Celebrity Operations: Greening the Heart and Mind of Joan Rivers TPS-0039

I was a respected consultant on emergency and disaster preparedness and permaculture design, and that landed me and my partner at the time, we were working together on her property. We landed a gig, a pretty well paid gig, doing a permaculture preparedness survival makeover, on Joan Rivers' daughter's house as part of their reality tv show, the episode was called The Big one, from the Joan Knows Best reality TV show. Rest her soul. Rest in peace. Dear Joan, you were an amazing, extremely important Wise elder matriarch of the entertainment industry, the sexual liberation, the independence, the power that she exuded.

It was an honor and blessing to have that opportunity to work very closely with her for that day.

We planned it out, they brought out a big truck and moved our chicken tractor and a little small pond container and I built a mini herb spiral into a container garden so that we could do this faux build-out in the backyard, a survival permaculture garden setup.

The premise of the show was that there was actually an earthquake in LA. It was mild but it was enough to feel, enough for a few things to fall off the wall here and there.

The producers of the show, after that real earthquake, said, wow, we should actually do an episode subplot. They wanted to do a little current of a subplot of what it would be like to have Joan Rivers and her daughter and her grandson be in this mode of having being woken up to the need to be more prepared.

So they went through their drawers, they took a bunch of footage of the family kind of going through a process of what it would look like to get prepared from scratch, or starting at square one and realizing that intuitive inventory of how vulnerable you would be if you were stuck because of a natural disaster, emergency, whatever type of disruption of services...

How long could you survive where you are at, at home, at work, at school, on the freeway? If systems of support were cut off and critical services were cut off, would you be able to render your own medical aid, first aid, provide your own food, shelter, water, clothing, and everything else?

So they got the footage of them going through the motions of seeing how unprepared they were, being motivated by that little tremor to get more prepared and to try to and figure out what the steps and the procedures would be to do that.

So they went to an amazing local survival equipment wholesaler and retailer. It was like Disneyland for preppers. If you go into this place, I'm not gonna mention it by name, you can watch the episode, but they were good. They were a company that supplied first aid kits, fire extinguishers, fire escape ladders that you could hang out your window. They had tanks for water storage. They had all kinds of tools, all kinds of camping gear. I could go on forever, their catalog was great, you go in there and you just wish you could buy everything and you just want to live there.

I guess stuff hits the fan, if you're an employee at that place and you can't go anywhere because the roads are tore up, or because there are any number of circumstances that would force you to want to stay put...you'd be wanting to have some guns too to defend it. So unfortunately, there should have been a gun store right next door. In fact, maybe that's what I'll do. I'll open a gun store right next door to the survival warehouse.

The interesting synchronicity was that since I had been for about a year on this land with this woman who fell in love with her gardener, which was this romance novel that we lived out together on this land. That's another story I've probably mentioned a few times, but it is very, very glorious.

One of the peaks of a man's life, a man's love life, though the beautiful romance crashed and burned.

It was very archetypal and mythical, the arc of the whole relationship. But I set foot on her property to help her establish permaculture installations as she had dreamed of and actually started to sketch out herself years ago. But just didn't have the appropriately trained and appropriately motivated person such as myself.

So there was an opportunity that she put out there to the spiritual community, that she had this land, and that she wanted to make it productive. I hit her up and I said, hey, this is what I'm trained to do. I would be happy just to have a place to pitch a tent. This was winter solstice of 2011, where we met originally. It was a lot of the 2012 heads commingling.

It was this burst of energy to say, wow, if I could possibly be bugged out on some land where the ground is more solid from the earthquakes, where you're higher in the mountains and you are tucked away into the woodlands and, and there's less zombie pressure, if you will. You're more out among people who have more to lose, and therefore slightly less prone to criminality when stuff hits the fan.

But going from where I was at the time, when I met her, I had been doing an urban survival permaculture training center garden, where I was living in this garden that I built on top of an asphalt parking lot in the corner of a giant punk warehouse venue artist loft compound, and really brought it to life, there are beautiful photos and footage of that. That was a highlight of my career to that point.

But I pretty much developed the outdoor, off grid, rugged lifestyle right there. That was in South Central LA where if stuff hits the fan, lights go out, it's gonna be ruled by gangs and not that it isn't already just there will be less cops and more non cop gang members as opposed to cop gang members, if you will.

