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ONLYFALCONS EPISODE 4 - THE GRAND FALCON
75 Plays1 year ago
A complete biography of the Grand Falcon, up to 2022. Now you all will know who he is, where he's been, what he's done, and what he plans to do.
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Transcript
Introduction and Identity of 'Falcon Guy'
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello there, falcarinos. We've been together for, some of us have been together for two years now. Who is the mysterious falcon guy? What's his deal? Where'd he come from? Is he an agent of the FBI? What is his agenda? These are all questions that will not be answered by the following recording, which is pretty much an honest recounting of my life up until this point.
Life Story and Psychiatric Letter
00:00:22
Speaker
The departure for this piece of writing is a letter
00:00:24
Speaker
I made in confidence to a psychiatrist to try to get treatment and to try to give him a full picture of who I am. Hello there, falcorinos. We've been together for, some of us have been together for two years now.
00:00:40
Speaker
Who is the mysterious Falcon guy? What's his deal? Where did he come from? Is he an agent of the FBI? What is his agenda? These are all questions that will not be answered by the following recording, which is pretty much an honest recounting of my life up until this point. The departure for this piece of writing is a letter I made in confidence to a psychiatrist to try to get treatment and to try to give him a full picture of who I am.
00:01:07
Speaker
So I edited it a little bit. I took out the
Punishing Biography and Cliffhanger Warning
00:01:10
Speaker
part in the early ages, which probably we all can sympathize with, you know, not fitting in, reading early, being annoying to your parents, all of that stuff. And I kind of cut that out, brutally summarized it with a few things that you'll have to kind of endure through until we can get to the good stuff. I'm going to warn you ahead of time.
00:01:30
Speaker
I'm not exactly a podcaster. I don't really have video or audio editing capabilities. There's no sound board here ahead of you to reward you for this experience. This is 16 pages of punishing biographical information that only strange people would find interesting. I find it interesting. You might find it interesting. And if that's the case, you should worry.
00:01:54
Speaker
Anyway, without further ado, here's the letter that I wrote to my doctor. And this is just the first part. You're going to find it ends with a cliffhanger because frankly, I'm not really ready to write about organic insanity just yet without establishing this baseline with you folks and with this doctor.
Childhood Intelligence and Early Experiences
00:02:14
Speaker
So without further ado, I do ado. Here we go.
00:02:19
Speaker
My name is Bernard Robert Goldsmith and I was born on February 17th, 1983 at Mercy Hospital in Sacramento, California, which was located directly behind my family's house on 41st Street. I had the same typical childhood that many of you do who in adulthood have found themselves to be unique.
00:02:38
Speaker
You know the signs, reading at an early age, being very difficult on the parents, because this is based on a letter to physicians. It contains a lot of detail relevant to an autism diagnosis, but which you would find boring. So I'm redacting some of it.
00:02:54
Speaker
Anyway, this goes on for my doctor. This is where the real letter begins. My strange early behavior and uncanny speech led me to be evaluated by a psychiatrist, Dr. Hudson, to determine if I was a sociopath. Instead, he suggested intelligence tests that I be allowed to read. I was tutored in reading and obtained literacy at the age of five.
00:03:17
Speaker
Two separate tests administered by two separate clinical developmental psychiatrists in the Sacramento region returned results of 153 and 158 at the age of five. Each of my siblings also demonstrated extraordinary intelligence on such tests, but their scores are unknown to me.
Social Challenges and Early Internet Exploration
00:03:37
Speaker
My experience of childhood was atypical. I did not form any close bonds or relationships with anyone, nor did I make any friends. I spent most of my time in my room arranging elaborate set pieces with toys or digging holes in the backyard of my house, which I later discovered was used as a dump site by the hospital for carcinogenic waste.
00:03:57
Speaker
I had a great deal of difficulty getting on in school. I was generally disliked by my peers for reasons that I could never understand and had a miserable time. I kept to the library and walked the grounds by myself at recess time. I enjoyed books with long or unusual words. By authors such as Booth Tarkington, a little plug there, you should check him out.
00:04:17
Speaker
The fifth grade went similarly, but in my spare time, I figured out how to get online, connect to local and nationwide BBS systems, and was exposed to a lot of material from an early internet. Through this system, I downloaded manuals on the occult, whatever forbidden writings I could find, along with the anarchist cookbook. Out of boredom, I started experimenting with recipes.
00:04:39
Speaker
I created a smoke bomb and a fuse capable of burning underwater just before the last few days of the fifth grade and tested it by lighting and flushing it. It successfully caused smoke to come out of the manhole covers around the school and triggered a short evacuation and investigation. I had several more of the devices in my possession and readily admitted to what I had done. I was not expelled, but I did not attend my last week of classes.
00:05:05
Speaker
A special program was devised between my father and the Davis School for Independent Study, a part of the district created to handle special individuals. Under this program,
Online MUDs and Hacking Aspirations
00:05:14
Speaker
I worked at an accelerated pace and skipped grades 6 and 7. During this time, I became involved in the creation of online muds, multi-user dungeons, text-based, massively multiplayer environments, precursors to the modern-day MMORPG.
00:05:29
Speaker
I also attended in-real-life meetups, both on the grounds of UC Davis and off, where I had occasion to meet and befriend phone-freaker Captain Crunch, legal name Donald Draper, along with his associate Stephen Innes, who taught me much about red boxes, blue boxes, and why neither were any good to use in Davis anymore.
Rebellion, Health Issues, and Programming
00:05:47
Speaker
I also attended in-real-life meetups, both on the grounds of UC Davis and off,
00:05:52
Speaker
where I had occasion to meet and befriend phone-freaker Captain Crunch, legal name Donald Draper, along with his associate Stephen Innes, who taught me much about red boxes, blue boxes, and why neither were any good to use in Davis anymore. Nevertheless, I had a dream at that time of hacking Defense Department systems somehow.
00:06:12
Speaker
After rejoining high school, I was surely a delight to my instructors because I had decided that they and the entire institution that they represent was nothing more than an extended stay at the Department of Motor Vehicles for me. Other than mathematics and the sciences, which I took to be serious subjects, I was intolerably insolent to every other instructor. I would read books during class, chosen because they were advanced and because they were large, and would make incredible trouble in every sort of way once they were confiscated.
