Mothership

Doctor Yakub, 29 Springs, California, 7/22/25, reflected upon in Baltimore, 9/17/25

I have returned to Baltimore, where I outlined this journal to extend to Winter Solstice two months and more ago. I am numb to dumb, addled over the increasing pace of lost friends, even as friends newly close lose more family I have not yet met. This is the cost of age and of being blessed enough to have many times the normal compliment of friends.

Returning to the Brickmouse House, I bring the King James Bible, Close Shaves and Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army, which I must review within the week, as well as read and summarize the 712 page The European Discovery of America and reread and summarize the 17^th century portions of Bound Over. Alexander hounds as the muse optimum even as the whimpering souls of millions of ditched slave boys haunt this gray ghost. I seem to hear them in the caws of the many crows outside in this dreary, rain-soaked mourning.

To complete Of A Naked Land, Advent—The Son of God, and Planting America, I must stop any travel, training, or crime writing, or at least focus such on those projects.

Looking at unwritten outlines, I find this one from July. Near Indian Springs, a young man I trained at an FMA school along with five others, drove me to his place of business, a legal weed grow, an actual miracle of industrial agriculture. I have never paid attention to plants or their cultivation, other than to tear up weeds and roots for housewives of friends. My recently deceased friend Rick, a month before he passed, told me, “I had a good fifty years. Then, when I got busted by the feds for growing legal weed in Vegas and lost everything, my health went to hell. That sent me back here, to Pittsburgh, this terrible place. We got to get to know each other again and I met the nice family down the street who come and read the Bible and pray for me—Now, I’ll never travel again, so I watch travel videos and live through these young people on TV… and you, your whole life sucked, never seemed to enjoy anything from when we met in middle school until a couple years ago when you got crippled. Now, older than you ever expected to get, you are having some nice time, met so many good people.”

I never got to tell Rick about the grow, his dream job, that came into being in the same state where he was twice held prisoner as a grow slave by violent criminals, one a Humboldt County redneck, the other a feral LA negro. The young grow master, Doctor Yakub, a lover of plants and weed like Rick, confided that the Chinese and Mexican cartels have combined to use imported slave labor from Asia to run “15,000 illegal grows” in San Bernardino County. This, combined with the California State preference to buy from cartels rather than legal tax-paying grows has this man moving to a less criminal state to grow weed there…

Five vast white buildings, each as large as a navy guided missile frigate, are penned behind wire fences across from a stone-walled compound belonging to a star athlete. These are high single-story structures, I think block with metal roofs, block walls either painted or sided. There are metal walk-in doors and metal rolling dock doors for trucks to back up. Around back is a huge collection of blue metal tanks and scaffolding. This section is run by a refrigeration mechanic, who is as important as the boiler room engineer in an old tramp steamer. Without this dude, nothing happens. The desert is not rich in water. The homeless we saw are the most weather-beaten, brown “white” people one can imagine. Rather than forced air, this system cools water, runs it through a water cooling pipe system in the buildings, and extracts the warmed water to cool, recycling steam.

A guard shack houses a security goon who badges you in. I was given a visitor badge. Each building has an access door that opens to an office space, a restroom, a lunch room, and lockers for employees. The low work ethic of many of those who seek employment in the weed business is a problem. There are some standout crew members. The constant hum, the white light, the white walls and doors, all contribute to the feeling of an interstellar generation ship. I mentioned this to my guide and he grinned, “It is exactly that, a generation ship, an artificial environment that takes a seed, to seedling, up through maturity, to harvest. The only thing we do not do is trim. We send the harvest out to trim, then bring it back, weigh and bag it, and wholesale it out. This is the result of forty years of one man’s work, from growing in a basement illegally as a young man, to this—a science and an art.

There is a seedling room, with tiny little plants.

There are grow rooms for the child plants, in which a couple of mother plants are kept on duty as some kind of vegetable nanny. I really did not log the plant politics in my meat brain. Each of these rooms, the elementary, middle and high schools of weed, has, I think, seven tables. These tables seemed to me to be between 48 and 72 feet long, watered by a drip system.

There is then a room of giant plants held up by wires like hops vines. This is a jungle.

Then, there is a room where the cut plants are hung and dried so to avoid mold and await shipment for trimming.

All of the growing rooms are fed from a central room in each building that is connected by pipes to the refrigeration complex outside. In this room, one to a building, are three large black vats, that could each serve as a one-car garage if turned on their side, which look like a small grain silo. In this chamber, plant food is mixed with the water that goes to the plants. I do not know if the three tanks are stages of mixing, or if there is a different mix for each tank and that tank feeds a different age grade of plant.

I was numb when emerging from the facility, with a feeling of having been on board a ship of alien life and time. The numbness overtakes me now, even as I look out this cool window at the bleak sky announcing the near and soon decline of the weeds that have waxed so green and high this weird summer, under these mocking, heretic skies.