I tip my hat to to LEOs when they do right but in that environment at the time of 2012, I wanted to get out of the city and go live out this romance novel experience on this land with this woman, and I wasn't hitting on her, I wasn't trying to scam on her sexually. It just sort of happened, I respected her. I was attracted to her. She's significantly older than me, almost 20 years older than me but nonetheless, a total bomb shell. I just loved the heck out of her, and respected a heck out of her, and we did beautiful things together. But her invitation to have somebody come, I was like, ah, that's me. I will come and help you grow food. I will restore this property. Just get me the F out of the urban zone, the urban center. I wanna be away from the densely populated urban area as far as I can.

It was a sweet spot because you're tucked away in the wooded mountains. But you're also able to still engage with city life. I didn't have to quit my band. I could still do some urban employment stuff. But I was excited to just live on the land, focus on the land, put myself to work on a daily basis.

First, building my little camp, doing the composting toilet, getting my sprouting operation going. That was my main source of sustenance, the staple food of sproutables. I still have the footage of it. I was trying to do like a little survivor man thing, documenting the projects as they went along. But I was just in this little corner of her property and doing my thing.

Then as I got my little mini camp established, I started to make a masterpiece out of the land. I established and sketched out the zones for the different, large scale operations of compost and plantings, and different crops further from the main dwelling, and then more of the kitchen garden right outside the front door.

This was my dream. I had been cooped up literally in the urban gardening and survival projects. So now I got to have this giant canvas. So I was filled with love and light, and at that time also very much the peak of virility, you could say. I guess I can't help getting into the romance. I guess I just can't help it. I won't go too deep into it all but we had this bit of a banter and it was quite charming. It was very much the "as you wish" sweet Wesley and Princess Butter Cup, a Princess Bride kind of thing, because she's like a millionairess living on her own property that she owned in a house that she built with her ex husband and with their ill fated marriage and divorce, left her with the house all to herself.

She was a very shamanic priestess in her own right in many ways, that was part of my draw, being drawn, there were ceremonial opportunities happening there for healing. So at one point she had already started to be developing feelings for me.

I was resolute in being open and non monogamous and basically really doing long trial periods and setting up agreements where we put leases on each other's bodies and say, I'm not just gonna grant you permanent lifelong access just because we kissed one time and we got the feels, it's gonna be metered out, and we're gonna hold true to contracts. If we're gonna be exclusive, it's gonna be a trial period to see how well that works and you have to renew that agreement at the end of it.

That's not the most romantic part of the story. Living and learning hard lessons of getting trapped in toxic relationship situations. But in a more romantic sense, we had this banter. We were getting along famously and she was thrilled to see her property come to life, and thrilled to be able to go out and clip fresh greens and got some chickens going.

She was a crack chef, she just loved to cook and to entertain. She designed the regal property to have lavish parties, I'd say holistically lavish parties.

It wasn't avarice or decadence, it was definitely frugal because, she's been public about this, she was healing. I'll just put it that way, she was in a cycle of healing some things that forced her to stop working.

For me to come in there at a time where she had so much liquid capital for so many decades of her professional career, and I came in there and I just came out of the South Central punk ghetto, having figured out how to truly measure the units of water and food and medicine and shelter in the most minimal amounts that you could comfortably live outside and be surrounded by the urban madness. I had just come out of that self imposed ranger school of sorts. I wanted to put myself through that emergent experience.

I had watched both of the Colony seasons. They were sophisticated social experiments where they put strangers, a group of volunteers who had various skill sets that were on point for doing urban survival social experiments. They put a bunch of people together in a constructed scenario of a post outbreak quarantine of a lethal global pandemic virus.

They were basically put into a survival theme park where they peppered in all these different tools and supplies and equipment and they had to ration food and they had to figure out how to purify water and do solar powered battery charging, set up the latrine and living quarters and defend the perimeter, and go through all of these survival obstacle courses that were staged out by the producers. I think it was one of the most important television productions ever.

They hyped up the sexual drama and politics and there was a lot of staging of things as to be expected.

But I think it was overall done very well both seasons and really brought out the patriarchal domineering, tyrannical, asinine factor in one of the characters, which they probably played it up, I don't know. But my God, this guy played a really good jerk.