00:06:40
Speaker
Eventually, I was allowed to read them during class. Using pen and paper, I taught myself C++, how to use the Linux environment, how to do a variety of things that would enable my later endeavors. As I completed each book, I would continue to bring it to class to keep on my desk like a trophy.
00:07:00
Speaker
I was at all times extremely and calculatedly insolent to any authority figure I felt to be illegitimate or ignorant. I wrote essays critiquing the American school system with the aim of having them confiscated, which they were.
00:07:15
Speaker
At this time, I began experiencing fevers, extreme exhaustion, muscle wasting, malar rash, pleurisy, weight loss, anosmia, cluster headaches, night sweats, Reynaud syndrome, various types of brain fog, and increase in unexplained infections in my cuticles. These were full of pus.
00:07:41
Speaker
For a full history of my experiences with systemic lupus erythematosus, which I had, I'm going to go into this a little later writing because I think that that's a unique experience that is going to be shared by a lot of people, so it's not for this podcast. Anyway, from a social standpoint, I was allergic to sunlight, had a disfiguring rash on my face at all times, and had a moon-shaped face as a side effect of the prednisone usage.
00:08:05
Speaker
This prednisone would later cause a condition known as osteonecrosis, or avascular necrosis, which would impact both heads of my femurs and both heads of my humeruses. Because I was experiencing pleurisy at the time, I believed the pain from this ongoing degenerative condition was merely joint pain and connective tissue scarification. I did not give up the dream of becoming a computer programmer.
00:08:28
Speaker
specifically
Gaming Breach and Job Opportunity
00:08:29
Speaker
to create and play with computer simulations of real world systems. And so I became obsessed with the development of a game known as Black and White created by God Games Sim developer Peter Molyneux. He was promising features to be included in the game such as a dynamic ecosystem that I was particularly interested in.
00:08:47
Speaker
I created a fan page, the Land of Eden, to track its development. I wanted to know everything about the game and its development. After several months of testing his systems, I finally penetrated them using an extremely rudimentary, unpatched exploit, secured an FTP login for myself, and downloaded the source code for the then-current test build of that game.
00:09:10
Speaker
After realizing that without help, I would be completely unable to understand any of the code I had stolen, I reached out to Peter and notified him of the breach. After some discussion, he invited me to fly to England and work at his studio in the upcoming game. I agreed and went, even though I was miserably, miserably sick from uncontrolled lupus.
00:09:29
Speaker
This was an extremely challenging period of my life that I do not retain full memory of, but you can see that my name is listed in the official credits of the game. My main
Academic Journey and Law School Transfer
00:09:38
Speaker
takeaway from this experience is that computer programming workers work too hard, are too underpaid, and they seem too personally miserable for me to want to become one.
00:09:49
Speaker
Because I was too sick from lupus to continue attending school, I dropped out at 14. Instead, with my father's help, I took a series of AP tests for college credit, along with distance learning at junior colleges all over the state to satisfy the prerequisites for directly entering a four-year university at age 15.
00:10:08
Speaker
The purpose of this was to continue my education at his institution, California State University in Sacramento. My father was a professor of criminal justice there, and unlike the other professors in his department, took his responsibility for counseling students through to the successful completion of their degree very seriously.
00:10:28
Speaker
His specialization was taking students whose educations had been discontinued and patching together a way for them to finish their degrees more easily. He would drive me to campus with him, I would go to class and sleep at my desk, and then I would go back to his office and sleep there. I was physically unable to pursue a degree in the natural sciences as I had desired, so I instead pursued analytic philosophy, which was close enough.
00:10:51
Speaker
In this way, I slept through three years of college, graduating at the age of 19. I did find myself teaching a review class and symbolic logic for one of my professors and grading the papers of another, all in the hopes that someday I could teach at a college in some low stress position I could physically manage. For law school, I took the same approach I did for college. Because I was unwell, I would need to stay near home. So I chose a local unranked school, McGeorge School of Law, now University of Pacific, McGeorge School of Law,
00:11:22
Speaker
with the idea of obtaining the credential and then possibly moving on to a low stress position as some sort of County lawyer. I discovered to my dismay that the practice of law is a highly stratified one and that I, and then it would be impossible for me to obtain a teaching position unless I transferred to a higher institution.
00:11:41
Speaker
I worked very hard and accomplished this through academic achievement and a compelling package of recommendations from my professors and my own personal story up to that point. I secured a transfer in my second year to New York University School of Law, rated then by US News and World Report as the number three law school in the country.
00:11:59
Speaker
Attending NYU, arguably a feeder institution, I could possibly figure out what academic research and publication is, how it is done, do some of that, and then obtain a teaching position after a federal clerkship, which I learned to be another mystical requirement to teach law.
Career at Sullivan and Cromwell
00:12:16
Speaker
transfers to NYU are within two weeks of their arrival, subjected to a lottery of interviews with prestigious firms, a guaranteed perk of attending that institution for that degree. Somehow I was selected by lottery to interview with Sullivan and Cromwell LLP. You may have heard of them.
00:12:36
Speaker
Somehow, I had the luck of someone pulling a hallway fire alarm during the screening interview so that I could not betray myself at that time. Somehow, during the subsequent five follow-up interviews, similar events happened to somehow allow me to obtain an offer at that firm and nowhere else. Despite not having the first clue about anything, I was now among what was considered to be the elite select at my school, offer in hand to a top three firm.
00:13:02
Speaker
I tried desperately during the following years to hold it together as my health deteriorated from lupus. In my final year of law school, I was unable to walk up flights of stairs. I was unable to read for stretches of time. All I had to do to keep my job was graduate with a grade of B or better in every class.
00:13:21
Speaker
I managed just that. I then realized that everyone manages this. I realized that they were not actually teaching law as I had learned it at McGeorge. I started to recognize that something else was happening around me, something strange that I could not put my finger on. I watched war criminals come and confidently give speeches about their philosophies and thoughts.
00:13:44
Speaker
Trying to cure or ameliorate the symptoms I was experiencing from my lupus, I started taking many different kinds of supplements and doing health research to find out how to possibly survive. During my third and final year of law school, in an effort to raise my HDL measures, under the supervision of my rheumatologist, I took three grams of niacin per day, which unfortunately caused me to go blind, a condition called niacin maculopathy.
Financial Success and Health Exploration
00:14:09
Speaker
As a result, my graduation from law school was delayed by a semester. This gave me the opportunity to have two summer associate experiences at Sullivan and Cromwell, which is an awesome experience. It is the experience of a lifetime, a look at what luxuries await for the select to enjoy.
