Where there's smoke, there's usually Sma...

So for once I decided to make actual New Year's resolutions.

I resolved that should I (continue) to fail to find paid employment, I would volunteer at least two days a week at something productive. So far I'm having little trouble keeping that one. I've been volunteering at Habitat for Humanity, working on two houses here in Port Townsend, and it's FUN! I like carpentry work, when there's no foreman shouting at me, and no internalized foreman giving me crap. I get to talk to interesting people, learn heaps from a group of highly skilled and experienced master craftsmen, and feel good about how I spend my Wednesdays and Thursdays.

I resolved that I would walk/exercise more, to keep the Yankee pounds at bay, and so far that has gone pretty well too. Long beach walks, hikes, laps in the Y pool, medicine ball work-outs at home, and the occasional bout of silly-assed dancing when I'm relatively sure no one can see through the curtains are the core of my plan, although getting access to/buying/building a boat I could row out once a week and do some fishing from is also in the works.

The third resolution is the biggest, and also the hardest. I vowed, and still am vowing, to quit the cancer-sticks.

But...

You knew there was a "but" coming, didn't you?

This one is proving difficult on a plethora of levels. I tried weaning myself down for a week (although to be fair and honest the last couple of days of said week there was no weaning) before quitting cold turkey.

That sucked so hard.

I mean really really sucked.

Like a Hoover in heat.

Thing is, I haven't gone 24 hours without a smoke since sometime in November 1994. Terrible I know, but there you have it. I made it 24 hours before succumbing in hopes of actually sleeping that night. Since then I've gone back to weaning myself off the smokes, rationing out the smaller, lighter cigs, cutting my habit from half-to-a-full pack a day down to 3-4 mini smokes a day.

The thing I find interesting is that while this makes perfect sense to me, many around me seem to feel that this is somehow the "wrong" way to do it. I can understand that, my first Cold Turkey was based on much the same thinking. Its the kind of thinking that makes people believe that if they want to loose weight, they have to starve themselves while simultaniously running a marathon every day, or that if they want to say learn a language, they must study for 8 hours a day 7 days a week to the exclusion of everything else. In essence, it is the demand that one punish oneself and make oneself miserable for the sake of a pre-determined goal.

Running Away from Utopia anyone?

Now, I've done this. It took me years to figure out that if I wanted to get in shape and stay in shape I needed to exercise (as opposed to "work out", i.e. making physical activity a part of my daily routine instead of an added "duty") enough to feel results, but not so much as to burn out and give up. Same with eating healthy, as when I went from a 2-4 liter-a-day cola habit down to maybe a liter and a half a week. Cold Turkey didn't work, but Lukewarm Chicken did.

I've smoked, daily, for 16 years. The idea that a person like me, with my need to think out my actions ahead of time as much as I do, who has relied on "smoke breaks" to deal with my nigh-clinical anxiety, and who (painfully uncool admission) still really likes to smoke, should "just quit" in a matter of days is frankly absurd. Unless one is a masochist, there's no reason to do it that way. I don't care about being "tough", I don't want to "ride it out" or "take it like a man".

I'm going to quit smoking. It will take awhile. But damnit, I've devoted so much time and effort to nicotine already, I'll be hogtied and spanked before I let my addiction make me a miserable, mean mofo to others and to myself.

I'll be nicotine free. Soon. But I'm not going to trade the stupidity of smoking for the masochism of forced virtue.

One step and a time...

Six (or Seven) Old Technologies That Peak Oil Will Resurrect, Causing Steam Punks To Cream Their Shorts.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last ten years or so, and considering my imaginary readership, that's not unlikely, you've heard of Peak Oil, or the point when all the gas runs out and society grinds to a shuddering halt, a new Dark Age descends, everything goes straight to fuck and starts to look like a certain Mel Gibson franchise.

Now, aside from the prerequisite survivalists, rich douche-bags with private armies, and “I told you so” eco-crusaders, the only group that should be looking forward to end of oil are, of all people, the steam punks.

Why?

Cause the future's so dark you gotta light gas-lights.

That's right, the technological clocks gonna get turned right back to half-past Victorian, only with a few modern twists.

Just like those cosplaying freaks like it.

