Hello Everyone!
Apocalyptic Homesteading Day 414!
The Food Scenario, Farming Is Often Bad Advice, The Wealthy Mindset Vs The Poverty Mindset & Tangents About Society
The colder weather moved in very late in the night once that big thunderstorm finished thrashing things for many hours. Aside from a bunch of dead tree branches littering the dog yard and the ground being super damp there is not much sign that there even was a storm. I mean it is super sunny out today and there is not a single cloud in the clear blue sky. Even the wind has died down to the point where I could probably have that fire today as long as I am willing to hover around it and keep it burning low because there is still the occasional gust of wind that could blow embers around. I will probably pass on the fire though because standing around in the cold tending a fire just does not seem all that appealing especially since what I want to burn is mainly my burnable 'trash' (cardboard, paper and such) and stacking it up further to be burned later is not going to be an inconvenience or anything like that. Since I mainly just want to make ashes for the compost it would be pretty counter-productive to have the wind blowing them away!
Anyway, I fell asleep rather early last night (right when the storm was at its fiercest) and when I awoke at four this morning and let the dogs out the wind jerked the doorknob out of my hand and the door itself hit the building so hard I was worried it had damaged it but alas it was fine. Afterwards I briefly considered starting my day but for whatever reason I just went back to sleep and all total I wound up getting something like eleven hours of sleep. I was having some rather interesting dreams so that played a part in things but while I was laying there half awake I had the realization that my poor diet (and general lack of physical activity) over the last many months is probably catching up to me.
I should probably look at getting on government food assistance again especially with how much the food prices keep going up. It is hard to sum up to folks who do not face these kinds of problems but say I have (for example's sake) two hundred dollars (minus taxes) in grocery money for a month of supplies and when the cost of goods goes up by say fifty extra dollars that represents a whole week of food for me. In other words there is not a whole lot of 'wiggle room' there for me when it comes to such things and while for many folks its no big deal that prices have risen for those of us at or below the poverty line it has made things pretty damned challenging.
One of the 'good' things about the food assistance is that there is no taxes involved when making purchases (because it is already tax money) so that helps tremendously to offset a wee bit of the inflated prices but hell it is not like even that would make much difference given how much prices are rising and will more than likely continue to do so. I made a joke a few months back that I will one day go to the store and my few hundred bucks would only afford one item and I would be stuck between buying a bag of rice or a bag of coffee and that I would probably choose the frigging coffee. I of course never explained why I would do that but I could sum it up as: Either way I would not have enough money to feed myself so I may as well be happy and have a cup of coffee to drink!
I know a lot of folks would be thinking 'you should grow your own food' and well yeah that is a nice idea and yeah I have tried again and again over the years to do so without much success (besides potatoes) along the way. The thing that folks often fail to realize is that most places just are not suited for farming especially on the scale needed to say feed a single person for a year. Storing said food is another matter but that is a different topic. Getting the right combination of good soil, enough sun, enough rain but not too much rain, minimal pests or vermin eating the crops etcetera... is the exact reason why most farming is done on an industrial scale and yeah its frigging expensive to boot! I am also just one person and yeah gardening/farming is a heck of a lot of work and well if you are just doing it to feed yourself you are not going to have much time to do anything else to earn a living.
There is assuredly a trade off there but if at the end of the day you are exerting more calories than the food you are growing can provide and investing what resources you have into farming and basically gambling your time and money on getting a good harvest... it just seems foolish. Not that failing has stopped me from trying year after year but like I said before having all the right conditions in the first place is rather paramount to being even mildly successful at it in the first place. Sure folks with the resources to do so, can clear land to create sunny places, buy dump-truck loads of good soil, purchase seeds in bulk, afford expensive pest control and yeah even pay other folks to do the often back-breaking work that is required which is the reason why even most big industrial farms receive government subsidies to remain in operation.
To sum all that up the whole 'grow your own food supply as a solution' is some rather flawed advice and often given by folks who have no damn idea what they are talking about in the first place. They are also basically saying: Hey you should gamble all your resources on doing this thing that may or may not work and so what if it fails because it is not like you are not poor already! On a different note, why those who do not live in some kind of financial poverty think that folks who do value their time and effort less than they do is frigging mind boggling. If anything that time and effort is even more precious but hey I do not want to wade into that particular swamp at the moment.
