Requiem for a Nightmare Red eye 4 the stoner guy

The events of last summer could most appropriately be summed up with a country and western tune. I was so disheartened and frustrated by August's end. Hempfest got torrentially rained on both days of the event, after preparing for what was destined to be the mother of all Hempfests. A team of over 90 people had met every month all year long in an extensive planning operation, going over each nano-detail with a red eye for the stoner guy, putting in hundreds of hours of careful planning.

                 We're dirty, we're hippies, we're Hempfest core members!

We detailed the massive undertaking with the love and nurturing a parent gives to a child,  and the result was a recipe for a level of greatness. For the entire 13 years we have been producing the world renowned "protestival" we have dreamed of a line-up like we had this year.

Dominic Holden (uber-activist and former co-director) and I had met several times with Dr. Roger Roffman of the University of Washington's School of Social Work, preparing a survey to see what our constituency felt about our plans to incorporate a marijuana abuse prevention and education component to Hempfest's  program. I have felt for some time now that not only does Hempfest have a tremendous responsibility to proactively address the politically uncomfortable but legitimate issues of pot abuse, especially by young people, but that we are also in an inherently unique position to do so.

Who else has the degree of "street cred" required to withstand the scrutiny of those pot purists who are certain to cry afoul as they interpret social responsibility as going soft and selling out to "the man". Just simply treating the issue of marijuana abuse as anything more than a laughable charade is extremely controversial within the legalization movement, as the vast majority of users maintain their lives relatively well.  We are the largest and most successful marijuana policy reform rally in history, dwarfing our closest competition in both size and content, so it would be difficult to accuse us of not being Irie enough after annually bringing tens of thousands of people to our resin drenched soirée in the park.

During the last year we had put a lot of gingerbread and icing onto the body of Hempfest, producing a musical line-up that was sure to satiate our audience's desire for quality entertainment.  We booked the quintessential pot culture band KottonMouthKings, a platinum selling act that blends metal, hip hop and whatever that Insane Clown Posse music is. The addition of Seattle rap legend Sir Mix-A-Lot put us in a fairly decent position to deliver a world class show, featuring almost 60 additional musical acts.

Also, after years of attempts, we were finally successful at persuading two of the top pot policy reform suits and ties in the U.S. to speak at our massive marijuana rally. Ethan Nadelman, the Executive Director of the Drug Policy Alliance (formerly known as the Lindesmith Institute), is one of the leading drug policy reformers in America and is often seen on network television extolling the virtues of decriminalization from a scientific and academic standpoint. And Rob Kampia, the executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project, the only real D.C. lobbyist for pot reform. He is also a mainstream media figure when it comes to cannabis policy issues.

Hempfest during normal summer weather, at 4:20pm 

So we had big plans this year and we gambled everything on a typical weekend of searing summer weather that we had come to expect based upon years of experience. "Mothah Naycha" had other plans. The weeks, even months preceding Hempfest were record breaking hot. Our on site set-up (which takes days) went like clockwork, and we were ahead of schedule setting up the 6 stages, hundreds of booths and extensive operational infrastructure.

The Saturday opening of Hempfest went just as smooth, with all stages running on time and our event staff humming with precision after a long 4 days of non-stop preparation. At around 2pm, from my perch on the Mainstage, I could see a cloud front approaching. I had harbored a bad feeling for some time about the fact that there had been no break in the sizzling Death Valley like weather Seattle had been experiencing, and that morning as I read the dismal, cataclysmic weather report of days of rain my heart did the Titanic. "They are often wrong" I assured myself. Yeh, right! 

Rainy Day Dream Away- "Wetstock"

 To say it rained that weekend would be like saying that the Grand Canyon is a ditch. We got pummeled by a torrential downpour. For the first time in the 13 year history of Hempfest the event was brought to a soggy standstill. All stages were down as the skies cried Mary on us, leaving both parks, in the end, a quagmire of mud, water and dashed hopes for the phattie Hempfest. The Hempfest we all thought was guaranteed after our year of relentless effort and unprecedented promotion. "Quag met mire".

The Mainstage incrementally lost its sound system, first limiting us to a single cordless microphone, and then relegating us to a hand held bullhorn. The rain let up a few times, only to come back fiercer each time, until the stage was shut down completely, leaving us with little more than a sea of mud, collapsing tent canopies and the few die hard Seattle supporters who weathered it all admirably, albeit amphibiously.

