comrade simba

Believe it or not, back in 2000 I was daily listening to web casts of Rush Limbaugh. Pendulums are funny things - it’s a long arc from California beach hippy to registered republican, and a shorter arc back.

The Internet is an amazing tool. Some where in a surf I came across the idea that the best way out of a rut is to really explore the other side. Maybe it was a Buddhist thing. Anyway, I decided to go slumming over at the left wing sites and all the things Ollie North & Co. found abhorrent. Turns out Howard Stern is one funny guy, and a few holes developed in my filter. Realizing I was on to something I named myself comrade simba just because it brought up a vision of some afro’d militant commie revolutionary - the furthest thing possible from middle class white people in North America.

The pendulum had swung to it’s lowest point on the arc about the time of the ‘04 elections. I was not liking Bush, and Kerry just made me want to kick puppies. Michael Badnarik caved and got a driver’s license. The bottom was in. We had moved to the farm, doom was in full swing, I found Cryptogon, Latoc, Survival Acres, etc. Also I was months away from the end of my 10 year driver’s license revocation, soon to be no longer transportationaly challenged, and totally disgusted with the State’s legal apparatus from 6 years of hardship denial on a “blow in the tube” technicality. “Comrade Simba”, the joke name, had come alive.

Good thing I wasn’t in my twenties, or maybe I would have thought of other things to do with fertilizer than top dress squash. I realized it really was all a joke - the world was a ponzie scheme and the meaning of life was more like chasing butterflies in the garden with my kid than being a consumer. I didn’t go build shit for other people for money once I got the license back - instead, getting self sufficient became more of my focus. The energy had gone out of the pendulum, by ‘08 I didn’t care if Obama could save the world - I just didn’t want to go to the trouble of digging a root cellar and painting a sign that said “Thanks, McCain” to hang above the entrance.

There is no Communist tendency associated with the name. There is no militancy, either. There’s just you, and me, and we either drop out of the mold the elite masters have set out for us and grow some shit to eat, or suffer through the powerdown looking for scraps in the garbage heap civilization devolves into once the power’s out and there’s paper bags on all the gas pumps. We don’t need pitchforks for a revolution - we just need to do a lot of quitting. Our pendulum is swinging back from the fantasy of unlimited energy into a more human scale energy base. My battle with the 21st century is almost over. My comrades will make the transition with me, and the rest will scrabble along on their personal power trips.

And so, comrade simba it is. I could start posting as “Fred” but it’s already been taken. I don’t capitalize it either, ‘cuz it’s more of an idea than a name. I doubt the NSA or DHS search filters will catch the subtlety; if in doubt put him on the list. But I’m betting that by the time they start printing out the lists to distribute to law enforcement, somebody will have forgotten to stock up on copy paper…

I felt like saying thanks for the comments from y’all. I may seem self absorbed and crotchety but I gotta say that every comment is piece of support for what I’m doing out here.

I was reading chickory’s last comment and something tumbled around inside - here’s a lady roughing it out in the Georgia outback planting shit for her family’s future security. That deserves an attagirl from all of us.

Here’s a question - does anyone else feel more connected with the other people that show up here? Anybody want me to hook up a chat module, or I checked out Twitter and it seems easy enough for us to get a touching base community going on with that.
So I put up https://twitter.com/comradesfarm
C’mon by if you want.

Thanks everybody - I really mean it.

That’s my polite response to the usual “how’s it going” generic greeting you get from anyone between total stranger and most family members. Total politeness asks us to return “…and how are you doing?” I don’t go that far. It’s not that I’m impolite, but I know damn well how 99% of the people I meet and greet are doing. I don’t want to start a conversation based on “I’m doing fine, thanks for asking. You, however, are probably destined to suffer horribly and die with a ‘this can’t be happening’ look in your eye when the financial empire goes bazzoo and the economy collapses”.

2-4-6-8 Who do we annihilate? Die off, die off, fuuuuck you!

Now, I’m not immune to lab altered swine flu virus sprayed from black helicopters, and there’s more than remote chance a marauding band could hit me before I can snipe them, but all in all I’ll live on until the heart blows up, cancer cuts me down, or a bizarre farming accident takes me out. What I won’t do is die from starvation, food poisoning, exposure, or riots and police actions. And that is my number one justification for throwing myself out here in the weeds and being responsible for a big garden and a hundred assorted critters demanding care multiple times a day.

