Cold | Snow Covered | Airbnb Scourge | Marcia Missing | Delinquent Taxes | Armando Quevedo | Joseph Smith | Circle Dance | Meet Kevin | Local Events | Scout Hike | Kelley Museum | Holy Weed | Mendocino Outlaws | Yesterday's Catch | Shovel Snow | Martinsville Bridge | Dark Day | Whitewashing History | Hotel/Saloon | Rigged Elections | Craig Willing | This Courtroom | Break Train | World Government | Jonah's Day | Jonah's Poem | Espanol | Wine Shorts | Deny Delta | The Golfer | Gaslit Fans | Looking Glass | Top Model | Midnight | Hinotama | Lead Stories | Spied On | Solidarity Culture | Talking Football | Wild Flashback | Snake Oil | Need Wine | Dostoevsky | Lonesome Journey
COLD TEMPERATURES are expected this morning. A mostly dry day is expected today until later this evening. An atmospheric river is expected to bring heavy rainfall, higher mountain snow and strong to very strong south winds this weekend and continuing into mid next week. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A possible record low 34F under clear skies with .24" of new rainfall this Friday morning on the coast. I do not recall a colder morning temp here ever ? Approaching clouds might bring some sprinkles before rain returns in earnest later Saturday. Monday is looking very wet currently but this remains an evolving series of systems to forecast so as often, we'll see ?
CHUCK DUNBAR:
We have many, many motels, especially on the coast, as well as regular b and b’s, state park camping sites, etc. We had plenty of tourists, and tourist related jobs, before the scourge of airb&b landed here. Housing is a critical need that should not be sacrificed to folks who avoid going to motels and want to stay in a “home-like” site–at the high cost of taking those homes away from families who want to live and work here.
POLICE SEEK HELP FINDING MISSING 78-YEAR-OLD SANTA ROSA WOMAN
by Isabel Beer
A Santa Rosa woman remains missing Thursday afternoon, Feb. 19, and police are asking the public for help locating her.
The Santa Rosa Police Department said Marcia Wilson, 78, was last seen leaving her home and walking east on Oak Street toward Hendley Street at about 7:52 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 18, on a neighbor’s Ring camera footage.
Wilson was wearing a brown jacket, brown sweatpants and possibly white shoes, according to a description from police.
Her disappearance comes as the region has been hit by a series of storms, with overnight temperatures in Santa Rosa expected to drop to about 34 degrees.
On this day in history: February 20
Authorities said Wilson has short gray hair, is 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighs about 135 pounds. She also has a scar on her forehead from a recent fall. Police noted she normally uses a walker but sometimes leaves home without it. She is not known to have any existing health conditions.
Wilson left her home without bringing any personal items such as a phone or wallet.
Police said that Wilson had been in communication with family up until she went missing and had last been seen in person on Feb. 15.
Santa Rosa police’s Violent Crimes Investigation Team, which handles missing adult cases, is actively investigating the case, according to Sgt. Patricia Seffens.
“There is nothing to suggest anything criminal is at play, it’s just because she is considered ‘at-risk,'” Seffens said on Thursday.
Anyone who locates or who has seen Wilson is asked to contact the Santa Rosa Police Department at 707-543-3600.
(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)
MEMO OF THE WEEK
(Mendocino County Treasurer-Tax Collector Chamise Cubbison seems to be finally getting serious about collecting delinquent taxes. — Mark Scaramella)
Date: February 9, 2026
Memorandum
To: Honorable Mendocino County Board of Supervisors
From: Chamise Cubbison, Auditor-Controller/Treasurer-TaxCollector
Re: Request to add 2 Senior Revenue Recovery Specialist Positions to TC and to recruit for Revenue Recovery Specialist I & II
I am requesting the addition of 2 Senior Revenue Recovery Specialist Positions to TC to increase the department’s ability to collect additional revenue through deploying multiple collection techniques beyond what the current staffing levels presently allow.
Ongoing challenges with the Property Tax System, the increased number of Property Tax Payment Plans, and the need for some staff to focus on critical tasks related to Auctions has increased the demands on current staff and is resulting in lost opportunities for more timely collection of revenue as well as the ability to employ more aggressive efforts to collect delinquent or defaulted bills.
This request is for 2 Senior Revenue Recovery Specialist positions that will be used to recruit or promote Revenue Recovery Specialists within the series of Revenue Recovery Specialist I, II, and Senior. The positions may be filled at their classification or underfilled within the series depending on budget and recruitment results. The positions will initially be requested to be filled at Revenue Recovery Specialist I & II.
The department anticipates meeting the assigned attrition factor for TC [Tax Collector] and covering the Fiscal Year 2025/26 remaining salary projection through savings from the vacant Investment Operations Analyst position.
Assumptions used to calculate the above amounts:
- Step5
- Health Insurance - Gold Employee Only
- Revised retirement rates for FY26.27
- PP0826 start for FY25.26
Thank you for your consideration of this request.
In a related move, Ms. Cubbison has put a collection services procurement item on the consent calendar for a $1 million contract with American Financial Credit Services out of Indianapolis to:
“Definition Of Services
County shall refer to Contractor with those delinquent personal property tax accounts, which County desires Contractor to skip trace, bill and recover. Contractor shall work those accounts, utilizing acceptable methods and procedures in a professional and ethical manner, in accordance with all federal and state laws.
To the extent permitted by law, County agrees to supply Contractor with the following information on each account referred via a medium agreed upon by the parties:
All necessary biographical and billing information in its possession.
Accurate balance due information.
Any other pertinent information or documents upon which the parties shall agree in writing.
Contractor shall provide County with notification of all County accounts on which it requests approval prior to filing a writ of execution to seize taxpayer assets or proceedings supplemental when freezing taxpayer bank accounts.
Notwithstanding any other provision of this Agreement, Contractor will not take any action required to seize taxpayer assets without the express written approval of the County.
Contractor will not settle or compromise any account referred to Contractor unless authorized by County or County Designee in writing.…”
(and so forth… with several more pages of accounting, tracking and contractual boilerplate)
We cannot find another example of a Califonia County contracting with a collection agency for delinquent taxes. It is usually done with in-house staff. It looks like it is rare, so there are likely to be some bumps in the road.
According to their website:
“American Financial Credit Services provides ethical and effective debt recovery services. Dedicated to collaboratively working with county offices to increase revenue by addressing their tax delinquencies. Committed to education and resolution for taxpayers, our highly knowledgeable team exceeds expectations, making a meaningful impact in the communities of our county partners. Through innovative and fair solutions, we restore financial integrity by empowering individuals and businesses to navigate their tax obligations.”
Their list of states that AFCS has customer counties in does not include California.
ARMANDO CECILEO QUEVEDO JR
We are sad to say we lost a really good man who put up a hard fight against not one, but two, aggressive cancers. Somehow he still managed to maintain his warm smile and love for people through it all.
Armando was born April 18, 1948, in San Francisco. He was raised by his father, Armando Sr., a Latin percussionist, and his stepmother Naomi, who was also in the entertainment and music industry. They managed, MC’ed and entertained at the once famous hot spot, The Sinaloa night club, in the heart of the city. Having a diverse musical family had a profound impact on Armando as a youth. He himself went on to be an accomplished drummer and percussionist of the 60’s era. He played with numerous popular bands, as well as those who were up and coming.
In 1967 Armando met the love of his life, JoAnne Aasved, of Fort Bragg Ca., while playing a gig. He had his love of music and now the woman of his dreams, but something was missing. In 1968 JoAnne began studying the Bible. She shared her excitement about learning God's name and the wonderful promises she discovered through her studies. Despite growing up in a multi-religious house Armando had never heard God's name. He was overjoyed to learn that God’s name is Jehovah and began studying the Bible along with JoAnne. They found what they were missing; a genuine hope with a real future to be brought about by God’s Kingdom. They were married May 10, 1969. A year later, on May 9, 1970, they were both baptized as Jehovah’s Witnesses and stayed busy sharing that hope with others. To their excitement, some of Armando’s closest friends and bandmates began studying the Bible and also became Jehovah’s Witnesses.
In 1971 they expanded their family with the birth of their son Justin. And two years later their daughter, Lorren was born. Armando was industrious, he truly felt there was no job beneath him. He often said, “Any job worth doing, was worth doing well.” This attitude was one Armando always carried. He did a variety of jobs, whatever was necessary to support his family. After a few years in North Dakota, Armando and JoAnne returned to Fort Bragg in 1973 where he entered the timber business becoming a faller. In 1976 he started his own business, Superior Pump Service. After long mornings in the woods he would work afternoons and evenings building up his new business. He was proud of his new business and happy to see it is still going strong today, as Superior Pump & Drilling Inc. However, his focus never drifted from what made him happy, sharing Bible truths with others. In fact, as you read this you may yourself remember a time he shared these Bible truths with you.
We want to express our gratitude to all the medical professionals who cared for Armando. To our local Adventist Intensive Care Team, your genuine care and professionalism were felt and appreciated. To our UCSF teams and support, thank you for getting him well enough to come home. And a huge expression of gratitude to our local hospice nurses, Haylee and Andrea, along with DeeDee. We could not have enjoyed as much time with him without your care and guidance. You rendered him, and us, an invaluable service. Thank you.
Armando is survived by his wife of 56 years, JoAnne Quevedo. Son Justin (wife Carey). Daughter Lorren Johnson (husband Loren). His four grandchildren, Sierra Barmettler (husband Mitchel), Chase Johnson, Elliot Quevedo, Kobi Quevedo. Along with many extended family members and friends.
A celebration of his life will be held at Caspar Community Center on March 7, 2026, at 3:00pm
OBITUARY FOR JOSEPH HERMAN SMITH
Joseph Herman Smith, born in Boston in 1947 to parents Melvin and Faye Smith, died on February 16, 2026 at home, on the eve of Year of the Fire Horse. Joe lived a vibrant, quixotic, and playful life, criss-crossing the globe, learning multiple languages, and making friends wherever he went. He spent the last 41 years on the Coast, where he was a fixture on the poetry scene, a volunteer at the State of the Ark, and a frequent flier at the Botanical Gardens.
In childhood, Melvin and Faye's military service took Joe to Berlin, Germany, Japan, and numerous other locales. That wandering spirit never left him, whether he was herding goats in Greece or visiting friends in Bali. While many in the community may remember him as an English professor, he also tended bar at the Old Coast Hotel, worked as a choker setter in Oregon, and had a myriad of other jobs, always in pursuit of the next great adventure. He held a Bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago and a Masters in English from the University of Oregon.
Joe loved reading, extremely syncopated jazz, and deep philosophical conversations with his children, friends, and correspondents. He was also a prolific poet and short story writer with a colorful style that matched his sometimes puckish personality. Joe was a deeply empathetic and caring man and in his honor, the family recommends performing a small act of kindness whether for a friend or stranger to carry his memory forward.
Joe is survived by his children, Eliza Brooks Lindsay, Cary Littlefield, and Simon Smith, along with his sisters Pamela and Cookie and their extended family. The family will be hosting a poetry reading and celebration of life in the coming months. σ'αγαπώ, Joe; we'll see you on the other side.
FREE LANCERS WELCOME
Circle dance this Sunday 3-5pm at the Mendocino Community Center
No previous experience or partners necessary! All dances are taught before each dance.
Dance is one of the oldest ways in which people celebrate community and togetherness, and the circle is the oldest dance formation. Circle Dance mixes traditional folk dances with new choreography's set to a variety of music both ancient and modern. Dances can be slow and meditative or lively and energetic.
Circle Dance groups are a grass roots phenomenon, with hundreds of dance circles in the US, England, and throughout the world. The Mendocino group has been dancing every month for over 35 years. As one dancer put it, “We are doing what people have been doing for millennia, on beaches, in forest glens, around campfires—dancing together in circles to express joy, passion, solidarity, pain and faith.”
For more information on Sacred Circle Dance go to http://www.CircleDancing.com
Tom Wodetzki ([email protected])
MEET KEVIN EVANS Candidate and for Mendocino 5th District Supervisor ,
“Voice for the People, Vision for the Future”
Thursday, February 26, 2026 Time: 7:00 - 8:30 p.m.
Community Center of Mendocino, 998 School Street
Learn about his platform and more importantly, share your concerns and ask important questions that you may have about issues in your neighborhood and the County as a whole.
Vote4evans.com
(via Chris Skyhawk)
LOCAL EVENTS (this weekend)
BOY SCOUT’S NAVARRO-NOYO HISTORIC TRAIL
by Katy Tahja
Yes, once upon a time Boy Scout troops could get permission to hike for seven days through timber company, private lands and Jackson State Forest. The hike was first done in the 1950s and last done in 1995.
Camp Noyo’s site had been used by Pomo Indians, later used for a lumber camp, and in the 1920s Fort Bragg Boy Scout troops could camp there arriving and departing on the Skunk Train. Often 500 Scouts a year would camp there.