6: Gasification plants, aka Gas-works:

Back in ye old coal-fired days, nearly every city or sizable town had a “gas-works”. Usually built of brick or stone, with huge cool looking chimneys and a railroad heading straight in. In other words, the sort of place your average steam punk aficionado would risk life and limb to enter, just to pose for pics in front of some eldrich tangle of tubes.

A typical gas-works usually consisted of several “coke ovens” which, sorry hipsters, didn't bake cocaine, but rather smoldered coal, removing impurities and making it burn more efficiently. The gases that this process gave off were called, imaginatively enough, “coal gas”, and were piped through the city to fuel street-lamps, light homes, and power furnaces, and even make you hallucinate and waste away from slow poisoning, like Edgar Allen Poe.

(Ya hear that Goths? That's right, put down that screw-top Chardonnay you keep claiming is blood and just huff some coal fumes! No seriously. Please. Do us all the favor.)

Now, these days you can't even put a lump of coal in your sister's spoiled brat's stocking without some Eco-crusaders smashing your skull in with a sustainably harvested ten-foot chunk of tree, so why the hell would these things be making a comeback?

Because you can get the same sort of gas by smoldering wood, garbage, yard-waste, and agricultural waste, and if you use the resulting charcoal as fertilizer (called “biochar”, 'cause putting “bio” in front of a word gives Capt. Planet a woody) you actually start to reduce and trap carbon that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere, causing global warming.

Admittedly, the tweaked out quasi-Waterworld that could result from global warming makes most steam punks squee like Pedobear at a Brazt convention, but that's another article.

Municipalities the world over are starting to look at “Biochar” plants as an inexpensive and possibly profitably green way to reduce waste and energy costs. Hopefully they'll build them out of brick and stone with huge chimneys and a railroad leading in...

5: Gaslights.

“Hang on a tic”, I hear all my imaginary readers remark, “I can get the point of modern day gas-works, but gas-lights? WTF dude, we have electricity!”.

To which I respond smugly, “Yeah, but will you have light-bulbs?”

Gas-lights work by burning gas, either straight out of the pipe, filtered through a wire-mesh mantle (like every camping propane lantern you've ever used) or to heat up lime, which glows super-bright at high temperatures, hence the “lime-light” that ye old thespians bathed in. Gas-lights are simple, easy to manufacture out of metal or ceramics, and work, well, pretty much as long as you have gas.

Insert Fart Joke Here.

You done?

Good.

Light-bulbs on the other hand burn out. Even the super-eco-greeny kind filled with healing energy and fairy farts. Oh, they last a long time, but they do burn out. And they aren't easy to recycle, let alone manufacture.

See, in a future without an seemingly endless stream of high-energy fuels, just making the glass for said bulbs would cost a small fortune. Then add all the energy necessary to ship in the materials (including for all you eco-yuppies who want to ban incandescent bulbs, highly toxic heavy metals to make fluorescents) to the factory, and then ship all those easily breakable bulbs out to the consumers during an energy crisis, and a $3 gas-light made in Bob's backyard out of old pipe fixtures that will last about forever suddenly seems like a better option.

Soon enough, we'll all be wiling away the wee hours to sputtering, flickering gaslights, the only lighting to use when creating steam-driven exoskeletons, or...

4:Syngas cars

“Syngas”. Just say it with me now, “syngas”. It even sounds steam-punky.

Syngas (sometimes called, with complete lack of poetry or precision,”woodgas” or “producer gas”) is the technical term for the gas that comes out of gasification plants. In 1901, Thomas Hugh Parker figured out that you can run a car engine on the stuff, and what's more, figured out you could attach a small-scale gasification plant to your car.

During WWII, because of fuel shortages and rationing, nearly every civilian car in Europe ran on syngas. Hell the Germans even had tanks running on the stuff. During the OPEC embargo in the 70's FEMA, in a fit of common sense sadly never again repeated, produced a study of how to quickly and cheaply convert vehicles to run on syngas in case of another oil-shortage.

These days, with oil prices going through the proverbial roof, people have started converting cars and trucks once again. The resulting conversions are usually a mess of strange piping, radiators, flaming vents, smoking metal drums and all the other aesthetic properties known to make steam punks harder than kilned hickory, although nothing this author's seen compares with the coolness of this.

