Taking a quick peak at your phone is now probably the least of your worries when it comes to not getting ticketed. Photo by author

In what may be the biggest WTF moment of Canadian policing this year, a man was reportedly ticketed $175 for giving a homeless person money—because the homeless person was actually an undercover cop.

Follow Jake Kivanç on Twitter.

The California roll: the gateway roll to actual sushi. Photo via WikiMedia

Look, I don't want to argue about this but the California roll is definitively the worst of all available sushi rolls. There's a reason it's found in every bento box and discount supermarket—it's made for people who don't like sushi.

This guy is cool now. Stock photo via Getty

Everywhere you go, millennials are pushing the boundaries of convention and defying the rules: Almost getting people elected, riding "hoverboards" that are actually basically just Segways, writing self-congratulatory thinkpieces about ourselves. It's a busy world out there, and millennials are taking charge. For instance, this is the first generation ever to admit that going out actually sucks.

"They're the greatest generation—of couch potatoes," is how the New York Post, in one of the most amazing articles ever written, describes millennials. The case against us? We're streaming more television and spending more time on our phones than Gen X, declining to socialize in person, and maybe most damning of all, "More young people are choosing to spend a quiet evening at home." We're not even cool enough to get drunk: "A 2016 survey by Heineken found that when millennials do bother to venture outside, 75 percent drink in moderation."

The Post suggests a few reasons for millennials' lameness, including a quote from a neurologist who says that cases of exhaustion among young people are on the rise and a note that going out, especially in big cities like New York, is expensive. But even those of us who aren't perpetually broke and tired are still not embracing traditional methods of socializing, like sitting in a dark bar doing shots until something happens. This has something to do with social media, maybe? Oh, and dating! Whatever happened to dating, right?

"You know, the whole 'Netflix and chill,' whatever you think about it... it's kind of a trend," one millennial helpfully told the Post.

You could point to various generational reasons for millennials' habit of staying in—it's not surprising that a cohort that came of age between 9/11 and the worldwide financial crisis would be a little more frugal and culturally cautious than their predecessors. Remember, the previous generation was so decadent and insulated from reality that "flannel" was a fashion trend and the most popular TV show was about six people hanging out in a coffee shop and periodically fucking one another. Millennials, in contrast to the depraved hedonists of Friends, who kept exotic animals like monkeys as pets, are a frugal, risk-averse sort, traits that don't lend themselves to turning Saturday nights into Sunday mornings.

You could also note millennials' well-established money woes and conclude that there's no great mystery behind us not wanting to drop $100 on a night out that ends with you walking home shoeless and headache-y at dawn. Or maybe it's just that "millennials" is a category that now includes 30-somethings, and people old enough to know shit about 401(k)s aren't inclined to spend their weekends snorting whatever gets offered to them in unisex bathrooms, then either dancing or talking about the JFK assassination for seven hours straight.

But really, what this completely real trend the Post has identified shows is that millennials have cracked the code. For most of human history, young people have spent a good chunk of their lives going "out," which mainly meant getting fucked up on mead or some mildly poisonous herb, then having sex with a stranger, waking up in a field, or both. Youths are always derided for this by the older generations, who claim that in their day the herbs were less poisonous and the outdoor coitus less brazen. Most of these kids, of course, settle down with one another and devote themselves to not being completely crushed by whatever economic system looms over them. Occasionally, they'll walk by a field and laugh fondly, knowing that their reckless phase has passed, and that what they really want to do is just hang out in front a fire with some of their closest friends and describe episodes of premium cable shows to one another. The wildest these nights ever get is when one of them cheekily brings some poisonous herbs to spice things up.

But millennials—if you believe the Post, and why wouldn't you?—are skipping past all that bullshit, those late-20s nights where you don't even enjoy waking up in a field but feel obligated to by your fear that you will be washed up if you don't spend Saturday puking while texting your friends to remind you not to mix mead and herbs, then going to brunch. Fuck going out. Fuck "out." It's expensive, it's crowded, it smells bad, the bands are usually terrible, the clubs are usually worse.

You know what's great? Sitting around and watching TV. Have you tried it? You get to wear comfortable clothes, summon whatever food you want via phone and eat it with your hands, go to bed when you choose—for most of the humans who have ever lived, this generation's typical night in represents an impossible pinnacle of luxury. People used to worry about stuff like drought, famine, and a new band of men with swords riding into town. Don't underestimate the simple luxuries of a glass of wine, a roof overhead, and a screen that can show you anything you can imagine.

So stay in tonight. Get a decent bottle of red wine or one of those bourgeois-ass beers that's brewed with like, lemon peels. Watch an entire Prince concert or a shitload of Peep Show. Or, fuck it, go Full Old and read a book. Sleep when you're tired. Wake up feeling rested for once. Go to the park. You'd be surprised by all the places you can go when you're not going out, and how nice the people are once you're there.

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For guys like me, who might cry during commercials or enjoy a candlelit dinner, it can be hard to feel manly, especially since masculinity is often about strength, confidence, and by basically being a dick. Filmmaker Simon Cartwright set out to explore those ideals by making a film that itself was inherently masculine—or as he put it, "loud, aggressive, and ultimately meaningless."

This exploration into machismo resulted in Cartwright's BAFTA-nominated short Manoman, which has been screened at more than 70 film festivals including Cannes and Sundance. The short follows a meek man who attends primal scream therapy classes in order to tap into his dormant masculinity. However, the process spawns something else entirely—a living embodiment of his id.

A bit like Brad Pitt's glistening Übermensch in Fight Club, this nude, rude, Danny DeVito-like creature leads our shy protagonist down the path toward madness. As they beat up strangers, destroy property, and pursue random women on the street, he moves closer to the dark side, losing his self-control and eventually the ability to recognize himself.

Cartwright masterfully illustrates this descent with puppets and aggressive rock 'n' roll, giving it a strangely satisfying aesthetic. By using rod puppets and CGI animation, he crafts a wildly unique and irreverent world where, in one scene, the props and rods of the production are used to beat the shit out of a character. The film feels just as alive and unwieldy as the wicked men in it.

Watch the film below, then scroll down for my interview with Cartwright.

VICE: Manoman is insanity. Where did you come up with the idea?
Simon Cartwright: Thanks, I'll take that as a compliment! I feel a lot of short animation is very gentle and paced quite slow. The idea for Manoman came from a desire to make something that was the opposite of that. I wanted it to reflect my take on masculinity, a much-used theme, but something I always see being treated in a very negative way. The aim was to approach it differently, to celebrate masculinity instead, at least on the surface.

Have you ever attended primal therapy?
I've never been to a primal therapy session, but I did a lot of research into it, and it's pretty incredible. Really what's shown in the film is a gross simplification of a deeply emotional process. The closest I've come was when we recorded all the screaming and singing for the film in the same session. We got about twenty guys into the recording studio, gave them all beers, and asked them first to sing their hearts out and then to scream until they could scream no more. It's a strange thing to really let go like that, screaming without restraint. Soon everyone was really into it, and the atmosphere afterward was incredible. People were saying they felt refreshed by the experience.

I definitely feel there is a dissonance between the two sides of most men—the civilized, learned behavior, which is acceptable within a society, and the default of every man to fight, fuck, and destroy.

How did you pitch the film to friends and investors? Especially when you tell them it's with puppets and—spoiler—ends with a golden shower.
Well, I might have omitted that part in my synopsis! I described it as being more of an experience like you might have going to a gig. I listen to a lot of noise and heavy music, and I wanted to get the same kind of feeling from a film as you might at a concert. Everyone involved in the film was totally on board, which was crucial as I knew we were on a knife edge between doing something meaningful and something completely absurd. Also I did a full storyboard and animatic, which meant I could just show people the film in that form and not have to explain it, because really the ending makes no sense unless you see it!

You've worked a lot in stop-motion in the past. What drew you to making a film with puppets? Have you worked with them before?
I've worked in many different kinds of animation over the years, each of them has their drawbacks and their benefits, but they all have some things in common, one being the lack of improvisation. This was something I really wanted to bring into my films, especially given this story, it needed the chaos of trying something new each time the camera rolls.

