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"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."
- Terence McKenna
forums
Talk to each other.
essays etc.
latest: The Fringe for Obama, October 21
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
misc.
advice,
links,
books, and more!
January 5. Warning: Math post! I just got a reply from Shane at UPP that 5 liters of Aspen 2t is about $25, and 25 liters is about $120. So there's hardly any savings buying in bulk. Also, there are no restrictions on transporting it across the border in small amounts. My mom and Charlie are going to be in Vancouver later this month, and they've offered to pick some up for me.
How much do I need? Last night I poked around for a long time trying to find a number for chainsaw fuel consumption in gallons or liters per hour, and failed. But just now I found this Oil Drum analysis that has numbers on gallons of fuel per cord of wood. Holy crap! This is exactly the same page that I've linked to before for its graphs showing that most vehicles get maximum fuel economy at 30-35mph (48-56km/h)! Anyway, it looks like a chainsaw will burn roughly ½ gallon (2 liters) to cut one cord of wood.
So how many cords of wood do I need? For a round cabin, the wall volume equals the difference between the external and internal radius, squared, times pi times the height. I crunched the numbers and came out with roughly 800 ft³ for the cabin and the practice hut. Now, not all of that volume is going to be wood. There will be gaps filled in with sand/clay/straw and insulation. But the volume of a cord of wood, 128 ft³, also includes the gaps in the stack, and I'm not planning to expand them that much. So I'll say I need 768 ft³, because that's six cords.
At two liters per cord, that's 12 liters of fuel for cabin wall wood. But I'll also want firewood, and the fuel keeps several years in storage, so I'll ask them to get four 5-liter jugs. $100 sounds like an outrageous expense compared to the current price of five gallons of pump gas, but compared to all the other ways you can blow $100, it's a great price for enough clean fuel to saw ten cords of wood.
January 5. Two completely unrelated links for your consideration. I don't feel qualified to say that either one is true, but both are intriguing. First, an Edge of Grace post about Healing Acute Injuries With the Mind. The idea is, if you get injured, you repeat the injuring motion but change it to one that wouldn't injure you, and this awakens your body's hidden healing powers.
Second, Jack sends this economic article on Monetary Flat Spin. The idea is, the economy has shifted into a different state like an airplane in flat spin, and injecting money (pulling back on the stick) will now have the opposite of the usual effect. His conclusion, which I do feel qualified to endorse, is that the only way to save the economy is to stop printing money and allow defaults on all the bad debts. Of course the owners of debt will never agree to that, and the big money economy will crash and burn. I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
January 5. Great news! Darren tracked down this press release from only two weeks ago, in which a Vancouver BC fuel company is now selling Aspen alkylate petrol. So, if there are no restrictions on taking it across the border, I'll bring out the chainsaw and maybe get a practice hut done by fall.
January 4. As William Gibson said, "The future is already here -- it's just not widely distributed yet." Ray reports from the near future:
Our little group seems to be acting more and more "tribal" lately. We tend to share meals on a regular basis. We contribute what we can when we can. Last night we took soup to some friends. We left there with a few pumpkins they grew in their garden. Last week my truck hauled a second hand transmission so a friend could fix his truck. Yesterday, the same guy helped me move a woodstove. This is not barter. If he could not have helped, that would have been fine. Someone else would have helped. Favors enrich the whole group.
Our group doesn't look too different than the people around us. We have our own households. However, all of us tend to have extended households. Extra people live under our roofs -- friends or grown children and grandchildren. I've noticed that fewer and fewer of us have regular full time jobs. One guy was relieved when he got laid off from his last job. Now at last he can finish the cabin.
January 4. Looks like I'm going to be mostly resting up in Columbia. I plan to go to St. Louis on Wednesday, but I'm also feeling the urgency of my schedule, and my ride across Tennessee in mid-January is not 100%, so I've just put a post on Craigslist seeing if anyone can get me to Asheville sooner. If both fall through, I may radically change my plans and go north and east from here, and try to fit in North Carolina later.
January 3. Thanks everyone who offered advice on the truck. Several readers think I should get a Ford Ranger instead of a Toyota, but I'd really rather spend an extra $1000 for the legendary Toyota reliability. It's always been my style to pay more up front so I can pay less down the road.
Also, some people have suggested renting or borrowing, but I'm imagining spending this whole spring and summer driving around once or twice a week gathering stuff from Craigslist and Freecycle and building supply stores and salvage stores and alleys and roadcuts and fields and hauling it to the land. Every back-to-the-land book this side of Tom Brown takes it for granted that the reader has easy truck access. (And Tom Brown drives a Hummer!) Even people who have spent years hauling stuff to their land still find it's worthwhile to own one. Maybe I can eventually put together a household that owns it collectively.
Finally, some people are suggesting biodiesel, but I think that train left the station years ago. In most of the country, used fry grease is coveted like gold and will only get scarcer, and farmed biodiesel is worse than fossil fuel. That could change in a few years if they build a lot of algae oil plants.