00:14:28
Speaker
My unique fortune would follow me to Sullivan and Cromwell. One day before I was to begin work, Bear Stearns collapsed. All meaningful work evaporated for the first six months of my employment. I spent my time memorizing how to create over 1,000 Japanese kanji characters, doing medical research for my own conditions, and launching elaborate wars against the Church of Scientology and assorted white nationalist targets such as Hal Turner and, quote, Yankee Jim. I had the ability to do this.
00:14:59
Speaker
I had the ability to do this because in early 2004, after writing several popular threads on an internet forum called the Something Awful Forums, I had been invited to join an offsite subgroup called Raspberry Heaven. I, along with the Raspberry Heaven coding collective, started a created website known as 4chan.
00:15:19
Speaker
I continued in my private time manipulating a newly formed group within that website called Anonymous. I spent time advising and dealing with the impact of several federal investigations and subsequent prosecutions that the site had to handle. I continued with the site until the success of Operation Chanology in 2008. This was a globally impactful operation against the Church of Scientology.
00:15:42
Speaker
I decided that this had become the right moment to leave. It was too much heat for me to tolerate given the sensitive nature of my professional work.
00:15:51
Speaker
For the rest of my time at Sullivan and Cromwell, I managed projects created by the ongoing financial collapse. This included extensive, high-security reviews of the personal correspondences of the very individuals that created a lot of misery. I got to take a look into how they lived their lives as I sifted through their electronic leavings. I was extremely capable in this role, but my deteriorating health made me question what I had struggled for so long to achieve.
00:16:16
Speaker
I had overcome obstacles that were incredible and unknown to most of the people around me. As a result, everything I saw seemed to me to be not just a tremendous waste of talented people, but on a front to whatever forces had created me in the first place, and it sustained me up until this point. I knew that I had an obligation to treat my time on this planet as an undeserved gift, and to search in it for a higher purpose. I knew
00:16:42
Speaker
that I was in the wrong place. So I quit. I was a made man with a guaranteed future of certain luxury. I quit. I quit because it didn't make sense. This move mystified everyone around me.
00:16:57
Speaker
I was also suffering from worsening health complications from my lupus, which I had been hiding as best I could. I had lost the ability to see things on the right of me for a day and even to conceive of such a dimension so that I was running into doorways while trying to pass through them. I would find myself unable to remember anything, read anything.
00:17:15
Speaker
I was finding protein in my urine increasingly. I was reminded constantly that my time here is very limited. Luckily,
Social Initiatives and Skill Development
00:17:22
Speaker
my coworkers thought of me as just odd so I could mask my symptoms until they became too obvious.
00:17:29
Speaker
With these things considered, I decided to try to spend the rest of my life, such as it was, doing something meaningful and to express what I felt my role as a human being should be on this planet. I fixated upon soil science, an interdisciplinary field that is the confluence of biology, geology, chemistry, and atmospheric sciences. I developed the theory that the purpose of man is to be outside of the natural predator-prey cycle of things, as we currently conceive of them at least.
00:17:56
Speaker
I moved back home, started attending science classes at my local junior college, and, after some negotiation, created a special position for myself within Yolo County with the title Special Deputy County Counselor. There, in my spare time, I would function as an attorney for the county, working with a local elected official to settle the estates of those who died without family or those whose affairs had devolved to the county of Yolo.
00:18:20
Speaker
At this time, I identified a drug candidate for lupus, bulimiumab. I had become familiar with monoclonal technology because of my private research into speculative and emerging anti-aging technologies. I liked the theory on which the drug operated.
00:18:36
Speaker
I also noticed a date discrepancy between the lifting of a double blind for patients participating in a study and the lifting of an NDA when those patients could discuss their experiences on the drug. I discovered before the market that the drug did indeed work. Using this information, I invested $19,000, which in a few short months turned into $360,000. Additionally, the efficacy of this drug suggested to me that I might live longer than 32 or so.
00:19:05
Speaker
So here I am, gave up my job, unemployed, uh, created a position for myself, going to school, learning science, and now I'm rich. What a life. Now that a treatment had been developed for lupus that was effective for me, I was able to walk outside in the sun. I no longer had strange scars on my face. I was no longer exhausted throughout the day. I could plan ahead and try to do things without needing to cancel on people suddenly without warning.
00:19:34
Speaker
I
Occupy Movement and Activism
00:19:35
Speaker
had been suddenly gifted with a life I had never been able to know. I was 27 and I needed to change my plans. I needed to make up for lost time. I needed to learn how to have social interactions, how to date, how to get a job, how to do just about everything. I took the windfall from the investment as a sign that I was on the right track, that I should find some way to work full time for the people. I considered this windfall to be my salary to do public good for as long as it lasted.
00:20:03
Speaker
Being only familiar with a reality that has had Marxist thought neatly redacted from it, I developed economic theories of my own. I postulated that the true capital is a kind of shadow entity called social capital.
00:20:16
Speaker
I knew that financial capital, as I had seen it, was obviously doomed, and that I should instead spend time outside of that system building community, whatever that was. I joined a local social order, the Davis Odd Fellows, and became an officer there. I helped organize local flavor events for the Chamber of Commerce, such as the Tour of Cluck, a bicycle chicken coop tour of Davis, California. I set up the Davis Flea Market, which was immediately taken from me by enterprising business thieves. The instant permits were approved.
00:20:44
Speaker
I became a board member of the local food cooperative grocery store and spearheaded changes in management desired by the workers there. I helped coordinate local political campaigns for local elected officials, going full in on everything to do with my little town. I showed up.
00:21:02
Speaker
All of these efforts were in the end completely wasted and meaningless, except as an object lesson in the futility of contrasting my efforts against the system that is defined at the start by powerful and entrenched interests, themselves formed by material conditions and incentives I could never hope to touch.
00:21:19
Speaker
This was also a time I set aside to catch up on certain milestones I had missed early on. I avoided or tuned out of most of my primary education. I made not a single friend at university being so underage and so much smarter. I never made a single friend in law school as my efforts there were spent trying not to collapse. I had some catching up to do and now had the time to do it. I was 27 and had never even kissed a girl.
