Learning the Abundance of Just Enough

Read this and turn away from your screens for a piece and look about you. Look at your stuff; really look at it. Chances are that you have way more of it than you know what to do with. I think I have twenty coffee mugs. I'm a single man. I only have two hands and four chairs and the chairs are in storage. I have a car that I haven't driven on an actual errand since August 2009. I have boxes of books and more boxes of kitchen ware. Look at your stuff and wonder; is it enough? Do I use all this? What's the point of this stuff anyway?

The "economic recovery" is crap. Anybody who tells you differently is lying and that's pretty much the entire mainstream media and most elective office holders. If you're anything like me you know a few people who are flat out-of-work and a few dozen more whose "job descriptions" rely heavily on yoga, tofu, pampered pets, massages, house plants, house-cleaning and handyman descriptions. Their actual incomes run about half to a third of what stable full-time employment would bring them. Surprisingly, no-one starves. Most have housing even if they move frequently. Their clothes may be worn but are usually clean and in fair condition barring fashion statements. They aren't going to be buying new: cars, houses, appliances, furniture or any other major purchases anytime soon. For some of them that may extend to ever again.

Yet they have enough. Most have the cars, bicycles, computers, clothes, furniture, kitchen-wares, linens etc. that are required to keep them comfortable. Many are concerned about losing weight. They all have cell phones. Everyone who wants recreational substances, alcohol, pot or whatever seems to be able to afford them. Utility bills get paid. Their medical care is deferred or billed to the state when their ailments get bad enough that a doctor is required. For most, it is enough.

In the next year millions more will be invited to learn the abundance of just enough. State and local governments are bankrupt and the federal government refuses to consider bailing them out. Jobs will be redlined. The american people have been told that governments can operate without raising taxes for thirty years and it's always been a flat lie. They've been told that they've been living in a capitalistic system also and that's been a lie as well. Look at the maps of which states pay funds into the federal budget and which states take money out. Most of the country geographically is on the dole one way or another. Reality and Congress are not in regular contact.

So as the economy rachets down due to reasons like Peak Oil, Climate Change damages and Finance Sector parasitism most of us are going to have to learn to make due with less. This is going to be painful for many until they learn to bicycle around, cook food from scratch ingredients, grow vegetables, glean fruits, mend clothing and get along with roommates. More than a few of us have learned how to treat everything short of major trauma and cancer without Big Pharmas big price tags. We'll learn to entertain each other as television and radio becomes increasingly, desperately, focused on extracting every last penny from those remaining in the "real economy."

We're better off.

Depressed? Slash the tires on your car, buy a bicycle and find something five or six miles out of town that you just have to get to. Lonely? Not with three roommates and their 28 friends wandering through you're not. Bored? Learn to play an instrument, paint, sew, knit, garden, fix bicycles, hack electronics, build furniture, boats, kilns, stoves and/or weld. Hungry? Learn the endless variations of beans/tortillas, hummus/pita, rice/curry, beets/cabbage or dhal/chapati that feed the rest of the world. Tired? Sling a hammock in a friends garage.

Learn to laugh as you dance. Comfort each other. Sit meditation. Paint faces. Learn to walk together. There is time enough and love enough for all. Just enough, if we share.

Technical Difficulties

My venerable and ancient Mac laptop has given up the ghost and is no longer with us. If you have wandered over here looking for me that's what happened.

I will be checking in at libraries and relatives houses as such access is available.

Thank you for your attention.

Pangolin

Canceling Saint Victim's Day.....

.... and demanding more.

I am hereby unilaterally and on behalf of the entire world canceling St. Victims Day. For those of you who are looking at your calendar and wondering when Saint Victims Day is the answer is pretty much every day. Any day, week or month that is announced to be XYZ "awareness" day counts. Cut it out. Just cut that shit out right now.

So what do I expect the people who have XYZ modern plight to do about getting the cooperation of the rest of us? Quit whining, get support the old fashioned political way, buy it with sex and money or fight dirty. Our American Founding Fathers did not kick out the British who had more money, a larger army and better transportation by standing in neat lines wearing brightly colored jackets waiting for the British cannon to chew them up. They shot the bastards from behind trees and walls and ran like hell.

Homeless people; grab a large stone and drop it on the road in front of the richest development in town. Repeat, with all your friends until arrested. Keep doing it until the police get exhausted. There are more of you than them and they really don't want to touch you. Oh, if you're getting arrested anyway; pee your pants, on purpose. (eat asparagus and take extra B Vitamins) There is nothing cops hate more than piss in their patrol car.

Health Care uninsured. Blockade one hospital or private medical building a week Critical Mass style. Make sure the plastic surgeons and other high profit medical business gets disrupted first. Oh, yeah; expect to get arrested also. Make sure you tell the officers how sick you are; it makes their jobs more fun to know they're arresting people who could code on them at a moments notice.

Climate Change? If you're concerned you better be on your bicycle and you better look good riding it. That means riding a clean, classy, bike whenever you can and presenting a neat, attractive appearance doing so. No spandex on your ass unless your S.O. can bounce quarters off it while you're sleeping. You could do something about your energy guzzling house too.

