Read today's papers and you'll find that there's another major financial crisis brewing, as banks like HSBC and the home of my own overdraft, RBS (now 84% owned by the British taxpayer) find themselves dangerously exposed to debt defaults, mostly in the construction industry, in the bling-bling dictatorship, Dubai.
Like everything else in Dubai (its highest building -- not, incidentally, the skyscraper sporting the huge portrait of the enclave's resident dictator, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum --is 40% taller than the next nearest rival), the debt crisis is one of elephantine proportions: $14 billion of syndicated loans to Dubai World are said to be looking very iffy indeed, and the total debt is estimated by some at about $90 billion, and others as far beyond that.
It would be tempting just to shrug this off, if it weren't for the fact that the Dubai hype reached even my post-materialist ears. Members of my family have been to Dubai, my bank lends my overdraft interest to the state's construction firms, my book editors are visiting with a view to writing books about the speculative bubble and the fascinating way in which it's burst.
"Was anywhere heading for a fall so obviously as Dubai?" asks Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. "Yet why did no one ever scream? Why did everyone just marvel?" The answer is partly that negative comment was actually a crime in Dubai; Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum told critics to "shut up" and media was closely controlled to exclude anything which might damage investments or stop the influx of rich foreigners and investors.
It's also undoubtedly true that a rising tide, even if it doesn't quite float all boats, brooks no opposition. Dubai's population of 1.37 million (2006) is comprised of a small conservative Muslim indigenous population, and 85% expatriates, most of whom are low-paid construction and service workers from India and the Philippines. The bling state rides -- I suppose we should say "rode" -- on the back of unorganised, unregulated labour.
The people close to me -- editors, writers I know here in Berlin -- were interested in Dubai not just as a speculative bubble and a sort of Brechtian fable (The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny played out in a 21st century which seems to have forgotten the 1920s), but because they're close to architect Rem Koolhaas, who was preparing to unleash his own sort of bubble on the city. Truly the architecture it deserved, you might say, but will now never get.
Here's a fairly superficial and, I'd say, immoral TV documentary by Piers Morgan about Dubai:
Watching that, my first reaction is "You'd have to pay me a lot of money to get me to live in a place like that!" It looks like everything I hate and avoid in the cities I know: endless anaemic shopping malls with ludicrously inflated prices, vapid celebrities and self-made, flabby entrepreneurs, absolutely zero culture you'd want to spend any time with (unless you're really into Kylie shows punctuated with "the world's largest fireworks display"), Sunday Times Rich List types with parasitic hangers-on, people with dyed blonde hair who talk about money and drink champagne, people who've never encountered a single interesting idea (let alone an idea critical of the kind of world they inhabit) in their lives, bubble-headed people floating about in a bubble economy.
Burst, Dubai, burst! And take your dictator with you! But don't take my bank, my sister, my editor, or the entire world financial system down into hell with you, please.
So Wednesday, after my 30 something hour stretch at work in 3 days, I get home about 4pm.
Jake and I take Polly to the dog park, we were gone maybe 30 minutes. We come back home to see a big ass box on our porch. Heavy as hell too.
We lug it in and take a look - FedExed to our address, but to a one "Janice Storm". Definitely not the prior tenant. No return address, save a third party shipper in Encino, California.
Frankly, I'm a nosy person. It would be one thing had it been dropped at the wrong address or something, but it was definitely our address with this random name on it. It was so huge and so heavy that this bitch was going to get opened.
After Jake and I google the shipper, prod, listen to and otherwise examine this weird ass box, we finally decide to hack into it. Except I'm a paranoid freak and make Jacob take it to the backyard, in case it is something dangerous or weird. Not that that would help him to not lose an arm from a mail bomb, but at least it wouldn't be an arm AND the coffee table, right?
We take turns listening to the box and all advances made are ginger and with our faces as far away as we can get them. We're both nervous and weirded out, but I laugh and say "you know this is going to be something lame like a ham?" We're giggling. Half because we feel silly for being so weirded out but half because we're really fucking weirded out.
So he carefully opens it - inside is a styrofoam cooler that fills the entirety of the box. Cooler is taped shut several ways and several times over.
Oh shit. Here we go. Wait, people ship hams in coolers. To keep them cold. Ham ham ham. It's still a ham. No big deal, just someone's holiday ham.
