With a Huff and a Puff... Hash Oil Explosions

Houses and motels, basements, apartments, downtown, Colorado, Illinois, Florida… Your kitchen and your space is used for making hash. Extracting hash oil, that is. THC. Cannabinoids – there, just let that word sink in for a moment…

It was that legalization legislation of 2012. You’re not just ok to smoke pot; you can process and sell it, too. American innovation. Like brewing beer at home. Or making little bitty Etsy crafty stuff.

“The explosions occur as people pump butane fuel through a tube packed with raw marijuana plants to draw out the psychoactive ingredient tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, producing a golden, highly potent concentrate that people sometimes call honey oil, earwax or shatter. The process can fill a room with volatile butane vapors that can be ignited by an errant spark or flame.”

Colorado had 32 of these explosions in 2014. No one was killed, as of Jan 2015. People claim they were cooking (not entirely false), and the law doesn’t quite know where to take it, either. Or at least not consistently. People go up for arson (pun subconscious; left in).

And the people get burned. Their homes or workspaces end up with the walls bulging out from the explosions, and the people who were inside take the skin off their arms and legs.

“O'Connor said the blast was so powerful that it blew the roof off the structure, hurled an aluminum roll-up garage door across the street and displaced all four walls, throwing one of them 20 feet.”

It’s the butane element that does it, both for the fireballs and for the law. You can buy, smoke, tinker with and sell cannabis, but you can’t do the whole manufacturing thing at home where it’s uncontrolled and dangerous. It’s a semantics law, as it always is with drugs. Legal highs aren’t actually legal; they’re sold as fertilizer or whatever, even though they come in handy little dosage sized bottles. And the law’s doing its version in the states with making pot at home. It’s not the pot that’s illegal; it’s using all that butane when you’re residential.

A couple who totalled their home in Colorado in May last year were, initially at least, charged with “first-degree arson, reckless endangerment and child abuse.” Another guy who blew up his family home has a four year prison sentence for arson, dealing and child abuse, and his children have been adopted by their grandparents.

The vocabulary’s all about reckless endangerment; not making drugs. Same ends, different means. You are allowed to ‘process’ cannabis, but you’re not allowed to ‘manufacture’ it. As George Carlin said about censorship: “You can prick your finger but you sure as hell can’t finger your prick.”

The defence (both the line and the lawyer) of a guy in Colorado who blew up his home:

““There are thousands of people in Colorado who are doing this,” Mr. Corry said in an interview. “I view this as the equivalent of frying turkey for Thanksgiving. Someone spills the oil, and there’s an explosion. It’s unfortunate, but it’s not a felony crime.””

In short, because of the legal weed thing, these explosions should, the advocates say, be treated as accidents, not crimes.

Don’t get it wrong, either. Hash oil is the strong stuff. This is not about being casual, usage and dosage wise. Psychoactively, it’s at 80-90% to regular weed’s 15-18%. It’s got a whack to it, so you’ll only need a tiny taste. Supposedly that’s why smoking it is called dabbing. Having a [little] dab.

And because you have to oh so carefully cook the butane out of the end product before you can consume, you end up with a very hard, glassy like substance. This means that you also have to get pretty hardcore to get your use out of it:

“To smoke dabs, you need concentrate ("shatter"or its softer cousin, "earwax"), a small, sturdy pick, a specially crafted bong and a blowtorch.

You twirl a dab of the concentrate onto the pick, apply a blowtorch that looks like it belongs in an auto mechanic's shop to the bowl of the bong until it's glowing hot, then touch the dab to a nail head inside the bowl. The dab vaporizes instantaneously and the user sucks up the smoke—almost pure THC.”

Those crazy cats, the adult heads in South FLA, contextualize their own experience with talk about professional stoners (professional in terms of having middle class pro jobs in law and medicine, and a healthy weed habit). Everyone does it: weed. Dabs, hash oil: less so. But the FLA heads, living in dirty and outdated apartment sleaze and watching the white collars smoke the same thing in prime real estate, they do it. They say a dab is equivalent to doing a bowl. It takes a lot of weed and conspicuous equipment. Vice found a guy pressing it in a pair of hair straighteners, and recommended t-shirt presses for quantity. Butane stays the most common extraction method, though. Kids take the final product to high school (plus middle school, plus elementary) in lip balm containers. And e-cigarettes are a good, odourless way of enjoying it. Junior only gets caught when or if he or she passes out in class.

It's a big distinction though, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a cherry on the middle class free spirited teen cake to add a little weed or coke to your high school or college experience, or career when you get older. You get the house, the grades, the fun first jobs, the car, the family knitted together for all the extracurricular bliss they can afford to provide, and when you wanna get loose you can add a little illicit stuff because you’re that well-read when it comes to knowing the best way to party. But the folks in the scuzzy homes cooking it up on the supply side – they look different, right? They are somehow wrong, dirty, loserville and illegal, while the kids and the people at the party smoking it are just having fun. 

“It’s probably one of the greatest days of my life,” said Robert Wylie, who the kids call Papa. “There’s a light in them that’s just wonderful.”

CBS Denver, ‘Children Who Survived Hash Oil Explosion at Home Officially Adopted By Grandparents.‘

Writing Pad - Writers' Rooms and Other Spaces

And these spaces are other. Writers really go in for odd places. There might be a shed and outdoorsiness. There might be some repurposed room in a house or old car garage or narrowboat or something. That’s if they have a set space. Transient, footloose writers might start typing or scrawling anywhere, and in different conditions.