We limped out of Saturday with our event schedule in disarray, the recently refurbished parks saturated by rain and an all volunteer event staff that was wet, cold and tired. But at least we had Sunday to redeem us. Or did we?

That night Noah must have looked down from Heaven and thought "Gather up two seeds from every strain". It didn't stop raining. I awoke at 6am to the sound of water running off of our rooftop and my heart just sank. "That's it", I thought to myself, "we are ruined".

As I drove into the site I was horrified to see several of our vendor's tent canopies completely caved in by rain, and a staff that was  borderline hypothermic, & struggling to save some of the damaged goods. And it just kept raining.  We held an emergency Steering Committee meeting in what was intended to be the Mainstage backstage hospitality tent. The decision was made that we had no choice but to keep the event open. Vendors had paid money to be there, we had the parks until midway next week and couldn't tear down in that weather anyway.

Synchronicity, or just chronicity in sync?

I have RSD (Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy) in my left shoulder, a terribly painful chronic disease, that makes typing excruciating sometimes. I was going to stop this entry here because of the pain and continue later, but something just happened that is so freaky & profound that I am compelled to continue,  so I can  relay it to you. 

            The Scene of the grime: Mainstage before Noah's Ark arrived.

We had all but abandoned hopes that there would be a Hempfest on Sunday, as it was still belching rain at 9am when we had our "crisis management" Steering Committee meeting. The sound engineers told me that there was no way the Mainstage could fire up the P.A. system at all that day because the rain was too unforgiving.

But our amazing high spirited all volunteer staff had not budged one inch, and was still hustling to cover stuff up and save our vendor's goods and wares. Drenched, cold and depressed, they maintained their posts, did their jobs, and kept the event alive. Meril, our awesome "Traffic Ogre" later said "man, at 9am you couldn't buy a fuckin' smile for ten dollars, but by noon on Sunday everyone had a permagrin!". That was because, to our amazement, at 10am the rain cleared and people started to stream in by the hundreds, then by the thousands.

The site was a disaster. Large pools of water were everywhere and the sod was not only saturated, there were huge mud pits, and some vendors had even packed up and left before the event opened that day. But the people just kept streaming in and by noon the event was in full swing, except the fact that all 6 stages were down due to water.

Even though they had told me it was an impossibility just hours earlier, the boys from Naf Productions had swept and dried the Mainstage off and had managed to get one cordless microphone going...and we had a rally again.

But our schedule had totally disintegrated, as bands had been told that they wouldn't be able to play and most scheduled speakers were not even on site. We had to reinvent the wheel right there on the spot. And we did, and we were lucky enough to have Pony Boy from Los Marijuanos backstage and between my mindless rambling, his hip-hop to a CD he had on him, and the valiant efforts of our stage managers to scrape up some featured speakers...we performed CPR on the stage and got that Hempfest heartbeat pounding again.

 That Sunday 4:20 ceremony at the Mainstage had tens of thousands of supporters present, and in the decade plus I have been emceeing that stage I have never seen a cloud of approval billowing past like we had that day. We scrambled to find acts to perform, and Kali's Angels from Marin Co., a blistering female vocal act performed Indian kirtans, Rainbow chants and goddess songs that made the red hairs stand up on the back of your nugs. Kali's Angels Website

The headline act of the event, the KottonMouthKings were stuck in traffic, so Tony B. from Funky Monkey radio came through for us and saved the day with a cadre of uber-talented break dancers & rappers who were scheduled to perform at an entirely different time. Tony B was amazingly graceful, unlike some other performers and managers that day.

After a crushingly difficult weekend, rife with bone snapping stress and disappointment, I can't tell you how elated I was when I saw two black limos cruising into the park carrying the members of our headline act, the KottonMouthKings. After being hoplessly dead in the water at 9am, feeling that we had been defeated entirely, we rose like a fiery phoenix from a wet ashtray to present a molten Mainstage show replete with a mosh pit more ferocious than any we had ever had. The mosh pit rivaled the one at Gasworks back in '94 when          7 Year Bitch erupted onstage and traffic was cluster-fucked throughout all of Wallingford and beyond.

