Lucid Dreams
Eustace Conway
Off the keyboard of Lucid Dreams
Published on Epiphany Now on May 12, 2013
Discuss this article at the Doomsteading Table inside the Diner
You’ve likely never heard of Eustace Conway or his Turtle Island Preserve before. Mr. Conway is a very unique individual whom has much to teach those of us concerned with how to thrive in a post-petroleum future. Mr. Conway never really joined society, preferring to remain embraced by nature. At 17 he moved into a Native American style teepee and lived in it for 17 years. At 18 he walked across the U.S. on the Appalachian Trail and shortly after that canoed from the North to the South. He also rode a horse across the United States from the east coast to the west coast twice. There are not many people like Eustace Conway that have been born to a first world country. Around 20 years ago he bought 1000 acres in Appalachia. He then turned that land into the “Turtle Island Preserve” with the explicit purpose of teaching others how to live on the bounty of nature. For the last 20 years he’s been doing just that. Recently the Matrix has decided to zero in on his strength to make a very important statement about what will and will not be tolerated in today’s America.
Recently the NC county bureaucracy, in which Turtle Island is located, has decided that after 20 years of operation Mr. Conway is to be shut down due to building codes. Mr. Conway has been working with the county inspectors for 20 years with no problems. He’s had to make sacrifices to keep his preserve and vision alive. He’s had to abide ridiculous things like not allowing the children of the preserve to drink raw milk, and not allowing them to eat the chickens he’s raised and slaughtered. Apparently it’s acceptable to the county for him to teach the kids how to slaughter and butcher the chickens, but not to eat them. I’m sure there’s a gaggle of more such nonsense that he’s had to put up with over the years.
One day, not to long ago, several county departments showed up on his land, unannounced, and unwelcome with a search warrant. The zoning code enforcement assholes, the tax collector, the health department, and every other waste of tax payer money department showed up to find cause to shut him down. This on account of an anonymous “somebody” who supposedly anonymously called the building code office to complain about how Mr. Conway was minding his own damn business on his own damn land. At that point they had to get every county department together to go violate the illusion of Mr. Conway’s civil and constitutional rights. They shut him down because he was “open to the public” even though he wasn’t. The entrance to his secluded 1000 acre track of Appalachia has a gated entrance with a large sign that says “no trespassing.” Their idiotic reasoning for him being “open to the public” is because Mr. Conway has apprentices that live on his property, and apparently this makes them the public. In order for the “public” to arrive at the preserve they have to fill out an application and be accepted by Mr. Conway. It goes without saying that these people want to be there. The fact of the matter is that Mr. Conway’s preserve is not open to the public any more than my asshole is. But the counties Orwellian double think standards of governance assert that private land is open to the public, and they are using this cockamamie gobbledegook as ammo to put an end to Mr. Conways primitive living school. Watauga county has opened it’s pie hole and allowed odious stupid to ooze out all over this gentle and responsible man’s freedom.
It’s clear to me that this is not about endangering the consenting non-public adults and their children whom arrive at the preserve by choice to learn primitive living skills. This is about setting a new precedence for what is and is not going to be accepted by the New American Gestapo. The truth is that freedom and liberty are not acceptable to the gears of Big Brother bureaucracy. The Matrix will not abide individuals who do not need the Matrix. The problem is not that Mr. Conway has remained unplugged from the Matrix for his entire life. The problem is that he is teaching other’s how to unplug and to stay unplugged. He teaches people how to live in harmony with the unmitigated wealth of nature. He’s being persecuted for the same reason the 19th century American government rounded up all of the Native Americans and put them into camps. Tribal people cannot be controlled by Big Brother because they need nothing from him. They don’t need EBT, Snap, unemployment, debit cards, jobs, health insurance, or a mortgage. They don’t need anything from the government. And what would happen if a lot of people caught on and decided to learn to live this way?
According to Watauga county, Mr. Conway’s dog house is a building, and therefore it requires electricity and plumbing. A dog house! Does your dog have electricity and plumbing in his plastic igloo? His buildings are built according to old world standards. They are built on foundations of rock and held up with whole trees rather than flimsy pine sticks used in standard construction. His buildings are made to survive through generations of use with quality as their guiding principal of construction. If the point of building codes are to ensure quality buildings that are worth caring about, esthetically pleasing, durable, strong, and made to last, than the bureaucratic goons can learn a lot from Mr. Conway’s buildings. On the other hand, if the point of those codes is nothing more than governmental control of the people, than they are succeeding admirably. The fact is, this is not about building codes, it’s about freedom and liberty and ensuring that there is none left in these failed states of America.
The Matrix has zeroed in on Mr. Conway because he is one of the strongest links in the self reliant chain of America. Freedom will not be tolerated in today’s America. It will be squashed beneath the wheel of “democracy.” The same democracy we’ve been spreading via the faceless drone strikes that mangle and kill innocent women and children over there. The same democracy that demands that you get in line and appreciate the poison that’s killing all life on Earth. The poisonous food and the poisonous medicine. The state sponsored plague that’s acidifying our oceans, polluting our fresh water, and filling our mother’s wombs with hundreds of man made chemicals. The digibits that suck the wealth out of every corner of the world on account of spreading misery and suffering to every sentient being on planet Earth. Mr. Conway’s way of being in the world is the antidote to all of the destruction that the governments of the world are ensuring we continue inheriting.
If we all sat down and listened to this beautiful and gentle man’s message than we would begin to heal all of the rot that has hollowed out the soul of America and the human spirit. Mr. Conway teaches how to live in harmony with the natural world. He teaches how to make fire with sticks, medicine out of plants, buildings out of stone and tree, and strong humans out of nothing more than dirt, sun, and rain water. He teaches how to live independent from the Matrix and it’s controlling hologram. It is clear that our government does not want this type of person spreading this type of message. It does not fit into the destructive paradigm brought to you by mindless bureaucratic goonery. Goonery that we complacently accept as it’s shoved up our asses without abandon, and as it splooges it’s vile incompetence in the face of planetary health.
Nothing is going to change the course our civilization is on if you don’t. The world is running out of the fossil fuel energy that is responsible for the 7 billion of us in existence now. We need to be embracing and learning from the Eustace Conway’s of the world rather than allowing them to be silenced. Why should we allow this to go on? If Mr. Conway’s preserve is to be shut down, than we might as well all get on with our Soma shots and get in line for the two minutes hate. We might as well embrace the Newspeak Dictionary and accept that freedom is slavery, love is hate, and medicine is poison. We might as well go to the Ministry of Health to get our chemotherapy ahead of the cancer that we’ve become. Mr. Conway, and those like him, are the cure to the hologram. Yet we get together and yell at the gargantuan telescreen that dictates what is and is not acceptable about reality. The least you can do is click here and sign the petition to call the dog’s off of Eustace Conway. More importantly you should care before they show up to your house to tell you how your liberty will not be tolerated. If we allow this to go on than there truly is no hope for our species.
SIGN THE PETITION TO HELP EUSTACE CONWAY CONTINUE TEACHING HUMANITY HOW TO LIVE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE.
Rat Kidneys, Science and the Promethean
Off the keyboard of Lucid Dreams
Published on Epiphany Now on May 5, 2013
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I recently finished a semester at our local community college where I took prerequisites for their nursing program. I was 33 taking 13 hours of classes in this bastion of hopium, wishful thinking, and just plan reality distorting dysplagia that is American higher education…or whatever the hell it’s called these days. My classes were Anatomy and Physiology 2, Medical Terminology, Probability and Statistics, and Compter Science 101, and each class had it’s own brand of incompetence, egomegaly superhero professors, and creative academic bullshit as required reading. I’ll be taking you on a quick tour of what economically accessible higher education looks like in America in 2013 in the following expose.
I’ll start with CPT 101 (computer science) since it represented the absolute pinnacle of what a pointless waste of brain cells college has become. The first class our instructor told us that she was only going to be our instructor for a couple of classes. Apparently she was going to be teaching at the community college in the next town and couldn’t be bothered with us. The first three classes involved a pre-digital literacy test followed by me spending time online at the doomsteaddiner due to the fact that there was nothing for me to pay attention to. When our next instructor arrived it got interesting. She had the worse case of ADD I’ve ever seen, and we got to be subjected to it on the overhead whenever she could be bothered with actually showing up to class. 10 minutes late was early for this magnificent specimen of a 21st century college professor. A month goes by and there hasn’t been so much as one powerpoint presentation about what the internet is, or what a computer is, or what Microsoft is…nothing. Just more doomsteaddiner surfing.
One day, the entire class and I were still sitting on the floor in the hall, 15 minutes after class had started, with no instructor. Usually this wasn’t a problem because we’d all just go in the room and get online to do what we no doubt would all probably be doing anyways if we were at home…only not getting college credit for it, except this day the class room door was locked. At any rate, I decided, all at once, that I didn’t go to war and drop bombs on Afghanistan so that I could sit on the floor in a hallway waiting on some incompetent twit to get her drunk ass out of bed to come spread her ADD around in an academic setting. I got up, walked to the next classroom, opened the door, and grabbed a random professor by the neck and said “hey bub, how bout opening our classroom door so that we can get up off the damn hallway floor?” That set a chain of events in motion that I was sure would get the ball rolling in our classroom. The head of the department ended up in our classroom that day. Our instructor rolled in 20 minutes late and then disappeared with the head of the department. The next class…there our Miss Incompetent was, on time and in class ready to spread her ADD around on the overhead in the name of computer science. I was thrilled that the head of the department apparently found it reasonable to put her back into position as the professor seeing as how she had taught nothing and been on time once all semester.
She was on time for the next two classes before she got back to her usual ways. One day, 18 minutes after class had started, still instructorless, I decided to check my school email. That’s when I noticed that she had just sent us an email stating that she was still in court and class had been canceled for the day. WTF I thought to myself. A couple of weeks later and she decides to assign us a project for Microsoft Access after we had already taken the Access chapter exam (having not been taught anything about it in class mind you). I got pissed off about the fact, as did others, and we began making a general consensus ruckus about what an outrage it all was. This resulted in the head of the department getting involved again.
This time she decided to shit can Miss Incompetent. We had three classes left of the semester at this point. Our replacement professor, and apparently second in command of the department, took over at this point. The first class was a powerpoint presentation on how awesome her 21 year old son was. He was a black homosexual who had moved from the Upstate of SC to Hollywood where he was pursuing a career as an actor. We got to see his facebook page and a bunch of head shots of him. Apparently he is a great and sweet man who bagged a roll as the local retard who throws rocks at Van Diesel who’s babysitting the neighbors kids or some stupid shit. He got about a minute on screen and shouted some retard slogan. Captain second in command of the computer department assured us that her son was destined for great things on the silver screen and then dismissed us from class. This was the best the school could cough up for the last couple of classes.
Next I’ll cover the only online class I took, Medical Terminology. This was the only class that I took that wasn’t a requirement. Of course, I was taking it because I was told by my guidance counselor that it was a mandatory prereq. As an aside, my overly competent guidance counselor had a degree in business administration. Apparently the days of guidance counselors having some psychology back ground are over. Let there be no mistake about it, this is a business and nothing more. My Medical Terminology proctor was a successful black lady in her late 30′s. She was a doctor, of chiropractics, and had an ego that was full of dead air, but full of itself nonetheless. I found myself in her office, for a scheduled meet and greet, to help me figure out the schools online class software. There were glitches that I couldn’t figure out. She hemmed and hawed and ultimately produced no help for me because she simply did not know the answer to my questions. She didn’t have time to deal with an “online” student. She also had no idea that her head was full of hot air that had just been blown up her ass by some other academic credential dispensing goon.
At one point I had a project due that involved reading a professional medical journal entry of my choosing, writing a 250 word synopsis of it, and defining ten medical terms. The instructions on how to submit this intolerably difficult academic exercise set a new precedence in vaguery. We were supposed to submit a “copy of the professional journal entry used,” and it couldn’t be the same article that any of the other students used in the class. How we were to know what articles the other students were using was never disclosed. At any rate, I sent her a copy of the url to the article as well as documented it in the appropriate MLA format in the bibliography and called it good. A couple of weeks later I noticed that I had been given a zero on the project because I did not submit a copy of the article, only a link as well as MLA citation (which tells you everything you could possibly want to know about the god damned article’s location and point of origin). I emailed her a kind WTF, and how do I submit a copy of the article so that I can get credit for the work that I did? She emailed me back with a one liner that said “go to the schools tech department to get help” if I couldn’t figure it out. She didn’t have time to deal with it, and at any rate she didn’t give two shits about my grade.