Despite the concentration-less days, where adherence to even the most anal retentive writing set up still can’t inspire copy, when it does hit it can hit anywhere. Keys get pounded while pub strangers bellow around the writer’s ears. A scribe who likes fuck heavy and fuck loud music and umpteen coffees as they work might write half a novel in total parched silence. 

That’s how it goes. You only need your routine when you’re out of it.

But those rooms, man. David Lodge with his ever so neat long desk and neatly filed book materials. Virginia Woolf with, yes, her garden shed and great bottle of green ink. Will Self using neat grids of post it notes to construct a novel and its narrative idea by idea. The spaces are museum pieces; you can go and see Raymond Chandler’s desk, Faulkner’s, Hemingway’s. Oh Hemingway’s – there’s a photo of him at a desk full of letters with a cat tiptoeing through the lot.

Of course the desk space is an outsider’s question. It’s fans and casuals looking in. Watching the interview. If you like a book, song, stage/screen performance, painting... there’s this tendency to find biography of the personnel involved fascinating. If you know what an actor’s/writer’s/musician’s life is like then you can see where the performance comes from, or the book from the author or song from the… You think maybe seeing the writers’ rooms and desks or whatever they used will show you the interface where the books appeared. If there hasn’t been a documentary programme where they show an author’s brain patterns as they start to type then there will be.

But that’s like trying to see life in the meat of the body. You can’t see how it feels. If Stephen King wants to write books set in the places he’s living in, with characters doing things he’s done, that’s fine. But don’t expect to understand exactly how or why the things make the copy, or what he thought about these things when he started putting them down.

It’s not about biography. You can’t look at a writer’s desk and see how the ingredients make the book. They are getting in there, though. All of this stuff gets looked at, or looked right through, when the author is conjuring and remembering feelings and ideas to paint around the narrative of the book.

They mentally collate anecdotes and thoughts and vivid and not so vivid memories and put them into characters, or at least use them to inform the same. Ditto mannerisms, plot lines, descriptions of the houses, the streets, the airport changeovers, what you get on the floor of a forest, the smell of the car on the school run… While they’re doing all this they are staring and yet not looking at the writing space they’re in. The rainy day half-light hitting all around the room; or maybe hot sunshine shifting the colours of everything… it’s all in their awareness.  And this is something they can do, rather than something they prefer. It’s just where their brains go, wherever they are.

So why the deliberate space? Why the processes? Roald Dahl with his writing plank on his lap and pot of sharpened HBs. Enid Blyton and her 6,000 words a day (Stephen King again has something similar going on).  Maybe it’s trying to tap the magic. If you rub all the right bits together on a slow day then maybe you’ll get a bit more fire, a bit more genius copy, than you would by waiting for it to come naturally.  If you sit in the space with your specific edition of the OED or Roget’s thesaurus and your pot of Bics and your lucky arrowhead and… then maybe you’ll be able to extract all the more words for it when the inspiration hits.

And maybe it’s just habit. If your working life is spent in a fixed, unmoving position while your brain takes you through universes of thought then perhaps the external space is better off being fixed in its details. Because that’s not really where the action is, or where the writer’s focus is. If they always wore the same jumper what autumn when they were penning blah then it may well look like their ‘writing jumper’ but really it was just the jumper that was there each day when they tossed on some clothes and sat down to write. If you’ve got your own little world exploding out of your head you grab what you can and sit down at the keyboard, surely. So perhaps two thirds or more of a writer’s habitual space is not habitual so much as ignored – neglected. They just forget to move things in the business of thinking and writing. The rest is the stuff they keep to hand to help them get the thoughts down quickly enough.

It’s like a university tutor giving you, to keep, a book from their shelves. You feel like you’ve got a crucial jenga piece; they’d just forgotten to throw it out.

Face it, every time you go to an author’s space and the National Heritage curator tells you what an inspiring view they had out of the window when they were writing Blah just remember: the whole time they were writing the best passages of Blah the only thing they could ‘see’ in front of them as a piece of paper.

Rage Against the Machine: the Restless, Frenetic Journalism of Jason Leopold v. United States

There’s something about journalists. Hacks. The pre-writing part. The balding/unshaved, bloated/emaciated, sweating, greasy, oblivious thing sat at the keyboard, monosyllabic irritation at interruptions, mustering the superhuman work ethic through cigarettes, caffeine, booze, cocaine… Starting work hopefully this side of midnight so they might get to go to bed not too long after sunrise.

Constant, effortless dedication to grabbing a story. Phoning folks cold. Talking to people who are involved enough and stressed enough to be a nightmare to approach and yet getting information out of them with the authority of a wronged hero in a movie. Journalists can be sleazy, morally dubious. But then they can also reel off the most articulate moral indignation over a story or event. It’s like they’re simultaneously fired up by and tired of the disappointments of humanity. When someone does something wrong it’s their job to really understand exactly how wrong, how corrupt or degenerate, it is when they type out the story. They are moral by trade.  

