And one day we will die
And our ashes will fly
From the aeroplane over the sea
But for now we are young
Let us lay in the sun
And count every beautiful thing we can see
Love to be
In the arms of all I’m keeping here with me
From Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the “Aeoroplane Over The Sea”
American Express said don’t leave home without it. I prefer not to leave home at all. Wife and kid y’know. We are something – everything we need to be.
Remember that Namaste dude that would post his lofty buddha jewels of wisdom in my direction in the comments section? I got tired of his shit and zorched him from the blog so he went over to my youtube channel and started in over there. By the way he claims to be a monk on a mountaintop in Thailand, but tracing his ISP yields a dallas tx address – go figure…
So I zapped him there and the same type of comments keep showing up under other you tube users’ names. They all have some “loser” theme to them and I gotta wonder what a fulfilling life one must have to spend the time creating accounts to post inflammatory comments on a youtube of me building a rocket stove. Click delete, block user etc and on my merry way. But I got to thinking and came up with this. So here’s to you namaste or whomever it is that feels the need to be greater than me:
<rant>Yep, I’m a loser. Got no friends to speak of that I go do things with, walk out the door and the things happy to see me are just dumb animals critters lookin’ for food and Sandy the Goat with that plaintiff “milk me” bleat. No gainful employment… the wife works, y’know. The skill sets I would be willing to share with others are not in any great demand, I don’t do chitchat well, and any conversation lasting over two minutes segues into shit that makes people highly uncomfortable, such as the skyrocketing rate of birth defects in Fallujah… couldn’t be all that depleted uranium ordnance now, could it?
I’m just plain anti social and I would have a higher tolerance for ignorance if there wasn’t so damn much of it everywhere you god damn go. A stark reality blinds me to the bright side of life when I come into contact with 99 out of 100 humans – today a Census lady came to the door – musta been 80 years old, had trouble walking and I thought how fucking sad it is that she’s forced to go after money – to collect info for the same system that used her up and said “fuck you very much”. And God help me not look at other people’s cart contents or method of payment when I go to the poison outletgrocery store…
I’m also flat out morbid. I see corpses wherever I look – The mass of busy people being all busy in the workaday world. A sense of glee comes over me when I see a new vacancy in a strip mall, another house up for sale with tall grass in the yard, and my absolute favorite – an obviously abandoned new construction project. Bad economic forecasts make me happy – I hear the death rattle of our screwed up culture in Green Speak and political discourse. I’ve tried to envision an owner of a jet ski who grows their own food; show me a new Cadillac owner and I’ll show you someone who starves when the food trucks stop rolling into the supermarkets.
I could go on forever – it’s an ugly shitty world out there so don’t find fault with me for wanting to listen to birdsong while I spread compost on the asparagus bed here on the ol’ homestead. Forgive me for being intolerant of your lactose intolerance and cluelessness about factory farm dairy products if you’re not milking goats twice a day. My life is my fault – there’s six different kinds of animal shit tracked into the kitchen every day – if you drop the toast it’s now chicken food – no two second rule applies in our house. But I’d say home is where the chickens run free – anything else is just four walls.
So I ain’t got jack, have no desire for wealth or social acceptability, and my greatest achievement is shitting in a bucket and making a mud stove. My lack of all normal ambition knows no bounds. I am truly a wretched specimen of all things civilized – a loser by any standard of decency. I am 40 acres without the mule and somehow quite satisfied with the milkweed fluff sackcloth bed I’ve made to lay in. People can think what they want… but they better not think about diggin’ my potatoes.
Best to ya, trolls and voles.</rant>
a speech I’m going to present at the community meeting this month.
So, what is the premise under which the game is played? That a murder has taken place! That’s the underlying assumption that can only lead to one conclusion.
