Small Moves, Elly

The title is from dialog of father to daughter in the movie "Contact." Passing through the eye of the needle of easy energy exhaustion, aka Peak Oil, aka Collapse of our society and the Die off, aka population adjustment, draws out from the desert, churches, mental institutions and government, seers. These long see-ers are twisted into a knot trying to see what might be our societies' future in 2 years, 5 years, 25 years, and 200 hundred years. I read many of these people's blogs and musings and try to assemble any sort of coherent future picture. Ouch.

As a reader of this blog you have sort of failed at total denial, as you're here reading this. You have my sympathy. There is little good news or hope anywhere, from anyone about the near term future of us. There is generally more hope for the 200 year from now mark as we will (as a society) have passed through the eye of the needle -a huge population reduction, destruction of the modern world and no support for our current fragile technologies. Many of these seers are trying to envision what might be a workable society after the technological era ends and then work backwards to see what they might do now to put the seeds of that future into the current matrix.

Some people who are pondering this mess are more concerned with the transition between the two times - today's hell bent total consumption of all oil and raw materials and this nirvana-like future 200 years from now where we all live under a Gaia loving matriarchal system and sing songs holding hands and wonder if the moon is angry tonight. This transition period may well take 75 to 100 years. Whatever else we might become we will certainly be remembered as the great salvage society after we're gone. We will be scavenging of the bones of the ancient "oil" peoples dead and rapidly decaying cities. Everything around us, the road, the skyscrapers, the power grid, all of it requires immense constant repair. That will not be available and much of those areas will be of necessity abandoned. The cities and suburbs will still be prime for deconstruction, supplying building material and metal for the rapidly shrinking population.

With that in mind what I can do today and have been doing is preparing my transition skills and materials. This is a state of the mcnalan:

I remain in my 22' airstream (22 feet on the outside - 19.5' inside) where all functions of my living are contained. It remains perfectly mobile and electrically self sufficient. I can be in motion for weeks at a time and years if necessary if I can find water to fill my tank and any remaining gas for the Ford F250. This gives me a certain flexibility to avoid disaster, but has a corresponding failure in the long term development of more primitive storage of food and tools. No root cellars for instance. Being mobile is a tremendous problem for food growing and storage and at the same time a tremendous advantage for getting out of harms way.
There are two reasons I continue this lifestyle choice now in the face of my belief that the collapse of the economy is imminent:
1. I cannot see where and what will happen and where it is best for me to be sitting.
2. I do not own land and therefore cannot create a personally defensible existence that I have control over. I'm doing the best I can by staying with my friend TJ and improving his and my ability to grow food there. However should anything happen to TJ I will have to relocate, and in the middle of a collapse the timing could be deadly.

So the mobile lifestyle casts my future in a certain direction. I don't get to have a home base chosen for best neighbors, a secure area, that I have legal right to exist on. But if we look at home owner rights in a collapsing tax environment it is very possible that land owners will find themselves not truly masters of their own property in any real sense. Debt foreclosure and right of condemnation mean that your local land owners of larger size in disguise as local government can really do whatever they want with your property. So putting up solar, wind generation, food production, etc. is also an invitation for your local government to take that very property. It is a question that vexes TJ and I no end in our conversations. How does a land owner prepare without making the property and improvements a target of lesser prepared individuals or of the local government itself and surrounding community?

We normally feel our local governments are of lesser importance in this current time (The time of free and nearly free oil energy) and so we focus on national issues (which is funny because we have very little power on that end of the stick). But in a collapse the federal government will become more and more remote as transportation becomes much more difficult, and local government, your volunteer fire department (emergency responders) will become the new lords of the area. Think of how the distances to the next town will increase in size as you find you have to bicycle or walk. Our individual worlds will shrink to what we reasonably can walk and pull a cart or possibly drive an electric vehicle or home brewed bio diesel light weight vehicle to in a day. Local becomes intimate and distant become irrelevant.

A small example - I would like to be prepared to put a small AM radio station up after the collapse to help people pass messages and coordinate food swap meets, etc. Certainly if I did that while remaining where I am now, the powers in Veneta would take that tower and broadcast equipment as necessary to their duties, which even I would agree with the decision if EVERYONE was my responsibility. Communities will attempt to level the prepared and unprepared to the great detriment of those who will prepare, and theoretically to the greatest good of all.
This is a bad idea. There is no way to save even half of the people in the coming collapse. Check Paul Chefurka's webpages (click on his link to the right) for die off numbers and rate. All you will achieve by the seemingly altruistic role of spreading out your abilities and resources is to hasten your groups demise. This is NOT like Katrina. No one is coming to save us in our near uncertain future as the energy and the collapse of our false paper money will guarantee that this is NOT a local collapse but a worldwide collapse.