00:21:45
Speaker
I spent long periods of time at the University of California, Davis, just watching the students interact with each other and trying to figure out how they did it. For the most part, this is an aside, for the most part, they don't. They just kind of sit in weird, isolated interviews. If you observe these people, you will find how weird society has become. Anyway, here I am creeping on college campuses. I apologize to the students I was observing. This is all for my own personal edification and probably not right. Let's see.
00:22:18
Speaker
Anyway, I researched anyway, I spent long periods of time at the University of California Davis just watching the students interact with each other trying to figure out how they did it.
Betrayal and Mental Health Struggles
00:22:28
Speaker
There was an invisible barrier of glass separating my world from theirs. Perhaps I thought it is because they are ignorant of true sorrow. I researched online where to buy clothes and how to dress. Thank you, Reddit. Thanks. No, thanks.
00:22:41
Speaker
I started socializing myself to be in public by performing pretend exercises for myself. I would walk through the streets of my city without fear of awkwardness. No. I was instead a factory owner on tour, looking at everything and everyone with a patron's benevolent eye. I would ask people for directions to places I already knew the way to, just to learn how to interact with them. I became a lead actor in a local playhouse in Davis called Barnyard Theater.
00:23:08
Speaker
I did a lot of experimenting at this time normal people would do during their high school, college, or subsequent years. As soon as the Occupy movement happens, I quit my position with the Yolo County Council's office and stayed in the park full time. I was still a business and economic development commissioner for the City of Davis and an odd fellow, so the central location of the park was convenient to me. We opened a second front for Occupy on the UC Davis campus, resulting in the infamous UC Davis pepper spray incident.
00:23:38
Speaker
This is where my friends were pepper sprayed in front of me by a police officer named Pike. I found this to be extraordinarily distressing for a long period of time, a condition I now recognize as post-traumatic stress disorder. After this, I was invited to attend Burning Man and offered a free ticket to do so from a strange person who showed up in my front yard one day. There, I met some women who were outdoor wilderness instructors and wilderness medical technicians who lived together in a shared home with other primitive skill instructors in Portland.
00:24:08
Speaker
I discovered during this time that my father was dying of cancer and had been suffering for the last several years while hiding his affliction from us. I found no solace in Portland and so traveled to New Orleans where I lived for in a squat for several months with my friends from UC Davis who had just been awarded a settlement for their roles in the pepper spray incident. We created pop-up restaurants and I explored abandoned buildings took photographs and wrote about my encounters with the locals.
00:24:45
Speaker
My father died quite hideously while neglected at my hands and at the hands of my mother, for neither of us were suitable to provide competent care. Two months later, two of my best friends from high school approached me and asked me to run a minimum wage campaign in Davis, California for $15 an hour by 2015. One, Sean Ray Craft,
00:25:08
Speaker
is the heir to a petroleum fortune, but at the time was a checking clerk for the local Safeway and styled himself a labor activist. The other, Joaquin Chavez, is a heavy metal DJ host. He was admitted to the University of Chicago History PhD program, but dropped out. Now he does facilities tasks at the local Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at UC Davis. He does sound engineering in a spare time and hosts a college radio show as a DJ.
00:25:36
Speaker
His father-in-law was president of his union up to CWA 9-11. This gave him aspirations for professional labor adventurism in his own future. The campaign went miserably and in retrospect was likely sabotaged at the start by union, democratic party, and national forces beyond our control. Because my father had just died, I poured myself into this role with an unhealthy intensity.
Married Life and Alcoholism
00:26:02
Speaker
Through the course of this campaign, I discovered that many of my friends I had made through civic activism were, in fact, not very good people. My two friends from high school betrayed and abandoned me rather than admit their roles in the failure of this initiative. They imposed restrictions upon it on the behalf of their sponsors that made success impossible, all at the behest of their superiors in the Sacramento Central Labor Council, along with other organizations they hope to work with in the future.
00:26:29
Speaker
They spoke ill about me behind my back to explain the failure. After quietly folding up the campaign they never spoke to me again. This was the end of 16 years of what, in retrospect, was something other than friendship.
00:26:42
Speaker
I now learned that my relationship with these people felt strange all along because for the entire duration of it, I was engaged what is called masking in the autistic community. I was allowed in their presence just to the extent of my usefulness with my natural oddity being kept close at hand in a back pocket in case it was ever needed to control or expel me. With more years, I realized that the trust I placed in these people and in most other people was extremely naive.
00:27:09
Speaker
People are nowhere near as complex as I think they might be. They have simple thoughts, follow simple impulses, and then invent reasons after the fact for having done what was most convenient and expedient to them at that time. That's the depth of a relationship most anyone is capable of in this society at this time. Upon reviewing the spiritual literature, it seems to me to be the way of people in most every society at most every time.
00:27:38
Speaker
Shortly after this upset, noting my own mother's need for Paxil, I obtained a prescription for Zoloft from some irresponsible doctor. I would stay on this drug for the next 10 years. At this point, after the failure of the minimum wage campaign and alienation from my friends, I had a suicidal thought perhaps every three seconds. After a period of excruciating adjustment, Zoloft stopped these thoughts.
00:28:05
Speaker
I then met Ariana, my future wife, a very smart hard worker, and an alcoholic from a new money family of alcoholics. It was she who taught me the ways of managing personal stress through carefully timed doses of alcohol throughout the day, with each male, and in the middle of the night, if one should happen to awaken.
00:28:23
Speaker
She also taught me that difficulties obtaining meals could be fixed with a quick shot of alcohol to provide calories. With her I became a habitual and brutally committed drunk. During our marriage we brought an RV and toured California in it trying to map the human geography of alternative lifestyles that we knew must be hiding throughout Northern California.
00:28:45
Speaker
What followed was two years of living that lifestyle with someone who drinks a lot of alcohol. This lifestyle was not good for my body and I started to break down. I noticed that I would bleed and never stop. My bones started to ache deep inside. I became deeply dependent on alcohol. This culminated in a disastrous wedding ceremony in 2015, after which I quit cold turkey.
Misdiagnosis and Psychiatric Struggles
00:29:08
Speaker
This is where it gets absolutely nuts.
00:29:11
Speaker
I did not know or understand the gravity of my mistake until I started to suffer from delirium tremens without any idea what was going on. I had gone from about a handle a day of alcohol to nothing. At the Kaiser emergency room in Vacaville they performed a spinal tap and suspected meningitis.