Television Travel Host and writer Rick Steves at Hempfest. Lookin' clean

KottonMouthKings played for a full 45 minutes to a mammoth crowd, we did the closing ceremony and the 2004 Seattle Hempfest was over. And we were victorious.

Elated, we had defied the inclement weather, beat the odds, pulled it out of our gut and made the event happen despite some of the worst weather an outdoor event could receive. How could anyone possibly ignore our achievement under these circumstances?

Dirty Hippies, Pot Hobbits and the alt media

So now, after all these words, we finally get to the crux of the biscuit, the catalyst that compelled me to create this humble blogjam in the first place. We felt so proud of the fact that we were able to keep our volunteer powered event alive against adversity like we had never seen even though we were exhausted, wet and cold for so long that our brains turned to that stuff that they use for filling in a Beanie Baby. We were on top of the world, a dangerous place if you don't have a tether.

It continued to rain on us throughout the next several days of brutal tear down process, but our morale had never been higher. The sod damage to both parks was extensive. The saturated grass gave way under the heavy wheels of the vendor's vans and equipment trucks and caused damage that cost Hempfest thousands of dollars and has us in the hole for the first time to the tune of about $5,000.

     Dom and I at the Fest...the Siegfried and Roy of hemp?.

So when the Stranger and the Seattle Weekly came out, for some reason I expected to see something different from the magazines than what we got. What, was I stoned?

I realize that you cannot purchase a good review, or a kind word, it doesn't work like that. But we HAD spent a total of $10,127.84 in both publications that summer. A figure that's hard to forget as you scan the rags for coverage.

I expected perhaps a brief acknowledgement of the sheer determination and sacrifice, the diligence and Herculean effort our staff and crowd put into our collective call for freedom from insane pot laws and for sane medical and drug policy. Or maybe public notice of the achievement of drawing national celebrities in the past, like TV travel host Rick Steves, former Dallas Cowboy Mark Stepnoksi or movie star Woody Harrelson, to a pot rally. Surely that accounted for something, didn't it?

Instead what we got was "dirty hippies" and "pot hobbits". The Stranger had a faux Associated Press article that read "dirty hippies forced to bathe at Hempfest", rumored to be written by Dan Savage himself. It featured a picture of an average hippie couple from some Rainbow gathering (that I later stumbled onto after googling "hippie").

It was accompanied by a quasi-constructive article by David Schmader that berated Hempfest as an "inherently insufficient event" and went on to say that we sought to be both a party for Washington State cannabis enthusiasts and a political rally, but "accomplished neither goal". It left me wondering what exactly was left for Hempfest to be if we were neither a rally nor a party. Schmader's article did point out some legitmate isues that we have been struggling with, like the fact that Hempfest attracts people who are already part of the pot culture, and if we think Hempfest is gonna legalize pot we have to do better (Hempfest will never legalize pot but we'll deal with that later.).

As I was typing this, a full 4 and a half months after Hempfest, an e-mail came into my box with the following, taken from last week's issue of the Stranger, by Dan Savage... "My boyfriend and I rate movies we see with our kid on the "HH" scale, which stands for "how high?"--as in, "How high does an adult have to be in order to enjoy this?" A film is awarded a number between 1 and 10, with 1 meaning "completely sober," and 10 meaning "higher than all the dirty hippies at Hempfest rolled into a big, dirty ball."

I contend that "dirty hippies" is hate speech, equal to "drunken indians" or "lazy niggers". If it said dirty stoners I wouldn't be so offended. We have meetings that last for hours trying to figure out ways to cirumvent the hippie label, ways to let non-hippies know that Hempfest is far more than just a bunch of tie-dyed drainbows puffin' tough in the park to a bunch of jambands. Of course there are hippies at Hempfest, but we are clearly less than 10 percent of the overall attendance. (Do a search on the Stranger website for dirty hippies)

    Even Jesus was a dirty hippie!

The Weekly, an event sponsor, offered little better. Knute Berger took a fashion police approach, complaining how Hempfest was merely a throwback to the sixties, and how it posed a threat to society with the "same old bad hair, bad fashions" and that we were where "quag meets mire". Both the Tacoma News Tribune and the Seattle P.I. somehow managed to find subjects worthy of writing extensive, glowing reviews about. Joel Connolly of the P.I. went so far as to call us "experts at organizing".