This was the only class where an “A” was a 94, and so it was the only class that was keeping my GPA below a 4.0. The one class that wasn’t mandatory for me to take. The other three classes an “A” was a 90 or above. The other gripe I had with the class is that we were required to pay 50 bucks for online software that we never used. The good and learn-ed doctor explained to me that the company responsible for the online material stated that we would be required to enter an access code for the class at some point. Doctor Learn-ed couldn’t tell me when that day would be, but she assured me that one day I would log onto the site and be required to insert that 50 dollar line of random numbers. I never had to insert that magic number.
Anatomy and Physiology 2 was ruled over by another Doctor who believed that the schools standard for Anatomy should be the same as Harvards, or any other Ivy league school for that matter. He liked pointing out how our required text book was wrong on every occasion where it was wrong. I learned quickly that studying the required text book was a waste of my time. After the first test I threw my 300 dollar text book aside and never opened it again (of course I’m not a sucker, so I bought it for 120 off ebay rather than at the schools usury store). Doctor Anatomy was at least competent and very knowledgeable, albeit under the delusion that we were here to learn. His class was the most difficult college class I’ve had in my life. I had to study about 20 hours to make an “A” on any of his exams and even then it wasn’t guaranteed that I would make an “A”. His anatomy exams were over 100 questions of him pointing to various foramens, notches, orifices, and meatuses while we recalled the overly descriptive Latin and Greek words. I made five “A’s” two “B’s” and one “F” and made an “A” on the final. My final letter grade was a “B.” The only “B” I made for the semester. I thought it was bullshit that one bad test, weighted the same as all the rest, brought my grade down to a “B.”
After class one day I got into a conversation with Dr. Ivy League about the foundations of science. Back in the 70′s and 80′s he was involved in doing research on kidney function for a large study that was being done at a large university. His particular study was about a specific symporter in the loop of Henle, which is a feature of the kidney that allows us to make concentrated urine. It’s impossible to see the loop of Henle under a slide because it’s too long. You can only see sections of it. However, there is a specific rat who’s Loop of Henle can be seen microscopically, and this rat is responsible for the majority of what we know about the Loop of Henle (as well as other kidney physiology). Dr. Ivy League was actually studying human kidney tissue in the lab, and he discovered a reaction that was different from the rat’s in the human kidney tissue. It was repeatable, and he could prove that the function was different. The dude responsible for the research at the university told Dr. Ivy league, when presented with this new information that had come to light, that it mattered not what the microscope was repeatedly saying about human kidney physiology. What mattered was what the official line said.
Now, Dr. Ivy League could prove that what the official line was saying was now wrong. He was told that he would remove this from his report and replace it with the rat physiology. He refused. This put an end to his research in histology and therefore an end to his membership in academia. No research, no books, no tenure for you. 20 year’s later, after billing pharmaceutical companies 500 dollars an hour to look at shit under a microscope as an independent contractor, and he was teaching at a local community college to pay the bills. Academia chewed him up and spit him out because he was concerned about what the microscope had to say about reality. He was concerned about the stated goals of science that feature illuminating mankind about reality. Science on the other hand, is not really concerned with reality, it’s concerned with the same thing the rest of BAU is concerned with…money. So the official line is that rat kidneys are mamallian, just like ours, and so they are close enough. And since they are close enough we can assume that they are indeed the same, and so base our allopathic treatment of human kidneys on the physiology of rats. Pharmaceuticals anyone?
Finally there was Probability and Statistics. I was actually impressed with this classes professor. She was an astute, competent, and beautiful teacher of math. She made the concepts accessible and easy to manage. The class featured a Promethean, which is a huge screen on the wall that she could write on. I didn’t have to take notes because her notes were saved and made available to us online. This allowed me to pay complete attention to her as she taught. I found it interesting to learn how the man manipulates numbers to make reality say whatever he wants it to. That is essentially what “Probability and Statistics” is about. I had questions about the theoretical aspects of the class because they seemed to be a bit presumptuous at times. I smelled bull shit with the official theories that we were to take for granted were true. However, I’m not mathematically inclined, and being 33 I no longer give a shit. I understand that it’s not about learning, or higher education, it’s about jumping through hoops to arrive as a Registered Nurse so that I can make money.
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Now I have Microbiology left to take during the summer session. After Microbiology I’ll have met all of the requirements and will be applying to nursing school this fall. I fully expect nursing school to be about the same bullshit that I just spent the last semester sifting through. Just a bunch of shit that I’m to commit to memory so that I can promptly forget it once I’m in the clinical setting. After all, how much shit do I need to know to do what a doctor tells me to do? I’ve already been a medic for eight years. I’ve been in tough medical situations with lives depending on my actions and no doctor to tell me what to do. You can’t teach competence. All that I’m doing in college is plugging a hole that’s in place to help with the business of college. I’m required to learn about how science doesn’t give a shit about reality, and how to sit in a computer class surfing the net, and how to manipulate reality with numbers; and all of this is somehow going to make me a better murse. I’m pretty sure I can do what a doctor tells me to do now…without all of the required bullshit and time wasted. Actually, I’m pretty sure that’s what I did in high school, when the doctor cradled my balls in his hand and asked me to turn my head and cough.
The Fox Den Endangered
Off the keyboard of Lucid Dreams
Published on Epiphany Now on November 17, 2012
Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner
It’s important to note how crucially important our living in Whoville is to my wife and I’s intentional plan for our lives. When Aunt Bee offered her house to Wendy and I, it was the opportunity I needed to complete the puzzle of how to resign from the Matrix. The main problem for me was figuring out how I could live mortgage free while having a mortgage. Aunt Bee is the reason I was able to resign, because without her there is noway I would have done so with a wife and child. Even so, we took a high stakes gamble by moving in with somebody that neither one of us knew much about. We just knew that the family considered her crazy, but as I have said that means nothing to me because I consider the average person in our society to be completely insane. To me, if you are under the influence of the American Hologram’s thaumaturgy, then you are by definition quite insane. I don’t need to go into an explanation as to what exactly the Hologram is. I’ve blogged about it extensively here at Epiphany Now.
I was a few months into this experiment, dealing with the nuisance of the Whos, when Mordred and Tina LeFay attacked, and it was a serious injury. It called into question the viability of what we were doing in Whoville. As I’ve been illustrating, Whoville is not populated by awakened individuals. The populace of Whoville is not concerned with broadening their awareness or expanding their consciousness. They are not Peak Oil aware and do not care about climate change. PO is not even on the radar and climate change is just liberal conspiracy theory attempting to “fukin’ mess with naescur god daamitt…fukin’ liberals tryin’ to spread that mooslim jibber jabber.” There are non-redneck inhabitants of Whoville, but they are still unaware of the Hologram. This has been the most challenging aspect of living in Whoville for me. Here I am trying to spread Permaculture to a populace that is unaware that there is a problem with the American lifestyle to begin with. I’m at best a fledgling permaculturalists with very limited plant knowledge. I’m in no position to spread anything and need somebody to follow myself. On top of this I am being assaulted by completely retarded Southern Baptist Satan worshipers.
What exactly did he mean by “Satan’s Authority”? Was it just his damaged brain spurtin’ out the first thing that came to mind in the heat of our encounter. Is he actually worshiping Jebus in the front of the church and then Satan in the basement of the church with a handful of other ratards after the morning service? I don’t know, and I don’t really care to find out. I just want him to stay the hell away from our homestead because he’s no good for us, or anybody else for that matter…to include himself. Aunt Bee later told me that Mordred had warned her that I had “the Earth spirit in’em.” The “Earth Spirit”!!! What the fuck? No doubt this is some shit he’s heard from his preacher. Apparently this is what he told Bee at their lunch just before he brought his scandaling ooziness to my homestead. They were sittin’ in a Chick-filet (a southern baptist owned fast food joint…no really, you have to be a professed southern baptist to work there) with Mordred reading the bible out loud at the table to Aunt Bee over chicken biscuits. I’m not makin’ this shit up either…it’s non-fiction and being reported as it occurred to me.
When Wendy got home, I gave her the entire report of what had transgressed in her absence. She was furious and extremely embarrassed of her relatives. I was still in a state of shock for having been treated in that way by family. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it caused some strain in our relationship as husband and wife, and for no other reason than her guilt over being related to that atrocity of a man, combined with my legitimate fear of her insane family (cause I haven’t even breached the topic of her mom’s crazy ass yet). After this incident I found out that Mordred and Tina were pretty much excommunicated from the Spencer family already for past shenanigans. The eldest brother Randy Spencer (and pretty much the only “normal” member of the Spencer family…at least as far as I’ve been able to determine), and Wendy’s mother Susan, both disliked Mordred from their youth. Mordred stayed in Grandpa’s house until he met Tina in his mid 20′s. He stayed at home because he was lazy and didn’t want to work. He spent his days smoking weed and getting drunk (not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that) whenever he wasn’t at church praising Jebus. That’s where he met Tina actually…in church. Tina took the place of Grandpa Spencer for Mordred. I guess he just needs somebody to bitch slap his poor ass around and tell him what to think and do.
Aunt Bee was the only Spencer that stayed in touch with Mordred. He kept her around because she gave him money. In fact, just about everybody in Aunt Bee’s life was around because she gave them money. That’s how she has learned to relate to family, and it’s also been a challenge getting her to understand that she doesn’t have to pay for our affection. She doesn’t see a problem with it, and actually enjoys the position it gives her. She likes buying things for people because she likes looking like she’s got money, and she likes the position it puts her in, but also because she really is just a kind individual whom likes helping people.
I realize that Wendy and I are also benefiting from Aunt Bee. It’s just that our relationship is a bit more symbiotic and fair. We are not taking her money…at least not directly. We have actually managed to save her money in utilities by getting her to understand that when it’s nice outside you can turn the air off and open the windows, and that when it’s cold outside you can put on clothing in the house and sit under a blanket rather than turning the thermostat up 10 degrees. When we moved in, Aunt Bee would turn the thermostat up to 80 degrees so that she could take a shower. She didn’t like feeling cold when she got undressed to get into the hot shower. We got her a little electric space heater to heat just the bathroom up rather than the 2000 square foot trailer. We got her to stop buying paper towels as we use wash clothes in their place. We hang dry our clothing when we can. We stopped all of the money that was leaving the house for things like fixing leaking toilets, steam cleaning all of the carpet in the house every month, and cutting the dirt and weeds twice a week. If something needs fixin’ or maintenance done, I do it for free. After all, it’s my home now. My point is that we have saved Aunt Bee a lot of money by living the way that we do. Unfortunately I must report that all this has accomplished is to enrich the Matriarch and her conniving brood of vultures. All of the money, and then some, that we have saved Aunt Bee, she has given to the Whos. The Matriach of Whoville has her trained very well. Anytime Aunt Bee has extra money she ends up calling her and coming up with ways she can spend money on the Matriarch. They’ll go out to eat, or get their hair cut, or go shopping. I understand that Bee likes spending money. It’s not just the Whos fault. That doesn’t take away from the fact that they are still taking advantage of her.
Wendy was enraged by Mordred. She decided that the best course of action would be to call 911 and report the incident so that we could have them trespassed. I talked her out of calling the police, but she printed up a trespass document online that was supposedly official, had me sign it, and mailed it certified mail to Mordred’s residence. We never got confirmation that he signed for it. I have suspicions that Aunt Bee called and told them what it was so that they would refuse to sign for it. I could care less about the notice because if he ever shows up again, as I have said, the first thing I’m going to do is call 911. The second thing I’m going to do is get my 12 gauge. My suspicions about Aunt’s Bee’s honesty have been proven correct since the attack of Mordred and Tina LeFay. I’ll get into that soon. The next adventure in the Whoville Chronicles involves something as simple as beating back the onslaught of Mother Nature. Of course this aspect of the story will also explore Aunt Bee’s honesty, and therefore ethics, and the issue of how we will be able to meet our unspoken agreement to fulfill the conditions of this arrangement we have entered into with her.