I made a little film called Serenity Now just to try out puppets as a way of working and found the limitations of it pretty freeing as it required me to think around problems that would never be an issue in animation. I worked with my good friend and cinematographer Steven Cameron Ferguson to experiment with how to push things cinematically as the performance was more limited that animation.

Do you prefer working in stop-motion or puppetry? What do you see as their key creative differences?
It depends on the idea; different things lend themselves to each medium. In the hands of a skilled puppeteer or animator, a character can deliver an incredible performance, but I can't do either that well! So I have to try and find ways around it and hopefully show character in different ways. I see it as being like playing punk compared to concert piano. The technique is less important than the feeling and the intent. With the right amount of intent, you can make anything happen...

Ultimately my aim is to bring these things together, along with live action, to create something that marries the best of all approaches together.

What are you working on now?
Right now, I'm writing a feature that I'm pretty excited about, even if it turns out nobody wants to make it! It would be live action mixed with animation to tell two sides of the same story. It's pretty out there... Also I've just officially partnered up with Nina Gantz, director of the short film Edmond. We recently did a commercial together and are working on a developing a bunch of projects, short and long. We're called Cartwright Gantz, come check us out on Twitter or whatever, hopefully we'll be making another film soon.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as a film curator. He's the senior curator for Vimeo's On Demand platform. He has also programmed at Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, and the Hamptons International Film Festival.

If every generation thinks that the one after it mostly consists of overgrown babies with soft hands and shorter attention spans, the grafting kids of the 1700s would rip the piss out of all of us today. Before the whole idea of the eight-hour work day was ushered into law in the UK in the 1880s, only children aged nine to 13 were expected to work for less than 12 hours a day.

While we try to claw our way out of the recession's hole, people can resort to taking on eight-hour shifts that they're ultimately not cut out for. And when you're terrible at your job, you tend to get fired. We hunted down some stories of people getting fired—and found out that a proper night's sleep and an aversion to throwing produce at people are generally good places to start for meaningful lengths of employment.

Name: Howard Ryan
Age: 27
The job: Court Clerk, Ministry of Justice
Location: London

One Sunday night I got the call from my temp agency saying they had a job for me on the Monday—so I went out drinking to celebrate. The next morning I got into the office, and for about an hour they were telling me all the rules and procedures of being a court clerk, about doing all the admin stuff. But about 15 minutes in I was spacing out; I wasn't hearing anything. I had a triple-shot coffee and we went to sit in court, with me clutching my notepad, for a custody case.

So I was writing the name and the date, and suddenly just fell asleep, nodded right off for about 30 seconds. No one noticed, so I carried on listening intently for another five minutes before my head just hit the table. A few people noticed. I tried to stay awake for another 10 minutes, but when one of the parents was talking about how they deserved more custody for their children I was apparently snoring. For a good seven or eight minutes.

When I woke up, everyone was looking at me so I went out for some fresh air and I managed to make myself scarce until the end of the case. At the end of the day the agency called me and informed me I wouldn't be welcome back, as I'd fallen asleep in court. On the bright side, they did pay me.

Name: Sam Walker-Smart
Age: 28
The job: Manual Labourer
Location: Cornwall

I was desperately poor and unemployed on an accidental gap year, waiting to start university. I'd been lined up with a seemingly simple, any-idiot-could-do-it packing job, starting on my 19th birthday. I woke up at about 4AM and rode the bus to a depressing-looking business estate where I was supposed to pack and shift boxes. But as I rolled up to the building it became quite clear that that wasn't the case—the guy had a bloody forklift, with all these drills and saws lying about. I stood there, about to run off and do my arts degree, thinking, Oh shit.

It started off alright: cup of tea, biscuits, cliched natter. I moved a load of heavy stuff and before I knew it I was knackered out of my mind. Then my boss said, "You need to saw this wood," and I thought, This wasn't in the brochure. I got through a few planks, kind of nodding off while standing there—it was about 7.30AM at this point. I was hacking away, and then the sound changed and I looked down and I was just sawing into my own thumb. There was blood everywhere.

I was like: "Oh shit!" and went up to the guy who clearly thought I was an absolute bellend. I told him I thought I was moving cardboard boxes, and that we'd both been given a bum deal. So he let me go. But he didn't give me any first aid and I just sort of staggered back to the bus dripping blood on the floor, and ended up having a Wimpy burger at 9AM on my birthday.

Name: Aaron Evans
Age: 28
The job: Bartender
Location: Kent

I got fired for being a complete wreck head. I turned up one Friday two hours late, buzzing on coke having not slept a wink. I ploughed through the double shift drinking the whole way, and then nearly crashed halfway through the day from my comedown. I messaged my man and he delivered me some more stuff to keep me going until close. Then I went out again with colleagues and ended up staying up for a second night... and yeah, I turned up on Saturday morning for my second double shift on zero hours sleep, still coked up. Disgraceful.

I got sent home for looking "unfit to work." At the time my colleague kind of mentioned how the previous day I was "in and out of the toilet" or whatever. The following Tuesday I turned up for work and my manager took me outside for a "chat" and axed me. He was a hypocritical cunt 'cos he's coked up weekly at least.

Name: Sean Saunders
Age: 24
The job: Customer Sales Assistant
Location: Preston

I was 16, working one of my first proper jobs at at supermarket around Christmas time. Other than watching a sort of morale-boosting video centred on the shop ethos, they hadn't really told us how to work the tills. I'm not an idiot so I figured it out—scan, take money, press button—fairly self-explanatory. But certain things, like limes or whatever, just had a code, and they're not on the till. You had to memorize it. So if you got in trouble, you could hammer the panic button under your till to call over whoever was supervising.

On my second day and a customer wanted to buy a frozen turkey, but it didn't have a barcode on it. So obviously I couldn't scan it or enter the ISBN, so I said: "I'm sorry sir, but I can't scan the turkey. Can you go and get another?" and he just kicked off and started yelling at me, "but I want this turkey!" I'm trying to explain to him that I just need another turkey to scan, all the while hammering the panic button willing my supervisor to come over, and the custoomer kept getting more and more irate.

He was shouting, swearing—"you must be a fucking idiot then, you don't know how to scan a turkey, just fucking give it me then"—and I just snapped. I threw the turkey at him. He looked so shocked that he just shut up completely. But what was really annoying was that my supervisor saw the exact moment I threw the turkey, since I'd been calling him in on the panic button. I mean, I didn't throw it at his face, I'm not a monster. It was more of a basketball chest pass. Anyway, after my supervisor sorted it out he asked me to come with him to his office and he said: "Well, I... I'm gonna have to fire you. You threw a turkey at a customer." Which was fair enough.

Name: Anton Lisigurski
Age: 23
The job: Bartender
Location: London

This place was the kind of bar where it would turn into a lock-in at 1AM all the time, with free drinks for everyone. The coke would come out, people would start dancing on bar tops—it didn't matter who the people were. One night it was someone's birthday and there were a lot of people in the bar, and there was an incident between one of the managers and a different bartender so we couldn't get any more free drinks.

At this point I completely blacked out because I'd been drinking quite a lot, and I woke up the next morning with more than one other person in my bed, realizing I'd left my bag at work. So I went in that day and for the whole shift the management staff and everyone were acting really weird around me, I kind of felt like I'd done something wrong but I was also quite hungover so I just thought maybe I had The Fear or something. A day after my manager took me upstairs and explained to me that I'd basically taken beers out of the fridge and put them into my bag, and then left my bag inside the pub outside his office.

@Daisy_Field / @george_f_heaven

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As Bernie Sanders's campaign shuffles toward its inevitable end, President Barack Obama's endorsement of Hillary Clinton Thursday did little to dampen the enthusiasm at a rally for the candidate in Washington, DC. For many of Bernie's fans, the endorsement was just more politics-as-usual, stacking the deck against the Vermont independent and his unusual Democratic presidential campaign.

Obama formally endorsed Clinton, now the presumptive Democratic nominee, after meeting with Sanders in the White House Thursday morning. "I know how hard this job can be," Obama said in a video statement. "That's why I know Hillary will be so good at it. In fact, I don't think there's ever been someone so qualified to hold this office."

Later that evening, elsewhere in the nation's capital, around 3,000 Sanders supporters—a relatively small crowd for the populist candidate—packed into a skate park outside of Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in northeast DC to hear their candidate speak. Among them were Jessica Caiazzo, 19, and Rob Odell, 18, who drove down from New Jersey the night before the rally to see Sanders.