Camp Navarro was a lumber camp for the Albion Lumber Company and later a CCC Camp during the Depression in the 1930s. In 1984, and again in 1995 Scouts reopened their trail, with permissions, between the two camps. Scout troops got certificates of liability insurance for land owners whose grounds they hiked over on logging roads. The Scouts walked six to nine miles a day.
From Camp Navarro on the Masonite Industrial Road they hiked up the north fork of the Navarro to Jack Smith Creek the first day. Next day further up the creek to Sheep Trail, across Johnson Creek to Matilla Road and on to Comptche-Ukiah Road, past Boomershine Mill and north down a logging road to south fork Big River. Third day was hiking down another logging road to Clarke Opening, and fourth day was hiking along the south fork to Big River. No mention was made of how or where they crossed Big River.
Fifth day mention is given to hiking in and out of the east branch of the north fork of Big River to a bridge near the little red schoolhouse on Highway 20, then east on Road 810 to Horse Camp for the night.
Day six took the troop back to the schoolhouse, west on Highway 20 crossing Chamberlin Creek, then north on Road 212 and west on Road 210 and north on Three Chop Ridge to Riley Ridge Road and hiking west to an un-marked road leading north to Camp Noyo (called Camp Silverado on old maps).
This jaunt across the county qualified Scouts for a “50 Miler” patch on their badge sash and a “Historic Trail” award. The troops would mark their routes on topographic maps and share this information, their menus for meals, what equipment they packed, etc., so that future hikers could apply the Boy Scout motto “Be Prepared” to their planning.
I would guess today it would be impossible to replicate this trip. There is only one Boy Scout troop left in Mendocino County in Ukiah and more industrial logging continues to take place. I like to think that for Scouts who loved nature, adventure, and their leaders, it must have been a memorable adventure.
KELLEY HOUSE MUSEUM PRESERVES PAST TO ENLIVEN FUTURE
by Carole Brodsky
Getting a personal tour of the Kelley House Museum by Board Member and Docent Jane Tillis is not just a treat; her presentations are a testimonial, underscoring the passion and purpose that staff and volunteers bring when they step into the Kelley Family’s 150-year-old historic home.
It was in the 1970’s when Beth Stebbins, Dorothy Bear, Nannie and Emery Escola established Mendocino Historical Research, Inc. Shortly thereafter, the Kelley House, built in 1861 by William Kelley began the conversion from a near-forgotten, unkempt property to a meticulously restored museum.
Today, the museum not only showcases the Kelley family. The historic home and grounds are a site for rotating exhibits. The museum is “ground zero” for the annual celebration of the iconic Murder She Wrote television series. The archives provide ways to research everything from newspaper articles to family genealogy and property records. The museum is a primary publisher of over 40 history books, the starting location for local walking tours and the repository for ephemera, photos and artifacts chronicling life on the Mendocino Coast.
Everything gets accomplished through the commitment of just two paid staff and a dedicated cadre of board members, donors and volunteers who recognize the importance of the history and culture of the Mendocino Coast.
The current exhibit, “A Woman’s Place Was Everywhere” could not be more culturally relevant. Tillis points out diaries and writings of the women who made and shaped local history- many behind the scenes. “Women did every type of work here. They were everything from teachers to prostitutes, shopkeepers to activists.” Due to the lack of male teachers on the coast, the teaching profession transitioned from men to women earlier than in most urban areas.
Coastal women faced social and legal challenges simply because of their gender. Millionaire, philanthropist and self-described “capitalist” Elise Kelley, daughter of William Kelley and Elizabeth Owen was born in 1866, becoming widowed at age 27. Following her husband’s death, she discovered she had been barred from inheriting several properties. She was granted the right to inherit her wealth by the California State Supreme Court. She became a donor to charitable causes in Mendocino and the Bay Area - founding the precursor to today’s Stanford Children’s Hospital. “Her case was significant because it determined that biology does not determine ownership,” Tillis continues.
The upstairs portion of the museum depicts what life in the Kelley household would have looked like during the Victorian era, with three bedrooms displaying clothing, furniture and art. For those not able to take the stairs, students from Mendocino High School’s Video Production Class created a short video taking visitors through the rooms. Perhaps the most charming feature of the bedrooms is the etching of the words, “Daisy and Abbie” in one of the windows- done by the Kelley girls at a young age. “I can’t imagine how they scratched those names onto the glass,” smiles Tillis. “Daisy probably used one of her mother’s diamond rings!”
But the museum is more than a paean for the Kelley family. The tragic and redemptive story of Look Tin Eli is in many ways playing out on the streets of America today.
Born in Mendocino in 1870, Look Tin Eli, or “Tin” was the son of a Chinese father and Native American woman. Tin’s father owned a general merchandise store that he advertised regularly in the Mendocino Beacon. They lived in the “Chinese” section of town, where they were allowed to run businesses but not own property. Immigration and citizenship were strictly controlled, and even the passage of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment excluded both Chinese and Native Americans from becoming American citizens.
Tin’s family sent him to China to receive an education, as he was barred from attending school in Mendocino. When he returned to the US, he was denied reentry. The family hired an attorney, and the California Circuit Court ruled that he was entitled to birthright citizenship - a case whose decision is still reverberating through today’s courthouses. Tin went on to become a prominent member of San Francisco’s Chinatown community, becoming president of the Canton Bank of San Francisco. He was instrumental in rebuilding Chinatown following the 1906 earthquake. “Some of the descendants of the first Chinese families that came to Mendocino still live here,” Tillis notes.
“Mendocino’s First People,” features the story of those who once resided on the land currently occupied by the museum - the Pomo, Cahto and Yuki tribes who traveled, hunted and fished here and were subjected to unspeakable injustices over the course of generations.
Preservation of and living in harmony with the land were foundational tenets of the First People. The Coastal Yuki resided from the Noyo River to Ten Mile River and northward. Shell mounds have been identified - areas where the Yuki people gathered, harvested and stored shellfish.
As the era of logging attained primacy, the world of the First People was upended and the genocide began, with 80% of California’s Native population dying of starvation, disease and violence during the late 19th Century. Children were sold as servants, with documentation that kidnappers in Mendocino County were given permission to shoot parents if they objected to their children being taken. Downtown Fort Bragg was once the location of the Mendocino Indian Reservation - a sprawling, 25,000-acre site overseen by the military. When it was finally closed due to mismanagement, it led to the forced relocation of coastal peoples to unfamiliar locations, such as Round Valley.
Daisy McCallum began collecting Pomo baskets in 1885, with the majority donated to the California Indian Museum in the 1930’s. Some have returned and are on display. With ten federally recognized tribes and two additional unrecognized tribes residing in Mendocino County, the Museum’s decision to enlighten visitors to the rich history of the First People was a significant one.
“We had several goals for this exhibit,” notes museum director Ann Semans. “We wanted to reflect the experiences of the First People who lived, and continue to live, in Mendocino. Secondly, we wanted to share and celebrate the Pomo’s rich culture. Finally, we wanted to tell more of the ‘hard history’ about the atrocities that nearly drove the Pomo to extinction.”
Bringing the exhibit to life was not without its challenges, Semans continues. “How do you tell the history of a people who lived here for over 15,000 years on two walls of a small house? Another challenge was showing that history. The photographs in our archives were taken following colonization, when Pomo life changed drastically. Images of the Pomo pre-contact are mostly non-existent, so we supplemented where we could with images from other collections and publications. Finally, the language used when referring to Native communities has evolved. We used terms preferred by the tribal members we worked with on this exhibit,” Semans explains.
Sometimes the best parts of a tour are “behind-the-scenes.” The museum archives are managed by Kelley House Museum curator Averee McNear. She is responsible for the exhibits, responding to research requests, the receipt of donations, maintaining the collection’s artifacts and acting as the museum’s educational liaison.
The museum is fortunate to have a vault. “It is temperature and humidity-controlled, and fireproof,” says McNear. Prior to its construction, archive materials were kept in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Hundreds of boxes contain the history of Mendocino, in photographs, slides, newspapers, records, physical objects and more.
One of the most sought-after sections of the archives concerns information regarding Mendocino’s historic buildings. “We have records of property, building receipts and information on homes. In the ‘90’s, a historic grant enabled staff to research properties. We’re constantly updating that material and adding as many buildings as possible,” McNear continues. “We are fortunate to have a lovely group of volunteers who help us on a regular basis.”
One item that captured the attention of this reporter: the first edition of the Mendocino Beacon, published in 1877. “Students who visit us on field trips love to look at physical newspapers.”
Family files are organized by last name. “We have records on many of Mendocino’s historic families. People love building family trees, so we receive many requests for this information.” The archives also contain maps, picture frames, historic clothing and textiles. “We rotate our textile exhibits frequently, in part because of sun exposure, and also because we know people enjoy seeing new items in the exhibits,” she continues.
The museum continues to accept donations. “A group of volunteers and I take a look at every donation and determine whether it aligns with the museum’s mission and whether we need it. We’re currently cataloguing dozens of family journals that were donated to us by a Kelley family descendant. Our archive volunteers each have a specialty. Even though we’re a small museum in a small town, I can almost always find someone who has an answer to a question.” McNear says she thinks she’s viewed about 20% of the archives. “We’re conducting an inventory soon, which I’m really excited about.” The museum offers an online, searchable service to the public which has garnered about 7,000 searches.
In an office that was once the add-on kitchen for the Kelley’s, Anne Semans is looking toward the future. For her, reconnecting people - particularly young people - to history is essential to preserve the relevancy and the significance of the Kelley House. As time goes on, she is examining more current moments in local history that are engendering public interest: the Back to the Land Movement. The “Save the Whale” activists whose efforts resulted in better protection for the cetaceans, as well as the development of today’s Whale Festival. The recognition of the earliest Kelley House volunteers, whose labor, vision and focus birthed today’s museum.
Semans believes in illuminating “hidden histories,” like those depicted in the Women’s exhibit and the story of the First Peoples. “We had some students visit during a Black Lives Matter event. Someone asked if any black people lived in Mendocino back in the day. I made it a priority to search, and found the story of Nathaniel Smith, the first black settler in Mendocino, born in 1852. He was a beloved resident who lived here for 50 years. We watch what students gravitate toward - what’s interesting to them. We had a student who never knew Mendocino had a racetrack. She went on to become a professional race car mechanic. Jane does wonderful trips with kids. Students receive a rich history of our town in four blocks, in just one hour.”
Semans has expanded museum tours to include a Historic District Tour and the Haunted Mendocino Tour, which is very popular with locals. “Everyone who lives here has their own haunting stories. Locals add so much insight and fun when they come on our tours.”
She had quite an epiphany when they rolled out their Murder She Wrote Film Tour, three years ago. “I had no idea of the interest in the show, and now, the Murder She Wrote Festival has become our most successful fundraiser.” Following the death of the series star Angela Lansbury, a spontaneous tribute for the actress popped up at the Blair House, where the show was filmed. “I discovered local folks remembered Angela for her generosity, engagement and philanthropy. This is our third year of the festival. Last year, people came from all over the world to be here. We sold out 200 tickets in one day, with 100 people on a waiting list.”
The “MSW” fan base feels deeply connected to Lansbury and her character. “There’s a nostalgic, endearing quality to this event, and now, multi-generations of fans are attending. Apparently during the pandemic, the show was on 24/7 in Italy, and it is still one of the most popular shows in syndication. This has been an incredible gift to us - I feel like it’s a little smile from Angela, coming from beyond the grave.”
As the organization approaches their 50th anniversary, they will be working with the Mendocino Land Trust on a natural history exhibit. The museum website features online exhibits, access to the museum’s published works and archives, ways to donate and descriptions of their tours. “Our goal is to continue to shine a light on all the ways Mendocino was, is and continues to be a remarkable place,” she concludes.
The museum is open Friday-Sunday from 11:00-3:00. For information on the Kelley House Museum, upcoming Murder She Wrote events, student field trips and more, visit https://www.kelleyhousemuseum.org, email [email protected] or phone (707) 937-5791.
(advocate-news.com)
THE PHILO CONNECTION: Big Sur Holy Weed
California is racing to save iconic cannabis strains before legalization kills them
by Lester Black
1) Kodiak Greenwood parked his truck on the edge of a dirt road in Big Sur and silently jumped out. Where are we going? I thought to myself. Maybe the cliffside mansion in front of us? I followed him in the midday sun as he crossed the road and scrambled up an embankment, weaving between green chaparral and yellow grass, following a trail you could walk by a hundred times and never notice. I was here only because I had agreed to not share the location with anyone.
We kept climbing, the Pacific Ocean unfurling hundreds of feet below us, until I looked up and saw a cannabis plant the size of a Christmas tree, bushy with fat green leaves and flowers that were just starting to form. It was Big Sur Holy Weed, Greenwood said, arguably the most mythical cannabis strain in California. I was finally looking at something I had spent the past year scouring the state trying to find.