It’s not that I want a massive kill/dieoff - I also don’t want it to be 97 degrees outside with 80% humidity. Bitching about the weather won’t change it; feeling one way or another about the masses’ future is just as pointless. I don’t even believe that all of humanity could avoid needless suffering by immediately ceasing to produce more offspring and embarking on a drastic anti-consumer lifestyle change - a minor snag like what to do with the surplus fast food employees would deal a fatal blow to any possible orderly transition.

That’s why you don’t hear TBTB talk about slowing the maw of consumption. Americans could easily stop buying worthless plastic crap they don’t need, cook their own meals from real ingredients, and not go to the mall for new clothes without suffering any real hardship - hell, it wouldn’t even be an inconvenience! But our entire economic system would collapse at a negative 20% growth rate.

So I’m living amongst 300 million mindless consumers that have built a society that collapses if a significant minority break out of their programming and stop buying shit they don’t need with money they don’t have. That’s, simply put, a dangerous situation if one finds themselves dependent in all areas on the system staying intact. Ergo - I grow shit.

Notice that this whole screed is dependent on my personal belief that collapse will happen without anybody doing anything differently. No data or statistics to support what I think, just wild assed assumptions. Dismiss me as a crackpot if you will, but I won’t be the one asking “howyadoin?”

So I owe Wells Fargo 57K for the rental house. The restoration bid was 65K, and after the insurance company ran the depreciation numbers into their Auto-Fuck the Insured computer the check will be 54K. Some guy offered 5K for the burned carcass, so I could just walk away with a couple thousand and be done with it.

However, I’d have a hard time spending more than 22K on materials to get the place salable for what we owe on it, maybe even low 60’s. So I think I’m going to come out of retirement (bwahahaha), strap on the nail bag and have one more go at a gut and strip remodel job. 32K for six months of god damn construction hassle is just too much money to walk away from.

Maybe it’s a mid life crisis. Swagger around with my leather framer bags hanging off my hips sweating like pig. Perhaps it’s an opportunity to rail against suburbia as I beat lathe and plaster off walls and bitch about the state of youth in this country ‘cuz ya can’t get any good help anymore. It’s probably simple greed. I want a tractor that runs, farm implements, a doomer shopping spree at the gun store and the wife wants a new kitchen. My inner doomer senses big change coming soon, so a lot of this is just one last huzzah! before TSHTF and I never leave the county again. Hey - a lot of so called doomers are taking a last trip to Disneyland while dollars can still be spent. Makes sense that I’d opt for saddling myself with a mega project when puttering in the tomatoes is a full time gig.

Waiting on the check…

And not enough time to get it all done.

Folks, I’m mentally zorched and physically pulped. My wife laughed and said she’s pissed at me for not being able to do the impossible. The crops and critters are a job in themselves, add the doomer building projects in the soup and the plate is too full to do much blogging.

Then the rental house garage got torched - probably neighborhood kids who found the door wide open to the alley irresistible. Had so much fun with that they came back a few days ago and set fire to the house itself.

So add a heap of insurance paperwork, mortgage upside downness and fire restoration (read: gut and strip) to the pot and weigh corn planting on one hand and sheet rock on the other.

If I play my cards right I may get a tractor out of this fiasco. Bad hand and I lose my ass… I just wanted to putter in the tomatoes whiling away my sunset years… God damn 21st century.

ps. posted a better quality vid to the previous post.

Some day he will be able to exercise the option of not getting in the police car…

Gotta watch out for those 2nd graders…

He won the 2nd grade spelling bee, too. The girls on the bus give him candy. Made honor roll, btw. Grows green beans.

This probably should be relegated to the “don’t feed the trolls” school of thought, but when moved, I post.

skye Says:

Your “better life” is not a life that all would live happily and so we get into the definition of “better” and how subjective it is. Why is it that you are so angry at people for making their own choices–especially those that don’t directly impact you? As a NON-LAZY fat grrl, I’m especially put off by your venom for people of my size.

It’s a shame…this blog was one of my favorites.

Skye - 99.99% of the population is living a lifestyle based on an infinite supply of unfathomably cheap energy slaves known as oil. Many will be unhappy when the lifestyle of Petroleum Man sorta… doesn’t seem to be happening anymore. I guarantee their transition from their present enjoyable lifestyle into a post petroleum one will be viciously painful. Most won’t make it.

I don’t think you understand the level of commitment it takes to spend 20 hours bent over in all kinds of weather to grow and harvest an amount of beans you can get for two bucks at the walmart. Modern agribusiness and our consumer culture do directly “impact” me - via an impossible to compete with market playing field, starting with the fact that it is illegal to sell dairy and poultry products without enslaving yourself to the very thing that’s killing us off.