Foreclosed? You just lay down and took it didn't you? Did you demand the company foreclosing on you produce the physical note? Did you make them evict you? Did you leave them an intact house? Your job was to wrench up the works that screwed you as much as possible even if it did nothing to help you. It will help somebody.

Hungry? Plant food in planting strips and along rights of way. Take over watering systems to provide for your stuff. Correcting anything you do will cost them $75 per hour minimum. (2 guys, 1 truck, phone calls and confusion).

Sexually oppressed or fearful? If you were raped its about time you not only learned a Martial Art but start aggressively teaching it to kids of your cohort. It's also your job to make if fun, popular and sexy. Rapists should be extremely fearful of very small blades secreted about the persons of women and one shot pepper sprays. That or a swift kick in the acorns. Waiting for 'something to be done' is getting kind of stale don't you think? Here's a clue; the men aren't going to do it for you. You got one body and one life to figure it out. You're way behind.

Uneducated. Get one laptop and hand it around. Find a twelve year old boy to hijack internet service for you. Give him some cigarettes or booze. If his parents weren't slacking he'd refuse it. Knowledge is knowledge and degrees are increasingly worth nothing as employers realize they don't mean the degree holder can read, write, speak clearly or think outside of a three-ring-binder. Soon enough Google will have some way of evaluating real skills that will bypass the degree bullshit. Be prepared.

In short, get pissed off and prepare to make others uncomfortable. Then deal with the consequences. Gandhi beat the British by simply making it impossible for them to function. If we have to sandbag the roads with our living bodies we need to do the same thing until we get some basic humanity. I'm not talking three bedrooms and a Cadillac Escalade for everybody. How about minimal; housing (10'x10'), food, clothing, basic medical and dental care and a bus pass. If we can afford to keep the dry husks of our elderly propped up on machines for years we should be able to afford some bullshit standards for everyone else.

If they don't want to go along with the program; fuck em. Sandbag them. Do every legal thing you can to make the bastards miserable and then start on the illegal things that don't hurt people. If they ask who blocked this or that road stand up and demand a jury trial. Sandbag their asses there too.

Twenty percent of us are unemployed and the jobs are not appearing. We don't own jack because the banks been skimming the game the whole time. Time to fight back. Just quit with the fucking whining and don't ask me for a nickel for your walkathon.

St. Victims Day is cancelled until you all learn to work together.

p.s. If this is your house, business, road, school or whatever that is disrupted you may need to scream like hell about something being done to get these assholes doing something other than hassling you. Hint: sick, broke, homeless people got nothing but time on their hands until they can land slots as healthy, housed, non-broke people like you with better shit to do.

p.p.s.- Cambodia, Rwanda, Germany, Serbia, California and the Former Soviet Union tried the massive prison and execution thing. It backfires. (In California with real flames)

Failure Is Sudden

All the kings horses
and all the kings men
couldn't put Humpty
together again


















Failure is sudden
it comes from long rot
you think to foresee it
I'm thinking not



It ends in confusion



This rot in the core



There many long years










And now it's no more

Solution: Piss on it...

Something completely different:

"Sustainable fertilizer: Urine and wood ash produce large harvest"

"Results of the first study evaluating the use of human urine mixed with wood ash as a fertilizer for food crops has found that the combination can be substituted for costly synthetic fertilizers to produce bumper crops of tomatoes without introducing any risk of disease for consumers. The study appears in the current issue of ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, a bi-weekly publication."

http://preview.tinyurl.com/n86598

Which backs up the work of this guy: http://e-terrapretarooftopexp.blogspot.com/

So you farmer types might want to set a terra cotta pot a discreet few steps out the back door and fill it with the ash from your wood stove. Modify as nature calls.

Reply to the Strong Man

There's a lot of strong men out there, good men, thinking men, who are sold a lie so that the powers that be can play god unhindered. The lie is this: You got to your place of comfort by your efforts alone. We'll protect your place; for a fee.

Then they say: The fees kind of high right now because we have to support all these slacker's. Cheat's. Lazy people. Gypsies. If you don't mind we'll just remove them and then the fee will go down. Just don't bother us while we do it.

This conversation has been going on forever and we've had a recent run on it over at Deep INTO ARTLIFE WEST in the comments section. More comment than blog but we like it and Nina's kind enough to host.

So I posted a comment there that I think is important enough to repeat here:

Got'cha Baz. You're a strong man who's got a good deal right now with TPTB. You've got your bit to play on and they mostly leave you alone on that bit. What's it to anyone else what work you do or don't do there? They weren't there helping you and you didn't want them there anyway.

Today.

Don't get hurt man. Nothing worse than a strong man brought low by pain. Or worse, asking your body to move and not even getting a response from the required part. You get hurt too far out the back door and it's the pigs turn to eat but you know that. Man hunting alone has to be lucky EVERY day.

There's no place to stand in the world for many of us. There is no place the government isn't claiming or deeding to the banksters. TPTB don't like you and they send a whole military squad to raid your house in the middle of the night and masked cyborg 'agents' shove automatic weapons in your kids face at four in the morning. Happens to someone I know just about every year.