What I find odd is that there is no body! The rule sheet of the game makes reference to a Mr. Boddy, the victim, but there is no game card, token, or anything to represent prima facia evidence of a murder – a dead body. Such is the power of premise. We say it’s murder, and murder it shall be. But, once the premise is subject to scrutiny, it is evident that all the components of the game are rigged to yield the desired result. Who’s to say the imagined Mr. Boddy didn’t slip in the Library, clonk his head on the table, stagger into the Conservatory and collapse next to a piece of pipe left over from a plumbing project the day before? Maybe everybody else in the mansion was with another who could offer an alibi except for Professor Plum who was outside on a wireless hookup buying stocks for his big Corporate employer using insider trading information? Plum takes a murder rap and the Amalgamated Insurance Guarantee Group LLC avoids public scrutiny. You 401K is safe… move along now.
We’ve agreed that it’s murder, and therefore we will find a perp, the weapon, and a crime scene, and anything else is summarily dismissed.
Are our lives any different? The object is to make money, buy stuff and therefore be prosperous and happy. The perfect summation of this most noble activity is “save money, live better, shop Wal-Mart.” The premise is this is the way to live our lives. This is normal. This is good. Western style consumerism is the pinnacle of human achievement!
It’s all based on a couple of other premises.
1. That infinite growth on a finite planet goes without saying.
2. That there will always be enough work to buy stuff we want.
3. That the initial excitement from acquiring a new gizmo or gadget is worth the price of acquisition, and
4. That like some great cosmic buddha, tomorrow doesn’t exist – only the immediate present is worth considering.
A little side premise here – the needs of the natural world are less than economic growth – ie: the micro ecology of that piece of woodland doesn’t count if it’s where we decide to erect a strip mall, or our dream house in the country. Sorry, that was my obligatory tree hugger statement – back on topic.
Maybe Professor Plum is innocent of murder. Maybe our premises are not so valid after all. But how will we know if we don’t even take the time to examine them? The topic for our meeting tonight is permaculture. That is an entirely different way than we have steeped ourselves in – one that takes quite a bit of effort to really understand. Our current premise is that Business as Usual agriculture is the way to feed ourselves. A good place to start would be to take it off its pedestal and look at it with fresh and unbiased eyes.
Thank You.
This is why I click on cryptogon.com everytime I log on. Always a link or two worth checking out.
Remember what George Carlin once said? Think about how stupid the average person is… and half of them are stupider than that.
Truly staggers the imagination. I couldn’t stop laughing at the absolute ignorance of some of the people, but of course I suppose it is okay to exercise your right to be a complete dumbfuck.
http://cryptogon.com/?p=13323
I posted this as a thread comment over on latoc:
I guess I’ll stroll in here and toss in my 2 cents.
Civilization sucks. It was a nice idea, but look where it got us. Civilization has always been a function of growth, and all through history growth has been achieved by tapping resources. These days, we’re just really fucking good at that game.
But, we all know that the great puddles of dinosaur juice are running down to the point where “economic growth” is a thing of the past. That’s the new kid on the block of humanity’s history. And it’s really a bitch to accept that what has always – always always always been is no longer in operation. It’s imperative that you get there before you can go anywhere else. I believe most of the conflict on this forum stems from not accepting the new reality.
I’m okay with anyone’s choices about what they want to do as the new era comes about. I’m in the grow some turnips crowd, and far be it for me to disparage someone who has his resources invested in becoming a warlord, or even deciding (for some of the older folks) to just hang loose and watch the show since death will probably come within a 20-ish year period of Powerdown. The topic theme is Angry America – and I see that as a symptom of blaming everyone else for a personal failure to see the writing on the wall.
Many of us want to see civilization flat out die ASAP. Some so they can pull out the guns and take out suits and badges, some so that the salmon have a chance at survival. And some have some End Times rapture belief. The bottom line is that the resource base is rapidly shrinking, the Powerdown is real, and 99.99% of humanity is going to suffer horribly if we don’t voluntarily work hard as hell to lessen our footprint on this planet.
Most of us here aren’t stupid – we know exactly what feeds the destruction and our degree of participation. Shall we support each others’ methods of extraction from the machinery of civilization, cheer one’s ability to insulate themselves from the effects of resource depletion, or quibble about society’s #1 boondoggle (whatever tops your list)?