Take away your high fructose caloric inputs and add in the manual labor that goes with freehold homesteading and those extra pounds you’re toting around would disappear real quick. “Fat” is the result of access to more than your own input - in the days of old only the Emperors and the ruling class carried around extra pounds. Dinosaur juice allows anyone to be able to block the isles at walmart.

There is no way that anyone with the most rudimentary reading comprention (hahaha) skills has failed to grasp that my attitude towards plasticland and all that blindly populate that mecca of pointless activity is less than respectful. On most days I don’t think a couple of high altitude EMP bursts wouldn’t be such a bad thing at all in the grand scheme of things. I’m not catering to the apartment dwelling crowd…

Periol splits urban insanity, airdrops himself out here and all of a sudden, after I’ve thrown myself at this freehold for 14 hours since sunup I have somebody here who’s happy to milk the goats and button up the critters for the night. I’m more than happy to host a post mentioning the  “fat and slow and helpless” bulk of people that clot up the drainpipe our civilization has become.

And Namste -  (Bowing in your general direction),Three pounds of flax! ;-D

posted by Periol

Been here on the ’stead for almost three weeks now, so I guess it’s about time for my first post.   Most of my time I’ve just been holed up here, working and learning.  Which is as it should be.  There are various chores that require us making reentry into the normal world for time-to-time, but for the most part there’s no need to go anywhere or do anything but take care of animals, take care of plants, and take care of the million projects that need to get done.

But tonight we headed out to the community meeting for the group that runs the “community garden” that no one uses, and a couple of local farmer’s markets.  Didn’t know what to expect, but I didn’t expect to walk away that depressed about the future of this area and the future of this country.  There are a couple of older farmers there who seem like they know what they’re about, and a few older women fired up about living healthy lives, but for the most people who showed up were fat and slow and helpless.

I guess I was hoping that we’d be talking at least a little bit about how to raise community awareness about the changes already happening in our society.   I guess I was hoping for more than listening to some amateur harpist play xian and irish jingles, or having some group chakra therapy with percussion instruments.  Even the time when we had group sharing about homeopathic remedies was ruined for me by the discussion of which remedies you could pick up at Wal-Mart.  I guess I figured that out of a room filled with more than 50 people, we’d sell out of the “farm fresh” eggs we were selling for $1 a dozen.   But no.

I could go on and on, but I won’t.  I grew up a city boy, and I’ve seen first-hand the toxic rot that is fast “food” and high-fructose corn syrup and cheap oil and suburban sprawl.  But in a lot of ways, in the city you have no choice.  Here in the country, there’s a choice, and America has clearly chosen to sell it’s soul for convenience, toxic crap, and American Idol.  Ugh.

Most of my city friends think I’m here on Comrade’s farm on a kind of vision quest - get away for a while, learn some new tricks, but in the end I’ll come back to the fold and take my 20 mile commute and Big Mac and occasional forays to the Whole Foods for my expensive organic kick.   They don’t understand that I’m not just doing this because I think we’re running out of oil, or that I’m tired of the city.  I’m here because this is a better life.  I’m here because this is better food.  I’m here because I think real community means taking care of each other, not depending on nameless faceless corporations that couldn’t care less about me to handle my needs.

I don’t need to be told what’s good for me.  My body tells me it’s happy not being chained to a desk all day.  My mind tells me it’s happy not having an endless list of things to do that don’t matter but I have to pretend they do anyways.  Every single organ in my body tells me they’re happier not trying to strip the toxins from the food I eat.  My eyes open in the morning and for the first time in a while, they’re happy about it, because this is a better life.

I guess I was hoping that coming to a place like this, with a long history of people living close to the land, I would be able to find some kindred souls.  There are a few people with real wisdom around here.  Sadly, they’re from an older generation, no one listens to them, and they have their hands full just keeping themselves going anyways.

Hey, I used to be a fat, lazy convenience addict too.  There’s always a little speck of hope that people can change.  But after tonight, I’m not holding my breath.  America used to be a great nation once.  But let’s not kid ourselves.  Every morning you flush the toilet after excreting the toxic waste products of your super-sized McDonald’s value meal from the night before, you’re flushing a little of America’s soul right along with it.

So yeah, wasn’t such a good meeting.  And until something comes along that forces people to wake up, I don’t see them getting better.  Oh well.  At least tomorrow the sun will shine for a bit, and we’ll get some time in the garden.  Things could be worse.