Jason Leopold: 45-year-old reporting for Vice. A Freedom of Information Act terrorist who wears Black Flag t-shirts on the media’s trips to Gitmo (How’s this for humourless, paranoid American muscle: Camp Justice authorities mistook the Henry Rollins outfit for an Al Qaeda reference). He was Truthout, LA Times, Al Jazeera America, freelance…

“I'm an investigative reporter for VICE News where I cover national security, counterterrorism, civil liberties and other issues. My aggressive use of the Freedom of Information Act includes suing the FBI and Department of Defense and forcing those agencies to changes its policies. […] In 2014, I was singled out in a study by Syracuse University as the journalist who filed more Freedom of Information Act lawsuits against the US government that year than all other news organizations combined.”

He’s got an amazing room. One like that rogue teacher or lecturer you knew at school or college had: all posters and mugs and books and photocopies and magazines and stacks of documents and bulging, unopened envelopes of yet more documents. The walls are lined with neatly crammed bookshelves. And you know everything gets used. Hard core metal and punk CDs – just as neatly stored. It’s mind fuel.

And Jason Leopold sits there at his Mac wearing band t-shirts [Clash, Dead Kennedys, Big Black, Youth of Today…], with music blasting at full volume to get the adrenaline up to write with. Fucken A. He lost an LA Times job over it, telling a fellow reporter who didn’t appreciate the dial hitting 11: “[I’ll] rip your fucking head off your shoulders, you little prick.” It’s that thing about writing – or anything you love – being the better high than anything chemical. Back in the existential calamity of his early 20s he’d funded a $300-a-day coke habit by stealing promo CDs from the label he worked for.

But that was then (circa 25 years ago for the cocaine).

10 years ago Jason Leopold was here:

[…] the former Los Angeles Times and Dow Jones reporter has written a book, "Off the Record," that criticizes journalists as lazy. Oh, and by the way, Leopold says he engaged in "lying, cheating and backstabbing," is a former cocaine addict, served time for grand larceny, repeatedly tried to kill himself and has battled mental illness his whole life. 

But the book's publisher, Rowman & Littlefield, has canceled "Off the Record" days before it was to go to press, despite having sent out news releases and listed the book on Amazon.com. The publisher acted after receiving a warning letter from one subject's lawyer.  

"I'm devastated," Leopold said yesterday. "I worked really hard these past two years to restore my credibility after the Salon fiasco. . . . I have a checkered past, and I was hoping that by coming clean about my own past, it would allow me to move forward."

[Washington Post there]

His credibility was always rollercoastering back then. Big scoops that foundered, leading to outraged copy from other news outlets who’d very nearly bought them [bought: paid; bought: believed]. Leopold’s stories got their feet pulled out from under them – there were either too many unnamed sources or else named ones that would claim to have been misquoted or total strangers to Leopold. Salon dropped a 2002 article of his on Enron and [then US Army secretary] Thomas E White when the sources denied having spoken to him.

“Leopold told The Washington Post at the time that Salon was being "wimpy," but a Salon executive said the source cited by Leopold as providing the e-mail insisted he had never spoken with Leopold. (In the book's press release, the author gloats that journalists, including this reporter [Howard Kurtz], "never bothered to check out my past" while covering his mistakes.)”

In 2006, about the same time as he released News Junkie, a tell-all autobiography that covered his past lies, ethical bending, crimes and cocaine habit, another story got discredited – hugely.

Jason Leopold via Truthout [13^th May 2006]: “Speaking on condition of anonymity Friday night, sources confirmed [then White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl] Rove's indictment was imminent. These individuals requested anonymity saying they were not authorized to speak publicly about Rove's situation. A spokesman in the White House press office said they would not comment on "wildly speculative rumors."” 

Washington Post [18^th June 2006]: “As we learned last week, Rove isn't being indicted, and the supposed Truthout scoop by reporter Jason Leopold was wildly off the mark. It was but the latest installment in the tale of a troubled young reporter with a history of drug addiction whose aggressive disregard for the rules ended up embroiling me in a bizarre escapade -- and raised serious questions about journalistic ethics.”

Ouch. And that WP journalist goes on to claim that Leopold impersonated him to research the Rove story.

Leopold was like those musicians who can beautifully articulate the mistakes they’ve made, dissecting their character in lyrics, only to shrug when the next album comes along because they’ve done the exact same things more recently, and probably will again tomorrow.

So, ten years on, he’s trying to dig up dirt without using anonymous quotes or lying to sources – no more fishing with fiction to get people to betray their secrets. He doesn’t want his sources disappearing or denying all knowledge of him [or, taking his detractors’ side, maybe he’s stopped making up sources and stories]. Either way, avoiding sources’ denials means finding documents. Black and white. Evidence that is somehow both damning yet neutral.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the UK was signed in 2000 and was in full effect by 2005.

The FOIA in the US was in effect by 1967.

Kudos to America for starting early, but then the extra decades have allowed anyone who produces documents worth worrying about to find ways of phrasing things carefully and covering their tracks – nine times out of ten.

It’s all in the details. If you, say, asked for all documents concerning force feeding at Guantanamo you’d get nothing back. This is because the process is called ‘enteral feeding’ at Gitmo, and that’s not what you asked us to look for, sir. Hunger strikes get Guantanamo bad press – it just sounds so damn bad when they have to say those words in front of the media. This is why the activity has been renamed – it’s actually a ‘long-term non-religious fast.’

Leopold knows all this, though. He knows the euphemistic vocabulary. He appeals every document he gets because, whether it’s been redacted down to a totally black page or not, they’ll always give up more information after an appeal. He notes that the redaction problem has got worse under Obama – everything gets filtered through national security concerns. Still, he’s got 20,000 pages of documents through the FOIA.

