comrade simba

Just ate a peach… from the first sapling planted when we moved here. That is huge – as significant as it gets. We are here, we have been here, and we will stay here.

Best damn peach I ever ate…

Part of a response I sent a Florida couple who saw my doomer wanted ad in the latoc classifieds…

Glad you wrote back. Even if your side of Florida doesn’t get a dose of goo… whatya gonna do about the other side showing up with… their “needs”?

It’s tough being a full on doomer. No bullshit, no rose colored glasses, no capacity for magical thinking. Knowing in my lifetime, and for sure my boy’s, the horse will be the primary mode of transportation down the state highway out front. Assuming I make it through the six months or so of society’s total breakdown when the entire country will be one big mass of migrating refugees – some more pleasant than others, but all in a state of desperation…

My hope is that the descent down the energy ladder will be as gentle as a series of shocks to different regions – much suffering (and many will die) but absorbable in the end. Some structure left to work with; people living in an agrarian balance within their environment and the rise of human labor with hand tools driving the engine of everyday living – rather than humans as cogs in a big corporate machine for the sake of the “Economy”. I think the gulf coast is the opening act in The Great Contraction and I’m looking closely at how it pans out. It’s no mystery to me why y’all are getting the jitters.

I have been busting my ass for the last 14 months rebuilding our rental house that somebody torched. I stripped it down to the framing lumber and re-did everything by myself while trying to keep the homestead functioning. I long to wrap it up this month and go back to “puttering” in the garden, and will at least have money to buy a tractor with the rest of the insurance money. It’s been too many years of hauling wood up from the ravines with a wheelbarrow and chipping fencepost holes through Missouri rocks with a bar and sledgehammer. The tractor will help with the heavy work around here, but even with that aid it’s still a tough go day after day. “Doomer Wanted” is a call for help with my heavy labor… I can do it by myself but if all my time is on the hard crap and the other guy soaks up all the putter in the garden it’s sorta a raw deal. Same with the wife’s side of things. Is her helper going to weed in the garden, knead bread, launder the clothes in a hand powered washer, keep the cookstove going, can, dry, sort seed, process herbs and feed critters including the humans?

That doesn’t even take into consideration the culture shock of no cell phone service, pizza delivery or dropping back from the 3bdr 2 bath with attached garage to a “cottage” featuring such novelties as the “Thunder Bucket” and quaint omissions of conveniences like a “thermostat”.

We eat well – that’s our claim to fame. The fact that we may eat at all in the future is our justification for this “voluntary agrarian landed peasant” standard of success. Imaging the sense of triumph when pedaling an exercise bicycle attached to a pumpjack and homemade pump for 15 minute sends a hundred gallons of water from the spring up to a water tank by the house. Staying cozy warm and well fed for a two week period when an ice storm kils the power lines and everybody else in the area is miserable.

It’s not a walk in the park, that’s for sure, but neither is it endless toil and hardship. My wife went to look at the progress I have made on the house – it’s trimmed out and ready for paint, cabinets and fixtures, and fell in love with the place. Spent the whole drive home trying to figure out how we could move back there without sacrificing too much. Garden the whole back yard, run a few chickens and rabbits etc, but the bottom line is it is just too satisfying being here where we are with the serenity and security that makes the homestead “home”.

I checked out the link for the homesteading university. clicked on the sample lesson and, well, harrumphed. Hydroponic growing tower. Complete with styrofoam containers. Do people even have a clue as to what we as a species are facing? Maybe solar panels and blueberry bushes are the answer. Me? I’m sticking with turnips and goats.

the comrade

Trim and paint, cabinets and fixtures and then one more coat of poly on the floors and I go find me a renter while hassling Wells Fargo for the last third of the insurance check. Looks like I’ll have this gut to the studs remodel job knocked out in time for the fall garden…

14 months ago I got The Call from the fire department. 14 months of one big pain in the ass. The thing that has kept me going is the full color brochure of the 16 Series Mahindra tractor taped to the fireplace mantle in the house. That way, when I’m slumped over tired to the bone on the stairwell “tractor” gets me back up for another round of fun. I probably moan out “Mahindra” in my sleep at night.

