Truth Against the World

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

The Who's Who of the Whoville's own Whos



When I resigned from the Matrix I had a plan that was pretty simple. My plan was to grow as much food as possible (using permaculture principles that I had yet to learn), keep some animals, and take care of my son, wife, aunt in-law, and self. This fall marks the fourth season that we have been here on this domestic homesteading expedition outside the bounds of the American hologram. We've had mostly successes but the cost has not been free. There has been no shortage of craziness and much psychological warfare with those who have not been happy to have us around. I had no idea what I was getting into with this particular situation...although I thought I had one at the outset. I was wrong. I've decided to do a series of posts about the journey thus far. This is the second of those posts. I don't know how many entries it will take, but I'll try to keep each one around 3 or four pages long.

It's unfortunate that a career that I'm perfect for has been ruined by corporate/government bureaucracy. When I started work as an EMT, I was certain that EMS was the life for me. Nothing that I saw in the field in the eight years I was on the meat wagon gave me pause for longer than a day or two. I was impervious to the gore and high tragedy an EMT must witness. Even now, when I see an ambulance, I miss it. It's ironic that dead babies, amputated limbs, body decompositions, and complete disrespect from the majority of our clientele had nothing on the amount of stress that was generated in me due to bureaucracy. In fact, the bureaucracy brought me to the point of near insanity. It was either medicate on fukitol or quit my job. I medicated on fukitol because I had a wife, one year old, and a house to pay for. My wages paid all of our household bills. There was no feasible way out until my wife came home from a Christmas visit to our hometown. While she was there her aunt Bee offered my wife a place for us to live if we ever needed it.

Every family is dysfunctional, but my wife's is exceptionally so (and she'd tell you the same). This is what I knew about her aunt before we moved here. I knew that she had been married to her husband, John Who, for 19 years and that he had passed about a year before we were to move in. I knew that Wendy's (Wendy is my wife) family considered aunt Bee to be crazy. I had met her a few times in the nine years I had known my wife, and I had no reason to believe that she was crazy. I knew she was on psychological meds. These days all that means is that she's been seen by a general practitioner who's protocol is to increase his big pharma kickback money. I also knew that she was Christian but doesn't go to church because she can't afford the 10% of her income tithe her preacher requires of the members (it's not the preachers fault that the bible requires this of it's followers). Because the family considered her to be crazy, and therefore never talked about her other than to say that she's crazy, my wife knew very little about aunt Bee herself. What I knew was from a couple of conversations with her over the last nine years. Suffice it to say, I knew little to jack. I especially knew nothing about the people in her life (which has been the source of nearly all our frustration). My understanding was that she was dying of loneliness and grief from her recently passed husband. This was true on one level. That level was the first of many.

We decided that before I put in my resignation it would be a good idea to go pay aunt Bee a visit just to make sure we wouldn't uncover anything we couldn't live with. It was January of 2011 when we went to Whoville, where aunt Bee lived. The visit was mostly too good to be true, but we had made a decision to follow our bliss and just chalked it up to that. What I saw was 50 acres or so directly behind the house of pasture. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Aunt Bee informed us that it was all in the family and that 14 acres of it belonged to her dead husbands brother, Jack Who. It all belonged to Aunt Bee and her husband before he died, but he left only the house and a fenced in two acres to his wife. The rest of the land was left to his brother and son. Aunt Bee informed us that we shouldn't fool with the land belonging to John Who's son, Tater Who. She informed us that Tater Who was the type of man whom opened a credit card in his father's name, while his father was on his death bed, to the tune of 10,000 dollars with no intention of ever paying it back. However, Jack Who was a good man, and he would have no problem with us tending his land. I couldn't believe what I was being told. I had 16 acres of land at my disposal to do with what I wished. I started plans to keep goats and chickens. To further add to the layer of unbelievable good fortune, aunt Bee informed us that we would need to pay no rent or utilities. She owned the house and two acres outright and only had to pay 100 dollars a year in taxes. Due to John Who retiring from the Airforce as a Master Sergeant, and her disability check, money was not an issue. This meant that my wife and I would have to come up with 600 dollars a month to pay our bills. It looked like everything was falling into place for me to drop out, resign from the matrix, and homestead. We went back to Suck Hill, where our house is, and I turned in my resignation followed by signing up for a cutting edge permaculture program in Ashville NC for the spring.

We were prepared to simply walk away from our house. I wasn't going to stay in a job I couldn't remain working without fukitol just because of a mortgage. We decided that my being present and unmedicated for our family was more important than good credit. However, we weren't going to just leave it without at least trying. My wife posted our house for rent on FB and within one day we had renters. One of my wife's colleagues had a daughter that was in her early 20's and just out of her first trimester. Her baby daddy was trying to do the right thing by manning up and getting a job and a home for them so that they could leave their parents homes. He had no credit and her's was destroyed due to medical bills for cervical problems. It would seem that the baby was a miracle baby seeing as how she was not supposed to be able to conceive. They were unable to find anyone that would rent to them without a very hefty nonrefundable deposit. All we wanted was for them to pay the mortgage. They joyfully agreed and so it was. We knew we were taking a risk with them due to their age and lack of experience in life, but we were prepared to walk away and it seemed like a much better path to take. So he looked me in the eyes and agreed to rent for a year and we shook hands on it.

