Druid Permaculture Gypsy Magic

    

     Wendy and I recently bought a 31 foot, 1969, International, Sovereign, Land Yacht, Airstream.  In it’s day it was the king of kings as far as mobile living is concerned.  In 1969 it sold for nearly 10,000 dollars.  Today, the equivalent Airstream sells for $70,000 dollars.  It took us about two weeks of craiglist searching, and driving all over tarnation looking to finally arrive at the one we purchased.  We set 17 one hundred dollar bills down on a desk, received the title, and hooked up to the behemoth and towed it 140 miles to our home. 

    The only incident was that one of the rather large windows, approximately 3 feet long by 2 feet wide, flew off of the airstream and hit the side of a fedex trailer.  We had no idea until the fedex driver pulled up next to us and blew his horn, passed us, cut us off, and began slowing down while signaling to follow him onto the off ramp.  He informed me that the window had hit is trailer, but not to worry because he didn’t think Fedex would notice the minor damage.  He then told us that he owned an RV dealership two exits down.  He was quite certain that they might have a replacement window.  Thanks but no thanks Captain Coincidence.  I got back on the interstate and continued yankin’ that airliner fuselage down the road with my buddies Ford F-350, 7.3 liter, superduty, diesel truck.  Apparently this is the largest diesel engine one can buy without acquiring a CDL.  From the front of the truck, (which is taller than me and I’m 6'3") to the back of the trailer we were well over 50 feet long.  Ironically this set up was completely legal. 
   
     This isn’t exactly a true story you would expect to read on a dedicated peak oiler/permaculturalist’s blog is it?  Well, it’s not fiction, it’s true.  First off let me say that I am not a hypocrite, and this in no way makes me one.  However I do understand how contradictory and paradoxical this all may seem.  Let me explain.

    The need for this arrangement was a long time in the making.  The largest irony here is that this land yacht weights about 3000 pounds, completely gutted, as it stands now.  How many energy slaves does it take to move a 31' trailer up the side of a mountain?  I live 115 miles down the mountain in the hills.  In order to get to Asheville I have to climb the famed Saluda grade (7% grade).  Not to mention the Green River Gorge.  To get a 31' trailer from the upstate of SC to Ashville NC it takes a lot of fucking raw fossil fuel power.  As my wife said the other day while sitting in the cab behind that 7.3 liter diesel engine, “I think I just grew a dick.”  It’s amazing what that kind of power will do to the psyche. 

    So why would I do something like this?  Our global civilization is chillin’ somewhere in the ghetto of the bumpy plateau that might as well be the gate to the downward side of Hubbert’s peak.  All I can say is that it makes sense to me.  The greatest paradox is that my wife and I are embracing our gypsy natures all while cultivating a homestead.  Homesteads require daily work to be done and don’t stand up well to the homesteaders leaving for months at a time.  Yet they can go fallow, and we have begun designing our homestead to withstand months of our absence.  The bottom line is that people don’t take kindly to permaculture, druid, gypsy, ninjas round these parts.  I think Zombie Whispering may be a bust as a career path.  It’s a great skill to have, but only for short term interatctions with zombies.  You can’t live amongst them and not be them in the long term.  Hence the need for our behemoth airline fuselage.
   
    This is what it looks like to us.  We bought a home for 17 one hundred dollar bills.  The undercarriage, towing hardware, and skin of this vessel are all in great condition.  We bought it road worthy (we’re in the process of replacing all of the windows with plexiglass).  We are also in the process of profiting off of all of the vintage vanity that composed the guts.  When we are done with it we will have acquired a portable aluminum home at no cost.  I’m not trying to justify what we have done.  I’m just trying to tease my way through the illusory conundrum.

    Here are my plans for the Airstream.  I’m going to craft a solar hot water heater onto the top.  It will be placed where the airconditioning unit is now (after we sell it for good money due to it being 1969 original and still blowing cold air).  I’m designing a system of rain water catchment for the top as well.  I plan on connecting one sink to the hot water and placing a 55 gallon drum over the wheel’s for a cistern to collect the water.  It will also double as a heat source for the inside of the trailer, which I plan on superinsulating.  I also plan on one solar panel that will run one deep freezer and keep us able to plug into the matrix.  That will be the only need for electricity.  If you have a freezer you don’t need a refrigerator.  Gallon glass jugs half full of water and frozen, and then placed in coolers, provide an ample refrigerator.  There will also be a pantry built into the trailer that will hold bulk dry food (which is pretty much what we live on now...oats, rice, polenta, beans, eggs, and dairy consists of the majority of our diet). 

    This is my plan for the kitchen.  It will be an indoor/outdoor kitchen.  I plan on one propane tank to run the original gas oven and my two burner camping stove.  This will be the only thing we will need fuel for when stationary.  Yet we will not need this fuel to meet our needs.  Propane will simply be for convenience.  The oven also doubles as a heat source in the winter.  The majority of our cooking will be down with a solar oven and a rocket stove.  However we are also installing a small two burner, antique coal burning stove (the stove is from the early 20th century, and I will use small twigs for heat as the firebox is pretty small). 