“They have included a series of disclosures from Guantánamo Bay; racist emails from the Ferguson, Mo., Police Department released after the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer and the subsequent racial unrest in the city; and some details of unreleased Central Intelligence Agency memos on torture”

He’s dishing dirt, and some of the dirt is really important:

The NSA’s difficulty/reluctance [according to taste] in finding Edward Snowden’s pre-whistleblowing communications

The Google Search That Made the CIA Spy on the US Senate

These Are the 6 US Prisons That May Soon House Guantanamo Detainees

Whatever was happening in his career before, what’s consistent with Leopold is his pouncing on information - and his will to always extract a good story out of it. To scour every page knowing that it is important. That these details will show the wrongdoing that everyone’s carefully hiding – because anyone degenerate enough to lie and cheat and do ill in their career for easy fixes and quick bucks and vainglory won’t be dedicated or clever enough to see the significance of the trail they leave behind in their documents.

Not with a bang but with a whimper.

The Grass is Always Greener – ‘Quiche’ at the Marlborough Theatre, Brighton

‘Quiche’ is a comedy by Frank McHugh.

The tl;dr version is ‘Brilliantly executed laugh out loud comedy with well-placed bittersweet-ness.’
The cast, writing and production are excellent and if you go you’ll have a thoroughly good night.

If you want more…


What do men and women want? They’re after one thing, right? Right…

‘Quiche’ offers two couples (perhaps more) and yet it really shows four people who are alone.

It doesn’t matter how nice you make that flat, how many times you move things around or invite people in or turn up the music; you’re still beating against the walls to feel something, anything that isn’t that awful gulf between you and the person you should be deep inside.

Dinner party etiquette. British social status etiquette. You congratulate people on the things you don’t think they do as well as you. To stay charming you admit to the faults in yourself that you don’t think are faults – just like when recruiters prepare you for interviews.

What do they call it? Owning the space? You walk in and you need to be confident, knowledgeable, talkative and competitive. Fail at this and you are getting ‘being in company’ wrong.

But of course they are getting it wrong. Which is why ‘Quiche’ is hysterically funny. These people are not qualified to be as self-assured as they are. Inwardly disappointed and outwardly crass characters hurtle towards sex – which will probably be quite similar in nature.

To get them there there’s inter-couple and intra-couple bitching. There’s bottomless glasses of wine, well-aimed insults, seething stares, hubris, and mixed reactions to the quiche.

Raging alongside are the coping mechanisms for the disappointment. The pride in the job you’re not really that good at or interested in. The men fist bump over echo-chamber recruitment and marketing wank; the women play career-fulfilment top trumps.

And one woman’s faults are another woman’s man’s strengths. You match your candidates to the roles. ‘Match’ is a relative term in Quiche’s world. You’re crying with laughter – and two emotions are causing that.

It’s farce that makes you pay for it. If there’s a pratfall then you’re going to have to deal with the scars it leaves behind. Sitting in audience land, you find yourself trying to suppress the tail end of your barrel laugh to keep up with a gear change into emotional consequences.

It’s life. Your emotions have to take you through some incredibly extreme heights and depths of ridiculous behaviour before you can start to see yourself – and see problems in your life clearly enough to be able to address them.

Quiche starts with four people who are alone. But that’s definitely not how it ends.


'Quiche' is at the Marlborough Theatre tonight at 19:45 and Saturday 18^th July at 14:45 and 19:45

Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/1635221

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Quiche-at-the-Marlborough-Theatre-16-18-July/462460607253680

Float with the Tide, Swim for a Goal: Chongo, Dean Potter and a Free Life

‘When I was 29 I climbed a building at San Luis Obispo College and broke both my arms. I was showing off for a girl.’

‘If life didn’t have risk, life wouldn’t be very real at all.’

Charles Victor Tucker III. Chongo – Chuck if you meet him and get on. He is a little bit stoned and little bit eccentric. He was a damn good and pioneering rock climber and slackliner (tightrope walking on a line that’s not taut – slack, in fact). A lifer. Big wall climbing when it was rock; not a rubberized indoor scout trip. He spent his 30s in Mexico learning how to re-sole climbing shoes.

He lived in Yosemite Park for about 25 years – not particularly legally. When he wasn’t dodging the park authorities he’d spend days tethered to El Capitan. The climbers dug him (he mended their shoes). He was a guru when it came to all things climbing and highlining (slacklining when it’s an eagle soar/nosebleed high rope you’re walking across twixt the rock faces).

“Darren Carter and I started off this whole slack-lining craze in the early 90s. We used to practice between trees, and then we took it high up...like across Lost Arrow Spire. I was the third guy across Lost Arrow Spire. First Dean Potter, then Darren Carter, and then me.”

He was eventually taken to court and removed from Yosemite. He now lives in Sacramento under a lorry. Or something like that.  He sits outside on a laptop running his website and writing about physics, selling self-printed 700-page books like The Homeless Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. These were penned back in the days when he could write in the Yosemite cafeteria and on people’s sofas. 

"When I walked across that thing [the slackline across Lost Arrow], it outmatched any 60 seconds in my life, and I've had some great 60-second increments," he said. But the same feeling lasted for days when he studied science, "and that's why I got into quantum mechanics. It was better than rock climbing."