"It changes my feelings more so on Obama than Clinton," Caiazzo said of the president's endorsement. "We all know she's a liar and a fraud. Now it's, basically, instead of Obama being progressive, he's fallen for party politics, and he's gotta endorse Clinton to keep it in the Democratic Party."

Odell said he considered Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren's endorsement of Clinton more unforgivable and said she was "essentially selling out her values."

"I don't know if she has a part in progressive politics now," Odell said.

Their sentiments were matched onstage by civil rights activist Cornel West, a Sanders ally, who blasted "Wall Street Democrats" and referred to Clinton as a "milquetoast neoliberal sister."

Washington Democrats will go to the polls next Tuesday in the last contest of the party's primary process. Only one young voter out of more than a dozen I interviewed at the rally said Obama's endorsement made him more open to backing Clinton. Most said that his support for Sanders's opponent was disappointing but unsurprising, and did nothing to sway their views.

"I've always been an Obama supporter, but I'm still as adamant about Bernie as I was," said Bria Gyamfi, a 22-year-old from Virginia who had come to the rally with a few friends. "Because it's kind of expected that he was going to endorse Hillary."

"If you weren't expecting the incumbent Democratic president to endorse the presumptive Democratic nominee, then your expectation was unreasonable," said Alex Putterman, 22, who recently moved to DC from Connecticut, where he voted for Sanders in that state's primary on April 26.

Although Clinton has by now effectively won the Democratic primary, some people I spoke to were still making up their minds on how to cast their ballots. Like Jamie Anderson, 21, who said he thinks he'll vote for Sanders. "I was sort of on the fence, but I was a little more inspired than I expected to be by the rally tonight," Anderson told me.

As Sanders spoke, rolling through the well-worn and well-loved lines of his stump speech, hitting issues like student debt, marijuana legalization, and police accountability, Manu Gowswami was happy to get a glimpse of his beloved candidate. A 19-year-old from Singapore interning in DC for the summer, Gowswami described himself as a Bernie superfan. "Bigger than that, a fan of politics as a whole," he added.

"I'm a huge Obama fan as well," Gowswami said. The Clinton endorsement, he said, was "something he had to do eventually. At the end of the day, though, this campaign has become something bigger than all of us combined. It's something that Clinton has to address now. It's big enough that she has to incorporate some of the policies that Bernie stands for in her agenda and potentially even include Bernie in her administration, which is what I really think is the best part of this campaign."

And among the most hardcore Sanders supporters, the end of the Democratic race is merely a bump in the road, on the way to a bigger, if vague, political revolution."I will continue this to till very end, and even when it's the end, I don't think it's the end because this is a movement he's created, and it's just snowballing from here," said Jessie Rone, 25, of Maryland. "Wonderful things are coming from it."

Photo by Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call

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Lindy West photo by Jenny Jimenez

A promising athlete. A woman incapacitated by alcohol. A lenient sentence, and a cacophony of outrage and counter-outrage.

For this week's First-Person Shooter we shipped a couple of cameras across the globe to Josh, a helicopter pilot in New Zealand who's been flying for over seven years. He works for Milford Helicopters, where he goes on five or more flights a day, usually taking tourists to high mountain tops or delivering workers and supplies to small islands, lighthouses, and ships in the middle of the ocean.

On top of snapping photos of the tourists he brought to Mount Parariki, a summit almost impossible to reach except by helicopter, Josh took a few exposures of his trip while dropping two technicians off at a lighthouse located at the top of a remote point completely cut off by mountains and sea. Later in the day, he also used a different, larger helicopter to lift life rafts back onto a ship's deck. Below, he answered some questions about his line of work.

VICE: What happened during your day? What'd you get up to?
Josh the Helicopter Pilot: After our 90 minute drive every morning, we arrived at the hangar, thoroughly inspected each machine, then pushed them out onto the pad. My first job was to fly two technicians and their equipment out to a lighthouse at Milford Sound for maintenance. The following job was to fly another two technicians to the top of a waterfall where the hydro station for Milford Sound is located.

My next few flights were with Chinese tourists who wanted to land on the glacier. By the time they were finished, the hydro station technicians were ready to be picked up. After squeezing in a quick lunch break, one of our bigger helicopters was tasked with lifting life rafts back to the ship's deck so I rode alongside, since it is easier to take aerial photos when not piloting. The rest of the afternoon was filled up with several glacier scenic flights, and my last flight was to pick up the lighthouse technicians I'd dropped off in the morning. Then we pushed the helicopters away, briefly inspected them for any obvious problems, then set off home.

What kind of cargo do you transport?
A huge variety, depending on the customer. Camping gear for hunters, trap supplies for trappers, tools and electronics for technicians. Sometimes a customer will be doing track maintenance and we will fly bags of plain old gravel on the end of a rope all day.

Where do you normally fly to?
Anywhere and everywhere—the beauty of helicopters! Tutoko Glacier is where our scenics go so we land there most often. Working passengers will always be going somewhere where they have a job to do that cannot be accessed by road. The famous Milford Track is in Fiordland National Park, so a lot of our work revolves around this.

Was it hard to take these photos while you were operating a helicopter in the air?
Harder than I thought it would be. You can free up one hand easy enough, but the shape of the cockpit, plus the people in it, can make it difficult to photograph certain angles.

Has anything strange ever happened to you while you were flying?
A few years ago, I flew from a ship based at sea, spotting tuna schools. A few minutes after take off, I noticed my spotter chowing down on these dried squid. I had had one of them the night before and got fairly sick from it. Against my better advice he carried on eating. Sure enough, thirty minutes later he was keeled over in his seat begging me to go down and hover. We were several thousand miles from land and at least forty miles from our ship, so I did. I hovered six feet or so high, while my passenger climbed out and squatted on the skid to relieve himself over the Pacific Ocean. I'd never been so torn between laughter, concentration, and concern that the rotor wash might pickup 'debris'...

If somebody wants to fly with you how do they do it?
We are based at the Milford Sound airport in Fiordland National Park. You can fly from Queenstown, or drive from Te Anau. The highway is spectacular and people often visit for the sake of the drive alone. Visit our website for more info.

Follow Julian on Instagram and visit his website to see his own photo work. If you'd like to participate in an upcoming edition of First-Person Shooter, contact Julian here.

Lead image by Lia Kantrowitz

Hello hungry readers,

This week I want to talk to you about frozen french fries, which I bake because I don't own a deep fryer. Can fries be called fries if they're not fried? "French bakes" seems more accurate. Can they even be called "french"? I've heard some people claim that Belgium was FF's point of origin. Anyway, here are my reviews of some frozen Belgian bakes.

Ore Ida Waffle Fries

My friend Cliff and I were incredibly stoned at the supermarket when I bought these. He kept saying he wanted to go outside because the supermarket was too much for him to deal with. He pointed out that Ore Ida was the best, but he ended up leaving my house before he could eat any.

These were definitely waffle fries. I still don't know what the purpose of differently-shaped fries is, but I don't discriminate. It's all the same garbage.

GRADE: A

Nathan's Jumbo Crinkle Cut French Fries

These were large, large fries, like the kind you get when you're at a carnival or something. These were the greasiest of all the fries I tried. Their flavour reminded me of watching a bunch of art school kids taking photos of the parachute drop and other rundown shit around Coney Island. Interpret that however you want.

GRADE B+

McCain Seasoned Crinkle Fries

I made these for my friends, but before I could try them, my greedy pig "friends" ate all of them. Here are their accounts of the fries.

Matt said: "Crunchy texture and surprisingly complex flavour. It was hard to imagine that they were ever frozen. The heat kind of made them soggy towards the end."

Helen said: "I ate these all the time as a kid, some were crunchy, none were too fatty or undercooked. They were spicy—must have been cajun."

Rachel said: "Those french fries! I don't have a sophisticated pallet when it comes to tasting frozen french fries, but they were better than I expected and had a good, crispy outer layer with a good spice."

GRADE: A (I think?)