3:Steam engines:

Let's face it, this article had to include steam engines. It just had to. But steam punks aside, there is a very good reason you'll likely be seeing more and more steam-driven vehicles around soon, and why those vehicles will likely look like something you'd imagine China Miéville driving around.

See, steam engines, whether turbine or piston, work by converting heat into expanding gas (water-vapor) and using the resulting energy to do mechanical work. The exhaust gases from whatever you burn to heat the water are simply wasted. Internal combustion engines, whether turbine or piston, convert the force of expanding gas, caused by combustion, into mechanical work. The heat produced is considered a waste-factor.

See where I'm going with this?

Combine the two into a steam-gas hybrid, and you're looking at theoretical increases in efficiency of 35-45% ( but of course, once actual engineering steps in and pisses on physics' parade, its more like 30%, max). As an added bonus, all the parts and materials you need are sitting around in the form of good-ol' fashioned metal, not highly-refined lithium, cadmium, and other cool sounding toxic materials. Lest you think I'm pulling this out of my ass, BMW is already on it.

I mean, sure, you could buy some sissified electric/internal combustion hybrid that looks like something out of an 80's sci-fi series, or you could have a friggin' syngas/steam hybrid monster with friggin' turbines! That runs on garbage! Or the bones of your enemies! And desalinates the water from flooded coastal cities while you're at it!

And speaking of steam and turbines...

2: Ships and Locomotives.

What's cooler than the aforementioned syngas hybrid? Well, how about a syngas-hybrid-clipper ship, cruising the sunken cities of the near future trading in rare technology, spices, and genetically enhanced love-slaves? Or shuddering steel locomotives flaring flame and spouting steam as they hurdle across the bleak windswept ruins of what once was called Wash-Ing-Town?

Thing is, rail and water based transport are about the most efficient technologies for moving large amounts of people or goods that anyone has ever come up with. Cars (even awesome syngas hybrids) don't even come close, and don't get me started on airplanes. What's more, trains and ships can use a wide variety of power-sources that just don't work that well when squeezed into a car frame.

Take electricity, for example. For a car to run on volts, it needs a lot, I mean A LOT, of batteries, and some method to charge them, which is usually too heavy to include in the vehicle in question.

Not so for trains. Because they run on fixed tracks, a third rail or overhead power line are you need to rocket across the wastelands. The same is true for steam/syngas. Trains can carry larger amounts of heavier fuel than can cars, making them the land-transport of choice for our post-oil future commutes to the gasworks. And those fixed tracks they run on are worlds easier and faster to lay down than building roads, using less energy in the process.

As for ships, not very long ago, almost all of the world's trade goods traveled by sea. That's why its called “shipping” after all. Even today, “shipping” is mostly driven by well, ships. Admittedly oil-powered ships, but ships nonetheless, because it's the most efficient way to move large amounts of anything from one place to another. Hell, they used to do it with sails alone! So when the oil runs out, be prepared to see huge tanker-sized clipper ships, complete with solar-panel sails, or huge wind turbines and steam engines plying the seas.

Hopefully fighting off cool pirates and not these a-holes...

And speaking of ships...

1: Airships

Every steam punk worth their bronze-painted Nerf®-gun knows that the ultimate level of steamy coolness is the airship (or “Zeppelin”, but never, ever “blimp”). Why, just imagine sailing the skies in your own air-yacht, spitting your cheroot stubs over the side onto the roofs of the little people, fighting off sky-pirate attacks with your steam powered rotary cannon and general aeronautical badassetry.

The thing is, its not that far off. Modern, and even old-school fixed wing and rotary aircraft burn fuel like a pyromaniac at Burning Man, whereas lighter-than-air-vehicles, (LTAV, or “nambla”) use much less fuel (especially those that use helium/hydrogen/methane/ammonia instead of hot air) than heavier-than-air-vehicles (HTAV, or “nambla”). Add in the fact that they can be sailed with prevailing winds, have large surface areas that could be covered with photo-voltaic panels (PVP's, or...ok, I'll quit), and could be made tough as anything with the use of carbon-fiber, Kevlar, or even genetically engineered spider silk (squee!) and the airship might just come to dominate the skies of our increasingly steam punk future.

Just don't call it a “blimp”.

Seriously dude.

Rotary cannon, remember?

Numbered lists and the difficulty of daily ranting.

So I'm trying to get back on the write-o-cycle, having fallen off roughly two years ago, but it's proving to be more of a challenge than I thought.