It's important to study that dynamic of what happens when the male ego gets out of control in a survival situation, it becomes really toxic, really fast.

There's so much to be said about that, but I was fresh off of that urban experience of survival training. Having watched those Colony episodes, I was like, I wanna put myself through that experience of deprivation, a full time drill, of seeing how far you can stretch certain things.

I was on an extremely tight budget. I was very, very, very poor, financially, which was part of the drill, really it made it all work. That was where I was coming from, she was brought down to my level, even though she owned property and owned her house.

Every cost of heating that place, the cost of piping in the water, the cost of driving in and out, the cost of family expenses she had, all that, it was extremely stress inducing.

For me to be able to come in there with these very sophisticated, simple and elegant techniques for living frugally, we started eating sprout soup every night. I also made my own bulk dry food trail mix.

So between fresh chicken eggs every morning and fresh greens and herbs coming out of the garden, and eventually fruits and some berries, the eggs, the the greens, the sproutables…

I pretty much brought sustenance to her from my humble buckets of mylar bags and five gallon buckets, I was nourishing her. I was providing for her. And at that time, it was like, every day, farm boy, fetch me a bowl of sprouts...as you wish.

So eventually you could imagine where that led. It led to a moment where two of her sort of priestess associates were commiserating with her about her being very distraught over her love life.

Then I come strolling by, probably with my arms flexed with buckets full of compost, or carrying some heavy object. Who knows, I'm kind of playing it up here. But they see this youngish buck kind of walk by them. Good day, good day, kind of thing. I'm kind of playing up the scene, but the way she described it to me was essentially that, when they saw me and they heard her talking about her woes, they're like, that's your man, go get him, like, he's effing right here at your doorstep.

That's how she told me that she opened up, and she had feelings like I'm starting to kind of crush out on you. In that moment where we first started to sit next to each other and be intimate, that's when I said, well, you know, I'm basically like a public resource, I consider myself a reference book at the library, you have to share me but I'm open.

It was very poetic the first, the first communications around how that was to be, it wasn't as cold and dry as I can make it seem sometimes.

I was able to be very romantic and poetic. I was able to dance her all the way into the penthouse, so to speak.

Another thing she said is that she did test me, though, because there was an opportunity to do a pretty epic project that had to be done, and I knocked it out so that was part of it too.

Also there was a moment that she said she fell in love with me, the moment that she saw me leading a group of other men to do some restoration work on this ceremonial teepee that she had. She was watching from afar. She felt it for me, and I felt it for her, and I felt at the time that it would be cool and that she would be cool with it being openish or closed for certain durations to be renegotiated later.

That kind of got eroded towards the end of that cycle, we called it a sacred contract for a period of months to see where we would go and see if we could be successful.

She was extremely, extremely business savvy and sales and marketing savvy. And I had all these skills, but I was kind of dilapidated and crusty.

I'd worked in corporate environments, I've been a professional web designer, worn plenty of hats in different career paths. I was more of the inventor, designer, geeky, nerdy, kind of not people person, not happy go lucky extroverted salesperson. And she was all of that.

Anyway, it was the peak of our romance and the peak of our success together, her selling my wares and me enhancing and iterating on my wares.

I was making sprouting kits and selling the sprouts. We were one of the first home businesses to legally register for the Cottage Food Act, which had come out in a timely manner, thanks to some beautiful activist work done by different coalitions of people to try to make it legal for grandma to sell brownies at the cafe downstairs in her apartment building, or whatever, you know, that was illegal. It's a college cottage food paradigm that exists in many other states.

We had permaculture workshops happening on the land. I was in the process of negotiated a sort of licensing deal to have a canonically sanctioned permaculture design course on the land with a novel approach to making it at your own pace.

We had meet ups going, we had workshops going, we had other instructors coming in. We had people renting the land for weddings. In fact, we sold a 150 I believe, amaranth seedlings to a wedding production as wedding gifts to all of the attendees. I can't imagine how prolific those seeds have gotten out there, hopefully. Amaranth is my spirit plant, by the way.

I'm just detailing some of the glorious achievements that we had in this romance novel come to life.

Part of it was that we did outreach, we started going to classes. In fact, I did my first aid CPR training class, certification class at that survival equipment warehouse place, they had a whole schedule of classes there.