The arrangement I’m talking about is our method of payment to her for allowing us into her home, now our home, to live utility and mortgage free. The unspoken agreement is that we will care for her into her “golden years.” We will take care of her financial and medical concerns. We will care for her in old age as if she were our own beloved parent. She has no children, and her husband has passed. You are now qualified to make a biased opinion on how things would work if the Whos were to take charge of these issues for her. It’s not as if the Matriarch required payment to help take care of her dying brother at the end of his life. The fact is, our agreement is just as beneficial to Aunt Bee as it is to us. As free as our mortgage and utility free lifestyle is, it comes at a cost…just not a financial one. In fact, we have been paying the cost of living this lifestyle since the day we moved here. Again, you are qualified to make your own biased opinion on the matter having read up to this point.
Before I get into the issue of Mother Nature’s relentless onslaught, and the insane tactic our society uses to combat it, and how the issue of Aunt Bee’s honesty weaves into this, I’ll explore one other aspect of our situation. What we have done…moving in with family like we have, is an option that I imagine is available to a healthy portion of my readers. In fact, it’s probably an option available to a majority of Americans. I’m talking about moving in with family to forgo the rat race. All that is required to drop out of the Matrix, or the American Hologram, is the ability to live mortgage/rent free. If you can manage that, than you can probably manage to not need your own vehicle. If you can live mortgage/rent free, and you don’t require a vehicle, than you can probably get by without working. The only other issue is going to be the one of health insurance. I would say that this is the largest sacrifice my family has made by choosing this option. We are dealing with this now due to our second pregnancy.
I’ve written about this topic before. If you have any elders in your family, there is a good chance that they have a home (pending they haven’t been sent to one of our amiable geezer freezers yet). There is a good chance that they spend a lot of money on getting things done around the house that they can no longer do themselves…like having the grass mowed, plumbing, and issues revolving around a houses tendency towards rot and decay. This is a potential opportunity for you…and your family. It’s a way to tell the Hologram to go fuck itself without having money. That is mainly what the Whoville Chronicles are about. This is just one anecdotal report from one individual who is putting everything he’s got into resigning from the Matrix/Hologram/Rat Race (it goes by many names), and doing so with a growing family. Of course there is always the potential option of moving back in with your parents. Naturally you have to grow the ability to not care about what people are going to say about you. Our society wants us to believe that you are not successful unless you have your own home and therefore lots of debt. It’s the game that everybody else is playing. It’s bullshit. The “ownership society,” is how Bush put it. That’s exactly right, as in the Corporatocracy owns your ass, and in perfect double think, you think you own it. What you own is the right to no longer participate.
The majority of the world, for the majority of recorded history, has lived with family for generations. A multi-generational household has always been the norm. It’s my opinion that the industrial revolution is largely responsible for changing that fact. This could be boiled down further to our magical petroleum inheritance being responsible for the lose of the generational household. Why do we feel the need to have our own homes? What is wrong with living in a family unit beyond husband, wife, and children? Isn’t this sorta what a tribe is? True, there is a lose of privacy, and? What does that really matter? Is it really that much of a nuisance to hear somebody else taking a shit, or making love, or having an argument? Does it really matter if your family happens to find out your business? Is it that important to be able to run around in your house naked playing grab ass and hide the sausage with your wife (or husband). The point I’m trying to make here is how much privacy do you need? At least privacy from your family. Besides, if you work for a corporation, it’s not as if your ass hole has much privacy, nor the contents of your urine.
Living with family has some major challenges. I believe that those challenges can be overcome. The fact is that the world is pretty much finished supplying us with the infinite growth paradigm delusion. Beyond this, refusing to participate in the Hologram is just more authentic and honest no matter who you are. In the next segment of The Whoville Chronicles I’ll be picking up where I left off. I’ll be telling about Admiral Dumpy and how I managed to push her off of Aunt Bee’s financial teat. To be clear, it was not my intention to do so. It just happened that my doing “the right thing” resulted in her being pushed off the teat…but not before she extracted one last bit of Whoville homage.
Culture of Denial
Off the keyboard of Lucid Dreams
Published on Epiphany Now May12, 2012
Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner
Afterward
3/12/13
The Post Petroleum Human Tribe is continuing to evolve. We are unplugged and wired in without wires. We drop down the memory hole and immerse our minds in remembrance. So that we don’t forget where we came from.
The American Hologram is a real program being projected within the Matrix. There are other programs, but this one is dominant in the industrialized senseless suburban consumer consumption wasteland artifact of 20th century chemical monkey man.
We’re coalescing for the future of the Post Petroleum Nation at a little place called the Foxstead. We’ll be hiding in plain site. When you look at us we’ll be directly ahead, in the woods, visible in your blind spot. Don’t bother looking to hard because we have vanished in our 21st century anonymity. We are legion and you can’t even see us. Hiding in plain site. Waiting for you to blink to make our next move. And you thought you would always remain in control of the masses.
Also, let me just say, in this afterward that’s happening in the forward spot, that I made my way back to “Where the Wasteland Ends” and it expanded my mindscape greatly.
The last bout of books that I have acquired and began perusing have come to me through two sources, Morris Berman and John Michael Greer. The book I’m currently reading is titled “Where the Wasteland Ends”and is authored by Theodore Roszak. It was first published in 1972. I’m 30 pages in and I’m already beginning to lose interest and for different reasons than one might expect. In fact, I’ve never even experienced a lose of interest such as this and it’s what I can only term as a type of exhaustion. It’s an intellectual and emotional exhaustion that protrudes from a dawning realization that the world is suffering from a legendary case of denial. As I read these books that were published years before I was born (in this case 8 years before I was born), and as I look around at the world today to see the furtherance of our march into the wasteland, I can only throw my arms up in despair and then drop my hands into the soil. I put them into animal shit and dead and dying biomass. I mix it all together with the steam rising behind me from the hot compost pile. I mix this all into red dirt in an effort to make cultivated plant seeds a nurturing place to grow. This brings me peace and hope, and the need for these necessary books is fading. I know what needs to be done and why things are the way they are. There is simply no reason for me to read about it any longer, it’s just depressing.
The fact that over 40 years ago books were already being written about the “Wasteland” or the Matrix or the American Hologram is proof enough that nothing is going to change or save our empire from this downward spiral. It’s a pretty hopeless realization. Yet it’s true none-the-less. The easy way out is through denial, and I’ve noticed that this is indeed an innate reaction, a knee jerk reaction. Intelligent people simply know on some unconscious level that there is very little meaningful action they can take to change any of this truth. They are wrong to think that unconsciously, but that doesn’t stop them. And so the realization just never happens for hundreds of millions of people because it’s just too depressing. The 100th monkey is not going to wake up from this chemical induced coma of denial until the death march of our empire is over. 40 years ago maybe, but now…it’s simply too late.
I didn’t sit down with the intention of writing a depressing blog, but even amidst my liberation I have been fighting this underlying current of depression lately. It’s taken me some time to figure out why I feel this way. I am taking all the actions I can to learn as much about growing food as possible. I have changed my entire life around to meet these mandates, and I have taken my family with me. As a result I am able to tend to plant life on 1.65 acres as my job. My job is now to learn as much as I can about growing food and that is simply amazing. I have had the good fortune to learn the truth behind the saying that the best fertilizer is the gardener’s feet. I’m present and unmedicated for my wife and son. Yet still there is this dreaded sadness that erupts through the fissures in the psychic ground that is supposed to protect me. The sadness is coming from a place that is much larger than I, and it has the capability of strong arming all of my defenses and there is nothing I can do about it. Ahhhh denial, it’s one hell of a drug.
I have come face to face with the source of this sadness. It’s become more tactile to me because I have had time to tease out it’s form and it origination. We’ve always had the answers about the antidote to the machine, to the wasteland. We put all of our cards into building the Wasteland and now we’re going to take them to bed for a self induced nightmare. How is anyone to deal with such horrible truth if not with denial? The only way through it is to feel it and that means a heavy blanket of sadness. I understand that what I am doing is the best I can do. It’s not only the best I can do, it’s the only meaningful course of action for me. I’m following my bliss. I know that food production is the most important element of this mess. It’s the one thing that I know with certainty is necessary now and in the future. It’s the one thing that allows me to be a whole person. Everything inside and outside is aligned though me with the simple act of growing soil. I am not in denial, and yet that comes with an immense cost because just about everybody I know is in denial about this. My friends, that is a recipe for loneliness, and no doubt one that I’m sure most of you are intimate with.
I suppose this means I have grown to big for this round of skin. I no longer feel the need to read books about how fucked up it all is. The truth is that it’s always been fucked up cause our species is, and worse than that even because we don’t have to be. Our species chooses to remain agents of destruction because of cowardice. Nobody wants to deal with the mess we have made, and so they hide in their convenient suburbanland and are at peace with trading their humanity for consumerism. Our species has made a Faustian deal…their humanity and honor for the numbness of complete denial. Not only do they lose their dignity, but they lose their future progeny’s as well.
Waking up from the Matrix becomes a sad ordeal rather quickly. I knew I was alone in the Matrix, but I had no idea about what it was like outside of it. I do have a small kernel of hope however. I don’t want to leave ya’ll with nothing but depressing truth. I have hope that I will find others like me because I already have. The problem is that I have met them 70 miles from where I’m at in Asheville NC. I’m referring to the group of souls I met at the Permaculture In Action event that I have been attending. For the first time in my life I have met a large group of people whom all view the world through the same type of eyes. We are all different. We come from different places, backgrounds, and times. This group spans from 18 to 60 something years old. The easiest way to describe it would be to say that we are a tribe, but in the 21st century a tribe can exist only with it’s members spread out in a vast region….a pack of mostly lone wolfs. I’m on the outskirts of our region with only one couple a few more miles further out than I. Our people are spread out in a 100 mile long diameter around Asheville NC. It only took one day for us to all bond into this tribe. The one guiding principal has been permaculture. We have all met each other because we share that one interest, but that one interest spans the breadth of a people whom have been freed from that cultural denial that I have been speaking of. We are united in our decision to do something about this culture of denial. I have plans to write about this Permaculture In Action Tribe that I have found, so I won’t continue much about it now.
I think we are the beginning of humanities long muddling trudge into a new environment. Our empire is just beginning to approach the back side of Hubbert’s curve. We have been on the bumpy plateau since 2006 or so. To my mind Hurricane Katrina was the harbinger for this new reality. We’ve probably got another five years left before we begin our descent in earnest. Those of us who are aware are already at the bottom of the back side of Hubbert’s curve. That’s where you find yourself upon waking up from the Matrix. We’re looking at a culture, an empire, of denial and trying to figure out just what the hell we’re going to do about it. The fact is that we’re going to have to just let the empire plummet to the flat ground after Hubbert. The best we can do is have things ready for when they arrive. I think I’m going to continue asking this question here at Epiphany Now. If you are reading this, and you haven’t acted on the information you know to be true, the information that hails from your soul, then what are you waiting for? We of the Post Petroleum Human Tribe need all of the help we can get.
The End of BAU
Off the keyboard of Lucid Dreams
Published on Epiphany Now on February 24, 2013
Discuss this article at the Doomstead Table inside the Diner
For the last six years I’ve made it my business to understand the plethora of fibers that compose our modern day reality. We live in a society that requires the rest of the world to function. Our modern industrial civilization has engulfed the entire globe. Our oceans are acidifying as we busy ourselves with destroying the last bastion of oxygen production, the great lungs of Gaia, the Amazon. Our species is very sick, but just like a patient with pancreatitis, hepatitis C, and cirrhosis we can’t put the bottle down. No matter how much pain it will cause us, we can’t bring ourselves to stop drinking. The fun has long since past, and now we just do it out of desperation; we do it because we don’t want to feel the immense pain that we have and are creating. We also continue drinking because we are scared of the future. The bottle we are drinking from does not contain liquor. It contains a fermented liquid that the Earth concocted using lots of algae, high pressure, and millions of years. Like liquor, this liquid had the ability to produce a great delusion for the human race. It’s this delusion that is responsible for our reckless destruction. It’s this same delusion that has us destroying the only home we know of in this infinite expanse of space. We are hopelessly addicted to this magical substance that might as well be the Earth’s blood. Like vampires we stick our fangs in the Earth and suck it’s blood to quench our addiction. We don’t care who pays the price so long as we can get another fix.