The strain’s tale is iconic. It was supposedly created on the cliffs of Big Sur by a silent and reclusive monk named Perry. He had mixed together two seeds brought to him from Mexico and the Himalaya by outlaw surfers and hippies. This new weed was hypnotic, cerebral and energetic, nothing like the stony and downer pot of today, and it helped the monk meditate into spiritual heights. The hippies used it to power parties and drum circles. It was quickly exported around the world.
This story has elevated Big Sur Holy Weed into a rarefied status in the legal weed world. The strain was featured in a UC Berkeley oral history project, and the state of California is even spending millions of dollars trying to establish how precious strains of cannabis like this one could someday be as valuable as grape vines from Bordeaux.
It helps that the story takes place in Big Sur, one of the most beautiful places on Earth, where towering cliffs crash into white sand beaches and coastal fog hangs in massive redwood trees. It’s a strip of coastline that has attracted and inspired novelists, poets, musicians, painters and, more recently, billionaires.
But by the time I walked up that California hillside, I had spent months trying to find out who this monk was. And while I was convinced that something truly remarkable did happen in Big Sur 60 years ago, I kept running into dead ends. Experts started to sound like liars, the violence of prohibition seemed to have erased the evidence I was looking for, and death was taking out the legends who may have known the answer. Greenwood has as good a claim to Big Sur Holy Weed as anyone: He grew up in Big Sur, got his holy weed directly from an old-time gardener and is the last legal weed farmer in the area. But even as I stood next to him on the cliffside and looked at his cannabis plant with my own two eyes, I doubted if even he had the real Big Sur Holy Weed.
It almost doesn’t matter. A week after I left, Greenwood lost his permit to legally grow cannabis, and Big Sur lost its last legal cannabis farm. The state government is spending millions to save rare cannabis like Big Sur Holy Weed, but I found out that it may not even exist. And even if it did, legalization might be what kills it — or whatever is left of it.
2) I was 260 miles north of Big Sur the first time I heard about the holy weed. It was eight months before I stood on that cliff with Greenwood, and I was following a gray-haired Jim Roberts between two rows of towering cannabis plants. Roberts looked like a white-bearded Jane Goodall, standing in his Anderson Valley farm with the sleeves of his collared shirt rolled up and a friendly adventurer’s glint in his eye.
“I’ve got a weird garden,” Roberts said as he pushed a branch of pot flowers past his face. It was October, when the annual weed harvest arrives in Northern California and the local farms become heavy with ripe cannabis flowers. Most cannabis farms look like fields of Iowa corn with identical marijuana plants lined up in clean rows. Roberts’ Sugar Hill Farms is more like Dr. Seuss’ idea of a weed forest. The finger-like leaves of towering 20-foot equatorial varieties wave in the wind while squat plants with broad green leaves grow in pots nearby. Everything is built on sloping hillsides around Roberts’ stone villa, which looks like it was airdropped from Italy.
Roberts, 62, first started smoking weed in the late 1970s, buying bud from a friend’s older brother in Laguna Beach. He has made it his mission to grow plants like the ones he grew up with.
“I think there was something special about those plants,” Roberts said. “They’re maybe lower THC, but they could get you more stoned than anything else you can have today. So that’s been my passion … to go back and see what we have, what have we lost in this process, and to keep those genetics going.”
Roberts walked up to an enormous plant covered in green leaves and told me no plant better represents the ’70s than this specimen. He called it Big Sur Holy Weed. He pointed to the engorged buds, which were starting to turn dark. “It is completely purple, just purple, purple, purple. It’s a really nice smoke. It’s a hybrid, but it’s just pleasant. It’s uplifting, it’s not too overpowering,” he said.
He then started to tell the story he knew: that his plant was likely the child of cannabis varieties that had been smuggled to California by surfers sometime in the 1960s, where local hippies, and possibly a monk named Perry, developed it into a local favorite. He first smoked the strain in the 1970s, when he would cherish every time a shipment of Big Sur Holy Weed would show up in Laguna Beach so that he could smoke this rare, energizing weed.
Roberts’ farm has become renowned for his careful work saving these old strains, but neither the cannabis industry nor the state of California has rewarded him for it. California’s stifling regulations have made it nearly impossible to run small farms like Roberts’ where every plant has a story. I first met him in 2023, when his farm was nearly bankrupted by a new labeling law. Meanwhile, pot shops regularly reject these heirloom strains, instead stocking the highest-THC cannabis they can find at the cheapest prices possible, even though it’s become a cliche that legal weed is too strong. It’s driven the historic varieties Roberts loves to near extinction, and it’s turned the incredible diversity of cannabis into something very boring. A legal cannabis store may have a hundred different names of cannabis, but usually they are all shades of the same thing.
That’s a shame. Humans brought cannabis from its roots around 12,000 years ago in China to every continent other than Antarctica. Hundreds of years of endemic growth have created unique heirloom varieties native to nearly every part of the world. This turned cannabis into a kaleidoscopic plant with varieties as disparate as a Chihuahua and a Great Dane.
And then, through a series of coincidences starting in the 1950s, surfers and hippies carried these heirloom cannabis varieties from around the world and brought them to Big Sur, where, like a whirling dervish around a bonfire, they spun into something entirely new.
3) A sweeping camera shot pans over the rugged Santa Lucia Range, capturing the iconic Big Sur coastline as its cliffs crumble into the Pacific Ocean. The camera drops down nearer to the water level, flying just over rolling waves, as Oliver Bates, the founder of a local farmers association, introduces himself and then tells the story of Big Sur Holy Weed.
“There is this legend of a very special monk named Perry who had it in the vegetable gardens, just as a healing herb,” Bates says. “A very medicinal thing, actually. It was even rumored he may have used it for salves, not smoking, for pain relief and things.”
This retelling of the strain’s lore appears in a UC Berkeley oral history project documenting the stories of California cannabis. It may sound like a trivial pot project, but this work could actually be the thing that saves California’s legal cannabis industry.
Genetics underpin all commercial agriculture, from the rice you buy at Safeway to the French wine that Sotheby’s auctions off for hundreds of thousands of dollars a bottle. Certifying a prized commodity allows farmers and regions to charge more for the authentic varieties — that’s what allows Japanese ranchers to charge hundreds of dollars for every ounce of wagyu beef. Yet there is no way to certify the genetics or regional farms in the $70 billion global cannabis industry.
If a journalist like me wanted to verify that a farm was really growing gala apples, or a winery was really selling true cabernet sauvignon, I could take those products to a botanist who would be able to verify through genetic testing that they are accurately labeled. Nothing like that exists for cannabis. That kind of standardization is done by institutions like agricultural schools, federal regulators and scientists. Almost none of that is available to cannabis because it is still federally illegal. On top of that, a century of prohibition made it a criminal liability to keep notes on strain types and where you got them.
Here’s an example: Mendocino Purps is a classic cannabis strain that was developed in its namesake California county, yet there is no standardized definition of what it is or who first developed it. Any pot producer in the world can just slap that name on a jar of cannabis. The same is true of Big Sur Holy Weed: A cannabis company can grow mediocre pot in a warehouse thousands of miles away from the white sand beaches of Big Sur and still call it Big Sur Holy Weed without anyone stopping it.
While California’s iconic cannabis goes unprotected, companies like British American Tobacco are spending millions of dollars mining these historic cannabis strains, which could lead to patents to ensure that they have proprietary access to grow whatever they want. There’s a possible future where megacorporations come to own the genetics to legendary strains like Big Sur Holy Weed and start sending California’s pioneering farmers cease and desist letters when they try to grow and sell them.
These problems may be exacerbated if cannabis is legalized nationally or internationally. Once the plant can freely move across state and international borders, there will be little reason to grow cannabis in expensive California if you can do it for a fraction of the cost in North Dakota or Colombia and just label those products with iconic California strain names. That could completely cut California’s historic cannabis industry out of the legal market.
California’s lawmakers are trying to prevent this future. In 2017, the state Legislature created the initial idea of an appellation program that provides a legal framework to protect cannabis place of origin, envisioning a world where places like Humboldt County can protect their cannabis the same way sparkling wine producers in Champagne protect their wine. Nearly a decade later, though, the program is still not running, although the Department of Cannabis Control funded a $2.7 million grant in 2023 to interview cannabis pioneers across the state to document the cannabis genetics they’ve developed. The California Department of Food and Agriculture’s website says it expects the program to start taking applications from farmers looking to protect their products this summer.
These protections are particularly relevant for farmers like Roberts, who are running tiny operations and will likely only succeed if they have protections similar to the ones that farmers receive in other industries.
Before I left Sugar Hill Farms, Roberts grabbed some Big Sur Holy Weed from his stash and gave it to me. When I got back home to San Francisco, I took out a piece of the dried cannabis. It was long and slender and deep purple, with a slight twinkle of crystals. It had a pleasant but muted smell, some sweetness and some woodsiness. I ground it up and put it into a pipe and smoked it on my back patio. A familiar pulse ran through me, like the cells of my body had been individually switched on. I felt happy and curious, and without intending to, I walked back inside to my computer and started typing.
4) The only way I could find out if Roberts’ Big Sur Holy Weed was really this mythical cultivar was to find a continuous chain of custody stretching from his farm in 2025 Mendocino County to 1960s Big Sur. Roberts said he got his Big Sur Holy Weed seeds from a breeder named Hardy Nieto, who hunted for cannabis under the business name Cora Genetics. Roberts thought the seeds were authentic Big Sur Holy Weed, but he also admitted it’s extremely difficult to confirm anything in the cannabis world.
“It’s so slippery because you’re all going by stories,” he said.
I tried to contact Nieto through his Instagram, and his seed company, but never heard anything back. Later, I saw that Nieto died in August 2025. His friend posted to Instagram that he had died after dedicating “decades to preserving and advancing cannabis genetics.”
While I was looking for Nieto, I was also looking for another breeder Roberts had mentioned who goes by the mononym Kagyu. Roberts told me Kagyu was probably in his late 70s and had been collecting legendary cannabis since he started growing cannabis in the 1960s in Santa Cruz, just across Monterey Bay from Big Sur. Roberts said his weed looked just like Kagyu’s Big Sur Holy Weed, a sign he took for his plant being the real thing.
Kagyu had a digital footprint and at one point owned a company that was breeding and selling seeds. He had given some interviews on cannabis YouTube channels, talking about his work collecting historic strains. But Meta had shut down his Instagram account, and he wasn’t returning any messages sent to any of the email addresses I could find for him. No one I talked with could pass along a phone number either. I asked one source in Santa Cruz who runs a cannabis store; he said he would ask his network but then came back empty-handed.
“My little bro said he used to follow Kagyu on IG but he’s gone now,” he texted me.
My search for Kagyu was going nowhere, but I was at least learning more about Big Sur’s weed farming past. I’ve been professionally writing about cannabis for nearly a decade and have always known Northern California’s Emerald Triangle as ground zero for modern cannabis cultivation in America. But the more I read about Big Sur, the more I realized that narrative — one I had a hand in retelling — was incomplete.
Big Sur, with its 90 miles of rugged Pacific coast, has always attracted outlaws. The coastline rises over 5,000 feet in only 3 miles with hardly a flat piece of land, making it a good place to avoid the rest of society. The Spanish and the first U.S. surveyors described it as “probably the roughest piece of coastline on the whole Pacific coast of the United States.”
The land was originally inhabited by the Esselen Tribe, a small group of Native Americans who were forced into the nearby Spanish missions in the early 19th century. There were a few periods of industrial activity — gold was found, lumber was cut down — but Big Sur’s general inaccessibility kept the entire area mostly a wilderness well into the 20th century. It wasn’t until Highway 1 was completed in 1937 that real development came to the land. Novelist Henry Miller moved to Big Sur in 1944, signaling the beginning of a bohemian movement to the area. Jack Kerouac’s 1962 novel “Big Sur,” written during an alcohol detox at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s cabin in the woods, forever cemented the Central California coastline into the counterculture mindset.
By the late 1960s, San Francisco was overflowing with young people looking to reject the post-war American culture. Almost inevitably, the hippies outgrew the city’s tiny footprint, and many started heading south to Big Sur. By 1968, hundreds of hippies had set up camps in Big Sur’s backwoods, and the influx was causing problems. A San Francisco Examiner headline from May 13, 1968, proclaimed that a “Summer Migration Is Feared,” with the county sheriff “battling to stave off a possible summer migration of hippies from The City.” Big Sur’s rugged coastline had become overrun with pot-smoking hippies, and the key ingredients were coming together for the region to create an entirely new style of cannabis.