00:29:30
Speaker
After realizing in the emergency room what my practitioners did not, that my condition was probably caused by simple alcohol withdrawal, I requested to be allowed to leave and stay at a nearby hotel to sweat through it with a short prescription of benzodiazepam. Instead, the emergency room psychiatrist decided to 5150 me as a danger to myself because he thought I might die if allowed to leave the hospital like this.
00:29:52
Speaker
I was sent to a third-party psychiatric facility, and after meeting with a psychiatrist there that lasted approximately three minutes, a physician who knew nothing of my underlying medical history or clinical record, diagnosed me with bipolar type 2 disorder.
Alternative Housing and Community Organizing
00:30:08
Speaker
This has stayed on my chart ever since and has caused me no end of incredible torment and trouble, as will be shown.
00:30:15
Speaker
Because of the housing crisis, my new wife and I experimented with alternative modes of housing. She was a former director of several successful housing cooperatives, and I too was extremely interested in exploring these alternative, collectivized methods. We made it a mission to visit, catalog, and rolodex every weirdo in Northern California. We wanted to trace the outgoing trajectory of every hippie leaving the communes at UC Davis as they dispersed through the local organic farms, overseas internships, marketing positions in the nearby city of San Francisco,
00:30:45
Speaker
renewable policy analyst positions in local government, everywhere they went, so did we. While traveling up and down the western coast, I retraced a journey I had made years earlier for Occupy and reconnected with the old activists I had met and still kept in contact with. Through our trip, we made connections, introductions, took names, and so forth for a project we called the Electric Co-op Franchise Test.
00:31:10
Speaker
We would study housing cooperatives with the hope of federating them, uniting them under some shared operational principles that would bring mutual benefit, or we could develop a model that we could unite with off-the-shelf financial tools already provided through various home and commercial subsidy programs.
00:31:26
Speaker
With the introduction of the Affordable Care Act, I saw an opportunity to provide healthcare access to the people that we had charted during our previous journeys. So we created a new type of healthcare access agency contemplated by those new laws. Ask Ariana!
00:31:41
Speaker
In the early days of the Affordable Care Act rollout, the website and other online tools were impossible to use. In true neoliberal fashion, this hole was plugged through private enterprise, the creation of healthcare access agents. These agents are funded directly or indirectly through government subsidies and insurance company subsidies that were created or incentivized through that act.
00:32:01
Speaker
This created a situation where these individuals, once helped by us, paid nothing and then saw their own health insurance premiums shrink to near zero or, in the case of uninsured people, their lives would be changed completely. We would assist with this transition with supplementary steps such as finding addresses for people to use or by engineering other workarounds to find them care.
00:32:25
Speaker
The direct agent of intervention they would know and remember would be Ariana, my wife, and her operation, which would be paid by a combination of insurance and government money. The clients we would help would never be charged a dime. This, in essence, funded our organizing work and also cleverly allowed us to be the agents distributing an essential public good where the government itself had failed.
Health Deterioration and Family Neglect
00:32:48
Speaker
While Ariana busied herself on the phone, I created an enterprise out of my mother's garage called Armadillo Labs, an engineering-focused business incubator. We had a 3D printer before that became commonplace and poached engineering students and other hopefuls from UC Davis. We provided a laid-back atmosphere for them to launch their startup projects.
00:33:07
Speaker
We would ask zero equity, or anything, really. The purpose was to create an environment where people could circulate, postulate, and try. A third space, as it were. Armadillo Labs created Foodfully, a smart refrigerator startup that was later sold to GE.
00:33:25
Speaker
Spectral Solutions, an unmanned aerial research platform company focusing on hyperspectral imaging for the purpose of land and crop management, and Dykes with Drills, a queer outreach program to teach literal homemaking skills to the people of those communities.
00:33:40
Speaker
In truth, I needed help learning about the mechanical arts. I was trying to rehabilitate a 1987 Toyota Dolphin RV into a permanent mobile home. Ariana and I imagined that we would live in it and circulate throughout California as rotating guests in various cooperative housing situations. We could sign people up for healthcare, spread news, and develop organizational principles. Things were looking up.
00:34:06
Speaker
During this time I was still in contact with many of my old friends from the Occupy movement, and some had decided to take their money and invest in real estate, specifically cannabis growing real estate, with the thought of achieving their liberation. I helped them with the legal side of setting up their rural cultivation operations.
00:34:22
Speaker
I would discover later that these and many other similar operations, these remote locations, are places where terrible depredations occur against workers. This bothered me a hell of a lot, guys, which kind of explains the next couple steps. You're going to see a few skips ahead.
00:34:40
Speaker
It was at this time I happened to stomp down on an irrigation spike spontaneously shattering the ball of my right femur. I was in incredible pain that was not getting better. I would never get better. A latent condition in the head of my femur caused by a drug prednisone that I had taken years earlier when I was in between the ages of 14 and 21 had cut off the blood supply to that bone and the bone was dying irreversibly and painfully.
00:35:07
Speaker
I stayed in bed, worsening over weeks until I was finally unable to walk. I found no help domestically, so I drove myself to the Kaiser emergency room. I was discovered there by staff scooting along the floor of a back corridor on my belly trying to find help.
00:35:22
Speaker
I gave them a quick medical history and declared to them that I believed I had avascular necrosis of the femoral head. An MRI confirmed this to be true. The surgeon I eventually met with prescribed an expensive magnetic wand, which I should rub over the joint at very specific timed intervals with a jelly that I could put on to assist. The magnetic wand was designed to destroy itself after a set number of uses, despite being a useful and expensive device, supposedly.
00:35:52
Speaker
The head of my femur by this time was a sharp fractured point being driven deeper and deeper into my deteriorating pelvis by the same tight ligaments that hold my leg in place. The magnetic wand of course did not work and was never designed to work. It turned out to be an elaborate scam perpetrated by the executives of Medtronics, people who were never punished and who profited greatly.
Medical Cannabis Industry Exploration
00:36:17
Speaker
I spent six months in excruciating, worsening pain. The only relief would be to distract the joint by hooking my leg up against something and letting my body weight partially pull it out of the socket. My waking and sleeping hours were spent seeking this relief. I received no help from my wife and no help from my mother.
00:36:36
Speaker
It was eventually found to be more convenient for everyone if I slept by myself on the floor in a back room. I would crawl to a sliding door and urinate out of it. On the occasion I would manage to need to evacuate, I would crawl or hop to the bathroom in excruciating pain and do it there.