For starters, this time around, I'm doing a lot of writing that isn't going up in the form of a daily blog/rant/thingy, and is aimed instead at a slightly more commercial audience. So I'm working on churning out snarky numbered lists for Cracked.com, angry-yet-non-threatening political rant for TruthOut.org, and useful and informative how-to articles on Experts123.com.

Of course, none of the above have "hired" me, nor do I know exactly how to submit my work to them, but hey, keeps me busy and let's me occasionally convince myself that I might at some point make some money off of it.

Thing is though, that the more I think of writing as a job, the less I want to do it, and the fewer and fewer topics I want to discuss on my blog, as I think "hey, wait a sec, shouldn't share that for free", which then makes me feel like a total money-grubbin' capitalist a-hole.

But every now and again I come up with something that won't fit anywhere but my blog, some short little ditty that just has WRB written all over it.

Like this.

America Explained in 4 Simple (but false) Statements.

4. "The American Dream" aka "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps."

For starters, practically no one in Merka has bootstraps anymore, we all get to wear shitty fall-apart-at-the-sight-of-weather sneakers manufactured in off-shore sweatshops and sold in box stores so huge our fat asses can't make it from one end to another without renting an electric scooter. Aside from that, this statement ignores the reams of data gathered over the last 50 or so years that shows that not only is upward mobility no longer a trend in Merka, but that downward mobility has been the rule for years now, even before the Great Re-possession. The reason Merkans still hold on to this ridiculous belief is based on...

3. "If you're poor, its you're own fault for being lazy/sick/stupid/black/brown/ etc."

Merkans hate poor people. Poor people not only make the whole country look bad, but for some weird reason there are always people in the government trying to take away our money and give it to no good lazy poor people. Oh, we'll happily spend tax money on police and prisons to lock them up, but actually trying to prevent poverty-based crime (and the VAST majority is poverty based) by obtaining some measure of *shudder* "economic equality" is straight out freedom-hating-socialist heresy because...

2. "Competition brings out the best in people".

O rly? So the same thing that induces people already making assloads more than your average working Joe (who does something worthwhile with his labor) to take illegal steroids to further wring cash and endorsements from people stupid enough to believe smacking a globular chunk of leather with a stick makes you a role-model brings out the best in people? The same thing that "forces" companies to lay-off thousands and move their operations abroad to avoid taxes, labor laws, and that pesky lack of slave-labor is a good thing? Really?!?! So a system wherein insurance companies and HMOs compete with each other to screw as much money out of the public while providing as little of that there expensive medical care as possible brings out the best in the assholes? I can only imagine that without competition they morph into some huge encephalitic elder god bent on murdering existence...

1. "There can be no common good without personal greed".

Okay, fine, they don't say it like that. Mainly 'casue they've given up on even the idea of a "common good", but this is what's behind all the "trickle-down" talk, the bullshit about "rising tides lifting all boats". People believing this, and believing that a piece of paper with a government seal justifies it are the reason that fully half the resources of this country, hell, of the world, are owned by a tiny fraction of the population, who don't give a flying fuck about the "common good" and would sooner slit your throat and sell your organs on Ebay than part with even a fraction of their vast wealth.

To summarize:

Most of you reading this are members of the new global underclass (you are just lucky enough to be at the top of that particular shit heap). In all likelihood, no matter how smart you are, how creative, or how hard you work, you will stay a member of the new global underclass. Because like all caste-systems, you are born into it.

The people you work for, who likely pit you against your fellow workers, while pitting the company you work for against other companies in an endless drive to "beat" the "other" "team" are in all likelihood the also the owners of the "other team". They will continue to pit you against other people just like you to force you to accept lower wages, fewer benefits, and eventual indentured slavery because "competition brings out the best in people". These same asshats will then claim that any move made to bring any-level of fairness to this fucked up situation will result in global economic misery (like we don't have that now) because if they are not allowed to make obscene profits off of your hard labor, you won't receive your minimum wage paycheck next week.

Where's that rifle????

PS: Yes I have sources to back this up. No I didn't post them. Why should I go through the trouble, I mean look at the Tea Party, not only did they essentially take over America, they did it without siting any real sources! Mostly they just pulled xenophobic libertarian shit out of their fat ignorant asses and flung it into the public debate like so many masturbating zoo monkeys.

