Starting life over in my mid-fifties as a “starving artist” pot grower with colon cancer no medical insurance no money and no idea what the fuck I was doing from one day to the next is not something to put on a polished curriculum vitae or a futile resume. Eh, Professor?
But. In the truly depressing year 2010. Figuring that I had maybe two to five more years to live?
Well. Let’s figure it. We’ll do the numbers right now.
I was diagnosed with stage 3c colon cancer in 2009. Five years of survival in the cancer world is considered “a cure”. What that means is… they don’t roll the dice… play with the tumbling numbers… beyond five years. If a person survives five years… and the odds aren’t good… they call it “a cure”. If the cancer returns with a vengeance, in a new, highly aggressive mutated form… as a direct result of chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy… in five years and… one day?! Which is quite common by the way
My dear friend Lorna’s breast cancer returned the day after they declared her “cured”. It spread like a California wildfire into her lungs and bones. And then she struggled on for another year and a half with a new, highly aggressive, mutated form of her old breast cancer which was directly related to her former… chemo/radiation… western medical treatments of five years prior. They told her to “go talk to hospice”
She chose to go work with Lorin Smith, a Kashia band Pomo Indian medicine man who lived/lives on Stewart’s Point Rancheria in Mendocino, California. We traveled together many times to visit Lorin in his hand-built traditional roundhouse.
Lorin was/is the most humble man I have ever met.
Lorna believed in Lorin. And his kindness. His exceedingly humble… “dirt poor”… Traditional Native American healing ways.
Hell. I believe in Lorin!
I saw the undeniable miracles myself!
How he kept her alive is a mystery. But. I was there.
And I witnessed him RAISING THE DEAD TO LIFE! more than once.
Many times.
When her former oncologist saw her by chance at the COOP in Arcata buying organic vegetables… a year and a half after she had been told to “go talk to hospice”… she was thunderstruck to see that Lorna was still alive. But. Lorna was tough. She had some unfinished business to attend to before leaving this world. We journeyed together for a time. And then she went on ahead of me bravely, with no regrets. Into the mystery.
That was a year or two before I was diagnosed. And then my good friend Karen was diagnosed with colorectal cancer a year or two after I was diagnosed. Karen chose to do it her way. That is. No chemo. No western medicine. Karen was very strong. A spiritual person. A believer in magic and alternative medicine. A fighter for the natural world. Much stronger than I am. She went into the mystery, too. Around 2015? Hard to say. I lost track of her on the… flower-petal path… in the fog of time.
Oh well. Syonara Zetsubou Sensei.
Goddess bless.
Point is. I was diagnosed in 2009.
2009 + 5 = 2014
Best guess… of dice and men.
So. To be perfectly honest. Very little art got made from 2009-2012. Twenty-ten was just a dire struggle in a smoky tunnel of blistering “chemo fog” to keep the lights turned on. Pacific Gas and Electric… PG&E… as we call them here. PG&E had a very enlightened policy back in those days. As a residential user of electricity used more amounts of electricity, they charged a higher rate. Usually it’s the opposite, right? Use more, get a better rate. But, no. As a grower of indoor weed, as a pot grower using larger amounts of electricity. In my case, 10 1000watt lights, a large
exhaust fan with charcoal filter, half a dozen air circulation fans, a couple of dehumidifiers, space heaters, water pumps, etc. In my case, my electricity bill was steep. A couple of thousand dollars a month. And. It kept going up. Up and up and up. They knew they had us. They knew we couldn’t complain. They were getting rich quick. They had it all figured out. We could either opt out of residential growing. Move into commercial space and pay a premium there to landlords who knew what we were doing and… were on the take as well… Or
Or what? That’s just it.
My goal when I started growing weed indoors was to make enough money to provide a home for my kids. I chose a house almost too close to a school so my kids would be able to walk to class. I chose a solid redwood framed, toxic mold free, bright, sunny cheerful three-bedroom, one-and-a-half bath, single-story ranch built in 1963, with skylights and a nice view into an open, lively cow pasture just outside the city of Arcata town line. In what is called “the bottoms”. The bottoms is a flood plain along the Mad River where cattle are grazed for local free-range, organic beef products. It is an area open to the vast sky, flat and green, with just a few farm houses and lots of white egrets, blue herons, black ravens… and the largest indoor/outdoor flower growing facility in the United States, Sun Valley Floral Farms… a Dutch conglomerate that puts fresh flowers into the markets all the way to the east coast of America daily, weekly, monthly… year round, twenty-four and seven.
My goal was actually to buy a house, pay it off as quickly as I could, and offer it to my disgruntled ex… or rather, the mother of our shared children for life. In the hope that I might… somehow convince Debbie dearest. To move out with our children to Arcata, California. At least. That is what I imagined was my goal when I started growing very highly prized flowers in my own single-car garage in 2006.
Anyhow. Those “best laid plans of mice and men”…
You know the story.
Keeping the lights turned on. Paying the mortgage, taxes, insurance, upkeep… household bills. Paying child support. Paying medical bills. Buying clones, nutrients, soil… Trying to sell those meager pounds of pot
with the wholesale price of pot always going down down down… and the prices of everything else going up up up
Oh. And did I mention getting broken into and robbed three times?
