commonsense look at our uncertain future, peak oil, collapse

Preparation for a low energy future

Sunday, February 18, 2007 7:57 PM
My post from yesterday has been edited for clarity. It was all over the place and I tried to reign it in a little. Please give it another chance and reread - it is just below farther on down the page.

This morning Phil and I went to Crystal Hill, about six miles away, and I remembered all the goodies except the camera, sorry! I'm going to have to have that surgically implanted. We spent several hours there looking over all the mines that people have dug into the rock of the hillside and it is quite unbelievable that sane people would worm their way deep inside some of these claustrophobic twisting rock passage ways after quartz crystals. But they did. We were looking for a few small crystals to grace my Barstick (see picture below if you are unfamiliar with my walking stick project), and it needed to be something local, as all parts of my walking stick are made of materials from the local wash, and drainage. Here is a small sampling of what we found. The funny part for us - all the nice ones in the photo below were found around Phil's car after we were done looking.

Left: yesterday in the morning the sunlight was pouring through the blinds lighting Barstick in a pretty way.
Above: These are some of the little gems that Phil and I found. Phil found most of the beautifully clear ones. They are quite small, about 1/2 inch or less, perfect for I want for my walking stick.

Also check out all the work that Gary and Becky are doing at the Daily Pill. They will be coming south next month and today they put up their new Unisolar solar panels.

Saturday, February 17, 2007 7:24 PM

Essay on Patience in trying to understand the future and on Memes.

Unimportant paragraph.
What a discordant day! So many noises and distractions inside my head. I have many projects I want to write about yet I achieved little on that front. The weather is changing here, it is getting much hotter in the afternoons. It is so tempting to just coast and let the thoughts swirl in my head. I have real work, on the airstream, I have water to go get for the main tank and the 55 gallon drum, I have a wheel bearing cover to make, I have laundry to do. But that is not what breaks my balls and leaves me stranded on this shore of discord. It is feeling that I can't do any of the small tasks an projects because I don't really understand how the changes are going to affect any one of us. I'm just plain frustrated.

Important paragraph.
Here's what I believe. (You may believe differently. You are wrong. If that angers you, get involved and show me what a rube, dope, and sour puss I really am - get mad, just stop being a consumer, you're eating my whole planet!)
A. That we have a big change coming.
B. There will be a worldwide large population die off as oil and natural gas grow our food. Less oil, less food, less people.
C. That when we read and discuss the current serious problems that face all of us, we begin gain knowledge that can help us in two ways.
1. Help us personally survive these coming times by reducing our surprise and personal shock when the shit hits the fan, and allow us to do a bit of physical and resource preparation too.
2. Allows us to use the remaining time before great change to envision a way we might live and prosper (not in a money sense) in a better future. Or, at least we can kick around ideas, pat the grass down to indicate a direction. Wrong or right, absurd or right on, makes no difference, because the first day you read about peak oil, or global warming or watched a Gore's movie, or just wondered if this resource consumption could go on forever, you began the process of this "new path work" that we are all involved in here, whether we like it or not.

Confusing paragraph completely rewritten:
Given those assumptions, I see the simplest things in new and complex ways. Let me give you an example.
I want to show you a little Altoids tin (humorous aside -can be skipped follows) - the candies that some people use for oral sexual pleasure which must be true because they taste terrible and who would buy them otherwise- survival kit that you can put together. You empty the altoids out and put lots of cool little gadgets that you could use to perform various survival tasks - like making fire, sewing a tear, a compass to find your way out, fish hooks, and snare wire, candles, etc. Over the last few days I have purchased all the goodies and will show you how to stock the tin with the suggested items. BUT, when I look at the suggested items, most seem ridiculous. I wouldn't know what to do with most of the stuff, and moreover some of it is like a little tiny sample of what you really need. Who needs on 18" snare if you're hungry, or one band aid?