Alexia Crispy Rosemary Fries

It's always odd when frozen food packaging advertises how crispy its contents are. Anything you put into the oven will usually get crispy, eventually. They didn't make the fries crispy, I did! There isn't a sign on my refrigerator advertising how tasty the food inside it is. I decide how tasty the food in my refrigerator is! I am the decider!

Anyway, I decided that Alexia's extra fancy French fries tasted like rosemary and were fairly crispy. When I served them to my guests, they didn't devour the whole plate as they had the previous week with the McCain fries, so I have to give them a lower grade.

GRADE: A-

Follow Nick Gazin on Instagram to see what he's eating.

Photo by Jared Leibowitz

George Watsky is a YouTube slam poet and rapper with a big vocabulary and sometimes, very poor judgment. He's released a number of albums since his debut in 2007 and his online videos have received hundreds of millions of YouTube hits. As of this month, he's a writer, too. His debut book, HOW TO RUIN EVERYTHING is a compilation of essays that touch on the hilarity and humiliation of his life so far—from his misguided pursuit of women twice his age, to the time he accidentally became an international ivory smuggler. For the record, he acknowledges the self-absorption and douchiness of writing a memoir in your twenties. In the excerpt below, he writes about his experience with epilepsy, and how inheriting the disease has affected the way he thinks about his family and his mortality.

—Kate Lowenstein

It's hard to tell what year it is in Hyampom, where Aunt Marion and Uncle Jack's raw wood cottage is buried deep in California's Coastal Range. Two weeks from now the worst forest fires in decades will rage across the Trinity Alps, turning acres of century-old pines to spent matchsticks. Our family will cry and wring our hands and wonder how we'll cross the suspension bridge to the cabin when it's turned to cinder. But then the fifty-foot flames will peter out just at the base of the hill and retreat, and the house in Hyampom will stand to see another summer. For now though, I float in the deep swimming hole near the cabin, toes poking above the placid water, staring upward at the greying bridge silhouetted against its bright blue backdrop, serene.

*

"What year is it?" a voice asks faintly. 


I'm lying on my back, bobbing up and down as overhead fluorescent lights race by. 


"How many fingers am I holding up?" 


Hmmmm . . . I puzzle, a mess of digits advancing out of the fog toward me. That's a tough one.

"Two?"


"Good job, buddy. Now, can you tell me what year it is?"


No, I realize. No, I can't.


"We have to give him a spinal tap," the doctor declares, jogging alongside my rolling bed. "In case it's meningitis."


"2001!" I recall, suddenly motivated.


I look down to see I'm wearing my navy-and-gold San Francisco Unified School District gym uniform, an IV in my arm, knees scraped and bloody, thighs spotted with fresh bruises. The fog gives way to a searing migraine. My jaw muscles are locked, the sides of my tongue chewed meat, burning as I probe my mouth to find slices of dead skin hanging on the inside of each cheek. The last thing I remember is running The Mile in gym class—the official one that determines whether or not George W. Bush will mail me my coveted fitness certificate, with the sweet gold foil stamp on it. I remember pumping my legs as hard as I could, making my hands sleek and aerodynamic, desperate for the athletic approval of a warmonger. I don't remember finishing.

Waking up from a seizure is a bit like being born. Everyone else runs around the hospital freaking out, but you've slept through the drama. You open your eyes to a world you can't make sense of. Information comes slow, until, out of the mist a faint voice asks what year it is, and before you can come up with the answer, you conjure your first word—Fuck—then think, not again . . .

After my second seizure two weeks later, at the Japantown bowling alley, my new neurologist puts me on a medication called Depakote. For the first few months swallowing the little, blue, diamond-shaped tablets, I have the head of a fat little boy on a frail body, cheeks chipmunked. I want to sleep all the time. On car rides I sit and stare indifferently out the window, never too happy, never too sad, which makes sense when I find out Depakote doubles as both an anticonvulsant and a mood stabilizer prescribed for bipolar disorder and depression. This revelation pisses me off, and I fight my parents hard. It just doesn't seem right to swallow a handful of mystery pills engineered to rewire my brain. What's the point of getting cured if I end up a zombie?

"It comes down to what you would rather put up with," Mom says, "the symptoms or the side effects."

It's no family secret that Mom's Aunt Polly, who died in 1945, wasn't simply having the "fainting spells" described in old letters from her mother. But those were the days when epilepsy could be legally punished with forced sterilization, and Polly was unmedicated when she died—fell and hit her head on her Freshman dorm bathtub at Sarah Lawrence. She'll be seventeen forever.

Epilepsy is known to have a hereditary element, and I'm proud of my connection to Great Aunt Polly's spectral legend. Although seizures, in and of themselves, aren't generally dangerous, there are noteworthy exceptions—seizures beget more seizures and "status epilepticus," a dangerous condition in which many episodes follow one another in rapid succession, can be deadly. But for the most part, it's the rest of the sharp and rigid world that wants to drown you, knock your teeth out, cave your skull in when you're going down. After starting my pill regimen I develop a new consciousness, at all times wondering, What am I near? What would it do to my body if I fell on it/into it right now? I learn you can't trust coffee table corners, rooftop edges. You can't trust urinals either—massive grinning underbites that would get a good laugh out of leaving me to be discovered unconscious, pants down, molars scattered across the linoleum. Hard things, tall things, and wet things—double-crossing murderers. Bathtubs, both hard and wet, are porcelain caskets. For a while we crack the door during my baths so my parents can rush in if they hear splashing. Then I switch to showers altogether.

*

"Can you tell me what year it is?" a faint voice asks as I bob up and down, lying on my back.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

When I can lift my head, I see that I'm still in my gym clothes—a pair of Nike shorts and a sweaty white T-shirt.

"George, what year is it?"

"2008?" I reply, recollecting that Barack Obama was elected president.

"Nope."

Man, could it be 2009 already. . .?

"George, it's 2014. How many fingers am I holding up?" My head is propped up on a pillow, neck craned at enough of an angle to see three men, one whom I recognize and two I don't, a hazmat box on the ambulance wall. Details float back to me slowly . . . leaving my apartment in Los Feliz, the Easton gym, running on the elliptical machine, sweat pouring down my temples. . .

Seizures are triggered by different traumas for different people. Lack of sleep, dehydration, the stereotypical flashing lights—anything that stresses your body and overheats your brain. It's clear now that one of my triggers, aggravated by dehydration and fatigue, seems to be exercise, specifically long-distance running. My first breakthrough seizure was running The Mile. With this second breakthrough, triggered on the elliptical machine, I consider that a higher power may be screaming: STOP EXERCISING! I CREATED YOU TO BE SOFT AND SCRAWNY! But I concede later there may be something more fundamental to my character at work. Running may pop the bubble, but it's anxiety that builds the pressure. The tension's been a part of me for as long as I can remember—a feeling of restlessness, a density of time, a sense that everything must be accomplished before it's too late. The seizures come at those moments when I press too hard, when I can't remind myself to breathe, when I can't lean back and accept life as it comes.

The week following my breakthrough seizure in LA is tough, particularly because my license has been revoked, and unless you happen to live and work along the route, Los Angeles, where it could take three hours to get from the Eastside to the beach, has possibly the lamest bus system in the country. I hate the dependency of asking for rides. It's a regression: relegated again to the backseat on family road trips, staring indifferently out the window. But it is funny, I have to admit, looking around the 704 bus in my Rollerblade liners—Skid Row burnouts asleep in the back row, runaways headed to the Venice Boardwalk, and Mexican mothers with young children on their way to and from school and work shifts—my memory is a sieve in the immediate fallout of a seizure, so I was annoyed at myself but unsurprised to realize that, after skating two miles to the bus stop and searching my shoulder bag, I'd forgotten my shoes at home. I was fucked in the head. But I felt at home trudging through the Chewbacca and Spider-Man impersonators my in my Styrofoam skate boots, just another lunatic at Hollywood and Vine.

*

The odds of having a seizure are pretty low at any given time. But floating alone at the Hyampom swimming hole, it does cross my mind. No one would hear me. I'd just taste copper in the back of my mouth, enjoy that warm weightlessness, soak up one fading view of the Trinity Pines, and no one would ever ask me what year it is again. It's a self-indulgent thought, but it builds a bridge to my parents in my mind. Their jokes about aging and AARP memberships are getting a little more morbid and a little less funny. The truth that anyone can die at any moment, including me, including right now, reminds me of a conversation I'd had up at the house with Mom and Dad that felt less like a talk between parents and son than of one between old colleagues.

