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Photo by Flickr user Travis Isaacs

It had been 20 years since I'd sat on a stool in one of these dark carpeted booths, but nothing had changed. There was the diagram of the human ear with its parts illustrated and labeled. There were the heavy headphones with rubber lining that clung to my face. There was the audiologist who watched me from outside, making note of when I heard a beep, and, more importantly, when I did not. I am deaf in one ear and have been since I was born. Tests like this have always made me feel like a defective specimen. Why put me in this booth, to chart the specifics of my malfunction? Doctors told me a long time ago: There was nothing to be done.

I've lived my entire life with the hole on my right side, where awareness should be. In grocery stores, at Disneyland, jogging through Griffith Park, I am used to being in peoples' way. I don't hear them say "excuse me," until it's the fourth time and they're already annoyed. If I have a friend with me, he or she might tell me to move, but I won't know what direction I'm supposed to go in, so I flail around like a big dumb animal and wonder why I have always been "the spazzy one." This is just who I am—one of the 15 percent of Americans with hearing loss. Or I thought it was, until I learned about bone-anchored hearing aids (BAHAs), a new technology that sends sound waves past the ear to the bone of the skull and is ideal for people who are deaf in only one ear.

After years of getting in trouble at school because I was the only kid who had to whip her head around to hear the gossip circulating around the classroom, of confusing strangers by turning into them when they whispered something into my bad side, learning about BAHAs, and finding out that there was something to be done, brought me back into the audiologist's booth. If I passed this test—or, rather, if I failed it—then maybe there would be normal hearing waiting for me on the other side.

Beep. I raised my hand. Sitting there was proof again that there was something wrong with me. A fainter beep. Another hand raise. There was nothing wrong with me, I thought.I was fine. I've been fine. I've made it work. A fainter beep. Was that even a beep, or the ringing I hear when I'm about to faint? I raised my hand just in case. What if I was doing too well at this? What if they denied me because once I again, I managed to pass as a fully hearing person? I stepped out of the booth and into the light.

"Well, you have profound hearing loss," the audiologist told me flatly, before having me pull up a chair.

She proceeded to show me a graph on her monitor that echoed what I've always known: My right ear is essentially just for decoration. Then came the actual news. The front desk had called my insurance while I'd been in the booth. Normally, hearing aids are not covered by insurance because they're a "luxury," but because a BAHA requires surgery, it would be covered. I could get a BAHA. This was actually going to happen. As she used a model of the human head to show where they would insert a screw into my skull for the new sound receptor, my excitement bubbled over.

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Photo by the author

I've never felt sorry for myself that I'm hard of hearing. I have, however, always felt that I'm living on roller skates while most people walk around in shoes. I don't hear in stereo, so every noise exists on one vague plain. Sounds have no sense of place for me. When people call my name, I don't know where they're coming from. For a long time, as a child, I struggled with insomnia because every time I lay down on my left ear, I could hear my own heart beat, and that sounded exactly the same to me as steps coming from downstairs.

Hearing without direction has made the element of surprise a constant in my life. Chaos is white noise that I no longer hear. I can pull an unexpected all-nighter in the middle of the week. I can leave for a road trip without packing. This is why I always told myself I wouldn't go back and be born as a fully hearing person, even if I had the chance.

I wouldn't, but finding out that I could get a BAHA forced me to admit that just because I've made the most of a defect didn't mean that I should live stunted forever.

I always thought the first thing I would hear normally on my right side would be a symphony or a flock of wild birds, but it was just one of those hearing test beeps, and I only heard it faintly.

Maybe I was on the way to spending the rest of my time as a fully-hearing person, but first I would have to navigate the circuitous nonsense that is a the silver-level HMO Anthem Blue Cross version of Obamacare. I went to a nurse practitioner at my primary care physician's office and was referred to an ear, nose, and throat doctor who was actually a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills.

I sat in his posh office, and he revealed that he was part of the tribe: "I'm deaf in one ear, too!" he exclaimed.

"Do you have a hearing aid?"

"No." And then, "Why do you want one?"

I'd never had to defend my desire to hear out of both sides of my head before, and I searched for specific reasons. All of them seemed small by themselves, but in the aggregate, they were important. I want to be able to drive a car and hear my friends and not the wind, as my good ear faces the window. I want to stop having to ask people to repeat mundane sentences with annoyed looks on their faces. I want to sit on either side of someone at the movies and not have to miss out on all the mid-movie whispers that seem insignificant until you're being excluded from them. I want to know if someone is walking up behind me.

On Noisey: A man who's been deaf his whole life talks about hearing music for the first time.

After pretending to hear what I'd said, the Beverly Hills doctor referred me to another audiologist, who had to do another test because the first one hadn't been "in network." At the second audiologist, there was another beeping test, but this time, we had to test not just my ears but my skull's ability to transmit sound. BAHAs are hearing aids that transmit sound directly to the inner ear, by way of the bone, rather than the busted ear. She put the headphone on my skull and fired off a beep. I heard it on my right side.

I guess I always thought the first thing I would hear normally on my right side would be a symphony or a flock of wild birds, but it was just one of those hearing test beeps, and I only heard it faintly. Still, hearing anything at all, to feel sound coming from that region of my head, felt like finding a leafy sprig growing on the moon.

For more on people with disabilities doing cool stuff, VICE meets Carey McWilliams, the first totally blind person in the USA to acquire a concealed-carry permit.

"Your bone isn't as viable as I was hoping," the audiologist said, showing me a graph of where normal hearing was (high), where my hearing was (low), and where the BAHA would put me (somewhere in between).

Until now, I'd pictured my hearing aid elevating me to perfect hearing. As with everything else that has existed only on the horizon of my future, I hadn't entertained the idea that reality may fall short of my expectations. Having a box on my skull would not give me normal hearing. I let this sink in before consoling myself, with a phrase that has gotten me through countless dead-end jobs and gas-station meals: "It's better than nothing."

Going Deaf? Motherboard investigates a pill to restore hearing loss.

Even so, I was excited. But then, later that week, Anthem Blue Cross mysteriously canceled my policy. I spent hours on the phone with them trying to find out why it had been canceled. I had paid my bills all on time. They told me that they saw I had paid my bills but that I would be issued a refund for my payment because my policy had been canceled due to lack of payment. I spent over an hour on the phone with a man named Steven who at one point said in a very authoritative voice, "Ma'am, just because we get your money doesn't mean we use it."

The closer I get, the more it slips away. My hearing loss frustrates me more now than it ever has before.

Two months wore on. I called Anthem Blue Cross almost daily. The hearing aid that I had come so close to getting, again became the stuff of "somedays." Eventually, with the help of the insurance commission, I helped Anthem Blue Cross help themselves see that they had indeed made an error, and my policy was reinstated. I now call the ENT's office every other day, but I still have not successfully landed an appointment with an in-network surgeon. Someone in that office is perpetually "looking into it."

Getting this surgery has started to feel like grasping a drop of mercury. The closer I get, the more it slips away. My hearing loss frustrates me more now than it ever has before. I shouldn't have to live like this when there's a way to fix it.

I will always be half-deaf, though, even when I finally get that device put in my head. I will always be a person who can sleep through car alarms and crying babies on planes because I can always turn my good ear down and envelope myself in solitude. I will always be a good listener, because for so much of my life, every conversation has required effort and focus. I hope, though, that I won't always be split into two sides: the me who is talkative and outgoing and aware and confident, and the me who is constantly apologizing and worried everyone thinks I'm dumb because I smile and nod when I don't want to say "I'm sorry?" again.

I wish I knew already what it will be like to merge these two versions of me—to hear my dogs barking and my phone ringing and my friend behind me on a surfboard telling me to watch out—all from both sides of my awareness, to walk through a world where these things have context and place and not just sound, but the other half of me wishes I had never heard that faint beep on the side of my skull at all.

Follow Tess Barker on Twitter.

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Image via Flickr user Ken Piorowski.

[UPDATE: Nebraska's legislature has successfully overridden Ricketts' veto with a vote of 30-19—the bare minimum to overturn the governor's veto.]

On Tuesday night, as expected, Nebraska's Republican Governor Pete Ricketts vetoed a bill to repeal the death penalty in his state, following through on a promise he'd made last week, when the state legislature voted 32-15 in favor of the measure. Surrounded by law enforcement officers and the families of murder victims at a news conference Tuesday, Ricketts told reporters that maintaining the state's death penalty was "a matter of public safety."

Later today, state lawmakers will try to override Ricketts' veto, a move that would make Nebraska the first Republican-led state to end capital punishment.

Supporters of repeal point out that Nebraska hasn't executed a prisoner since 1997, and only has ten inmates on death row. Ricketts dismissed those numbers Wednesday, calling the lack of executions in his state a "management problem."

"I am committed to ensuring that Nebraska has a functional death penalty," Ricketts said in a statement, adding that "the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services has purchased the drugs necessary to carry out the death penalty here in our state."

According to the Omaha Daily Herald, Ricketts issued a press release earlier this month announcing that the state had purchased two of the three drugs necessary for lethal injections—sodium thiopental and pancuronium bromide—from the Indian distributor HarrisPharma.

Nebraska officially switched its execution method from the electric chair to lethal injection in 2009. In 2011 Hospira, the United States' sole manufacturer of sodium thiopental—an anesthetic often used in lethal injections—announced that it would cease production of the drug. In a press release, the company wrote that they were concerned that they "could not prevent the drug from being diverted to departments of corrections for use in capital punishment procedures."

That same year, a federal judge ruled that Nebraska had illegally imported sodium thiopental, from a drug company based in India. According to the Associated Press, state officials then "obtained a new batch from another Indian source," only to have the drug's Swiss manufacturer, Naari AG, claim the sodium thiopental in question was a sample meant for non-lethal use in Zambia. According to the Daily Herald, at least one of the sources for Nebraska's 2011 sodium thiopental purchase was HarrisPharma.

In an op-ed published by the Omaha Daily Herald earlier today, Ricketts defended his veto. "Unlike California or Texas, which have hundreds on death row," he wrote, "we use the death penalty judiciously and prudently." He continued:

It was just six years ago that the method for carrying out the death penalty was changed from the electric chair to lethal injection. That change was pushed for by the same special interests that are now standing in the way of its use. It is the litigious actions of these groups that impede the will of the people.

Overturning the death penalty, he argued, "vests the killers with more justice than the victims."

If state lawmakers override Ricketts' veto, Nebraska will become the 19th state to completely abolish the death penalty.

Five in-depth stories on the death penalty:

1. The Majority of US States Do Not Have the Death Penalty
2. Liberals Won't Let the Death Penalty Die
3. Utah Firing Squad Proposal Points to Death Penalty Crisis
4. UN Vote Against Death Penalty Highlights Global Abolitionist Trend and Leaves the US Stranded
5. Meet the Irish Catholic Priest Who Ministers to Inmates on Indonesia's Death Row

Follow Drew Millard on Twitter.

Earlier this month, when nine biker-gang members were killed in a Sons of Anarchy–worthy shoot-out in Waco, Texas, Sergeant Patrick Swanton, a police spokesman, made a statement that was refreshingly sensible. The shoot-out had taken place outside a heavily frequented shopping mall, in broad daylight, and the bikers had even opened fire on responding police officers. Yet, when asked if the authorities knew the names of the gangs involved, Sergeant Swanton responded: "We do, but we're not going to give them the privilege at this point of putting their names out there."

Politicians and law enforcement officials commenting on the recent spate of Islamic State–related arrests would be well advised to take a page out of Sergeant Swanton's PR playbook. Instead, they consistently provide the Islamic State with the publicity it so obviously craves. In that way, the current Islamic State craze in US law enforcement and security circles serves two seemingly opposed but fundamentally codependent narratives: that of the US security apparatus, but also, counterintuitively, that of the Islamic State itself.

After all, what better publicity could an ambitious—if brutal—political startup like the Islamic State pray for than being mentioned by the most powerful man on the planet, President Barack Obama? Back in February, Obama referred to supposedly widespread Islamic State recruitment here at home as an "urgent threat."

Unsurprisingly, his subordinates have been disseminating that same message. Federal law enforcement spokespersons have decried the growing influence of IS and the allegedly surging risk of attacks on US soil. Earlier this year, FBI Director James Comey announced open investigations in all 50 states of "people in various stages of radicalizing."

Realities do not seem to deter any of these officials from their statements. Even crediting unsubstantiated US intelligence estimates, only about 150 Americans have traveled—or attempted to travel—to Syria to join militant groups, a small number compared to the overall population of American Muslims.

Nor has there been an attack carried out or attempted on US soil at the confirmed behest of the Islamic State. All officials can point to if pressed is the recent attempted attack in Garland, Texas, whose perpetrators appear to have been freelancing. Or maybe a single case out of Columbus, Ohio, where the defendant is alleged to have returned from Syria with instructions from the al Nusra Front, a US-designated terrorist organization, to carry out an attack in the US, which he never did.

Even the director of the FBI is not above relying on a discredited theory that individuals "radicalize" to violence along a predictable path with "stages" as innocuous as deciding to grow a beard.

And, of course, the tendency to overstate the threat represented by the Islamic State does not stop at our borders. Commenting on the recent apprehension of a 16-year-old girl who attempted to travel from London to Syria, UK Home Secretary Theresa May, too, spoke of "the seriousness of the threat... from IS," casting it in stark, existential terms.

The point here is not that authorities should disregard whatever threat might be posed by any individuals seeking military training overseas or planning acts of mayhem domestically. But the frequency of public expressions of concern by high-level government officials and the stridency of their warnings bear little relation to the actual scope and gravity of the threat.

There have been more than 20 Islamic State–related arrests in the United States so far. Quite often, they have turned out to be heavily government-driven , involving paid informants or undercovers, following a pattern observed in the recent arrest of six young men in Minnesota, for instance.

The story told by politicians and law enforcement officials around these cases and, more broadly, about the grave threat that the Islamic State purportedly poses to the United States, serves to justify our current expansive and expensive domestic surveillance and security apparatus. Indirectly, it bolsters current US foreign policy. Even local cops want in on the action, including New York City top cop Bill Bratton, who recently waxed apocalyptic about the Islamic State in order to ask for 450 extra police officers to be added to what is already the country's largest police force.

But the heated rhetoric and high-profile prosecutions of insignificant Islamic State wannabes come at a cost that is far less obvious, but every bit as real as the political and financial windfall they occasion for some officials in the United States. (Not to mention the havoc these cases wreak on defendants, their families, and their communities.)

In tangible ways, these very same arrests and the accompanying overheated talk advance the Islamic State's interests, too. In its propaganda, the Islamic State postures that it can project its military might into the hearts of pluralistic societies like the United States. Having already demonstrated an ability to draw impressionable Western Muslims as recruits to such danger zones as Syria and Iraq, it has threatened to activate unspecified elements for strikes in North American and Western European cities.

Of course, that is mostly empty talk, likely aimed at sharpening divides and suspicions between, say, American Muslims and their non-Muslim compatriots. No official has credibly claimed the existence of a network of sleeper cells in American cities under direct Islamic State command. The territorial United States is not awash with terror cells. Even those Americans who want to travel to Syria do not necessarily pose a direct threat to the United States.

But splashy Islamic State–related cases and the official chatter surrounding them fill the gap between reality and the perception that the Islamic State relies on. In that way, those prosecutions and the rhetoric around them perform valuable propaganda work for the Islamic State, at no cost, while serving law enforcement's self-justifying agenda.

One way out of this strange bedfellows paradox would be for officials to refrain from exaggerating the peril represented by youths who seek to go abroad to join up with the Islamic State and similar groups, and to no longer highlight and exceptionalize attempted or actual acts of violence by Muslim-identified actors.