He is the best kind of guru, because his climbing advice includes this:

How bitchin you might be (or better stated, how bitchin you might imagine yourself being, however accurate or inaccurate your conclusion) has nothing whatsoever to do with whether you will be the unfortunate fool who dies, or spends the rest of his life in a wheelchair, or worst, simply ends up ‘existing’, drooling in a bed all day long, staring blankly into space (or into wherever).  

Nature does not care in the least whether you are bitchin or you are not, any more than it cares if you or anyone else lives or dies, or is maimed for the rest of their life (because the bitchin die and get maimed, no less than the unbitchin do – nature is absolutely fair in questions of death and maiming). 

Understand this: it’s hard to be bitchin when you’re dead, permanently crippled, or hopelessly trapped, lying in a bed drooling, staring blankly into space (or again, into wherever), which are all very, very real possibilities, when you choose to climb anything, but especially if you choose to climb rock, tightrope walk (slackline or highline) on a nylon strap, or simply find yourself in the company of others who fool-heartedly entertain ideas of actually doing any of these very things [http://chongonation.com/warning.htm].

View image | gettyimages.com

But then there’s how it looks. That hair-thin bolt of colour across the canyon. A slackline surrounded by miles of gargantuan nature, so high up and climate extreme that the ant-sized trees in the distance are neck deep in mist or cloud or whatever. Springing on the line is some barefoot dude, all-American skinny with never-been-indoors flesh and old man-thinning yet young boy-styled hair. His movements on the slackline constantly channel hop between childlike joy and inhuman discipline, focus. Feeling everything coming from years of practice. Feeling everything, period.

 “When there’s a death consequence, when you are doing things that if you mess up you die, I like the way it causes my senses to peak”

Dean Potter there.

Potter and Hunt’s bodies were discovered on the wall of rock along Yosemite Valley. The men, who jumped at the same time, both landed on the rock outcropping below their jump-off location on Taft Point. It is thought that the men may have been trying to clear a “notch” on the mountain and ended up slamming into it instead, according to the L.A. Times.

A witness who saw them jump heard a ‘pop-pop’ shortly after. She hoped it was their parachutes deploying.

Saturday 16^th May this year. Potter 42. Hunt 29.

You BASE (building, antenna, span, or Earth) jump. You launch yourself off the rock in a wingsuit that makes you look like a flying squirrel – with all that flesh joining the limbs and catching the air. Sometimes Dean did it with his dog Whisper on his back.

The appeal of the wingsuit was that it was flying – what Dean really wanted to do. "I know it's kind of a strange thing I'm talking about, but another part of me truly believes I can fly, like somehow my mind can figure it out." More practice, more studying. Eventually you could perfect a descent and land – no parachute.

Kid. 13/16 (depending on the interview) he starts climbing with a friend on military land. No ropes. Grabbing each other’s hands and feet to get higher. Staying silent to avoid scaring the shit out of their parents. By 19 Dean’s scuzzy and penniless and living on a sofa to be near the rocks. Salt sandwiches for Christmas (yup, literally – the white stuff in bread).

Chongo gets him slacklining in the 1990s. It’s an odd combination of breaking some of Yosemite’s rules (they’re not wild about BASE jumping) yet also being a member of the park’s Search and Rescue.

Turn of the millennium it was all speed rock climbing – with and without ropes, with and without water (you drink your own). 16 hour climbs were record broken down to 4 – Dean’d be up at the top having a fit trying to breathe and throw up at the same time.

View image | gettyimages.com

Speed attained, he channelled extreme. He did free soloing (Nothing. Nadda. No ropes, no harness – you just don’t let fucken go of the rock). He did slacklining without the tether (you got like five seconds to pull the cord on your chute – and when there’s no chute you really must try to reach out and grab a hold of that blah-thousand feet-high slackline you’ve just slipped off).

He’d had close calls before ‘I grab the 10 mm cord with my bare hands. I'm 300 ft off the deck, [...] I hear the zipping noise of rapid rope through soft skin. I fight the immense pain...ripping my hands to the muscle...stopping myself.’

But he was safe. He had his dad’s military discipline. He calculated: enough drop to deploy a chute or angle a wingsuit away from the rocks. Studying air currents (Dean would stare out into that bodyshock-big landscape so long he could see them). The best quality lines, the material, the metal, the hardware. Maths and physics and spiritualism. Out there alone on the rocks climbing’s all meditating. It’s bigging up the exhaling because of Kung Fu – your opponent can only deliver a fatal blow when you’re Inhaling.

Above all it was the only thing he wanted. It was life – no matter how close to death it was. Because of how close to death it was.

You’re only alive when you’re doing it. Incidentally (and I guess it’s debateable whether it’s always incidental to a sportsman/climber/musician/artist…) this is what makes you so good and so apt for sponsors, deals, fame and coverage. But it is incidental on some levels – fame/finance have to be second to the drives for perfection and new extremes or the latter wouldn’t be strong enough to happen.

You’d do it for free. You’d… kill yourself to do it – cos not doing it is death anyway. You can’t get or hold down a job – not even to fund your passion, not really. You bum around on sofas and eat shit and share habits and smells and dialogue with teenagers (teens dig you too, natch). But you don’t give a shit (not about how you live; not about your kid-friendly counterculture kudos) – it’s just about doing the thing you love.