5) When the hippies were filling the Haight during the Summer of Love in 1967, they were almost exclusively smoking cannabis imported from other countries, mainly Mexico. That’s the pot they took with them to Big Sur when they started moving south a year later. Soon, though, they developed a local supply, thanks to a new conservative effort led by President Richard Nixon that inadvertently launched America’s cannabis growing movement.
For 10 days in October 1969, traffic across the southern U.S. border with Mexico was nearly completely halted while the Nixon administration conducted “Operation Intercept.” Authorities stopped millions of vehicles and travelers while they conducted “ten days of relentless warfare on the smuggling of marijuana and dangerous drugs across the Mexican border,” according to an October 1969 New York Times story.
This was one of the early salvos of the War on Drugs, which would ultimately destroy entire American neighborhoods with criminal penalties, deprive low-income Americans of their civil rights, and, much less talked about, build California’s entire cannabis farming industry by onshoring billions of dollars of cannabis production that formerly took place overseas. Nixon made it more dangerous to import weed over the border, so outlaws across the country started growing it themselves. Big Sur was a natural cultivation spot, home to poor hippies who loved weed, needed to make money and happened to live in a place cops couldn’t easily investigate. They started importing seeds from overseas and breeding them together, mixing genetics from countries like Mexico, Thailand and Malawi to create new breeds of marijuana.
Ten years after “Operation Intercept,” Big Sur’s cannabis farms were so well-known that they landed on the front page of the Sunday Los Angeles Times. On Nov. 25, 1979, a story about a hedonistic cannabis “harvest party” on Big Sur’s south coast and the burgeoning marijuana farming industry ran as the issue’s top item, ahead of news about the Iranian hostage crisis. The story profiled Patrick Cassidy, “a slender, bearded satyr,” and his 12th annual harvest party, which took place every fall. California had gone from growing almost no pot in 1975 to producing over 30% of the state’s supply, the paper wrote.
This coincided with the rise of a new growing technique, in which farmers started killing all of the male plants in their gardens, creating sexually frustrated females that grew larger, oilier and more potent flowers. The technique is called sinsemilla, which comes from the Spanish for “without seed,” because it creates unpollinated cannabis flower that lacks any seeds. The LA Times story reported on sinsemilla with incredulousness, writing that “apparently it works.”
The farmers of Big Sur did not invent sinsemilla — Mexican journalists have attributed its development to a drug trafficker named Rafael Caro Quintero, although he is not believed to be its sole inventor. But Big Sur played a huge role in spreading this agricultural revolution. The LA Times story explored how the region’s farmers were some of the first to cultivate seed-free cannabis. Three years before that article, a group of Big Sur farmers published a book titled “Sinsemilla Marijuana Flowers,” with full-spread color images, that documented how to grow seedless cannabis. It was printed 80,000 times between 1976 and May 1979. The book’s real authors have never been publicly revealed — it was written under the pseudonym Jim Richardson, with a forward by David Crosby — but Justin Donnelly, a Big Sur cannabis farmer, confirmed to me that his father James Donnelly wrote the book while living in Big Sur. The book’s only reference to the land is a final, full-page spread that shows a fanning marijuana plant backlit by the sun over the an ocean, a telltale sign of the Big Sur coast.
This puts Big Sur at the ground floor for the development of modern cannabis. These coastal crags are where strains were crossed from cannabis varieties smuggled from around the world and then given the sinsemilla treatment to make them more potent. Finding a specific legendary strain like Big Sur Holy Weed would be like finding a crucial piece of history.
That is, if it actually exists.
6) Being a journalist can sometimes feel like you’re trying to push a heavy boulder off a cliff. You pound and kick and throw your shoulder into the rock with all of your weight and nothing budges, until, all of a sudden, the boulder releases and crashes into the ocean below, almost taking you into the depths with it. So it went with Kagyu.
After reaching out to dozens of people and getting no closer to finding the mythical breeder, I finally sent one more email to an address with Kagyu in the name. A minute later, a man called me and said, “Hello, this is Michael.”
Michael Fratis, better known as Kagyu, was born in 1944 and found a spiritual connection to marijuana after trying it for the first time while serving in the Navy. Following his honorable discharge, he moved to Santa Cruz and started growing cannabis at an off-the-grid property in the nearby mountains of Bonny Doon.
“I didn’t talk to too many people in the ’60s about what I was doing. They would take your house and car and everything you owned in those days. I was a guerrilla farmer,” Fratis said. “I had a bunch of friends, but they didn’t even know I was growing.”
Fratis told me he hauled water from town and never built up a large growing operation because growing cannabis could land him in jail for life. He said he remembered buying Big Sur Holy Weed in the 1970s from other dealers and having it delivered in rose boxes. “This monk Perry, I never knew the guy, he supposedly bred it. My understanding is that it’s Mexican Zacatecas purple crossed with Afghani,” Fratis said.
A surfer traveling from Big Sur gave Fratis his holy weed seeds, and Fratis proceeded to grow out the plants until he had a consistent supply of seeds. That matched Roberts’ story. It was believable that a surfer could have been tight enough in the Big Sur growing community to get seeds directly from Perry the monk himself. Fratis was active long enough in California cannabis that his seeds really could be direct descendents of the mythical strain. I felt like I had finally found the real connection, the real proof that there was a monk named Perry and Big Sur Holy Weed really did exist.
So, I asked Fratis who this surfer was, if he happened to know his name, and when he got the seeds.
“I got that seed 15 years ago, around 2010,” he said. He didn’t know the surfer’s name.
Half a century had passed between the monk supposedly growing pot in the monastery garden and Fratis getting these seeds. Back to square one.
7) By the time Fratis called me, I had already connected with Mojave Richmond, a cannabis breeder known for his work bringing California cannabis strains to Amsterdam in the 1990s and helping to create a new wave of global cannabis genetics. He was born in Big Sur in 1969 to a family of cannabis growers. Patrick Cassidy, of “harvest party” fame in the LA Times, stayed with his family on Plaskett Ridge at one point, and some of Richmond’s first memories are of the legendary harvest parties. He lived without much electricity growing up and remembered taking baths at the Esalen Institute. If anyone was going to know about Big Sur Holy Weed, it was him.
Not more than five minutes after I had gotten him on the phone, Richmond shattered a year of my reporting.
“There’s all these different versions, but the real story is there is no such thing as a single Big Sur Holy Weed,” Richmond said. I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, wondering how I could justify to my editor why I had spent so long trying to find something that apparently doesn’t exist.
Richmond proceeded to unravel the elaborate stories I had spent months diligently writing into my notes.
To start, he said, it was scientifically impossible for any type of cannabis grown during the 1960s to be a single, consistent strain. It takes millions of dollars of agricultural science to create stable botanical seeds. The hippies of Big Sur were just openly pollinating whatever cannabis they had and collecting seeds, a haphazard technique that would have created wide variations in the resulting plant.
That’s why, Richmond told me, “there is no real lineage of Big Sur Holy Weed. It’s more a class of cannabis that was being grown at a time in Big Sur.”
Richmond took credit for some of the strain’s mythology, saying the name itself came from his own family home. A family friend — he couldn’t remember their name — turned to Cassidy and said, “Hey man, your weed is like holy weed.” That was it.
Richmond said he used to tell stories about his brother growing weed under the Franciscan monastery. He thought maybe that story had been twisted into this great legend of the monk named Perry.
My own reporting found reasons to doubt any monk was actively growing cannabis. Various retellings of the myth say that it was attached to the New Camaldoli Hermitage, the Tassajara Buddhist monastery or the Esalen Institute. The hermitage didn’t respond to multiple interview requests, but I found a definitive history of the institution written by Paula Huston titled “The Hermits of Big Sur.” The book profiles how a monk named Pedro Rebello helped establish the monastery, so I reached out to Huston and asked her if Pedro ever went by Perry and if she knew anything else about Big Sur Holy Weed. She said she would ask her friend who has been a monk at New Camaldoli for decades. She wrote back a few days later:
“First, there was never any Perry in the community, and Pedro Rebello was definitely not called by that name. And as I said, the Benedictines don’t grow cannabis or use any sort of drugs as part of their spiritual practice, and wouldn’t countenance its use within their community.”
I reached out to Tassajara, which is connected to the San Francisco Zen Center, and a friendly person quickly responded, linking me to David Chadwick, the author of a book about the center and its most famous teacher. Chadwick kindly told me he now lived in Bali but would reach out to some friends. He wrote back a week later, saying, “There was never any pot grown in the woods near there by students that I know of.” He said some people certainly smoked cannabis, but overall, it was “strikingly low” among the actual monks. He added a warning: “I assume the story surrounding it is a sort of myth made up to increase its appeal and any attempt to find a real Big Sur monk origin is doomed.”
The Esalen Institute never responded to multiple interview requests.
8) Richmond had shredded the last few strands of the story I was chasing. Dejected, I followed through on existing plans I had to attend a meeting in Santa Cruz. The organizers of the state-funded appellation study were inviting cannabis growers to join the project. Todd Holmes, the UC Berkeley historian who had filmed the video of Oliver Bates retelling the story that got my hopes up in the first place, was going to be there. At a minimum, I could tell him in person that the story of Perry the monk was bulls—t.
I arrived early to the meeting at a carpeted community center room with low ceilings and chairs arranged in a full circle. Holmes was standing in the corner, fussing with a video camera on a tripod, and across the room I noticed the same friendly gapped-tooth smile from the UC Berkeley video. I walked over to Bates and introduced myself. Bates told me he was no longer growing cannabis — legalization had made it impossibly expensive, he said. After the bare minimum of pleasantries, I shared the CliffsNotes version of what Richmond had told me. Bates didn’t seem taken aback. He just calmly said he believed the elders he had talked with about Perry. “Who am I to say their story isn’t real?” Bates said.
By now, more people had trickled in and taken their chairs. I counted 16 people in the circle, including six organizers and me. I heard one person say it was a good turnout. The organizers went in a circle explaining how their study was trying to establish protected cannabis growing regions around the state. One cannabis farmer said he felt like the whole project was capitalism obsessed with profit and trying to steal the magic of sacred cannabis, like friendly Smeagol from “Lord of the Rings” turning into a blood-thirsty, ring-obsessed Gollum. Mistrust still runs deep in the cannabis world. The organizers tried to reassure the attendees that their study was only the beginning, and that actually establishing appellations and protected strains would take far more work.
When Holmes spoke, he said, “We recognize that the community are the experts, and they should have a voice in that research.” Then he said something that sounded like the opposite.
“When we think about the historical foundation and the historical understanding of California cannabis, we really have schoolyard lore,” Holmes said. “We have some writing, but particularly in the academic realm and out there in the world, we don’t have much.”
I had to push back on this idea that the people telling “schoolyard lore” were actually the “experts.” It felt like giving a diploma to an 8-year-old who claimed a dragon lived in the woods behind the gymnasium. Later in the meeting, I asked Holmes point-blank: What good is his oral history if the person he’s talking with has told an outright lie?
He smiled.
“An oral history is a document that then can be analyzed after it’s done. Meaning, let’s say you go and interview 25 people, all of which are going to have variations dealing with a certain cultivar or a certain part of that history. That’s for later on, for us to double check that. What does the herbarium say, and what does the ethnographic interview say?” Holmes said.
I started to realize that Holmes was doing something that sounded like journalism but was in fact very different. He was a collector, not a validator. His work is necessary, given prohibition’s dark effects on cannabis.
Halfway through the meeting, Hannah Nelson, an attorney who has been representing cannabis growers for decades, pointed this out. “People like me were telling people for years to not write anything down or keep even a piece of paper,” she said. Now, I was using that lack of paper to call out today’s farmers. If marijuana were legal, some enterprising Big Sur farmer may have teamed up with a UC scientist to stabilize their genetics, and the parents of Richmond or Roberts could have kept photos and meticulous notes of their cannabis stock. I would be able to look at those documents and report that there was strong evidence to back up their stories.
But marijuana is not legal, so those photos would have been grounds to lock their whole families up for decades and have the government seize all of their money. So they don’t exist.
It was beginning to dawn on me that holding weed to the same standard as something like wine or wagyu beef ignores the biggest reality facing cannabis. In my rush to validate history, I was actually ignoring history. Yes, cannabis is unique and there are genetic lines and unique growing regions worth preserving, but it’s also been muddled by a century of violent criminalization.
I left the meeting feeling surprisingly better about this entire project. Or maybe I was just excited to finally visit Big Sur.
9) In my compulsive urge to find Kagyu, I had emailed every cannabis breeding website I could find. Almost no one got back to me, and if they did, they generally weren’t helpful, with the exception of one breeder. She said she didn’t know Kagyu but that I needed to talk with a guy named Kodiak Greenwood. “He has an incredible story,” she said.
I called the number she shared with me, and a man with a deep voice answered, tinged with an honest country accent that sounded more like it was formed by living near wilderness than near red Solo cups. He said he had Big Sur’s last cannabis license — but not for long.