We grab a steak knife, cut the tape and open the lid. Inside it's full of packing peanuts and a big black wrapped... thing. This is becoming less of a joke and more of a concern by the minute. I get a sheet for Jake to dump the box onto so he doesn't have to lift this random thing out of the cooler with his hands.
Obtusely shaped and completely wrapped in black plastic, Jake and I look at each other. We are thinking the same thing and we both know that this operation needs to be moved inside and fast.
Jake grabs the cooler and its former contents and moves it inside while I scoop up the blanket with the packing peanuts and the box. We lock the doors. We turn off the lights. We move the thing to the bathtub. My heart rate is climbing rapidly.
Jake pulls at the plastic. We work to remove yards and yards of black plastic. Fold after fold of black- the type of plastic that garbage bags are made of.
Ham ham ham ham ham. A ham would be shipped wrapped up, right? This is not real. I am letting my mind get the best of me. Boring, packaged ham. Ham ham ham.
After lots of work and lots of layers, we get to a layer of this blue paper wrapping covering a layer of petroleum jelly. We both know, 100% now, that this is not ham. This is dope.
Jesus fucking Christ, don't let it be coke. Please please please don't let it be coke.
Underneath the jelly is layers upon layers of industrial pallet wrap. Thick clear plastic we work at for what seems like forever.
This is not happening to me. I can not be mixed up with something like this. This is not real.
After pulling away yards and yards of clear plastic, we come to a misshapen cube of duct tape.
No no no no. I do not want to be responsible for this. No no no no no no.
Jacob stops several times during this whole process as it's been clear for quite some time that this is no holiday ham, but I tell him to keep going. I need to see, for sure, what we're dealing with and I want to see it with my own eyes.
I hand Jake the steak knife and tell him to cut into it. Dry green cannabis buds peek out from the slit in the tape. It is a massive brick of marijuana, at least 20 pounds.
I am momentarily relieved that it is not cocaine. My relief gives way to fear and panic and I am shaking and telling Jacob "Someone is going to come looking for this. It has our address on it, someone is going to come looking for this and then they're going to come looking for us. Someone is going to be very angry about this."
***
To momentarily give you some context here, let me also tell you this:
Jacob had never smoked weed until about two years ago. In the past year his interest in pot, pot culture, pot cultivation and pot legislation has come to a fever pitch. He smokes pretty frequently, he is always on top of current pot related political news, he reads tons online about marijuana cultivation and culture.
A couple months back, he convinced me to let him have a plant. I was never quite comfortable with it, not because of any ethical concern, but the legal ramifications of that are far too risky to be worth it, in my opinion. But Jacob has been so fervently dedicated to this thing, it was impossible to discourage him. He tended to it several times daily, successfully transferred it from soil to a hydroponic system, built a grow box for it, rigged up lights, researched more on the topic than I even knew existed.
He started it as a seed in early September. As of this week, it was 3ish feet tall, lush and about 4 weeks away from flowering.
***
"We have to get rid of it all. We have to get rid of everything and I have to get out of here and we have to call the cops."
Jacob agreed, but I could see on his face that this was going to be painful.
We hashed out a plan-
We had to call the cops asap, but that meant we had to clean the house first and quickly. I would take all of the paraphernalia from the house, dump the plant and anything related in a dumpster somewhere, squirrel Jacob's bong and personal stash at a friend's house and figure out where we would stay the night.
Jake would help me move out anything to be dumped, clean the house, call the cops and meet me wherever I was.
I was frantic and imagining foot soldiers from a Mexican drug cartel looking for their shit any minute.
I packed up all things pot-related, which was a lot, took the dog and cat and a couple changes of clothes and split.
I called Allen from the car. We worked out an estimated street value. As a low estimate, we came up with a little over 70 grand. As a low estimate. This did not make me feel any better.
I was driving aimlessly and paranoid, as now I had enough shit in my car to put me in jail for quite a while if I were to get pulled over. I had no idea where to take this stuff. I turned down back roads and looked for big dumpsters. Every time I came close to stopping I got spooked.
Too many streetlights. Too many people. Not enough cover. How am I going to dispose of this 6 foot grow box, buckets and tubing without being seen?
I finally drove somewhere comfortable, the side of town I work on and pulled around the back of the YMCA. It was perfect - their dumpster was in a small partially fenced enclosure, far away from the doors and the road and with little light.
I ditched the plant. The buckets. The nutrients. Lights. Grow box.
I got back in the car and drove off. Now what the hell do I do?
Jacob calls.
