri where you can you know, you're looking at you know,
you can look at a satellite map and there's farming
and agriculture all in the floodplains that where the actual
river channel is, and the river channel is much wider

(01:18:03):
than where the river is now. But you could see
the river channel when you put it into terrain view,
you know, you could see the topography, and you realize, wow,
you know, this whole channel has been basically carved out
as the river wiggles back and forth to and fro,
you know, and has done so, you know, over the

(01:18:23):
course of yeah, the last few million years. The Mississippi
River is really fucking old. I think. I don't know
the exact age, but I remember when I was in
Cape Girardo and I was looking all this stuff up
and I saw what looked like a mesa kind of
where it was, I think it was south of town.
And then it turned out not to be a mesa.
It was it was the old land mass that had

(01:18:45):
been carved out on either side by the river, and
what was on the river was now on the east
side of this meysa, but on the west side was
as I zoomed out and looked further south, I could
see that wasn't I could see that was basically the floodplain,
like the former channel of the river. And so because
that river had once run there, it had deposited all

(01:19:05):
the sediments that led to the cool uh those sand
prairies where you get a totally different cast of species
then the prairies like twenty five miles to the west
where there is no there is no uh river floodplain.
So it's it's it's new to me. It's fucking nice.
It's it's cool. It's more zooming out the scope of

(01:19:30):
you know, looking at things with the in thinking of
the context of time that it took for those channels
to be carved out, because the river right now is
like a tenth of the width of that channel. But
during flood events that would cause the river to overflow
its peaks and change course, shift course, and uh, and
it's been doing that for a long fucking time. So

(01:19:51):
and then of course, you know, you get the change
up in the geology or change up in the substrate,
which causes things like sand prairies where you get a
totally different cast of species than you we get on
a more music prairie. It's where that uh what was
it polygonum? Fuck, I forget the name of it. Let
me look this one up. Hold on, not polygonum, it
was it was polygonum at one point. Polygonella americana. God,

(01:20:14):
what a weird fucking plant. What a cool plant with
those tiny white flowers and juniper like leaves. But it's
a relative of buckwheats and polygonece. So so anyway, so
you know, we had a nice time looking at the
uh the geology in any area, like in Rock Island,
and what's the what are the Iowa cities? I don't know.

(01:20:35):
I forget fucking trains coming. Why's he doing it? That's
a little excessive. It's a little extra honkage of the
horn anyway. So uh, but then we you know the
funny thing about the venue in Rock Island. God, all
those Mississippi river towns have such a great such a
great uh the stings come by such a great vibe

(01:20:56):
to them. I remember, you know, when I was like
twenty five, I would just for ships and giggles, ride
trains to Fort Madison, Iowa, and just hang out there
for a day or two and come back right there
on the Mississippi, right off that Burlington Northern line. It
was a fucking one. It was just a wonderful place.
They had like a little movie theater there. It's probably
closed now, maybe they still got it. But I would

(01:21:17):
just go just for ships and giggles. Want to get
out of Chicago, Go ride a train, uh illegally a
freight train to Fort Madison, hang out for a day
or two, sleep in the bushes and come back and
just going through those those fucking river bottom lands and
the woodlands in the Midwest and smelling all that fucking

(01:21:39):
all the volatile compounds coming out out of the leaves
and the smell the humid air. Oh was so nice.
But uh anyway, but so yeah, So the venue was
this little coffee shop slash restaurant. Would have moved. They
used to have punk shows and movie nights and stuff
like that, but it was right around the corner for
a halfway house. So we kept getting, you know, people

(01:22:00):
that were kind of down on their luck coming out.
I don't know, maybe he's a rehab center. But we
got this one guy. He was like a nice old whino.
Well he might have been a little mentally ill, but
he came up and he tried to sell us a
granola bar. And when I declined, he spitefully looked at me.
He spitefully looked at me, you want to buy this
granola bar? Brother, And it was like one of those

(01:22:23):
Nature's Nature's Valley, you know, the ones' a little high fruit,
those corn syrup like ticket to diabetes. And uh anyway,
So and then he just I said no, and then
he's like what SI shoot you were And you know,
I know where this goes. I know it's fuck. He's
gonna he's gonna pull out like a pair of uh,
you know, half worn tennis shoes and try to sell us. Yes,

(01:22:44):
So I was just like, nah, man, I just I'm
not you know, I'm not wucking in through it. Good luck,
you know, all due respect. I just I just want
to be alone right now. And uh and then he
just spitefully looked at me again, and then he started
eating the granola bar that he was trying to sell me.
And then we had like four or five more instances
like that, you know, just just normal like street urchins.