Can't beat 'em...

Hmmm...

I had this glorious plan.

I was going to write a scathing denounciation of wealth and the wealthy, to be concluded with a soaring call to arms, for the masses to rise up and smash the egocentric, greedy bitches who are actively destroying their fellow human beings and the very planet that supports us.

I was going to. Totally rip into it. Tear shit right the fuck up.

Then I did a bit of research.

I got depressed.

I laid down and took a friggin' nap, like an over-active toddler.

Shit is worse that most of you think, especially when its worse than I think.

More tomorrow.

Beer now.

Burning Weed

Today at breakfast I picked up a copy of the Little Nickel Classifieds, usually a good place to find jobs, cheap trucks, or adoption-for-hire schemes.

The first ad on the front page was for a tip-line that pays up to $5000 for turning in pot farmers.

Right next to it were a solid dozen ads for "Medical Marijuana" ranging from home-delivery to dubious "Doctors" prepared to write you out a script for $100 bucks a pop.

One of the biggest reasons there is next to no meaningful Left (the Liberal class, the Dems, most of the Progressives, and Greens in the US are "Leftist" in more or less the same way that McDonald's is "food") in the US is pot.

More specifically, the fetishization of pot by a large number of left-leaning people, the continued criminalization of pot by the establishment right, and the division within the would-be Left over pot.

So many of those who hold socialist, anarchist, co-operative, and communalist views are more interested in getting high, and the legalization of their drug of choice then they are in social justice, universal health care, ending poverty (more on that tomorrow), ecological justice, or the end to America's permanent wars on various common nouns.

Except of course the "War on Drugs".

That one they'll fight.

For the record, I support the legalization of pot, not because I smoke it, not because I entertain some rainbow-colored unicorn shit idea that "The world would be better if everyone smoked weed", but because making pot criminal fuels the prison-industrial complex, is used as an excuse for ever-increasing intrusive police state measures, and serves to prevent the adoption of wide-spread agricultural/industrial use of renewable hemp (which the "legalize it" crowd often tries to trot out as the "real" reason for their quest, which would seem a lot more reasonable if they weren't red-eyed and scarfing down White Castle).

But the sheer amount of time, energy, and focus that goes into this one issue is completely out of whack. The US is currently fighting two seemingly endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention "police actions" and such in Columbia, Guiana, Belize, most of the 'Stans, Yemen, and the Horn of Africa, to name just a few. The last three years have seen the single greatest movement of wealth from the poor to the rich in the history of, well, history. The rich/poor gap has ballooned, the planet is as sick as a chemo-patient, a cabal of trans-national corporations are constantly tightening their grip on the very essentials and building blocks of life (water, food, DNA) and the one thing that gets the vote out, the one thing that stirs the soma-vacationing Left outa it's off-grid cabins is the call to legalize pot?

Which of course hands the Corporatist Right and their butt-kissing Moralist minions enough ammo to blow gaping holes in the credibility of anyone in anyway connected to the legalize-it-left, while those "leftists" who reject pot (and booze, and tobacco, and meat, and sex, and well, most things that make life fun) and tattoo X's into their fists turn on the very people who they claim to share ideals of ecological and social justice with, because unlike the Moralist crowd, the left likes to smoke, drink, and fuck.

Ok, fine, the Moralists like to smoke drink and fuck too, they just won't admit it.

How about we focus on the pressing issues; human rights, social justice, economic equality, the abolition of wealth (more on that tomorrow too), and ecological justice, and leave the legalization of pot (or the criminalization of animal products, stupid vegans) until the current tide of reactionary economic fascism has been beaten back into Mordor and the gates slammed shut?

Burning Bushes

A while ago, having nothing but time on my hands and the overwhelming urge to do something other than housework for a change, I went out and drastically cut back the hedges that blocked nearly all the light from the living room and kitchen windows. It took hours, chopping away with a cane knife, cutting tree-sized limbs with a chainsaw, and trying (but not really succeeding) to finish-cut with an electric hedge trimmer.

By the time I was done, I had light streaming into previously dark rooms, and a pile of hedge-trimmings the size of a Buick.