Suffice it to say that as with much of that sort of advice the folks who give it are by and large just talking out their ass and their particular 'status' in life will never quite accommodate them with understanding what poverty is really like. It may often seem like I resent or dislike folks for what they have in life but really nothing could be further from the truth. Sure I often love saying 'Some people are so poor all they have is money' (not my quote but I like it nonetheless) and when I find myself saying that I always feel a deep sadness for such folks so go figure. For anyone combing over this looking for things to be offended by: Yeah I am speaking in broad terms here and yes I do know that not everyone thinks like that but my point is that by and large it is a very common sentiment among those who are 'better off' than others.
Okay, maybe I am going to wade into that swamp I mentioned a bit! Folks often deplore other folks for having a 'poverty mindset' but it is not like that is the mindset that has say been the cause of genocide (or attempted genocide), the toxification of the oceans and most bodies of water, the destruction of forests, the extinction of species and generally brought the planet to the brink of no longer being a sufficiently habitable place. In fact it is the 'wealthy mindset' that has caused these things. The greed and lust for power in folks hearts is an abysmal affair that is at the root of most of the current problems that humanity has been facing for most of known human history so if we really want to look at which way of thinking is severely faulty (and yeah a sign of severe allowed/permissible/encouraged mental illness) I do not think it is 'the poor' which need to change their way of thinking. Not that having a 'poverty mindset' is all that great either or anything but I am trying to illustrate a point here which is basically: Instead of reigning in the rich societies (at least western ones) tend to subjugate the poor instead.
Folks can debate stuff all they like but its a fact that ninety-nine percent of folks are 'ruled over' by one percent of the population and that one percent can get away with things that most folks would (as we say in the south) 'get buried under the jail' for. This kind of inequality and 'justice for some but not others' goes back a long time but the thing is times are changing and the extreme pressures at play (like the planet rapidly moving towards being uninhabitable) is at long last pushing that ninety-nine percent towards no longer tolerating the status quo that has brought us all to the very brink of extinction. Better late than never I guess but honestly it is probably too damn late because the time it would take to topple the current structures, recover from the ensuing chaos and later rebuilding a 'better world' would put us way beyond the point in time where doing so would matter anyway. In other words it is just too little too late and there just is not much else to say about it.
Yeah, that is all some rather cynical and pessimistic stuff but it is difficult to see things any other way if I am going to be even remotely honest with myself about my own perceptions. I will undoubtedly hold out hope that we humans can ever set our individual (and tribal) differences aside and work together towards a better present. I know most folks would say 'future' there but we are looking (at best) decades of a future to effect the kinds of changes that we have resoundingly failed at doing for if not millennia then centuries now. To think that in our last brief moments that we are going to somehow put aside our divisions and become more humane towards all people is downright delusional especially given that the status quo will fight tooth and nail to preserve itself and yeah even if that brings the experiment of life on earth to an end. It is a wretched affair all the way around but I just cannot bullshit myself into any other line of thinking at this juncture and I am a frigging pro at bullshitting myself about any number of things!
Anyway, it is good to get that stuff out of my system and word it out the best that I can because as troubling as it all is it does not exactly help me to bottle it up and let it linger at the edges of my awareness. When I think about what I can actually do about any of it I always come up empty handed besides writing about it all and doing the things in my own life to effect the kinds of changes that I want in it but at the end of the day I know that it will probably never be enough. For the most part I am merely an oddity with a predisposition to use too many words to describe things that are downright challenging to describe to myself in the first place let alone convey to others.
By and large I think that I keep writing in an effort to maintain a semblance of 'sanity' and if I catered to politics, religions, trends, fads, conspiracies or any number of other horseshit things I would perhaps be absolutely crushing it at this point or be utterly trolled out of existence. Instead I just keep plodding along doing the same thing that I have been doing for something like the last one thousand eight hundred and twelve days. For those taking notes yeah I have yet to actually quit sharing even though I have taken a few breaks along the way.