00:36:52
Speaker
I received no substantial assistance from Kaiser with the exception of farcical pain management classes adopted probably in response to this lawsuit. They basically cut off pain medication for everybody. So I'm raw dogging this guys. I made sure to keep inviting people over to swim in the pool or do other things just so that I could have a little assistance. I needed assistance because during this time, both my wife and my mother were highly critical of me for not performing chores around the house.
00:37:19
Speaker
I was, in fact, the anonymous culprit behind just about anything found amiss on the premises. Any project that I had started before being struck down was a mess to be cleaned. My mother took to the habit of, quote, cleaning the house by finding objects she did not know the origin or place of and just chuck them into the room where I lay, which gradually filled with whatever objects people did not want to deal with. This made mobility more and more difficult.
00:37:44
Speaker
One of the people that I was inviting to my house to try to keep a constant stream of help was discovered in my backyard at 3 a.m., stealing whatever cannabis he could find. I sat with him and smoked with him while he explained himself. As an aside here, you have to understand the story of the metamorphosis after this. This is exactly what I think was happening.
00:38:05
Speaker
in that author's environment or what he himself experienced. It is the experience of chronic illness to turn into something different, to be classified and disposed of by your family. This is so common that everyone eventually will discover its truth.
00:38:23
Speaker
Because the RV I had bought was in the middle of being renovated, it was partially exposed to the outside elements from an open vent on its side. I patiently and indirectly asked for assistance in sealing this, but was unheard. I watched, crippled as the project I had hoped to complete was penetrated by rain. At that point, there was nothing left to do but demolish it.
00:38:44
Speaker
Eventually the situation became intolerable. I was ignored by my wife who had constructed her own private world around healthcare access. She never left her room and adopted habits from her childhood. She pissed in a jar to avoid having to confront anyone in the house, drank heavily and hid it.
00:39:00
Speaker
For my own part, being an incredible pain, I drank heavily as well, and in fact relied on my wife's habits to supply me with the alcohol I was using for calories and most of my sustenance. The remainder of my sustenance came from stealing candy from my mother. With these vices to sustain me, my health deteriorated further. I spent most of my time sleeping or in an alcoholic stupor.
00:39:22
Speaker
I came to the realization that I was dying in the exact same circumstances of the neglect that my father came to know in his final months. Myself and my mother are completely incompetent, not up to the task, and he, alone, in a room, unable to walk, unable to ask for what he needs, dying, slowly, starving, eating only candy, for it was convenient and the least troublesome source of calories.
00:39:47
Speaker
I knew now with great intimacy this experience, which was the last one he had of us. In his final days he was utterly, utterly alone. The label of bipolar followed me here and defined my relationships with my loved ones and their dispositions towards me.
00:40:04
Speaker
There is a social disposal mechanism baked into the psychiatric industry, a way of conveniently labeling the behavior and identity of others, of turning any inconvenient or incongruent aspect of a personal relationship into a type of externality that can be dealt with neatly and professionally.
Business Theft and Turmoil
00:40:21
Speaker
What those professionals did not know when helpfully labeling my behavior for me
00:40:25
Speaker
was that I was autistic. Any language they defined around me, I would readily adopt and use to explain this phenomena. My wife, herself the daughter of an academic psychiatrist, helped me by identifying various aspects of my behavior as psychiatrically pathological.
00:40:41
Speaker
So it came to be that the little things my family disliked about me, the things that they could not explain without looking deeper into their own behavior, those things were taught to me to be symptoms of bipolar disorder. This was very helpful feedback from my psychiatrist who prescribed me an increasing number and variety of drugs.
00:40:57
Speaker
In truth, I was trapped. In all my life, I have always had a refuge, a place of retreat, a place where I could decompress if in danger of what I now understand to be, quote, autistic overload. Here, I had nothing of that kind. I was under constant, unpredictable siege.
00:41:14
Speaker
My mother was still not dealing well with the loss of my father because of her unpredictability and destructiveness. She had been isolated from just about every aspect of household management and maintenance. She had not so much as taken out the trash for herself in over 20 years of marriage. She relied on him to take the cans out to the curb.
00:41:31
Speaker
The existence of these tasks undone would bring my mother to unthinking hysterics. She would call for me by my father's name, demanding for help with every minor task. Even when I could not walk, she would pester me constantly to roll large, ponderous trash cans out to the curb.
00:41:47
Speaker
These were things I was incapable of doing without excruciating pain, and I told her this. She should have known this, but somehow she could not. I was trapped there with her with my wife who was also using me as an outlet for her personal upsets, which were many.
00:42:03
Speaker
At the end stage of it, laying in my room, I would simply be in an unmentionable place in the dark where people would throw complaints and undesirable objects. Of course, I managed to find my own refuge by being as drunk as humanly possible as much as humanly possible. My day-to-day involved drinking enough of anything so that I could stop shaking and get back to sleep or drift into a reverie.
00:42:25
Speaker
I would calculate everything carefully so that I could avoid throwing up, which I did anyway, frequently. I would drink anything, ever clear, unfinished fermenting wine, and I would drink it as quickly as possible. This was to help against the pain, a way to sleep forward through the months and months of inept, doomed medical interventions, and a way to dispose of myself, as was so obviously wished.
00:42:46
Speaker
During this time I discovered that Joaquin Chavez, the union careerist hopeful I had started the minimum campaign with, had decided as part of a promotion for his college radio show to post pictures of the corpses of concentration camp victims alongside badly written poetry about the extremeness of these graphic images. He also posted up graphic photos of historic lynchings of African Americans all on the campus servers. I reported these lynchings to the news but kept the Holocaust photos to myself. It hit the papers.
00:43:17
Speaker
Hey there, I know you listen to this Joaquin. Being in the above physical condition, deteriorating in the end stages of extreme alcohol dependency, I was at all times in a state of either stupor or psychosis and panic. Unreasoning, afraid I would be sued by my former friend for reporting him to the news agencies, I gave the proceeds of my father's life insurance money to my then wife Ariana as a loan, which she could use to pay off her business and law school debts.
00:43:46
Speaker
Suddenly she became financially solvent. I had been supporting her throughout this entire time from my savings. Now she was free. The matter of divorce came up soon after and I readily agreed. My life had been made into a hell on earth and these people would finally be free of it. They were better off unshackled from what they had been witnessing and ignoring for so long. Problem solved. My wife out of the picture, I was left to my own devices.
