Truth Against the World

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Meet the Whos



They call this area of Palookaville "Whoville," after the Who family. Who is actually an Irish name in reality, but due to me changing the name to half ass keep us safe while living in Whoville, you can't tell that it's Irish. The Who's are your typical southern clannish type who are descended from the Scotch/Irish Appalachian folk. Palookaville is farm country in the upstate of South Carolina. This area of Palookaville is surrounded by Who folk. Across the street from our house is Bart-Who road, there's another road near here called Who road. Next to our house is a large farm house with the head Who in charge, King Who, of the Who clan, and across the street from his house is the Who bar and grill also owned by King Who. Next to the bar is a piece of shit blue single wide trailer with windows that are shitty brown opaque with cigarette smoke, and a lesbian Who named Karen Who and her lobotomized lover of the last 20 years, who I've nicknamed Admiral Dumpy, living inside. Admiral Dumpy is in her late forties and looks like a dumpling on legs. She thinks she's the bee's knees, has an I.Q. of negative something, and the only thing she can work correctly is her mouth (and by that I mean she knows how to produce sound with it).

There is a large lesbian population in Palookaville and there's even a nudist colony somewhere around here that nobody talks about but everybody knows about. Behind the trailer is an old farm house with the matriarch of Whoville who my wife and I have nicknamed Mad Madam Mine which is a play on Mad Madam Mime from Disney's "The Sword and the Stone," and the seagulls in Finding Nemo that repeat "mine" over and over again. You'll come to understand all of these nicknames for the Who clan as this humble story unfolds. There are a lot of Who's in Whoville, but all the Who's that are important for this-a-here story have already been mentioned. I have a hard enough time myself keeping up with all of the Who's whom Aunt Bee prattles on about from time to time. There's one thing that all Who's have in common and that's money. They don't do shit for each other unless they are getting paid. Descent families typically will help each other out for free because they love each other, and they're family, but not the Who's. Here's a good example.

Mad Madam Mine is John Who's sister and she's in her late 60's (John Who was the Who that was married to Aunt Bee). Now John Who died a very slow death at the hands of Parkinson's Disease. His mind stayed nice and coherent while his body slowly atrophied and rotted. Parkinson started his work on John Who the year after the two love birds got married. For the record, I met John Who a couple of times before he died. He definitely broke the Who mold because he was an upright, caring, and descent man. Towards the end of John's life, when he could do nothing for himself, Aunt Bee took care of him. She fought to keep him out of a nursing home and managed to succeed for the duration of his life. Now while he was laid up in a hospital bed in their living room unable to move more than a finger, and only slightly at that, his family was fast at work taking advantage of every ounce of wealth and kindness they could.

While his son, Tater Who, was busy signing John up for credit cards and maxing them out to the tune of 10 grand, Mad Madam Mine was busy nickle and diming Aunt Bee. Aunt Bee would have to rely on Mad Madam Mine to sit with John while she did things like go to the bank and grocery store.  Mad Madam Mine would come and sit with John for a small fee. Aunt Bee would have to buy her toilet paper, paper towels, and other household items as payment for Mad Madam Mine to sit with her dying brother. Otherwise she would be too busy to help. Of course, while this was going on, Admiral Dumpy was charging Aunt Bee fifty dollars a pop to ride a riding lawn mower over her two acres (it's actually 1.6 acres with two two car garages and the three bedroom ranch modular house making it just over an acre of actual grass that had to be mowed). She would also charge 50 dollars per room to steam clean, which was a chore Aunt Bee felt was necessary to have done due to Admiral Dumpy's insistence.