I didn't start packing up our house until after my last day of work. When we got married in 2006 we didn't even have enough stuff to fill a one bedroom apartment. We had to buy a couch to put in the apartment. We lived in that apartment just at a year before we bought our house. We lived in our house for five years and my wife managed to fill just about every inch of available space with stuff. You have no idea how much shit you have until you start packing to move. While I packed our house up my wife busied herself with hustling all of our junk via a local network of rednecks on facebook called "Just junkin'." I was amazed at the amount of money she made selling shit that we had laying around our yard. The last meet that she went to she managed to make 500 dollars off of junk, some of which was literally laying in our yard having been forgotten about. She must have had a secret portal to another dimension that she housed all of this junk in because I had never seen half of it. I didn't even know we had this stuff. Five years of thrift stores, Goodwill, photography business equipment, plus a consignment business where she took photography props and supplies from local photographers and sold it for a percentage, stuff that had simply been given to her, stuff she pulled out of dumpsters and off of the side of the road, and most importantly stuff from the galaxy's stuff generator. I thought I was going to lose my mind trying to get all of this junk 70 miles down the road to our new home.

Let me just say that it was a good thing I was keeping myself on a strict drug regimen to keep my mind limber (cigarettes, coffee, alcohol, and marijuana to be precise). It's been eight months since the move and we still have shit in the attic and our garage back in Suck Hill. A large part of my job has been organizing and stowing all of the junk that we have since started calling "inventory," due to my wife's gypsy magic abilities. I suppose she knew something I didn't while she was amassing all of this junk. We make a good team because I am hyperOCDanized where organization is concerned and she is not. However, I hate money, and it hates me, but it loves her. She gets the money freely and I organize it. Without me, she'd spend the money on more junk and therefore have no money, but without her I would just have no money. Together we usually get what we need. In the next post we'll take a closer look at the inner workings of my corner of Palookaville known as "Whoville."

5 comments:

William Hunter Duncan said...

LOVING the new trend. Here's the thing though, Druid. The least you could have done to honor that snake was feed it like steak to your permaculture circle. And by the way, she would have heralded the dark turn whether you killed her or not. Perhaps if you had danced for her she would have honored you, and not taken any of your chickens. Perhaps if you had sat with her and smoked you would have learned something. At least you talked to her, after you killed her. But then you just threw her body in a field, like any worshipper of OMOG. (About whom I am alight to hear more of :)

I'd like to hear more sometime too, of those people who treated you so badly, medic-ine man.

Luciddreams said...

William...I agree with you, but there is no way I could have arrived for the first weekend with a snake offering. I suppose I could have, but I didn't know any of those people. It was late and I needed sleep. At any rate I felt guilty about it, but like I said in the blog, I'm not keeping chickens to feed the local wild life.

Sometimes practicality trumps idealism. Just like when I asked the Arch Druid about whether I should cut a quarter acre of trees down to get more sun for gardening on my land. He told me to cut them down but plant more elsewhere. I was surprised to receive suck advice from him. Consequently I cut the trees down and then moved a year later making the entire thing more than pointless. You should see it now. I still own that property. We rent it now. I went back to help the new renters and revisited that place in the woods. There is already a ten foot tree in the center. Nature doesn't waste any time and hardly cares about the insult.

Full disclosure. I read about Druidry and take it seriously. The myth it provides that is. But I don't do ritual magic. Not now at least. It just provides a frame for my world view. I believe it but don't really practice it. I do pay tribute from time to time. My garden beds are positioned as a tribann both invoking and evoking. However, JMG says as much in his books, some Druids do not practice ritual magic. I seem to be one of those. I do more study and practice by honoring nature in my daily life.

Luciddreams said...

such advice from him...not suck

Jason Heppenstall said...

Lucid, you are an excellent bard. It's incredibly relevant to consider how each one of us who 'gets' our current predicament actually ended up on that path. I'm pretty crap at actually explaining it to anyone using my actual voice, as opposed to my keyboard. I guess I'm just not emphatic enough in real life - and I've realised that you need to be emphatic in your message for people to receive it (it doesn't matter what the message is ...).

I can totally relate to the lack of magical practice. I too consider myself to have been practising druidry for years without actually realising it. If I'm honest though, I'm vaguely repelled by some of the people in the pagan scene and worry about becoming 'like them'. Maybe it's just something I need to get over ... in the meantime I'll just keep doing my thing in my own way.

On a vaguely druidic note, I have been disconnected from the matrix of late and was over in my birthland buying a small forest with the inheritance I received from my father. Yes, I kid you not. I'll blog about it soon enough, but there is much excitement in the Heppenstall household of late.

Luciddreams said...

Jason, that's awesome about the forest and I can't wait to hear about it over at 22billionenergyslaves.

I have the same reservations about the people in the pagan/new age/druid/ritual magic scene. To be honest I don't know any of them personally. I've met the pagan/new age version on many an occasion and was always repelled by their child like belief in fairy magic and what have you. JMG is the first voice I've really resonated with, and he has gone a long way in helping me to understand what magic is and why it works. I've just never been able to take ritual magic seriously although I understand the reasons for it.

I think the truth is that we are loners in the real world. My sense of spirituality is very personal and heady. I don't do well sharing it with other people in any way other than this way...as an avatar known as Luciddreams spreading the word in the anonymous world of the interweb...the real gears of the Matrix. We are suited by time and circumstances to do the work we do online. In the real world...the wasteland, I don't talk to people much and keep a very small amount of friends whom I barely interact with.

I've always thought that it's a pent up passion that burns the average person when released. As soon as it finds a possible other to understand it's released uninhibited and with all of the force and fury of intense life. I recognize fellow passengers, or kindred spirits, even when they have no idea who they are. The passion envelops their energy and they back away..."fucking weirdo..." I imagine.

At any rate, thanks for the complement. We have a lot in common. I have an intuition that people like us are better left in the shadows of the wasteland. However, here in the interweb, our voices can be more than heard. They can be internalized into the minds of many. They can exponentially expand their manipulation of the wasteland via minds that would be receptive in no other way except anonymously.