Adrift

I fell asleep in the desert and awoke in my cubicle. I feel adrift, tired, a little sick, slothful, fatter, dumber, in short, I'm a cubicle worker again. The thing about a hard job is that it takes 8.5 hours of hard work, you're tired, you get home, you don't want to think, deal with relationships, hell, you don't even want to fuck.
The thing about my easy job is that it takes 8.5 hours, I get home mentally tired and I don't want to think, deal with relationships or even move forward on the things I want to do. Welcome to the Matrix. Welcome to reality TV, welcome to crusing the net and watching Craig's List for free things, free things, CB radios, Ebay, irrate callers, sweet and helpless callers, mean callers, high food chain callers (I'm low on the food chain).
The thing about a job is that it steals your time and your best thinking power. I love my job, it is easy for me, I'm good at it, and I enjoy the people I work with. I hate my job because it takes all the time I have to get ready for what comes. I hate my job because by the time I get home my brain is toast and I'm stupid. I'm still a match for the carrots, but the corn definitely is smarter than me.
So as I look around me and wonder why more people aren't waking up the needed changes, preparing for this low energy collapse of civilization, I realize they can't. Like me, all there is is work and then the daily wheel that must be turned each day with children, food, vehicles, relationship problems, lack of desire, too tired for desire - the last thing to act on is the nagging knowledge that all this will get worse, not better. I know why they don't change, because the sedation of TV, reality shows, and the mental short to ground that is work, makes automotons not revolutionaries.
Of course the first collapse triggers - brown outs and fuel shortages will be just one more fucking thing to add to the list to do when you get home. However they will become all that is on the list very shortly after that.
We are a plane spinning into the earth, and it is hard to pull out of your seat because of the spin, but each of us must. We must not give in to lethargic acceptance of what has been the same will always be the same. Soon it will not.
I have planted the garden, put in trees, berries, bought the hi milage Geo and worked with peak oil and relocalization activists in Eugene upon my return. TJ is deep in to power ans solar, and I'm studying wind yet again, looking at the simplest quick answers for power.
I've been buying more and more canning jars, I've been buying locally (to Veneta/Elmira) whenever possible. I am watching and learning more and more. There is a dividing line, a place where each of us thinks, I will wake up, I will move my heavy feet from their familier path, I will not accept the death of me and those around me lightly. I know that our plane of petrochemical largesses is about to crash, but I will not do business as usual just to make it easy for myself.
And I feel like shit, I feel adrift and alone and separated from my friends. I know that I have become too far out there for many people who used to talk to me. I'm pretty upset about this mess myself and wish disparately that it not be so.
My mother use to say, "if wishes were horses, beggars would ride," I'm cheap, I'm a scrounger, but I'm not a beggar, and I act on what I believe. But it is so sad to watch everyone, to watch myself, slog through the days, doing so very little to prepare myself for what comes.
Cubicle work comes with the drug of emotional mass. The job, the place seems bigger than me, so how can peak oil affect such a monumental instrument of non-profit profit. It is huge, thousands about thousands of people, surely they can't all be wrong and me right, can they?