“The permitting is just so challenging that I think I’m going to give up,” Greenwood told me. I asked him if he had any Big Sur Holy Weed, and he said he indeed had the real thing. I started asking more questions, but he said if I wanted to know more, we could meet at Deetjen’s, a picturesque inn set in the redwoods of Big Sur.
A few weeks later, I was sitting next to Greenwood at a short bar in the back of the inn, taking a stool that I realized was reserved for locals when a man sat next to me and put his own maple syrup on the bar top. Greenwood started to tell me his story. He was born in Big Sur in 1980 and grew up mostly on the coast with his mother, although he went to live with his father in Mendocino County for high school. He got into growing cannabis to make money and because he was fascinated by the plant, although he said he didn’t actually like smoking it.
He said he got seeds for his Big Sur Holy Weed from one of his father’s friends, an old-time grower from the southern coast of Big Sur who gave it to him and said, “Here’s something you may or may not like, but here’s some seeds from the original Big Sur Holy Weed.” Greenwood has since kept that original plant alive through a series of clones.
At this point, the inn’s manager, a man named Matt Glazer with a salt-and-pepper beard, walked over to us. Greenwood introduced me to Glazer, and I explained how I was trying to find authentic holy weed. Glazer said I was thinking about it wrong if I was looking for anything grown outside Big Sur.
“In France, they don’t give a s—t about the grape. They tell you where it’s from. That’s what matters,” Glazer said.
Big Sur’s geography is unique enough to create distinct cannabis. The crazy cliffs create temperamental weather; deep fog rolls off the ocean and lingers under redwoods but then burns off into a sharp sun as you climb higher up the mountainside. Long days of sun reflecting off the Pacific create unique growing conditions.
If Glazer is right, and the only thing that really defines Big Sur Holy Weed is that it’s cannabis grown in Big Sur, then the strain is going to fade fast. When we were talking at Deetjen’s, Greenwood was on the verge of losing his provisional pot farm license because he couldn’t upgrade his property to meet all of the state and local standards. A week after we met, his permit would lapse, and Big Sur would lose its last legal pot farm. Thousands of other legacy cannabis growers like Greenwood have already lost their licenses in similar ways, undone by onerous state regulations and sky-high regulatory fees.
“We’re going to lose an incredible amount of genetic diversity,” Greenwood said. “Strains will disappear.”
Sitting next to him at this dark bar in this beautiful place, I asked Greenwood what his holy weed was like. He said it has “exceptionally dense” buds and broad leaves — something I saw for myself a few hours later as we climbed the hillside to see his giant plants — and a heavy high that will “ruin your day” with its strength. This was the exact opposite of every other description I’d heard of Big Sur Holy Weed; everyone else called it energizing and uplifting and said it has narrow and sparse leaves. The holy weed I smoked from Sugar Hill Farms was racy and energizing too. Yet here I was in Big Sur being told the opposite.
I didn’t tell Greenwood he was wrong. It had been a year since I started trying to find the real Big Sur Holy Weed, and I no longer believed it was possible. Reality is not built from a series of true statements pulled out of thin air and written down in a reporter’s notebook. It’s created in a complex dance of people telling stories — some of them fake — and experts picking them apart, whether it’s a botanist or a lawyer or a journalist. There might not be a monk named Perry who grew a special type of cannabis, but the hippies of Big Sur did create new strains that went on to change cannabis forever. If enough cannabis farmers work together with scientists and historians, Big Sur could someday have its holy weed. As long as legalization doesn’t shut it down first.
(sfgate.com)
MENDOCINO OUTLAWS: A MOVIE IN THE MAKING
by Molly Dwyer, edited by Averee McNear
On October 15, 1879, the Beacon reported Mendocino had been “thrown into a state of excitement hitherto unparalleled by the occurrence of a shocking calamity … two of our most esteemed citizens were atrociously murdered and a third wounded within four miles of our town, their comrades narrowly escaping death.”
What made these murders so devastating was that the men had been deputized. Cattle had disappeared from a herd belonging to the Mendocino Lumber Company, and the slain men were ambushed in the line of duty. They rode into a trap set by killers who became known as the Mendocino Outlaws.
The tragedy began when constable William Host rode into the Big River Woods in search of evidence of cattle rustling. He discovered the remains of a half-buried steer, and the next morning Host returned with two deputized lawmen to investigate further. They spotted tracks and followed them to an encampment where four men lounged around a fire eating breakfast, beef curing in plain sight. Also in plain sight, resting against a redwood, were Winchester rifles, pistols, and abundant ammunition.
Host had no warrant. He feigned ignorance of the area, inquiring if the men knew of another good place to set up camp. The Mendocino Outlaws weren’t fooled; they knew who Host was and were waiting for him to collect local taxes, expecting to steal a haul of around $15,000.
Back in Mendocino, Host deputized a posse and set out the next morning with seven men. Among them rode 31-year-old James Nichols. A veteran of the Civil War, Nichols hailed from Ellsworth, Maine. He’d come west after the fighting and taken employment in the logging industry, working his way up the ranks to superintendent at the Mendocino Lumber Company.
Nichols wasn’t the only Maine native in the posse. Thomas Dollard came from Ellsworth, too. Born in 1843, he was a couple years older than Nichols. Dollard had left logging to join yet another Maine native, Henry Jarvis. They’d opened a thriving merchandising venture on the corner of Kasten and Main Street and Nichols and decided to throw his lot in with them.
According to “History of Mendocino County” by Lyman Palmer, the posse found the first camp abandoned. They tracked the bandits along Big River Ridge until they located a second damp deep in a ravine about a mile from the first. They worked their way down a steep precipice and dismounted to investigate. William Wright was in the lead. He bent over the ashes of an abandoned fire. According to Palmer, his final words were: “They must have stopped here last night.”
Wright’s observation disappeared in a hail of gunfire. The outlaws, positioned in the burnt-out trunk of a massive redwood, fired from the opposite side of the gully. Wright took a bullet as dozens of shots rang out in rapid succession. Only four of the posse made it to cover. Among those who didn’t were Dollard and Nichols. Dollard took a bullet to his thigh, returning fire as he fell back. Hit twice more, he rolled to the bottom of the ravine where he managed to crawl under a log in the creek. Nichols took a bullet to his shoulder, but he made it to his horse. He and another man got away and rode for help. By the time help arrived, however, Dollard was dead and Wright was close to it.
Two well-armed parties set out that same evening, and the next day more men joined the hunt. Within a week the governor had offered a reward—$300 for the first and $200 for each subsequent killer. It took 61 days to bring the shooters in.
The Carlson Hotel became a staging ground. Nichols and Wright were brought there to have their wounds looked after. Wright had taken a second bullet near his heart and remained “helpless and speechless.” He died the first night, his body removed to a room over the post office where Dollard had been taken. Nichols survived and had the great fortune of being nursed to health by the Carlson twins: Katherine and Bessie.
One can only guess what Katie Carlson felt. Rumor suggests there was talk of her marriage to Thomas Dollard, but evidence is scant. Two and a half years after the attack, James Nichols married Katie Carlson. Their daughter, born the following year, was Edith Nichols.
(kelleyhousemuseum.org)
ED NOTE: For the full Mendocino Outlaws story, readers might want to get a copy of Malcolm Macdonald’s book on the subject, “The Mendocino Outlaws,” available at Gallery Books in Mendocino: https://gallerybookshop.com/product/mendocino-outlaws-malcolm-macdonald
Much of the book was serialized in the AVA: https://theava.com/archives/tag/mendocino-outlaws
CATCH OF THE DAY, Thursday, February 19, 2026
RICARDO CAMPOS, 31, Ukiah. Under influence, contempt of court.
DEONNA FOWLER, 34, Potter Valley. Assault with deadly weapon not a gun, domestic battery.
DANIEL MEINECKE, 49, Arcata/Ukiah. Parole violation.
TASHA ORNELAS, 39, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, vandalism, failure to appear.
JEROMY ORSI, 49, Fort Bragg. Domestic battery.
MICHAEL PARKER, 48, Ukiah. Controlled substance with two or more priors, probation revocation, bringing controlled substance into jail.
ALWOOD SMITH, Ukiah. Vandalism, contempt of court, parole violation, resisting.
EARL VOGT III, 44, Lucerne/Ukiah. Failure to appear.
WHILE I SHOVEL THE SNOW
Well they say, can't please everyone
But I'm stuck on a winning streak
Well today there's clarity
And tonight I see tomorrow
All at once the winter's here
All the lochs are frozen over
As I look in back of me
See a shape beside the walkway
Half of my life I've been watching
Half of my life I've been waking up
Birds in the sky could warn me
There's no life like the slow life
So for now I'll take my time
For now I can't be bothered
Well I learned a lot of things
And I fudged a lot of numbers
Once again the winter's here
All the lochs are frozen over
So I look in back of me
See a shape beside the walkway
Half of my life I've been watching
Half of my life I've been waking up
Birds in the sky could warn me
There's no life like the slow life
— Peter M. Bauer, Walter Martin, Hamilton Leithauser, Paul Maroon, Matthew Frederick Barrick (2010)
A DARK DAY
Editor:
Feb. 19 is considered a Day of Remembrance in the Japanese American community because it is the anniversary of the date in 1942 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. That order forced 120,000 Japanese Americans, including my 16-year-old mother and her family, from their homes and into incarceration camps for the duration of World War II, marking them for the rest of their lives.
At this moment, it is more relevant than ever to remember that day since our nation is repeating this mistake. How can we as a nation and a people forget the lessons of history so easily? How many times will the United States remove people from their homes, separate children from their parents and incarcerate people without due process, all in the name of “security”?
I am astounded to see this happening yet again, but I am also encouraged to see grassroots organizations, communities and individuals standing up for what is right. If only this had happened in 1942. Would history tell a different story? Do what you can to take a nonviolent stand, act with compassion and kindness, and lend someone a helping hand.
Jodi Hottel
Santa Rosa
WHITEWASHING HISTORY
Editor:
The current administration is systematically dismantling the American soul by controlling media and the arts to erase uncomfortable truths. By whitewashing history — demolishing the White House East Wing and sanitizing Smithsonian exhibits — they replace diverse narratives of slavery and indigenous struggle with “pro-rich” fiction. This isn’t just aesthetic; it is an intentional demolition of democracy.
From the “Drill, Baby, Drill” exploitation of the Arctic to deep-sea mining, policy now serves personal enrichment over public health. While the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s retreat has cost consumers $19 billion, federal safety nets like FEMA are being drained to fund a sweeping immigration crackdown.
Meanwhile, the judiciary is packed with partisan loyalists to ensure these unconstitutional litmus tests go unchallenged.
This “neo-royalist” agenda prioritizes power-serving lies over the mistakes of the past, using tax dollars to undermine the right to fair elections and free speech. To dismantle federal departments and ignore historical truth is to leave the nation in ruins. There is no moral excuse for this vitriol and irresponsibility. To continue supporting this regime is to become an accomplice to the erasure of our future.
Jeff Stucker
Sebastopol
IF ELECTIONS ARE RIGGED….?
Editor:
Can a politician win two out of three elections and claim that America’s elections are rigged? Could the presidency shift back and forth between parties on a regular basis if elections were rigged? Could control of the Senate and House of Representatives fluctuate between the parties on a regular basis if elections were rigged? Just asking.
Dave Heaney
Petaluma
WE'RE AS RADICAL AS REALITY
I Am Willing To Return To Mendocino County
Warmest spiritual greetings,
I am willing to return to Ukiah, California, if the American society would assist me in getting into a senior subsidized apartment. An ideal location would be the yellow colored senior apartments near the corner of Gobbi and South State Streets, across from the Ukiah Co-op and Safeway.
Memo to Bruce Anderson: I am willing to return to Ukiah, if anybody in Mendocino County is willing to get real with me. Otherwise, it continues being completely ridiculous. I will let your actions define the finer points of your philosophy.
Please contact me.
Email: [email protected]
Mailing Address: P.O. Box 34181, Washington, D.C. 20043-4181
Telephone Messages at Adam’s Place Homeless Shelter (202) 832-8317
Yours for revolutionary ecology and a peaceful sustainable future.
HERE, IN THIS COURTROOM
Jury box. Flag. Bench.
Counsel tables. Witness stand.
Your basic courtroom.
A place purpose-built
To single out the facts proved
From the facts alleged.
Lawyers. Bailiff. Crowd.
Parties. Jurors. Witness. Judge.
Court reporter. Clerk.
Live participants,
Each aware each other’s here,
Seeing that it works.
Live testimony.
Exhibits. Offers of proof.
Objections. Rulings.
Serious action,
So consequential we can't
Turn ourselves away.
Here. In this courtroom.
— Jim Luther
THE CASE FOR CREATING A WORLD GOVERNMENT
by Anthony Leighton
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 the United States of America (US) became the world's premier hegemonic power.