Better paragraph:
There are many assumptions in survival kits of any size. First, it assumes that you'll remember what is in it and what all the little bits are for. Or that you can read instructions when you are totally freaked out. IS handing you snare wire the same as you being able and willing to build a snare and deal with the poor dead, hung rabbit that results?
Hardest for me, is that all of the kits assume that people will be looking for you - in the good way, where I believe there may be people looking for you in the bad way. So I have had to ask myself, where are you walking to when the shit (of whatever stripe and flavor) hits the fan? How long, what for, what sort of emergencies, what problems do you walk away from? Do you use your supplies to help others? My different assumptions about what will happen in the next few years means that it suddenly becomes very difficult to know what to suggest to you - that you might put in your altoid's can survival kit. Because to know what should be in it, we have to know what is going to happen and there just is no one who can really tell you that. Everyone will say, its really really bad in ways we can't get our heads around. And they are not lying. Local disasters are different than worldwide disasters. It will be very very bad. This is what tortures me as I try to write because really no matter what you put in the tin you are better off than having no tin at all. You might just have the absolute right thing in there. If you have made no preparations then you certainly stand a greater chance of being a sad statistic sooner.

New 2nd subject introduced - this is really what this essay is about:
This leads us what I really was trying to get to for days. Memes. These questions lead to the problem of programmed learning that lives in our head quite well and complete even without our taking it out to look at it. These are memes that are socially induced thought viruses that replicate themselves because they tend to come out of your mouth and into the ears of others, and they are instructions on "how to be and how to act and what to believe AND the importance of telling others the same instructions. They are small computer programs of your mind, and they will cause you to do illogical and unbelievable things (except to others who have the same memes floating in their brains). Maybe you will take poison and kill yourself. Many have because of what they believed. Maybe you will decide that dying for your political beliefs is required both by religion and by your Emperor, as the Japanese did sometimes on Pacific Islands in WWII.

Removed extraneous crap from several paragraphs below (you'd think I was paid by the word):
But memes aren't always so visible. They can be very subtle. Example: Shit hits the fan, you're all set, you've got a place to go to wait things out and the way to get there even with the world in grid lock. You have food and energy and skills that you have acquired and polished. You are a man/women machine for the new age. You are so flexible in thought and body that you are like smoke. You move through every situation intuitively, passionately, with deductive reasoning tempered with a deep connected empathy for all people and things on this small fragile planet. Great! As you reach for the door knob...

The phone rings. It's your a friend from the old home town telling you that your mother is hurt is hurt. What do you do? You have programmed meme screaming in your head that you must sacrifice yourself for the ones you love. And you very well may do that this time and die for it - which is your business, EXCEPT if other members of your family then die because of your absence. Memes are like electrical shorts in logic. Logic goes out the window because it is not necessary - you know what you MUST do. Who's telling you what you MUST do - Memes.

OK, so how in the world do we lay the ground work for a sane world when we ourselves are ruled by the very value system programming that caused the problem Empire in the first place? And on top of that we have a bunch of knee jerk reactions that could make us make very bad mistakes for many that we love.

This is what has been giving me a headache for days. It seems that there must have been a historical precedent for reprogramming ourselves. Marx and Lenin and Stalin, reprogramming Russia, sort of , but then I thought of Thomas Jefferson. About how long Thomas Jefferson took to write the Declaration of Independence, with Adams and Franklin pushing and seething at his back. It was not days or weeks, it was months. If it took Jefferson months to write a document when with faced problems much more definable than what we face at the end of cheap oil. They knew what problems the new democracy would face. Democracy itself was a French imported philosophy, Jefferson didn't have to do the raw hard thinking of how it might work. But he did face the daunting task of seeing what would NOT work in the New World.

