Even a drop is a lot

I arrived on the California coast and saw the Pacific ocean for the first time in almost a year. What a shock from the desert. I'll have a picture of my feet in the water here today, as soon as the sun comes up and it gets a little warmer.
Crude Awakening is a movie by a European film maker and his partner, Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack. From what I've been able to read about it and from a taped interview over the phone with Basil Gelpke, I believe this might be a perfect follow up to showing someone the Cuban movie, the Power of Community. Here is a link to the movie. Meanwhile, it is being shown all over the world at film festivals, but the DVD is not out yet. I'm hoping to find a bootlegged copy somewhere.
But this morning I want to talk about another set of crude awakenings, both internal to me and external. First, I'm in a very tiny campground right on the beach north of Arcata in Northern California, and there are plenty of people here who are living in tents and while writing this to you, I'm looking a man about 45 and apparently his mother, crawling out of the back of a Nissan truck canopy. They are very precisely cleaning the condensation from their breath off all of the windows, and acting very much as if this is normal. Now she's wiping the taillight lenses.
There are people living far outside my comfort zone, as they travel and adjust to a collapsing economy, seeking to preserve the normalcy of cleanliness, and without any recognition. Disenfranchised people are invisible, made deaf and dumb by their circumstance.

Many of them who saw me roll in to this camp yesterday. Those in tents, car living people, truck living people (everyone has a dog, except me), all of them saw my Airstream truck combination as extremely interesting, NOT for the cuteness, the warmth, the king sized bed, the fantastic fans, the satellite dish pointed phallically south, BUT they wanted the SOLAR panels. Fringe, displaced, out of work, or out of luck people, after food, water and shelter want electrical POWER. I get it, it is hard to understand the importance of something until you don't have it at all.

So many people discuss how alternative energy can't replace oil, being a drop of sunshine compared to an ocean of crude. HOWEVER, when you have NONE, even a drop is a lot.

My internal crude awakening is that all the joy of the traveling is gone now. The education about oil, energy, and societal change and collapse has taken all the fun out of burning large amounts of gasoline to get me north and south each year. Instead of Booker T and "Time is Tight" smoothing my way down the endless, effortless highway, I just feel parasitic, gross and in appropriate.

Yes, I'm aware that my life style, producing 99 percent of my own energy, living for the last 6 years in a 160 sq feet of space, has consumed a tiny fraction of the power that most American's consume in their homes, but still. It really sucks to move just to move at the cost of the most magical of fuels, gasoline. I don't know exactly what I will do about this, but change is inevitable and I will not remain long at the ends of such a long road. Currently the options are give up the south in the winter, relocate to Arizona where the north and south destinations would only be a hundred and fifty miles apart, requiring that I end my job completely.

Like so many of you who have come to understand the sketchy outline of change that comes, my choices are grafted on a very tenuous time line. I have no idea when the shit will hit the fan, except to say, sooner rather than later. So that is my epiphany for this morning, the sun is just breaking over the mountains to the east and soon it will be warm enough to greet the cold cold Pacific with my toes.