This is Life During the Oil Crash. Why argue the premise?
the comrade
I suppose I’m offering it up here just as some sort of summary on how I look at “things” these days. Maybe I unplugged the fan that was blowing wind in my sails. I’m not adrift… just don’t have any overriding desire to be anywhere but right here right now.
A wise man once said to me “people are who they are”. I’ve come to the conclusion that cultural inertia is the strongest force in human nature and what mystifies me the most is that I’m not following the mold I was raised in.
Must have been the drugs.
Didn’t get stupid this year – too many years in a row of over ordering thinking I will spend a blissful growing season devoted to the garden. Reality says shit will come up and I’ll be fighting weeds as usual. So I got smaller packets and fewer items. Maybe half of the seed will get in the ground…
376RK-Red Kidney Bean (A=2oz) 1 x $1.40= $1.40
559GB-Golden Bantam Yellow Sweet Corn (B=8oz) 1 x $4.00= $4.00
678DO-Dakota Black Popcorn OG (A=2oz) 1 x $2.20= $2.20
692HB-Hopi Blue Flour Corn (B=8oz) 1 x $5.00= $5.00
893SO-Sugarsnap Snap Pea OG (A=2oz) 1 x $2.00= $2.00
943PF-Prescott Fond Blanc Cantaloupe (A=1/16oz) 1 x $1.80= $1.80
963SO-Sugar Baby Watermelon OG (A=1/16oz) 1 x $1.00= $1.00
1226NL-National Pickling Cucumber (B=1/4oz) 1 x $1.40= $1.40
1411BZ-Black Zucchini (A=1/8oz) 1 x $0.80= $0.80
1539CO-Early Summer Yellow Crookneck Summer Squash OG (A=1/8oz) 1 x $1.10= $1.10
1608TQ-Table Queen Acorn Winter Squash (A=1/4oz) 1 x $0.80= $0.80
1668SM-Sweet Meat Winter Squash (A=1/4oz) 1 x $0.90= $0.90
1675CR-Candy Roaster Winter Squash ECO (A=1/8oz) 1 x $1.70= $1.70
1720NO-New England Pie Pumpkin OG (A=1/4oz) 1 x $1.30= $1.30
1748CF-Connecticut Field Pumpkin (B=1/2oz) 1 x $1.50= $1.50
1962LU-Luffa Gourd (B=1/4oz) 1 x $1.80= $1.80
1966LB-Large Bottle Gourd (A=1/8oz) 1 x $1.30= $1.30
1990BS-Bushel Gourd (A=1/8oz) 1 x $1.50= $1.50
2073SK-Shin Kuroda 5″ Carrot (A=1/8oz) 1 x $0.80= $0.80
2136CH-Chioggia Beet (B=1/2oz) 1 x $1.70= $1.70
2248FB-French Breakfast Radish (A=1/8oz) 1 x $0.70= $0.70
2253PO-Plum Purple Radish OG (A=1/8oz) 1 x $1.50= $1.50
2300TG-Takinogawa Burdock (A=1/8oz) 1 x $1.20= $1.20
2372WE-White Egg Turnip (B=1/2oz) 1 x $1.20= $1.20
2540LS-Bloomsdale Spinach (A=1/4oz) 1 x $0.70= $0.70
2723SO-Salad Bowl Lettuce OG (B=4g) 1 x $1.50= $1.50
2849WD-Winter Density Bibb/Romaine Lettuce (A=2g) 1 x $0.70= $0.70
3158GI-Gigante dItalia Parsley (B=1/8oz) 1 x $1.20= $1.20
3313FO-Fiesta Broccoli OG (A=0.2g) 1 x $2.20= $2.20
3355EJ-Early Jersey Wakefield Cabbage (A=2g) 1 x $0.70= $0.70
3459WO-White Russian Kale OG (B=4g) 1 x $2.60= $2.60
3722PB-Purple Beauty Sweet Pepper (A=0.5g) 1 x $1.00= $1.00
3770CY-Long Red Narrow Cayenne Hot Pepper (B=1g) 1 x $1.00= $1.00
4038CO-Cosmonaut Volkov Tomato OG (A=0.2g) 1 x $1.20= $1.20
4136RO-Speckled Roman Paste Tomato OG (B=0.4g) 1 x $2.00= $2.00
4414SB-Sweet Basil (A=4g) 1 x $1.00= $1.00
4491BO-Borage OG (A=0.5g) 1 x $1.10= $1.10
4509NP-Catnip (A=1g) 1 x $1.00= $1.00
4512CO-Chives OG (B=7g) 1 x $2.50= $2.50
4531BO-Bouquet Dill OG (A=2g) 1 x $1.00= $1.00
4556ZF-Zefa Fino Fennel (A=0.5g) 1 x $1.00= $1.00
4580HH-Horehound (A=0.2g) 1 x $1.00= $1.00
4585LV-Lavender (A=0.2g) 1 x $1.00= $1.00
4592LV-Lovage (A=0.5g) 1 x $1.00= $1.00
