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?

Changes of state

Last week I began a discussion of the basic necessities that should be the questions you ask yourself in a disruption. They were shelter, water, heat, food, clothing, communication and power. Implicit but not stated was safety.

These are important observations to make of yourself and your life at any time but especially as we enter the plateau phase of the disruption. We have several pivot points under our feet now and it is somewhat depressing, nerve wracking and unproductive to reiterate the litany. However we should understand the basic periods of of this global energy realignment that we can keep straight what one might do during each phase.

Today in a hurricane, tornado, earthquake or evacuation, you might assume help is on the way and you need only survive for a few days until it gets there. That is the function of all 72 hour emergency packs - to get you noticed and to help you survive for three days until the good guys show up. Twenty years from now your emergency pack will be focused on tools, snares and long term survival, and camouflage. No one is coming to rescue you.

So it serves clarity for me at least, to lay out the states or stages of our next 70 years. These are the expected stages of change.

The Remembered Recent Past:
Energy remains abundant, science finds new answers, life is better for everyone, and third world countries look to first world to see their future. there is no concern for resources as they seem endless. The sea is so big, the fisheries are forever. The sky so large we couldn't possibly affect it. Man is the center of the world, and all resources are his tools for growth, increasing complexity and a better life for his children.

NOW - Plateau and decline. Easy energy has been used, capitalism is running out of easy raw materials, another spiecies has gone extinct while I write this, the seas are sterile in many places and the fish will be gone in 20 years. There are islands of floating plastic in the Pacific the size of the state of Texas. Global warming is happening despite our wonder that it could have occurred, wars are being fought currently over globalization, and the world stock piles of grain foods have fallen from over 100 days to 56 days. A corn to ethanol boondoggle is guarranting starvation for third world countries in the near future and our pre cheap energy population of 1 billion has grown to an oil/food assisted 6.6 billion.

We are in the bumpy plateau of the pregnant pause before collapse. Already we are beginning to take our civilization apart for the value of the raw materials. Copper is being scavenged from every dump and abandoned building. Oil, irreplaceable, continues to be pumped at the maximum capacity of wells near exhaustion. The plateau decline is in progress and will last bumping every harder downward towards global starvation, blackouts, failure of the dollar, failure of the power grid.

Deconstruction: Begins with the failure of the electrical power grid. After numerous brownouts and assurances from government that it will fixed "soon", it will go down and stay down. That is the true beginning of the dismantling of suburbia. It will be the period in history known as the salvage era. Salvage will go on for a long time, but the big salvage period will likely last less than 10 years. Electronics fail and are gone, building materials are recycled, but then even the demand for those begins to reduce as we hit a maximum die-off in the 2030s with over 300 million people dying in a single year. At that that steep decline, salvage resources will be ever more available, but the power multiplier of heavy equipment and cheap energy will be gone. Salvage will slow and become a more sane and lifetime job for more and more back to the landers.

Sustainable future. This will be who is left after 2080, and they will be living a completely different life. Their technologies will be based on personal energy levels from food resources - meaning the current sun light falling on the earth. That amount of energy will define the level of civilization , if any that is left.
This may devolve to hunter-gather stage as the earth recovers, or we may find that we pushed the global warming switch over center. There is also the very real probablity in many minds that we will enter wholesale nuclear war by 2030, and that would radically change the later sustainable future picture. That is why no one is willing to guess that far out into the future.

In the near future I would like to begin exploring the idea of what you should be doing now for the plateau phase and the coming transportation and heating crisis.

Keep your head

"Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools:"
Rudyard Kipling, "If"

Sometimes I feel adrift in all this information that is outside the mainstream. That is the danger of turning off the intravenous feed, the TV. As I learned more and more about oil depletion, and began to examine the bones of our government, society, and culture, I found myself in a morass of preparing for too many scenarios, simultaneously. All the while, I feel like I am waking up from anesthesia and fuck it hurts! So today I was thinking of Grace Slick while on a work call, which brought up Keep your head, because I can never remember the lyrics correctly (Feed your Head) which made me think of making sure the basics are covered. The daily basics of "Keep your head."

Shelter
Water
Heat
Food
Clothing
Communications
Power

No matter what sort of collapse comes due to the confluence of our perfect storm - economic, energy depletion, global warming, sterile seas, comes it must. I must not, and you must not, let the strain of preparing for the uncertainty of de-consumption confuse to the point of paralysis.

The goals and concerns of society are quite different than the goals and concerns of you or me.
While crowd control and looting are the main concerns of the military during a disaster, your concern is keeping you and yours alive and safe. There for the list above. Those things should be in your mind at each step. If you are in shock with a bank collapse or hurricane you don't have to have the concerns of the society on your mind, or plans for food storage three years from now.
You need to think, shelter, water, heat, food, clothing, communication, and power.
I'll be talking about each of those in the next few days.
Keep your head.

Catalyst to Action

Right, the raspberries are in. Click here to jump to the main site and see the other pictures of the garden work this weekend.

Preparing mentally for a certain collapse of the now without being able to see the uncertain tomorrow is exhausting. It is a lonely task and it makes no friends. The facts eventually convince your friends and family, but at the cost of depression. However action, any positive action that has immediate benefits for you and those around you has an immediate benefit. My decision to go ahead and garden here on TJ's property has changed the way people near this place act towards TJ and I. It may be simply that people trust and talk to people who are planting things. Growing things, like walking dogs, rarely comes from the bad place. Gardening comes from the loving side, the creation side (even if we're going to eat them up later!). But I think there is something more. Action is a catalyst to further action, and here's the piece I'm after, people in action are more open to change and new information.

I have noticed that when I push forward without any clarity at all on how this might actually help me survive what comes, and begin to plant trees, garden, and berry vines that I feel much better about my future. Planting a tree, planting berries, ACTING in the REAL world, seems to create a positive feedback loop. Neighbors stop and talk and participate in the planting and garden changes. This weaves TJ and me into the community fabric in a way that talking about peak oil never wood. I feel the boundries of future tribe expanding to include those that are close and helpful. I think the difference is that both TJ and I are acting, doing rather than just talking, and the action has the ability to open people up to other forms of communication.
So I'm thinking that doing anything is better than sitting and waiting for the right thing that will position you best for what comes. So if you get a chance, act on what you believe, as it is a powerful tool of change for those around you as well as yourself. I'm working tomorrow, I'm headed to bed!
Back at work - where I was going with this is linked to an article I read in Orion magazine by Kunstler. He is very frustrated. Read his article here!