"What age do you see yourself as, Dad?" I'd asked him.

"Aaaahhh . . . the continuity theory of personal identity . . ."

"Jesus Christ." I'd immediately regretted asking.

"I'd have to say in my early thirties... you know, maybe it sounds silly but I still feel like I have these endless possibilities in front of me."

"It doesn't sound silly to me," I recall replying, before swimming over to the bank of loose shale to dry off in sun.

I catch my reflection in the water, pieces of me plagiarized from the past—Dad's nose, Mom's chin, her dad's hair, his sister's brain—and look up to admire the scenery, while I can.

From HOW TO RUIN EVERYTHING: Essays by George Watsky, to be published on June 14th by Plume, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2016 by George Watsky.

Life Inside is an ongoing collaboration between the Marshall Project and VICE that offers first-person perspectives from those who live and work in the criminal justice system.

Being on certain substances is kind of like committing suicide on an installment plan.

My wife had left me, and my best friend had passed away. Although I still had everything I needed—a house, a car, two dogs—I didn't have much left in terms of a love of life. I had always been kind of a maintenance pothead, but one day I was watching an episode of Breaking Bad and started thinking about methamphetamine.

I decided: that's what I need to get rid of myself.

Once I was addicted, I sold my belongings to purchase meth. I had this Siddhartha-style plan, where I was going to rid myself of everything in my life and figure out what was valuable. It was cathartic. Meth turned out to be a potent anesthetic against emotions, a chemical solution to get my head to shut up.

Think about going to a bar and using alcohol as a social lubricant. Now go a step up, and then ten floors higher. I used substances to spackle areas I could have worked on.

My memory is like a movie: snapshots and then a fade to black.

The first time I got arrested, they didn't know what to do with me. I was an "upstanding citizen"—middle-class, prior service Marine. They kept letting me go. The judge didn't say to me, "You have a meth problem. We're sending you to rehab." It was just, "Don't do it again."

The last time, in December 2011, the judge finally sent me to jail on a $200,000 bond.

Inside, I started detoxing. I'd always been a husky guy—I'm 215 pounds now, about 5'9"—but at that point, after nearly two years of meth use, I was 145 pounds. There was a lot of hallucination and plenty of paranoia. I requested to be put in segregation in a cell by myself, where I slept for a week. Maybe I'd wake up and have a meal every once in awhile.

My memory is like a movie: snapshots and then a fade to black.

When I woke up and realized the true nature of my circumstances, I went to see a nurse and told her I was depressed. She gave me Celexa, an antidepressant. What that did was make me apathetic, a feeling that things just happened.

I spoke to my dad on the phone, and he told me that while I'd been inside, someone had broken into my home and taken my dogs. I'd rescued those animals, and in the end, they were all I had. That wasn't part of the plan, and yet it sort of was: It was because of associations I'd made from using drugs—someone knew where I lived and decided to take what I had.

I hung up the phone, went back to my cell, and thought, I'm gonna end it.

Usually this is where the superego steps in and says, "Wait! Stop! That's not a good idea!" But apparently because of the antidepressant and attendant apathy, my superego wasn't operating well.

I had to be careful that the guards weren't watching me, since they came around every 15 minutes. I don't know if I waited until the exact minute the guard walked away or I didn't care, but I wrapped a sheet around the top bunk and sat with my legs crossed on the bottom bunk and then slipped off. Sounds grew muted. My field of vision started narrowing, like tunnel vision.

I remember seeing a flashlight in the window. Someone opened the door and called for help. Someone else cut me down with a knife. They unwrapped the sheet and put me on a gurney. I remember someone, a guard, being excited and saying, "I've never done that before!"

I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in a suicide smock rolling around on the floor in a concrete room, an observation cell where one wall was all windows. Everyone was respectful. There was dignity, as much as could be. This wasn't some backwater town with Barney Fife telling me to shut up.

After two days, I had a large contusion around my neck from the sheet, but they moved me to a part of the jail for people with serious mental health issues. A padded cell with no toilet, just a drain in the floor. I spent a couple of hours there, then went to a cell for inmates who are a danger to themselves. I was still wearing a suicide smock—no metal or buttons, almost a dress. They gave me a suicide blanket, too, which was big and thick, like one you use for moving. I also got a rack for a mattress, but no mattress, and a toilet and sink unit. That's it. They'd come around and give us meals on foam trays, with no silverware, and a foam cup that's been cut so that the bottom is like a triangle. That's how you scoop your food.

I remember when I was allowed to go back to a regular cell, a corrections officer asked me, "Are we doing sheets today?" What he meant was: "Can we trust you? Are you going to try again?"

I said, "We're doing sheets."

I went back to my segregation room and laid down on a mattress for the first time in over a week. That was a pitiful, demoralizing moment. I spent another three weeks in there counting the days until I could meet with a judge, since I was still pre-trial. I wasn't allowed much to read, but they let me have a copy of "The Big Book," which is the main text for Alcoholics Anonymous. I had a lot of time and no solutions, and I found the problems described in the book weren't so different from my own. I did the first three steps on my knees in my cell.

After the jail did an investigation, I got a piece of paper with findings that said it was a suicide attempt, and I spent another seven days in segregation.

The third-person observer in me said, "If you live through this, find a way to use all this in a positive way. Make it worth it."

In early February 2012, a judge sent me to rehab. I might have gone to prison—that's what prosecutors initially proposed—but there was a new kind of intensive probation program for drug users on offer. The only trick was I had to plead guilty. They gave me a surveillance officer who would just randomly show up where I lived to check things out and give me a breathalyzer. I couldn't leave town without permission, and I had to call a number every day to see if I had to do a random urinalysis. That happened at least once a week, sometimes every day. This went on for three years until I was let off three months early, in November 2014.

Not long after, I enrolled in the Recovery Support Specialist Institute at the University of Arizona.

When I was doing drugs, there had always been this third-person observer in me, just watching the entropy of my life. I had been a project manager for technology companies, and my whole professional career was about painstakingly putting things together. But the process of entropy—of having everything fall apart—is much faster.

The third-person observer in me said, "If you live through this, find a way to use all this in a positive way. Make it worth it."

It redefined my mission in life, to begin helping people with what I went through. There's a movement in behavioral health of having people who've been through recovery serve as counselors. I can make a connection very quickly. I know the look in their eye. I say to them, "I know exactly where you're at."

I'm grateful the judge let me into that drug program. If he hadn't, I'd probably be a number in the Department of Corrections, or I wouldn't be alive.

If you are struggling with depression or suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

This account is based on interviews with a man who was incarcerated at the Pima County Jail in Tucson, Arizona. Now he works as a recovery specialist and trainer for professionals who work with populations affected by addiction and other mental health issues.

There's always been something weirdly magnetic about comedian Maria Bamford. You may have also come across her years ago on Comedy Central Presents, where her sensibility immediately had me hooked as a child. She always made her shortcomings as a functional member of society a touchstone, deepening her voice by a couple of octaves in her impression of the adult world. It sounded like the voice-over of a late night infomercial—aged 11, that seemed legit.

Bamford has steadily honed her craft in the decade-plus since. She's always been considered a comic's comic, appearing multiple times on Louie or being dubbed Stephen Colbert's favourite comedian. Yet still, she's orbited largely on the fringe.

Her new Netflix series, Lady Dynamite, isn't doing much to change that, but it should. The show, executive produced and co-created by Arrested Development's Mitch Hurwitz, is both a complement and a foil to Bamford's on-stage persona. Where her stand-up is steady with almost unnerving calm—both hands usually clench the microphone inches from her face – the series is frantic, Cybill by way of Pee-Wee.

The show chronicles Maria playing a version of herself, coming off a career upswing and crashing into a subsequent a mental breakdown. When Dynamite begins, Bamford is re-acclimating to life as we live it. The narrative unfolds over three timelines, handily labeled "past", "present" and "Deluth", the latter of which are scenes in her hometown of Deluth, Minnesota, where she moves in with her family in the aftermath of a bipolar episode, mirroring Bamford's real-life mental health issues.