As I started stuffing said trimmings into the yard-waste can, and then black plastic bags, I started to reminisce about my childhood, when late summer would include at least one big bonfire of collected yard-waste, scrap wood, and (shocking by today's environmental standards) whatever other flammable junk we had to get rid of.

You can't do that most places these days. Here in Port Townsend, you either have to set your yard-waste out for pick up (which you pay for) every-other Thursday, or pack it up and drive it to the dump (where you have to pay).

And there, in the crisp autumn sun, I had my Moses-moment.

First, it dawned on me that these rules do nothing to "help the environment", rather they wrap a green cloak around a government mandated monopoly on waste disposal. Think about it for a minute. You are required to send this material either in your own (gasoline burning) vehicle or the city contractor's (diesel burning) truck to a central location, where it is chopped up and ground down (by a diesel-powered chipper) and placed in a huge pile to compost (where the anaerobic bacteria deep in the pile will leach out large amounts of methane, which does ten to twenty times more greenhouse gas damage than CO2), until it has decomposed enough to be shipped out in container trucks (diesel again) to garden centers to be sold as potting soil, which is then taken home in the back of consumer's cars and trucks, burning fuel all the way.

Whereas if I burned the stuff right here in the garden (its mostly laurel trimmings, which rot very very slowly but burn well, as they are rich in oils) there is a much smaller amount of air pollution (nicer smelling too, laurel makes a sweet smoke), and the ash and charcoal (trapped carbon) can simply be spread back into the soil. To top off the absurdity, our house, and nearly every house on the street has a wood-burning stove, all of which were blazing away.*
*For the record, no, I can "just burn all the trimmings in the wood stove" as they will burn wet and oily, risking a chimney-fire like the one we just had, a result of the previous tenant not being aware of this fact.

It got me thinking of other "greenwashed" practices that we all feel obliged to follow, yet aren't all that ecologically sound.

Take recycling. While you can still get paid for some recyclables in Iceland, very few places in the the Northwest will pay you to do so. That didn't used to be the case. These days, you have to pay someone (either directly, for curbside recycling, or indirectly for the fuel to take it to the dump) to recycle. Not to mention that the city-contractors drive two separate vehicles, one to pick up trash, one for recyclables, doubling the carbon emissions. After which the dump uses petroleum burning vehicles to shred, compact, bale, and ship these materials to distant plants to be recycled into new goods, which are then shipped all the way back here.

It would be one thing if the recycling took place locally. * If waste was recycled into useful products within a hundred mile radius, to be re-sold primarily within that radius, then the net reduction on greenhouse gases, resource depletion, and local unemployment would certainly justify the resultant pollution. But if the purpose is to simply provide a cheaper set of raw materials to distant manufacturers, is it really much "greener" than resource-extraction (mining, logging, etc).

*It may in regard to paper products, as there is a paper mill not a half-mile from the dump. If not, that's just fucking criminal.

Or take electric and electric-petroleum hybrid cars. Is the amount of pollution and resource extraction, not to mention the fuel spent on shipping material and finished products, that goes into manufacturing these vehicles counter-acted by their reduced CO2 emissions? Wouldn't it make more sense to simply (and it is simple) convert existing vehicles to run on renewable fuels (like methane, wood-gas, ethanol, and biodiesel/plant oils, all of which if produced locally for local sale are if not fully carbon-neutral* then at least much less harmful than petroleum fuels) or further convert them into steam/internal combustion hybrids (which do not require any of the scarce, hard to refine chemicals and minerals required by gas/electric hybrids and "cutting edge" electric cars)?

*Depending on how they are produced, some of these fuels actually result in a net reduction in CO2, not just neutrality.

In the end, recycling, hybrid cars, and yard waste disposal are not about "saving the planet" as much as they are about "insuring profits". The garbage company that hauls away my yard clippings and recyclables makes a profit from the monthly charge to our household, and a further profit from the resale of the valuable materials (paper, plastic, aluminum, glass, scrap-metal, wood-chips, compost/potting soil etc) to whoever will pay the highest price, whether near or far, for purposes ecologically sound or not. The car companies that tout their newest "ultra-efficient" hybrid wonder wagons don't tell you about the waste their production causes, nor that you could reduce your bills along with your "carbon footprint"* by simply converting your existing car to run on locally produced renewable fuel. They don't want to talk about those things. They want you to buy their cars.