Following the attacks on the World Trade Center the US declared wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both these wars the US committed documented war crimes. No valid reason was provided for the brutal attack on Afghanistan beyond the sanctuary they provided for Bin Laden, the presumed leader of the, mostly, Saudi Arabian, terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center. The war in Iraq was based on the false premise that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. In both countries guerrilla fighters with extreme religious values rose up to fill the void. In the end US troops and its coalition partners were mostly pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan. None of the US government officials were held to account for the lives lost and the lies they told about Iraq.
The political system in the US or any other country is not well suited for a unipolar hegemonic government. All countries inculcate their children with a sense of patriotism and a love of country, and all governments act to protect the interests of their people and country as a priority; the US is no exception. With the two party system and presidential elections every four years the political direction is subject to extreme changes. The voters in the US have a propensity for selecting charismatic individuals for President, often with little diplomatic experience and a lot of baggage. The President, considered by some to be the most powerful person in the world, is, usually, elected with less than half the potential US voters. The whole rest of the world has no say.
There are two current wars that the US is directly involved with; The war in Ukraine is a proxy war against Russia where US and members of The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), have been providing most of the weapons with Ukrainians doing all the fighting. Thousands of lives later there is no resolution. Ukrainians have fought with great valor, but are no match for the much larger Russian state. The Russian President Vladimir Putin has little interest in a settlement, his terms for a settlement have not changed since the war began.
The war on Gaza started in 1948 with what Palestinians call the Nakba, (the catastrophe), when many Palestinians were driven off the land that is now the state of Israel. During the six day war in1967 the Gaza Strip was one of several territories seized by Israel. In November 1967 the UN security council adopted resolution 242 calling for the withdrawal of Israeli troops in exchange for peace, but the status of Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights were never resolved.
Following the election of Hamas in 2007 Israel intensified its restrictions blockading Gaza which became the largest open air prison in the world. Since then Israel has periodically attacked Gaza to kill what they describe as terrorists in operations that have been described cynically by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as ‘mowing the lawn’.
On October 7 2023 Hammas broke out of Gaza and attacked Israel killing 1200 individuals and taking 250 hostages. Israel chose not to have a measured response, but imposed a complete blockade on fuel, electricity, medicine, food and water and commenced a bombing campaign, killing well over the acknowledged 61,000 Palestinians including civilian women and children, that continues to this day. Children are starving and dying.
President Biden, a self described Zionist, green lighted the endless supply of weapons now totaling more than $17.9 billion making US complicit in what the International Court of Justice, (ICJ), has described as a plausable genocide after South Africa launched a case on January 3 2024 alleging that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza amounted to genocide. So far President Trump has not suspended the supply of weapons.
On November 20 2024 in a UN Security Council vote on a ceasefire in Gaza, 14 countries voted in favor of the resolution. However the resolution failed to pass because the US used its veto power as a permanent member of the Security Council and was the only vote against the resolution. The US has used its veto power to block resolutions that were critical of Israel at least 46 times, each time reinforcing Israel’s sense of invulnerability. On December 11 2024 a non-binding resolution brought before the 193 member assembly at the UN demanding a ceasefire passed overwhelmingly with 158 votes in favor. The US voted no. The US government votes in its own interests, it sees Israel as its strategic ally in the Middle East. It clearly does not vote in the interests of the world.
The United Nations’ Security Council and the veto power that the five permanent, (P5), members have is an ‘achilles heel’ for the UN and highly undemocratic. It undermines the extraordinary work that the institution and staff have done so well and breaks down the fiduciary obligation of enforcement. The Secretary Generals one after the other have provided the preeminent and eloquent descriptions of what is happening around the world and what should be done to provide resolution.
Having a single country as a unipolar leader does not work. It sets up a perpetual state of conflict. The dominant countries compete for military and economic power using up resources that would find better uses domestically. If the tables were turned, as they might be, would the US accept Russia or China as unipolar leaders with Presidents Putin or Xi Jinping being the most powerful man in the world? Moreover is any single individual sufficiently enlightened to play this role without succumbing to the corrupting nature of power?
Almost all the countries that have hegemony in their history have committed what now would be war crimes and atrocities in their past. In a unipolar world it becomes hypocrisy to reconcile the fiduciary responsibilities of government with past behaviour. Powerful governments tend to ignore inconvenient fiduciary responsibilities. It is time to create an international institution that can fulfil the fiduciary responsibilities of government and enforce international law.
How the Institution Could be Structured
The proposed institution will be a representative government for all countries of the world, representing equitably the world's population.
The structure of the institution will be based on an equation of the population, land mass and gross domestic product (GDP) for each country. The equation will determine the number of representatives each country receives. It will also determine the financial responsibilities and contributions each country will have to make. A baseline below which smaller countries with scarce resources can find forgiveness from financial obligations will be provided.
The polity of the institution will be democratic; Each representative will have one vote. Issues will be reviewed in committee for recommendations and will come individually as legislation before the representative body for discussion and then a vote. There shall be no ‘bundling’ of issues. The vote will require a simple majority (50% +1) to pass. There shall be no ‘supermajority’ requirements. Then the issue will go before a tribunal of supreme representatives for review. There shall be a minimum of three supreme representatives, who shall be elected by the body of representatives, from within their ranks, for a term of six years every two years, staggered such that one third of the supreme representatives are either replaced or re-elected. They are tasked with reviewing the proposed legislation and if necessary making suggestions for changes. They will not have the power of veto. They may repeat this process three times after which the body of representatives will have the final vote.
The Purpose of the Institution
The purpose of the institution will be to fulfill its fiduciary responsibility to represent equitably the best interests of the world population. To follow, enforce and expand international law. To support the work of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and International Criminal Court (ICC). To provide a consistent approach to climate crises. To deal equitably with the evolving refugee crisis. To negotiate and help with conflict resolution to prevent wars. To stop nuclear annihilation. To prevent the distribution of lethal weapons of war. To provide the best educational options to every person. To eliminate hunger and starvation. To eliminate child abuse and child labor. To provide the best medical care for all people.
Committees should be formed staffed with preeminent authorities and experts on these topics to provide real solutions.
It is hoped that the institution will disincentivize the escalating battle for unipolar supremacy, avoid the evolving nuclear threat and be a trusted venue for diplomacy.
(Anthony Leighton, a retired boat builder and furniture maker, is a long time resident in Anderson Valley.)
JONAH'S DAY:
My day started with my cardiologist who is changing my heart medicine. I walked to Arizmendi on Valencia and bought brioche and two slices of pizza; the brioche was delicious. In the evening I went to City Lights to hear author Gioia Woods talk about Ferlinghetti & the bookstore. All the City Lights luminaries were there. Then in Lyft going home with a driver from Ethiopia who said it was fine to take his picture which I did after a long conversation which took us from North Beach to Japantown where I live.
POEM FOR TODAY FROM ME
I know I’m gonna die;
my body tells me so
and so does Ed, the
Tibetan Buddhist lama, who
says death is the
next big thing
in my life. But I don’t want
to die just now or even tomorrow
at the earliest.
I want to write one more essay,
take one last walk up and down
these hills in Japantown,
eat one last bowl of ramen at
Hinodeya, watch another movie
at the Kabuki 8, come home,
climb into bed and read the
latest issue of the
London Review of
Books, fluff my pillow,
turn off the
light and close my eyes,
perhaps never
to open them again.
One never really knows
if it’s the big sleep
or just another
long nighttime nap.
— Jonah Raskin
WHAT I'M READING
by Esther Mobley
More closures this week: Hotaling & Co., the distillery formerly known as Anchor Distilling, is shutting down its production facility at Pier 50 in San Francisco, Camper English reports in the Chronicle. It will continue to produce its spirits, including Old Potrero whiskey and Junipero gin, outside of the city.
Jacopo Mazzeo poses a really interesting question in SevenFifty Daily: As climate change transforms winegrowing, will more of the world’s wine appellations need to change their laws around which grape varieties, farming techniques and vinification practices are allowed?
Sales of very pricey wines aren’t suffering quite as much as the rest, Kathleen Willcox writes in the Drinks Business. She cites data showing that Cabernet Sauvignons over $200 grew by 14% in value recently, while those priced under $60 declined by 17%.
REP. JOSH HARDER URGES ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS TO DENY PERMITS FOR EMBATTLED DELTA TUNNEL PROJECT
by Dan Bacher
As the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers considers making a decision on the embattled Delta Tunnel, Democratic Rep. Josh Harder (CA-09) called on the federal agency to deny the federal permits required for the project to be completed.
The potential approval comes for the Delta Conveyance Project at a time when the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta ecosystem is in its biggest-ever crisis as the Delta Smelt becomes virtually extinct in the wild and other Delta fish species and Central Valley salmon populations decline dramatically.…
YES, GIANTS FANS SHOULD BE ANGRY — THEY’RE BEING GASLIT
by Dieter Kurtenbach
It seems my criticism of Tony Vitello’s bizarre press conference on Monday struck a nerve with some of the Giants’ blind faithful, because I’ve heard from countless black-and-orange supporters claiming I have it out for the team and their new skipper.
And while I’m sorry they didn’t actually read my column — or, frankly, anything I’ve written over the last few months — I was thrilled to hear from them. At least I know they’re awake. Forgive me for wondering if that was the case before this week.
Because the most damning thing to come out of camp recently wasn’t any of the strange, buyer’s remorse-tinged bellyaching from Vitello on Monday. No, it was Buster Posey’s interview on KNBR last week, and I didn’t hear an ounce of outrage about it.
And now that I have your attention again, Giants fans, I’d like to relay what he said:
“Look, I get it, from a fan’s perspective, they want us to go out and sign every marquee free agent. That sounds great in theory, but that’s not reality.”
That, folks, was grade-A gaslighting.
It’s a fundamentally ridiculous framing — an anchoring tactic designed to make any reasonable request for competence look irrational.
No one was out here suggesting the San Francisco Giants sign every free agent. No one was seriously expecting a fantasy draft where two Kyles (Tucker and Schwarber), Dylan Cease, Edwin Diaz and Michael King all landed at Oracle Park in a single winter afternoon. Even the Dodgers, the cartoon villains of spending, kind of sort of have a limit.
But how about signing anyone of consequence this offseason?
I can be more specific: How about a closer? There were a half-dozen legitimate ninth-inning arms on the market, and the Giants landed zero. How about a top-line starter to make a big three? Or how about some actual depth in the rotation rather than a prayer circle for health and prospect progression? How about a backup catcher who can hit?
I won’t even re-hash my gripe with the Luis Arraez signing — we’ll see how that plays out. (Though I fully expect to hear from a good number of you about that in a few months with the subject line “You were right.”)
Instead, Posey and the front office have resorted to business as usual. After a year of honeymoon spending — Matt Chapman, Willy Adames, trading for the bulk of Rafael Devers’ contract — the Giants’ 2026 pickups were a buffet of mid-tier, minimal-market, lets-take-alow- stakes-gamble free agents. It’s Tyler Mahle. It’s Adrian Houser. It’s Harrison Bader. All fine players in a vacuum.
But as a collective? It leaves you asking, “That’s it?”
This is the baseball equivalent of buying a couple of scratch-offs at a gas station and calling it an investment strategy.
No one is advocating for reckless abandon. But how about spending to the luxury tax line?
Because the San Francisco Giants are anything but poor. This is not a small-market team scraping by on local goodwill; they are the sole big-league baseball team in a massive market that is arguably the richest in America.
The books prove business is booming. According to CNBC, this franchise brought in $533 million in revenue in 2024. That was the third-highest mark in Major League Baseball, trailing only the Yankees and the Dodgers, and every indicator suggests that number will go up on the 2025 books.
This organization also reportedly has debt levels that would make Dave Ramsey weep with joy — a measly 4 percent of value. (The Dodgers are at 10 percent; the Rangers and Padres are at 25.)
This team cleared $65 million a year before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization — third-best in baseball, per CNBC.
Add in the fifth-highest overall valuation in the sport, and you have a juggernaut moneymaking operation with some nice, clean books. It’s a great business. It’s a great investment.
So why isn’t that investment being put back into the on-field product at a commensurate rate?
Why does this team’s projected luxury-tax payroll sit at 12th in the league, per Fangraphs? Posey, the player, understood that winning takes far more than lip service. But Posey, the executive, seems content to manage a massive talent debt to the Dodgers that grows larger by the day.
The Giants are betting on the upside of a bullpen that has already been strip-mined of talent. The Dodgers have at least four healthy bullpen arms that would close for San Francisco right now. If you include the guys on the IL, it’s six. (And the bullpen was the Dodgers’ weak point last year!)
The Giants’ 3-4-5 in the rotation is Mahle, Houser, and a youngster — probably Landen Roupp. The Dodgers counter with Shohei Ohtani, Emmet Sheehan, and Roki Sasaki. (To say nothing of Blake Snell, River Ryan, Gavin Stone, or Landon Knack.)