Biographical elements crop up everywhere. In the first episode, Bamford installs a neighbourhood bench outside her bungalow's street corner to better connect with her community, which Bamford did IRL. In flashbacks, we see Bamford in popular ads for a mega-chain named CheckList, mimicking the same ones she actually did for US retailer Target. When her manager tries to coax her back into a similar commercial contract, Bamford says she would rather return to smaller performances, "like one alone in living room"– a sly nod to Bamford's last comedy special.

The breezy way that Lady Dynamite incorporates Bamford's complicated history is the latest in a line of inventive female-led comedies using trauma and personal history as a rich source of absurdity. In 2012, Comedian Tig Notaro processed her cancer diagnosis on-stage just hours after being given the news, in her now-famous Largo set. Most recently, Netflix's Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt touched on post-traumatic stress with a similar sense of childlike whimsy. Louis CK is the reigning king of absurd pathos, but his FX series never uses absurdity as an aesthetic. His view of the world emphasizes the natural freewheeling with the unnatural. His New York feels something like jazz.

Bamford, meanwhile, makes her world feel like a jingle. Lady Dynamite may not be the first show to mine complex insecurities for humour—comedy is, after all, tragedy plus timing—but it feels like one of the first in our era of mental health awareness to present the comedy as both problem and antidote. The chaos on display as Bamford tries to rebuild her career and personal life flip-flops between life before, during and after her depressive episode.

The colour palette of the series, shot by Heimo Ritzinger, changes in the "Deluth" chapters, dulling its bright yellows for icy blues, but the tone of the series remains brilliantly consistent all the way through. Maria's manic episodes, such as in one episode when she forces her parents and childhood frenemy to join her family garage band, maintain the same level of measured chaos as Maria in the present day, who uses the memories we see in flashbacks as the context for her being cautious in the present.

By fusing three distinct timelines in Bamford's life together, Dynamite brings the same level of absurdity into both her depression and recovery. The best moments of the series tend to be when the show's fun-house mirror allows us to see Maria the way she sees herself. A showbiz lunch with a hot potential agent (SNL's Ana Gasteyer, below, who steals every scene she's in) transforms Maria into a lamb; when Maria winds up back in the care of her parents in a flashback, she enters as a little girl.

The randomness is the staple of the show's two creators Mitchell Hurwitz and Pam Brady, of Arrested Development and South Park, respectively. Lady Dynamite operates with less ego than those series, though; here, the show's madness is less satire, and more abstract character development. The way the show shifts in mood and energy tells us more about the woman at its centre than the people in the writer's room, and it's exactly what makes Dynamite feel like it's breaking some kind of new ground.

It's hard to emphasise the radical quality of Bamford's creation, but it's no surprise that it takes something of a sales pitch. "Do the work," Maria's mother says to her in a flashback, echoing Bamford's own daily mantra. In real life, those three words help Bamford get a hold of herself when she wakes up, when she's about to go on stage, when she feels destabilised. Lady Dynamite both affirms and refutes that voice. It reminds us that she is of this world and not, formed by the sum of her anxieties and experiences—and so hard to take your eyes off.

@rodb

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Stephan family, minus Ezekiel. Photo via Facebook

This week Alberta parents David and Collet Stephan will finally face sentencing after being found guilty of failing to provide their 19-month-old son Ezekiel Stephan with the necessities of life earlier this year.

David and Collet find out their fate June 13.

Before he had a baby and settled down in 2014, "Ketamine Kev," as he was known to his friends in London, spent many of his work lunch breaks in a K-hole. Kevin would snort a fat line at 1 PM, and by the time he got back to his desk at a digital marketing agency, he'd spent the last hour "floating weightless atop an undulating green sea" at the park down the road. Kev and his girlfriend would often invite their friends for dinner to indulge in a few grams of K and a spot of Xbox.

That sort of lifestyle would be incredibly rare in America, where ketamine remains an unpopular underground drug, but in Britain the dissociative is consumed casually. You'll see it at post-club chill out parties, music festivals, and universities; it's also been name-dropped by mainstream bands such as Chemical Brothers, Blur, and Placebo. Last year, the British DJ Scuba told his Twitter followers he would give them a bump of the drug if they voted for him in a competition. Special K is associated with British dubstep, deep house, and other music scenes—so much so that some devotees have campaigned against ketamine—but the drug is seemingly beloved by all classes. In October, cops caught a friend of Kate Middleton's family driving with "regretamine" all over his face.

The UK's love of K has not made it across the Atlantic, at least not yet. The Global Drug Survey 2015, an online survey of 100,000 drug users around the world, found that a quarter of British respondents said they had used ketamine over the last year, compared to 5 percent of American drug users. The Monitoring the Future survey of US students found in 2011 that less than 2 percent of high school seniors had used ketamine in the past year; after that the drug was dropped from the survey.

So why do Brits like ket so much?

Ketamine was first synthesized in America in 1962 by scientists seeking a new anesthetic to replace PCP. Today it's used across the world in pediatric, emergency, and veterinary surgery—hence the "horse tranquilizer" tag—and it's shown promise as a method to treat depression.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, ketamine became popular in the illegal party and squatting scenes taking place in the south west of England. At the same time, it was also gaining traction amid the gay clubbing scene in London, where CK1, a term for consuming a mix of both ketamine and cocaine, was being used alongside GHB and ecstasy. Back then, Britain's rave culture—inspired by the MDMA-enhanced house and garage scenes in 1980s Chicago and New York—was growing exponentially, and illegal outdoor parties were giving way to huge corporate superclubs.

As MDMA went from being a subcultural phenomenon to a key player in the mainstream, ketamine piggy-backed on that drug's rise. Clubbers would snort it to ease ecstasy comedowns at a growing number of after-parties and chill-out events dominated by music genres like IDM, dubstep, and psytrance. It wasn't made illegal by the British government until 2006, but even after that, its popularity continued to grow.

A 2008 study of the drug in the UK by researchers at Lancaster University found that people took it because it was a seen as a sort of LSD-lite. One interviewee named Chaz told the researchers: "It's a laugh, a funny experience, a strange experience. What I like about it is that it doesn't last very long. I liked taking acid but it always went on for too long." It was also cheap (until recently, it could be bought for as little as $20 a gram), and the supply—thanks largely to people importing it in bulk in liquid form from Indian pharmacies—was plentiful.

The drug comes with a number of nasty side effects, however, including bad hallucinations (the notorious "K-hole"), severe kidney damage, and addiction. In recent years, a number of high-profile overdoses drew national headlines in the UK, such as Nancy Lee, who had regularly used ketamine from age 16 to her death at 23. One consultant neurologist I spoke to in 2014 told me he had 40 young ketamine-damaged patients on his books. Over the previous two years he had carried out five bladder removals and one kidney transplant due to the drug.

For more on drugs watch our doc on how to sell 'em:

Americans are no strangers to using harmful recreational substances, but according to Adam Auctor, who runs the Bunk Police, a drug testing organization that attends EDM events and music festivals in the US, ketamine has an image problem even among drug users.

"The majority of Americans who participate in substance culture view ketamine use negatively. It's seen as an antisocial substance due to its sedative properties at higher doses," Auctor told VICE. "Many also perceive ketamine use as too extreme. 'Why would you take a horse tranquilizer?' is a common sentiment. Many people see it as no different than something like heroin or oxycodone: escapist, trashy, and too extreme for most people who use MDMA." That opinon was echoed by ketamine experts VICE spoke to in the UK and by respondents on one of Reddit's drug forums.

Because ketamine never had the breakthrough moment in the US it had in the UK, it never got to the point where it become a cultural touchstone, and never got a boost in popularity from, say, a rapper's shoutout. "Ketamine is just not something that's mentioned at all in music, mainstream or otherwise," Auctor said. "It's also not something that many people consume in public."

Americans perhaps have less need for ketamine than drug users in the UK. When it comes to comedown panaceas, Americans have better access to high-grade marijuana. Plus, unlike the British, they can far more easily obtain the dissociative drug PCP (a cousin of ketamine), which is easier to manufacture. This doesn't mean Americans are necessarily choosing PCP, a.k.a. "angel dust," over ket, but, according to the National Forensic Laboratory Information System, there were 5,000 PCP seizures made by US authorities in 2014, compared to just 1,138 for ketamine.