The irony is, if I wanted to flaunt convention, regulation, and the like, and just set the remaining pile of trimmings alight, I'd likely have to use a either a petroleum-based accelerant to start the fire, or some plant-oil shipped here all the way from California, or paper produced locally, shipped thousands of miles to be printed, then thousands of miles to be filled with product, and then thousands of miles so I could buy it.

You just can't win...

Back in the USSA...

So I've been back for about two months now, and life is just speeding along. Like fast, really really fast, and as I'm usually a slow kinda joe, its scary and exhilarating at the same time. Kinda like a roller-coaster.

The only problem I'm having is an old and familiar one. I keep "I should"ing myself to a state of utter panic, instead of, as my rather wise and wonderful Mary says "letting the universe unfold as it should".

This morning, as I was trying to ignore the "I shoulds" by wasting yet more time on Facebook, an old schoolmate contacted me about a class we took together, and long story short, sent me an essay I'd written last year which in a wondrous case of serendipity, reminded me of why I'm happier when I stop shoulding myself all the time.

So instead of continuing to beat myself up about not writing as much as I "should", I'll just repost my old self giving my new self some good advice, and call it good.

(Written for The Ethics of Nature, University of Iceland, Fall 2009)

Running Away From Utopia

I’m a raggedy kind of man.

Like most things about ourselves my raggedness is partly choice, partly upbringing, and partly my “nature” (as slippery and elusive a thing as that is).

I wear second-to-third hand clothes until the holes are too big to ignore. Not as a fashion statement, but because I figure if folks are going to make things disposable, might as well wear them out before we dispose of them. My apartment started out life as a guestroom and storage space, and although I did break down and buy new furniture (for the first time in my life) for the living room, the kitchen and most of the rest is at least 75% recycled, salvaged, or flat out McGyvered.

Every bit of electronics in my place was given to me, either as a gift or a hand-me-down. If people had not seen fit to foist this stuff on me, I would never have a TV, cell phone, or laptop.

(In the interest of honesty, I have since purchased a new cell-phone, as the US uses a different, far inferior system.)

I buy cheap food and do my best to cook it at home. I eat local, because it tastes better, because I was raised that way, and because part of me recoils from the idea of food from thousands of miles away. I dumpster dive on occasion, “liberate” food from work that would otherwise be thrown out, and take advantage of free eats whenever I can, not out of poverty, or even stinginess, but because I hate waste.

On the other hand, I hate having too much stuff around me. Pack-rattishness brings out my mean streak. I cannot for the life of me understand people who horde things useless to themselves instead of letting others who might make use of said stuff do so. Except for books that is. Parting with the written word is like loosing a limb for me.

(Amazingly, I got rid of 80% of all my books when I moved back to 'Merka, still reeling...)

I work, but as little as I can and only at something I feel is worthwhile. As in most cases, this ethical stance results in a certain level of poverty. Not that I mind. I’ve long been of the opinion that wealth is to poverty as obesity is to malnutrition.

So when faced with this particular project, (We were asked to come up with a project that involved out personal relationship with nature and report on our progress) I ran into a bit of a snag. I consume little, I don't own a car (never have, even if I know how to drive), most of the time I avoid even the bus if I can. I toyed with the idea of vegetarianism, but frankly the argument for it doesn’t hold water for me. Besides, I like meat, fish, and cheese. It’s not like I live the life I live to be greener than thou, nor do I live my life the way I do out of some pious sense of “duty”. I live my life the way I do because, by and large, it makes me happy. I like the challenge of living on limited means; I love the creativity and cunning that it takes. But when faced with this assignment, with the idea of essentially experimenting on myself, using reductionism and preconceived goals to measure my relationship with nature, I recoiled. One of my other traits came to the fore, namely a level of rebelliousness that tends to get me in trouble.

I simply didn’t want to force myself into yet another project essentially based on the idea that I should have to constantly strive towards a goal with no way of knowing if it will be of any real benefit to me. Frankly I’m tired of society telling me I’m supposed to be something more, something better, healthier, happier, stronger, better looking, morally superior, more educated, more environmentally and socially responsible than I am.

After all, if ethics is the study of “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” the world we live in is a study in “you shoulds” and “you shouldn’ts”.