I actually got to leave the farm without worrying about the goats getting out on the road, pigs squealing with hunger,  bunnies and chicks out of water and cooking in the sun, and getting home soon enough to milk the goats before their udders look like dangling basketballs.  In between all that he planted a bed of peanuts. The next day we dug some post holes… just so happens that  those four holes were where a nice rock shelf lives so lots of rock bar and sledge action was required. He stuck it out to the very end so that shows he’s no wuss.

Comrade is happy. Can’t find any fault but I do get a kick out of watching newbies in action:

rooster

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwBjbaZUzBE

There’s a bloddy mass of something on the cutting board right now as he solos his first gutting/dressing… project?

If the rain ever goes away we can start in on some serious food growing - it’s just a mudhole out here with all the spring rains. The usual weed encroachment is in full force and I’d like to avoid playing the “Where’s the Beet?” game this year. Periol claims to not have a problem with marathon weed sessions so I’m looking forward to long in depth conversations about societal asshattery as we work our way down the beds.

My poor knees…

Get a Monty Python visual of that just for a laugh, but a new truth flashed into existence and just has to be stated for the record -

I am absolutely tired of my life being dictated by the norms of suburbia.

What the hell am I talking about? I’m supposed to be all off grid and self sufficient blah blah blah and all that rot, right? As far out there as I am, I’ll rant about a number of examples for your entertainment…

Every god damn week I gotta leave this place and mow the fucking world. See, the mother in law has a pacemaker and can’t mow up her monster corner lot in the 3 bed 2 bath gov’t subsidized low income  suburban housing tract she lives in. By herself. We can’t pay 40 bucks a whack to hire somebody to do it, since we’re already splitting her cable bill with the wife’s sister and sending farm food up at the end of the month as the food stamp allotment can’t match the actual grocery bill. Blah blah blah. I cover my costs by charging my mother (who isn’t hurting for money) less than 1/2 of what she was paying the regular guy and since 15 bucks barely covers gas and maintenance I mow her neighbor’s yard for dirt cheap, too. Wouldn’t you know, I opened my mouth to her neighbor’s neighbor and so I got that one, too. Woohoo actual profit!

Problem is, those suburbanites freak if the grass isn’t groomed like clockwork, and it tends to rain now and then, or goats are giving birth, or I gotta move the pigs or I’m all stove up or just flat burned out and need a break from 16 hour days of responsibility (mow day is actually a lighter day than a typical day on the ’stead). So I know they’re all pissing and moaning at the tangled mass of foliage making the neighbors think low-lifes live there. I hate stress.

We went into self-quarantine lockdown last Thursday until we could get a better idea of how this flu thing was shaping up. Took the kid out of school (after the District Spelling Bee was over - he placed 4th, heh heh), took flak from my family for screwing up birthday plans, the principle has one more piece of ammo to deem us kooks with, his friend is pissed because he couldn’t go on a bowling party, and since the flu is not as deadly as it could be (yet?) it’s either send him back Monday or home school with all that attendant bureaucratic hassle.

Norm and Norma of Suburbia say yuk to raw goat’s milk and there is only so much cheese we can eat as a family. What to do with the surplus? I just want to have a couple of steady buyers who appreciate real nutritious food and can keep their mouths shut to pay for feed and make our costs approach zero for all things dairy. Getting tired of hauling 6 or 7 dozen eggs to town and having to make an effort to sell them for a buck and a quarter to compete with the VoleMart since 100% running loose bug and seed fed naturally high in  omega-3 fatty acids chicken eggs might have a bit of poop on them. Obviously full of contaminants. And don’t forget to wash your hands to avoid Swine Flu as says our President…

And, I tell you, this whole Community Garden and “Back 2 Basics” county thing is the epitome of futility. I got to assign two plots recently - to a lady who wants to grow gladiolus to sell at the new B2B Farmer’s Market. Like I wanna shell out 15 bucks and fill out a form and make a moral decision to claim sales for state tax purposes or be a cheat. Maybe we’ll have another food swap at the monthly meeting where everybody can trade the cake they picked up at the VoleMart on the way over with some cookies another bought from Price Cutter. Nice meetings, though - gives me a venue for engaging in criminal activity - finding a buyer for a 1 1/4 pound ball of cheese for 4 bucks…

At least I got Peroil here to take care of the farm on Mow Day so the wife can bake bread and make potato chips and granola cereal and do her online teaching without having to know what each feather or hide covered critter is needing at all times. I think I’ll take that profit mow and use it to pay cash for critter feed (cash sales are subject to sales tax but not on my feed store account - they can find the small operators to regulate if they supoena the records…). Screw selling crap - feed the surplus to the pigs. Take that, Norm.