    The bathroom will be a composting toilet on the inside as well as a camping style shower.  To shower one will simply take the lid off of the 55 gallon cistern, fill the bag, and then hang the bag in what will be a very small showering area on the inside of the airstream.  The water will just drain overboard and be collected in another container for reuse elsewhere. 

    Another aspect I’ve been playing with is a small scale biodiesel set up.  The idea will be to remain in place seasonally and only move as the seasons dictate.  So we will move no more than three times a year.  I figure three to four months is plenty of time to acquire the feedstock and make 30 gallons of fuel or so.  My permaculture associate has operated a biodiesel business in the past, so navigating the various ins and outs and what-have-you’s won’t be difficult.  The next phase of this plan is to acquire an old diesel truck.  However, it’s not necessary due to the fact that I have a 7.3 liter and a 6.3 liter at my disposal. 

    I’m not delusional about the transient nature of security that this plan provides us.  It requires lots of moving parts, but only to move on occasion.  Once in place, we will not need the grid for my families survival, and we will have the ability to go wherever sanity needs us.  I’m throwing all in on permaculture.  It is already providing me with community, but that community is up the mountain.  This is the only plan that will enable me to move my family there due to the hand I have been dealt. Staying in Zombieville is not an option long term.  However we can’t leave now, so this is the best we can do.  The matter of security is one in which I find the majority of us peak oiler’s don’t want to talk about.  I’ve said it before, Zombies are first and foremost insatiably hungry beings.  Zombie children are ravenous feral little evil fuckers that I want to limit my interaction with.  Don’t be mistaken about my intentions.  I have a healthy and open line of communication with the reality of the future.  The Airstream will have a weapon safe.  Essentially this is the vessel that we intend on surviving the long emergency in. 

    I suppose this is fate.  I’ve always been a nomad...it’s just my style.  So Druid Permaculture Gypsy Magic is the final form it would seem...for me and my family.  We still have a homestead here, in the hills, and we still have an obligation to care for our elder.  However that doesn’t mean that we have an obligation to stay in Zombieville.  I intend on surviving whatever the future throws my way.  As for the plans for the rest of the space in our spacecraft.  The first ten feet of trailer, in the front, is going to be nothing but bean bags, oversize pillows, a full size memory foam mattress, and a nice plush circular couch.  That’s right...an oversize chill room great for taken her easy as much as possible while surviving the downside of Hubbert's Peak. 

     As an interesting aside.  The Apollo 11 crew was quarantined in a 1969 airstream for 21 days after returning to Earth.   I suppose if it was good enough for the American legends that walked on the surface of the moon...it's good enough for my family.  The irony in this symbolism is so sweat that it's uniquely beautiful.  The airstream truly is an American Icon that represents the height of American engineering applied to recreation.  I find this a perfect symbol to make an abode to travel into the long descent with.  It's a very real American vessel ripe with space age overtones.  I think what we are doing is necessary, logical, and unavoidable.  If nothing else, the psychological security blanket that this project is providing my family is worth it.  All of us who are aware of the reality of the long descent want to feel that we can do something constructive to combat the helplessness.  There is great value for my families psychological health in this vessel.  This is a very real spacecraft that we are designing to navigate our way into the long descent. 

Talking to President Nixon while in Quarantine

Mobile Quarantine 

On the side of the USS Hornet

Gypsi Magi

1969, 31'  Airstream International.  N. Augusta SC.  Fate, destiny, and Will working together.


I'll blog about it one of these days


They say it's a land yacht.

They say if you control the water you control life

They say myth matters

follow your bliss, dreams reverse

wake up

Irradiated Zombies

One might wonder why somebody whom has resigned from the Matrix, and then subsequently removed himself from it, would want to waste any time fooling with the “interweb” (as my wife calls it). It would seem rather contradictory to quit the Matrix only to return to it. This blog is nothing if it's not a signal that I am broadcasting into it. “Hey agents, look over here,” is essentially what keeping a blog such as this one is doing. I can say a few things about that last point. The truth is that ever since I resigned from the navy, where I was employed (if you want to call it that) as a nuclear engineer, by way of missing ships movement and smoking all manner of herbs while UA (unauthorized absence), I've been on the radar, or list, or computer logarithm that concerns itself with all things command and control. Simply put, they've had their eyes on me ever since I was severed from the navy. As a side note, shortly before they severed me from the USN they sent my ass into solitary confinement for three days of bread and water in a class Charlie federal penitentiary in Bangor Washington. I'm not saying I've done hard time, or that I'm a convict, like is depicted for the newfangled myth of our time by the likes of Michael Schofield from Prison Break (he's the new MacGuiver, ), I just find it a particularly qualifying bit of personal past history.