So we started going there together. We also did the CERT training together, the community emergency response team training. We were doing our best to implement everything we could within our budget and kind of bootstrapping everything.

We were getting into things like tactical permaculture. We wanted to do air soft tactical training, air soft weapons training, with my novel idea of somehow creating seed pellets to be used in air soft guns, so that you would know by what was planted beneath your feet from the seed pellets where the kill zones were.

So you better avoid the places where you see a lot of wild flowers growing, because that's where everybody's getting shot.

We had a legitimate top tier tactical training marksmen professional involved with the project and we had started to draft out what would be the ultimate kind of like laser tag permaculture experience of tactical air soft training.

Actually learning how to grow edible tactical hedges and perimeter digging moats. My mind was going crazy. This was like playing fort all over again, imagining growing sugar cane and doing stick fighting training.

Being that warrior, defending your community with your sugar cane staff, which you can nibble on for a little bit of extra blood sugar if you need to run or fight. Obviously just imagination running wild but all this stuff was starting to get real. Things were happening. We were doing archery, she was a martial artist herself, she had training gear there already, so we would have the kicking post in the middle of the room. We'd get up and just wail on it from time to time as needed to blow off steam.

I think there are a lot of people who have beautiful memories of that time as well.

So we had started working with that survival store.

Also together, one of our rituals yielded a mascot character for my brand, which had existed for years, but didn't have a family friendly branding strategy.

She was like, look I wanna sell your products and your teachings and your services to these upper echelon extremely wealthy families here in this district, but you gotta drop the zombie stuff.

She advised on re-editing one of my first survival manuals. I was talking about when the zombies come, she's like, you gotta modify that slogan. She helped smooth out those edges and make it marketable.

So I redesigned my business card, and with her handiwork of getting that business card out to people, we got one put up on one of the bulletin boards at that survival warehouse.

So here's where it all ties together. When the Joan Rivers production crew started searching for survival training, survival supplies, etc. they found that place. They went there, and when they asked them if they did home installations or home consulting, I believe they said, no, but, oh, here, didn't we get that business card from those people, those nice, friendly, rural homestead folks that come and shop here and train here?

So they gave the production staff my business card, or I should say, at that time, our business card, and we got a call.

I remember, like yesterday, getting that call, I didn't even know who Joan Rivers was, I think she may have answered the phone, and she looked like she won the lottery, she looked pretty keyed up.

Of course, she has a big place in my heart from Space Balls, but I wouldn't have really from childhood kept track of the name. I hadn't been following her career since then.

But of course, to my beloved, who is almost 20 years older, she had a way more deep connection, A as a woman, B as an older woman.

It didn't click for me, but it clicked very loudly for her. And so she was on point with, like, hey, they wanna pay us to do this thing on this show.

I was like, okay, but there were some things that they were kind of pushing on that I thought were gonna be poor representations and I just kind of freaked out because I'm like oh great this is gonna be an opportunity for them to make fun of us.

For them to completely throw us under the bus, and for all of my professional colleagues to tear me apart for messing something up or saying something wrong.

As confident as I was in many things at that time, in that moment, that was just a lot of pressure.

Anybody who does anything on camera feels that pressure like, oh, I'm gonna have dandruff or mocos or eye boogers, or have a Freudian slip or slip and fall or whatever.

But if you're representing something that's a highly doctrinaire and highly snobbish community, which survivalists and preppers are, always trying to one up each other on their preps and all that stuff. And then, permies can be pretty vicious in terms of the political correctness of what type of compost to use or where you got that material from, or how many times you reuse the water.

There's all that ego BS and so, I'm already immersed in that, but I figure, oh my God, if I'm gonna go on this TV show...

There's enough of a media spot to feel pressure to do things right. If they were gonna mock it up for the show, even if it's obviously kind of faux, I felt pressure not to be responsible for a violation of the principles of permaculture or the science of it.

So we mocked some things up. We built a little mini set, I was ultimately relatively comfortable with it. I don't think I will burn in hell for selling out, for most part the shoot went well the chemistry was great. We lucked out.