Given all that, I am preserving what little sanity remains by making "small moves." I try not to look up at the whole thing, this perfect confluence of decreasing free energy and a capitalist state that needs every more growth, people and energy. So . . .
I have plants in the ground at Terry's house to teach myself - remind myself - about growing my own food and saving seed. I've put in fruit trees because they will prepare themselves and be a source of food for someone (hopefully TJ and I and friends - but who knows?).
Most importantly to my mental health, I've isolated myself from 1 year of broken supply lines by putting aside in the trailer everything I need to keep me alive, happy and well fed for 1 year.
I have several years of insulin stored at the perfect temperature and redundancy built into most of my technologies.
I have communication devices (yes I know about pulse and I'm prepared for that), I have shortwave, CB, walkie talkies and and cell phone. I have dried regular grains and foods for a year. I have drink mixes (Splenda sweetened) for me for a year. My electricity is all solar and it works well even in Oregon (during 8 months of the year). I have movies and books and ways to do everything that you do in your full sized house, though perhaps not as conveniently I'm sure.
I have two bicycles - one with a small motor, a old Geo metro that got 50 mph on my last fill up, I have my Airstream and my truck that is in almost perfect condition with low miles. All fuel tanks are kept full and I keep 3 gas cans full at all times. If necessary I could drive the Geo across the USA with only one gas stop.
I have a back pack packed with 3 days supplies that is ready to go, and I can make most of what I need. Maybe.
I consider this a mid level technical hope and solution. Phil, the flint knapper, thinks this is trying to hold technology (my personal technology) at a higher point that necessary, and that someday this level will certainly be unsustainable. I agree, but I am planning for transition, not the arrival in the brave new world in 200 years. I am 57 and diabetic. I'm in good physical condition and I work at staying fit. But I certainly would be excited to look back and see that in 2030 I as still alive. So my plans are for entrance into the salvage culture. I'm well suited for that if I medically can live into that period. I need very little insulin currently, and in a pinch could go years without it with diet modification.
Getting a new radio, adding a shortwave antenna, and storing food that I like and eat currently is fun. A corollary benefit is that part of my life that I modify for the future has the result of improving my current life. I hadn't expected that but it is great! I eat cheaper, use less gas, and have grown to understand that all the social medications that we pay for to even stand our lives for one more day are generally unnecessary or fun to subvert. Paying for movies, paying for vacations, working every day for a better retirement (you understand that it ain't going to be there right?), all of them eat your current energy output for a promise that tomorrow will not deliver.

So I suggest, and most humbly because I know you think I'm nuts, that you begin to bring your work energy back to paying for yourself. Go to free concerts, and cook your own food. You know most of what you eat out sucks anyway and you're doing it out of habit. Change your habits, getting thinner, get meaner and leaner and divorce yourself from the approval of a society that you will come to see is NOT YOUR FRIEND. You are a worker and consumer and this society needs you to keep increasing your debt every day, despite the noise to the contrary. Ever increasing debt creates every increasing money that fuels further growth if the oil can be pumped to back up the dollars (even when pumped from outside of our borders, the oil money is loaned back to us as the purchase of federal bonds). If it stops, even if belief stops, falters for one long breath, it all falls down.
But to step in the maelstrom of depression and awareness if shocking. Start with small moves today. Buy extra of everything you eat that doesn't need refrigeration. Get a shortwave radio and turn off the TV. Meet your neighbors if they will be an asset in what comes. Small moves, yet quickly.

Sicko and Nested Russian Dolls

Higher language function and interpretation is a good thing not so much. We take what impacts us, sound, heat, light, and touch and turn it into something that "makes sense." Then we decide how we relate to that "sense." It is an interpreted reality, a shorthand version of what our senses collected. We pay attention to very little of it because our senses deluge us constantly with input; not sense, but raw input. That sensory data gets integrated with all the patterns that we have expeirienced and we from that subtractive and it-looks-like process we construct our reality. Unfortunately that makes it pretty easy to control me. All you have to do is twang any one of my interior easy buttons and I'm off. Why is it so easy to fool me? Why is it so easy to fool you?