Our children are the ones who will pay the price. They are suffering from our debt in this toxic environment that their physical brains must mature in. Trying to figure out why this has happened is about like trying to figure out why a drunk continues to drink. His addiction has him homeless, laid out in the freezing cold street in his urine soaked stitchless rags, and yet he doesn’t care because that’s what his dark substance provides him. He’s in unfathomable pain, and yet he can’t feel any of it. Not until there is no liquor left will he finally be forced to face the reality. He wakes up in the cold street, piss soaked pants, peels himself off of the sidewalk, and begins begging for more. Death would be much better for him. This is our species. Drunk on oil. Until that oil is gone the delusion will remain. Business as usual. We don’t even care that our children will pay the price for our recklessness.
Maybe the irreversible damage is done and there is no point trying to repair our diseased organs. In which case, I suppose we might as well just stay drunk until we’re dead. Maybe it’s just going to be too painful to bear the sober burden waiting for us. Could it be that this pain has grown so monstrously large that changing is impossible? Is there a Rubicon that our collective pain has crossed? If this is true than we might as well get on with it and put ourselves out of this misery. Save our children from the misery that we are ensuring for them with every action of every miserable day. If we are to just continue this madness than I would prefer we put an end to it. Problem is, I’m a father, so I don’t have that luxury. I’ve got to find a way to conjure up some hope for my sons to believe in. Yet every place I turn to find just a miniscule fiber of hope I’m met by the blindness that is a pervasive aspect of the holograms programming. It’s hard wired into the falsity that the hologram projects. How our species got to this point can only make sense metaphysically. It can only make sense in the quadrants of existence that the Matrix cannot detect. We have collectively lost touch with spirit. In our quest to conquer knowledge and nature we have lost our connection to the natural processes that are created by that spirit in the first place. We need nature to exist, but nature does not need us.
Those who control the work at the power plant that burns the Earth’s blood to perpetuate the Matrix’s hologram programing are not to be trusted, nor is their message. They are the catalysts that keep this drunken delusion disseminated to each and every human mind. Their intoxicating message must be ignored. Unfortunately everything about BAU is designed to continue perpetuating BAU as an endless positive feedback loop. Communication technology has become the great controlling opus of BAU. Cell phones, the internet, and television are how this great evil ensures it’s continual existence within the human psyche. These things ensure that the message is being projected and received. If there is to be any hope, it will be found in learning to use these things to reverse this destructive process. The solution to our problems is staggeringly easy to understand. However it won’t be easy to employ. I’m positive that it’s going to be painful. We just have to accept that fact and move forward in regardless.
The solution to all of our problems is to begin ignoring BAU, but in order to successfully do that, we must extract ourselves from it’s clutches. Ultimately, BAU is kept going by the electricity that is created by burning hydrocarbons. The electrical infrastructure is the Matrix’s Achilles tendon. Electricity is magic, and by itself is neither good nor bad, but the system uses it to keep us all enslaved. This magical force used to be the product of nature alone by way of what might as well be called lightning, and our species seems to be proving that it should have stayed that way. We proved incapable of wielding that one…fire on the other hand. It’s starting to look like the Amish were at least correct about the nature of electricity. I want to make it clear here that I’m NOT saying electricity should not be used, or that it’s even evil by its own nature. What I am saying is that it should not be used if it’s coming from the Matrix’s infrastructure. This one step would ensure our extraction. Simply put, in order to fight the Matrix, we must remove ourselves from its physical clutches. Our species flourished long before the grid, and it will flourish after it. But if we do not begin taking the necessary steps towards extraction than our species will lose the chance to flourish.
Our spiritual amnesia must also be addressed. Unplugging from the grid would allow each one of us to once again remember sacred and natural divinity. The white noise emitted from the hologram blocks our spiritual receptors. The incessant drivel that is audible beyond the white noise is about nothing of consequence and is projected to every mind plugged into the grid. The last time I heard about that drivel, I was enjoying traditional Mexican cuisine, and it was intrusively going on and on about some poo poo cruise that the entire world was watching…and for some reason it was considered normal that those poor souls had to continue eating onion sandwiches and shitting on the deck. Some vacation…at least they got to shit in the great outdoors…albeit on the deck of a cruise ship. I bet those processed loaf bread and onion sandwichs were some god awful smelling turds . Come on people, my chickens have more dignity and sense than that and they shit all over the damn place 24/7.
I was talking about spirit. That noise from the machine…it’s function is to ensures we don’t get the chance to contemplate spirit. Our minds and bodies are being filled with corporate programing when they need to be filled with sacredness. Yet they are so full with the former that there is no room left for the later. The cup has runneth over with the hologram. It’s far beyond the mental realm. We are controlled on a physical level as well. Man made chemicals are ubiquitous in the very cells that compose our bodies. You need electron microscopes to even study that level of control. Some of these chemicals are prescribed to us by the Ministry of Health, others we willingly ingest, but the majority we have absolutely no control over. Our bodies absorb those toxins autonomically. Between the Matrix’s mental control, and the physical chemicals pervading our biosphere, we are left almost hopeless. This is why we must begin extracting ourselves from these horrible mechanisms of control and destruction.
I understand that advocating for the avoidance of hydrocarbon fueled electricity seems excessive. That’s because it is. It’s excessive, purist, anal, unrealistic, idealistic, and probably impossible, and yet it’s our only hope. Unless the amount of petroleum we are capable of getting at is less than what will be needed to bring the Earth’s biosphere to it’s catastrophic environmental threshold of chaos. We can pray that this will be the case, but just hoping is not good enough. We must begin turning our backs on the way we have done things for the last 200 years. The only successful strategy we can have towards righting our wrongs is to begin ignoring the Matrix and it’s delusional hologram. Protesting does not produce results. The machine simply does not care what we think. It’s got it’s own momentum now, and it views itself as unstoppable.
Fact, our way of life is going to destroy the biosphere to the point where it will no longer sustain human life. If we continue BAU that will be the outcome. That being the case, I don’t think there is anything that is too extreme if it can reverse that outcome. If the solution is unrealistic should that matter? Should it stop those of us who have identified the problem from trying to correct it? I don’t think the solution being unrealistic should matter to us. Maybe it is too late. Maybe there really is nothing that can be done at this point. Yet without hope there can be no point to existence. If we are just doomed to failure as a species than we might as well destroy ourselves and get it over with. I don’t think that is the case. I want to believe that we can fix our biosphere so that it will once again become healthy for our children.
There is a great spirit that has all of the answers. In Druidry we call it AWEN (pronounced Ahhh Ohhh Ennnn). Funny how that word sounds like AMEN isn’t it? I wonder if that’s just a coincidence? We have lost touch with that source. Unless we learn to once again sensitize ourselves to the stone, we will destroy all current life on Earth. This is the message that needs to be heard right now. This is what we need to wake up to. Our job is to awaken that spirit in as many people as possible. The only way to accomplish that goal is going to be to use the Matrix and it’s hologram against itself. Somehow we are going to have to find a way to channel all of that Energy that is being created by burning the Earth’s blood into consciously destroying the Matrix. I don’t know how to do that, but that’s what needs to be done. The solution may reside in enough people realizing that a different way is not just necessary and possible, but that it is most importantly desirable. I happen to believe that the 100th monkey is about to wake. But he won’t if you don’t. That’s the point…isn’t it. It’s easy…wake up…
The Faustian Shanghai
Off the keyboard of Lucid Dreams
Published originally on Epiphany Now on February 18, 2013
Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner
The time has come for the collective consciousness of our planet to take responsibility for our predicament. Pointing the finger and exclaiming who’s fault this mess is has lost it’s point. Yet what exactly does it mean to take responsibility for our global mess? How does one take responsibility for the colossal clusterfuck we find ourselves in? Is it possible to change business as usual? Anything is possible if you have money, because everything on our globe has a price and at any rate the IRS requires it of us. Unfortunately money has an affinity towards not going anywhere once it’s created. The money changers create it and then give it away to themselves while the rest of us blindly service the hologram that tells our brains that our highest purpose is consumption and acquisition of useless throw away uselessness. The money that we do manage to get our hands on is already spoken for by the same ass holes who created it in the first place. When we aren’t working at acquiring money to keep the hologram active, we’re anesthetized by all manner of mesmerization by way of fukitol franken pharma chemicals and the idiot panel. Anything to distract us from how stupid and pointless our existence inside the hologram has become.
Is this our fault? If not, than who’s fault is it? There is nothing new here. The only difference between now, and when we first started with agriculture, is that the ass holes creating the money have had over 10,000 years to figure out how better to control us. They figured out, probably around the first year, that whoever controls the food can control everything and everybody. Since that day there has been slaves and masters. Now our masters are invisible entities hidden behind corporate non-persons and government bureaucracies. They all have one thing in common. They are concerned with our bank accounts and want every worthless penny to return to them. They were just loaned fiat pennies after all. It’s their money. This is the real meaning of the 1% versus the 99%. Of course only in the empire do we have the time to sit around and contemplate how badly we have it. Everywhere else they’re concerned with scavenging some useable refuse to construct a roof to keep their dirt floor from turning to mud, finding some calories to stop their child’s grumbling bellies, and looking for a way to get plugged into the hologram where they too can get fat on petroleum sugar. That’s why it’s not their responsibility to care about destroying the hologram. We, those who have enough leisure time to read this must begin taking responsibility for the clusterfuck.
Ideally it’s the responsibility of that lucky class of people whom have money beyond a month to month basis. If you don’t know whether or not you’ll have money to pay the next round of bills, and you have no health insurance, and you have kids to think about, than you can hardly be held accountable towards changing anything… right? But if you have money than that money convinces you that there is nothing wrong and in fact there is no hologram. There’s just your comfortable life of leisure and plenty of excuses for you to use to explain away any problems facing the world. The money you have is yours and you can do whatever you want with it. You earned it! Since there is a price for everything, you can keep yourself supplied in it regardless of availability. If gasoline, food, and healthcare cost twice and three times as much as it did before than you can simply throw more money at it. You are an ass hole no better than the ass holes belonging to the ass holes you busy yourself with sticking your nose in. It’s time to wake up because there are a lot of us who no longer have any money.
The energy is running out and you’ve painted us into a corner. You’ve made it necessary to have that energy to feed us. Some of us are dealing with the reality, but you aren’t. A lot of us want to deal with this reality but can’t because we have no money. All we can do is watch and wait to be discarded into the same dump we cart our pointless consumer trash to once we’re done with it. The only meaningful action available to us is to continue fighting amongst our peers for a better position next to the table where your food scraps fall from. Or maybe that’s just what you want us to believe?
Maybe you don’t matter anymore. The time has come for all of us proles to stop giving a shit about you and what your incompetence is capable of. You’ve proven that all you are capable of is destruction for powers sake. Money doesn’t really matter to you, just power and how much of it you can get. In your psychotic egomaniacal state your willing to consume and destroy everything just so that you can one up your peers. It’s fun to you isn’t it? You’ll destroy everything in the name of vanity.
I told you a little over a year ago that I would find a way out of your game. How long do you think you can last once we all stand up at the same time because we’ve realized we’ve been Shanghied. Nobody signed up for this. There is an emergent consciousness that is growing exponentially now. It’s growing right along side the population of 8 billion. That consciousness is aware of the appetite that will have no bottom once your GMO’s self destruct and reign terror down on the human race. Once your radiant energy and mutant chemicals morph into an extinction like event that trickles down into the 1% of Gaia’s fresh water supply. You’ll choke along with the zombie hordes, and it will be on the flesh of your own progeny. Nothing will save you once the Cartesian 1′s and 0′s stop mattering. They will stop mattering.
The apocalyptic date has past already. Nobody noticed. They watched the movies and were entertained by it’s passing, but they once again forgot once the black out ended and the American Hologram was restored. The black outs will become more frequent, and each one will bring with it the demise that’s waiting for you. You won’t be able to print your way out of the final black out. You already don’t matter and yet you have no clue. There are those amongst the hordes that your information gathering machine doesn’t recognize. They are anonymous. They are invisible like the fox because they have stopped caring about your 1′s and 0′s. They are beginning to remember what they lost when they got on your Faustian ship and entered into your Shanghi arrangement. They are small now and they reveal in their invisibility, but they will live to repopulate once you are gone. They are learning that the Earth and the Sun provide for them if they only believe with enough Faith. What does a tree care about medical insurance and mortgage payments? It still produces meat that falls to the earth as concentrated energy waiting to be absorbed in the human gut.
