comrade simba

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…