It is largely because, in the post-9/11 era, terrorism incidents are virtually guaranteed to draw high-level official reaction and extensive media coverage that they are politically valuable to groups like the Islamic State. For those reasons, too, they appeal to young people in search of a cause and to would-be terrorists leading marginal or troubled lives and looking for a greater purpose.

Reducing the profile and visibility of such incidents and of claims relating to the ambient "threat" would likely undercut potential recruits and the groups they wish to join. It would also create space for a sane and rational conversation around security in the present era, away from the clamorous rhetoric that characterizes the usual debate.

But while it would certainly make for sound policy, pressing officials to reign in their saber-rattling and fanfare about the domestic threat posed by the Islamic State and the attendant small-fry cases amounts to asking them to abandon a prolific cash cow. Sadly, this is likely to prove a stillborn proposition.

Ramzi Kassem is a professor at the City University of New York School of Law. He directs the CLEAR project (Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility) as well as the Immigrant & Non-Citizen Rights Clinic.

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Don's best! Photo via Flickr user Stephen Dyrgas

Watching the Stanley Cup playoffs is all well and good, but since there are no Canadian teams left standing, it's tough out there for hockey fans in the great white north. In order to fill the gaping hole of Canadian hockey in my soul, I decided to watch the entire first decade of Don Cherry's Rock'em Sock'em Hockey videos. Other than seeing my uncle's VHS copy of the first or second instalment of RSH when I was a kid, my regular dose of Don Cherry has been limited to his appearances on Coach's Corner (and at the swearing-in ceremony for the worst mayor in Toronto's history). So I wanted to see what wisdom I could glean from Grapes—and maybe learn something about my own intestinal fortitude along the way.

Cherry has been regularly criticized for (among many other things) promoting the more violent aspects of the game—most of the videos conclude with his favourite fights of the year (usually involving now-dead Red Wings enforcer Bob Probert). And while that's clearly out of step with the current culture of head-injury awareness and toning down the fisticuffs, Cherry was often hammering home the importance of playing safe while playing aggressively.

But after about a dozen hours of being berated by Cherry's infamous bark-speak, not to mention witnessing literally hundreds of slow-motion bodychecks, I started to feel a bit like Alex in A Clockwork Orange—my spirit broken by the pornographic repetition of hip checks and on-ice brawls, all set to a mind-shredding soundtrack of mediocre mid-'90s dance music and accentuated with used car dealership commercial graphics.

You may ask yourself: to what end? Maybe it was to prove my Canadianness, or maybe just see how much Grapes one man could take.

Rock'em Sock'em Hockey #1
From the get-go, it seems like such a weirdly insular presentation—just Grapes talking into a camera in what looks like his basement, complete with a neon Molson Ex sign in the background. It's like there's nothing else for him to do. The chintzy "rock" song soundtrack leads straight into a full-on amphetamine ramble from Cherry, all while struggling to hold his famous dog Blue for the shot.

This first video, released in 1989, was the brainchild of Grapes' son, producer Tim Cherry, and served as an extension of the late-'80s show they made together called This Week in Hockey. It feels like something that probably took them an afternoon to film—just another easy money project. The very essence of a cash grab.

Probably 90 percent of the footage is from Canadian games, and a select few at that. The clips are randomly assembled in generic categories and paired with fairly inane and uninsightful commentary ("He loves to score!"). The production is such that it's hard to tell if this is this a bloopers video or not: there's lots of players falling down, shooting pucks in the wrong net, and giveaways.

The free-flowing associations makes it all seem weirdly insider-y, like a tape Cherry made to show to his buddies at a bachelor party. He talks about players like he knows them personally, or maybe he's only featuring players who he personally likes. In any case, we end up with Cherry telling stories about the hardest hits he's seen in the past, before cutting to loads of slow-motion bone-crushing presented almost pornographically over a robotic drum track and slap bass soundtrack and no commentary except, "Boy, weren't they beauty hits?"

The conclusion is, of course, a fight highlight: "What's a Don Cherry show without a few tussles. Let's give all the sweethearts a chance to turn it off." After which it's a glimpse of the late great enforcer Bob Probert in his prime, to which Cherry adds, "Too bad [Probert] is out of hockey. Let's hope he makes it back." (Probert had been arrested for cocaine possession at the border at the time.)

This tape (yes, Cherry even calls them tapes) clocks in at only 30 minutes, so I'm feeling OK with the project so far.

Rock'em Sock'em Hockey #2
The second edition again features what seems like a pretty limited assortment of clips—lots of Montreal Canadiens, Toronto Maple Leafs, and Edmonton Oilers. But Cherry dips into the vault of history to show the famous Bobby Orr playoff goal where the Bruins great goes flying onto his belly after scoring.

Cherry randomly tells the tale of one of his favourite games—the one that ended his coaching career and sent him on to Coach's Corner.

There's a musical interlude called "Grape Jam," which is a Beastie Boys–esque rap containing lyrics like "He has a six inch collar / he's no creampuff," "Europe—it's a nice place to visit, but stop sending us hockey players," and "Visors, don't like 'em." Apparently, the tune was created by comedian/actor Jeff Lumby and "Humble" Howard Glassman, so it seems that Grapes wasn't taking himself too seriously here.

This is the first time Cherry includes clips from Coach's Corner, but there's no obvious reasoning behind what makes the cut, other than ripping on Swedes and Fins by challenging them to "hit or fight or do something."

Again, there's no commentary on the hits section, and more fights at the end, which makes the whole tape seem like violent foreplay leading up to the hockey fight montage.

Over the credits, the outtakes of Cherry trying to say "rock'em sock'em hockey" are actually appalling. How long does it take to get clean takes of the commentary in the rest of the video? Simply imagining how much raw Don Cherry is required to patch together 45 minutes of an RSH video is making me feel overwhelmed.

Rock'em Sock'em Hockey #3
It's the same bunch of players in all these videos: Calgary Flames goalie Mike Vernon, Montreal Canadiens, Boston Bruins. Surprisingly, there's not a lot of Wayne Gretzky or Mario Lemieux, both of whom were in their prime in the previous season. Was it too cost-prohibitive to get them to sign releases—or did they own the footage for their videos? Oh, wait, here's a clip of Gretzky taking a puck in the side of the head.

The clips are even more random than before: hits, bloopers, saves, etc. all fly by in the same montage. Grapes attempts to tie them together by offering actual tips for players, complete with used-car-dealership-commercial graphics, which are pretty underwhelming, even for 1991.

It looks like the Coach's Corner section is going to be a permanent thing in these videos now. However, this one features a particular lowlight: Cherry doing a pre-game bit in LA where he's sporting a flamboyant earring, pimp hat, and wraparound shades, and says in his most effete voice, "my friends Sly and Arsenio lent me a few things." He's actually borderline making fun of homosexuals, and people from California, and anyone who doesn't like fighting. "Hockey without violence is like a silver ballet."

Yikes. It's one thing for Cherry to throw this together in the heat of the moment during a live hockey game, but another entirely to include it in the permanent record of RSH. I'm starting to wonder about the judgment of both Don and Tim right about now.

Rock'em Sock'em Hockey #4
There's a new logo this time. And a new locker-room vibe. The narrative conceit this time is showing clips based on Grapes' dictionary ("trolley tracks," "tick-tack-toe," "top shelf," etc). Cherry drops the words "beauty" and "brutal" a little more often, and I wonder if he's the origin of the Canadian usage of both.

This round of Blue's Bloopers is just a bunch of refs getting hurt. The series sometimes finds a weird glee in watching people being injured, while at other times, Cherry will get super pissed off at cheap shots and knee-to-knee collisions.

There's no consistency to his philosophy of sport other than focusing on the most aggressive moments in hockey, and ignoring much of the finesse—only highlighting great plays when they're accompanied by some brutality or performed by otherwise aggressive players.

Once again, the choice of Coach's Corner rants is super questionable: When recounting the story of seeing a puck fly into the crowd and hit a woman in the face, Cherry says: "Keep your eyes on the puck. I've seen some awful smacks. It's always some woman yapping away."

Four videos into the series, we're starting to see some recycled lines, which will undoubtedly become catch phrases, like, "It's tea time again for you folks who don't like the odd tussle." Still, for all the aggression in RSH, it seems odd that there are only a handful of fights on each tape. Maybe I'm just starting to crave more violent stimulation.

Rock'em Sock'em Hockey #5
From the strobe-lit proto-techno dance club opening, complete with Grapes fully embracing the pimped out persona he was teasing just two tapes ago, it's clear that this is a very different era of Rock'em Sock'em. The graphics are still decidedly chintzy, but there's far more effort in the overall production. The opening sequence, entitled "Chain Reaction," features a succession of players dishing out hits and then being slammed in a virtual daisy chain of bodychecks. Cherry delivers straightforward commentary for a while, steering clear of the editorializing that played so prominently in the previous tape.

Cut to Cherry playing pool in a man-cave, with Blue hanging on the side of the table. Grapes makes a bank shot to introduce a segment about, wait for it, bank shots. Sure, it's obvious, but it's a step up from the random stream-of-consciousness footage from the previous four instalments.

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A new era in Rock'em Sock'em imagery

What has hit a new nadir, however, is the graphic treatment used to introduce each segment: live-action flames paired with the animated melting ice surrounding the video screen. Simply describing it can never do it justice.

This is also the tape that contains the infamous Don Cherry dance-rap track "Rock'em Sock'em Techno," which is in fact a collaboration between Grapes and a group called BKS, featuring Chris Sheppard. The performance is actually a bit of a head fuck, considering it's equal parts C+C Music Factory, trippy graphics, and, well, bodychecks.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/sExSTLqpNoU' width='500' height='281']

Weirdly, the dance traxx keeps bumping throughout the show—though it's hard to imagine Coach's Corner fans being particularly happy to hear the same proto-house music tune for 15 straight minutes.

There are far more hits in this one, as if Cherry is finally coming to terms with the fact that his audience really just wants the violence. The hits make it a bit like watching an action film with a massive body count: death after death after death with no consequences. At least half of the hits look like penalties, and yet Grapes celebrates pretty much every one.

Cherry's insistence during the fights that "nobody gets hurt" is particularly ironic considering many of the dudes in those fights would later be the subjects of brain-injury studies and enforcer documentaries exploring how their aggression and violence was being exploited, sometimes to tragic ends.

Following the final match-up of bruisers Tie Domi and Bob Probert (again, "nobody gets hurt here"), Cherry delivers a positive message: "Hey kids, whether it's in sports or in school, there's no limit to what you can do."

Cue another dance track: "No Limit" by 2 Unlimited.

Rock'em Sock'em Hockey #6
At this point, I'm more than a little terrified of how weird the next tape is going to be. It's only really been just over three and a half hours, but I'm starting to hear Cherry's voice everywhere. Maybe this is the key to his coaching style: relentless badgering. Maybe I should be channeling his intensity into something more constructive than being able to recognize a "beauty glove save" or knowing not to cross centre ice with my head down.

Still, I press on with the 1994 edition, where Cherry's editors are in love with slo-mo hits but where Grapes has (fortunately) toned down the presentation. We're back to the one-shot intro format, backed by rustic barn-boards and simple lightning-bolt graphics to introduce each of the segments.

The new format is to just go through a bunch of playoff series without really giving any context for what round we're in. Just team vs. team: this was a brutal series. It's actually surprising how little insight Cherry has into the game sometimes. He simply points out the obvious and name-checks his "buddies."

Holy shit! A bizarre 3-D spacecraft flies across the screen and I wonder if I'm seeing things, or was that really there? When it comes to inexplicable graphics, truly anything is possible.

More techno music, and another Probert fight to close out the show. This is getting a little predictable until...

Grapes' tips for kids! (I guess this is why RSH #6 clocks in at 90 minutes.) There are no actual kids here: just Cherry skating around on an empty rink delivering commandments like: Don't walk on cement with your skates; get your own water bottle (apparently, according to Cherry, a kid in Mississauga died from meningitis contracted when someone else using his water bottle); never go blind into the corner; you can't get hurt when you're up against the boards; don't hit from behind—it's a cowardly act and he hates it. Most importantly, "Don't cry wolf. That's not the Canadian way, that's what they do in Europe, like soccer." Cherry is one of the few people with such a concerted dislike for Europeans.

Rock'em Sock'em Hockey #7
This one is filmed inside the Hockey Hall of Fame, which gives the impression that there's actually going to be some sort of narrative arc. Nope, same bangin' dance tracks (more 2 Unlimited!), including a techno version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Kurt Cobain has only been dead a year at this point and is definitely rolling in his grave.

Cherry seems more inclined to just let the clips play, only piping in every once in a while. It's kind of a nice change, but feels a little bit like a cop out. There's a pretty good segment on dives, though.

This one also ends with a "lesson." Now he's showing actual kids how to buy the right equipment. I bet the kids are wondering, "Why is he always yelling? He's just suggesting that we wear equipment that fits correctly—why is he so angry about it?"

Rock'em Sock'em Hockey #8
"What makes a tough hockey player: someone who goes into the corner and knows he's gonna get hit. Remember: always keep your head up. Let's go!"

What kind of opening is this? At least the soundtrack has gone from dance music to some weird programmed electro metal—all grinding beats and gnarly guitar distortion.

I think I actually prefer the random weirdness of the early tapes. At least there was a charming unpredictability to what Cherry was going to introduce. This is by no means polished, but it's definitely by rote. Also, I'm starting to think that the shitty graphics are really an aesthetic choice. There's no way that they don't have access to better technology, unless Tim and Don are trying to keep the overhead as low as possible.

It's been a while since Cherry strolled down memory lane and talked about his brief career as a goon for the Boston Bruins' AHL team and a not-great coach for the Bruins later, but here he is reliving being on the losing end of a Stanley Cup final. And then onto his brief stint as a the coach of Colorado, where he almost got fired for choking a player. The upside of this digression is that Cherry offers up the possible source of his grudge against Swedes: Hardy Astrom, the goalie for Colorado when he was coaching the team, who apparently wasn't very good. "I called him the Swedish sieve," says Grapes.

Probert comes back for one of the fights of the year. "I love these guys... My kinda guys." Also, when talking about another fight: "A Russian hockey player who looks like a Canadian—never saw that before." Sure, Grapes.

Rock'em Sock'em Hockey #9
There's something weirdly butch about Don Cherry chucking weight to the sky in a gym. Maybe it's the black tank top and the backwards baseball cap. Or maybe it's lines like, "A blister never stops a hockey player, if you know what I mean." What am I even saying?

In any case, Cherry leads off with Gretzky and Lemieux, featuring them prominently for the first time ever. Is Cherry selling out? What are the politics of who gets into these videos?

It's all the same sort of footage as the previous videos: players on the same team colliding; refs getting bonked around; glove saves; overtime goals. And yet, at nine or so hours in, I think I've finally acclimatized to Grapes' incessant banter. It's just like breathing—the barking goes in one ear and straight into my pineal gland. It's rhythmic: hit, hit, hit, "Bawnago!"; hit, hit, hit, "Like a real Ca-na-dian!"

Maybe that's the case this time around because there are far less graphics, and Cherry's voice is the only cue that we've switched gears into a different segment. Maybe the graphics were standing in the way of my attaining oneness with the Rocking and Socking. I think I'm almost ready for some more playoff hockey—just in time for the Stanley Cup finals.

Next up in the lesson plan is tips for parents, which Grapes delivers with grandson Del Cherry on his knee looking super stunned. Questions from parents include: When should my kid start to skate? Three. Should my kid play hockey all year round? You can't play all the time; you've gotta have that hunger... This shit goes on for a full 15 minutes.