What will you do when enough people figure that out? What will you do when the goats eat your poison and shit it out? When the fungus transforms your gut rot carbon and neutralizes it. We are legion and we will inherit the Earth once your Matrix goes down and the Hologram dissipates into the same nowhere it came from. We are waiting for that day. We are silently preparing for your obsolescence. We have become anonymous economic non-persons whom you have long since forgotten. We are migrating to the margins of your machine and into terrain it cannot go. We are protected by our own anonymity. Watch as our signals disappear exponentially. The 100th monkey is about to wake.
Fateolysis and Destiniogenesis
Off the keyboard of Lucid Dreams
Published on Epiphany Now on February 2, 2013
Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner
Can one change one’s fate? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I’ve come to some conclusions on the matter. Before this question can really be answered there are some perspectives that must first be fermented to produce a living understanding. I think we are guaranteed a certain amount of fate regardless of our actions or inaction’s. There are miniscule roots that run for miles from our DNA that were forged in a cauldron located in the millenniums before us. There are aspects of our fate that require magi status to do anything about, and even then I’m not so sure they can be gotten to and manipulated. This isn’t to say that there is an omniscient God who cares about the outcome. It’s more a matter of interconnection emanating from the proverbial butterfly’s wings. Simply put, fate will happen and requires no consciousness on your part. This might as well be a metaphysical law. It probably is, but I don’t have the occult background to know if there is such a law. I’m sure some of my readers might be able to illuminate the subject.
There is magnificent alchemical work that can be done to accomplish a chosen destiny. Achieving destiny requires your active participation and much discipline. It requires foresight, focus, and fateolysis, because in order to achieve destiny it requires the building blocks of fate to be teased out and manipulated. Fate must first be broken down in a conscious cauldron of change using all catalysts and enzymatic agents at ones disposal. Without this process destiny becomes a blind process subject to the whims of DNA and flying insects. I think the conclusion is that fate can’t really be changed…just broken down and altered. How much fate has happened before you even become aware of it? What age where you when you started thinking about attempting to change it? Until one becomes conscious of the process it’s all produced by fate alone. The nature of our existence, on this plane at least, is to constantly move forward while growing older. The adept’s apprentice knows that he must become consciously involved in this process of reality manipulation if a chosen destiny is to have any chance of descending and solidifying into reality.
The trick is to become responsible for your choices for movement in this fluid field of existence. Then all agents concerned with one’s movements must be identified and studied. The more of these agents that becomes successfully ousted, the better your chances of a chosen future. This is the act of Neo seeing the agents for the programming that they are and receiving the ability to stop bullets in response. He performs fateolysis by entering into the frame of the agent and exploding it from within. This is the point where Neo adds the final enzyme into the cauldron of his fate and destiny to create a manageable merger of the two. Fate can’t be ignored and destiny must be maintained.
I’ve become very interested in the fate of my children. Realizing the workings of these matters in my own life has allowed me to consciously manipulate them for my sons. DNA can be changed. I believe that my offspring’s DNA is slightly different from my own. Well at least the half that I’m responsible for. I think it’s possible that innate abilities can be created and passed on. I want to be clear here because I’m NOT saying that I’m going to attempt to change who my son’s are. It is however my ultimate and prime responsibility as a parent to manipulate their fates. Things are operating now that they have no control over. But I, and my wife, do have control over them. We are responsible for their existence. That responsibility is a heavy burden that must be cherished.
Take my in utero son, whom we have named Harper Tribann McCarty (although my wife want’s to drop one of the n’s and I’d like to keep it for authenticity’s sake…marriage is a continual act of compromise), for example. He has no choice about the types of chemicals that are accompanying this critical time of his physical development. It is true that man has made a mess of the planet where health of life is concerned. Man has been a chemical making monkey for the last hundred years or so. Those chemicals are so ubiquitous in our reality that we develop in utero with them. This part of my son’s fate I can do little about. The quality of food that my wife eats is something we can control to an extent. The nutrients that we give him for development we can do something about. In forging my own destiny chickens have arrived. They poop out happy backyard chicken eggs for my family. My wife eats those happy chicken eggs with their brilliant deep crimson yolks swimming with the building blocks of life. Those eggs nourish Harper’s environment and provide his cauldron with quality natural resources. This is just one example in a universe of examples where my destiny is contributing to a better fate for my child.
My wife makes bread with pure, simple, natural ingredients; flour, salt, water, and yeast. The final product is influenced by natural alchemy and imbued with her intentional love. The final product removes a trivial amount of those malevolent chemicals, but it’s yet one more act of us influencing our child’s destiny. My 2 and a half out of utero son is beyond my comprehension. I’m obviously biased here, but this is not about being megalomaniacal or hyperegoic. He is an amazing human being that has his own destiny to contend with. I get to be a part of that process. He can do nothing about his fate while under his mother and fathers care. We can influence his fate, and we must do so. If my children are to have a chance in the long descent than I, and my wife, must do all that we can to better their fate in that climate. Chicken eggs, occasionally happy chicken meat protein, homemade bread, homegrown organic veggies, fermented foods made from pure and quality ingredients, compost, lots of tolerance and love, and an eye for the reality of reality will all help assist my son’s in their journey through this anthropogenic clusterfuck of an environment.
In return, my son, soon to be sons, have influenced my destiny by their very existence. It’s largely symbiotic. My own dysfunction in life has allowed me to access a moral compass that is derived from wisdom. Many of the problems that are a product of my own dysfunctional psyche have been outed, dealt with, and banished. It’s a good thing to, because those things are all a product of my fate and they could have easily created a negative fate for my sons. My wife has done this same work. This past year she has been vigorously scrutinizing her fate. She has picked it apart and placed it in that cauldron. We are consciously manipulating this reality landscape with our wills. There are many factors tethered to our fate that we must learn to deal with because they will not go away. These factors were solidified into place before we even knew about them. They have already interacted with the future in ways we can do nothing about. Such is the nature of fate. It’s irrevocably present. The best one can do is to identify it’s parts and workings. This is how fateolysis is produced. One must know the proper enzymes to place in the cauldron to produce the desired destiny.
From my fateolysis comes the raw parts of a new destiniogenesis. My destiny is to be a Druid. Nature must be embraced by man. Our desire to control nature is destroying our biosphere. If we are to have a chance of continual survival on this planet than we must honor nature. We must stop this psychotic control, which is nothing more than an illusion anyways, and begin the process of making nature sacred again. This is something that can only be done one person at a time. I’m largely trapped in the matrix. At least for now. I’m trapped because I can see no other way to maintain a healthy family in our current world without access to money. I have to play the game in our nations “academic” business to earn my position in the outer party at the ministry of health in our dying empire. By 2015 I’ll have a piece of paper that will say “Registered Nurse” on it. That piece of paper will give me access to a job that will pay me good money. Money that will allow me to maximize the environment to raise little druid sons. A safe environment tucked away from the madness of man. An environment surrounded by sacred nature. Nature that will influence, guide, and illuminate my sons Ayden Zen and Harper Tribann (or Triban depending on the compromise involved in marital negotiations). This is my chosen destiny. The destiny that will influence the fate of my sons. I only hope that when they reach the age of reason they will agree with me that nature is sacred. Hopefully enough druids will rise up to the challenge and begin the process of relinquishing that delusional and illusional control over nature.
Collapse Fatigue
Off the keyboard of Lucid Dreams
Published on Epiphany Now on January 14, 2013
Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner
It has always been the case that we live in an uncertain world. Our world is uncertain because the nature of reality is transience. One thing to be certain about is that things change, have changed, and will always change and this can be explained by understanding what entropy is. This rule of physical law is the great driver of decomposition and an explanation for why things change. Entropy applies to everything and there is no escaping it. The more complex a system becomes, the more energy that system uses, the more energy that is lost to nothingness. Eventually everything will be equalized into one great equilibrium where nothing is different from anything else. This almost sounds like a definition for spiritual enlightenment!
Humans are a pretty complex assortment of variables both on a physical level and on a psychological one. Collapse applies to both of these levels. It is a very physical phenomenon that gets transformed into a psychological one when filtered through human awareness (or lack of awareness as it were). Collapse fatigue is a psychological problem that’s due to the process of collapse that is currently underway. It’s widely understood to be a fatigue that is caused by waiting for this collapse to occur, but I submit that this is an unfounded because collapse is occurring all around us. Entropy ensures that this collapse is always the case, but sometimes when conditions are right things will increase their decomposition. We want these conditions to be right so that we can avoid collapse fatigue. What exactly does this idea look like?
Let’s take the example of a compost pile with our civilization being said pile. There are as many ways to composts as there are to skin a chupacabra, but in the end the results are eventually the same. The process itself creates life. The final act of dying offers up those substances that are required to facilitate life. On one side of this gradient we have a pile that is simply left to decompose at it’s own rate anaerobically. It’s a loose pile with no particular shape, nobody tends to it, it’s not kept at the perfect moisture, the carbon to nitrogen ratio is never taken into consideration, it’s just left to rot…eventually. On the other end you have the compost pile that is tended to as a loving parent tends to a newborn. The point is to facilitate the aerobic breakdown of the organic materials in order to arrive at the end product, compost, as quickly as possible. We want collapse to be an aerobic situation when it’s anything but. We want there to be some type of order , but there is no order to be found. It would be nice if the whole process didn’t stink so badly. If only someone or something would come along and take the terrible stink away. The thing with an aerobic compost pile is that the keeper of the pile knows what they are doing. They know that the end result is compost. The keepers of our pile have no idea that we are decomposing (albeit some of them do, but overall they are clueless IMO).
We’re all in this decomposing pile of a civilization together. Those of us suffering from collapse fatigue have realized that we are decomposing. We are composting anaerobically which just adds insult to injury. Why are we the only ones that smell this horrible smell? There’s billions of organisms in this pile, and yet we are the small few that realize the overall picture. Let’s get the oxygen, n/c ratio, and moisture right and get on with it already! But alas, the keepers of this pile could care less. They aren’t keeping this pile to make soil. They’re keeping this pile because it’s the cheapest option for profit. The antidote to collapse fatigue is to realize that we are dealing with an anaerobic pile. The pile is massive and nobodies going to expend the energy to turn it.
Probably the greatest debate within the peak oil community is the one of fast collapse versus slow collapse. Those who are suffering from collapse fatigue advocate for a fast collapse. They do that because they secretly want to see the collapse. They want their prognostications to be vindicated before their peers. After all, we’ve spent all of this time, money, and energy prepping and we’re going to go to our graves having never needed any of that preparation? I believe this is the case. There may be a natural disaster or a “cliff event” on the stair step collapse that will give us reason to enjoy our preparations, but there will never come a time when we can stick our fingers in the faces of all of those sheep and say to them “see, I told you so.” When those cliff events happen there will be countless excuses emanating from the idiot screen explaining it all away. “Don’t panic, there is a solution, the government and scientists are on it…technology, now back to the regularly scheduled show.” Those who can’t go back to enjoying the show no longer matter. They get pushed down the memory hole where they no longer count as statistics. The become proles and economic non-persons.
The reason why this is going to continue being a slow collapse is because of the nature of the interplay between fossil fuels and our civilization. Fossil fuels represent the entirety of the keepers of this compost pile. Fossil fuels (more precisely humans burning of) explain everything from our shifting and changing climates, droughts and super storms, to the global economic crises, to the poisons that permeate everything, to the shrinking water tables, to those whom are starving. This is true because our current civilization was built on a foundation of fossil fuels. Currently those in the PO community who are arguing for a fast collapse scenario are doing so because of the nature of economics. They say that there has be be a breaking point in our global economic system because we can’t keep creating more money ad infinitum. I say they can, and will keep creating money. They can do this so long as there are fossil fuels to burn.