Somewhere along the line during this time period I’ve become completely indifferent (or maybe just totally disgusted with) to commerce and shopping and people and traffic – the general mayhem of civilized culture. 16 hours on a belt sander grinding and smoothing 1740 sq ft of tongue and groove flooring sucks a lot worse than the same time spent playing “find the vegetables” in the garden. The hour’s commute each way to the house is so seemingly pointless that I have taken to camping out there two nights a week to save the time wasted. Most people are shitty drivers at best, and now that the cell phone texting phenomenon has taken over it’s flat out dangerous on the road. I swear to god when this thing is over I’m never setting foot in a Lowe’s or Home Despot again. They can go on my Wal-Mart list… I simply can’t stand subjecting myself to being around that level of consumerism anymore.

14 months ago the insurance check was 3000 less than what I owed on the mortgage. some guy offered 5000 for the burned out carcass. I could walked with 2 grand in the pocket but noooo, I went for the 18 grand net profit. Never again. I’m going back into retirement in a month and never looking back. Out of the economy, peripheral involvement in commercial activity and back to leaving the homestead once a week to offload eggs and visit my mother. Hanging out until the power goes out, ho ho!

I miss being home. I missed the first goat kid of the season the other day. I know the wife is sick of all the critter chores since summer came and I’m on the job all day every day. I miss blogging – no time to sort out all the things in my head and say what I mean. I feel like I’ve lost 14 months of my life and wonder how in the hell people do most folks watch years and decades go by in the mill without going postal. I’ll get more than a tractor out of this deal… I got a good close up look at a culture choking on its own vomit.

Took a break from the internet for a number of reasons. First, lightning zorched my ethernet card and I hate using the wife’s laptop – or any other computer for that matter. Too busy to deal with getting a new part.

Another reason for being gone is that now that summer is here and my wife and son are home all day to take care of critters I’m working on the rental house rebuild all day every day – even camping out there a couple nights a week to save on commute time. The T&G flooring is all done (1700 sq ft of the shit), sheet rock hanging will be done after tomorrow’s festivities, so I’m down to trim, paint, cabinets and setting fixtures. Of course I’m too cheap to just go out and buy trim – I’m making it out of the old flooring I pulled up. Rip it on the table saw, cut it with the chop saw, router the edges and grind with the belt sander. It’ll hold paint anyway, and trim being way over a buck a foot that’s a pretty good chunk of change to convert into tractorage, ho ho!

As long as the hole in the gulf keeps burping up shit there’s no reason to do anything but ramp up for heavy economic jolts to ‘merica’s non negotiable way of life, so I bought my boy a single shot Daisy .22 rifle. Little twirp has a tighter 3 shot grouping at 20 yards than I do! We went to a Jake’s Day Field Event a couple of weeks ago and he shot 6 out of 6 targets on the .22 range – first time with a 22 so it was time to gun him up. Also, after one throw to get his distance he stuck the target every time with a Tomahawk. Proud father, eh?

Thanks for all the comments on the last post – I’m going back into the tunnel for a couple more weeks until I have to pay bills online again. Enjoy cheap gas courtesy of demand destruction while it lasts, and buy more beans, canning lids, ammo, seeds, and other doom stuff before the next wave of people wake up and say Folgers.

I haven’t posted lately because everything I think about seems so trite in comparison to what I think may be TEOTWAWKI unfolding like, really any day now. Normally I like to joke and holler about how fucked everything is while being resigned to watching a long slow painful death of the great american way of life. I grew tired of the “End is Near” sandwich board and forgot how spooky it felt. It is on me again… and I tend to go quiet when the really major stuff happens… thus, no recent posts.

If that Blow Out Preventer comes away from the wellhead due to erosion the gusher goes from 70 thousand BPD to… well, a lot more than that. But the worst part is when that happens there isn’t any plugging the damaged wellhead option available. The reservoir burps out goo until the pressure is gone. Who knows the number… but it’s measured in Valdezes, 11…22..33..44..55…million. You get the picture.

I may be one in a thousand (or ten thousand) who isn’t completely asleep but I have a bad feeling that an awful lot of sleepers are going to wake up if BP has nothing left to work with than an open hole in the ground erupting a geyser of shit. Think filling your bathtub with a firehose – the word I’m looking for here is violent and uncontrollable. Kiss the peel and stick bathroom tile of the Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard economy goodbye.

