Roll with it

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”

     – Cormac McCarthy, “No Country for Old Men”

I am a religious person, but even during times when I wasn’t I believed that everything always happens for a reason. If you hit every stop light on the way out of town, that extra 2 minute delay allowed a whole family of deer to cross the interstate without totaling your car. If you spill a drop of coffee on your shirt, you will make a mental note to slow down and will avoid spilling a pot of boiling water on yourself the next time you make spaghetti.

No, you don’t. Put it back on the shelf.

“Reduce, reuse, recycle” is a good concept. But first, apply two other often-overlooked principles: reconsider and refuse. Do you really need this consumer product?
-Eustace Conway

And for the love of God, please, don’t buy someone a gift that you know they don’t need and they know they don’t need just because you feel the pressure from society to buy gifts for everyone. Before you get your boss a cute little coffee mug full of bad chocolates for $3.99, just imagine how many mugs he already has after 20 years of gifts from 20 employees. I know it’s nice of you. I know it’s an easy gift to grab from the center aisle of the grocery section at Wal-Mart, but put yourself in the receiver’s place. If you’re not a hoarder you wouldn’t want that either, would you?

I suppose I sound ungrateful, but really I’m not. I just believe that if I don’t have the energy to put personalization into a gift… IT IS OKAY NOT TO GIVE ONE. They’ll still love you.

Stop shopping!

“A person dependent on somebody else for everything from potatoes to opinions may declare that he is a free man, and his government may issue a certificate granting him his freedom, but he will not be free. He is that variety of specialist known as a consumer, which means that he is the abject dependent of producers. How can he be free if he can do nothing for himself? What is the First Amendment to him whose mouth is stuck to the tit of the “affluent society”? Men are free precisely to the extent that they are equal to their own needs. The most able are the most free.”

     –Wendell Berry, “Discipline and Hope” in A Continuous Harmony (1972)

Are you already gardening? Are you a complete beginner but you’d like to get started? The internet is still working for now…start reading!

Would you like to expand your garden next year? Maybe start your own seeds to save money buying all your plants? Go get a book from the library and learn how. Make it your interest to learn. Send away for a bunch of free seed catalogs…most have TONS of good information inside.

Identify the store-bought products that you use that you absolutely could not live without. Then ask yourself why you have the rest.

Do it before the end of the year

“We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”

     -Terence McKenna

There are still 5 or 6 weeks left in the year. That is more than enough time to teach yourself some useful skill that would be laughed off a sitcom or a talk show. Pick something you’ve always wanted to do and learn it!

• Hunting
• Shooting skills
• Knitting
• Canning
• Butchering
• Baking
• Cooking without a recipe
• Light a one-match fire

The list goes on and on…let’s learn how to keep chickens, even in town. Let’s figure out what we, personally, would do for water if the city tap dried up tomorrow. Or what we would do to keep warm if we were to take shelter in our own home during a 3 week winter power outage.

All my rowdy friends are coming over tonight

The two party system is a ruse. It is Monday night football.

     -Jimmy Cracked Corn

If you can keep people divided on minor issues that they believe to be very important, they’ll never get anything done.  Our government prefers to keep us occupied with this charade on the competing opposing news networks and newspapers so that we don’t realize that no matter which party wins…WE don’t win.

Just leave me alone

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicity.

     -Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address.

Thomas Jefferson was one smart fella, in not just my opinion. In fact, President Kennedy put it best when speaking to a congregation of every then-living American Nobel Laureat:

“There has never been a greater concentration of intellectual power here at the White House since Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

     -President John F. Kennedy

You can feel it coming

We’re not scaremongering This is really happening

     -Obadiah Parker in “Idioteque”

Yes, I know the song was done first by Radiohead, but this version speaks to me. I’ll include a video link to a live performance by this amazing band. Listen to the lyrics folks….

Who's in bunker, who's in bunker?
Women and children first
Women and children first
Women and children
I'll laugh until my head comes off
I swallow till I burst
Until I burst
Until I..

Who's in bunker, who's in bunker
I've seen too much
I haven't seen enough
You haven't seen enough
I'll laugh until my head comes off
Women and children first
And children first
And children..

Here I'm alive, everything all of the time
Here I'm alive, everything all of the time

Ice age coming, ice age coming
Let me hear both sides
Let me hear both sides
Let me hear both..

Ice age coming, ice age coming
Throw me in the fire
Throw me in the fire
Throw me in the..

We're not scaremongering
This is really happening, happening
We're not scaremongering
This is really happening, happening

Mobiles working
Mobiles chirping
Take the money and run
Take the money and run
Take the money..

Here I'm alive, everything all of the time
Background:
The first of the children

Orchard Wisdom

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the 2nd best time is now.

     -Unknown

I’m going to post a series of my favorite quotations on the blog…quotations that I have saved over the last couple years…quotations that define my feelings towards the world I am living in.

So why don’t I have an orchard?  Because I don’t have a farm yet.  I have two small cherry trees that are going on 4 years old and an apple tree that is entering it’s 3rd year of life, but I need more….