And therein lays the rub. I’ve grown ever so weary of the proponents of positive social, environmental and political change stating their case in the same sad sorry self-help arguments that religions and moral-majoralists seem so fond of. I’m tired of my life, my body, my society, everything being reduced to one big project, grand glorious goals upon whose altar we sacrifice experience and pleasure in the hope of obtaining some heavenly utopian future. I have no interest in a revolution I can’t dance to, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to die for the cause.

I’d rather live for it. Besides, hair shirts itch.

By framing everything in terms of improvement, goals, progress we fall into the inverse of the trap that we fall into when we discount the welfare of future generations to service our own present greed. Instead of living in the here and near now, learning to live within our means, learning to accept limits, as individuals, societies, and as a species, we sacrifice the possible present happiness (which would likely lead to lives that wouldn’t be based on the poverty of our progeny) for a future utopia which we will never obtain. In the meantime, while we try to perfect ourselves to fit our preconceived ideas of perfection the world rolls merrily along towards oblivion.

A greeny utopia full of beautiful thin healthy people who never get cancer, never get fat, always smell of flowers and live lightly on the earth, happily telecommuting and consuming a never-ending series of earth-friendly products from the cornucopian horn of progress is not the world I want to live in. I long ago realized that utopias are terrible things. No one is free in utopia, because you can’t have a utopia with free will. Utopias are static, unchanging, eternal.

And Nature hates stasis as much as it abhors a vacuum.

And yet I’ve long been guilty of utopian thinking. Hell, we’ve all been. Whether planning your own physical utopia of six-pack abs and breast implants, or commercial utopias of success and acclaim, or political utopias free of pollution, violence, sexism or whatever other sin you despise.

I’d beat myself up for buying too much, for not having a vegetable garden, for eating out, for my rather embarrassingly voluminous beer consumption. I turned bike rides on crisp fall days into mindless calculations of calories burnt, of how much faster I was than a week before.

So I decided to try to not be a utopian for a while. That’s my project. Which is really difficult. It’s a Zen sort of thing. A project that rejects goals, that refuses to measure progress.

I have no idea how I’ve done.

And I think that’s the point.

That said, I can say the experience has been positive. Riding your bike while counting calories is a chore, whereas zipping along, enjoying the cold air pumping through your lungs, feeling the force of your legs powering you along, will put a smile on anyone’s face. Letting go of self-imposed academic standards and just letting yourself learn what you’re interested in is far more satisfying than high grades (although a my internalized ethos of academic over-achievement has made that part of the plan hard to stick to). Being content is far more enlightening, I’ve found, than being ambitious. Better for the planet too.

In letting go of preconceived notions, I’ve gained a level of contentment that I haven’t felt in a long time, which has led to some interesting insights. Content people almost by definition consume less. When you are happy with who you are, what you have, and where you are, you won’t feel compelled to chase after products and services that promise you the contentment you already have. Moreover, content people have the time and energy to think things over, to act in ways that will allow their contentment to continue. By working towards present contentment they avoid the trap of utopianism, because utopias are generally the product of malaise. Content people are hard to sell stuff to, hard to frighten, hard to shame, hard to control.

Happiness is revolutionary.

That being said, there are drawbacks, mainly social. What with the ingrained Protestant work ethic now in a dysfunctional marriage with pop-culture worship of the wealthy, successful, or famous explaining to people that you are purposely living in the moment and intentionally avoiding making long term plans garners a lot of criticism. People will see you as lazy, as “part of the problem”, as a free-loader (even though I owe nothing, pay my taxes, and receive no government support) or they will worry that you are depressed, having a breakdown, or “just trying to put a positive spin on your unfortunate financial situation.” (actual quote from an acquaintance now bankrupt in Iceland)

Then there’s the pressure. Thing is, in the world we live in, striving for future success or achievement is taken as a given. One is told that “resting on your laurels” is a bad thing, rather than an acknowledgement of contentment. This process is so ingrained that I have a really hard time not replacing those preconceived goals I’ve given up (like getting a Master’s Degree, losing ten kilos, finishing my remodel at some predetermined date) with a slew of new preconceived goals.

That being said, the more practice I have recognizing the symptoms of utopianism the easier it is to avoid them, and by avoiding them, I hope to let my life unroll slowly on its own accord, not constantly goading it onward. Every preconceived goal is a paving stone on my own personal primrose path to perdition, and I’ve been on the road crew for far too long.