If even one out of fifty sleepers woke up and made a run on the grocery store, the gas station, and the bank JIT fails and sets up the next wave. That’s all I really want to say, and I bought another thousand rounds of 22 ammo and a box of 12 gauge 00 shells today. I think I need to get some more tomorrow, too.

Hard to have a dialogue on a blog – too bad those of us in this state of mind can’t all be neighbors. Would we trade our current community for a collection of doom surfers? I’d take the chance – “may you live in interesting times”, heh heh.

Michelle – this county is focused on the 5 square miles that encompass the wal mart complex – supercenter and the corporate data facility. The rest of the county may as well be in Thailand. As long as the taxes get filed. No building codes, no permits for anything if you are outside of a town. Nice to be in a backwater… Most folks around here haven’t lost all common sense – you’re not crazy just because you milk goats. The first thing that is asked is how much you sell the milk for – as if the goal of any activity would be for the purpose of making money. That mindset is damn near universal anymore, so what makes me an odd duck is having self sufficiency as my endgame. There is a local farmers market sponsored by our community group but I don’t want to pay a 20 dollar fee, fill out paperwork, or sell stuff to people with nothing to offer but FRN.

The main reason I’m a “homesteader” rather than “farmer” is because I don’t want to engage in commercial activity. Barter and trade within my circle is the goal, not converting my labor into “money”. I swap eggs for stuff at the garden shop run by friends, mow around the Taekwondo hall in lieu of training fees, etc.

Mayberry – sure wish a big ol’ belly laugh was in the cards if the whole economy goes fucko bazzoo. I have two friends with long guns and redneck backgrounds that have a standing invitation to bug out to here WTSHTF. We’ve all heard the phrase have’s and have nots – today I am a have not but that all changes if the food trucks stop rolling in to wal-mart. If guys like us can weather the first six months of civilization’s meltdown we have a good shot at raising grandkids. It’s a very large and mean pride of lions stalking the village.

Timmy – at least one goat, sometimes more, twice a day and count the years. I solve the world’s problems on the milking stool some days, others just figure out the correct thing the homestead wants me to do that day. The best times are when I can empty the head and squeeze the teats to the rhythm of my mantra – om ah hum benza guru padme siddhi hum.

Anyway, I’m glad that show is now over. The reporter asked and I said I’m out here because it’s crazy out there… and I don’t look like a freak saying it. Nice to get some justification now and then.

Thanks for the comments everybody. It’s looking real busy for the next week or two… need to stay off the computer and get some critical shit finished off. Take care.

Lmao at this screen shot. “Comrade Simba on right wing tv” hahahaha

Here’s the link to the video… flv format or mpeg

Too bad it was only a three minute human interest story crammed in between sports and stock market crap but not bad for a brief overview. At least the dig at wal-mart got through which is the main point of what this whole homestead thing is all about. Do it yourself or rely on the agribusiness corporations – expect the stores to be stocked and the food to be worth eating? Yeah, right. So this is one more drop in the sea of examples; chances are good that as many people who write us off as crackpots will be less than or equal to the numbers who see that this is a good idea.

Betcha somebody picks up a shovel this week.

Apparently he realized he missed some shit so Mr. Smiles came back out yesterday. Here’s the rocket stove, the hand cranked washing machine, the Thunder Bucket^TM… Shoved the exercise bike against the pump jack wheel and showed him the PVC Special piston pump. Tossed out some good 15 second doomy soundbites and jabs at suburban delusion… whatever.

Don’t much care. He said I was a kind man for allowing the interview but I’m really just a crazy man – harboring an insane belief that the show might get somebody up off the couch heading for the front yard with a shovel. I guess another guy he found for the show has a windmill and grows some shit. Again, the real story is how absolutely dependent society is on things continuing as they have in the past.

News article about how fucked Tulsa, Oklahoma is. That’s a hundred miles away and has a population of 400,000, and a million in the metro area. Cutting some funds for police, fire, road repair – the usual suspects. Nasty little inner city “activity”, too. Tulsa seems to be my canary in the coal mine – wouldn’t it be funny if the first metro area to go bazzoo and have the troops called in happened to be right next door? Okla fuckin homa – who’d a thunk it? At least we get to see if Ammo and Camo Bubba goes to the dark side or fights for truth justice and the american way. My money says they’ll join in the riots and “blame it on the niggers.”

