Personal bubbles

It has been a while, hey? The state of mcnalan, my personal bubble world. A small world comprised of work and sleep and working on my trailer, and, oh yea, being plugged into the burgeoning, looming, giant of our staggering drunk and failing economy. I'm just scurrying trying to make sure that it won't fall right on me.

The housing bubble has begun the public display of it's inevitable death throes. Even a child knows that you can't just sell something (houses) back and forth between each other, pretending it is increasing in value each time. The extra money came from in loans from China. Eventually someone begins to doubt you can pay it back and clenches it's corporate money pooper and companies begin to fall, and worse yet, these lousy loans have been repackaged and mixed with the good stuff, but like rodent shit and hair in the cereal box, there is a point where even the blind begin to notice. Bear Stearns, American Home, and now others today. Crumbling down.

It is like the drunk with the big bar tab. Cut him off and cut your losses or keep his tab open hoping he'll find a way to pay. For every big tab there is a day of reckoning where you have lost credibility with the bar owner and he is sad to realize you will NEVER pay your tab, and he closes you off. No more credit. Watch the Dow for the next 12 months.

Oil is money and they ain't making any more of that, unlike money which we can print or coin out of anything left. But oil and home mortgages are arm in arm in this dance, and as the oil goes, the petro dollars go, the credit streams dry up, bad loans foreclose (foreclosing quickly now), and America's false real estate bubble bursts and destroys, well, a better question is what is NOT destroyed with the credit dries up?

The ruling class of the capitalist world who hold your notes, they will be hurt too, but don't cry for them to much, they are busy getting their ill botten gotti out of US investments and into Europe. Watch for the dollar to tumble when they are done looting the companies that will be forgotten in a moment. Today Dell closed a center in southern Oregon and 200 jobs went poof. All the poofs will not make the papers - back page stuff, 200 at a time and then larger but your media is owned and controlled and it will be spun that good times are just around the corner. No, the collapse will be very personal and it will be one person at at time.

So back to my little bubble. I have no real estate and no wads of cash to inflate, no ulcers over my 401K (though I worry if there will be anything there when I want to reach for it when I'm 59 and 1/2 years old (1 year and 8 months -minus a few days). I'll pull every dollar I can and convert to real trade items.

Meanwhile in the day to day I have picked up my first 50lb bag of wheat, 25 lbs of pinto beans, I've stocked up a year's worth of food, dehydrated, 5 years of insulin, and I'm working out in the gym here at work almost every morning that I can stand it. Some days I get to sore, pushing this 57 year old body to be more flexible, stronger, and more fit.

The garden grows, the corn has Kentucky wonder beans climbing up and squash leaves shading the roots. The blue berries are done and I've mulched them heavily with sawdust and horse shit. The raspberries are loving their spot, spreading out and very green. I'll mulch them even deeper for August's heat soon and card board over the area which will be a new row of raspberries and black berries. The two apple trees- one has done well and the other seems lost in limbo, probably because of the big pine root we cut digging it's hole. We smelled turpentine but didn't know it would shock the little tree so much. When it is dormant I'll dig it up, hose off the roots (November) and replant it in a different area.

The next year garden area is covered and the grass is dying.
Why do I bother? Because when all is unsure all you can do is the next thing that moves you in the direction of independence from the thing that is the problem. I might not being doing exactly the right thing at the right time or in the right place, but I can promise you that doing nothing, doing business as usual, being an ostrich with your head stuck in the sand (or up your ass) is exactly the wrong thing. IF you do something you have a chance of surviving what comes in a better position, MAYBE. If you doing nothing but live in your mortgaged home and go to work in a company that will evaporate in the next 2 years you will not be alone. Unfortunately being without direction, assets, or skills among a great crowd people all looking around, shaking their heads, saying "what the fuck happened?" is not a very good strategy for your physical or mental health.

So I'm working every weekend, every night to move my little trailer world further and further from the umbilical of industrial life. I read others who are more eloquent than I, like Chefurka and Kunstler and try to map out an ethical life that I would like to pursue during the upcoming collapse.

You might think that society is doomed, and in fact the society of over abundant cheap to free energy is going to become a very different society, HOWEVER, I have, you have, choices about how YOU (not all people - YOU) can live in this new society.

Look to your salable skills. Let your imagination open wide and see yourself with all choices again open to you, including the preciously sweet right to make the wrong choice and die. We are entering a time in which as strange as it might feel, what you think and do will make a tremendouos difference in what happens to you.

You think not? What if today you googled "floating neutrinos sailing". You quit your job, move to the coast on a river, work for hamburger joint for minimum wage and build yourself a huge ocean going raft out of the discards (Styrofoam and broken plywood) from the poor side of town. You leave on an ocean voyage, continually growing your little floating world, following the currents back and forth across the oceans? Is that different enough from what you are doing today?

I had a friend talk to me about suicide not too long ago. That's what our straight jacketed world of social convention and sterile work does to people. We feel trapped and there is no support for doing something different. You have to be crazy to break away. If you're not, and you break away, you oddly feel very normal but begin to make "regular" people uneasy. But my advice to anyone who thinks they might do themselves in, and I'm no psychologist - but why not just say fuck it and build yourself a raft. Have some freaking FUN!

Live loud chickies, LIVE BIG! Do the different thing, cut a new path to the waterhole, refuse the velvet harness that seeks your neck. Everything we have been told in school and on TV and on the job about the world and your right place in it is FALSE. You and I were born with the right to an equal share of everything on this planet and we have the ability to choose freedom at every moment, not just once but again and again and again. Build your raft, make your cob house, and stay away from the people who whisper then shout society's enslavement messages in your ear until you think you are your possessions and that they are important.
For me, the only important thing is to witness each new day, to eat it up, to see it coming, live it, cry, laugh, despair, rejoice - none of which I'm good at chickies - you know that - but I have thrown that velvet harness off my back and I will speak what I feel, and I will be honest to myself and I will not please them. I will not please you. But I will always love you all.

mcnalan in the summer of 2007, before the collapse.