(01:23:05):
It was literally harmless. Maybe a little annoy maybe a
little annoying, maybe a little sketchy, but with the two bad,
you know, I just mightbe get some property crime or something.
But uh but yeah, but then the show went good.
Like this little small town, like fifty people came out.
I forget how many. Maybe it was forty, I don't know,
but uh but yeah, I mean fuck the two hundred

(01:23:27):
and fifty people came out to the Kansas City show.
We were like two hundred for Saint Paul's when you know,
good old Meredith throw me a spiteful letter, bless her heart,
and uh yeah, it's just a good fucking show. So
maybe we'll plan one in the Southwest. I'll probably be
doing this again once the once Concrete Botany comes out

(01:23:48):
in April, if we're all still alive, you know, notock
on wood h And then today it was cool too.
I was I was at Garfield Park with my daughter
like two weeks ago, and we were walking going around
that I was just I was realizing that this is
such a great fucking spot. They've got so much rare
material there, both in the cactus House and the fern House,

(01:24:10):
and just a lot of cool plants with a really unique,
you know, ecological story like something that pollinates them or
or an evolutionary stories. You know there are they're this
weird relative that like they have a need them there
g n E t U M you know, relative of
Wellwitchia and Federa. And it's a healthy fucking need them too,

(01:24:32):
Like you can't really see I can't think of many
other places in the US, like conservatories or glasshouses where
you can see a need them they're from like the
Old World tropics and they're not cool until you see
the reproductive structures and you realize, yeah, man, this is
like a really weird evolutionary outlier that's not related to
a whole lot of other things that currently exist on

(01:24:54):
planet Earth except yeah, feder and they got they have
a couple well Witchi is too, only one is in
the ground. They've got a bunch of other rare cac die.
They got a boojump tree, Fukiria columnaris, and everything's labeled.
Most stuff is labeled, you know, with the family too.
So that was so it was cool. So I wrote,
I mean, I was gonna do it anyway, but I figured,

(01:25:15):
if I can get the backing of the organization, maybe
you know, the institution, why not. And so I wrote
one of the heads of the Botanic Garden or the
Garfield Park Conservatory and ask them if I can, you know,
how would you be all right with me holding a
tour here, because I just I want people to get
excited about this stuff. And my angle is the more

(01:25:37):
people know about the stuff that grows here, the more
they can appreciate it, and the more they can advocate
for it. If you know some whoever knows man. You know,
the administratorship at these places turns over, you know, more
often than you'd think, and maybe you get some guy who, like,
you know, has a fucking business degree and not much
horticultural knowledge, and he's in charge and he wants to

(01:25:59):
put in you know, annual begonias and fucking coly whatever
corny shit, you know, fill the beds with impatience and
horticultural garbage that has no educational value. And so you
get people to know that this stuff is there and
appreciate it, and they will come and they'll protect it.
And it was cool. I was talking to Ray, one

(01:26:21):
of the guys who runs the Desert I think he's
the dude that runs the Desert House. He's been there
like twenty five years, and he was telling me what
it was like when he started in ninety nine when
Garfield Park, like they used to get like twenty people
a week coming through there, and at one point they
almost got rid of that main indoor section, like the

(01:26:45):
main glasshouse, almost got rid of it and turned it
into tennis court or some shit, you know that kind
of shit because like, oh, you know, visitorship is down.
You get some fucking pencil neck in there, and he's like,
you know, visitorship is down. We gotta go.

Speaker 4 (01:26:57):
We gotta figure out a way to get people interested.
Why don't we turn it into a mini golf? What
this is too many golf, These plants are boring. Let's
do mini golf. It's a great opportunity. Even if it's rainy. God,
we could have a bitty golf course. You know, some
stupid shit, who knows. I've seen it happen all the way.

Speaker 1 (01:27:15):
Shit like this especially happens in Texas, especially in Texas.
A lot of bleak shit happens. They're not surprising that
it happens in Texas, Texas and many other other states
in the south southeast, So you never know. So but
maybe now you get people interested in and they're like, oh,
they got a fucking well witchia and it's you know,
a plant that's by lame ass mainstream horticulture standards. It's

(01:27:37):
not pretty whatever the fuck that means. It's not pretty.
Eight that's pretty. Eighth doesn't have pretty flowers. It's just
it's a wild ass plant with a cool evolutionary story.
There's fossils in Brazil and on the western coast of
southern Africa. You know, it's a remnant from a time
before the Atlantic Ocean opened up. So it's more related
to fucking redwoods than it is to any you know,

(01:28:00):
broad leaved die cat udicod right, and so people know
that they gotta fucking well witchy there. They got to
need them. They got all this cool stuff they got.
What is it, calum? I forget the name. It's it's
it's one of those. It's a cacta. It's a cactus
that produces flowers, uh, right out of the tissue. What

(01:28:21):
is it, sub SESSI list what's the species name? Hold on,
let me look this up. That was a mouthful even
for me. C A L y m m antheum. What
the fuck was I see? I'm already sucking it up.
Calum antheum c A L y m M A n
t h I U M substerile. And I think there's
how many? How many species are in here? I don't

(01:28:42):
know what's the c It's like there's four of I
don't know either. But the cool thing is that the
flowers emerge looking like new stem segments, and then you know,
the suddenly a flower emerges out of the time. It's
a really weird. It's a really morphologically unique practice species.