The thing is that it has all done a lot of good for me both mentally and emotionally and my original intention of 'sharing my life with some friends' may have gotten out of hand somewhere along the way but by and large the scope of it all continues to land in the 'put it out there and let the chips fall as they may' category and yeah I am rather unapologetic in that regard. I have actually lost readers along the way not because my views conflicted with theirs but because my own views failed to conform to their way of thinking. Sorry-not-sorry but folks being supportive will never be more valuable to me than sticking to my own thoughts and ideas (no matter how unpopular or flawed) they might be. Being true to myself will always come first and I just will not compromise regardless of the cost and yeah there is always some kind of frigging cost when it comes right down to it.
Having chosen this lifestyle for myself I have no legitimate complaints because I know that living a lifestyle outside the 'norm' and being honest about my successes and failures are not exactly a recipe for success. In so doing I think that folks often think something along the lines of 'That crazy hermit must be up to no good' when in fact doing 'good' in the world seems to consume my frigging thinking all too damn much and the worst thing that I probably engage in is reading the news and paying attention to what is going on in the world because it leads me into a confrontation with one existential crisis or another. Maybe I should be flattered by such pigeon-holing because it surely makes my life seem more interesting than it actually is. There is no conveying to folks the kind of peace that I feel when alone in the woods and yeah it is me loving that feeling of peace that drives me onward and although folks often misinterpret it as me disliking other humans... I understand that their own lack of peace (or appreciation of it in others) is what motivates that kind of thinking.
Being a person of extremes I think that if it was a 'dislike of other humans' I would be hellbent on keeping them out of my life instead of sharing as much of my life as I can with folks. Everyone needs a hobby though and for some folks vilifying (or sanctifying) others seems to be one heck of a full-time hobby these days. Perhaps it would be more productive for folks to look inward at what to vilify or sanctify in themselves but as a species I just do not think we have evolved ourselves to that point quite yet. Not that I am an expert at it or anything (or make claims to be all that evolved) but I damn sure try! In a world dominated by entertainers, influencers, athletes, talking heads, advertisers, politicians and corporations there just is not much room for actual humanity in the form of being authentic, decent, compassionate and humane to not just other humans but all living things. I do not know if there just is not 'room' for it or just no 'incentive' for it but I think that they amount to the same thing.
Okay, this post has gone off on many tangents and the further along I go the murkier things are getting. What I was trying to get at is that we often want to be accepted by the society that we live in, we want to have a voice in that society, we want to be heard by that society and when society does not accommodate us we grow discouraged (some even grow depressed, angry, desperate and violent) but what I am driving at here is that being accepted/heard by a fundamentally flawed society should never be the 'end all, be all' of things because asking something to care about things it has no interest in caring about is a recipe for disappointment, sadness and heartache.
Not to harp on western civilization but I often look at it like its a rabid critter (one who has the rabies virus) and although it is dying of thirst it will lay down next to a clean body of water and die before ever taking a single sip of water. Oh yeah and it will bite and infect everything it can along the way but that is an entirely different train of thought. My point is that an ill society might well know its ill (or suspect it) but it is often powerless to do a damn thing about it on its own because at that point the illness has already crippled it in one way or another beyond its ability to care for itself. It is not that the infected host is mad, angry, upset or whatever... it is suffering from an illness and one that it is so overwhelmed by that often it is not even aware that it is ill in the first place even if it has some marginal awareness that something just is not right.
No one wants to believe that some 'mighty' society can be so fundamentally flawed (ill, sick, terminal or whatever you want to call it) which is probably why folks often turn to conspiracies, alternative facts (Ha its a fact or its not a fact sorry to burst your bubble there) or charismatic charlatans to help make sense of something that makes no sense at all. I mean hell even the most flawed logic is appealing when the alternative is random chaos or just a lack of logic altogether. I get it though because most folks are in no way shape or form comfortable with the unknown let alone thinking for themselves. The tragedy in it all is that the aforementioned charlatans know this very well and tend to exploit it to their advantage. If you think your favorite politician (or talking head) has your best interest at heart I have to ask you if you have any actual proof of that so it can be (I dunno) placed in contrast with everything history has taught us about politicians and albeit public figures in general. Do not worry I will not be holding my breath waiting for an answer with any merit to that one.
So, here we are at the end of this post and once again I am unsure that I have adequately conveyed anything that I was trying to convey in the first place. I guess that seed of doubt will always be there for me, nudging me to do better, to try my best and share my thoughts in the hope that it makes a difference to more than just me. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night or something like that.