Which brings me to life themes. I feel that we are all a series of nested beliefs some more important than others, but each nested into the larger one above and that all of them are our current "Life Theme." We slowly change that by taking in new information, emotions, hurt and joy, but the change to the life theme is very slow. This probably keeps us from quitting our jobs and leaving our mates several times per day. From a social evolutionary point of view, slow is good, change should be slow. More on this later in a later post.

But first, what is that total construct, the Life Theme? I think we have many roles, and each of them is defined by our agreement with or opposition to the central theme. For instance, I'm not married now, and I don't plan on every being again. If I'm sitting with other bachelors, and survivors of their own divorce wars, I will generally define myself in that group, and my role within that group, in agreement with the basic idea that marriage is a prison. So for that nested Russian doll, for that bit of my life or personality, I play an agreement role. What that agreement costs - my next relationship - a tendency not to want a deep relationship because of loss of personal freedom - in others words my agreements with ideas influences my future behavior. It also defines me and allows me to superficially know who I am.

I have a role at work, another personality fragment that is in opposition to the administration of the work environment because I believe it is not really trying to provide what it purports to provide (and paints as a mission statement on the walls) to the patient. I am radical in that place in words as I am not easily controlled by work (I have no debt and I can do other things - I do not cling to the job, thus fear of job loss is not an overwhelming concern). So I define myself as part clown, rebel, smart, and ultimately concerned that I make people, the customers, feel better when I work. That encoding of my heat, light, sound and touch as a good worker in a fraudulent environment is that Russian doll, that life theme that presents a fragment of me to my coworkers. They thus have a short hand model of me to respond to without much thought.

But there are much larger Russian dolls that these smaller themes nest in. I have loved my country and define myself as a real patriot in that place, and I filter all information based on that belief. Oh I have been more than a cynic, downright seditious in fact, but I have not looked at the data stream very closely, instead I have thought, all the bad things about politics and unfair and unloving treatment of the common class are exceptions, and probably my fault in part for being lazy and not paying more attention to politics. But I have still clung to the belief that America is great and free and the media is a watch dog snapping at the heals of self absorbed politicians, exposing them to us as faithful guardians of the First Amendment should and must. I have thought that America just needs a little, um, tweaking.

BUT No. No. IN the last five years I have begun looking at every part of this particular life theme of mine - e big Russian Doll for me, called the "world in which I live" my life. Everything began to fall apart when I looked closely at any part of it. Nothing is as it should be, and it leaves me speechless that I could have had so little real information in the last twenty years, and that I persisted in believing that I was in a democracy that the rest of the world aspired to. I believed that really the rest of the worlds peoples would give anything to have the quality of life that I enjoy.

This week was typical, and extraordinary. I watched Sicko by Michael Moore. Stop reading this right now and go watch it. I'll wait.

Ok, you're back. What I have learned in the last five years is that everything we are told by the news media and even by the authors of books and magazines and commercials is a lie. Of the various forms of lies it is the most insidious, the most foul. It is the lie we ought not tell to the child inside of us. We are told to love our country, that we live in the best place on earth, that hard work is rewarded, that anybody can become important here through hard work, not by birth class, that we are a melting pot of the best of all the world, that we are the alloyed stell of imcomparable strength that comes from all people added to the struture, and that if we work hard, we will find love, happiness, and success in a special place, called the United States of America.

If you have just watched Sicko, you are feeling what I have been feeling for five years. No. No. No. We are not a democracy, we are a capitalist machine. We are three classes, the duped sheeple who think they are the middle class, the very very rich (2 percent) and the poor and disenfranchised. We are a managed workforce and consuming machine for capitalism so that the parasitic 2 percent can continue to feed off of your blood, sweat and hopes. In return for the massive debt that we are continually sold, we get drugs, high blood pressure, increasing obesity, and stimulated to go out and buy more and take on more debt - as debt is the creation of actual money that feeds that upper 2 percent. Debt is also the chains that bind us to jobs that we would not accept, and debt is the root of the fear that makes you shiver when you think about being fired, not getting paid anymore, getting divorced, not finding your love - all of these have as their basis the underlying assumption that the debt you carry will cause you to die, shamefully, publically, if you stop.

Sicko made me cry for the death of a dream that I wanted to believe in. I wanted us to be the white hats. Yet all I find is that my country lies to me, will say anything to me like a cheap whore sucking my cock in an alley just to get me to come, because my cum is the debt that allows the continous enriching of that top 2 percent. This whore is more than willing to suck the life out of me telling me how good and handsome I am while she drains the life from me and my country and my land Fuck you capitalism. Fuck you to death. More later after you've had time to see the movie. Crack yourself open - open your eyes, don't be afraid to look.