(01:29:03):
And I actually don't know more about it beyond that,
I've never encountered where is it Native Bolivia or some shit,
I forget, no Peru so but anyway, but it's a
weird one, and it's you know, there's I remember reading
about it before and encountering it in the literature and
it being in there. You know, how unique and bizarre

(01:29:23):
this genus is. And they fucking got one. You can
go see it at Garfield Park right in an otherwise
you know, somewhat botanically boring city except for the prairies,
but there's no prairies downtown. Well actually they're doing a
lot more of it, a lot more native plant things
in the city, you know, but in the temporal latitudes,

(01:29:43):
you know. So it is like a living museum. It's
a fucking living museum. That's what a botanic garden should be.
Instead of a show garden. It's a show garden. It's
just pretty. It's just good for the wedding backdrop in
the corporate you've heard me rant about this. We don't
need to get into it. It's part of the presentation
I was giving. And you know, shitting on traditional horticulture.
I need them, I need the I need to really

(01:30:05):
up the verbal attacks on it, because I think the whole,
the whole paradigm of American horticulture needs to change. There's
a place for all that corny shit, you know, the rich,
the rich board housewife stuff. You know, her husband's an
orthodontist or a you know, or a neurosurgeon or a
fucking lawyer or something, and she needs something to do
and she's at home, and you know, this is like,

(01:30:27):
that's like the typical I mean, that is very nineteen fifties,
but that is like the typical thing you would encounter.
I think for so long it had a lot of
these botanic gardens. It was just like just the whole
framework of and it was a total turnoff to anyone
that wasn't affluent and from that that class. Whereas if

(01:30:48):
you if you view plants and you've you view what's
interesting and beautiful from the context of evolution and ecology,
you know, there's such a deeper philosophical and and also
scientific understanding of the world you live in. It ties
into everything versus just some fucking you know, annual pogonia
species that doesn't even exist in nature. It was just

(01:31:10):
bread in a greenhouse by hybridizing two species that would
otherwise never encounter each other in the wild, and then uh,
and then back crossing them. And you know, it's got
it's got leaves that stay red throughout its whole life cycle.
So and that's attractive because plants. Plants are boring otherwise
and we need a gimmick to make them interesting. So anyway,

(01:31:32):
all right, well that's that's that. Uh, that ends it
for the rant for now. But I'll be in h
I'm going to Oklahoma City October first, at Native Plants
Nursery in Oklahoma City. And then I'm walking the dogs
right now. Actually we're just all walking like a pack.
Louis not even wearing a fucking leash. She never does.

(01:31:52):
You know. The coyotes come out at night. You could
see them lurking around the neighborhood. So Oklahoma City, October first,
October second, I'll be in McKinney, Texas. Whereas it it's
there Fort Worth or Dallas or I don't know, it's somewhere.
It's up there. And uh, and then I think I'm
done with the presentations for a while. And then uh oh,

(01:32:13):
and then I'll be at my friend Willie's nursery in
Austin on the twenty sixth or twenty seventh, and uh yeah,
and then I'm going. I think I'm going to Florida
for a week two to film Lake Wales Ridge in
mid October. I don't know where the fuck I'm going.
I have to check. I don't know. I want to.
I don't want to think about this right now. I
want to. I want to fucking lay down. I want

(01:32:33):
to lay down. I want to rest and relax and
not think about any of this stuff. And uh, you know,
light my fart's on fire and chuckle and fucking zip
of seltzer, smoke a cigar, drinking na beer, you know,
through some exercises, you know, maybe make a fucking juice.
I don't know. Anyway, if you came out the tour,

(01:32:55):
thanks a lot. If you want to download that Google
drive folder uh full of books, you can find it
on the Crime Paced website. Click on Midwest Tour and
then the Midwest Tour page and it'll be the link
will be at the bottom of the page right there,
and there's a link to the Angio sprim phylogeny poster
and some other goodies, some other relevant goodies for you. Yeah,

(01:33:20):
all right, well, enjoy the enjoy the dystopia and disconnect
from it and look at the living world every once
in a while. Okay, it's fucking good for you, all right,
that's all. I gotta have a go. Digo fox It
by

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