My point is that they've been watching me since 2002 when I exited the navy. I had a classified clearance, which doesn't really mean shit seeing as how nuclear power ain't exactly a big secret these days. So while keeping this blog doesn't exactly help the cause for my broadcast blackout, I find it severely important as a service to humanity to help as many people as possible in learning the skills that are necessary for successful exit from the Matrix. Once you exit, your new life in the real world begins. That is where the hard work, although good work, comes in. Because it's not exactly as though we have many sane elders left any longer. That is a grave problem with severe consequences that are all tangled up with the iron bar to the collective head of modern society.

You know those pesky laws of thermodynamics that I spent so much time acquainting myself with while studying to be a nuke?  Which, as another detour from my point, I got shanghied into...I joined to be a deep sea diver and was flamboozled into standing ten feet next to a reactor looking through a periscope at the reactor once an hour during my five hour watch. All while launching jets off of the flight deck around the clock in response to the conspiracy that was 911...the great pretext to pounce on all of the oil in the middle east. Peak Oil anyone? Like the Government is clueless about PO. People who believe that shit are quit literally, as in very real, Zombies. Watch as you drive around...they can be seen walking, if you can believe that, on the side of roads and interstates these days. These ain't the hippies of yore either...they're vets recently returned from the desert where they busied themselves shooting women and babies in the face at point blank range. They're heavily medicated and unemployable waste generated by the military industrial complex that we were warned about. Do you actually believe that people can come back from that kind of shit and be anything resembling sane? If you believe that then stop reading now cause I'm not talking to you.

So back to the task at hand. Why am I keeping this blog active? In the risk analysis one must do, where exposure to the Matrix is concerned, the first check is “no longer broadcasting a signal into the Matrix via internet.” Well, I've already demonstrated why it doesn't change much for me. They know where I'm at, have known since the summer of 2002, and they know what I'm doing. I am exposing myself like this because I promised I wouldn't give up hope in my fellow man. That being the case, I need to help if and when I can.

I've been a writer my entire life. When I was in the first and second grade (I think...might have been 3^rd and fourth) I had to go to a reading and writing therapist...I think that's what he was called. I was behind in reading and writing for my age. I've been writing ever since and I was around 8 years old at the time. How's that for irony. Add to the fact that I recently found out that my half brother has Asperger's Syndrome which is carried by the father and he's my father's son. I took an online test and scored 70% in the affirmative. John Michael Greer, who's work I study, and whose organization I'm a member of (Ancient Order of Druids in America), and whom pretty much informs my current view of all things Druid, has it himself. If you connect enough dots it gets rather obvious what I'm getting at. Now, it must be said, that within that Syndrome, which is a very high functioning autism, I'm on the high functioning end of that. I believe I am particularly cut out for the job of liberating minds from this dying paradigm, this illusion, this hologram, this particular American Dream in this paricular Anti-Culture that is in the beginning stages of the compost heap. It's starting to heat up ain't it.

All of that to say this...I'm a leader. I've always been a leader, but all good leaders must also follow. I do that as well. I'm surfing this wave that will crash onto an island of hope and prosperity for nature and man. The work that needs to be done right now is the work of getting nature and man back on an even keel with one another. The consequences of Man's actions for the last couple hundred of years is beginning to mature into unavoidablity. We have to begin doing the work of crafting hope in the world. I believe Permaculture takes the Lion's share of that work for me, but an actual living spirituality is just as important. My particular path is Druidry. I consider myself a Druid because the truth is that I initiated myself last Alban Arthuan. I'm waving this flag because John Michael Greer is something like my Merlin.

I'm my own individual, just as my wife is, and just as you are. I'm broadcasting this signal into the Matrix because I've been called to do it by fate, destiny, and now will. It's an unavoidable part of where I'm going by necessity. Quit honestly, it's going to take magic to successfully deal with the future we are already in whether you want to believe it or not. I have faith that I will successfully navigate my way into the future. I don't know when I will blog again, and probably never on a schedule. I'm doing a lot of studying these days, but also a lot of doing in the World (specifically permaculture), and there's the matter of my son Ayden Zen that I must tend to on a daily basis. I will occasionally shout into the Matrix via this blog. 

 So here it goes...I am, and will continue defying the Matrix. I am doing it successfully. I'm typing this now to confirm that it does work. You can resign from the matrix, and if you follow your bliss, you will succeed. However, you must be ready to be attacked on a regular basis by agents. They will be your friends and your family. They can be anybody and everywhere. You have to be ready to constantly fend off their misery and remain authentic. It's very taxing work at times, to stay unplugged as a lifestyle, but it's necessary for the future of man on this living Earth. If enough of us do not head the call, the Earth will eventually shake us off like fleas...or perhaps we'll just irradiate ourselves into Zombies.