720 canning lids

Two Saturdays ago Bi-Mart had a canning jar lid sale as they do every summer and I bought 480 regular Ball canning jar lids, and 240 wide mouth lids, a mixture of Ball and Kerr. The lids are interchangeable as you know. I bought about 100 more this week.
Anyway, I emailed a friend about the purchase and he asked in a return email why I bought so many. He had a dozen or so canning jars and was thinking of buying 12 lids apparently. At that moment I realized how differently each of us prepares, or does not, for our quickly coming uncertain future, where the only certainty is a lack of cheap energy from oil.

Why would anyone want a dozen canning jar lids? Why do I think 720 is about 5 times not enough? So I've been thinking about that space between his 12 canning jar lids and my desire for thousands of lids. How differently we each approach Peak oil given our individual circumstances.
My friend is growing a small garden and will can a small amount produce. He has bought a single solar panel and a small charge controller. Without putting a word to it he is practicing what will be necessary to know later but not actually shifting his lifestyle to a new low energy future now. And there is no right or wrong here, we all are living on this luxury liner as it sinks, if you'll forgive that metaphorical image, and each of us is deciding at what point we mark the "party over" and become earnest in our preparations. Also somethings you simply cannot do without detaching from job and family.

If you knew that a complete oil collapse was going to happen on July 28, 2007, and you understood that this would mean a collapse of the economy and the distribution of all the things we buy at the super market, at Walmart, at the gas station, heating fuel, and gas prices of $50/gal, what would you do today?

Your preparations would probably include buying everything you would never be able to buy again or make. You might also decide to move temporarily or permanently. You might run your credit cards up to the max and use the money to buy emergency supplies, seeds, garden tools, get your well dug, or buy every solar panel and wind generator you could afford. In the short term you might buy a generator or two and all the gasoline you can get cans for - because - as the saying goes - they won't be making any more of that (and what is left will rise continually in price).

Anyone following the confluence of the perfect storm that is coming in energy, health, global warming, fish stocks, erosion, over population, pollution and disease understands that the day described above is absolutely coming but maybe not on July 28 of this year. Any day it can happen when the financial world takes delivery of the fact that we pumped the greatest amount of oil on May 5th of last year (2006), that we are indeed post peak, and every property, every business is now extremely over-valued as the flow of petro dollars will be ever smaller from now on.

So my friend's question puts my head right in the middle of the mess. Do you prepare now and appear an idiot to all around? I must participate in my middle class life to keep resources (money) flowing in, while I rush to teach myself a shit load of new skills. Sometimes it seems all to much to do, sometimes it seems I'm insane for doing it at all, but most of the the time it seems to slow and too little.

Yet a little at a time, I'm more streamlined and will be less affected by some of the aspects of what is coming (collapse of currency, loss of jobs, destruction of transportation, loss of air travel, extending over time to loss of food, and then a die off world wide to a population 6 times smaller than what we have now). I take that I produce all my own power (solar panels) for granted now. I was only plugged in for about 20 days last year in November (rained constantly in Oregon). I have heirloom seeds for 5 years planting, I have 6 months of food for myself, an 2 years of insulin. I will be able to live about 5 years if insulin is no longer produced by a carb free diet and weight loss. My goal is to store 5 years worth of insulin at a perfect temperature which might stay effective longer.

I also expect upheavals and I see the linked aspect of fuel, demand, and supply mechanisms much more clearly. So the preparation my friend is making is about practicing, and mine right now is an attempt to actually separate myself to a degree from what is coming. Practice and doing are critical to everyone who would like to improve their prospects during times of great upheaval.

The commonality between my friends and I is that we have looked the problem in the eye, and though our understanding my be flawed and distorted, we have not flinched from the data that exists in every segment of the society. We understand how fucked we are, we differ only in our reactions and our preparations to that information.

What amazes me is that the information is all about - and easily acquired - just start by googling "peak oil" and follow from there, yet most people look for a moment and can't look at it at all - this is true at every level of government, business and education as well as in the mind of most individuals. We are not talking about fringe people who have a new cause, it is geologists, and scientists and it is not new information - it was always visible from the first day we pumped our first barrel of oil. However, it would appear that we all have such investment in what we have "achieved" that we simply cannot look at the end of our current energy rich life style at all. Only denial works for most. Lemmings don't do well at the end of their lifestyles and if you continue to lack the courage to look at what is coming then when it arrives a vast majority of deeply in debt people will find themselves hungry, homeless, and in shock.