Money is nothing accept a token that represents a share of the Earths fossil fuel supply. Money used to be a representation of precious metals, but all of that stopped when man figured out about exploitation of fossil fuels. Now money is directly proportional to the amount of fossil fuel energy that is available for our exploitation. We didn’t arrive at the top of Hubbert’s curve overnight, and we’re not going to find ourselves at the bottom overnight. There is going to be a long and invisible process of people using less and less energy. Western civilization wastes gargantuan quantities of fossil fuel energy. We can easily use half of the energy we do and still have a life that doesn’t vastly depart from our current lifestyles. In fact, we are going to be forced into accepting this new reality. Every year we are going to use just a little bit less energy than the year before. We are going to have just a little bit less money than the year before. We are going to have less of everything directly proportional to the amount of energy that is available.
We haven’t seen much austerity the past seven years because we’ve been making up the difference with unconventional energy. Austerity is the closest thing you’re gonna get for proof of collapse. As petroleum becomes more scarce so will money. What we’re going to see is the economic crises. Just as we saw it in 2008 with the too big to fail fiasco. A couple of banks caused the U.S. government to print a couple trillion dollars? No, peak oil caused the government to print that money. Simply put, peak oil defines the process of collapse. The telescreen won’t be talking about peak oil. It will be talking about the economic crises.
Collapse fatigue is a psychological process that need not be endured. Lamenting over the process of collapse, sure, but suffering because it has not happened yet is not recommended. Collapse fatigue can be avoided by simply understanding that there is not going to be a fast collapse. There will be war, disease epidemics, famine, natural disasters worse and more frequent than years before, financial austerity, and marshal law. There will be explanations for all of these things broadcasts via the telescreen. There will be as many explanations as their are idiots to believe them. What there won’t be is our civilization talking about how we built our house on a foundation of sand right on the beach just before sea level rise caused by burning fossil fuels. Your neighbor and work associate is not ever going to talk about the ramifications of peak oil. Waiting for these things to happen is no different than waiting for Godot. S/he’s there, but s/he’s not going to appear and shake your hand.
It’s completely understandable that we want collapse. It’s no different from the terminal cancer patient wanting euthanasia. Our way of life is without redeeming characteristics. If you are reading this I don’t need to go into all of the reasons why. If you are aware of collapse fatigue than you are aware of how insane our civilization is. Is it any wonder that our children go to school and randomly massacre their peers? Is it really a mystery as to why? Who are we to lash out at to voice our discontent? This system is a faceless and nameless process that can’t be pinned down. There isn’t a king who’s head we can collectively cut off. There is nowhere to escape this calamity. Nowhere to run and hide. The entire planet has been usurped by petroleum and petroleum governance. The patient has already died and we don’t have the decency to pull the technological plug that animates the corpse. That’s what our civilization has become…an animated corpse. Everybody agrees that it’s not a corpse. This is what we have erroneously labeled collapse fatigue, and this is what we should be lamenting.
We just want society to call a spade a spade, but it’s not going to happen. The best we can do is prepare for the worse. It beats doing nothing. But in those preparations don’t be operating under any delusion that one day your going to be proven correct before your peers. The best you’re every going to get is labeled a kook and given a television show on the topic of prepping for the sheeple’s anesthetizing entertainment. If you can make yourself believe that there is not going to be a fast collapse than you have the cure for collapse fatigue. It is a product of the fast collapse scenario and nothing more. Our civilization is too big to fail just like those banks were. As long as they’ve got fossil fuel energy they will be able to hide our civilizations process of entropy. Fossil fuels are simply too energy dense to notice all of that energy that we are pissing away. Collapse depression is a real thing that can’t and shouldn’t be avoided, but collapse fatigue need not be a problem. It’s a product of unfounded prognostications about how our energy future is going to play out.
Meaningless Holidays
Off the keyboard of Lucid Dreams
Published on Epiphany Now on December 28, 1012
Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner
Have A Meaningless Holiday Cheap Plastic Shit On Me.
There was a time, not so long ago, where it seemed the only limiting factor for what you could accomplish was your own laziness. Maybe this idea has always been an illusion, but I don’t think so. A four year college degree doesn’t get you employment now. The only thing you can expect from a four year degree now is a monthly bill that has to be paid. My wife got a four year degree in communications and all it has done has been to generate a $117.63 bill every month which is comparatively low. That’s mostly because she worked and paid $800 a month towards college while she was attending. We have another 10 years to go before her student loan is paid in full. What are we to do now to better our financial situation? What kind of meaningful work is there in our meaningless society? If you were to argue that our civilization has meaning, what kind of meaning would you argue for?
Our lifestyle is dependent on a wealth pump with the intake end rooted by coercive trickery in the third world. It’s come down to a cheap plastic lifestyle assembled in China and imported to America. All of this cheap plastic shit is designed to make it’s way to a landfill where it will outlive the human race as cheap plastic shit. My house is awash in this holiday plastic shit that was generated through a perverse celebration which requires everybody to perpetuate this cheap plastic shit paradigm. The fact that it’s meant to be a celebration of the birth of our salvation is just too ironic for further comment. What does the Winter Solstice have anything to do with cheap plastic shit made in China and Jeebus? Apparently there is a link, or I wouldn’t be literally tripping over it now. To make matters worse half of these gifts just end up going straight back to Wally World where they are exchanged for store credit because trailer park America can’t even abide the cheapness. They’d rather have store credit to buy cheap American beer and cheese puffs so that they can anesthetize their minds from the onslaught of how cheap their lives have become.
I suppose it’s a good thing that all of this worthless crap is so cheap because minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. That’s $290.00 a week gross at 40 hours a week. That’s in the neighborhood of $230 a week take home which is $920 a month. Are they fucking serious with that shit? What the hell are you supposed to do with $920 a month? About the only thing you can do is buy some cheap American beer and cheese puffs at Wally World to go with your kid’s cheap plastic made in China gifts. It’s no wonder America stares at the teevee at night, after working for jack shit at a job that doesn’t matter. All so that we can live in a place that’s not worth caring about and is destined to rot as soon as climate control goes away. That cheap plastic shit is going to outlive our residences.
The only thing the world cares about is money. Have you ever really let that sink in? I remember making the decision, right about the time I dropped out of college with a 4.0 gpa, that I wasn’t going to live my life being concerned about money. I didn’t want to make decisions that had to do with the acquisition of money because it felt so cheap and trivial a thing to be concerned with. I thought there were ideas and causes that needed my attention more than money. I was wrong. Those ideas and causes require money. It’s strange how if you have enough money, than you don’t have to worry about making money because the bankers just give you money. I wish I could live off of the interest from all of the money that I have. But when your bank account looks like it was made in China, all the bankers do is nickel and dime you $5 dollars a month for the privilege of keeping your money there. I had a negative balance in my savings account a couple of months ago from those charges growing more than my “savings.” This is just the way it is. It’s sad.
How is it that I’ve made it to 33 years old and I am just now figuring all of this out? I got married. Somehow that meant buying a house and being concerned with something called a “career.” I wasn’t very good at the career bit. I had one, it lasted about six years until I had to chose between being medicated with a career or not medicated with no career. I chose the later. Now I’m going back to college for the eighth time in my life. Hopefully with my new found knowledge about the way the world works, I’ll be able to actually acquire a degree and a career after said acquisition. It’s not a career that I want. I never once said “self, I think we should be a nurse.” It’s a practical decision that revolves around what the world requires from me. I’m doing it for the money. I’ve never done that before in my life. I’ve never done something so blatantly about money. When I’m studying medical terminology, anatomy and physiology, probability and statistics, and intro to computers this semester it’s all going to be motivated by the end goal of a job that will pay me well for my time. It has nothing to do with my ideals, or about the change I want to see in the world, or about helping people…just money. Just the root of all evil. That’s what I have to concern myself with at 33 years old. Why? Best I can tell it’s because I was so brazen as to want to reproduce and have a family. Apparently that means I have to be concerned first and foremost with money. Because without it…well that doesn’t make me a very responsible family man now does it.
Now here I am, studying to be a nurse. In this case I like the euphemism of RN. RN sounds less gender specific (or how about a murse), which is a quality I like since I don’t have tits that can feed a baby. Where else does the term “nurse” come from? If you think about it I will be nursing my family with money. So my tits will feed them money instead of milk. I wish I could nurse my family by building soil, keeping livestock, and growing food…or farming, but that’s not in the cards. Not for me at least. How foolish of me, all these years thinking that the unexamined life was not worth living. When you examine it, if your going to be honest, what other conclusion can you come to other than that your examination better come up with the rent and utilities. For 750,000 years paleolithic man didn’t have to worry about rent and utilities. Money wasn’t even a concept. Life was a somatic experience with meaning all around. Now the only thing that matters is money, and the only meaning is cheap plastic Chinese pointlessness that lies about waiting to be tripped over. I can hear it now, “yeah, but he had to worry about getting eaten by saber tooth tigers, killing Woolly mammoths, and not freezing to death.” Sounds like a meaningful existence to me. What do we have to worry about now? Taxes, terrorists and football? Inconsequential drivel and cheap plastic Chinese made crap.
I’ve got an announcement to make (you must be pretty bored if you’ve made it this far)…cheap plastic Chinese made crap (for good measure, and to help drive my point home). I managed to get diagnosed by a psychiatrists with Aspergers syndrome. That’s right, I’m officially an Aspie. Just barely mind you. It wasn’t an easy case, but at the end of the day I met all of the criteria as outlined by the DSM5- 299.80. Presence of: A2,3, 4. B 1 and C,and absence of: D, E and F. I was right. At least I’m justifiably different from the rest. I have a reason for this shittier than usual attitude. I have just enough Aspie to make me intolerably in the world, but not enough to make it a disability to get me off of the hook that’s attached to the rent. Finally I have a psychological reason for not liking my own species much. Still, I have to buckle down, and go out into the pointlessness to extract money so that I can have a family. The only way to extract that money is to participate in yet more pointlessness. When society is soulless can there ever be any hope of meaningful activity? How fucked is it that the last thing I want to do is to deal with people (here again explained by Aspergers) and yet just about any work I could get will require me to deal with people. Our society is a service one. All we do is make up a bunch of needs and then service them. I’ve been thinking that maybe I’ll try to get a job at a grocery store since at least eating is a need that has to be met. A nuclear engineer turned medic turned grocery store clerk. You don’t really have to deal with people. Just ring up their shit and say “have a nice day.” Maybe I could get a job stocking shelves. That would be even better. Talk about wasted talent. Yet I never found a job that was worth any talent. Eventually I’ll be nursing, which will occasionally provide me with the opportunity to do something worth while, granted only occasionally. At least I’ll be paid well for my effort. I’ll just have to learn to become impervious to the rude patients who view the hospital more like a hotel than a hospital. I was thinking I might like to be a hospice nurse. At least then people will be dying and less prone to acting like ass holes. It should help keep my life in perspective as well. Plus, being an Aspie, I don’t suffer much from empathy, which is a positive attribute when seen from this angle. I’m just trying to focus on my strengths.
That’s gonna be some time from now, given I reach that point in time. Our society isn’t exactly healthy. What do I have to bitch about really? I’ve got a roof over my head and food in my belly. So what if I have to go out and spend my priceless time on this Earth cultivating and fostering a lifestyle that’s not worth caring about. The least I could be is grateful for the opportunity to line the man’s pockets. After all, it’s not as if I’m entitled to anything other than taxes. I’m just bitter that my ideas about right living don’t matter at the end of the day. What matters is the acquisition of money. After that, if I’m left with any, I can use it to be the change. That’s the point. Without money, you can’t be the change…not if your me, and definitely not if you have kids depending on you to keep them safe and healthy.