So they’ll raise taxes and cut back on services. People who can leave will leave, walking away from their mortgages and jobs and broken lives heading for mom and dads and the great whatever in the hinterlands. The smart ones, that is. Those who know when it’s fourth and long you fall back and punt. Go Sooners!

Regarding the financial yada yada post, it’s been kinda fun to be in this mindset – Go Bernake, Go! Keep it all alive if you can. The Romans musta felt the same way at Christians vs. Lions, You know how it’s going to end but it’s fun to watch them run like hell.

I’m so bored – just bored out of my mind. Garden is only half planted and I don’t really care about getting on it. The focus is on the rental house rebuild – how many more days on the flooring before I can finish up the sheetrocking? Paint and trim in a far distant future… I knew going in to it that it was going to be my last big hurrah – I’m officially middle aged and looking forward to going back into retirement.

Tomorrow is opening day at the Farmer’s Market and I’ll load up the tiller and hoes and work in the community garden across the street. Less than a half dozen plots spoken for so I’m going to load it with cowpeas corn and winter squash and watch it all turn into a beautiful tangled mass of food for a pig. Pathetic – weeks gone by at the sale barn without any weener pigs – cheap or not – so it looks like I’ll have to shell out 35 bucks to some guy on craigslist if I can find his place down a tangle of Mac County back roads.

Enough rambling – it’s just a clusterfuck.

Kunstler says it real well sometimes:

This sucker is going down because the train of bankruptcies underway has a remorseless self-reinforcing power to provoke more and more bankruptcies at every stop along the line as every promise to pay is welshed on. The mortgages will not be paid and securities will not pay their investors and the banks will choke on the bad paper promises in their vaults and the pension funds will not pay their beneficiaries and the states and counties and municipalities will go broke and not pay their employees and creditors, and the federal government will not be able to “print” new money in sufficient quantities fast enough to compensate for all the money not being paid up-and-down the line… and one morning we will wake up and discover that all those promises to pay were sham promises based on no productive activity whatsoever… and that will be a sad day. Perhaps the Dow Jones Industrial Average will hit 35,000 on that day.

There’s a lot of fat in the system, here’s a short list of “normal” crap that can be discarded with very little jolting of personal well being:

Ipods and all the peripheral gadgetry – back to low power am radio.

Cell phones and calling plans etc – POTS on a landline once again.

The new car, or the second car. Insurance on 1 vehicle is hard enough.

Jet ski atv speedboat, and the dock space, trailers, and vehicles to haul them around.

Netflix, computer games, Dominoe’s pizza..

The list can go on, and the thing that I look for is indications that these are being discarded. A boat on the side of the road for sale means that household is culling fat. Stumps me why the same yard isn’t turned over to a vegetable garden. How can the climate be so bad if new furniture stores are still open – when 2nd hand shops are packed with hardly used stuff at half the price? Do you sell your jet ski and go buy a sofa set?

And who’s buying all the shit for sale? Everybody I know is just cranked down economically pummeled and yet there are 8 walmarts within 50 miles of me – and this is not a metropolitan area by any stretch of the imagination.

I’m gotten past the sense of imminent catabolic collapse but I can’t understand how shit keeps going on and on – there’s no manufacturing, no production of real goods, no real reason for people to have any pocket change at all! When a mortgage goes belly up does some entity profit, and send the proceeds trickling down the food chain enabling a quicky mart clerk to head to the mall and buy a 50 dollar pair of jeans for his kid?

It must be some kind of magic. A strange voodoo on money where it doesn’t take any to have buying power. From the same article:

And there is likewise surely a huge effort underway in the banking sector right now to cream off as much cash as possible so that when this sucker does go down they will bethink themselves better positioned to survive the consequences.

I think the huge effort part is right, but it is an effort to absorb as much devaluation as possible as fast as it can be absorbed. “Consumers” may not be borrowing much these days but they are still making those interest payments which may be the voodoo money keeping everything alive. 1 out of 10 defaults means 9 are still feeding the vampire. The financial community seems to be absorbing the defaults fairly well, and as long as it continues we can contract our way down to a bag of turnips without things going bazzoo.