00:44:12
Speaker
Armadillo Labs was still operational and a 14-foot fixed-wing aircraft by this time had been tested, constructed in prototype, scrapped, and then constructed in earnest.
Health Recovery and Business Betrayal
00:44:23
Speaker
After the Medtronic Magnet Wand had failed, my surgeons prescribed what is called a core decompression surgery. The current underlying theory about avascular necrosis is that after an initial insult, such as trauma or disruption to the blood supply of an area of bone, a small part of it can be caused to die. Under normal circumstances, the necrotic tissue would then be absorbed and new healthy tissue would remodel the area and replace what had been lost.
00:44:50
Speaker
In the compact environment of the humeral or femoral heads, things are slightly different. Necrotizing tissue expands after it dies, but it has no room to do so. Inflammatory processes that would normally recruit immune cells to the area to cause a further expansion of volume in again, a very limited space.
00:45:11
Speaker
As these tissues expand, the ability of blood to reach the area is compromised, causing neighboring tissues to lose their blood supply and then also die and expand in a similar way. This is an incredibly painful process. A lot of pressure. It is a cascading, geometric, necrotic failure of the bone.
00:45:31
Speaker
A core decompression is a procedure designed to intervene in this process. It amounts to finding the areas of necrotic bone tissue using MRI imaging and then using a drill to extract as much of the tissue as possible. This is all done to preserve the surface integrity of the joint it supports.
00:45:48
Speaker
Under ideal conditions, the removed material relieves the pressure, allowing blood to circulate in the area, allowing for natural bone regeneration. Here, this procedure was attempted after the head of my femur had already collapsed. This was a pointless surgery. There was no possibility that it would do anything except further cripple me. I spent the following six months in incredible agony. It was at this point that I decided to investigate the world of medical cannabis.
00:46:17
Speaker
Up until this point, I had been receiving most of my cannabis gratis, or at greatly reduced prices, from an assortment of local people I had helped with grow operations, setting up health care for them or their employees, or other favors, but I wanted to know the retail experience of medical patients.
00:46:32
Speaker
The person who arrived at my door was someone who recognized me from high school and from my previous labor organizing work. I talked to him about the situation. He was driving a personal, uninsured vehicle, which did not have a seatbelt. He was delivering medical cannabis for a local grower who did not pay him a minimum wage, and what wage he did pay was often and without warning made, quote, in kind. That is, he was paid in weed.
00:46:55
Speaker
He also had no health insurance, which was an immediate problem that I could help him with. I'm a lunatic, by the way. I hope you've noticed this. After doing further investigations into the structure of the medical cannabis economy in Davis, I found his story to be typical. There were a number of stringers I knew who were at below poverty wages paid informally and thus unable to access social services or the health care to which they were entitled.
00:47:19
Speaker
They could not exist officially, not being provided with any legal documentation of their work. They couldn't even file their taxes. Furthermore, their jobs were ending soon. Medical cannabis was coming to town and things would need to become official. All their employers were going out of business. I immediately involved myself with the new draft ordinances being put forth by the city. I created a cannabis collective under those existing laws, the Davis People's Harvest.
00:47:44
Speaker
My plan, which was a good one, was to be operating as the only legal cannabis collective in Davis at the time of the legal switchover. This was easy as the existing operations were closing and their employees and customer base were glad to switch over to an operation that would continue to exist.
00:47:59
Speaker
Then, as the city changed over to commercial cannabis, we would already be an existent dispensary, easy to convert, and more importantly, we would have an established customer base. I made sure to create a carve-out in these ordinances that allowed for the existence of my proposed entity, and then I set about making it. I hired my old high school friend, who was a luckless weed delivery driver at the time, Ishar Daliwal.
00:48:21
Speaker
I-S-H-A-R-D-H-A-L-I-W-A-L, Ishar Daliwal, and a local live music DJ who also delivered Nicholas Glass, and finally a local named Sarah Clanton. These three people I paid out of my pocket to cover the period of transition between their old employment and the operation of the new legal dispensary.
00:48:47
Speaker
I hired independent attorneys, abiding by California ethical standards, to set up first the corporation containing the dispensary, the Davis People's Harvest, and the DBA, the People's Kush. It was my hope eventually to launch this dispensary and transition it over to a worker-owned enterprise. It was my hope by investing the last of my life savings to launch this company that I could find for myself a place of employment where my disabilities would not be such a huge issue, where my ongoing health matters could be hidden in the back office.
00:49:16
Speaker
By this time, I was allowed to petition for a total hip replacement. I had been in agony for just under a year and a half and the surgery only took a few hours and I walked out of it completely better and under a week. That was a lot of wasted time that I was destroying my life, losing my savings, destroying my relationship, causing a lot of hardship and it was all because of complete mismanagement of this issue.
00:49:41
Speaker
Anyway,
Failed Surgery and Mental Health Challenges
00:49:43
Speaker
the business was an amazing success. We were first on the scene. We were the very oldest dispensary existing in Davis at that time. And we had a great reputation for providing excellent customer service and very reasonably priced cannabis. This is because of several decisions I made and also because the entire operation was running on $125,000 of my retirement money.
00:50:05
Speaker
I was confident being a citizen of the town, well known, working closely with police, with the city staff as this was being crafted. I felt confident in my position.
00:50:16
Speaker
As soon as the commercial permit, which I had paid for by personal check, had cleared, I was physically attacked by Ishar Daliwal and removed from the business. He knocked out my front fucking tooth. He then cleared out the corporate bank account and a cashier's check issued to his own name. Then he simply submitted fraudulent paperwork to the California Secretary of State, with some help from some crooked lawyer friend of his who can only work as a bartender, replacing the board of directors totally. He then sold the license to a Los Angeles combine. We didn't.
00:50:46
Speaker
He is now on the W E E D E N. He is now on the board of directors there. He has made what is probably several million dollars by my calculation, taking this local operation and selling it, selling it. The entire reason we got the licenses because, hey, look at all these outsiders. No, this is this is local. Nope. What he did was he took my face. He took my work. He took my ability to make this thing happen. He punched me in the fucking face and took my shit. That is America.