Don Cherry Tenth Anniversary
It's at this point in the series that Cherry loses the Rock'em Sock'em title in a naming-rights dispute, but that's not the only thing that's changed. This is the year Cherry grew the goatee that would define his visage for the next while. It's not a bad look for the first edition on DVD. Very Y2K. Welcome to the future!

The graphics are pretty classy this time around. Just player names and little explosion. We've come a long way from the fire and ice video screen. Much like Coach's Corner, however, these are starting to feel like the same video year after year, with minor variation. Though I'm actually surprised at how tame the commentary has become. There are no clips of Cherry insulting women hockey fans or European hockey players.

However, for the third time now, the editors have chosen to run Cherry's effete pimp bit, where he insults people from California and homosexuals. Which comes after another clip where Cherry says to Coach's Corner co-host Ron MacLean, "Tough guys can blow me kisses—guys like [McLean]: whoa!"

Don Cherry #11 (and beyond)
I probably should have stopped here. After all, these things aren't even called Rock'em Sock'em again until the 20th video. But I was curious about how Cherry and Co. dealt with the new millennium. So I rolled through Don Cherry #11 and #12, and then started scanning various bits from some of the later tapes. In these later videos, Cherry begins his stint as the coach of the OHL's Mississauga Ice Dogs, so we get to see him barking orders at actual players. During one video, the narrative conceit is answering viewer questions. Occasionally, the music improves, such that #12 features rock music more traditionally befitting the aggressive play. Much later, the visuals get super slick—such as the opening to the 25th anniversary DVD.

Follow Chris Bilton on Twitter.

At first, you can't move. It feels like you're waking up, except your arms and legs and head and tongue are all frozen in place. You want to cry for help, but you can't. You're betrayed by your body, paralyzed. You lie there as your breathing begins to quicken, your heart rate jolting, until you see it: a shadowy figure in the room, moving closer. Maybe it's a man in a dark cloak. Or maybe it's an old woman, grotesque and witchlike. Either way, there is something sinister—and you are there, in your bed, powerless to do anything.

This real-life horror is known as sleep paralysis: a half-dreaming, half-wakeful state that leaves your body immobilized while you encounter nightmarish visions of terror. By some estimates, it affects about 6 percent of the general population, many of whom are left without an explanation for what happened to them. Was it a dream? Was it reality? Was it supernatural—and will it happen again?

After it happened to filmmaker Rodney Ascher (best known for directing Room 237), he began to seek others who had experienced the same thing, and found a community brimming with its own mythology and philosophy about sleep paralysis. In his new film, The Nightmare, which straddles the line between documentary and horror film, Ascher shares the stories of those who have experienced sleep paralysis and struggled to make meaning of it. I called Ascher to learn more about the film, his own experience with sleep paralysis, and the blurred lines between the real and the imaginary.

[vimeo src='//player.vimeo.com/video/125421779' width='100&' height='360']

VICE: What was it like the first time you experienced sleep paralysis?
Rodney Ascher: The first time was more than 15 years ago. I woke up around four in the morning and I couldn't move, I couldn't talk. I wanted to call for help—I was living in a house with a couple of roommates—because I was paralyzed and kind of panicking. I didn't hear anything, but I sensed that there was something outside the house kind of looking at me, or coming toward me. At a certain point, there was this black silhouette of a man, with very sharply defined edges, kind of slender, and he was in the room, walking toward me very slowly. I was absolutely horrified. I wasn't sure if it was a ghost or a demon or something, but I sensed evil, for lack of a better word. It came very close and it leaned right over my face and I think I just kind of went into a fugue state. Somehow, I peeled myself out of bed in a way that felt like a fly peeling itself off of glue paper. It took me a little while to relax after that.

I was convinced it was a supernatural experience—I thought I was in danger of demonic possession, and it took a long time before any alternate explanations offered themselves up to me.

When did you finally get those explanations?
Well, what was really striking to me was that this had happened to me when the internet was in its earliest days, so there wasn't really anything that I could use to research what I had experienced. I think if I did, I wouldn't have looked it up as a sleep disorder. I would've been researching something about, like, ghosts and the supernatural, which is how it felt to me. When I decided to research it a little bit, and see if I could find other people sharing their experiences or find scientific explanations for what was going on, I was astonished to see the sheer number of people out there who had gone through it; who were telling the details of their stories, some of which were even more bizarre and frightening than my own, in a way that they were starting to understand what had happened to them. That was fascinating to me, and made it clear that there was a bigger story here.

In terms of the science, what's actually happening to your brain during sleep paralysis?
Well, even some of the simpler explanations get complicated pretty quickly, but the clearest ones that I've come across talk about moving through REM states in the wrong sequence. When you're sleeping, you go through REM 1 and REM 2, and you're supposed to go back through REM 2 to REM 1 before you wake. But if you break from REM 2—the deepest level—to consciousness, then you're still halfway dreaming. Your body gets immobilized normally when you're sleeping, so that you don't act out your dreams. To me, that suggests that the opposite of sleep paralysis is sleep walking. If your body doesn't shut down while you're dreaming, you might act stuff out and that might be dangerous to you and the people around you. But if it works too well and it keeps you immobilized after you wake, that can be very disturbing. And if you're still halfway in dream mode, then you're seeing things while being aware of your environment, that can be pretty disturbing too.

But none of that stuff gets at questions of, well, why do different people see the same thing? Or if people are all dreaming similar things, should there be a clearer understanding of what dreams mean? The questions I'm interested in about why people see what they see and how they struggle to make sense of this stuff are questions that aren't strictly scientific.

Related: Motherboard explains why sleep paralysis is so terrifying.

What are the common figures that people see?
The three-dimensional shadow man is probably the most common one. Lots of people describe seeing something similar, but wearing a hat—they call him the Hat Man. Then there's another Hat Man that seems to be related to UFO stories in a way that I don't totally have my head around. It can atomize pretty quickly. People talk about seeing the Old Hag, which is like a very old woman, or Cloak Man, who's like more or less the Grim Reaper. Also cats, black cats; spiders...

[body_image width='1350' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/05/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/27/' filename='the-nightmare-reveals-the-real-life-horror-of-sleep-paralysis-500-body-image-1432760461.jpg' id='60654']

And these are all part of a common mythology within the sleep paralysis community?
It's weird, because these are like the opposite of UFO stories. Most people are loosely familiar with some of the main details of a UFO abduction story. Most people have an idea of what an alien might look like—a tall, grey alien with big black eyes and a little slit for a mouth. But with sleep paralysis—as common as these experiences are—don't seem to be a big part of American folklore. So first, you have to experience it, and then you look for answers, and then you discover that other people have seen the same things. And that makes it all the stranger.

Since the terror part of sleep paralysis is produced by your own mind, is there a sense that there's a social contagion to it? That if you familiarize yourself with the mechanisms and the mythology, that you're more likely to experience it?
That's certainly something that some people believe. I don't have any hard data, but it is an idea that's out there. But it's interesting that you say this is something "produced in your own mind," which is a very rationalist, secularist, scientific way to look at it. There's not a consensus about [whether or not that's true] among people who have experienced it. This is really one of the questions we're exploring in the film: Is this something that's the product of your own mind? Are you projecting it from inside, or are you sensitive to something that's out there but is usually invisible? Or is it something that's hardwired, some kind of ancestral thing, like the Jungian idea of the unconscious? I don't know which one is scarier.

The entire thing seems terrifying—but do some people experience sleep paralysis without feeling fear?
There's a whole school of people who make peace with it. They see it as a gateway to lucid dreaming and out-of-body experiences. There was a debate online that I enjoyed where one person was saying, "If you just relax, and don't fear it, your shadow person can become your guide." Then someone else would rebut it like, "Are you out of your mind? These things are demonic presences! You welcome them into your room like you welcome a fire into your house." To me, that was evocative of the debate in the first Poltergeist, of "walk into the light" or "don't walk into the light."

The last time it happened to me, it was in the course of making this film, and I kind of thought to myself, "Oh! Sleep paralysis! This is happening." So I tried to relax and take notes and see if I could see anything that would inform how I would make the film. So I wasn't scared. It was kind of an awesome lightshow.

There seems to be a real power in sharing your sleep paralysis experience with others so that people can figure out what's happening to them.
That's absolutely right. When you see the film, it's not presented as anything like therapy—and because it's terrifying for most people, I tried to make the movie scary for people. I think there may be a connection between these experiences and the birth of the horror movie, and so I allowed this film to go into horror movie mode from time to time. Nonetheless, I spoke to people after the movie who've experienced sleep paralysis, and who've been grateful. Some people have said, "All my life I thought that I was alone, and I thought I was the only person who went through this." It was reassuring to them. So I don't know if I've accidentally made something that's therapeutic—despite my worst intentions—but I think it's always very comforting to find out that you're not alone.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

The Nightmare appears in theaters on June 5.

As the Christian Right loses its footing and youth church attendance continues its sharp decline, a rogue band of Christian superheroes called We Are Watchmen is out to put things right. According to their website, We Are Watchmen gets its name from Ezekiel 33:6. Their purpose, explained largely through Holocaust imagery, is to "use music and message [sic] to mobilize American Christians to civic duty." They are particularly concerned with the national debt, "Secular Humanism," and the "sixty million innocent babies murdered in the name of 'women's reproductive rights.'"

They also love Ted Cruz. Here's an excerpt from their manifesto:

We Are Watchmen is a movement that uses music and message to mobilize American Christians to civic duty. Music. Message. Movement. Just as many churches in Germany sang louder on Sunday mornings to drown out the sounds of wailing Jews in boxcars on the way to the concentration camps, the majority of pulpits and pews in the American churches have been willfully ignoring the stench of blatant evil rising in this once godly nation.

Sixty million innocent babies murdered in the name of "women's reproductive rights" since the passage of the unconstitutional Roe v. Wade. Our children and grandchildren buried in 18 trillion national fiscal operating debt. Prayer banned from schools, God banned from the public square, religious liberty under attack, as Secular Humanism usurps Christianity as the official religion of the United States. The American churches remain silent, less than 25% of the nation's Christians vote.

And what better way to right those wrongs and mobilize America's dormant Christian youth than by spitting some sick-nasty rhymes? Using a mash-up of resurrection and arsonist imagery to describe the rise of America and Cruz's presidential election, the Watchmen lead us through the conspiracy of the modern-day USA with all the dexterity of a rhyming dictionary.

Choice lyrics include:

"We are the greatest nation that's ever been implanted on the planet
We never panic, when things get rough
We put our hands up on the granite
and grind for righteousness"

"Switch off the dead news
The lame stream media, feeding us the fed stew
Collectivism: everyone's a victim, like the reds do!"

"All in for war?
All in!
Can we win?
No doubt!"

Want Some In-Depth Stories About Ted Cruz?

1. A Brief Guide to Ted Cruz's New Presidential Campaign
2. Ted Cruz Wants to Lead an Evangelical Ghost Army in 2016
3. Watch a Weeks' Worth of Senator Ted Cruz Denying Climate Change
4. Ted Cruz and Immigration: From a Cuban Prison to an Iowa Parking Lot

[body_image width='2346' height='2346' path='images/content-images/2015/05/28/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/28/' filename='remembering-mary-ellen-mark-a-legendary-documentarian-and-mentor-to-generations-of-photographers-405-body-image-1432784629.jpg' id='60742']^{Mary Ellen Mark at the 2013 Aperture benefit. Photo by the author}

Mary Ellen Mark, one of the greatest photographers of humans who will ever live, passed away this Monday night at the age of 75. She leaves behind a body of work that sings truths about the humor, horror, and joy of being alive. She was a champion of social documentary photography, never shying away from difficult subject matter—from prostitution to mental illness to the rituals of prom. And not for nothing, she was one of few women in that near-extinct male-dominated profession. This forced Mark to become strong and opinionated in her views of the medium, and she remained compassionate towards her subjects, often maintaining relationships with them long after her work was finished.

[body_image width='800' height='1007' path='images/content-images/2015/05/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/27/' filename='remembering-mary-ellen-mark-a-legendary-documentarian-and-mentor-to-generations-of-photographers-405-body-image-1432753495.jpg' id='60623']
Photo by Mary Ellen Mark: Clayton Moore, the former Lone Ranger, sitting on couch, Los Angeles, California 1992.

This winter, I interviewed Mark about her role as a mentor to younger artists. Although never a full-time teacher, she was incredibly available and open and warm to emerging photographers, especially those interested in social documentary work. I first met her in 2009, when I was a photography student at the Rhode Island School of Design and my class went on a visit to her magical Greene Street studio. My friend Rachel Stern scored an internship with her the following summer, and I would drop by sometimes. Mary Ellen was almost superhumanly supportive of us—she invited Rachel and me to her photography workshops to give presentations of our work as "guest artists" although we were unpolished college sophomores.

[body_image width='2000' height='1362' path='images/content-images/2015/05/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/27/' filename='remembering-mary-ellen-mark-a-legendary-documentarian-and-mentor-to-generations-of-photographers-405-body-image-1432753818.jpg' id='60625']
"Central Park, 1967," from the 1999 book " Mary Ellen Mark: American Odyssey,"

It may be difficult to believe that such an icon could be so accessible, but my experience is far from uncommon. Ask any young photographer in New York who has documentary aspirations, and if they haven't met Mary Ellen in person, they will extoll the virtues of her photography and tell you about their friend who was her intern, or ask if you've been to her famous Christmas party for dogs.

[body_image width='558' height='559' path='images/content-images/2015/05/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/27/' filename='remembering-mary-ellen-mark-a-legendary-documentarian-and-mentor-to-generations-of-photographers-405-body-image-1432757529.jpg' id='60640']
Photo by Mary Ellen Mark: Wilma, the poodle of photography dealer Janet Borden (a close friend of Mark's)

This last December, I met Mary Ellen at her studio to interview her, especially about her impact on younger generations. We looked through books she had published of work by her students, and she excitedly pointed out favorite pictures. I had intended to schedule a second conversation under the guise of needing more information, but secretly it was just another excuse to see Mary Ellen. Sadly, that second interview will never happen, but I'm glad I get to share the first.

VICE: I want to talk to you about teaching.
Mary Ellen Mark: Yeah, I teach. I teach workshops. I've never taught full-time in a photography school or university. I've been asked to, but I wanted to retain my freedom. Taking pictures has always been the most important thing for me. I teach [a workshop] in Mexico. I've taught in Oaxaca for 20 years. And I teach in Reykjavik in Iceland, and at ICP [the International Center for Photography] sometimes.

What kind of things do you teach in your workshops? I remember that you tell your students to put black tape over the screens of their digital cameras.
I ask them to tape over the back of the camera, first of all because I think they should learn how to use light. Also because you're never sure whether you have a picture until you print it. Often people shoot tons without thinking, then look in the back of the camera and think they have the image, and they don't. I'd rather my students come back to the hotel where they're staying, or their home, and then look, the same way you'd look at a contact sheet. And I basically teach by editing. Every day they bring to me what they shot the day before, and I edit their work.

I'm still shooting analog, just because I love film, and I have the best most incredible silver print maker in the world, Chuck Kelton. So I don't want to change at this point. I have a digital, but don't really use it. I think it's such a different thought process. And I want to feel that I have my negatives. I want to feel that they exist.

[body_image width='2000' height='1453' path='images/content-images/2015/05/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/27/' filename='remembering-mary-ellen-mark-a-legendary-documentarian-and-mentor-to-generations-of-photographers-405-body-image-1432760323.jpg' id='60652']The author's contact sheets with notes by Mary Ellen Mark. She did not particularly like the pictures.