Here is where I forgive myself for not finding easy answers, and where I understand what has been so hard for me the last few days - all my projects are for an uncertain future, and I don't know if I'm smart enough to find paths through the upcoming darkness:

But the problems we face don't even allow us to think about them in terms of one Empire system stacked up against another. We're not trying to replace Empire with NEW and IMPROVED Empire because Empire, like the super meme virus that it is, eats all the resources and ends with a dead world. (Mars?) We are trying to get in touch with a whole new part of ourselves that has laid dormant for thousands of years. We, I, us are trying to lay a path that avoids the worst of the collapse, constructs a completely different world of non competitive symbiotic (not parasitic) relationships with each other and with whoever is left, and then, on top of that, constructs new MEMES that let us know when enough is enough. Memes that let us know in a civilization sense, when enough is enough. We have to share, not just with each other, but with every other physical thing on our planet. We have to let ourselves reintegrate with all life whose space we share. It never was OURS to USE, it was always OURS to share. We will learn sharing or we make a dead cinder of our beautiful planet - not through nuclear war but through the simple destruction of our home through exhaustion of the top soil, the fresh water, the easy energy, and C02 emissions resulting in shutting off the great ocean currents.

So I realized that I am impatient to understand and to see. I really want to tell you what I will put in my little bug-out bag, my Altoid's can, but you know, its scattered all over the floor and tables of La Casa Blanca and I'm still sort of clueless, but I am working on it.

Before I felt frustrated. Now having written all this which I'm going to post. I hope that we will find our way in this game of pin the tail on the future, despite the blindfold and the dangerous ground all around. What a ride. If Tom can do write the Declaration of Independence in less that a year, then I can find a way to let my heart and soul have their say, about cougars, Empire, and the Machine that uses us without regard for our heart and humanity, every day for as long as it takes me to get my head around it. Don't be shy, pitch in, it's a big change coming for all of us, and I would love to integrate what you know and feel. Night chickies

Edits finished Sunday night:

Friday, February 16, 2007 9:42 PM
Just headed off to bed and checked I Bonobo. You cat lovers should give it a look - as you know she has cats for which there is no known cure.
Friday, February 16, 2007 8:49 PM
I'm sleeping in tomorrow and going to coffee at BK at 8:15am for all you chickies who aren't working. I'll climb the hill after. If you have time, see you there! Had to work on other webstuff tonight and there was a lot more I was going to talk about but that umbilical that is one of my last two connections to the Empire evil money machine was calling.

If you haven't looked at Gary's Daily Pill you should, he's started his solar and shows the battery hookup and discusses some of the understanding you must have to live with solar panels as your primary electrical source.

I've had several interesting comments on Phil's blog today, one from Phil himself. He is able to put words to emotions that are difficult to write. I look forward to even more expansion from Phil on the theme of "measuring yourself not by what you have but by what you can do."

PIctures!

I finished shaping the butchering knife. I was trying to get a fatter paring knife shape to the oak. On the left I've sanded with 150 grit and applied the first coat of Varathane. Tonight at my table, above, it is dry but soft. When it is hard I will sand with 220 grit and put another coat on. When it is all sealed I will begin polishing the blade and sharpening it. Keep in mind I'm doing this without any special tools. No belt sander, no band saw, no vice to hold the wood with. I actually shaped most of this one with my hatchet, then went to a file, finishing with my pocket knife and sand paper.

I found a hunting knife in the desert with a broken tip and while it was full tang it had no handle. It is a cheap Chinese knife, but the steel is 440 stainless and so I decided to accept the gifts of the desert and build a handle out of local found wood. That way both pieces would have come for free from my little desert home.

I had a piece of ironwood root from a tree that had been knocked over at the big tent construction, and the one root was torn up. I cut a six foot section of that dying tree about 3 weeks ago and it has been drying in the truck since then. I cut a small section for the knife handle a few days ago and coated it with car wax to slow evaporation and cracking (checking). I let it cook in the front of the truck along with my shoot arrows, and today I began to make the two pieces that will form the handle, using just this saw and a pair of vice grips. It turned out pretty well at this stage. I will cook it in the solar oven for a few days and then begin working on it seriously.

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