Which reminds me... when I bought the land I also bought a chainsaw, and vowed not to use it until I could get alkylate fuel. It's much less polluting, easier on engines, and doesn't break down in storage, and everyone uses it in Scandinavia. And now, four years later, it's still not sold in America or Canada.
January 3. I've landed with Allen and James outside Columbia Missouri, probably staying four nights. Note to Ian: your mailbox is full. Thanks, but hold onto it.
January 2. Been busy learning farming. Under Simba's instructions, yesterday I milked two goats and made raw cheese, and today I killed, plucked, and gutted a chicken. Tomorrow Joel will pass me off to Allen and I'll be in Columbia MO for a few days.
If anyone reading this has a bunch of contacts and a few free months, I highly recommend doing something like this. Traveling is not fun -- video games are fun, and traveling is difficult and uncomfortable. I've spent more than half the trip either sick or tired, and I've probably been aging at double speed, instead of my usual half speed. But it's one of the best things I've ever done, because of the vast wealth it has added to my experience and skills, and all the great people I've met.
January 1. Here's a quick interview cutting through the hype about the Earthquake Swarm at Yellowstone. This is the biggest swarm since 1985, but we're going to see a lot more warning before the next supervolcano.
January 1, 2009. Has anyone else noticed that this decade never got a name? The sixties, the seventies, the eighties, the nineties, and what? You could say "the two thousands" or the "oughts" but almost nobody does. (Update: Tess says that in the UK they call it "the noughties".)
Anyway, I'm not making any specific predictions for the new year, just a couple general themes. First, no safety net. To see what this means, consider a literal safety net: you're a trapeze artist, and you've always practiced with a net, and now it's gone. Now, if you make one little mistake, you fall to your death. On the one hand, this will lead you to learn great mental focus. But on the other hand, it will slow or stop other kinds of learning. You're not going try any new moves or take any risks. Moving back to metaphorical nets and real situations, we're already seeing investors and lenders becoming ultra-cautious.
But also, in reality, most of us are not yet in danger of dying. And people who lose their jobs or their money, but not their lives, will have less to lose and be more willing to take risks. Also, the safety net that's disappearing is the one provided by institutions and strangers. If you still have friends and family to catch you, this could be a good year.
The other theme is get your ass in gear, and this is not just something I'm advising but something I'm observing. Half the people I've stayed with are already in the middle of big changes, aggressively paying debts off, standing up for themselves at work, increasing the number of bodies under one roof to save housing costs, choosing a long-term landbase, planting fruit trees, making local connections, improving their diets.
My own big move, other than this tour, is that I'm seriously thinking of buying a pickup truck so I can haul clay and pallets and roofing and windows and compost and bricks and rocks and plywood and pipes and sinks and tubs and barrels and straw and leaves and more clay up to my land. It will wipe out my savings, but without a truck I just don't see myself getting it together up there. I haven't had time to check the forums on this tour, but I've just started a truck thread there to see what you all think.
December 31. It turns out there's a small community of enlightened back-to-the-landers in southwest Missouri, and now I've met six of them. Joel and Charity live in an off-grid straw bale house that Joel built mostly by himself. It has a raised platform floor, a dozen telephone poles as supporting posts, a very high ceiling with a hanging bed, clerestory windows, a metal roof, wood-burning heating and cooking stoves, and a fluorescent light powered by a small solar panel. They're planning to move to West Virginia and build another straw bale house using what they've learned from the first one, which reminds me that I should really make a practice cobwood shed on my land before I make the cabin. They also have a nice biodiesel bus and a happy three month old baby. Joel makes money by picking up dead chickens at the new factory chicken farm across the field, which is the main reason they're moving.
Comrade Simba and his wife are the first real farmers I've stayed with. They have a large vegetable garden, some sapling fruit trees, around eight goats, two of them giving milk, a bunch of egg-laying hens, and two pigs. The eggs have dark yolks and great flavor, and last night I drank a glass of milk still warm from the goats, which had no discernible goaty taste. He used to feed the pigs on dumpstered produce, but that dried up so now he feeds them field corn and kitchen scraps, and his goal is to feed them completely with stuff grown on the land. They started the farm five years ago and he says it's been a steep learning curve all that time.
Yesterday we retrieved Simba's milk goats from Ken and Dee, who took care of them over Christmas. They have goats, chickens, horses, and a few meat rabbits that could be bred into a vast supply of meat rabbits in an emergency. We talked about the coming difficult times and then Simba showed Dee how to make goat cottage cheese. Here's a photo of me that Ken took.
December 30. Correction: although a giant tornado did pass through this area a few years ago, it was an ice storm that knocked out the power.
December 30. Thanks Larry for tipping me off that I'm mentioned in the latest Sharon Astyk post, Why Buy the Cow When I'm Giving Milk Away for Free? She writes, "I'm hardly the purist that Ran Prieur is said to be -- I've heard he actually refuses to make any money on his work."