Do your students learn from each other as well?
They definitely learn from each other. I have a rule, though: They're not allowed to show each other what they're working on until the final critique. They're not allowed to compare work. Because I hate that kind of competitive edge. Most photographers have it.

Do you?
Well sure, I'm sure I have it, I'm a photographer.

What do you look for in a photograph?
First content. But then I'm looking for frame and design. You can have amazing content, but if it's a busy, terrible frame, it won't work.

I remember you talking about the "odd frame."
Sometimes there's an eccentric frame, but it works perfectly. Your first thought when you pick up a camera, especially a square-format camera, is to frame everything in the middle. But I'm looking for the exception to that. Making a powerful photo, but using the edges—using all of the elements in the picture.

[body_image width='2000' height='1352' path='images/content-images/2015/05/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/27/' filename='remembering-mary-ellen-mark-a-legendary-documentarian-and-mentor-to-generations-of-photographers-405-body-image-1432764395.jpg' id='60674']Mary Ellen Mark: Federico Fellini on the Set of 'Satyricon,' Rome, 1969

But first is content. The picture has to be about something.

What can give a picture content?
It's impossible to say. I think all the pictures I have on the wall here have content for different reasons [ Points to framed black-and-white prints on the studio wall by Graciela Iturbide, Arnold Newman, and Sally Mann. ]

There's content in them. It triggers your emotions.

[body_image width='1037' height='717' path='images/content-images/2015/05/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/27/' filename='remembering-mary-ellen-mark-a-legendary-documentarian-and-mentor-to-generations-of-photographers-405-body-image-1432759562.jpg' id='60646']
Photo by Alexandra Strada, a student of Mary Ellen's, from a book of work produced in her Oaxaca workshops over the past 20 years

It's impossible to say what makes a picture have that effect.
It's impossible to say because it could be a picture of a flower that triggers your emotions. It could be a picture of a tree or a person. War pictures—of course they have content because you see the horrors of war. But that doesn't make them easier to take. It's easy to say an event is content in a photograph, but it's not. It can be an Emmet Gowin photograph of a child with her arms crossed.

How do you teach that?
You have to teach them how to observe. And how to use this machine that we call a camera. To translate what their mind thinks and sees. Ask them why they took the picture, and just see how it all evolves. When you teach, each person is different, and you have to encourage them to be their best. Not to be like you.

I've very seldom had this happen, but there are some people who will never understand. They just don't have a visual sensibility.

Luckily, I've had great photo editors.

[body_image width='2000' height='1323' path='images/content-images/2015/05/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/27/' filename='remembering-mary-ellen-mark-a-legendary-documentarian-and-mentor-to-generations-of-photographers-405-body-image-1432763730.jpg' id='60670']^{Mary Ellen Mark: Amanda, right, and her cousin Amy in Valdese, North Carolina, 1990}

You have learned from having people edit your work?
I have. I've learned from teaching how to edit peoples' work. Often I'll ask my husband [filmmaker Martin Bell]. He's a great editor, and he's very direct and honest with me. if it's the right moment, or an off moment, or it doesn't work.

Martin is your greatest editor.
He's tough, but you have to be tough. I think you have to be honest.

Do pictures your students make ever remind you of your own work?
Sometimes, but I don't want them to. I want it to be their work.

Because I Imagine a lot of people go to the workshops thinking, I want to photograph like Mary Ellen Mark, right?
I think they come because they want to learn how to photograph people. I've had less landscape photographers in my classes.

[body_image width='800' height='533' path='images/content-images/2015/05/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/27/' filename='remembering-mary-ellen-mark-a-legendary-documentarian-and-mentor-to-generations-of-photographers-405-body-image-1432763086.jpg' id='60662']
Photo by Lisen Stibeck, a student who Mary Ellen called "exceptionally gifted" (from the book Daughters)

A good picture to you has a person in it?
I think a good picture could not have a person. I think landscape photography is incredible. But you really have to know what you're doing and how you're doing it to be a great landscape photographer. I don't. I don't know how to do it, so I'd probably be not a good landscape photographer.

Who were you teachers? You went to the Annenberg School right?
Yes. There was a magazine man who was really lovely and encouraging to me named Louis Glessma who used to be the editor at Holiday. He was very encouraging. I think you have to be encouraging and honest. Some people are just mean, and I hate that.

[body_image width='1000' height='677' path='images/content-images/2015/05/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/27/' filename='remembering-mary-ellen-mark-a-legendary-documentarian-and-mentor-to-generations-of-photographers-405-body-image-1432765171.jpg' id='60680']Mary Ellen Mark: Kamla behind Curtains with a Customer, Falkland Road, Bombay, India, 1978

Do you think taking pictures more often makes you a better photographer?
When you use a camera, it's almost like using a musical instrument—you have to be in practice.

Why do you think it's important to support younger artists?
Because it's tough! It's a tough world. So it's really important to help young people. I don't care if it's male or female. It is a bit harder being a woman. More than a bit. It is tough, it's really tough.

[body_image width='1000' height='1494' path='images/content-images/2015/05/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/27/' filename='remembering-mary-ellen-mark-a-legendary-documentarian-and-mentor-to-generations-of-photographers-405-body-image-1432763565.jpg' id='60668']Mary Ellen Mark: "Tiny" in her Halloween costume, Seattle, 1983

What are you working on now?
We're doing a book now with Aperture about Tiny [Charles, a longtime friend and subject of Mark and her husband]. And so we went twice out to Seattle, for the film. Not for pictures—unfortunately there's not time for me to do more pictures, but for the film. At the very end Martin and I are going to make one more trip out there. Just in case he needs any spots filled in the film. We followed her for 30 years, It wasn't like we met her in Streetwise and then came back 30 years later, it's like over the past 30 years we've made several trips to Seattle where Martin's filmed her at different periods of her life, and I've photographed her.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/gG98tnd4q9Y' width='800' height='600']

So you met Tiny when he was filming Streetwise?
No, I met Tiny first. My discovery! Right ? Mart? I discovered Tiny, right?

Martin Bell: Yup

Mark: I did everything!

Bell: You did everything.

I met her in Seattle, when I was doing a story for LIFE magazine. There was a wonderful editor they had called John Loengard, who is also a great photographer. He was a great editor, because he was a very fine photographer who became a photo editor. It's very challenging to work with people who are really good and understand photography. Elisabeth Biondi is not a photographer, but she was a very good photo editor [of The New Yorker, where Mark was a regular contributor]. Very hard to please. I like hard to please.

Because it makes you take better pictures?
You know, you can't get away with the tricks.

So I had an assignment fro LIFE magazine to photograph street kids in Seattle. I went out there and spent three and a half weeks with a writer. And the first big Friday night there I met Tiny. She stepped out of a taxicab. When I met her she was 13 years old, and dressed like a prostitute. Dressed like a grown-up prostitute.

You met Tiny on assignment for LIFE, and this was your job, right? Are these kind of magazine assignments still out there?
Absolutely not! In regard to photography, magazines have become more and more... illustrative. Don't you see that?

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You are a social documentary photographer, which is a job that doesn't exist anymore.
It does not exist. I'm glad you said that. It doesn't exist anymore.

Find out more about Mary Ellen Mark's forthcoming Aperture monograph on Aperture's website. See more of her photographs, books, and films here.

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Late last week, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a psychiatric therapist in Marin County, California, has begun recruiting subjects for a study on the possible value of MDMA as a clinical anxiety reducer. The study, led by Dr. Philip Wolfson, received DEA approval this March and has been authorized by the FDA. Dr. Wolfson is seeking 18 adult subjects suffering from severe anxiety stemming from a life-threatening condition with a life expectancy of at least nine months. Once these individuals are selected, 13 will undergo therapy sessions after taking a controlled dose of MDMA, while five will receive a placebo.

Classified as a Schedule 1 drug since 1985, critics of MDMA have linked it to hundreds of deaths in the rave and club scenes. Its effect on users' heart rates and blood pressures has led to fears that it might be dangerous for those with cardiac problems. And university studies have linked it (especially its long-term usage) to changes in neurological functionality, leading to anxiety, depression, insomnia, or paranoia over the long-term (and listlessness and deep sadness in immediate post-use crashes).

Yet in recent years we've come to understand that many early critical studies of MDMA didn't account for subjects' other drug use habits. (Some research on its potential to damage the brain has even been redacted.) We also know that much of the danger of (ostensibly) MDMA-based drugs like ecstasy or molly derives mostly from the questionable additives laced into them. More recent studies, in which over 1,133 people have taken controlled doses of MDMA with no adverse effects, have found that the drug can help those struggling with mental illnesses and perhaps even Parkinson's disease .

Such revelations have led to a renewed interest in research on the psychological benefits of MDMA-based therapies, promoted and funded by organizations like the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Since the early 2000s, they and other researchers have performed a number of studies on the effects of MDMA in reducing anxiety in PTSD sufferers and autistic adults who feel stress over their difficulties navigating social norms.

To understand more about the potential of MDMA revealed in these studies, the contributions to be made by the new project in Marin County, and the future of the drug as a psychological aid, VICE reached out to Dr. Wolfson to talk neuroscience, warm therapy, and MDMA legalization.

Related: Watch our documentary on an 8-year-old leukemia patient who takes medical marijuana to treat her illness

VICE: We know that MDMA creates a sense of openness and closeness that can help patients to open up and sift through their emotions, but how does that work? And why does MDMA have such long-lasting effects on the way people who take it think and feel?
Dr. Wolfson: It apparently has an effect of making the amygdala [part of the brain's emotional control center] less active. That may contribute to the actuality that MDMA makes it possible for people to tolerate trauma, negative thoughts, more easily—to process them while under its influence and probably thereafter, and to get in touch with positive feelings more easily as the negatives go away.

The afterglow—I don't think anyone has a clear sense of what that is. It's a complex brain-personal-environmental kind of phenomena in which people continue to feel good after having that experience. That's a common thing in [the] mind. Human beings continue to feel great after an uplifting or peak experience [and] that is sustained. Not forever. But we know of that occurring with all kinds of things—with great sex... religious or spiritual experiences.

Some users say their shift in consciousness lasts for months or longer, which seems more significant than the impact of good sex.
I don't know that it's terribly different. I think that a great relationship changes people for life even if it's not sustained. So I don't want to discriminate a drug effect from a human effect.

But there are people who, even with one experience, have sustained emotional improvement for very long periods of time, and I think that's because people are moved psychologically. People emerge from depression or negativity or bad feelings about themselves and others and experience an openness that they haven't had before.

In the autism studies we have just concluded, people who have not had much emotional life because they're high-functioning autistics had a taste of something new for them: a sense of feeling. And that sense of feeling for such people will persist on and on. They've had a knowledge of something else. And I think people can be altered in a very positive direction permanently despite the vagaries of life that may emerge.

Proponents of MDMA-based therapy say that proper guidance and context while taking the drug is important. What guidance will you be providing in your study?
The MDMA experiences are embedded in a complex and intensive psychotherapy process. We, as in all of these studies, have a co-therapy team.

We begin with a very intensive screening process in which we get to know people and what they're about: their illnesses, what their fears and what their social support are like. And then we go through preparatory sessions—all sorts of measures to look at changes during the course of the treatment.

Then we do a 24-hour overnight session, the first one [with MDMA or placebos]. The overnight takes place in a wonderful setting in the study site, which is comfortable, warm, and conducive to openness and to feeling relaxed. It's like building a nest, which is a good thing to do in psychotherapy. People come, stay overnight, are driven home by their support partner the next day after an integrated session. There are three integrated sessions before the next MDMA or placebo session, and that is the pattern.

It concludes after three full MDMA sessions or two full placebo sessions and then three MDMA sessions for the placebo group. Everyone gets three MDMA sessions with intense psychotherapy.

We do many kinds of techniques to help people open to themselves. We're working basically with people's fears of recurrence, relapse, and death itself.

You're looking for subjects without cardiac conditions. Is that because there is a real danger for people with heart problems? And if so, what alternatives are there for them to get a similar experience to MDMA without the amphetamine-related heart issues?
The [cardiac] concern with MDMA is two-fold. The first is that we don't want to have incidents within the study that mar the study. People with hypertension, controlled or not, have a higher risk of having a myocardial infarction. We're trying to keep the study free of events that will pollute it for no good reason. The second is that many of these substances cause a transient increase in blood pressure, which MDMA does (and so does ketamine), so there's a small risk factor for people who have high blood pressure. But in general if MDMA were legal you'd go case-by-case.

Unfortunately the only thing available of a transcendent nature different [from MDMA] is ketamine.

How similar is what your doing to previous research on MDMA's anti-anxiety role in PTSD and autism and how much of what you're doing is new?
The methodology for the actual use of the substance is now standardized with our study. This will be the basis for going ahead: A single dose of 125 milligrams and a half-dose of 62.5 milligrams versus an inactive placebo, that's going to be the model.

And our patient population is totally different in terms of their concerns. There's a PTSD aspect that we're looking at because people with life-threatening illnesses [who] have been treated intensively can have phenomenon very much like PTSD. But we're much more concerned about people's longevity, what they're doing with their lives, how they're impacted directly with their fearfulness, depression, ways in which they're coping. And we're trying to help them look at that much more clearly so they can think about ways that they can make better choices and feel better about the time they have ahead.

Why did you decide to pursue that goal via MDMA versus any other drug or approach?
I worked with MDMA in the legal period with therapies with couples who were significantly depressed, anxious, etc.

In my own particular case, I had a son in that period, my oldest child, who became ill with leukemia at twelve-and-a-half, and during his four years of illness MDMA was part of my life and my family's life. (The kids didn't use it. I have two sons.) And it helped us to process as much as we could and handle terrible circumstances. So personally I knew its power. My son, Noah, died when he was near 17 and MDMA certainly didn't stop the terror or the misery, but it helped us to cope with what was going on and to have a nest in which we could find love and a connection and go on with our lives as well as possible. So I had that personal draw to it and after that I continued to work a lot with people who had life-threatening illnesses in a variety of settings. I knew its power as an empathogen, that is to create a feeling of empathy toward others and toward one's self, to be able to put one's self in other's shoes.

It's unique in that it's not a hallucinogen like psilocybin, which is being used in other life-threatening illness studies at [Johns] Hopkins and NYU. [It's] not a peak-experience psychedelic, but rather something that could be used more in a psychotherapeutic way.

MAPS is hoping to have MDMA legalized and in prescription use within five to ten years. How realistic do you think that is?
I think we have a real shot. I've been out in the open doing this now for a week and the deluge of people who are not experienced in this realm [but] are interested, open to it, is phenomenal. Probably 100 requests [to be a part of the study] from diverse people—a lot with PTSD who don't understand what we're doing.

The process of getting this legalized is fairly straightforward. There could be political pitfalls, but we're finishing up our FDA approach for phase three studies, which are the next phase for approval of a prescription drug, of a prescription method. We hope we can get going with much larger studies. Phase three requires several hundred people.

We'll take two-to-three years before we get approval, so we're hoping, can conceive of, getting formal approval around 2020 if all goes well.

We can also hope for compassionate use because the Veteran's Administration and the whole approach to vets who are struggling with coming back into our society, who are highly suicidal at times—the lack of success of methods at the VA have promulgated an interest in our substance. So we hope that there may be a compassionate use fast-track for some people to avail themselves of the benefits of this as a psycho-therapeutic tool, not just as dropping a drug.

You say there've been positive reactions to your work, but have you faced any backlash?
Not yet. It's always possible. I think there's still some strong feeling about the rave movement and people getting in trouble in the rave movement. There were deaths, and still are, but very rare from MDMA use. And we don't have the answers to all of that, so I can imagine that there are people who are pretty negative with moving ahead with MDMA. But we haven't [seen] it. We're doing a very controlled, thoughtful study. So, so far so good.

