Plan B Blog Quotes

"I'm talking about an ice-nine event that radically and almost spontaneously alters our upward trajectory of standard-of-living."
(take me to that blog)

"We are overly dependent on frail things."
(take me to that blog)

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Wind Surfing... (in which I come |this| close to smoking hash)

I've asked these good folks to design a wind / solar power system for my Plan B cabin-in-the-woods. (Don't worry, I've come a long way from protecting my generator with a derringer - I think I can protect a full-scale power plant now.)

I surfed
around their site and two clicks later was reading this fascinating discourse on the ascent of humanity by Charles Eisenstein. That's when I realized I was getting close to smoking hash... Oh my gosh... I don't mean I got close to ME smoking hash! I mean I got really close to hash that others are smoking. "close to smoking hash" like "stand close to that person over there" ... oh anyway...

As stated, I haven't tie-dyed anything since 1974, but when I did, I did it to identify with that segment of the population who saw conformity in solid colors and wanted liberation from the implied life-style conformity those solid colors professed. In later years, I've run across the Tie-Dye Nation, no, lower case, I've run across the tie-dye nation a few times.

The most significant was when we spent a decade home-schooling our chil'ren. There are two categories of homeschoolers: Wal-Mart and Brown Egg. The Brown Egg homeschoolers are fighting some perceived ill in the establishment. Either they are right-wingers who are convinced that public schooling is more about socialism than socializing or they are fall-off-the-earth-lefty-liberals who don't believe the public school system has the capacity to release the inner chakra/feng shui/karma in their precious neoPicasso. Either way, they retreat to the country-side, nail together a chicken coop, and raise themselves some brown eggs which every right thinking (or left thinking) person knows is better for your g-izzle. Your rarely see them in public unless the local free-library/museum has a hands-on exhibit with give-away hemp tote bags. On the other hand, you see Wal-Mart homeschoolers everywhere. They're the ones you see... well, at Walmart, at about 11:30am on a Wednesday. What's dowdy mommy and the three pale-faced innocents doing "out of school" at that hour? Well, school started alright, but while the kids were doing their cypherin', mom was getting lunch ready and realized she had no milk, or white eggs, so she swept up the whole mess of 'em in the mommyvan and headed off to Wal-Mart on an impromptu excursion now labelled "Consumer Science" (self-justifying thus: "if the publich schools can do it, so can we").

...Oh... my point is that both Brown Eggers and Wal-Marters are homeschoolers, they just do it for entirely different reasons. But once a year, when the Homechool Industry Traveling Trunk Show and Used Book Sale comes to town, there they ALL are. Their common
practice over-shadows their differing principles and they both wrestle over the same math books.

And so this loops me back, as I had intended all along, to smoking hash and this article. I have said that I agree with the Unabomber's indictment against the Industrial Revolution and the concommitant evils it wrought. Charles Eisenstein sprinkles a dash of Ted Kaczynski and a pinch of H D Thoreau on his jute-dyed ganja and rolls up a blunt in the charter of the Masonic lodge - arriving at the conclusion that we are all separated from the life-essence that is us and we are it, koo koo kachoo. gehazi.

So, here I am, in this big circle of life, holding hands with right-wing Bible-thumpers and left-wing narco-pacifists.
Plan B world is going to be an amazing place. The convenient and comfortable stratifications of Plan A world are going to dissolve and I may just find myself teaching may neighbor's kids Old testament history in exchange for some brown eggs while our dopple-ganger windmills hum romantically on the distant hill-top.

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