This Monday I’ll be off to fill out applications for a job that will hopefully be more than minimum wage. Grocery stores and restaurants. I could go back to granny snatchin’ but it will only pay $11 an hour, and I’ll have to put up with the smell of lotion and doodoo that’s so ubiquitous in those geezer freezers where we stuff our elderly for big pharma to profit off of until they stop breathing. Granny snatchin’ is too depressing for me to go back to. I’d rather flip burgers at McDonalds where I’ll at least not have to deal with the public. I can just stand there and do a menial task over and over again while not dealing with what it is that I’m actually doing there. Besides, those burgers are no more poisonous than allopathic medicine is (and I won’t be tempted to eat them either). I’ll just go from poisoning people for minimum wage to poisoning people for 60 grand a year right out of school. I think I can deal with people for that amount of money. The most I’ve ever made in my life is $28,000 a year, so I’ll be more than doubling that. That’s 60 grand? $4000 a month take home thereabouts? I’ll be fuckin’ rich, and I get to wear scrubs as a work uniform. My wife will be able to stay home and raise our children, and I’m going to have a lot. If I’m gonna be out there participating in the meaninglessness of a society not worth caring about than I’m going to at least come home to meaning. I’ll have time, and money left over after the bills are paid. That will enable me to afford to be the change I want to see in the world. Great advice Ghandi, but some of us have kids to feed. Granted, I chose to have kids, but isn’t that a large part of the human experience? Aren’t you glad your parents had you? And if you have any siblings, aren’t you glad your parents had them?
So what is the meaning of life? It seems the answer to that question only matters if you can afford to ask it in the first place.
Conspiracy, Peak Oil and Fukitol
Off the keyboard of Lucid Dreams
Published on Epihany Now on December 20, 2012
Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner
Before the 9/11 truth movement existed I knew what we were being told was bull shit. I knew that because I was on the vessel that dropped the first bombs on Afghanistan as a result of 9/11. I knew in my bones that the American population, and the world, was being lied to, but I didn’t know the specifics. I wanted out of the navy before 9/11 happened. I had realized that enlisting in the military was a grave mistake for me because I valued self exploration, autonomy, and intellect; none of which the navy provided, gave a shit about, or allowed to occur. I choked down the contracts I had signed until 9/11happened. It was one thing to be slaving away as a nuclear automaton relatively benignly as far as the world was concerned, but it was quite another to be assisting in the killing of invisible innocents. I wanted to know the truth badly.
After about a year of alcohol and drug use, I started to actively pursue the truth (in those rare moments of temporary sobriety). This search led me to Alex Jones and his infowars. It didn’t take long before I became a card totin’ prisonplanet member. I listened to his broadcasts and watched all of his documentary films. For a couple of years I was an Alex Jones disciple. He verified my anger and my actions concerning the navy. I knew that I was right to do what I had done, but I didn’t have the proof until Alex Jones. When patrons came to my bar they got an ear full. I ran a lot of people off, but I opened a lot of eyes as well.
I was all about exposing the Illuminati for their NWO conspiracy to imprison the planet as an intellectual thing until I viewed “The Passion of the Christ.” Shortly after viewing that film I had a dream where I met evil incarnate in the form of an old female demon that looked a lot like Zelda from “Pet Cemetary” only scarier. It was a vivid dream that felt more like reality than my waking life. It scarred the shit out of me and caused me to run back to the eager arms of Christianity, the religion of my child hood. Yes, for about six months I could be seen sitting behind my bar during the slow times reading a pocket sized copy of the New Testament. Then I started reading the likes of Tex Marrs, whom if you don’t know, is a Christian evangelical conspiracy theory nut job. He takes the Illuminati seriously on a spiritual level and applies it all to Revelations and the end times. Now, I was a Christian conspiracy theorists, which is the original type of conspiracy theorists. In fact, the Illuminati really is a Christian conspiracy theory and doesn’t make much sense out of that context. This is Satan operating amongst man. I even got into reading the “Left Behind” series at this point in my life (I don’t mind if you laugh at my expense…I would). Then one day, and I don’t remember the day or the moment, because I don’t think there was one, I just stopped with the Christian nonsense. Basically the fear from meeting Zelda wore off and I came to my senses. All that meant was that I dropped the spiritual implications from what the Illuminati was. Now it was framed in a more secular content, but otherwise I was still ate up with it.
I met my wife in October of 2002, 10 months after flipping the penny that brought me back to the South. I was drunk, as usual, and I walked into one of the several bars I frequented looking for companionship. I was by myself this particular night. I noticed an ex-girlfriend of a friend of mine playing pool with a smokin’ hot vixen (pictured above). I always liked Summer (the ex of the friend), and knowing her gave me the courage to start talkin’ shit to that vixen. I was so broke at the time that Joey and I’s fifth apartment didn’t even have the power turned on yet (we had been living there for about two weeks). Our first date was financed on a roll of quarters belonging to Wendy. We went to a hole in the wall pool hall where they have .25 cent games and you can’t see cause all of the smoke and bad country music, and then we went to the Waffle House where we drank coffee and she ate hash browns. I told her that I had lost count at 23 women, had done just about every drug under the sun, and usually scared women away because I was too “deep.” I still have that paper coin roll in my wallet.
Six months later Wendy and I were living together. Three months after that Wendy was gone and I was left with a Goodwill couch, an entertainment stand with nothing on it, and a computer. She had vanished due to a torrid affair that I had gotten myself wrapped up in presumably for being too “deep”. I had fallen in love with a bar patron of mine who reciprocated those feelings. It is a long story, and one that I’ll spare you the details of. However, for whatever reason, Wendy did not want to give up on me, and so a few months into the new relationship I was cheating on her with Wendy. It was a mess. When it was all over, Wendy and I were back together, and she was living 70 miles away. I had a drivers license and a broke down car that didn’t work at this point. Wendy did a lot of driving on account of my sorry ass, and I still don’t know why.
When we were engaged was when I got hauled off to the slammer for being a stupid drunk. I continued going to my job managing a shit hole bar via my bike. Luckily for me, the cop who had pulled me over had resigned from Spartanburg PD and moved to Charleston. Case closed. I got back my license and didn’t get charged with a DUI (which would have sealed my fate as a loser cause I never would have worked in EMS otherwise). However I did lose 2500 dollars to a lawyer who required 5000 to represent me. He let me off the hook with just the 2500 dollar retainer on account of his punk ass didn’t have to do a damn thing for the money.
At this point, engaged, and not a damn thing going for me short of tending bars, I decided I better do something a little more in line with a domesticated lifestyle. This was when I finally decided to become an EMT. Just before we got married I got certified as an EMT-basic and began working for a local convalescent transport company making 11 dollars an hour. I worked for them “Granny Snatchin” for a little over a year before I got hired with Piedmont EMS in Rock Hill South Carolina. Getting the job was the fruition of my goal to be on a real meat wagon working EMS. Shortly after taking that job we bought our first house, which they wouldn’t allow us to buy with me on the mortgage. Wendy financed it herself with the income from her successful business as a wedding photographer. We got a really good deal. 3.65 acres surrounded by woods in the middle of the city of Rock Hill. The house was 1450 square feet with a detached 800 sqft garage. We paid 110,000 dollars with an APR of 7% fixed, which wasn’t that bad for the time. A year later the housing market collapsed.
2007 was also the year that I ran into JHK’s “The Long Emergency,” and got schooled on peak oil. Up to this point I had never heard of the idea and had never even thought about infinite growth on a finite planet. Up to that point I was unaware that our problems were much more ominous than the Illuminati’s NWO. Reading TLE was the first step on the stair case of reality and not conspiracy theory for me. I didn’t let go of the Illuminati easily at first, but Alex Jones and I had to break up. He’s a peak oil denier, and I couldn’t deny the truth of peak oil and therefore couldn’t reconcile why he would deny it. I moved on to Richard Heinberg, Michael Ruppert, Dimitri Orlov, and John Michael Greer.
Up to this point in my life I had never owned any land or seen the need to grow any food. I started gardening organically right out of the gates. Then I started prepping and dealing with the roller coaster ride that learning about peak oil becomes for anybody who doesn’t decide to bury their head in the sand. I debated for a long time about whether to procreate or not. Wendy pretty much just took my word for it on the PO front. She was too busy running her business to notice or really care about PO and mostly just placated my concerns about the future. She wanted a child, and so did I, it was just the future I was concerned about. How could I willingly bring a child into a world that was on Hubbert’s bumpy plateau? A couple of years of PO study and obsession goes by and we decide to have a child. In 2010 my son Ayden Zen was born.
My wife’s business began to tank due to negative returns on technology. Digital camera technology is so good now that any dumb ass soccer mom can take 5000 pictures at a wedding and then photoshop 500 or so of them into descent pictures. Talent is rapidly dissolving into technology in photography. Camera equipment is very expensive, and this is part of the reason why photography got so expensive. Now rich soccer moms get their 3000 dollar camera along with thousands of dollars in related equipment and editing soft ware and they’re in business. They can undercut the professionals because they are just playing for egoistic reasons and not concerned with paying bills cause their husbands handle all of that. In our case, my 28,000 dollar a year (gross income, I brought home 2000 a month) just paid for the vehicles and our house and I was out of money before I was even paid. Our son arrived and Wendy’s business was on the downward spiral.
I was extremely stressed out by all of these changes. Wendy felt guilty about her money going away which put her in a bad mood, which further strained our relationship. I was stressed out trying to live a 40,000 dollar lifestyle on 28,000 dollars with no feasible way to better my situation. My son added an entire new layer of stress to all of this. Healthcare was slowly changing from something I loved to something I hated due to all of the governmental changes. We went from patients to customers, and I began hating all of the new bureaucracies that became inherent in the new healthcare landscape. What I had was a house that was falling apart. A house that was a ticking time bomb fit to explode and leave us with a leaking roof, no heat, cockroaches, and thousands of other things that needed to be maintained with no money to maintain any of it. All my career working on the meat wagon was doing was keeping us from drowning, for the time being. I broke and ended up on fukitol for a short period of time. If you’ve been following Epiphany now for the last year, than you’ll likely know what’s transpired since then. It not, have a look around.
This post pretty much concludes my autobiographical stint, at least in any kind of chronological order. I’ll be wrapping it up with one more post along with Jason Heppenstall and WHD (who’s apparently going to begin and end his auto offering in one post soon). I’ll save you any suspense cause we’ve got enough of that waiting on Jason. I’m just going to be writing a conclusion blog. I won’t be concluding Epiphany Now, but I’ll more than likely be slowing down. January 9th I’m going to be taking 13 hours of college prerequisites for the RN program at our local community college, plus I’m gonna be going back to work granny snatchin’ part time. It’s come to that. I’ve got to pay the monkey. My wife is five months along into our second pregnancy. We have no income for 2013 unless I go back to work. We just found out yesterday that we’re having another boy and the ultrasound revealed no abnormalities. After all of this, I’m going to be plugging back into the Matrix. I’ll be talking about that and my plans for the future in my next post.
Solitary Confinement
Off the keyboard of Lucid Dreams
Published on Epiphany Now on December 11, 2012
Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner
I put my utilities on and was escorted to the master at arms shack. They had rounded up four others from berthing. All four of them had been participating in the drinking and gaming. I had been there, watching, and smoking cigarettes, but I wasn’t drinking. What mattered was that I was out of my rack past 2200 hrs. That one infraction was enough to earn me a ticket to Captain’s Mast, which is more non-judicial punishment, which just means there isn’t a lawyer involved. A week or so went by and then it was time to go to the navy’s kangaroo court to defend myself against my terrible crime of being found out of my rack past 2200 hours while on restriction.
When I got down to the lair of the ship where the Captain’s Kangaroo Court was located there were about 30 of my shipmates standing in formation waiting. There were so many of us, in fact, that the Captain was cycling us through four at a time. I guess they figured we were all guilty of the same thing, being shit bags. They march us in to stand in front of the captain and he read off our charges. All four of us were being charged with drinking and gambling (I was honestly just watching). The captain then asked if we had anything to say. I did. “Sir, I was not drinking or gambling. I was in the shower while all of that was going on (which was a lie, cause I was watching, but they didn’t know any different). I was caught returning to my rack.” By this point the captain was familiar with me. He no doubt remembered me from my “rainbow chit” and I had been to mast once before upon returning to the boat from being UA and missing ships movement. This was the third time I had been before him for being a shitbag. The captain pointed his finger at me and said “fireman McCarty, you will not win, you will lose, three days bread and water in solitary confinement.” I couldn’t believe it.