One time late on a Sunday night. It was New Year’s eve and I had to drive my kids and their mother up to Crescent City an hour and ten minutes north. So they could catch a cheaper plane flight home to Vermont. They had been visiting me for Christmas. I think that was 2011?
Gone for a couple of hours on a Sunday night and boom. There it was. The front door swinging open in the rain. And that sinking feeling again. I’ve been robbed. I’ve been violated. Wonder what it’s going to look like in the house this time? Wonder how many doors have been smashed open? How many locks and jambs have been broken? How many drawers have been emptied, paintings ripped off the walls, plants cut down…
Yeah. Pot growing is a pipe dream.
A few folks who are really good at it, and… by being really careful and getting really lucky. Or. By being father, mother, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, son, daughter, first, second, third cousin… or married to… the county sheriff
Some few do alright.
But, the naked truth is. Most of us lose our sweaty shirts, our dirty pants, and our stinking underwear doing it.
There is nothing glamorous about
Yo, man. Look at me. I’m a Big Gangsta Growa makin it Big Time… Livin the Dream… Gettin “Rich Quick” Bitches!!
Uh huh… Forget it.
And then the police came and smashed the doors down and really destroyed the house… stealing everything they wanted
Cops with all their self-pitying, self-aggrandizing, self-justifying… passive-aggressive authoritarian… murderous macho behavior… are just another rival gang of lying thieves with state-issued licenses to break and enter and steal!
Don’t kid yourself. The whole “Criminal Justice System” is just that
CRIMINAL!!
Justice is an inside joke between the DA, the district county judges, the lawyers for hire and their attack dogs… the crooked cops.
Hello Judge Judy.
Everyone who isn’t growing a garden, owning a business, or… actually being creative… taking chances… and producing something of value that everyone else wants to buy, own, or steal
Like a sweet green loaf of A-1 organic indoor sour diesel, headband, og kush, pure kush, master… at $3000 a pound
Is either sleepwalking, afraid of the risks, or dead.
A third of Humboldt County clocks in for Humboldt County!
Two-thirds of Humboldt County works for themselves in the Good Old American… highly entrepreneurial, highly unregulated, highly out-of-control… mad mad mad wild western world
The Good Old American Way Damn It!!
Screw the goddamn environment!! Fuck the government!! Chop down the forests!! Plunder the landscape for gold!! Damn up the rivers for power!! Fish out the oceans for groceries!! Run out the native people!!
And when there’s nothing else to rob from the land or your neighbors… from the forest or the ocean or
Well, damn it!! Start planting pot as fast as you can!!
Dig it?
So the fourth time… the time when the real criminals, the uniformed pros… the local Humboldt County Drug Task Force cops… showed up!?
That was far worse than the teenage tweakers and hit-and-run amateur thieves!! What they did to destroy my house was serious damage in comparison. It took months to repair what that team of gorillas with shiny badges… broad axes, twenty-pound sledge hammers, and forty-eight inch crow bars… on speed accomplished in a few short, blind-raging minutes
And then they shut the electricity off for months in the middle of winter and did not turn it back on again until I had paid and paid and paid
So-called Humboldt County “inspectors”… stinking drunk… staggering at lunchtime!!… who visited my house over and over and over
Coming up with absurd new requirements… like a new lightning rod!?… for me to accomplish before the electricity and gas could be turned back on
And me, a harmless fifty-seven year old man… tending my own garden… with no aliases, no guns, no tattoos, no criminal record… not even a fucking parking ticket in twenty years!!
Me! A veritable Poster Boy for the Illicit-If-Not-Illegal Multi-Billion Dollar Medical Marjuana Industry of Northern California! Me! The truly small time grower of a miraculous money plant… that everyone and his grandmother was benefiting from in one way or another
THE TRUE SACRIFICIAL, UNOFFICIAL CALIFORNIA CASH COW!!
Yours truly. A sad, pathetic loser in the terminal stages of cancer… growing a medicinal herb… a benevolent flowering green plant in his garage… in a house he owned himself and payed thousands of dollars of taxes to the county on
They robbed me blind and left me in the cold! In the falling rain
And went to Disneyland!!!!
In their shiny new Italian leather hobnail boots they bought from the money they stole from me
My fucking life’s savings!! Everything I had.
Sixty… seventy grand?
So. Take it from me, bro.
Find another career. Before it’s too late.
Yeah. That was bright and early on Monday morning, September 2012.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
When the SWAT team from the Humboldt County Drug Task Force in full riot gear and the film-makers from The Discovery Channel showed up at my second grow house… the one where I was living
PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR!!
STEP OUT OF THE HOUSE!!
GET OUT! GET OUT!!
OUT OF THE HOUSE!!!
Cameras rolling
PUT YOUR HANDS ON THE VAN! HANDS ON THE VAN!!
SPREAD YOUR LEGS! SPREAD YOUR LEGS WIDE!!!
“Is that a three-legged cat…..?”
Good luck, Motherfuckers!!