4643SN-Stinging Nettle (A=0.2g) 1 x $1.20= $1.20
4657RM-Rosemary (A=0.2g) 1 x $1.30= $1.30
4666WS-White Sage (A=0.05g) 1 x $1.30= $1.30
4679MD-Mad-dog Skullcap (A=0.05g) 1 x $1.20= $1.20-currently on backorder
4684ST-Stevia (A=0.01g) 1 x $2.00= $2.00-currently on backorder
5085PB-Pacific Beauty Calendula Mix (A=2g) 1 x $1.00= $1.00
5369RS-Rocket Mix Snapdragon (A=0.025g) 1 x $2.20= $2.20
5499MD-Madder (A=0.25g) 1 x $2.00= $2.00
5930BR-Red Broom Corn (A=4g) 1 x $1.00= $1.00
6022BM-Panorama Red Shades Bee Balm (A=0.02g) 1 x $1.30= $1.30
6146SM-Indian Spring Single Mix Hollyhock (A=0.25g) 1 x $0.90= $0.90
6316CT-Creeping Thyme (A=0.1g) 1 x $1.00= $1.00
6427DB-Danish Ballhead Cabbage (A=2g) 1 x $0.60= $0.60
We’ll see how it goes, eh?
Kicked off the new year with goats kidding blah blah see previous post, and have been doing battle with the idiot cold spell that has been slamming us all week. 3 crates of stovewood for the Pioneer Maid cookstove and two wheelbarrow loads a day for the heater stove. Feed ‘em and feed ‘em and feed ‘em. It has been nice to have a teakettle full of hot water available at all times – been chugging down weird herb potions the Good Witch Wife concocts to beat this cold into submission. Nothing like herb teas to loosen up huge gobs of lung chiffon – my 8 year old son is truly impressed with 15 foot distance hocks.
Since it’s cold as hell it’s been a good time to bump the rafter insulation project to the front of the job list. Seems like every batt that goes up raises the house temperature by a half degree. As long as it’s above 50 in the house in the morning I can get it warm in here during the Woodstove Hour before the wife gets up. Getting the Milking Parlor (garage) warmed up is another matter. All we have out there is the Hasty Baker cookstove. 40 degrees is good enough for a goat, ho ho!
School has been closed all week – somewhere on a back road is a piece of ice and the school district lives in fear of bus crash lawsuits. I’m sure they’re happy to not have to heat the buildings much when it’s like 5 degrees outside either. I read that some school districts close because they don’t have the money to clear parking lots and sidewalks. I guess that’s what happens when counties go broke.
I’m going to call that the opening act of The Year Everything Starts to Not Work Very Well Anymore. I think the best place to look for evidence of collapse isn’t the stock market or employment figures, but in tax revenue dependent services at all levels. Budgets will finally meet a hard reality – one where numbers can’t be moved around to cover a shortfall. The nearby city (big town) of Neosho for all practical purposes went belly up last month, my county is starved for cash and I see lots of potholes springing up this year and road maintenance disappearing on the tertiary roads that are already beat to shit as it is.
So I’m slogging through the farmy stuff, as the rest of the country slogs away trying to keep the cable bill paid. Nice to know some of the bank bail out money is going into full body scanners, eh? What the hell, at 125 million it’s only fifty cents per capita. Guess I can’t have a Coke the next time I go to the feed store… A small price to pay for our nations security. Where’s that sarcasm smiley?