And they will shoot. Oh damn straight they will.

So that MINE word some folks hold on to is a LIE. It's a lie that the cyborg whispers to us to separate the strong from the weak. Wolves from the sheep, Steers from the heffers. We know what happens to steers, don't we now.

Hey, don't look here. We're just taking a few of the weak ones. Don't bother yourself about where we're taking them; do you want to come too? Then the 'borg looks at you and you KNOW you're fucked if you don't back off.

Don't bother yourself. It's just the tweakers. Just the morons. Just the gimps, gypsies, Indians, wetbacks and Maori. Just the Jews. We're just cutting out these steers to improve the herd.

You got yours know. You keep it. You don't owe them steers nothing.

Don't get hurt.

You see, I got hurt. Hurt so bad I can't find the trail back to the warm hearth. Just wandering the wilderness losing bits of my kit whenever I stop for a boil up. TPTB they whispered to what I thought was my family. Hey, you got YOURS to protect. Don't go helping him. So they wander out and give me a few kicks and tell me to get my ass back to the barn and do my chores and then they leave. Never a hand down to pull up on. No shoulder offered for a limp back.

The 'borgs been whispering to them too from the evil box. "This could be YOUR's. And THIS and this and this and this and then you will be complete. But not if you're helping others oh, no. How could you buy this if you're helping others. Be a Wolf. We've got the vultures to take care of the weak."

Crashing in the Fog, Smelling the Smoke

I was always crazy. Bad things happened to me before I could spell my name; Gitmo-style bad things. The first escape I had was nature. I found that under a bush or up a tree was a fair place to hide from the lash. The second escape was reading.

For some reason the original Whole Earth Catalog was left in my families living room; and all subsequent editions. Imagine a second grader learning to read with that as source material. Yurts, dome homes, aikido, organic gardening, sexual revolution, birth control, dope, alternative politics. "The Man Who Planted Trees" was in one of those books. I was ruined for commerce. Then I started reading Heinlein, Pohl, Asimov, Bradbury, Benford, Bear and Spider Robinson. Worlds with different rules, and new ideas.

By the seventh grade I was pretty close to unschoolable. I already read more than all of the other students and most of the teachers. I had too many ideas and no experience. I lasted through tenth grade by taking two days off a week to go hiking and acing tests on the days I attended. Drove everybody around me batshit.

I was never convinced that chasing the almighty dollar was worth a damn. I dropped in and out of college. Did stints as a cook, mailroom clerk, barrista, masseur, house-dad, construction worker, cloth dyer, retail clerk, handyman, manager and a few other things that I forget. Got married, rehabbed a house for the wife's family, got booted with no thanks. Helped set up a co-housing community where the ex and kids still live. Never finished college due to a little encounter with black mold. Learning a bit about pain now; from the inside.

The business of America has been fraud for over 30 years IMHO. The fortunate stumble onto the personal computer revolution helped balance the books but honestly never got us to break-even. Education is on a downhill slide. Reading skills that would have flunked you out of my mediocre high school are tolerated among at the State University down the block. College juniors stumbling to read portions of the text out loud as if we were in fourth grade. Business fraud is so rampant that your insurance, bank and credit card contracts mean nothing. Try and read them; I dare you.

While ever increasing amounts of information are available fewer people than ever have any clue as to know what to do with it. As Joe Bageant and many other writers are pointing out our brains are being jammed as if thinking were a speech by Fidel Castro. We are being advertised, game-boy'd, porn'd, caffeinated, televised, entertained, sugared, salted, I-podded and cell phoned into the chair bound critter from the Wall-E movie. All of this leads to cascades of bad decisions that pile up on each other like freeway traffic in tule fog. We can hear the crashing in the distance but we can't see the shape of the wreckage.

It's BAD people. We FUCKED UP. Climate Change is real and is rolling downhill. Our food supply is dependent upon ever-increasing supplies of oil. The oil supply has topped out and is decreasing. Our medical system ignores fundamental facts about how bacteria and viruses work. We have about a billion young men in the world who can't support wives; a billion potential soldiers. Only a tiny few of understand jack about defusing anger, stress, trauma and sexual violence. The really nasty bit is the lubrication, the money, that has kept the machine working to date, the american dollar, is turning from the oil of commerce to the sand in the gears.

Old school thinking isn't going to get us out of this one. You can take your capitalism, communism, marxism, Book of Mormon, Ayn Rand tracts and Starhawk DVD's and light a bonfire of the vanities. We need to crack our brains open to new ideas and then test those ideas out in millions of experiments. It's time to break open the hallucinogen locker and hand out the goodies in Parliments, Cabinets, Congress and colleges the world over. Not for entertainment, or the pretty lights or to get everyone laid. We have to shatter our individual stories of reality again and again until what's left is what nature puts in front of us. To break the idea that we understand reality independent of the natural world.

Nothing else.

Right now we don't seem to be able to see shit but our stories. We keep hearing the banging in the distance. Now we're smelling the smoke. It would sure be nice to be able to clear this fog.