It’s 40-something Jay Adams getting up at 5:00/6:00 to skate – for the best light; not for the coverage (the journalist slept in, in fact). These people have leather skin and fucked skeletons and damage. Their relationships explode. They are in and out of court. They are incomprehensible to people (most people) who have equal or higher priorities than the climb/sport/art…  Writers, songsters and actors drink and syringe and waste away and never get any sun and blow their brains out with bullets or brute thought. They frazzle themselves in the chase for the best. Their best.

It all comes back to the same thought: tragic as it might be for these people to die trying – or to succeed but then never reach ‘old’ because of the misadventures they clocked up in the effort – giving it up to ‘live’ would be a greater tragedy. It seriously undervalues what living means – or means to them.

I’d be combative ­because I’d feel—and I still feel—that being free is the most important thing. But now the rangers just see this guy who has been here for 18 years, a guy who busts his ass every day practicing his art. And though I do some things that are illegal, if the rangers ask, I am honest. If I fly over their car and they have to chase me, they chase me. But if I don’t rub it in their face, they don’t go out of their way to hunt me.

Dry State: The California Drought

Steinbeck had it right.

“California farmers produce more than a third of the nation’s vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts. To do that, they use nearly 80 percent of all the water consumed in the state.”

The amplified version of the American Dream is the California Dream. 1 in 8 people in the US live in California. Live in all that sun. Fun, casual, expensive, (unequal), pools, ridiculously beautiful everything – bodies, buildings, views, cultural output…, paradise with a lobotomy, shorthand for America if you look very quick.

California’s the seventh largest economy in the world. GSP of about $2.2 trillion – larger than Brazil, Italy. Larger – it’s got 423,970 km² to the UK’s 243,610. Population’s more than double what it was in 1960.

Growth, sprawl – the post war boom and full throttle economic drive to spend/build/earn/repeat saw California line everything richly with new schools, transport, parks, the state water project…

Jonathan Meades, noting France’s adoption of American growth, of sprawl, mused on the effects:

“How many ex-urban furniture showrooms does a small town in the middle of France really need? How does the sin of car dependency which such development fosters accord with the universally preached, seldom practiced, tiresomely trite and entirely unrealistic doctrine of sustainability?” 

Sustainability. California’s the state where the desert goes right up to the chain fence. Then there’s instantly grass and plants and sprinklers and pools and water fights. Then the desert starts right up again on the boundary the other side. I guess that’s Palm Springs – 201 gallons of water per head per day, in the middle of the desert.

Artificial lakes right next to the sand, so the homes in that development can get boathouses. Friggin’ FARMS in the desert. Subterranean pipes sending water to them because there’s none to start with. Fields and livestock and produce growing in abundance and the water has to be pumped in to get that happening.

Water rich territory ships out its juice to water poor territory. It’s all irrigation canals, dams, artificial lakes, aqueducts, pumping plants, tunnels…

The New York Times shamed Americans with stats last week.

“The average American consumes more than 300 gallons of California water each week by eating food that was produced there.”

A bunch of grapes? 24 Gallons

Four glasses of milk? 143 gallons

Three and a half walnuts? 7 gallons

And the LA Times had a go: it takes 1,800 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef.

Almonds take up about a gallon each, nearly 10% of California’s agricultural water consumption. As the Independent neatly calculated, that means that California’s almond crop uses more water each year than …Los Angeles.

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For much of the 1960s the Governor was Edmund G. Brown Sr (Pat). It’s now Edmund G. Brown Jr (Jerry). Jerry was also Governor from 1975 to 1983.

The New York Times characterized the two Governors as being about big government projects for industrial/residential expansion and monetary growth (Sr/Pat), and ‘Small is beautiful,’ conservationism and eco minded reforms (Jr/Jerry).

In the early 1960s it was growth, like it or not – well, it was liked. People were moving to California at a rate of 1,000 per day: “Pat saw an almost endless capacity for California growth.” By Jr/Jerry’s tenure in the ‘70s Ecological awareness and consideration for resources had set in – shit runs out, it seems. By Jerry’s second tenure, starting in 2011, there was the drought.

Yes. While Texas and Oklahoma are being washed away by flooding from record-setting rainfall, California’s now had four years of diminishing returns from rain, and four years of drought.

Snowpack - that was the key. California’s mountains should be covered in 6/7 feet of snow. Even with the rain issues, the spring melt should see the state through. But Governor Jerry was standing there in April – it wasn’t less; it was non-existent. 6% of the amount it should be. There was nothing to come. No run-off.

With retrospect comes wisdom, the NYT notes criticism of Edmund G. Brown Sr’s expansionism. All those large scale, New Deal-y construction and infrastructure projects – were they accommodating new people or encouraging them, thus exacerbating today’s problems?

Another situation where cause and effect play tag is described by Drs Doug Parker and Faith Kearns of the University of California, discussing the burden of supplying ‘enough’ water to California.

“Given the size of the state, we will always have more land available to bring into production than we will have water to put on it.

This […] means that efforts to increase supply of water or reduce demand for water will ultimately lead to more agricultural lands being brought into production, more water available for cities to grow and more water to remain in streams to ensure a healthy environment.

But eventually we will face more drought and water supplies will again be inadequate to meet the new higher levels of demand.”

Is the drought the end of the State’s celebrated growth – indeed, of its celebration of growth?

You’ve got the tech capital and the movie capital - the pinnacles of the pinnacles of American/Western/American culture, and people might not be able to shower there for more than five minutes.