If you haven’t read the December 31st post I suggest you do… this sorta ties in with it.
Clusterfuck from the git-go:
Par for the course, the goats had access to a buck all goddamned year and decided to make whoopee exactly 5 months ago. So they all dropped kids at the worst possible time. Two dropped kids the day before the wife and I went on our annual two day vacation (eat sleep read jacuzzi and some romper room… 48 hours of no chores) and the rest popped off one per day until we now have 9 kids surviving. It’s cold in these parts – I think 3 of the weakest kids didn’t get enough food from mama and succumbed to the weather so we brought them in the house tonight. That sometimes sets up some confusion with the mama/baby pairing function so I’m now possibly looking at milking 6 goats twice a day and feeding the milk back to the kids.
Predictions for ‘10:
I’m halfway through the new metal roof on the house… I predict I’ll be close to done by the end of the year.
I tore out the ceilings in the house and have most of the rafters insulated at the moment. The plan is to nail up car siding so we have a pretty vaulted ceiling and lofts at the gables for plants and sleeping – heat rises y’know. I predict I’ll be seeing some R-13 in spots through the next holiday season.
The Greenhouse gods hate me. Been on that project for two years now, why not put some money on three?
The garden will be weeds through the summer.
The goats will find their way through the fence and make at least one good hit on the fruit trees.
I’ll net less than I planned for ala the townhouse remodeling project, but the wife will get her kitchen. I’ll be short a few thousand on the tractor I have my eye on. Three cheers for zero % 60 month financing at the struggling local Kubota dealership.
Once the townhouse is finished I won’t find a buyer willing to pay what I owe on it – bwahahahaha!!!
So much for the Captain Obvious list; on to the good shit:
As if smacking around brown skinned peoples in Iraq and Afghanistan wasn’t enough, America’s fearless leaders will put the squeeze on the brownskins south of the border. With Cantrell going to shit Mexico’s production available for export seriously shrinks… and U.S. needs take precedent over their domestic requirements. Or else… Won’t be to hard to garner public support once the spics have been tied to the terror network. Hate and gullibility are fairly easy to manipulate.
Every dollar out of the have-not’s pockets into the bank’s coffers covers one more dollar of toxic mortgages fucking up their balance sheets. And that one dollar sucked out of the commoner covers a hundred buck or more of super arsenic credit derivitives and other such exotic financial products. Prediction: If a dollar of fed money keeps a thousand dollar CDO from melting down, they’ll print it.
The “Green” marketing movement will be quietly shelved. I smell some kind of “patriotic” spending meme resurrecting from the Bush graveyard. A couple of years have passed since that play – plenty of time for the Short Attention Span consumer to get excited about again.
Propane will go up, crude will come down. High end SUV’s run on gasoline, parked in three car garages in all electric McMansions. The poor heat their trailers with propane.
Iowa farmers will feed their hogs soybeans, and close to a billion people in countries that don’t matter will seriously suffer malnutrition – half of them will die.
Predictions are soooo easy.
1. Name an issue
2. Use common sense to see the best option
3. Predict whatever is ass backwards and collect your winnings at the cage.
Bottle fed the kids. Going to bed. Pretty sure the sun will rise long after I get up to do it again in the morning. Happy New Year? I’m thinking 1932 is being recycled.
Lessee… grew about 85% of everything we ate, 50% of which was derived from Big Ag grain products to power our meat machines. Used 200 gallons of propane, ran through at least 1000 gallons of gasoline, and averaged 750 kW of electricity a month.
You might say we trashed our landbase from selectively cutting a couple dozen truckloads of trees off our 50 acres but I cleared all the junk out of the head of the ravine above where the spring begins to flow that former inhabitants used as a dump. Used no pesticides or industrial chemicals and composted everything that could be put to better use than tossed in the trash truck that comes by my mom’s house on Tuesdays. I flushed very few toilets this year.