To clear that up: What I refuse to do is require payment for the transfer of information. I happily accept donations, although I'm discouraging them at the moment because I got an unexpected chunk of money for Christmas. And if I were to speak at an event that had the budget to pay speakers, I would like to be paid, because I would be giving up my time.
I admit to being a bit of a money-phobe. It's good to have enough money to have basic comfort, to not be desperate, to eat healthful food and stay out of debt if you're frugal. But if I had got an engineering degree and a high-paying job out of college, I think it would have made me fearful, ignorant, isolated, and maybe evil. In fact, if I look back to any point in my life and imagine how I would be different if I had got a bunch of money then, it never looks good. So why should it look good now?
December 30. A few days ago someone emailed me responses, from a certain internet forum, to one of my essays that contradicts the ideology of that forum. And then he was surprised that I wasn't grateful, and wrote "It certainly amazes me that you wouldn't seek allies there."
I seek allies wherever I can. But if you want to build an alliance with anyone, the last thing you want to talk about is a subject where you have deep contradictory opinions. That's why nobody talks about religion or politics at family reunions. Instead you begin on common ground, by saying things the other person already agrees with, and then you move on to subjects where they have not yet formed a firm opinion, or subjects they haven't even thought about. It's easier to convert your mom to anarcho-syndicalism than it is to convert an anarcho-capitalist.
Somehow western civilization has picked up the belief (and Fox News has taken it to extremes) that you create understanding through a clash of opposing ideas. Really all you create is noise and pain. I don't know where it started, but the latest Archdruid post, History's Arrow, leads me to blame Hegel.
December 28. I'm rethinking the schedule for my trip. I was going to try to hit several places in Missouri and then get to Durham, by any means necessary, soon enough to see some people there and get up to DC for the inauguration on the 20th. But now I have an invitation at the Wildroots collective near Asheville, and a potential free ride there if I can wait until the 16th. That would mean I'd either have to hit Durham and the inauguration out of order, adding 500 miles of travel, or skip one. I've been having doubts about the inauguration anyway, mostly because I'm remembering how stressful and not-fun it is to follow the crowd in the geographical sense. And I read that they're reducing crowd estimates because the roads and rails are just not physically capable of bringing five million people to central DC in a few hours. If I'm serious, I have to go into the city on the night of the 19th and camp out.
More generally I'm thinking how much easier this trip would be if I had bought a car (and it hadn't broken down). If you've invited me, I hope you're not offended if I pass within a few miles without seeing you, because every place I stop, I have to find another ride or buy another ticket. Traveling carless is challenging and fun, but next time I want to try it with a car, if I can afford it.
December 28. Teiji writes:
I'm from Honolulu, and last night our whole island experienced one of the longest blackouts in recent history, 12+ hours. Just for fun, I took my motorcycle out for a ride around town, and instead of chaos and traffic jams, things were orderly. Without police or traffic lights, lanes of traffic would stop to let the other direction go, then those lanes would stop after a while to let the first direction go, and so on back and forth. Only a few of the biggest intersections had cops directing traffic, and I wonder if they were even necessary. I heard on the radio that one pedestrian took it on himself to direct traffic, until the cops told him he wasn't allowed to do that. My theory is that without control and authority, people still know what to do and can manage themselves.
I agree! But control and authority have ways of infecting human systems, both through government and through private power, and both from the inside and the outside. What would happen if the blackout lasted a month?
My current host told me that a few years ago, a ice storm hit the county, and the power was off for weeks. Most people left. They had no skill or confidence in living without electricity, and no animals to take care of, so they got in their cars and drove to places where they could be comfortable. I never completely put this together until he said it, but if America has concentration camps, that's how they'll fill them. We won't have to be forced at gunpoint -- we'll pound on the gates and beg to be let in, if they're called "Evacuee Facilities" and they promise us food and warmth.
December 27. Thanks Reid for this inspiring article about some folks squatting an abandoned ferry in NYC.
In other news: Amateurs are trying genetic engineering at home. This is the kind of thing that makes predicting the future impossible. In ten years we could have microbes breaking down plastic in the oceans, breaking down asphalt in the highways, or sweeping across continents exterminating all life. Related: Biotech's growth curves leave Moore's Law in the dust.
December 27. Just letting everyone know I'm OK. In Albuquerque I greatly physically exerted myself three days in a row, and then on the next day I ate two sweet meals, which was enough to trash my immune system, so I got sick on the train to Topeka. I felt generally awful, had a terrible sore throat, was sweating heavily even though I was already dehydrated, and kept burping for hours after my last meal. Finally my internal critters sorted themselves out, but I'm still feeling weak. Right now I'm at Simba's farm (don't know if he wants me to use his real name) in far southwest Missouri, cooking up some extremely locally grown pork and sweet potatoes. Last night I stayed with Joel and Charity, who live in an impressive straw bale house nearby. I expect to hang out in this area until the new year, then try to stay with a couple other Missouri people, and then try to get to North Carolina.