People are installing artificial lawns. Thin cattle (dried out grazing land) are auctioned off to farmers further east, pastors drive around giving out bottled water, mayors are drinking and promoting recycled sewage.

Farmers, fountains, the rich… all objects of rage and frustration. Starbucks and Nestle have been petitioned and pilloried over their water bottling activities:

“While Starbucks recently pulled its water bottling operations from the state on ethical grounds, Nestle and other companies like Walmart continue to source water for bottling in California, buying at the same rate as residents and selling at one hundred times the profit.”

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Farmers. There are 19^th century water laws established in this state, allowing “nearly 4,000 companies, farms and others to use an unmonitored amount of water for free.” Over half the claims on waterways in the state come from these.

The earlier your claim the stronger you are (2014’s 95% water cuts to farmers didn’t affect those with pre-1914 rights). It’s all about people nailing bits of paper to trees in the gold rush.

“Known as "first in time, first in right," it was established in California by the Forty-Niners — who used prodigious amounts of water to blast gold out of the Sierra foothills — and essentially says that whoever is the first to divert a set quantity of water from a source has priority rights to it.”

But then history’s getting a shock or two. 22^nd May saw Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta farmers agree to give up a quarter of their water this season in return for no further restrictions. People are budging on their historic water rights to stave off bigger enforced cuts.

“In the weeks since Gov. Jerry Brown announced across-the-board cutbacks for urban water systems, the state’s farmers have become something of a scapegoat. Residents who are expected to time their showers and let their lawns turn brown have angrily accused the agricultural industry of not doing enough to curb its use of water, although many growers have faced substantial cuts for the last two years”

(It’s the second year farmers have received a 0% share from the Central Valley Project irrigation canals, for instance).

So yes. The first mandatory water usage reduction in state history was ordered by Governor Brown on April 1^st (25%). “This [sic] savings amounts to approximately 1.5 million acre-feet of water over the next nine months.” Freedom, where freedom amounts to the civic part of your American citizen’s world remaining as untouchable as possible, your right to green lawns and waterslide parties and uninhibited FUN, is being revised.

Where does the lifestyle go now? No one likes the government saying no to their lifestyle. It’s the height of political toxicity in the States, and yet…

It’s those scary arguments. The ones people like discussing – so long as they can forget about the implications and carry on living the same. Climate change, over consumption, pollution, overpopulation – all great to be clued up on when you need conversation topics for the new friends you make as you fly somewhere or trade sports car stats or work towards baby number four or…

“I think the drought does say: Sober up. Have a mature conversation in which climate change is one of the things discussed, but population growth is discussed, and the extreme emotional commitment to green lawns, and ornamental gardens with plants that you cannot eat and probably even goats cannot eat—let’s put all of those factors into the conversation, and let’s not lose our bearings by picking only one topic and throwing out all the others … If we were a people devoted to croquet and badminton, and we couldn’t live without lawns on which to perform our sacred ceremonies of croquet and badminton, and golf and so on, that would be one framework. But it’s not actually sacred to us. We don’t really have to have those great green expanses, and it’s very discussable what a good landscape should look like.”

The Atlantic there.

How to Create Merry Hell: An Informed Choice for Election 2015

In 2010 the UK budget deficit (also ‘UK net borrowing’) was around £148bn. It’s now at £90bn (the next highest (hm, ‘deficit’ …lowest?) figure from 1979 to pre-crash 2007 was £50bn). But that’s what’s chipping away year by year. We are still getting further into debt by an annual £90bn.

Total debt, the National debt, is rising and has been since 2003. It’s currently at £1.56 trillion. It goes up by £2bn a week. As a percentage of GDP it’s less scary – post war it reached nearly 250%; now it’s about 81%. It was about half that 10-15 years ago.

But back to the yearly budget deficit book balancing. At debatable levels of ‘need,’ we need £12bn of welfare cuts.

Pensions make up half of the welfare budget, and they are protected. So where are the cuts going to come from? Child benefits! At least we know where the leaks are going to come from – the Lib Dems.

Thursday Next

So what is it? Austerity and those shameless welfare cuts taken to yet more unprecedented levels under the Conservatives, ‘everything paid for without any more borrowing’ from Labour, just as long as you don’t expect a timetable, ‘everything paid for by leaving the EU’ from UKIP – or something,  ‘all the things Labour are scared of doing’ from the SNP,  Lib Dems in the middle, or no cutting at all from the Greens (spending and borrowing, in fact – working/earning our way out of debt).

What are the questions being bandied about? Are they, in all honesty, your questions, when it comes to voting – if you vote?

Why won’t they say what they are planning? Has the government been competent with the economy? Would Labour be any better? Is there any difference between what the parties are offering? Do you want an EU referendum? What does the NHS need? Coalition threats. Would Nicola Sturgeon really create a sort of American cholesterol affair – where everyone’s blocked by everyone else’s intransigence in the House/Senate?

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Will they/won’t they coalition options. Every leader and spokesperson’s giving love, hate and back again descriptions of their potential partners. Surely the oddest time to be making coalition threats is at the end of a five-year …coalition. In May 2010 the vibe of “no majority: it’s the end of the world and Jeremy Vine’s career as we know it” lasted right up to and through election night. Then the coalition started and we realized it’s more… ‘meh.’ We’re hardly milking fear of the unknown here.