Remembering Rick Santorum as the runner-up in the 2012 Republican presidential race is a little bit like trying to remember a strange, vaguely sinister dream. Sure, it seems real. You feel like you experienced it. But it couldn't possibly have happened, right? Do we really live in a country where a has-been "Google problem" could be one Willard Romney away from running against a sitting president? But it did, and we do.

We could again. On Wednesday morning, Santorum told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos that he's "ready to do this again,"—"this" being "run for president." Tonight, he'll make a formal announcement of his candidacy, joining a field that, depending on how generous you are, includes about 250 candidates, at least 12 of who are reasonably serious people, or at least hold reasonably serious jobs.

Which begs the question: How did Santorum—a sweater-vested theocrat who lost who hadn't won an election in 12 (now 15) years, and who lost his last race, as Pennsylvania's incumbent Senator, in an embarrassing landslide—almost take the Republican presidential nomination? And could he do it again this time, in a very different race?

Trending Now: Everything We Know About the Josh Duggar Molestation Scandal

Santorum's national career began in 1990, when he won a seat in the US House of Representatives, which he held until moving up to the Senate in 1994. As improbable as it may seem now, Santorum's success back then was partly attributed to his ability to convince blue-collar Rust Belt folk—including some Democrats—that he had their best interests at heart.

Santorum's time in Congress was also marked by the unabashed, borderline insane conservative rhetoric on social issues that is now his political brand. His legacy included the Santorum Amendment, an attempted addendum to No Child Left Behind that would have allowed schools to teach intelligent design alongside evolution.

But it was Santorum's comments about gays, including comparing homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia, that really put him on the map—mostly by inspiring gay columnist Dan Savage to retaliate with a revenge website, spreadingsantorum.com, which defined the senator's last name as "the frothy mixture lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex," and which was a leading Google search result for Santorum through the 2012 campaign.

Nevertheless, by the end of his second Senate term, in 2006, Santorum had become chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, making him the party's third-ranking senator. So it was all the more remarkable when Santorum was annihilated by Democrat Bob Casey Jr., in the 2006 election, suffering the worst loss by an incumbent senator in modern Pennsylvania history.

In that failed 2006 campaign, Santorum demonstrated a characteristic that's defined his whole political career: he just couldn't shut up. Instead of recognizing that voters were disenchanted with the Republican White House—and that as an incumbent, he could probably afford to be a little less forward about his love for George W. Bush, and his thoughts on porn and unborn babies—Santorum dug his own grave. He tied his foot to the cinderblock that was the sinking Bush administration and its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even trying to claim, falsely, that the US had found WMDs in Iraq. He just kept on talking and talking and talking: about how evil abortion was; about how the Boston Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal was somehow a result of liberalism; about how feminism ruined the family.

"We were no great geniuses for taking him out," a Democratic strategist told Reuters after the 2006 race. "He was out there shooting his mouth off. He obviously doesn't take direction very well."

All of this would seem to be enough to ensure that Santorum would never hold political office again, let alone be elected president of the United States.

VICE News: Shane Smith Interviews US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter

But that all changed in 2012. Barack Obama was in the White House, and the Tea Party had enervated the conservative fringe in a way that Santorum could only have dreamed of in 2006. There was now an audience for his hysterics—a Republican base that welcomed the kind of apocalyptic fervor that Santorum was peddling, and applauded his refusal to back down from even his most controversial convictions. It isn't so much that Santorum changed between losing his Senate seat and coming in second to Romney in 2012. It's that the Republican Party, and the country, changed around him.

The result was that Santorum turned into an Iowa surprise, feeding on the shift in the political climate that had taken place since his last political race. Instead of looking like a loser, he could recast himself as another conservative victim, and, alongside the new grassroots Republican movement, as a force that had arrived to correct the party's errant leftward drift.

But four years after coming in a distant second, Santorum is no longer the only one seriously working that angle. He faces much stiffer competition this time around, including at least four sitting senators, three governors, a Bush, and Mike Huckabee, Santorum's warmer, more electable evangelical twin. Early polls show Santorum running somewhere near 10 ^th place among his likely 2016 opponents, with about 2 percent support among Republican voters . If he's going to get any higher than that, he better have learned something in 2012, because he is no longer in the right place at the right time.

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On a clear Valentine's Day afternoon two years ago in the rural town of Modesto in California's Central Valley, Jesse Sebourn and Jeanette Robles were hanging out outside an apartment complex when they decided to fuck with some graffiti memorializing the murder of two Norteño gang members about a year earlier.

A couple of alleged Northerners—the term for those sympathizing with the Norteño cause, but not fully initiated into the gang—who lived there were not amused. They decided to chase down and pound the outsiders.

After enduring a mild ass-kicking, Sebourn called his dad, Michael, an ex–Aryan Brotherhood member. Together they rounded up a posse of nine—including five women, some of whom allegedly have ties to the Sureños, a rival street gang. By then it was dark. After buying some booze and drinking it in a nearby park, the motley crew allegedly went on a hunt for Northerners.

It wasn't long before they found one. According to prosecutors, the posse jumped out of their vehicles and attacked Erick Gomez, who was with his pregnant girlfriend.

What happened next depends on whom you believe. The prosecutor in the case, Assistant District Attorney Thomas Brennan, argued at trial that the group kicked and punched Gomez, that Dalia Mendoza stabbed him at least three times, and that Giovani Barocio then shot Gomez, hitting him in the heart with a bullet and killing him. "You are my witnesses, I earned my stripes," the shooter allegedly said, referring to earning a place as a Sureño.

Sebourn's defense attorneys maintain that he and his father were not at the scene, and have raised questions about the legitimacy of the North-South beef. They have also argued that Jesse's mental disability, acquired at birth, rendered him incapable of understanding that he was advancing gang objectives. The other defense lawyers and their clients offer varied accounts of who was actually doing the stabbing and beating. Finally, famous defense attorney J. Tony Serra questioned Mendoza's account of the events and argued that it could not be trusted because she cut a deal with the prosecution in exchange for a reduced sentence.

But with Gomez dead and Barocio, the alleged shooter, on the lam—he's believed to have fled to Mexico—the remaining defendants were tried for months in Modesto, charged by the DA's office with murder, along with a gang enhancement charge that made life sentences a plausible outcome. The trial resulted in a hung jury.

The murder, and the the hundreds of other gang-related incidents like it, are the backdrop to the national attention currently being thrust on California's record drought and its struggling agriculture industry, much of which is located in the Central Valley. The small cities—Modesto is home to about 200,000 people—towns, and farms that sprawl across the valley produce a sizable percentage of the nation's fruits and vegetables. But in some of the region's minority communities, young people suffer from hopelessness desperate enough to drive them to join criminal organizations run by men living in prisons hundreds of miles away.

The Sebourn case centers around the Street Terrorism Enforcement and Protection (STEP) Act, a law passed in 1988 that sought to curb the growing problem of gang violence. It's a controversial measure, with legal scholars questioning its efficacy and arguing that minorities are disproportionately targeted for sentences that are greater than their crimes would normally warrant.

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All photos by Jennifer Simpson

The Central Valley region has an inferiority complex, one longtime resident told me, and it's not hard to understand why. The swath of land includes the Sacramento Valley and the San Joaquin Valley and is home to 3.5 million people. The region has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in California, smog that's among the worst in the nation, and endemic poverty, with the unemployment rate across the region sitting about at about double the national average.

No wonder there's a looming specter here of gang-related crime, which experts often attribute to poverty. Reformed gangster Jesse De La Cruz is one of those experts. Now in his 60s, De La Cruz retired from criminal life after being released from Folsom Prison in 1996. He kicked his heroin habit, got a doctorate—his thesis was on the sociology of gangs—and currently makes a living as an expert witness testifying in gang trials. "There's no doubt that we have a gang problem," De La Cruz says. "But gangs are born from hopelessness, from poverty, from broken families."

Jesse De La Cruz

Stanislaus County, where Modesto is located, is traditionally a Republican place, and Modesto has a population that is about 40 percent Latino. Of course, the widespread practice of employing undocumented immigrants from Central and South America has its own consequences, such as child labor, poor working conditions, and inescapable poverty for new immigrants.

Related: Read more about the harsh conditions faced by young immigrants.

Latino gangs operating in the Central Valley can be divided loosely by whether members claim to be Northerners (Norteños in Spanish) or Southerners (Sureños). Sources I spoke with for this story contradicted one another about the distinction between a Northerner or Southerner, and full Norteños and Sureños. The English phrasing may refer to sympathizers, and not gang members, but much like the rest of the underworld, truth is fluid and elusive.

It's clear that the rupture between Latinos living in Northern and Southern California began in state prison during the 1960s. While doing a bid at Duel Vocational Institution, some gangsters from Los Angeles decided to unify the gang members doing time, calling themselves La Eme (or the Mexican Mafia) in order to protect themselves from other inmates, who organized by race. But the alliance didn't last. Underlying tension between the Northerners and Southerners exploded after a murder over a pair of shoes in San Quentin; the Northerners formed Nuestra Familia (Our Family), the Southerners remained La Eme, and the two groups have been quarreling ever since.

Although the Nuestra Familia (Norteño) and Mexican Mafia (Sureño) are primarily prison gangs, members operate on the outside as well. Usually, senior Nuestra Familia members act as regional managers, or oversee cities, resolving disputes between members and managing the drug shipments that make up a significant portion of their revenue. It's important to remember that Norteño and Sureño gangs—there are dozens, if not hundreds of local chapters in California—aren't by default part of the prison gangs. That requires a separate initiation. In De La Cruz's case, he says, that meant being ordered to shank someone in state prison.

Assistant DA Thomas Brennan in his office in Modesto

Brennan, 49, the lead prosecutor in the case against the Sebourns and their alleged co-conspirators, is a fearsome attorney. Packing a semiautomatic pistol for protection, he describes his lifelong passion for the law with a palpable intensity.

"It's when the gang member commits a violent crime [that] I lose concern for rehabilitation, I lose concern for diversion, because now they've hurt somebody, they've crossed the line," Brennan tells me in the Stanislaus County District Attorney's offices on Twelfth Street in Modesto's downtown. "Once that line is crossed, the hardcore prosecution comes, and I've been doing that since 1999."

A football player in high school, and a veteran—he was military police for six years—Brennan's work on gangs in Stanislaus County has attracted the eyes of the federal government, which swore him in as a special assistant US Attorney in 2008, a position that allows him to take on gang leadership thanks to extra resources. Federal prosecutions generally carry longer sentences, and can also mean doing time in other states, which—theoretically, at least—makes it harder for gang leaders to control their turf from behind bars.

Brennan doesn't work alone. One of his investigators is Lieutenant Froilan Mariscal. A Modesto native, Mariscal says that he grew up in the Deep South Side neighborhood—a primarily Latino community, and one of the poorest parts of town. I ask the 37-year-old son of Mexican immigrants why he didn't turn out like many of the troubled young people who join gangs. "Luckily, I had a good household," he replies. "Both my parents were strict with us, and showed me the right way of living. Unfortunately, a lot of these kids that get involved in gangs, have absent parents, or just born into the gang lifestyle. That wasn't in my family, they were hardworking people."

Mariscal says that gang crime is holding steady, unlike most violent crime, which has been declining in California and across the nation for years. "The only time there are spikes and dips is when gangs are laying low, when they know the heat is on them," he says.

Watch our documentary on California's drought:

Brennan credits Mariscal for being crucial in obtaining a legal mechanism called a gang injunction in Deep South Side in 2009. An injunction is a civil action—the city essentially sues the gang—that makes otherwise legal behaviors associated with gang activity punishable with jail time. According to Mariscal, the injunction typically names specific gang members, who are served with a notice informing them of the new rules. For the 43 alleged gangsters named in the legal proceedings, that means a curfew of 10 PM, among other restrictions.

"The gang was so entrenched in that area, and had been that way for two decades, our District Attorney [Birgit Fladager] wanted to use some out-of-the-box thinking," Mariscal explains. "What else can we do to fix this? Because it had been so bad for so long. The gang injunction is a tool."

Injunctions are controversial because of the restrictions they place on the alleged gang members, especially when it comes to the curfew. "I have real problems with the gang injunction," local defense attorney Robert Chase told the Modesto Bee in 2012. "It applies severe restrictions on these young men without any real due process of law." Residents told the newspaper they had mixed feelings—some claiming the injunction had a noticeable effect on their lives, while others were afraid of where it was all going.

"Look around you, it's like the third world, man. People have nothing." –Jesse De La Cruz

I visited the neighborhood with De La Cruz, the gang expert. Although he didn't grow up there, his boyhood home was remarkably similar. In a thought-provoking memoir entitled Detoured, De La Cruz chronicles his birth in Texas to an undocumented immigrant mother, and a father who was not all that interested in raising him. De La Cruz contracted polio before he was a boy, the virus leaving him with a paralyzed foot and a limp.

After his family moved to California in search of better work and to escape from Texas's radical racial segregation, De La Cruz slowly got to know other guys mixed up with the Norteños, and the prison gang that they pay tax to and take orders from, Nuestra Familia.

After 30 years in and out of the state's prison system, De La Cruz walked out of Folsom's gates determined to stop using heroin. Ambitious to this day, he now says he intends to go to law school as well. But dropping out of Nuestra Familia led to another member of the gang killing his brother in retaliation, he says.

Standing in the tiny parking lot of a corner liquor store, I ask De La Cruz about Deep South Side. He tells me that gang involvement isn't about poverty, but rather the conditions that poverty creates. "It's about hopelessness, bro," he says with a thick California-Spanish accent. "Look around you, it's like the third world, man. People have nothing."

His point is obvious. Looking in all four directions from the intersection, there are no sidewalks along the cracked asphalt streets, while chickens and roosters are audible all over the place. The houses are small bungalows, many falling apart. A farmer with a pitchfork yells something at me as I examine graffiti of an Aztec eagle, an icon claimed by Norteños but also the symbol of the United Farm Workers, a powerful labor union in the state.

When De La Cruz goes into the store for an ice cream sandwich, he ends up chatting with the Mexican-Yemenese guy named Sam manning the cash register. After De La Cruz mentions his red hat—the Northerners claim red as one of their colors, and the Southerners blue—Sam says that he's sporting the red hat because if he doesn't, he's going to get fucked with. Still, he swears that he's not in a gang.

I'm sitting in a cramped computer lab at the Maddux Youth Center with Ben Wheeler, who runs a group called Seeking Safety. It's part of aftercare for juvenile hall kids, a program designed around recently released youths' emotional, spiritual, and physical needs. A collaboration between Youth for Christ, a religious organization that aims to bring spirituality to kids who are looking for it, and a jobs initiative called Work for Success, the group offers a regular time for at-risk young men to express themselves in an emotionally safe space. The participants, often, have never lived with families that provided emotional safety, and some claim to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The group works through a packet that addresses coping skills, grounding, and strategies to deal with anger. The religious content is light, but definitely at the core of the teaching material. At the end of the class, the seven participants lower their heads while Wheeler says a prayer.

Afterwards, I sit down with Wheeler and a former Norteño named Daniel, who describes how his parents hadn't really been interested in raising him; for the most part his uncles were responsible for his upbringing. His uncles, he says, used to get all the boys to fight one another—it was fun for them to watch the youngsters beat each other up while they watched. As a result, Daniel has trouble feeling compassion for anyone but his kids.

When I ask why he dropped out of the Norteños, Daniel explains that it's because the gang uses young, ignorant people to achieve their own ends—and that they don't care about the collateral damage that they cause.