In 2014, I spoke to Marcel Ketman, at the time one of the world's largest suppliers of ketamine on the dark web. "I sell a lot to the US, but this doesn't mean the drug is particularly popular there," he told me. "The US is tech-savvy and has a massive population. But in terms of sales, per capita the UK far outstrips the US."

The UK government increased penalties for ketamine possession in 2014, but there's obviously still a great deal of demand. This January, a series of raids on eight factories in India uncovered 1,200 kilograms of ketamine that India's Central Board of Excise and Customs believed was being produced for foreign markets such as the UK.

Some people believe that Americans will follow their British cousins down a K-hole. Auctor says that judging from analysis his team have carried out online, Triad groups in New York City may have become involved in selling the drug, imported into the US from Hong Kong.

A retired online drug seller also thinks ketamine could be the next big thing stateside, especially with the genre Yanks call EDM growing in popularity. "K has actually taken off quite a bit in America, it's just not reported much," he told VICE. "It's mainly trendy clubbers using it as a cool drug, having bumps here and there. It seems America is way behind the UK dance music-wise—they're at raves with dummies and whistles for fuck's sake—and the drugs always follow. So K will follow. Give it ten years and they'll all be wobbling around in warehouses with techno blasting till 8 AM on a Tuesday morning."

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The first thing I learned when I caddied as a teenager is that no matter what, you never have any change. If you've just finished hauling some tanned banker's bag and he asks if you can break a $100 bill—so he can give you $60 or whatever—always tell him you don't have any cash. He won't be thrilled about it, but he'll almost always give you the hundo.

In time, older caddies taught me other tricks, like keeping extra balls in my pocket. If the golfer was playing Titleist 3s, I'd have those fuckers ready to go, and if he shanked his shot into the woods, I'd pretend to search for it for about a minute before dropping a backup ball casually out of my pants and claiming I had discovered the real one. It was a lie that kept us both happy: I appeared to be closely paying attention to his game; he didn't have to knowingly cheat.

These were some great life lessons, but perhaps the best thing about caddying was that I got to see the One Percent in their natural element. I've spied on presumably trust-funded bros as they dumped woodchips into the water cooler at the turn, just for fun. One particularly dreary evening, a mean and hostile gentleman left part of his bag unzipped, and as he walked up a hill, money started falling out. I gathered it all up without question.

I recently asked some current and former caddies what they've witnessed the upper class do on the course. Most of the resulting stories were pretty horrible, because as a caddie, those are the ones you remember. As one interviewee noted, "It's always hilarious to see rich, old white men threaten to kill one another."

Without further ado:

Peter

I rolled into the country club one morning at my normal start time, 6 AM, to find a black Suburban parked outside of the building we used as a hotel for members and members' guests. The car was running, and there was driver in it. I couldn't figure out why this vehicle was waiting outside, and I felt I should ask if he needed anything. When I approached the guy to figure out what was up, he didn't roll down his window to say anything. He looked at me, turned away, looked at me again, and went back to staring at his cellphone.

Turns out, he was a pimp. One of the wealthy members, on a weekend getaway with some buddies, was renting out the hotel. This member—let's call him "Mr. Smith"—decided, after getting sufficiently plastered, that it was time for a little extra fun in the carnal sense.

The only issue, though, was that I was caddying for the township's chief of police that morning. I mentioned how I thought it was strange the driver in the Suburban wouldn't roll down his windows. When the chief went over there to ask him about his business, the driver responded that his girls were inside, and he was waiting for them to finish up with a client. Without me knowing, the chief then arranged, later that morning, for the police to arrest Mr. Smith and the prostitutes on their way out of the hotel.

By 8 AM, word had gotten out about Mr. Smith's activities. Not long after, a call came over the walkie-talkies that Mrs. Smith had just arrived to hit some golf balls and play a quick round, despite the fact she knew her husband was on a guys' weekend.

The employees thought it best to inform Mr. Smith of his wife's arrival and that it was probably in his best interest to get the fuck out of there. A valet pulled up his car to the back of the hotel, so nobody would notice him leaving. He made it to the gate, along with the pimp and the two prostitutes, where he was detained by the cops.

Later on, housekeeping filled in some of the details. Mr. Smith, apparently, was very into "ass stuff," they said," and it got the room pretty messy. However, he picked up the tab, and it was soon cleaned, repainted, and redecorated.

Mr. Smith is no longer a member of the club, as he was kicked out for "indecency."

Kevin

Growing up, I caddied and worked in the bag room at a prestigious private golf club in central New Jersey. Here are three things every caddie knows: The best golfers are the least asshole-ish guys; if someone's filthy rich and has no need to show off wealth, he or she is always nicer than the people who are moderately wealthy and have to brag about it; finally, most people cheat.

Every year, the club hosts a golf outing and hires strippers to go around with the players. On each tee, a girl in a short skirt would bend completely over and tee up the ball for the golfers. On one occasion, another caddie and I saw a guy finger one of the strippers while his friends were putting.

After another tournament, during the banquet dinner, a guy had sex on the first tee box. At a different party, a member and his wife were complaining about the meal, and the chef came out of the kitchen, punched the man in the face, and quit. The owner of the club also pissed in the icebox next to the bar that night.

Mathias

I'm a caddie who frequently works on the Latin American PGA Tour. Once, in the Dominican Republic, I caddied for this guy from the South. He loved God and his family, because he told me, repeatedly, that he loved God and his family. He talked about how much he wanted people to come to Bible study. While he played, he recited verses from the Bible. He struck me as a stand-up guy, and it didn't bother me that he was so vocal about his religion.

On the 17th hole, though, he smashed a driver farther than I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of drives. I said "nice shot," or something to that effect. He responded with, "We have a saying down in the South: I wouldn't even hit a nigger that hard in the face." It was, to this day, the most racist thing I've ever heard.

Michael

I recall an interaction on a wide-open par five fairway between the a randy member of a foursome and a concessions cart driver. This was at a private course in New Jersey, where the clubhouse was an old fox hunting manor and Wall Street executives would helicopter in for an afternoon of golf.

The driver was a young girl, about 20, and cute in a sexy way. She wore white Chuck Taylors and short shorts. The randy man, who was handsome and probably like 45, ordered four beers with a smooth, bedroom voice. She smiled and went to the cooler, where she bent over to reach the bottles of beer. She handed the beers to the men, and the smooth guy paid her. She then said, "Thank you, sir." I assume the tip was large.

The guy wasn't finished, though. He dropped a ball onto the fairway: "Listen, sweetheart, if I hit it on the green, you're coming to dinner with me." He had a thick Italian-Jersey accent. I could see her round cheeks. He took a practice swing. He took another. He stepped up to the ball, cleared his throat, and maneuvered his body into pose for the shot. He drew the club back and came hard down on the ball, striking it at the toe of the club, launching it straight at the concessions driver, rather than toward the green. The girl had been standing in front of the cart but wasn't hit. The men rushed toward her, making sure she was OK, panicking at how close she could've been knocked out. The randy man's smooth voice went up a few octaves.

Sammy

The summer before freshman year of high school, I caddied at this course in an extremely wealthy part of Denver. I don't have much experience with other country clubs, but I can't imagine you could get any more cliché than this Stepford-esque fuckhole. The clubhouse looked like the hunting lodge that the woman-hater in the OG Disney Snow White hung out. I'm 13 or 14 or whatever, questioning my sexuality, super into punk rock and rap and anything that would piss off my suburban parents and peers. My best friend was into the same, and his mom forced us into this caddie program.

The next morning, my friend and I showed up on the practice green in ripped black jeans, surrounded by khaki-wearing assholes. The caddie master's name was Skip and he was all kinds of racist and anti-Semitic. The dude never looked me in the eye once, and he was always doing terrible shit, like uncomfortably hugging the only two girls who worked there for horrendously long periods of time. Yeah, I fucking hated Skip.

There was a lot of despicable shit, but the worst of it really was the fact that I didn't get paid. Skip operated on the "chit" system. After you worked your round for the day (if you were lucky enough to get a round), you handed your chit to golfer whose bag you carried. He would rate you and write down the amount he wanted to pay and tip, and then you would cash out in the caddie shack with Skip.