I refrained from being a good citizen by blowing off the local voting rituals offered up to us. Bat down a tax raising issue one yer and it just keeps coming back until it passes. What’s the point? When it comes to politics I just buy more ammo and avoid discussions with the true believers, left or right. The last shred of huzzah for this pathetic excuse of a democracy evaporated… about the time the turnip crop matured.
During the last half of the year I was a one man economic stimulus package… 18,000 dollars of manufactured materials and compensation to the slaves I had working for me went into the rental house that caught fire in May. Another 14 to go and then the rest of the insurance check goes to the wife’s new kitchen and a tractor for me. Gonna get a diesel one… just so I have the option of going fuckin’ green with biofuel in some far distant future when the resource wars have used up all the resources and we’re back to using digging sticks to plant soybeans… to run the tractor and FEMA, DHS and military vehicles.
Stopped using credit cards for anything that could be bought without them. Fuck online bank billpay – I’d rather wait in line at the cable office listening to some fat crackhead trying to convince the clerk she paid the bill a week ago. Shopping for Chinese slave labor products without giving the CC companies their 3% per transaction.
Bottom line – slightly subnormal consumer class behavior ruled the year. The farm increased its fertility, and I think one person built a rocket mass heater due to my demo at the Farmer’s Market. I believe he’s heating one of his commercial greenhouses with it.
Better luck next year, eh?
*Snark*
Kunstler made a statement today:
Reality doesn’t care if we are on-board with its mandates or not. The human race has to get with whatever program reality is serving up at a particular time.
which has helped me understand that tricky philosophy bit about everyones’ reality being their own. Because my reality is waaaay different than 99.9999% of folks I know, know of or can imagine. And I can’t imagine anyone dropping in to my reality tunnel and digging it like I do – that much has been proven by three different doomers who have come and gone. Thing is, that’s getting to be okay with me. If my livelihood was dependent upon my ability to show up at 8am, punch in and put Tab A into Slot B for 8 hours, punch out and repeat five days a week, 50 weeks a year I’d be a dead man. I imagine that a factory drone would starve out here if he had to do what I piddle around with on the ol homestead. A guy who blogs as old horseman once said most people would starve if you handed them a hog in a crate and a sharp knife. My reality tunnel incorporates the ability to head out with a K-bar, entrenching tool and a 5 dollar tarp and make out fairly well, but saying yassah to some fat balding mid level manager is right out.
Some days I dream of getting all Wild Man of Borneo but that’s usually on a day when I gotta crawl around under the house and drill new holes through the floor to re-route the cable line ‘cuz we moved the tv to a new location in our great game of Musical House. When walls go, things change, y’know. Not that I mind getting rid of pesky shit like ratshit laden insulation and ceiling tiles, but when joists and roof bracing goes engineering collar ties becomes sorta critical. I truly would rather eat grubs and roadkill skunk than staple insulation batts to rafters, but winter sorta snuck up on me. It’s not like the three years it took to go from dirt out the back door to picking grapes from a chair on the patio/ grape arbor… Eventually, what we’ll see when we look up will be tongue and groove pine on a vaulted ceiling with lofts on both ends of the living area instead of a low, nasty, and beat up acoustic tile ceiling. Some people walk over and turn the thermostat up a notch – I re-engineer the damn house. Reality tunnels.
I’m out of touch with today’s – this day’s – reality. I can make a phone call and cut a check to Al’s Gas and get 500 gallons of propane delivered, reinstall the central heat unit that I purposefully removed two years ago in a Foxfire wood burning state of mind, and spend the days surfing and watching tv while working in some of that domestic type stuff. But my “today’s” reality is interlocked with my tunnel’s view of tomorrow… one where the power is out and no amount of propane will run the unit’s electric fan and the toes get cold. That makes me technically insane, right? Maybe we’re all insane by that standard… putting money into an IRA for a comfy retirement is pretty much the same thing – assuming the state of affairs further down the timeline?
Robert Anton Wilson said you might as well create the funnest. coolest reality tunnel you can for every moment. I’m heading back underneath the house now – I’m On The List and working my way through my escape tunnel fleeing from the FEMA/dot gov goons…