Posey seems to want to pass this off as prudence. It’s not prudent; it’s paralyzed.
The best-case scenario is that this is a front office terrified of making a big-money mistake, so they make the biggest mistake of all: betting on mediocrity.
The worst-case scenario is that they’re cheap.
At least when Farhan Zaidi was in charge, they leaned into that false narrative of prudence by constantly working the bottom of the roster. I don’t see that happening here. If the goal is to just hang around, win 81 games, and pray for a Wild Card spot, then congratulations — mission accomplished.
But don’t tell the fans who pay some of the highest prices in the league that they are out of touch for expecting one of baseball’s truly rich teams to act like it. It’s the fans’ money funding this whole thing, after all.
A bad team can be entertaining. A rebuilding team offers hope. A mediocre team that refuses to spend money that it absolutely has is just a bad relationship you can’t break up with.
I’m sorry to say it, but the Giants are currently one Logan Webb injury away from third or fourth place.
A true fan would hold their team — especially this team — to a higher standard than that. Because they deserve better.
Yet, the only thing the Giants seemed willing to spend freely this offseason was those true fans’ patience.
And it seems they’ll get away with it, all because there will still be troves more that will gleefully sign off and defend anything that’s black and orange — as weird, bizarre, or downright embarrassing as it might be.
(East Bay Times)
THE NEW NETFLIX AMERICA'S NEXT TOP MODEL DOCUMENTARY
by Maureen Callahan
If beauty is pain, America's Next Top Model was torture.
A new three-part doc on Netflix — Reality Check: Inside America's Next Top Model, currently the streamer's #1 show — purports to tell the savage truth behind the hit reality competition, with creator and host Tyra Banks in the hot seat.
There's only one problem here: Banks isn't apologizing. She won't cave to woke culture. In fact, she's doubling down.
Hallelujah.
Everyone has something to say about this doc — even ostensibly highbrow outlets such as NPR, Forbes and The New York Times have been forced to cover it in some way.
The UK Telegraph: 'The shocking story behind what was once the best reality contest on TV.'
HuffPost: 'Inside America's Next Top Model Isn't the Reckoning We've Been Waiting For.'
The Cut: 'Tyra Banks Isn't Sorry Enough.'
Sorry for what?
During its 15-year run (the show premiered in May 2003 and became an instant phenomenon), Banks gave girls and young women with no connections, no means and no money the chance to become not just working models but, possibly, supermodels.
But to hear these aggrieved former contestants put it, they were shocked — shocked! — to learn that models were expected to be stick-thin, to possibly undergo cosmetic interventions, and have the way they looked evaluated and critiqued.
To say nothing of their apparent incredulity at how ruthless reality television could get.
'The biggest disaster ever is always the best thing,' says ANTM exec producer Ken Mok. 'People have [a] 104-degree temperature. They're throwing up. They need IVs. That's the best news I could ever have.'
Hey — at least he's being honest. Unlike, say, an Andy Cohen, who often dresses up his exploitation of reality stars as empowering for them — liberating, even.
'I think it's really a feminist show,' Cohen told The Hollywood Reporter of his Real Housewives franchise in 2024, 'because it can be about women finding their voice or finding their power or discovering their sexuality.'
If by 'feminist' Cohen means humiliating these women at their lowest moments — drunken fights and falls, getting arrested, going to rehab, getting divorced, viciously outing other cast members' drug habits or financial frauds or same-sex relationships — then sure, call it 'feminist'.
The worst you could say about America's Next Top Model is that Banks initially drew contestants in with something of a fig leaf — her show, she said, was an attempt to push back at an industry that had one standard of beauty: thin and white.
But once the show took hold, everyone knew what they were really signing up for.
'When we started filming I was a size 6, I was 5'10" and weighed 115 pounds. I thought I looked good, but then you go on TV and you're like, "Oh shit, maybe not,"' Cycle 10 contestant Whitney Thompson says in the doc.
'It was a big juxtaposition [sic] to go into the fashion world where people are like, "You're such a fat cow." It was just demeaning.'
Here's the deal: Thompson was already very thin for her height. But that was not thin enough for high fashion, where disordered eating, drugs, cigarettes and Diet Coke were the usual calorie restrictors.
Is that completely effed up? Yes, of course.
Then again, Ozempic wasn't available yet.
Are we really going to blame Tyra Banks for the institutionalized faults of the fashion industry and/or competitive reality TV — both of which have their fair share of known casualties?
The blood oath, the Faustian bargain of reality TV, is this: If you lack talent, intelligence, connections or status, but are dying to be famous, this genre will give you that shot.
In return, you agree to be ritually humiliated, degraded and bullied. That's it. That's the deal.
And so, one contestant agrees to sit in a dentist chair for hours and have four teeth yanked to 'fix' her smile. Another, Cycle 6 winner Dani Evans, resisted closing the gap between her two front teeth, but lacked the fashion knowledge to cite '70s supermodel Lauren Hutton and her gap when pressured by Banks — and she ultimately went along with it.
Nothing comes for free, but these griping ex-contestants would have us believe they thought America's Next Top Model was a finishing school.
The trope of revisiting cultural phenomena through a woke lens, as is attempted here, is utterly pointless. Everything is a product of its time. This doc expects us to be outraged that two challenges required every contestant to switch races — white models in blackface, black models turned Asian.
But guess what? Every contestant went along with it.
Most cynical, to my mind, is former contestant Shandi Sullivan blaming production for not intervening after she got drunk — 'blacked out,' she says — and had sex with a male model on camera.
It's reframed here as a possible sexual assault, rather than a poor personal decision that left her disconsolate because she knew her boyfriend back home would dump her.
Should production have intervened? Ideally, yes, as they did on a 2023 Below Deck episode in which a blackout drunk stewardess appeared to be nearly assaulted by a male castmate.
But reality TV will always go as far as it can, and as far as network lawyers will allow.
Is producer Mok remorseful? Not here.
'We treated Top Model as a documentary', he says.
As for Banks, not only will she not be shamed into false apologies, but she's about to come back with more of ANTM.
'You have no idea,' she says, 'what we have planned for Cycle 25.'
And either despite — or due to — this documentary, there will be no shortage of willing contestants.
(DailyMail.co.uk)
HINOTAMA
The ball of light rose piteously
in the west
and lingered in space
Children
stood together after dinner
and watched the ball of light pronounce
long syllables
The children were meant to remember it
reconnect with it
grow old with it,
grow dreams over
the imprint they made
of what they left behind
a bitter yet beautiful
endangerment of life
— Brandon Shimoda (2022)
LEAD STORIES, FRIDAY'S NYT
Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump’s Sweeping Tariffs
President Acknowledges That He Is Weighing Limited Strike on Iran
With New Momentum, Republican States Push Broader Limits for Trans Americans
In 2025, Trade Deficit in Goods Reached Record High
MAHA Moms Turn Against Trump: ‘Women Feel Like They Were Lied To’
January’s Winter Storm Was Brutal. So Are the Heating Bills.
Some Reese’s Treats Drop the Milk Chocolate. Mr. Reese Disapproves.
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
I have a question, given that independent journalists are of interest to the various governments, does any of this surprise or shock you? Back in the 1970s the press and the government had a very adversarial relationship. It is only somewhat recently, 20-30 years, that this has changed. Are you surprised at the depth and breath of the corruption, malfeasance and pettiness of these people? Anyone who points out errors, corruption, thinking differently has a file on them. Writers, artists, community leaders, students, everyone, now has a file about their activities, hobbies, and work. This goes far back to WW2. We know now that we are being spied on by our own government whether or not legally or illegally. Just a fact.
TALKING FOOTBALL WITH NIXON IN 1968:
by Hunter S. Thompson
"It was a big yellow sedan with a civvy-clothes cop at the wheel. Sitting next to the cop, up front, were two of Nixon’s top speechwriters: Ray Price and Pat Buchanan.
There were only two of us in back: just me and Richard Nixon, and we were talking football in a very serious way. It was late — almost midnight then, too — and the cop was holding the big Merc at exactly sixty-five as we hissed along the highway for more than an hour between some American Legion hall in a small town somewhere near Nashua where Nixon had just made a speech, to the airport up in Manchester where a Lear Jet was waiting to whisk the candidate and his brain-trust off to Key Biscayne for a Think Session.
It was a very weird trip; probably one of the weirdest things I’ve ever done, and especially weird because both Nixon and I enjoyed it. We had a good talk, and when we got to the airport, I stood around the Lear Jet with Dick and the others, chatting in a very relaxed way about how successful his swing through New Hampshire had been…and as he climbed into the plane it seemed only natural to thank him for the ride and shake hands….
But suddenly I was seized from behind and jerked away from the plane. Good God, I thought as I reeled backwards, Here We Go … “Watch out!” somebody was shouting. “Get the cigarette!” A hand lashed out of the darkness to snatch the cigarette out of my mouth, then other hands kept me from falling and I recognized the voice of Nick Ruwe, Nixon’s chief advance man for New Hampshire, saying, “God damnit, Hunter, you almost blew up the plane!”
I shrugged. He was right. I’d been leaning over the fuel tank with a burning butt in my mouth. Nixon smiled and reached out to shake hands again, while Ruwe muttered darkly and the others stared down at the asphalt.
The plane took off and I rode back to the Holiday Inn with Nick Ruwe. We laughed about the cigarette scare, but he was still brooding. “What worries me,” he said, “is that nobody else noticed it. Christ, those guys get paid to protect the boss….”
“Very bad show,” I said, “especially when you remember that I did about three king-size Marlboros while we were standing there. Hell, I was flicking the butts away, lighting new ones …. You people are lucky I’m a sane, responsible journalist; otherwise I might have hurled my flaming Zippo into the fuel tank.”
“Not you,” he said, “egomaniacs don’t do that kind of thing.” He smiled. “You wouldn’t do anything you couldn’t live to write about, would you?”
“You’re probably right, I said. “Kamikaze is not my style. I much prefer subtleties, the low-key approach — because I am, after all, a professional.”
“We know. That’s why you’re along.”
Actually the reason was very different: I was the only one in the press corps that evening who claimed to be as seriously addicted to pro football as Nixon himself. I was also the only out-front openly hostile Peace Freak; the only one wearing old Levis and a ski jacket, the only one (no, there was one other) who’d smoked grass on Nixon’s big Greyhound press bus, and certainly the only one who habitually referred to the candidate as “the Dingbat.”
So I still had to credit the bastard for having the balls to choose me — out of the fifteen or twenty straight/heavy press types who’d been pleading for two or three weeks for even a five-minute interview — as the one who should share the back seat with him on this Final Ride through New Hampshire.
But there was, of course, a catch. I had to agree to talk about nothing except football. “We want the Boss to relax,” Ray Price told me, “but he can’t relax if you start yelling about Vietnam, race riots or drugs. He wants to ride with somebody who can talk football.” He cast a baleful eye at the dozen or so reporters waiting to board the press bus, then shook his head sadly. “I checked around,” he said. “But the others are hopeless — so I guess you’re it.”
“Wonderful,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
We had a fine time. I enjoyed it — which put me a bit off balance, because I’d figured Nixon didn’t know any more about football than he did about ending the war in Vietnam. He had made a lot of allusions to things like “end runs” and “power sweeps” on the stump but it never occurred to me that he actually knew anything more about football than he knew about the Grateful Dead.
But I was wrong. Whatever else might be said about Nixon — and there is still serious doubt in my mind that he could pass for Human — he is a goddamn stone fanatic on every fact of pro football. At one point in our conversation, when I was feeling a bit pressed for leverage, I mentioned a down & out pass — in the waning moments of the 1967 Super Bowl mismatch between Green Bay and Oakland — to an obscure, second-string Oakland receiver named Bill Miller that had stuck in my mind because of its pinpoint style & precision.
He hesitated for a moment, lost in thought, then he whacked me on the thigh & laughed: “That’s right, by God! The Miami boy!”
I was stunned. He not only remembered the play, but he knew where Miller had played in college."
WILD FLASHBACK
"It was the ultimate horror,” Thompson described afterward in a letter to a friend. “The final groin-shot that only a beast like Daley would stoop to deliver. It was an LBJ-style trick: no rest for the losers, keep them on the run and if they fall, kick the shit out of them."
After the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago Hunter Thompson wrote this “wild flashback” about the tumultuous event. It is the first time he uses the character Raoul Duke as his alter ego.