Not a completely terrible idea, except I never got paid. Skip would say the safe was broken, or locked—stupid excuses. I can't claim it was discrimination, but whatever the fuck was going on, it didn't happen to anybody else. After a while, my mom (who should never be fucked with) realized something was wrong. I told her what was happening—that I wasn't getting paid—and she stormed in there, got all the money I was owed, and I never fucking went back.

A few years later, my mom was telling a coworker about the whole Skip situation, and it turned out this lady was the wife of one of the loaded higher-ups at the club. He said something, and they fired Skip. So I guess not all rich people are terrible. Just an overwhelming majority are.

*Last names have been omitted, and some names have been changed, at the request of the subjects, for privacy.

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All photos by the author

In October, 2015, I went to Krakow, Poland to host and produce a documentary for THUMP about how a non-profit music festival called Unsound was transforming a subterranean salt mine into a literally-underground techno party, as well as repurposing historic spaces across the city as cutting-edge performance venues. Unfortunately, at the time, I was also trying to get over a break up that sucker-punched me right in the soul, depleting the majority of my remaining confidence.

While I was in Poland, I took a lot of photos. I was drawn to the tension between the city's history and the hyper-modern festival. Krakow—with its preserved building facades, post-Soviet vibes, and excess of elderly people—felt antiquated to me. Unsound and its lineup of experimental and international artists, on the other hand, was anything but retro. Together, the film shoot sometimes felt like an attempt to record an anachronism.

To distract myself from the feeling that someone had inadvertently boofed my heart, I snapped photos of men by themselves, couples who looked happy, and sad-sack scenes on overcast days. I was attracted to moments of other people experiencing solitude, privacy, and intimacy, despite being surrounded by cameras and feeling pretty exposed and vulnerable because it was my first time hosting a documentary for VICE. I wanted to get lost in the past (a time when I was still in that relationship) or jump into the future. The present, with the production crew and fringe techno music, was sometimes too overwhelming.

When I look back at these photos years from now, I hope I can't identify what year I took them in. That's not to say they're timeless, but sometimes stuff like music, relationships, and foreign cities are easier to get lost or immersed in when they don't feel anchored to a date. Unsound may have added fresh energy to Krakow, but when you're heartbroken, you only see the things you want to see.

Scroll below to peep a selections of my photos from the trip.

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The author, ready for a day of royalist fun. All photos by Chris Bethell

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

It's 8 AM on a Saturday morning, and I'm in a part of central London that most people try to avoid to bypass the hordes of tourists. But here I am anyway, throwing myself into a day that couldn't be a more stereotypical idea of what tourists imagine England to be.

We're in the middle of the Queen's official birthday weekend, Union Jack flags flapping everywhere you turn, where thousands of people have crammed themselves around St. James Park, Green Park and Buckingham Palace to see 1,600 soldiers and 300 horses perform the Trooping the Colour parade down the Mall for the old monarch.

I moved to London from America in September to study photojournalism and I feel like I've assimilated as well as a loud-mouthed American can do. I drink cider at my local pub. I walk in the rain and pretend it's not getting my socks wet. I feel I've found my place in London.

Not to do something half-assed (or arsed as you Brits say), I decide to go big with Trooping the Colour. My basic understanding is that it's a parade in which troops bear their regimental flags or "colours" to celebrate the British sovereign's official birthday.

That's not the same as the Queen's real birthday though, because Edward VII wasn't too into celebrating his birthday with outdoor activities in November. George VI—this Queen's dad—then made the official birthday in June a thing, to dodge his December birthday. And so my first level of bemusement comes to be—only in England would they change the date of a celebration to better the chances of the weather being good.

Anyway, I stroll up to people between Green Park and the Victorian Monument to get some answers to my mounting questions. First, why would people travel here just to have a possibly impaired, fleeting view of the Queen?

Here's Joseph Afrane. He's from Ghana, one of the Commonwealth countries, and says he's here to show not only his loyalty, but also his appreciation of how much she helps the economy. "People stay in the hotels for today. And she does so much work with charities. She helps people," he says.

I happen across three pensioners known in the royalist scene for their commitment. Their outfits show as much. Margaret Tyler baked a birthday cake for the Queen's 80th and 90th birthdays, and "hopes to bake a cake for her 100th birthday," while Tony Appleton is so legit that he hands me one of his own business cards claiming himself as a royalist and town crier.

Just kicking back with Margaret Tyler, Tony Appleton, and Terry Hutt (left to right)

He explains to me that "meeting the Queen when I was 17 and in the navy was the start of my life." Terry Hutt, who we last saw in April for the Queen's actual birthday, tells me that as an orphan, the royal family is his family and that "the royal blood is his blood." He says he was outside the hospital for the births of both Princess Charlotte and Prince George. Like I said: committed.

I then come across a group of women dressed in traditional Bavarian garb.

Christine Kaufmann, Lisa Burghart, Melissa Imhoff, and Anita Pfaffingir

Lisa Burghart and her friends say they came out just for the Queen's 90th because "she met so many people and now she can see us." I'm not entirely sure she can see us all, but fair enough.

It's now roughly 9 AM. Things are picking up and I'm starting to feel pretty excited. I find a girl wearing a Happy Birthday hat and ask her, her mother, and her mother's friend why they've staked out their spot for hours just to see the Queen go by.

Here's Charlotte Diaper, Amanda Rose, and Lindy Diaper (left to right)

Amanda Rose, in a sharp Union Jack vest, is quick to correct me. "It's not just to see the Queen. It's to bring people together and to show our support of the troops," she says.

To get into things a bit more, I buy a Union Jack flag and strike a pose with some "bobbies"—I just learned that nickname today.

I walk along the Mall and up to a soldier selling programs today, who is normally in the Irish Guards. He basically swerves all my questions about his daily life as a soldier and today's festivities but throws me a couple of winks after refusing to share his name. I dub him The Enigma.

Next comes the moment we've all been waiting hours for: the parade. As an ardent horse-lover, the echo of hooves on pavement almost captivates me more than seeing the Queen. But it's cool to see her too. What I am most impressed by during the parade is that the spectators not only cheered for the royal family, but also the troops and police officers. Their gratitude did not extend, however, to the street cleaners getting rid of the horse shit, who in my mind may have put in the hardest work today.

Just before 1 PM, making my way back to Buckingham Palace on the Mall, I meet Grace from Ghana. She finished her shift at work and then came down to the celebrations. "I have lived here since 1985," she says. "If I am in London, I come to the Trooping the Colour. I wouldn't miss it. Even work this morning didn't stop me."

And that's how this celebration seems to work: people here feel as though the least they can do for their Queen is show up, wave a little flag around, and cheer. I find myself getting swept up in it all, mostly because I've never seen this many Brits in one place all smiling so broadly. Ever. The people I speak to don't seem too concerned with questioning why they care about the Queen so much, when she just happened to be born into her family and life of privilege; they feel no justification is needed. But that's not what today is about. It's about an easily embraced sense of patriotism. And a bit of drizzle too, of course.

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OK, I have a fucked up sense of nostalgia. Photo via Flickr user waferboard

The mural featured several beefy tigers slinking down a cascade of grand steps flanked by classical marble columns. Their cartoonish eyes seemed to follow you no matter where you stood. It struck me as something one might find on the wall of a drug dealer's rec room. Not an especially successful drug dealer, but one with enough coin for a white Camaro and a purebred dog ("He's a big softy," he'd say as the animal's jaws clamped around your thigh). Fortunately, I was not standing in a drug dealer's rec room—which would have been especially awkward as I was wearing a nametag. The mural was painted along the length of my high school gymnasium, a site of misplaced ambitions and broken noses in its own right.

Dear Surrey, you've changed, man. Maybe it's for the best.

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All the world 's a stage, and all we are merely playas. Image photoshopped via the author

When I was in elementary school, the first thing I did with new dictionaries was find the bad words, circle them, and draw helpful illustrations in the margins for the next kid. This was before smartphones and streaming porn came to Saskatchewan. Over the years, my love of language evolved: I eventually took Latin and Ancient Greek in university and discovered no job prospects (hence, this story) and also a wonderful world of language histories. Meanwhile, my love of filth remained unbreakable and constant.