So here’s to the power masters handling the decent into our agrarian peasant future – good job so far and best of luck in the days ahead. 300 million bummed out people resigned to a state of general crappiness is a lot better than 300 million going ape shit. Joe Blow used as much gas as Mr. Jet Set so peak oil is on everybodies scorecard, along with any other type of resource depletion. The typical credit card holder spent money he didn’t make just like the banksters created shit out of thin air so share the blame ‘merica – everybody is all in. The future of the sheeple is shit no matter which way it goes, but the future of the elite is still up in the air. Joe Blow is still going to mindlessly spend every dime he can get his hands on buying shit he doesn’t need if he can, but those at the top have a lot more to loose and if they don’t play their cards right it’s blood in the streets time. I’m going to root for the Ivy Leaguers on this one.

WTF Comrade? You gone soft on us? Nope. The right wing is screaming louder at the banks that the socialists ever did, so I figured I ought to spend some time making sure my reality tunnel wasn’t too ridged. It’s a luxury I can indulge in since my food doesn’t come from the Wal Mart…

I have lost the ability to interface with the mean of society…

The T.V. people for the local Fox station came out to the homestead yesterday for some show they were doing about sustainability, off gridness, whatever. (My brother in law is the station manager so that’s how I got looked at) This comes at the same time our big spring gathering takes place so all the cleaning and decrapperating came in handy, and I made sure there were nice 150 degree compost heaps cooking, grass all mowed, clean Thunder Buckets^TM a maggot bucket foaming returning Mr. Wiggles to the earth via chickens, tinder in the woodstove, milk ripening for cheese, etc. This place was seriously prepped for a full scale demo.

So camera guy and The Guy With The Smile show up three hours late – the goats are screaming to be let out to pasture, Sandy the Goat wants milked in the worst way, chickens bitching about being in the pen, and I’m all hot and dirty cuz there is no way I can be at this place without finding something to work on (I happened to be on the back end of a wheelbarrow full of manure as they came up the drive). He asks where to start first and I said the goats are pretty pissed off so lets get that out of the way. So as I’m milking he’s asking me why I’m doing what I’m doing. Wait a minute – I haven’t even showed you what I’m doing…. I said you see that asparagus in that bed over there? Go eat a piece – that’s why I’m here.

I pretty much spent the whole time trying to show “why” by direct pointing, but he didn’t seem to follow the finger. A grape arbor over the patio – where we sit in the shade and eat grapes off the vine like fucking emperors. The wife had made an absolutely perfect loaf of bread, I had a fresh cheese made up, fresh steeped chocolate mint tea freezer fulla pork etc. Showed him cute little bunnies, month old chicks, the sky was blue and dogwoods in bloom. And for the life of me I couldn’t see a glimmer of recognition or understanding in Mr. Fox – 14. Just that dumb grin and a bored camera guy.

He asked me several times if I knew anyone else living the off grid/self sufficiency thing. No, no, and hell no – I’m the only fucking person I know who grows most of what they eat and ties themselves to a barnyard fulla critters. I’m the only person for miles and miles wanting an asteroid to vaporize the local chicken plant and walmart to belly up and destroy the county’s tax base. I don’t even watch your stupid tv station’s programming for the right wing Simpsonians. I think the best I did was mutter something about not wanting to deal with the asshattery of Plasticland – that out here was real and if you got your hands in the dirt you’d know what I was talking about.

It used to be about doom – now it’s just chores and avoiding toxins from the industrial food manufacturing industry. In July when I’m hauling water out to the garden to keep the corn alive I don’t wanna see some jackass washing his fucking car in the driveway.

Mr. TV left and is probably busy cutting sound bites and looking for other things to fit his story line. I think he missed the story that was there – that if I’m the best he can come up with maybe this sustainability idea is as rare as hens teeth and that ought to scare the shit out of anyone. All I know is that I feel like a crackpot for wanting to show off a 150 degree compost heap, disappointed that the sawdust toilet never got looked at, and astounded that a fresh piece of goat cheese was declined.

It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter at all. Like I told Charlie on my visit to his ’stead at least we eat good and stay warm in winter. If I had a solar array set up I woulda been a celebrity. Instead I’m justa boob fell off a turnip truck.

*Newsflash* ….. the countryside is not fulla food. If this were an actual emergency…