But back then, because of all the apocalyptic wobbles and the tardy election outcome, the Lib Dems and Conservatives fought it out and, a year later, we got the compromise AV vote. That got a woeful response, with claims that everybody thought it was a terrible idea/was scared of it/couldn’t understand it. Though the BBC reckons it might have helped towards a Conservative victory next week had it gone through.

In any case, the polls aren’t predicting majorities any time soon. What is changing, exactly? Has the rise of the other parties taken votes away, preventing the snuggly, warm majorities the Conservatives and Labour once reached? Adding up the votes and seats for the ‘main two’ here:

1987: Con + Lab votes = 73.0% of the vote and 93.1% of seats (605/650)

1992: Con + Lab votes = 76.3% of the vote and 93.2% of seats (607/651)

1997: Con + Lab votes = 73.9% of the vote and 88.5% of seats (583/659)

2001: Con + Lab votes = 72.4% of the vote and 87.9% of seats (579/659)

2005: Con + Lab votes = 67.6% of the vote and 85.6% of seats (553/646)

2010: Con + Lab votes = 65.1% of the vote and 86.8% of seats (564/650)

[Guardian 30^th April]     2015: Con + Lab votes = 66.9% of the vote and 83.5% of seats (543/650)

Well, going down I guess (and they seem to have consistently shared 98% of the seats from the ‘40s to 1970 – before pretty Jeremy Thorpe’s Liberals started to show promise and then naughty old Shirley Williams and her Social Democrats broke free). But see: Tony Blair got a majority when Labour and the Conservatives only had 85.6% of the seats to vie for in 2005, yet there was no majority in 2010 when the parties shared 86.8%.

Labour won with 35.2% of the popular vote in 2005; the Conservatives didn’t win with 36.1% in 2010. Welcome to statistics.

And those winning figures – looking a little low? Remember GCSE level history and politics lessons, folks – first past the post can all too often mean that most people in the country don’t vote for the winning party. Blair’s best: 43.2%; Thatcher’s best: 43.9%; Churchill’s best: 48.0%. Welcome to democracy.

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Have a seat. The possible loss of single party majorities here is not so much about the smaller parties leeching votes. Like it or not, it’s the number of seats that counts, rather than the percentage of the popular vote (it’s not like Strictly or X-Factor where things modulate with the judges’ scores/choices or whatever). 86% of the seats has been more than enough to generate a majority government before. 83.9% of seats was all there was to be had in 1931, but the Conservatives got in by a landslide.

It’s really about the lack of a clear winner/loser between the Conservatives and Labour. 1931 saw the Conservatives win 470 seats and Labour …46 (admittedly that marks the last outright majority in an election. 1931, kids – granny wasn’t even born). 2015 currently looks to be: Conservatives 276 and Labour 267. Welcome to symmetry.

Perhaps it’s the crucial swing seats that have gone over to the other parties and pwned the chance of a Conservative or Labour win – but then that’s what was wrong in the first place.

“Although there will be 650 individual contests in the 2015 general election, the outcome will be determined in a much smaller number. In 12 of the 17 general elections since 1950, fewer than one-in-ten seats changed hands from one party to another. Even in the massive Labour landslide of 1997, some 70% of seats stayed with the parties defending them.”

Because they haven’t changed much it means they won’t change. So we won’t bother electioneering or reporting politics there as much – that feedback loop where the current situation becomes the cause of the current situation.

It’s like people who don’t vote: the parties don’t rely on those peoples’ votes and don’t put their issues on the agenda, so then those people don’t vote, so…

Thursday Next

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Informed choice. That’s got to be democracy. Let’s face it, a handful of soundbites and bad jokes from the respective parties’ giggling speechwriting pools isn’t doing very much to help.

Apathy. No winning majorities. It’s not because they are all the same. It might be because, once in power, policy gets hammered and flattered by legislative issues, circumstances and all the things that can crop up over five years – so every government turns out to be the same.

But there are differences between these parties and their many, many members’ hearts and minds, differences both generous, clever, noble, disingenuous, cynical and degenerate, and these are evidenced when they plan their manifestos. If you want to make a choice at the box-ticking stage it’ll only be real if you know what the differences are.

It takes minutes. Just run through a couple of apps. They ask a few questions and then give you your leaning towards each party based on their policies. There’s VoteMatch. There’s ISideWith. There’s Who Shall I Vote For?

Locally you can check through your candidates. And if you want to see your current MP’s track record then type your postcode into They Work For You. It’s nice and concise, too.

The apps/quizzes are also useful for showing what’s making the agenda and the narratives and questions policy gets formed around.

Cutting the deficit? Public service cuts? HS2? Skilled migrants? Tuition fees? Free school meals/winter fuel allowance? NHS/privatisation? EU? Capping emissions? Foreign aid? Bedroom tax? Zero-hours? Tax rates for rich? Capping rents? Help to buy?

And there are, perhaps, some surprises separating the parties:

No one should be imprisoned for possession of drugs for personal use

Do you support the legalisation of same sex marriage?

Should terminally ill patients be allowed to end their lives via assisted suicide?

Should the UK reinstate the death penalty?

Should the British Monarchy be abolished?

Answering the questions and getting my recommended parties, I was surprised by the percentage difference between the parties I tend to consider and the ones I do not – they are poles apart. The parties are answering policy questions very differently in their manifestos at least.

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