August 29, 1968
Woody Creek, CO
"Sometime after midnight on Wednesday I was standing in Grant Park about ten feet in front of the National Guard’s bayonet picket fence and talking to some Digger-types from Berkeley. There were three of them, wearing those Milwaukee truck-driver hats with mustaches instead of beards, and their demeanor—their vibes, as it were—made it clear that I was talking to some veteran counter-punchers. They were smelling around for a fight, but they weren’t about to start one; they had a whole park to kill time in, but for their own reasons they’d chosen to stand on the front line of the Mob, facing the Guardsman across ten feet of empty sidewalk. Behind the line of bayonets, Michigan avenue was a crowded no-man’s land full of cops, TV cameras and barbed-wire covered jeeps … and on the other side of that moat was the Conrad Hilton, its entrance surrounded by a wall of blue police helmets and big sheets of plywood covering the windows of the street-level Haymarket Bar—where, several hours earlier, the plate glass had been shattered by human bodies pushed completely into the bar by the crazed police-charge.
The Berkeley digger-types were convinced that the earlier action was only a preview of a clash that would probably come before dawn. “The bastards are getting ready to finish us off,” said one. I nodded, thinking he was probably right and not even wondering—as I do now—why he included me. I was, after all, a member of the official, total-access press. I had that prized magnetic badge around my neck—the same one that, earlier that day, had earned me a billy-club shot in the stomach when I tried to cross a police line: I’d showed the badge and kept on walking, but one of the cops grabbed my arm. “That’s not a press pass,” he said. I held it under his face. “What the hell do you think it is?” I asked … and I was still looking at the snarl on his face when I felt my stomach punched back against my spine; he used his club like a spear, holding it with both hands and hitting me right above the belt. That was the moment, in Chicago, when I decided to vote for Nixon.
The Berkeley trio had noticed the press tag at once, and asked who I worked for. “Nobody.” I said. “I’m just sort of getting the feel of things; I’m writing a book.” They were curious, and after a jangled conversation of bluffs, evasions, challenges and general bullshit, I introduced myself and we shook hands. “Thompson,” said one of them. “Yeah … you’re the guy who wrote that book on the Hell’s Angels, aren’t you?” I nodded. The one closest to me grinned and reached into his jacket, pulling out a messy-looking cigarette. “Here,” he said, “have a joint.”
He held it out to me, and suddenly, with no warning, I was into one of those definitive instants, a moment of the Great Fork. Here I was in Chicago, in a scene that had all the makings of a total Armageddon, with my adrenaline up so high for so long that I knew I’d collapse when I came down … ten feet in front of a row of gleaming bayonets and with plain-clothes cops all around me and cameras popping every few seconds at almost everybody … and suddenly this grinning, hairy-faced little bugger from Berkeley offers me a joint. I wonder now, looking back on it, if McGovern would have accepted a joint from McCarthy on the podium at the Ampitheatre … because I felt, at that moment, a weird mixture of panic and anticipation. For two days and nights I’d been running around the streets of Chicago, writing longhand notebook wisdom about all the people who were being forced, by the drama of this convention, to take sides in a very basic way … (“once again,” I had written on Monday night, “we’re back to that root-question: Which Side are You on?”) And now, with this joint in front of my face, it was my turn … and I knew, when I saw the thing, that I was going to smoke it; I was going to smoke a goddamned lumpy little marijuana cigarette in front of the National Guard, the Chicago police and all three television networks—with an Associated Press photographer standing a few feet away. By the time I lit the joint I was already so high on adrenaline that I thought I would probably levitate with the first puff. I was sure, as I looked across that sidewalk at all those soldiers staring back at me, that I was about to get busted, bayoneted and crippled forever. As always, I could see the headlines: “Writer Arrested on Marijuana Charges at Grant Park Protest.”
Yet the atmosphere in the Grant Park that night was so tense, so emotionally-hyped and flatly convinced that we would all be dead or maimed by morning … that it never occurred to me not to smoke that joint in a totally public and super-menacing scene where, as the demonstrators had chanted earlier, “The Whole World is Watching.” It seemed, at the time, like a thing that had to be done. I didn’t want to be busted; I didn’t even agree with these people—but if the choice was between them or those across the street, I knew which side I was on, and to refuse that joint would have been—in my own mind—a fatal equivocation. As I lit the thing I realized that I’d lost the protection of the press pass, or at least whatever small immunity it carried in Chicago, if any. That billy-club jolt in the stomach had altered my notions of press-leverage.
With the joint in my hand, glowing in the night as I inhaled, I figured, well, I may as well get as numb as I can. Then, in a moment of fine inspiration, I took a nice lungfull and handed the joint to the AP photographer standing next to me. His face turned to putty; I might as well have given him a live hand grenade … and then … then … like a man stepping up on the gallows, he put the thing to his lips and inhaled …
… and I knew I was home free, or at least I wasn’t going to be busted. He’d been standing there very cool and observant waiting for something to happen on the front lines while he stayed on the balls of his feet ready to run when the bayonets came; I could almost feel him over there, a heady presence, vaguely amused at this flagrant felony being committed under the eyes of the National Guard and taking sides, himself, by declining to photograph us … it would have been a fine Chicago Tribune-style photo: “Drug-Crazed Hippies Defy the Flag” … and then, it was his turn. When he put the joint to his lips and drew on it very skillfully I knew he had measured the balance of terror and decided that it was safe, under the circumstance, to smoke a joint in public.
I admired the man, and liked him even better than I had the night before when he’d bought me a drink out on Wells street. We had both been caught in a police charge, and instead of running with the mob we had both ducked into a bar, letting the cops sweep on by. Now, 24 hours later, he was sitting on another flash point, smoking a joint—a strange gig for a press photographer. They are a weird breed, estranged in every way from pointy-headed reporters and editorial writers. If reporters are generally liberal in their thinking, photographers are massively conservative. They are the true professionals of journalism: the End, the photo, justifies anything they have to say, do or think in order to get it. Police brutality, to a good press photographer, is nothing more or less than a lucky chance for some action shots. Later, when his prints are drying in the darkroom, he’ll defend the same cops he earlier condemned with his lens.
All this was running through my head as the joint came back to me and my sense of humor returned along with my sense of taste and I realized, after three or four tokes, that I was smoking really retrograde shit. “Jesus,” I said, “this is awful stuff, where did you get it. Lake Michigan?”
The fellow who’d given it to me laughed and said “Hell, that’s THC. What you’re tasting is old Bull Durham. It’s chemical grass synthetic stuff. We soaked it in THC and dried it out.”
Bull Durham! Synthetic grass! I was tempted to jam the butt of the thing into the little bastard’s eye … all those terrible charges and I wasn’t even smoking grass, but some kind of neo-legal bastardised Bull Durham that tasted like swamp corn.
It was just about then I got the first rush. THC, DMZ, OJT—the letters didn’t matter, I was stoned. Those bayonets suddenly looked nine feet tall and the trees above the park seemed to press down on us; the lights across the street grew brighter, and bluer, and they seemed to track me as I wandered off to see what was happening in the rest of the park.
It didn’t take me long to realize that I’d blown my keen-eyed observer thing for that night, and that I should get the hell out of the park while I could still walk … The scene was bad enough with a perfectly straight head; peripheral vision was the key to survival—you had to know what was happening all around you and never get out of range of at least one opening to run through when the attack came. Which was no place to be with a fuzzy head … I aimed for the stoplight at Balboa street and lurched across to the Hilton bar. A 500 pound cop with blue fangs stopped me at the hotel entrance and demanded to see my neon magnetic hotel press pass. It was all I could manage to find the thing and show it to him, then I aimed myself across the lobby toward the bar, where it suddenly occurred to me—I had promised to meet Duke at midnight.
Now, as closing time neared, the bar was three-deep with last minute drinkers. The desperate scene outside seemed light-years away; only the plywood windows reminded those of us inside that the American Dream was clubbing itself to death just a few feet away.
Duke was sitting with Susan at a table across from the bar. They didn’t see me and I stopped for a moment around a corner, standing in a dark spot near a table full of Humphrey delegates with their badges and straw boaters and noisy homefolks chatter … waiting for my head to clear; “nobody gets stoned on Bull Durham,” I muttered. “What’s that?” said one of the men at the Humphrey table. “Bull Durham,” I replied … and he turned away.
Duke was hunched down on the table, with both hands on his drink and talking very easily. She—Susan—the girl with that electric memory, was sitting next to him, watching his hands as he talked … smiling that same vague smile I remembered from … what? Five years ago? Yes—almost six now—in San Juan.
She looked thinner, not much older but her eyes were bigger and her cheekbones were sharp … a woman’s face, no more of that wistful virgin thing. I gave my head a quick snap—an acrobat’s trick, they say, to stop the whirling fluids that keep us balanced in those little horseshoes of the inner ear … and then I advanced on the table, feeling perfectly balanced.
Duke looked up, and for an instant I thought he didn’t recognize me. Then he smiled: “Goddamn,” he said. “It’s about time.” I nodded and sat down in the booth, with words piling up in my head and saying nothing, looking across the table at Susan and smiling, or at least trying to. I felt very obvious—as if everybody in the place was watching me, waiting to hear what I’d say. Susan smiled, “Hello,” and I nodded, croaking out an echo, then looking away and calling for a drink. “Some dope fiend from Berkeley just got me stoned,” I muttered. “I’ll get my head straight in a minute—just ignore me.”
She laughed, reaching across the table to touch my wrist—and I jumped, just as the waitress arrived and I ordered a beer. “What kind?” she asked, but I waved her off: “Any goddamn kind, just a beer, a large bottle, terrible thirst … ”
Duke was watching me with a flat, undecided sort of half-stare; I could see it without looking at him, but when I leaned back and faced him he smiled instantly. “You’re a traitor to your class,” he said, “sneaking in here to drink with the over-thirty generation.”
“I’m thirty,” I said. “This is my time, my perfect moment … ” And I suddenly felt straight; the THC fog was gone, a bottle of beer appeared in front of me and my world came together again. I looked at Susan and smiled. “I saw you at the Fillmore last year,” I said. “But when I tried to get backstage they threw me out.”
“Oh … ” her face was confused. “You should have called me, or told them you were … or something … ” Her eyes flicked up at me, then away, looking down at her drink … confused, like me, by five years of living in different worlds. The last time I’d talked to her, in San Juan, she was hysterical at the airport, waiting for the plane that would take her back home to Connecticut for a rest, a hideout, a refuge—away from that nightmare scene of the beach house and the Carnival and Duke, and even me … I felt like touching her, to say hello in a better way than I had—but it seemed like the wrong thing to do. Duke was curling down on the table like a cold wire, sipping his drink without lifting it off the formica. The scene was too weird, too heavy—none of us could handle it, too much had happened, and too far apart.
“Well … ” Duke shrugged and sat up straight in the booth. “What the hell is wrong with us? Can’t we talk like human beings?” He looked at Susan: “Let’s do it like an interview, sweetie. You’re famous now, and we’re just a couple of rude journalists … where’s your public manner?”
She looked at him, not quite smiling, then turned to me: “Are you as uptight as he is?”
I shrugged, fishing in my pockets for a match. “Yeah,” I said.
— Hunter S. Thompson
"Gone are the pure days when I used to get excited in life, now I need wine for excitement."
— Jack Kerouac (1958)
DOSTOEVSKY
against the wall, the firing squad ready.
then he got a reprieve.
suppose they had shot Dostoevsky?
before he wrote all that?
I suppose it wouldn't have
mattered
not directly.
there are billions of people who have
never read him and never
will.
but as a young man I know that he
got me through the factories,
past the whores,
lifted me high through the night
and put me down
in a better
place.
even while in the bar
drinking with the other
derelicts,
I was glad they gave Dostoevsky a
reprieve,
it gave me one,
allowed me to look directly at those
rancid faces
in my world,
death pointing its finger,
I held fast,
an immaculate drunk
sharing the stinking dark with
my
brothers.
— Charles Bukowski (1997)
(Stating The Obvious Again)
To take a position on any hot local issue means the candidate will alienate a good portion of the electorate and maybe that’s why they don’t take one, or more than one, except for vague platitudes uttered to get elected without rocking the boat…
And then once elected, they continue their delivery of anodyne nothings so as not to jeopardize their chances for re-election…
(More of the obvious)
The present situation requires “setting up shop” for automatic writing. Automatic writing means letting the Spiritual Absolute flow through the body-mind complex without interference. I would appreciate the postmodern American society being supportive of this. At this time, I need to move out of the Washington, D.C. homeless shelter, which I have no further need of, since the legally permitted Peace Vigil in front of the White House (24/7 365 since June 3, 1981) was removed by the current presidential administration, because it was out of step with the new aesthetic design for the District of Columbia. At this moment, I’ve got $4,900 in the bank checking account, $147.16 in the wallet, $167.34 in the EBT account, and enough health insurance for a family of four. Thank you very much. Please do what you can. PEACEOUT
Craig Louis Stehr
Adam’s Place Homeless Shelter
2210 Adams Place NE #1
Washington, D.C. 20018
Telephone Messages: (202) 832-8317
Email: [email protected]
Mailing Address: P.O. Box 34181
Washington, D.C. 20043-4181
February 20, 2026 Anno Domini