"The real big issue that I was able to see, and a lot of others were able to see, was that the gangs initially had a purpose," Daniel explains. As he sees it, that purpose was to protect Latinos serving time from the other inmates, and enrich themselves in the process. "[Nuestra Familia] served that purpose, but a lot of those guys ended up in Pelican Bay [State Prison] doing indeterminate [time], they have nothing coming, they can't see their families anymore. But a lot of these guys still take care of their families, they buy houses for their families. How are they doing this? They're doing this by exploiting other people, other youngsters. Keeping the cause alive, so it can benefit them."

One of Daniel's uncles tattooed the four dots on his hand, denoting that he was a Norteño (they claim the number 14, which the four dots refer to). That, along with associating with other gang members in the neighborhood, could theoretically provide local law enforcement with enough evidence to add him to the injunction—or add gang enhancements to any prison sentences he gets slapped with in the future.

"The law leaves it up to the gang experts to identify gang members," Mariscal says, adding that he must be able to demonstrate that a supposed gangster meets two of ten criteria the county uses to prove membership, like wearing colors certain colors, frequenting "gang areas,"or being seen flashing gang signs.

"It's not black and white though," Mariscal insists. "Just because someone is walking down the street wearing red, doesn't mean they're a gang member... We have to be able to articulate why they fit these criteria. We can come up with a gang member in different ways, there's more than one way to do it."

Gang problems are the reason Brennan doesn't offer plea bargains— increasingly common in recent years—to most gang members. He tells me that he doesn't believe it's fair to the general public to let violent gangsters avoid justice.

Of course, defense attorneys in the Sebourn case don't agree with Brennan's approach. "A prosecutor has a duty to administer justice," Greg Bentley wrote in a text message when I asked him about the case. "In our modern-day criminal court system, this includes ensuring voluntary guilty pleas with appropriate sentences are entered by defendant through the plea bargaining process with an eye towards public safety, but also rehabilitation for those who commit crimes, especially when dealing with young people who obviously made poor life choices."

The prosecution against Sebourn and his alleged conspirators cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, including $130,000 to rent a nearby office space that was large enough to hold all of the defendants, attorneys, and bailiffs. Meanwhile, the Stanislaus County Sheriff's Department assigned additional deputies to secure the block around the courtroom. This prosecution and others have driven the county's budget for publicly funded defense attorneys $700,000 in the red, for the second year in a row.

Now the DA's office is retrying the case.

"Ignoring [the reality of plea bargains] creates a significant risk that taxpayer money will be wasted in trials like Sebourn's where even those defendants who confessed are not convicted," Bentley wrote.

Sebourn's retrial is likely not going to take place until 2016, leaving those in custody—the shooter remains at large—locked up until that date. (At the moment, about 75 percent of the 1,060 inmates being held in county jail are still awaiting trial.)

Meanwhile, Brennan, the prosecutor, is moving on. After completing the litigation on an unrelated murder case, he says he'll be going to work for the State Attorney's General Office—a role that will allow him to continue working on gang prosecutions. He adds that in the long run, he wants to be an educator, training county prosecutors on how to best defeat gangs in court. But even if he won't be around to litigate the case, Brennan's office plans to charge De La Cruz with perjury for allegedly lying while testifying about the gangs wrapped up in the Modesto murder.

"It was crystal clear, and the charges will be based on sworn testimony in a jury trial as it appears on the transcript," Brennan argues.

"I didn't testify to anything that's perjury," De La Cruz insists. "I testified to my opinion of the case. He cannot do it." Outside of Modesto, De La Cruz says he's in the middle of working on another case about a gang-related murder. The kid who did the deed received more than 100 years in state prison, a sentence De La Cruz doesn't believe is just.

But guys like Daniel, still living in the same neighborhood, dealing with the same problems, face an uncertain future. With few social programs available, and the road ahead littered with challenges, young people here are exploited foot soldiers in the middle of a prolonged battle between criminal organizations controlled by hardened gangsters locked in solitary confinement. On the other side is the justice system, which, by design, focuses on locating and punishing people that fall within its wide net. And by the time young people end up in a courtroom facing off against Brennan, or other prosecutors for murder, in some ways it's already too late. The circumstances and context that put them on that road are irrelevant. All that matters now is that they're wrapped up in what the law says is gang warfare.

Follow Max Cherney on Twitter.

Palagia started throwing orgies because she needed the money. It was the late 90s, and she and her friends had been living in a West Village squat until it was burned down by mistake—her roommates left before it was rebuilt, but despite threats of eviction, the Greek-American decided to stay. The problem was she couldn't afford rent on her salary as a teacher.

"I had to come up with a creative idea to keep living there because I was making next to nothing," she told me during a recent conversation at her current apartment in Chelsea. The West Village townhouse was behind an iron gate and looked like a jail, making it an ideal space for a certain kind of theatrical—and erotic—party.

Palagia (pronounced pal-asia, it's a pseudonym; she didn't want her real name to appear in this article) had plenty of experience with sex-filled events. She attended her first orgy in 1990, before she was old enough to drink, at a DC restaurant near the National Mall. The event, thrown by a group called Capitol Couples, could be described as a swinger's party, though Palagia refuses to use that term (or the word orgy, for that matter). She was "totally shocked" at first; she even ran into her second-grade teacher and her husband, who was handcuffed to a toilet and wearing a cock ring. Her teacher was so embarrassed that she immediately uncuffed her spouse, put his pants on, and left.

"What I learned from this wasn't about shame, but it clarified something else," she explained. "That couple always seemed the most in love, the most connected, as opposed to the other couples and families in my suburban town. They were living this lifestyle and creating fantasy together."

Speaking of orgies, here's an interview Noisey did with Ty Dolla $ign.

Palagia remained a part of the group sex party scene after moving to New York in 1996, regularly attending S&M events at the Vault—a notorious kinky spot in the Meatpacking District that supposedly featured celebrity cameos from Madonna, Robert Downey Jr., and Heather Locklear. She went to sexy shindigs at places like the Hellfire Club, Idlewise, Trapeze, and Checkmates (the latter still exists). Each had its own style and vibe, but Palagia thought she could one-up them. "I always loved erotica, but didn't like the rules of erotica or the rules that were currently in the books or in people's minds," she explained. "I wanted women to come to a sexy environment and make their own rules, break them, be naked, masturbate—but no one would touch them without permission." One Leg Up was born.

"I wanted women to come to a sexy environment and make their own rules, break them, be naked, masturbate—but no one would touch them without permission." –Palagia

In the beginning, OLU was strictly a rent party. Palagia's friends would pay nothing, $10, or a max of $80 for a couple, and the hostess didn't see it as a business. "It's not like I woke up one day and said, 'I want to start organizing sex parties as my career,'" she told me. "I came up with an idea to save my own self in the way that I wanted to be saved. And people thought I was fucking crazy."

Palagia's brother made her a simple website in 2000 and she developed a roster of paying members as well as a rigorous application process (you had to write an intelligent essay if you wanted in)—both features most sex parties didn't have at the time. Her goal to build a community that was about "safe and sensual environments for women." By the early 2000s, OLU had expanded into two events, a "whetting your palate" sex-free party called a Take-Out where couples could mingle, and the full-on soirees, which Palagia branded as Eat-Ins.

"I played and I fucked and I had a great time. Those were the fun days," she said. In 2003 a writer from the New York Post came to one of her events and published a positive piece that emphasized her parties' high standards. After that, Palagia resigned her teaching position and became a full-time sex party planner. "After that article published, I knew I was on to something," she said. "[One Leg Up] started to grow even more and blossomed into something that I didn't expect."

Over the years, the events have acquired an aesthetic—a fusion of burlesque performance art, nostalgia for the 20th century, and a type of sensuality you might find in vintage French porn. In other words, the sort of orgy your grandmother might have been comfortable attending, assuming she attended orgies. Each party has a theme: "Sexy Medics," or "Flower Power," or a Roaring 20s event that required guests to don pinstripe suits, flapper dresses, and old-timey masks.

Palagia goes out of her way to make each event as immersive (and theatrical) as possible. She hires live musicians, stilts-walkers, fortunetellers, and conversation facilitators to help break the ice. She also bans guests from using technology like smartphones, ensuring a certain amount of focus on the task at hand. Each event starts out like an ordinary costume party before the focus shifts and the guests begin to engage in all types of sex—be it group play, sensual touching, or light BDSM.

One Leg Up is one of the oldest sex parties in New York—Palagia says she knows 15-year-old kids who were conceived at her events.

At one recent party, help in a sprawling apartment suite in downtown Manhattan, I saw a nude 50-something-year-old man use a feather duster to tickle a young Italian woman's nipples while his wife went down on her. In another room, a 48-year-old woman from New Jersey sat on a leather couch and let a stranger hold her new fake breasts—though she didn't allow him to touch her below the waist.

OLU is one of the oldest sex parties in New York—Palagia says she knows 15-year-old kids who were conceived at her events—and also a vestige of a bygone era, a remnant of the days when squatters lived in the West Village and hype spread through word of mouth, not social media. Today there are more sex parties than ever, and thanks to the internet it's never been easier to indulge your sexual whims—take your Tinder date to a swingers club! Or cut out the middleman and form your own Tinder orgy! But as group sex becomes more mainstream, and a new wave of parties sell themselves on being expensive and exclusive, some experienced prurient partiers in the scene are wondering if they've lost a little bit of soul on the way.

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Illustrations by Heather Benjamin

Group sex has been around since at least the days of antiquity, but in the American imagination, orgies really took off in the 1970s. Not only is that decade now known for kicking off the "Golden Age of Porn," it was also when the swinging subculture emerged into mainstream consciousness (maybe most famously, a pair of New York Yankees swapped families in 1973). Stereotypes about orgies are still linked to that time: aging dudes with Ron Jeremy mustaches, vaguely European men wearing medallions in hot tubs, "key parties."

Libertine New York City was home to a thriving group sex scene for years, but the community hit some turbulence in the 2000s. Rents were going up, making it difficult to maintain a consistent venue—Palagia had to move out of her townhouse and OLU became a wandering party that was held in a series of apartments and hotel rooms. But after 9/11, Palagia said, new regulations required hotels to restrict guests from having a certain number of people in a room unless they all signed in, making anonymous orgies more difficult to organize. The financial crisis only made things worse.

"Once the recession hit in 2008, I noticed that people's creative energy was depleted and [party organizers] were under a lot of duress," Palagia told me. At one point, she rented out her personal apartment for a full year to keep her business afloat.

"We built a dome on the roof, would bring fire spinners, multiple DJs, and had our own Burning Man camp." –Kenny Blunt

Kenny Blunt, who has organized Chemistry, a New York sex party for Burning Man devotees, since 2006, remembers a similar orgy slowdown. When he and his co-hosts first started the event series, "it was always like a labor of love and it was always a crazy situation," he told me. "We built a dome on the roof, would bring fire spinners, multiple DJs, and had our own Burning Man camp." You couldn't get away with that sort of thing now, however, he explained: "New York has changed a lot in the last ten years. We can't get away with that stuff anymore and it's really sad to me because rooftop events aren't the same. No one allows you to do anything on a rooftop anymore."

But even if New York is tamer than it used to be, in many ways it's easier to organize a sex party than ever. In the past few years, money has come flooding back into the city, and people are more open to the idea of orgies than they once were.

"When I first starting attending these kinds of events, they were hard to find," explained Larisa Fuchs, founder of House of Scorpio, an LGBTQ-friendly sex party and longtime friend of Palagia's. "I've seen kink, swinging, poly-sexuality, and polyamory come out of the shadows more and more in the last 20 years, and especially in the last few.

"The internet has helped a great deal—it's so much easier to organize, promote, find your people," she added. Thanks to the web, there are now "more sex parties than ever."

And in a world where there's an app to set up threesomes, fewer sex parties feel the need to hide their light under a bushel—there's Sanctum, for instance, the exclusive club that bills itself as "LA's #1 erotic experience." In London, there are a host of fancy orgies, including the Heaven SX event series, which caters to the hottest of the hot. The most famous sex party to emerge in recent years is probably Killing Kittens, an extremely posh London-based affair that, like One Leg Up, sells itself partly on being about women's pleasure. The difference is that KK is explicitly marketed to the "world's sexual elite" and cultivates a mask-heavy Eyes Wide Shut vibe—and while OLU has stayed local, KK is attempting to become a global brand.

In March, KK came to New York, and a Post preview of the event practically drooled over the idea of 1 percenters having exotic encounters with one another:

Leggy models in Christian Louboutin heels and Wolford stockings glide from room to candlelit room. A dapper man in a custom suit eyes them while sipping Champagne by the mansion's fireplace. A DJ plays in a corner. Oysters are slurped at the bar.

And then, in a matter of minutes, pants are off, bras are unhooked and a tangled web of nude revelers go at it on a bed plopped smack in the middle of the 12,000-square-foot home.

That sort of press undoubtedly helped KK's NYC launch sell out (tickets were priced at $250 for couples and $150 for single women—men cannot attend by themselves), leading the organizers to add a second weekend. Call it the Coachella of orgies. Or, as one attendee later described her experience to me, "Killing Kittens felt like the Starbucks of sex clubs, complete with disgruntled workers suffering through a soundtrack of Rihanna dubstep remixes." The sex writers who descended upon the event in the service of gonzo-style reviews were even more scathing, calling it "the nakedest middle school dance I'd attended in decades," "a bust," and "depressing."

Watch our documentary on America's booming divorce industry:

I attended the second KK party later that month, at a rented loft in the Flatiron district, and it was what you would expect: plasma TVs everywhere, a leopard-print pool table, speakers pulsing EDM. Guests—many of them Wall Streeters with foreign women on their arms—were wearing expensive suits and cheap masks. There was a lot of awkward mingling and chain-smoking on the tiny balcony while attendees gathered enough liquid courage to enter a "play area" in a separate room that included a humongous bed and a perimeter of pleather couches. At the bar, a real estate broker told me that attending Killing Kittens was a reward to himself for closing a multimillion-dollar deal. His date, a European woman who didn't seem to know him very well, said the exclusivity attracted her.

Once attendees finally did embrace the "sex" part of the "sex party," the physicality barely felt as interesting or unique as the price tag and branding might suggest. As I sat on the couch and observed the play room, a handsome man more or less climbed on my date (with her consent) and whispered something like, "You're a freaky girl, aren't you?" She humored him for a minute, but sharply kicked him off her lap once he began chewing on her ear like a dog toy. On the big bed, it looked like a flesh pit of people auditioning for amateur porn. As people fucked in Brazzers-friendly positions (doggy, missionary, nothing particularly exotic), it sounded like each cluster of well-tanned limbs was trying to out-moan the next.

Another guest, who had also attended One Leg Up the prior week, said "for a party that is promoting itself as 'elite,' you'd expect something better than TVs playing Breakfast at Tiffany's on loop, IKEA furniture, and $15 vodka sodas in plastic cups. If I had paid for this myself, I would feel like a sucker."

This points to an obstacle many sex parties overcome—it can be surprisingly hard to create intimacy at events centered around the most intimate act of all. This is especially true as parties like Kenny Blunt's Chemistry grow and have to adapt to changing circumstances.

"We did a slight price increase a couple years ago. We have to because costs rise. It's a much bigger production now than it used to be," Blunt told me. "We used to fit everything we need in our conversion van, which was like a Scooby-Doo kind of van. And now we rent a 15-foot truck and have a storage space filled."

That's a big change for what was once a "friend-filled zone," as Blunt described it, which is now populated by a lot of outsiders who might not be familiar with what is going on. "You know we do try, especially at the beginning [of an event], to welcome new people, and kind of answer questions," he said. "But it is an environment where you are kind of thrown in on your own. It's a big party."