00:51:16
Speaker
I am now part of his life story and will be forever. He will need to explain just how and why he came to possess what he does to his children if he ever has any. This is probably going to be my only consolation. I was crushed, but worse was in store for me.
00:51:34
Speaker
Because of the friends of the people who stole my business were confronting me on the streets of Davis and harassing me and trying openly to provoke physical confrontations with me in bars or other public venues. I had to move to neighboring Woodland into a low cost apartment where I started slowly losing my mind.
00:51:52
Speaker
There were early signs. I became violent for the first time in my life. I physically broke down a door in my house during an argument. I noted myself ranting and raving. I did not know this at the time, but the hip replacement operation had failed in an insidious way.
00:52:11
Speaker
Hip implants typically fail by mechanical loosening from the bone or because of infection on the surface of the implant. In this latter case, bacteria can contaminate the appliance during the implantation procedure or a bacterial spore might infiltrate the body and find itself on the implant, reproducing itself. Once
Downward Spiral and Family Challenges
00:52:28
Speaker
an implant becomes so infected, it must be removed by a lengthy procedure which includes a month-long stay in the hospital and multiple extremely risky surgical procedures.
00:52:39
Speaker
This type of infection has an impact on every part of the body. The bacterial colony, following some mutual signal that science is only beginning to understand, will transition to a planktonic state and circulate through the body affecting every organ system. The valves of the heart that are typically first impacted. This is painful. It also causes myocarditis or the inflammation of the heart. I was experiencing a resting heart rate of around 90 beats per minute at that time.
00:53:06
Speaker
which is pretty high. Later on, my resting heart rate would be 120 beats per minute and I can only control it with medication through a beta blocker. Such infections also impact the amygdala, a part of the brain that governs aggression, fear, and pain response, making it hyperactive.
00:53:23
Speaker
From my perspective, I knew no fear. I knew no limits. I, much later, discovered an extremely attenuated pain response. I was astonished by the feats that I was now capable of. I made video tapes of myself exploring this by hurling my body against the concrete floor over and over and springing up, unharmed, in no pain. I think you've seen some of these videos. They're definitely bizarre.
00:53:45
Speaker
I saw a video of myself early on before my friends had all abandoned me for acting strangely. I was pacing and trying to talk. The physical way I moved became quicker and had an uncanny, aggressive quality to it. My thoughts became fantastical and malicious. I felt aggressive and angry all of the time for no reason. I attached these feelings to anything and everything I encountered without knowing it. I hatched ornate, bizarre plans to obtain revenge against my former business partners.
00:54:16
Speaker
I reported these feelings to my psychiatrist who prescribed them to bipolar disorder and gave me some more medication. To continue my treatment, I was prescribed an increasing number of antipsychotics as many as five different medications at one time. Life became difficult and disorienting.
00:54:32
Speaker
I would also spontaneously fall over for no apparent reason. These medications also caused bizarre physiological changes in me. The medications were, in many cases, disastrously inappropriate. For one example, I was put on lithium, a drug that is toxic to and directly damages the kidneys, an organ that does not heal once he damages it.
00:54:52
Speaker
despite already having chronic kidney disease. So you don't give people with kidney disease lithium. It's like the first thing you ask them. Follow-up care consisted of an appointment every month or every three months or an increase in authorized medication doses if I reported problems. Which having a worsening infection I did.
00:55:09
Speaker
I continued to feel unaccountable rage and fixated upon anything and everything that had ever gone wrong in my life and anyone who had ever wronged me. When I found myself buying materials to commit acts of property destruction against my former business partners, I dutifully checked myself into a mental institution for another unhelpful stay.
00:55:28
Speaker
I continued trying to solve my problems through the psychological health system. I committed fully to the therapy programs that were prescribed by my psychiatrist and believed fully in whatever clinical conclusions they made. I found mental health support groups in my area. I went with my mother. I took part in a drug rehab program where I struggled to relate my experience of drug dependency and addiction with the other program participants. I'm not a drug addict, and I did not belong in that program.
00:55:56
Speaker
but I tried my hardest anyway. I started fainting regularly. Standing became difficult. I would run out of breath walking to the bathroom or just getting up. I would collapse and damage items in my apartment. Because of the medications, I also became oddly shaped and very overweight. For the first time in my life, I shut myself up in my apartment for months at a time. I would sit in a chair and stare at a wall and discover that I had been so positioned for well over two days.
00:56:22
Speaker
I stopped showering, eating or changing clothes at all. Breathing itself was a struggle.
00:56:28
Speaker
only after purchasing a co2 meter and gauging my apartment that i discovered there was a problem with my gas appliances and that for 24 hours a day seven days a week i had been sitting in an environment with concentrations of 3 000 parts per million at the low end that's really high a thousand is dangerous and five to ten thousand for the 30 minutes after i took a shower and the in apartment water heater activated so i'm basically suffering brain damage sitting in here
00:56:55
Speaker
Food became unnecessary, so I stopped eating completely. For a full calendar month in February 2022, I lost 55 pounds. In that month, I took the opportunity to observe the physiological changes that starvation brings to a human body. It was extraordinarily painful, which I observed impassively.
00:57:15
Speaker
I learned a lot about my body that I never knew before. I sat for long periods of time completely dissociating. My toenails stopped growing in places and instead started bleeding and oozing. I started losing sensation in my feet, finally my lower left foot and leg. I identified a nerve cluster in my left calf that had gone completely numb and took the opportunity to experiment with this phenomenon. I burned my skin there with acid to test the theory about the nervous system, but I felt no pain.
00:57:42
Speaker
I eventually reached out to my rheumatologist for help and supervision. She noted that my white blood count was slightly elevated. This meant to her that I was not taking enough medication to suppress my immune system. It was also a sign of non-compliance on my part with the existing prescribed regimen.
00:58:01
Speaker
She refused to discuss my situation or other treatment options until my test results showed a sufficiently suppressed immune system. She demanded I double my dosage of that medication. Over objections, I complied. And what follows is a time of darkness. And there we have installment one. You haven't even met any Falcons yet. Installment one of this incredible journey that I've been on that probably maybe only 4% of you were on.
00:58:31
Speaker
I figure that from this, I can write several other things that would be interesting to you. But for now, don't follow me on Twitter. I'm leaving that fucking place. I'm setting up things online so that you'll have an easier time subscribing to my podcast. And this is an excerpt from more material that will be put in a written form as one of several pieces