When we did that show, it was 50/50 in our minds, certainly in my mind, like, oh my God, are we gonna be the laughing stock? Because if you are Joan Rivers' laughing stock, she's gonna just bully you mercilessly with her lines, that could be traumatizing, we'd have to have some thick skin to deal with that.

I expected that was gonna be because we're the crazy winged nut survival freaks who want to do this backyard makeover.

So ultimately, it worked out well, it worked out in our favor because the arc of the butts of the joke, if you will, was that, the whole show series was basically that Joan Rivers had moved in with her daughter to drive her absolutely bonkers by trying to control her life and her motherhood and just drive her crazy with her inappropriate humor and all of her diva-ness, right.

So that was the premise of the whole reality TV show. So what worked in our favor miraculously, was that Joan was authentic, I believe, because of the time we spent with her, she got it. She asked us about our backgrounds, I said, I've been a survivalist since I lived on the street as a young teenager. I saw some dark things out there. Then my partner, she grew up on a farm, she had experience with very down to earth farmer relatives, and grew up around all of it, and wanted to just live and breathe in that holistic life. She's a professional designer.

She had an aesthetic for nature and for natural materials, just because of the vibration of it, because that was her background.

So more of that rustic americana, we clicked on that level.

Joan Rivers even said, you look good together, which Joan Rivers telling anyone, they look good is like the most golden complement you will ever get. So we took that to the bank, at least spiritually. If you get that approval, what can't you do if you can impress Joan Rivers visually and have her say that you look good together? That was a huge compliment, although it was funny that one of her staff, at first thought that I was my partner's son, and she had to be corrected on that.

There were lots of funny moments, and they have quite a bit of footage from that, and they only used a few minutes of it in order to fit into that little subplot thing. Those were a poignant few minutes.

The funny thing was that, so Joan hires us to come and do this consultation and do this backyard makeover. She is thrilled and gung ho to have us essentially appear to be tearing up the lawn or bringing in things that are gonna just replace the lawn.

Ultimately we're going to be growing vines all over the place. We started building a chicken run. We brought chickens, and we brought a chicken tractor that I built.

We were going to turn the swimming pool into a living edible natural pond and fish farm. The great thing was that Joan was totally on board with everything and totally stoked and gung ho and then the antagonism, the tension that was created with her daughter being like, Mom, you're crazy, what are you doing, you're not bringing chickens in my backyard, you're not putting fish in my pool.

It really struck a nerve. The lines that Joan said I couldn't have paid her a million trillion dollars to say about how you know when the stuff hits the fan, the neighbors are going to be lined up for her eggs.

We're going to be sustainable. We're doing this for her grandson. For the future generations, were getting back to the basics...

I'm not direct quoting, but it was powerful what she said and, and you could feel it, and it comes from a woman who was old enough at the time to have remember about actual self sufficiency and hard times.

So it was a meaningful experience, a beautiful experience.

Unfortunately the relationship that brought us this opportunity didn't last. We parted ways in a pretty ugly meltdown that caused ripples in many layers of communities. I'd love TO hope that we would be able to not necessarily rekindle but certainly reminisce on what was mostly good. It was an acute collapse at the very end after wild success in love and in business and the sky being a limit.

If what we did was good enough for Joan Rivers, even as a joke, that was a nice, demo real to have, that was a nice endorsement to have.

We went and hit up a town council committee and we did a presentation for an emergency disaster preparedness committee.

It was as legit as it could get, the sky was the limit. We had a mascot. We had a brand. We were selling buckets of survival food, sprouting kits and trainings and workshops.

It's a damn shame and it all comes down to monogapathic behavior. She could not handle in the slightest, the notion of following the letters of our agreement, which gave me freedom.

It was a horrific meltdown of her feeling like she was losing me and losing control of me. I take full responsibility for what I did, that was asinine or inappropriate or immature or not of high moral character in the process of how this went down.

But basically, we would still be friends, we would still be together, I would still be on that land. I would still be taking care of those trees that I planted, all the life my wizardry brought to that land, I would still be stewarding that. I would still be, in her words, the man of the land.

We would still be living happily ever after. If only she would have allowed me to fulfill my dharma and to explore the healing work that I needed to do.

Still I remember us at our best. For the most part, we grew stronger and better from all of our little minor disagreements, we were a power couple. We were doing business together. We were living together happily. Maybe we'll get a second chance in another life.