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Killing Kittens, for one, shows no signs of feeling ambiguous about bigness—there's another New York event on May 30, and founder Emma Sayle has expanded to Australia while eyeing Canada and other European cities. "We can launch anywhere in the world, as long as we have the right partners who understand the brand," she told me in an email.

Chemistry is following that model of expansion as well, and there next party is also on May 30. "We'd like to do a few other big events and maybe do a ski weekend or trip with a core group," Blunt told me. "We might want to start franchising in other cities, too."

This is a normal enough model for any entertainment brand—develop a product that people like, test it in different markets, spread as far and as fast as you can. But some veteran erotic party organizers are suspicious of these sorts of ventures.

"I think [Killing Kittens] is so cheesy," Palagia told me. "It will be nothing but a one-hit wonder because it's contrived and only focused on the money.

"People respect my parties and keep coming back because I've curated them in a way that's true to my own vision," she continued. "I'm not saying I'm better than all the other parties. I just have a different style and that's why I've been doing this the longest."

Larisa Fuchs agrees that the mentality some parties embrace is flawed. "One pet peeve I have about other parties is that entry requirements, like wearing a costume or bringing a partner, can be bypassed with enough money," she said. "Having the ability to pay a premium doesn't make someone a better fit for your party, unless what you're really after is a following of those who can pay the premium."

Plenty of people seem happy to pay, however, and the idea of rich people having strange forms of sex seems guaranteed to get press—as a Daily Mail headline from January put it, "The rise of the middle-class swinger! Posh orgies the hottest new trend as professional couples flock to VIP-style sex parties."

The question is whether these erotic events will sustain themselves for a long time—whether they can make the transition from mere parties to communities a la One Leg Up. In any case, Palagia is still going to be in New York City doing her thing; it's not just a job, it's her lifestyle. "I'm going to throw these parties until I can't fucking walk," she told me. "Well, even then I still might throw them."

Follow Zach Sokol on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE Spain.

"It's usually moist when I get it," Jon tells me. "That's the best part."

He puts a few lines on a worn-down CD case that's obviously had its fair share of speed chopped up on it.

"I stopped liking coke a while ago. People aren't after that kind of hit anymore, they're after something more exciting. Speed has become really popular again," he continues while filling a bunch of little blue and yellow bags with amphetamine.

"Each bag weights exactly one gram—no more, no less. That includes the bag's own weight. You have to weigh the stuff in the bag or else the scale will end up encrusted in powder residue."

Jon is a speed dealer who lives in a small village close to Bilbao, Spain. "Speed has always been popular here. I remember before I went to jail there was at least one guy per bar selling the stuff. I'm only ever at this one bar these days. People trust me because they know my speed is much better quality than the other shit people are selling. They don't even care that it's moist."

After packing his bags, he says that he will be going down to the bar he frequents and asks if I want to tag along. Curious as to how a run of the mill night looks for a man in his line of work, I decide to do just that.

When we reach the place, he doesn't even get a chance to sit down before the waiter hands him a beer. Almost instantly, a tall middle-aged man approaches him.

"This guy is the best. He used to buy from me but he has a family now. He isn't interested in buying gear anymore. Fuck it, I'll just give it to him," Jon says.

Read: A Guide to Spice, the Drug That's Putting British Students in the Hospital

The man takes the little "insomnia bag"—as it's apparently called—saying, "There's a party tonight. When I decide to go out, I really go out." He then asks Jon whether or not it's moist. To which Jon replies, "Why the hell do you ask me that? You know exactly what I have."

He disappears into one of the toilets but isn't gone for long. When he strolls out, he goes straight up to the bar and starts shouting, "Nobody can do it like this guy! Mate, give me some rolling paper; I need to dry this out. It's getting wetter and wetter every single time. If it wasn't for how badly you smell, I'd say you showered with it."

"Stop complaining. You know exactly what you get when you come to me," Jon snaps back.

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In the next hour, seven people approach Jon looking to buy. One of them looks me up and down and asks who I am. Jon assures him that I'm fine—I'm not a "snitch" or whatever it is they're calling me.

The one thing that all these customers have in common is that they all follow the exact same ritual: They talk to Jon, go straight to the bathroom, and return with one of their eyes watering. I guess that's how you tell which nostril they've snorted it into.

It doesn't take more than three hours before he's completely sold out. "I've spent three years in hiding because the cops caught me with one and a half kilo of speed. I've no doubt it was someone trying to fuck me over. A snitch, you know? These guys nowadays, they have no respect. They know they can make easy money so they don't give a shit about who's come before them. What they sell is shit."

When I ask him to tell me about his time in prison, his tone changes. "I don't want to talk about that, it was fucked up," he says while sipping his beer. "Ever since that trip, I have to walk around with eyes in the back of my head. If they catch me, I'm in a lot of trouble. It would be considered reoffending and that means a lot of jail time. I don't even want to think about it. That's why I only sell on a small scale. I never do it at night, either. That's when they catch you."

"Speaking of, it's almost 6 PM. I better go home and get some more. There'll be more people coming soon."

Watch: Sisa, Cocaine of the Poor

We drive his rickety car over to his house on the outskirts of town. He opens the freezer and takes out a huge bag of speed. Apparently 200 grams is enough for an entire month.

He fills up about 20 little bags and spends his time weighing each one meticulously. "This one is 0.1 g too much so I'll take a bit out. This is one is a bit heavy too but I'll leave it in so they'll think that I'm generous."

He gets a magnet out of his pocket and stuffs the bags into it, along with another magnet. Once we are outside, he sticks the bag to the inside of the car's back left wheel. "It wont fall out and if they stop us, we'll just say that it's not ours. They don't have any proof. They can't say anything to us."

Jon is vigilant. There's no music in the car and one eye seems fixated on the rearview mirror. We circle a couple of blocks more than once just to make sure no one is tailing us.

Unsurprisingly, he doesn't want to tell me where he buys his speed from. "I'll just tell you that I bring it in from the north of Guipúzcoa, from a small village with a lot of boats. But I'm not going to give you names or places. It'd be the end of me if I did—they are sick snitches. One day there's going to be big trouble," he tells me, waving his finger accusingly.

Back at the bar, people come and go, greet each other and shake Jon's hand, money ready between their fingers. Jon always asks for a cigarette and leaves the "present" inside.

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"It wouldn't be hard for me to make some serious money but I don't want to risk it. I get by just fine with the small amount that I sell each month. It's better to have one set of trustworthy clients rather than trying to expand the business and sell to all sorts strangers at some messy party. That doesn't interest me," he explains.

While we continue chatting about the quality of the gear that's sold these days, a well-dressed, gray-haired man comes up and asks to buy a few grams. The guy only has a 50 euro note, so he buys us a round and a packet cigarettes and gives the 30 euro change to Jon. When he heads to the toilet, Jon tells me that "that guy is a bastard.

"He's dressed like that to pretend he's reliable. He knows very well that no one plays games with me. If there's no money, then there's no stuff. That's just how it is."

Our gray-haired friend quickly reappears after realizing he has nothing to snort with. He turns to Jon and asks if he can borrow a note quickly.

"No fucking way with a capital N," Jon responds.

He disappears back into the bathroom again but is back in front of us immediately. Looking Jon in the eyes, he says, "Give me one of those rolling papers, mate. This shit is fucking moist."

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Photo via Flickr user Laura Bittner

UPDATE 5/27: A version of this piece appeared in March, but we decided to update it in light of the news that a Penn State frat is being shut down for three years after an investigation found that members were involved in hazing and sexual harassment.

Times aren't looking great for our beloved national icon, the all-American frat bro. The year has yet to reach its halfway mark, and already we've seen frat after frat publicly shamed in the wake of one alcohol-and-ignorance-fueled scandal after another. Rehabilitation efforts are made, apologies are read at a monotone, a few red-faced bros shout about their First Amendment rights, and nothing much seems to change at all.

Case in point: after members of the University of Oklahoma's Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity were caught singing racist songs on camera earlier this year, the national chapter announced that it would be launching a diversity initiative, including a phone number to which people could anonymously report SAE members for engaging in racist behavior.

The chapter was, of course, shut down. The president of the fraternity gave an embarrassed speech, and the two leading troubadours were swiftly expelled. It was one of a thousand all too familiar stories of frat bros behaving like entitled brats without a shred of respect for anyone who isn't them.

From Noisey: What Songs Should You Play at Your Frat Party?

Do we need to run down the list of recent ugliness committed by frats? There was the Georgia Tech chapter of Phi Kappa Tau, which in 2013 sent around an email instructing brothers in the finer points of sexually assaulting drunk women. There was the Kappa Sigma chapter of Stanford, my own alma mater, where future Snapchat mogul Evan Spiegel suggested Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson as a cool party costume. We can't forget that Pi Kappa Phi of North Carolina State is on indefinite suspension after the discovery of a notebook (allegedly a pledge book) referencing rape and lynching that was signed by multiple members of the fraternity. There are all the brutal injuries, assaults, and crimes that result from sloppy frat parties across the country. And there was the private Facebook group started by Kappa Delta Rho bros at Penn State, where members shared photos of, as a detective put it in an affidavit, "nude females that appeared to be passed out and nude or in other sexual or embarrassing positions." That was the second such group started by the Kappa guys; the original—called "Covert Business Transactions," because someday these bros will run Wall Street—got shut down after a woman learned her topless photo was on it. You just can't keep these enterprising bros down!

The Kappas were just formally kicked off campus, and there are inevitably some consequences for the frats and individual bros caught up in scandals of this sort—but that doesn't mean that people have stopped defending this bad behavior. In March, one brave (and anonymous) Kappa bro gave an outraged interview to Philadelphia magazine following a statement in which he blamed the media for reporting on his fraternity while "overturning the sexual mores and moral standards that for millennia had at least to some extent curbed outright licentiousness." (I think he's referring to feminism, but who knows.)

Mixing all sorts of metaphors, the defender of sexual mores compared the nation's outrage to a medieval witch hunt, went on to describe the chapter's Facebook group as "satirical," and finished by saying he thinks "nobody did anything worth getting in trouble over." Right.

More fun times in college: Check out our documentary on a white student union.

This bro would also probably think it's unfair to link those above incidents to the recent disbanding of the University of Michigan's Sigma Alpha Mu chapter, after its brothers destroyed a family-run ski resort, racking up nearly half a million in damages. According to USA Today, the bros gleefully wrecked 45 hotel rooms over the course of 48 hours, "destroyed ceiling tiles and exit signs, broke furniture and doors, and urinated on carpeting." #YOLO.

Meanwhile, at Washington and Lee, Furman, and the University of Houston, three different fraternity chapters have been suspended for hazing-related offenses in the past two months. A fourth, Pi Kappa Alpha at the University of South Carolina, was suspended this week following the suspicious death of a brother early Wednesday morning. In 2014, at least two young men died because of hazing. Really, bros. There needn't be more.

At some point, you have to stop blaming these things on "momentary lapses of judgment" or whatever the excuse du jour is. At some point, you wonder why this sort of irresponsible, life-threatening bullshit keeps happening at organizations that are supposed to be molding young men into responsible future politicians and financiers, but are instead churning out self-centered, obnoxious alcoholics.

The counterargument, in the words of our anonymous KDR bro, is that "Everybody fools around, everybody makes jokes, everybody occasionally engages in... what might be considered inappropriate behavior!"

And sure, frats occasionally do good things in the name of brotherhood. But if that "brotherhood" doesn't keep morons from taking photos of naked, unconscious women, throwing racist parties, drugging up young girls, and exposing fellow brothers to murderous conditions, there doesn't seem to be much of a point to it at all. For the love of God and country, bros, it's time to clean up your act.

One idea: Start acting like your centuries-old "fraternity values" mean something. You want to be honorable? Stop exposing your members to dire, deadly, dumbass conditions. You want to be brothers? Stop telling 18-year-olds—who look up to you and want to impress you—to do insane, life-threatening stunts. You want to be leaders? Stop whining about how oppressed you are: You're the most goddamned privileged group of men in America.

And yes, you need guidance. Isn't that what fraternities are for, guiding the most privileged into respectable, charitable lives? If there's ever been a time when America's young men needed help, it's now. They're coming of age when mere penis ownership is no longer an automatic ticket to the top. Fraternities have the money, the clout, and the space to make a revolutionary impact on the perspectives of college-aged men. Given the stated values of America's fraternities, shouldn't fraternity brothers be the guys least likely to chant racist songs, sexually assault women, and risk their peers' lives?

As it stands, frats will go on doing awful things, and as a result of those awful things young people, some of them teenagers, will end up hurt or traumatized or dead. Then those chapters will get suspended and students will get expelled; some organizations, like SAE, will hire expensive PR brains and make a big public show of contrition while their members privately fume and whine about how they're the persecuted ones. What we need isn't the predictable outrage cycle that follows each example of bad behavior. What we need is for these prominent, centuries-old, monied institutions to start doing their duty and teaching boys to be men, not drunken, sexist, racist children.

To do something positive with all this, donate to Gordie's Call.

Follow Jennifer on Twitter.

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A Shell ad featuring J. G. Parry-Thomas, who died while attempting to set the land speed record in 1927.

There are infinite ways to feel you've been remembered, that your mark will outlast all others. It could be for almost anything—like, for instance, if you're the one who in all the history of humanity ate the most chicken nuggets in a 24-hour period, you will withstand the test of time. In a culture where attention holds as much private value as any currency, sought by all, the route to significance could be as arbitrary as your imagination might allow.

For some, the price of this ambition is death. In the last handful of years alone, numerous reports of people passing away in the attempt to break a world record turn up, setting themselves apart at least from thousands of others who remain unremarked upon for how they failed.

Of course, you don't have to be Samuel Beckett to imagine that the failures, one after another, year by year, are in their own ways at least as striking as the fulfilled feats themselves. If nothing else, in that way that most days time passes by in bloated calm, or mortal terror, most of us can identify more with the person who died in pursuit of becoming the titleholder than any titleholder at the top.

In the spirit of that, here are some of the insane, beautiful people who died so far this decade trying to be the lord of their own realm.

Trying to Fly Around the World in 30 Days (2014)

Babar and Haris Suleman, a son and father team of pilots, had prepared for months on their way to breaking the world record for flying around the world in a single-engine airplane. They would land for fuel 25 times in 15 different countries over the course of their 26,500-mile journey, completing the circuit in record time, while also raising money for charity to send children in Pakistan to school.

Not long after taking off from Pago Pago International Airport in American Samoa, by causes unclear, the 17-year-old pilot crashed into the Pacific Ocean, ending his life. His father's body was never found.

At night, in darkness or with moon, the ocean often seems so wide it's like it might go on forever scrolling out into itself, its body wide and deep enough to cover over every body ever living and still seem as placid from above—the same breadth where every summer millions flock to burn away their off hours basking at the edge of immeasurable death.

Trying to Participate in Largest Group Skydive (2014)

Among a group of 222 skydivers who'd gathered together in Eloy, Arizona to jump out of a plane at the same time, one wouldn't make it: Diana Paris, 46, who had recorded more than 1,500 jumps throughout her life. This time, though, surrounded by hundreds of other bodies in mid-air, her parachute malfunctioned and did not open enough in time to slow her fall from being fatal.

The 221 remaining divers in the group would resolve to attempt the record again without her, holding a slot of air in the formation open for where her body would have been.

All our air is the only way by which we touch, breathing out and in in cycles beyond landmass. At a certain distance held above, anything at all could appear so small it might just be another lurking planet, until it moves. The same gravity that wants the mass out of the sky being that which holds you down against the ground to walk wherever, or against the bed to sleep.