"Don't toss our stash! Did you toss our stash? The cops just left- everything's fine. Come home."
The cops had come and gone. They felt much more relaxed about this than we did. They joked around, asking Jacob how much of it he'd smoked while they were on the way. They asked Jacob if he was usually home on Wednesdays. He isn't and neither am I. They said that it's common for dealers to scope a house enough to find out when no one's home, have their distributor FedEx a package to that address and tell them to just leave it on the porch. Then, a gopher swings by and scoops it up and no one is the wiser. In theory. It is apparently a pretty common phenomenon, or more common than you might think.
The cops said that packages get intercepted relatively often and that they've never seen any retaliation over it, dealers are more concerned with not getting caught than losing a delivery. It seems like a pretty inefficient system, but I guess it's better to lose a single shipment than it is to risk having your whole operation shut down.
30 pounds of pot. Knowing now that there was never any real danger, Jacob is torn up over the plant and the lost investment. He wishes we could have sold it off slowly.
I am just glad it wasn't coke. If it had been coke, my ass wouldn't be anywhere near this house for weeks. People might let a brick of pot go, but no one can convince me that my ass wouldn't get killed over a missing brick of yayo.
This is what happens when No Country for Old Men is one of your favorite movies and you watch too much Tarantino.
I am still disturbed that someone has been watching our house. Even more disturbed that someone was probably checking in for pick up while we were opening their shipment.
"Windermere Police officers were the first to respond to the scene that was "spitting distance" from the golfer's home in the gated community of Islesworth, Fla., according to Windermere Police Chief Daniel Saylor.
"When they got there, he was laying in the street," Saylor told PEOPLE. "His wife had broken out the back window with a golf club to get into the vehicle and pull him out."
Saylor did not know how Nordegren managed to pull her husband out, but she was determined to do so. "She used two golf clubs," Saylor says. "She bent one and used another one."
Woods, 33, first hit a fire hydrant and then smashed into a tree, according to two Windermere patrolmen who arrived first at the scene.
"When they got there, they noticed he had lacerations to his lower and upper lip and blood in his mouth and he was in and out of consciousness," Saylor says."
Um, yeah. Remind me never to piss off one of them Swedish bitches. Daaamn.
If I came up with a story that lame and unbelievable, my mother would have grounded me for the rest of the school year. I guess the cops will believe anything famous people tell them. Wow.
I hate to break my 555 Journal Entry combo but I wanted to let everyone know I've been doing really good. :D Catch me on twitter if you haven't already:
That last post about Cardboard Village (only a few good songs on that LP BTW) has brought back memories of James Taylor .. he was huge in the early 70s, we went to see him in 1972 in Lexington. I never knew about his heroin use, but listening to him now I'm not surprised. Theres something drifting and gentle yet lost about his style, he seems to be lonely, the sorrow comes through in the music. I think one of the reasons he was so popular was that his music acted as a balm against the Vietnam War, a soothing, reassuring sound, with words of love and friendship. People were hungry for a contrast to the images of war and revolution, they were seeking reassurance and soothing art. So the whole laid-back California early 70s style was born. Simple songs for the Me Generation. I always liked that slogan "Free to be, you and me", too bad it didn't last.
Checking out of a mental institute at the age of 18, James Taylor went first to New York where he busked in the park for change and got hooked on junk. Like some lost character from Milos Forman's under-rated film, Taking Off, (and the connection is there actually with an appearance by the young Carly Simon) Taylor could have easily become a drug casualty like many at that time. But his was a fate too strong to be waylayed by the black rider of death, and drifting to London, he drifted right into Apple Records and Paul McCartney who saw the genius of the 20-year old Taylor. His brother Livingston, in an interview on youtube, says that James couldn't have been anything else, it was either stardom or disaster, and even then I think he probably had a rough road, despite all the perks and Laurel Canyon hideaways. He built his own house on Martha's Vineyard, apparently, which I suppose attests as much to his need to be alone as it does to his self sufficiency. Watching him on youtube, one gets the feeling he's a rather cagey guy, hiding behind the touchy-feely emotive style of his songs. But regardless of who he is as a person, those first few records were amazing. As he says they were mostly written from a pure space before he was discovered and songwriting became a job for him with all the pressures to keep writing hits. James Taylor was part of the soundtrack of my childhood, it recalls that lost time for me. We cant go back again, and living far away in space and in time as I do, well to all my old friends, "I always thought that I'd see you again ...."
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