I was outraged, deflated and hurt that both local alt-culture zines chose to ignore the uber-sophisticated infra-structure of Hempfest, replete with on site intranet, staff kitchen equipped with stainless steel refrigeration unit and restaurant caliber washing stations, over 1,000 voters registered on site, pro radio dispatch and operations protocols. All the national level drug policy reformers say that Hempfest is the most sophisticated and professional drug policy reform event in the world. But instead they focus on a stereotype that any honest examination of video or photos of the event will swiftly prove a hollow falsity.

KottonMouthKings arriving at Hempfest during torrential, no, biblical downpour.

Dom, probably the most intelligent and savvy activist I have worked with in 20 years of trenches activism, just had a good portion of the letter he wrote to the Stranger printed. And in a pre-emptive strike that has caused me to re-write an ample portion of this text, the Stranger has, in a blind siding gotcha whammy, addressed my concerns in their Regrets issue. This is what they printed:

"The perverted faggots, neurotic Jews, shrewish women, intelligent Asians, well-hung blacks, coke-snorting rockers, and red-nosed drunks at The Stranger regret making so many jokes at the expense of the dirty hippies at Hempfest. For the record, the hippies at Hempfest are no dirtier than hippies are on average, and we regret implying otherwise."

Ok, it could be a coincidence, but it kinda seems like they saw what I had written in this blog for the last several weeks. Of course Dom submitted and had accepted  a pretty scatthingly succint letter to the editor about the dirty hippification of Hempfest.

But this whole issue prompted me to have a great epiphany, a revelation. Why in hell did I expect the Stranger and the Weekly to take us seriously and put our message out? Why did I expect THEM to put  OUR message out? I was obviously doing a terrible job promoting our message or I wouldn't be so upset and vulnerable about the name calling and cultural bigotry.

I threw a "hemper tantrum" last august and fired off my annual whiney bitch letter, hissing and fitting about how hard we worked and how important our cause is. And we did and it is. But I'm sure the folks in the Stranger offices had a good belly laugh at how easily they pulled my dirty hippie pot-hobbit crank (metaphorically speaking, that is).

You see, I actually AM a hippie. It is something I am inherently proud of, but Hempfest is a diverse mixture of people from all walks of life. I think the dirty hippie characterization is inherently unfair and offensive. Just do a search on the Stranger website for dirty hippie. It's not like this has been an isolated incident.

Dan Savage's words to me, via e-mail the year before were "Vivian, Vivian, where's your sense of humor?" So I surrender. I have had a sense of humorectomy. I have received comedy implants. I had no idea that sense of humors were so cheap on Tee-Hee-Bay.

I've thrown my last hippie-fit. My funny bone has popped a woody. I have a new found sense of perspective. If there were not tens of thousands of Americans rotting in jails and prisons, hundreds of thousands of cancer and AIDS patients suffering without the legal relief of cannabis and millions of old growth trees being slashed down faster than a republican can steal an election I would have been able to laugh it all off a lot easier a long time ago. If Hippies were not discriminated against, if we did not have to live with bigotry and prejiduce against us, if we were not the subject of humiliation and denigration on a cultural level in society, I would have laughed with everybody at the starting gate.

                                 Felony dirty hippie in progress.

The fundamental point in it all this is that we need to create our own media. This blog is a small, humble beginning to that end. I am grateful to both the Stranger and the Weekly for the many positive things they have done both for me personally and for Hempfest in the past. I was chosen "Best Organizer" in this year's "Best Of" edition of the weekly. A title that I feel I hardly deserve. And when I challenged Seattle's old poster ordinance back in '96, the Stranger did a special edition, complete with huge pink pull out poster. Backed me totally.

I think they are both great publications, and I look forward to being in an organization that works closely with them. And I am thankful that I can afford to roll with anything that comes our way now, since I have this weblog to put my opinion forth, with my new tumor of humor!

Thanks for sticking with me this far. There is the Fool Town Crier following, and tons of great peace links and news bits. Funny assed Bushit and great graphic eye candies for your bloodshot optical orbs to receive. Reistance is fertile! 

Vivian McPeak, Templedragon Times.

July 26, 1920, H.L Mencken, "The Sage of Baltimore",

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so

certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." -Bertrand

Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)