Trying to Be Buried Alive (2012)

Despite their not being an active world record in which one is buried alive, 24-year-old Janaka Basnayake of Sri Lanka aspired to set one. Family and friends assisted him with digging the ten-foot hole, and covered his body back over with soil after he'd secured himself in a wood chamber on a Saturday morning at 9:30 AM.

Six and a half hours later, upon excavation, he was found unconscious, and at a local hospital not long after, pronounced dead. The family would explain the young man's ambition by telling the media how he had performed shorter versions of the act before, as well as countless other strange fate-defying feats.

What do you step on when you walk? What laces the dirt that holds you up, that holds the mall up, held beyond all eyes until forced out? If it wasn't depth or pressure or lack of oxygen that ended Basnayake, perhaps it was some sound or vision pressed into his head as the earth mistook him for part of it, and all the other bodies brought to rest for miles in the gray mud alongside.

Trying to Ride Your Bike for Five Years Straight (2015)

Juan Francisco Guillermo's plan for record-setting spanned five years, during which time he would cycle 155,350 miles around the world. Having begun in November 2010, he was in the home stretch of the fifth year of his goal when a truck on a highway in Nakhon Ratchasima province hit him, despite having been carefully in his lane on a long straight piece of road. He was killed instantly on impact. His wife and two-year-old child, who had been accompanying him on that leg of the trip, were injured but not killed.

Every move you make is a product not only of your action but of the actions of countless others, orchestrated unseen in time to constraint the present instant to becoming open to what is done. A flick of the wrist from any arm on every road you pass choosing to spare you by not relinquishing control, splitting across the given lines for just a second. Every trace of where you've been covered over as quickly as any other marking.

Trying to Dive the Deepest (2013)

Other divers could see as he descended that Nicholas Mevoli, 32, was pressing further than he should. He had reached a depth of 68 meters in an attempt to break the record of 71 meters for deepest dive without fins among American men, a far shot still from the world record of 101 meters. Nearly to his mark, he faltered, as if to ascend just short, and then forced himself to press on, continuing to complete the dive to 72.

Relief hit the observers when Mevoli surfaced, though immediately they realized he was not OK, despite his physical hand signal to the contrary. He could speak, and there was a dazed look to his eyes, a disconnection between brain and operation. Shortly after, he fainted into unconsciousness, and blood began pouring from his mouth. Following 90 minutes of CPR, he was declared dead.

There is always a further layer. Whatever length or distance set only suspends the edge of where initiative shifts from one effort in a million to the one that stands up against time, until again someone comes to claim the next breadth. The present gap between completion and resignation in the end may prove only just enough to end the wish that pressed you forward in the first place.

Trying to Live (2015)

Misao Okawa of Japan had been named both the oldest living woman and the oldest living person for almost three years when the duration of her claim came to an end. One month following her 117th birthday, having spanned the 20th century in full, she outlived her husband by more than 70 years, but spent her last hours in the company of her many children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. Her advice for long life was "to eat sushi and get at least eight hours of sleep a night."

Upon death, Okawa relinquished both her titles, as despite being the oldest living of her kind, she was not the oldest person to have lived ever, short by nearly five years. The successor of her titles had to be researched at her passing, the list not kept complete. She remains the oldest Japanese person ever, and the oldest person ever born in Asia. On her last birthday, she is said to have claimed her life seemed short.

In the end, it is life that gets in the way of life. All you have done compiles in what you were and does you in. What you do or do not remember is as much of how you ended up as what you accomplished, what words could be written in your name, with the next body behind you waiting to fill in the place you called your own as long as you could call it anything.

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Nasya: the final frontier. Photos courtesy the author

One year ago, I made a commitment to get off the drugs that modern medicine had promised would heal me. My liver was starting to hurt from all the painkillers, sleeping pills, antidepressants, and anticonvulsants I was taking. I had been floating in bed on opiates for weeks and was completely content in this world of no feeling, no pain, no headaches. I kept taking the pills to numb the debilitating pain around the left side and frontal cortex of my mushy, empty, non-working brain brought on by multiple head injuries. There had been hockey hits from the biggest girls, bicycle woes from the worst taxi drivers, and, this time, a car accident caused by geriatrics still clinging to their drivers licenses.

I hated myself for blindly filling prescriptions and taking the advice provided by the "rehabilitation team" surrounding me. I fought the urge to decapitate myself and pushed through the crushing sense of loss to do what so many escapists do—I journeyed to India to an Ayurvedic health centre, where I would try to purify myself.

At a time when juice cleanses, colonics, butter coffees, and the Beyonce diet were ubiquitous, this seemed like a more wholesome approach. Ayurveda—the 5,000-year-old science of life—places a strong foundation on food as medicine. Ayurveda reasonably believes that no two bodies are alike, and it defines bodies based on their constitution (both mental and physical) and how we, as individuals, relate to the energy flowing within. I was drawn to this field of study for its all-natural views and ancient lineage. I also had a deep willingness to try virtually anything that promised to rid me of my chronic headaches.

My speculated cure was to be found in beach-abundant Goa amongst a large portion of the over two million annual international and domestic visitors flocking towards the Arabian Sea. Historically known for its Portuguese influences on architecture and its drug-infused trance nightlife, the visitors of Goa today are still pleasure-seekers, but in a different light. A booming industry has been built around health and wellness, especially yoga retreats and ayurvedic detox getaways.

I committed to a 14-day panchkarma; a popular (and intense) cleanse to bring the body back into balance and prevent disease. Most of the patients at the centre were Russian and interpreters were ever-present. If you can imagine a Girl, Interrupted–style residence set in desolate Siberia with palm trees, those were my surroundings.

The physical treatments I openly subjected myself to seemed bizarre to me, with my Western upbringing, though they are familiar and unremarkable for most people in India. Under the guise of one young female doctor and over a dozen interns (who seemed more concerned with my "American" love-life than my health), I was scheduled for three full hours of treatments every day and had a strict diet to follow that was cooked by one of four Ayurvedic chefs on site.

Treatments were focused around bodily fluids—pissing, shitting, barfing, crying, sweating. We talked about my period blood and my pussy juice. Food was lacklustre. I forced myself into acquiring a taste for cantaloupe so I could take a break from the three-times a day serving of kitchari—a staple mixture of two grains hyped for its nourishing qualities and digestibility.

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A dough crater filled with hot liquid: the best thing to put on your back for hours at a time.

Upon arrival, I was stripped down to nothing in front of two young female doctors, and covered in a small piece of cloth held in place by a thin cotton string. A lonely grown-ass women in a diaper, I sat on a sturdy oak-framed table where warm oil that smelled of a stale vintage store was poured over the crown of my head. The oil percolated its way through each follicle and eventually down my face, greasing my hair. I survived a synchronized body scrub that felt like I was being skinned alive layer by layer with sandpaper gloves. I was put in a trance by way of a 45-minute traditional shirodhara ceremony—a warm oil drip slowly moving from temple to temple to stimulate the third-eye.

I was trapped in a wooden steambox to sweat toxins and excrete metabolic waste profusely—a treatment known as swedana. Every time my body was inclosed in the box filled with herb-infused steam, I took the opportunity to explore my exhibitionism and the psychology of public masturbation. With my head perched above the steambox, I wondered if the interns in the room could sense when I was peaking or if they were just impressed by my Western-bred kidneys and liver working hard to detoxify my blood.

I underwent a strictly ghee (clarified milk butter) diet for three days as part of purgation therapy—where I finally learned that we are what we eat, but more importantly, we aren't what we shit. I kept a very detailed poo diary I affectionately labeled the "shart chart" and had to face the darkest, most vulnerable emotions as I quite literally "let go" of things that no longer served me via my anus.

The sweat glands in my underarms were secreting toxins that produced the most wretched odor my nose had ever encountered. I took nutraceuticals with high levels of heavy metals and succumbed to the recommendation of an oily enema. I laid still for hours with a doughy oil-filled crater set on the base of my spine like a suction-hose to the skin. My back was stamped and burned by scalding hot satchels of healing herbs. Oh, the ecstasy of human experience.

On the basis that stagnation is the enemy of good health, my doc prescribed a final detoxifying treatment called nasya for my last days at the centre. In a room that looked like a bit of the set from Saw 3, I sat down on a robust wooden recliner to accept a set of lubed hands in a vigorous face, neck, and chest massage. I was led over to a sterile metal chair where I was told to lean over an electric gadget producing steam of the herbal variety. A heavy fleece blanket was draped over my head, forcing me to embrace the haze. I lasted only two minutes of the prescribed ten before I quickly moved out from under the fleece, as I was certain I had given myself third-degree burns.

Back in the medieval chair, the sadist wiped moisture from my face, tilted my head back until my nostrils were facing the sky and put a mixture of ginger/lemon/milk/herbs in the holes of my nose until I felt liquid rising in the back of my throat and was forced to spit the wasabi-like burn out my mouth. A gauze-like cloth that had been soaked in ghee and dried out was used as a Zig-Zag to roll up powdered turmeric—the magic spice known to combat inflammation that leads to disease. The ayurvedic blunt was lit up and jammed into a phallic metal smoking apparatus with an opening on each end. My head was cocked back and I was instructed to inhale the dense smoke twice through each nostril until I could blow a milky cloud out my mouth.

It hit me hard. I was scared, but ready to follow the white light that had begun to dominate my vision. It was as if a force greater than all our parts had stripped the roof off the clinic and the blueness of the Goan sky folded in on itself and church bells and temple calls started ringing in my ears. I saw a black dot for a moment that felt like an eternity and when the doc said "finish" my sight and sound came into the moment and I was sucked back to earth. Back to the godforsaken chair we had started in. She jammed cotton balls in my ears and warned me to stay away from ceiling fans to protect the interdependent anatomy of my ear-nose-throat.

If there was something I subconsciously went to India looking for, then I had found it. Evacuation of the bowels brought on by clarified butter and a milky hit from a turmeric blunt was the medicine that made me feel human again. My vision, my disposition, my whole constitution had shifted. I no longer felt like a slug with a low processing speed and weak cognitive functioning. My head was out of the clouds and I could feel again. I didn't want to numb anything anymore. I was ready and willing to live with or without headaches, depression, and anxiety. Maybe it was a textbook definition of the placebo effect, maybe it was the 5,000-year-old science; one can never be certain. But what I can now say with certainty: letting go is far more important than taking in.

[body_image width='800' height='1067' path='images/content-images/2015/05/27/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/27/' filename='the-ups-and-downs-of-being-a-little-person-876-body-image-1432741086.jpg' id='60566']Ingvild with her brother and sister. Courtesy of the Fischer family.

This article originally appeared on VICE Alps.

You'd think that in 2015 anyone would be aware that calling short people things like "midgets" and "goblins" is more than a little offensive, right? Well, believe me—it happens. I'm fully aware that it isn't usually out of malice but it definitely doesn't make the words any more appropriate.

For short people, climbing stairs can become an extreme sport, you have to possess a flawless aim just to throw your letters into postboxes, and ATMs, well, they're just out of the question. These factors make you realize just how important height is in your everyday life.

Ingvild Fischer knows this. She is herself one of the 10,000 little people living in Austria. She's also the secretary of a group called Federal Organization for Little People and their Families, or BKMF Austria. The following is a retelling of Ingvild's perspective.

A lot of folks are unaware that terms like "dwarf" and "midget" are often offensive. They've usually picked up the words from their parents and use them without knowing that they shouldn't. I've heard these things so many times that I've lost count. I've had kids stop me on the street and called me things like Lilliputian—the mythical tiny people from Gulliver's Travels. Of course I don't like to be compared to a character from a 1720s book. Would you be? I'm a human, too. A smaller one than you, but still a human. No, I can't fly or make myself invisible or anything of that nature. Unfortunately, I don't possess any magic powers.

I'm 4'5" and was born with a condition known as achondroplasia—the most common of the the 640 possible causes of dwarfism. Achondroplasia is a genetic defect that causes your arms and legs to shop growing while your upper body continues to. So actually, if I'm sitting, you can't really tell that I'm short. You can actually spot this "defect" during pregnancy and in Austria it's still legal to abort such a child right up to eight and a half months into the actual pregnancy. Which I think is crazy.

The association I work for is strongly opposed to that. We offer both help and advice to parents expecting a child with achondroplasia. I understand that it must be an overwhelming feeling to be told that your child is going to grow up like this, but so what? There are countless examples of short people leading lives just as happy, if not happier, as anyone else.

Our organization is made up of people of all sizes—regular-sized parents with diminutive kids, diminutive parents with regular-sized kids. There's no "common situation," really. It's always different. And guess what? They're all happy.

My short stature was noticed relatively immediately after birth and although it hasn't always been easy, my childhood was actually great. I grew in the countryside so I guess I was quite sheltered. Things were good—I played with local kids, hung out with my siblings, the usual.

I never saw my size as an issue until I went to school. Sure, I understood that I was different, but had no idea that people would think I was that different. It was only after my height was repeatedly commented on that I began to notice something was wrong. I began to see kids looking at me out of the corner of their eyes.

Adolescence was tough. I stood on the sidelines and watched on as all my friends started to form their first relationships. It was really hard for me to find someone because of my height. In the end, I managed to find the right guy—who later became my husband. He's at 4'5" too.

Some members of our association are even shorter than me and my husband. People mistake them for children and pat them on the head and stuff. Imagine how patronizing that feels. To be a grown-up human being and have other adults treat you like a child.

That's sort of the problem, people let your height taint their view of you as a human. The workplace is a prime example. All of your colleagues tend to underestimate your abilities because you aren't as tall as them. They figure you won't be as good at your job as they are. Employers need to learn that as long as the office is accessible to us, we work just as well as any tall person does. You don't need to treat us like children.

Daily life can be a bit of an issue sometimes. Really banal things can become an obstacle. Everything is made for regular-sized people so there's tons of things that are just unreachable. Take, for example, shopping carts. They're almost impossible for me to drive. Even when I can drive them, I need to get help to reach things on the top shelves. Sometimes you just don't have the energy to keep asking people for help so you either don't buy the product or you get to climbing.

Speaking of climbing—stairs can be quite an arduous adventure that can leave gasping for breath. ATMs are a drag, post boxes might as well be towers, but the worst of all—elevator buttons. Whoever decided to place them vertically is just evil. It basically means that I always have to get out of the elevator halfway up because I can't reach the top button. Can't someone fix this?

Recommended: Kingdom of the Little People

Clothes used to be almost impossible to find in my size and when I finally managed to find some, they were covered in Mickey Mouse drawings. Thankfully, the internet has fixed all that.

At 135 centimeters, I'm one of the bigger little people. In general, the smaller you are, the harder you have it. I know people who are 80 cm and I can't begin to imagine what difficulties they must face.

I still get a lot of attention when I'm out in public. People stare, point, and a whisper a lot. I'm a lot better at dealing with it than I used to be—there have been times when I didn't want to go out for fear of being mocked. These days, I just ignore the stares—I am what I am and I don't feel like justifying myself anymore. I only really notice because my friends get weirded out when it happens. I'm probably oblivious to it by now.

People of my nature are often offered stereotypical roles in movies. Sometimes they're looking for cute little people, sometimes they're after creepy ones. Rarely anything outside of those two. Our association gets all sorts of calls looking for "dwarf characters." It's really a tricky subject because people don't want to be exploited but it pays pretty well.

I used to wonder why I was born like this—I couldn't make sense of it but today I'm actually thankful for it. I guess my faith in God helps me through it. I hope that some day society can stop seeing us as abnormal and starts to meet us halfway—at least in terms of accessibility. At the end of the day I'm just as much part of the population as anyone else and have just as many needs, feelings, and aspirations as any other human.

I'm not some creature from a fairytale land—all I want is an elevator where I can reach the top button.

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