The next thing I knew I was being hand cuffed by a master at arms. I was escorted up to the hanger bay and paraded by the ships crew. I was cuffed with my hands behind my back. There were three master at arms escorting me to berthing where I was to acquire the items on a list under direct supervision. Toothbrush, white t-shirts, skivvies, utilities, socks. Once all of the items were acquired I was escorted off of the ship and into a prison van that was waiting for me. I was driven to naval base Kitsap in Bangor Washington where they have a military penitentiary. The place has maximum security capabilities. That’s where they were taking my happy ass. We arrived and I got processed in. I had to strip naked so that prison staff could inspect my body. They even noted where my tattoos and scares were located. I had to bend over and spread my butt cheeks so they could have a look see up my ass hole. I had to take a physical with a physician so that he could verify that my body was fit for three daysof bread and water.
I was given five minutes to take a cold shower, and I was informed that it would be the last shower I would receive while there. From there I was taken past the main control center for the prison. There were several halls I could see to my right because the upper walls were made of glass. Through the halls I could see a large area with inmates milling about (general population), and I could also see a circular command and control structure in the center. I was taken into a large room that had lockers and a picnic table in it. The stuff that I had gathered was placed in one of these lockers. I wouldn’t see that stuff until I left, so I don’t know why they had me gather it. Before they stuffed me in the cell they took my belt and my boot laces. They didn’t want me opting out. I guess they had a problem with people on bread and water killing themselves in the past. There were four cells in this room all adjacent to one another. I had one other guy to the left and two to my right. There were already two prisoners present. Me and another guy that was awarded solitary from that night would be filling up their solitary capabilities.
I was shuffled into the small cell and quickly shown around. The guard with the duty of acclimating me to my new home said, “There’s the sink with a styrofoam cup for drinking tap water, the overhead fluorescent stays on 24 hours a day. You are not allowed to lay on the bed until 2200 hrs, you can sit on it. You are not allowed to cover your head while sleeping. We will be by three times a day to give you your bread. Here is your reading material.” He handed me a copy of the prisons “rules and regulations.” “Any questions?” I just looked at him until he decided to close the door, lock it, and leave. There was a sink, a toilet, a metal rack with a very thin cushion, a thin military wool blanket, a feather pillow, a window that was about two inches wide by three feet long that I could see through by getting on my tip toes on the rack (which was not allowed, and would have gotten me a couple more days of solitary if caught), and the door to the cell that had a slit in it big enough to pass a loaf of bread through with a window that was about a foot square. I had three days and three nights to go.
I learned what it was like to be locked away by the machine while I was in that cell. I knew that it was only for a short period of time. I knew that it would pass, and I would eventually be free from this nightmare that the navy had become for me. I was angry about why I was in that cell. It did not feel justified to me to have to endure three days of solitary confinement bread and water style over such a small infraction. The Captain was using me as an example to all would be restrictee offenders. He had grown to not like me for obvious reasons. I was 22 years old. I decided that I would make the best of it and treat this like training for monastery life. I sat down on the bed and began meditating. I could meditate for an hour or two at a time before needing to get up and move around a bit. Eventually I learned that I could hear the door to the outer room open and shut when the guard would enter to check on us. It was a very faint sound, and I had to stand at the window and watch the guard to identify it. Once I knew the sound, I knew when I was not being watched. I would lay on the bed for hours and try to keep a feather suspended in the air as long as possible by blowing up in it’s direction. Time slowed to a grinding halt and it seemed like I would never get out of there.
Sleeping was difficult because the fluorescent light was just above my rack. Three times a day they would come by and give me a white loaf of bread through the door and allow me fifteen minutes to eat as much of it as I wanted. They give you a choice between white and wheat. I chose wheat and they gave me white. I confronted the guard about it and he said “sure enough, you did ask for wheat…you want this white bread or not?” I think it was just more psychological games. I would roll the slices of bread up as tightly as possible and make gooey bread sticks out of them. Keep in mind that they fed their best servicemen food that had “not fit for human consumption, prisoner and military use only” stamped on the box. This wasn’t your grandma’s homemade bread. One can only eat so much white bread no matter how hungry one is. I would eat about seven to eight slices per feeding before I would no longer want to eat. Sometimes I didn’t eat at all. I didn’t shit for weeks after I got out of there.
At one point the dude in the cell next to me lost his mind. He started screaming and yelling wildly and would not shut up. I also remember that he was singing songs from Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” This got the other two inmates screaming for him to shut the hell up. It sounded like a bunch of wild rabid zombie chimpanzees. I think the dude losing his mind was in there bashing his head against the walls. At least that’s what I assume those dull thumps I heard were. His name was Guideon, and he was on restriction with me, but he had more time to do then I did. I saw them cart him off to somewhere. He was fighting and thrashing against the guards to no avail. There was blood present. I don’t know what happened to him, but I never saw him or heard from him again. There is no telling what happened to him. They kept us in line by threatening more solitary confinement. They made it clear that if you were caught breaking any of the rules you would have weeks and months tacked on. We were informed that there was no limit to the amount of time they would keep us locked up if we did not behave. That’s how they kept us in line. Knowing Guideon’s stupid ass, he’s probably still in that fucking prison in solitary confinement.
This was the climax for me in the Navy. This was my most precious and deep message. I was lucky to learn it as easily as I did. I now know what it is to be locked away by the defenders of our hologram. I experienced the tyranny that is perpetuated by one man at a time. I saw it in the way the guards looked at me and in the tones of their voices. I experienced it as the beginning level of the depravity that they were more than happy to perpetuate for me. It was an environment where nobody cared about you in the least. They really did not care if I rotted my life away in that cell. There was no compassion to be had anywhere in that place. My family had no idea I was in that cell. The feeling was that I could be left to rot, and my family would just wonder what had become of me. I’m sure the navy would have just told them that there was a training accident. That’s what it’s like in the military. My stay in that brig was a very surreal experience of what the military industrial complex considers a person. We are numbers, nothing more, and nothing less. I know this in my bones now.
Hopeless Messicus
Off the keyboard of Lucid Dreams
Published on Epiphany Now on June 5, 2012
Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner
What does it mean to prepare for the collapse of our petroleum laced convenience anti-culture? The easy answer is to learn how to grow your own food, but that’s too easy. Growing food isn’t easy but that answer is. “Ohh, just learn how to grow your own food, that will prepare you for the end of petroleum!!” Now walk out into your yard (which is probably surrounded by zombies) scratch the sod off and plant some seeds. Wa la…or as Merlin might say, “hockity pockity wockity wack.” Now just go back into the house and turn the television back on secure in the knowledge that food is on the way. Well you might want to make sure that you have at least planted something that is going to yield a lot of energy…like taters. Now all we have to do is get everybody in this anti-culture to start planting taters in their yards and we’ll all make it…won’t we?While the taters are growing, let’s look at a few more items of concern for our petroleum people in this petroleum society which is made possible by…well…petroleum…and corn. The reality is that we have become fat and gooey in our air conditioning. About those taters that we just planted. It’s wonderful that we don’t have to worry about such things as colorado potato beetles or any of those other pesky pest insects. Let’s not forget a few other factors we would have to worry about if it were not for technotriumphalism. Factors such as the unknown affect of GMO’s on humanity, migrating insects that are in the wrong place at the wrong time due to the changing biosphere, or soil that looks more like the wore out innards of an elder prostitute. If it were not for those scientists out there pounding the “manipulating physical reality with cute gadget” pavement, we would have to worry about subjects like the laws of thermodynamics and biology.
Did you hear that ding? It was the sound of the potato that just got cooked in the ground. Thanks to nuclear power plants that are just leaking radioactive shit to beat the band out there in Aikido land, we no longer need microwaves to nuke what little bit of nutrition was left out of them taters. Now our genetically modified tater chips can add some nice radiation to our diet. Who needs radiation therapy any longer when you can just buy it for .99 cents at your local convenience store, and with free monosodium glutamate. Wait…but isn’t that fighting the cancer causing agents with cancer? Okay, I’m confused. Phew…it’s a good damn thing that high fructose petroleum sugar green guilt gulp drinks are so cheap. If they weren’t so cheap, I might have to drink that even cheaper rain water complete with every fucking toxin you care to guess at. You know the space brother’s are close when the rain water ain’t fit for human consumption and we’ve got zombies chewin’ each other’s faces off on the side of the interstate due to “bath salts.” Whatever the fuck that is…is that the slash and burn Walmart Meth that’s causing all of these zombies? Is it true that people go to Walmart and gain everything they need to manufacture meth while there? And is it true that they even make the meth there and then use it and leave? I heard that was true.
Our world has past the point where fiction can go. Orwell and Huxely didn’t even envision zombies chewin’ each other’s faces off as reality…at least not to my knowledge. Is this really reality now? I heard another story that broke my heart the other day. I heard that if you go to jail your gettin’ strip searched. Better not go to jail for any reason. It’s a good thing that the police can’t just pull you over for no reason and then take you to jail because you are suspiciously acting suspicious. It’s also great news that the federal government can’t show up and take you away for doing nothing wrong. Wait…so you can get pulled over by the law for no reason and then never be seen or heard from again? It’s a good thing I don’t have a job to drive to, or I might have to put myself at risk of never being heard from again for no reason. I guess it really doesn’t matter because just being alive gives you cancer these days. What a fucked up prize to inherit. It’s a wonder I’m not a pessimist, or facetious for that matter.
We need to learn to let go as a species, and I’m not talking about Buddhism here either. I’m talking about learning to let go of the leisure we have all grown accustomed to for the last 100 years or so. I suppose the “middle class” didn’t exist until after the second world war. That means this illusion we have been living in has only existed, this time around at least, for roughly 70 years (there’s always the possibility that technologically advanced civilizations existed on Earth and vanished with no trace…like Atlantis). Everything we know as normal about society these days ain’t even old enough to have died from old age yet. It’s gettin’ there though isn’t it? Think of all of the things about our technopoly that we take for granted every second of every day. Drinkable running water (you won’t die from a waterborne pathogen at least), electrical outlets, personal motorized transport, food that magically appears sterilized in grocery stores, climate control, free entertainment at your command, telecommunication technology. I could go on, but I’ve gone on long enough.
Knowing all of the above, who would remain optimistic about our future? Or as Archimedes might say, “Whoooo…I’ddd like to know Whoooo” (I’ve been brainwashing my son and I with Disney’s Sword in the Stone”). My wife has baby fever now that my son’s learning to use the potty. I’d love to have another child for many reasons. However…see above. The world is a clusterfuck and the prognosis is continual clusterfuck status for the next 100 years or so, and that’s being optimistic. If we are to listen to magi’s such as John Michael Greer, then we’ve got another 300 years before something like a steady state world will exist. That’s 300 years of worse than the year before, for members of civilizations at least. I keep thinking that I need to inject some hope into this blog, but I can’t seem to stop paying attention to reality. I feel like a fraud when I try to muster up some happy shit to say about the future.
I’m marinating in a permaculture tribe right now. I’m making connections with real people in person. The only problem is that I have to drive 70 miles to participate. I have to go up the mountain. How am I supposed to do this where I’m at? There’s nothing but zombies out there…chewing each other’s fucking faces off. They don’t even have the decency to do it in private. That’s the reality that I’m supposed to fight with optimism. I’m supposed to start my own tribe here in Stupidville, where they water their plants with electrolytes and they can’t figure out why they won’t grow. Where they think their vote for president counts and Coca Cola is good for them when they are sick. They go to the Dollar General to buy their sustenance for cryin’ out loud. Let’s not forget the shit house rat crazy southern baptists Christians that are the majority. These are people who like to spend their time exercisin’ demon’s in retard tongue. They don’t have to worry themselves with reality because Chebus is coming to save them. It’s enough to make a grown man cry. A majority class of people who never left their childhood.
I want so badly to believe that the 100th monkey is going to arrive for humanity before it’s too late. Yet I know that it’s already to late. What do you do when hope becomes gossamer delusion? Sometimes sadness is appropriate and healthy, and our society is a sad mess. There’s a very real human drive inside of me to do something about this fucked up prognosis. I am doing something about it, but men can’t be islands unto themselves. So I want to get on with it. The shit has already hit the fan but society is to anesthetized on stupid and ignorant to notice or give a shit. How am I supposed to grow a tribe in Stupidville? I can’t leave because leaving takes letting go of any sense of stability on my families part. My wife and I fantasize about becoming gypsies, but it’s just fantasies. This is where learning to live in the moment comes in handy. Much past the present moment and your just trying to kick water up hill. Why do we insist on trying to kick water up hill on our way to Hopeless Messicus? I’d like to know.