In fact Admiral Dumpy was Aunt Bee's go to woMan to have anything done around the house. Admiral Dumpy (who I occasionally will refer to as "Chicken Liver" when the mood strikes me) is the type of lesbian who thinks she can do anything a man can do and better. Her dying wish in life is to grow a pair of balls. Karen Who, Chicken liver's lover, is Mad Madam Mine Who's daughter...one of two actually. There's another Who daughter of the mad madam's whom lives with her and supposedly works as a hospice nurse. She's a mysterious Who because you never see her, but she's supposedly there. Now, I don't have a problem with gays or lesbians, to each his or her own. I care not how you like to maintenance your genitalia so long as it's consensual and with an adult (hell, you can be a chicken fucker if that's what get's you off...I just don't want to hear about it). However I do have a problem with lesbians who have a problem with me just because I have a Johnson and natural body/facial hair. That's Admiral Dumpy the chicken liver extraordinaire. To put it shortly, she's a dumb ass who doesn't know shit about shit, except that it stinks, and this explains why when I moved here my toilet wouldn't stop flushing once the toilet was activated. Aunt Bee explained to me that she paid Admiral Dumpy fifty dollars to fix it about a year ago. She said that she heard Dumpy cussing and then she came out of the bathroom and left the house without saying anything else to Aunt Bee about it. Admiral Dumpy the putrid chicken liver extraordinaire is unfortunately a main character in this story...unfortunately.

We moved to the Whoville section of Palookaville on February 18th of 2012. Our POD was delivered about two hours before we arrived. Before I even had a chance to crack open the POD and start unloading it, the Matriarch of Whoville, Mad Madam Mine, just happened to stop in for a visit. I had no fucking idea what I had gotten myself into, or anything about the Who's for that matter. I just treated her like I treat everybody else, with respect and with the benefit of the doubt about possessing a sense of decency. To a Who, decency is only something to be used if it will gain them booty, or plunder, or cash, or a hand up (or perhaps a hand job...I'm not sure on that, but they seem to be the type that would work for sexual favors if it was the only option). So when the Mad Madam asked me if I wanted to ride to the trash dump with her, I figured she just wanted to get to know who was moving in with her "friend" of 19 years. What I didn't know was that she was on a reconnaissance mission to figure out how exactly she needed to handle me.

The trash dump is four miles from our house. On the way to the dump she did her best to extract as much information from me as possible with regards to what I was doing there. What was my plans, when did I plan on going back to work, was I going to go back into EMS? Now that I reflect on it I understand that she was just trying to figure out if I had any money, and how I was planning on getting money, because when it comes down to it, money is all a Who cares about. I told her the truth. I told her that I didn't plan on working for anybody. I told her that I planned on homesteading and that this would include goats and chickens. I told her about permaculture and how I was going to be training in permaculture in Asheville NC in the spring. I said that my plans for money was going to be eventually selling value added food products from my homestead on the side of the road. You see, what she was doing was trying to figure out if I was competition for Aunt Bee's money or not (which really isn't a lot, but since the house is paid for and she gets government checks in the mail, there has traditionally been plenty to go around). She didn't offer any information about anything. Of course she also wanted to know if I was Baptist, and did I plan on going to church, "and I'd like to invite you to my church this Sunday," which is code for "I'd like to invite you to give my cult leader as much of your money as you can stand so that he can pay his mortgage on his ridiculous McMansion."

At some point Aunt Bee leaked the information to the Mad Matriarch that Wendy and I sold stuff online. Within a week of our being here we had all manner of Who's calling us asking if we wanted to buy their junk from them. We played nice, but they were trying to sell us all manner of dumb shit. They also got wind that Wendy is a photographer and were trying to sell her stupid shit they thought related to photography. Every other day my wife was fielding a Who call that related to them trying to sell us something. It was ridiculous.

Meanwhile Wendy, Ayden Zen (my two year old son...who was 20 months old at the time) and I, were all trying to figure out how to live with Aunt Bee. She gave us the master bedroom but told us that we had to use the matching furniture that belonged to her. She had a lot of idiosyncrasies like that that we had to learn about. She didn't want any shelves on the walls, and she didn't want to break any of her furniture sets up, and didn't want any of the pictures in the living room or den moved. I understood her reservations with changing anything. I quickly learned that the only reason she didn't care about the kitchen was because she didn't use it for anything. When we moved in there was a pack of saltine crackers and a few cokes in the refrigerator and that was it. She ate a packet of flavored oatmeal in the morning and a can of campbells soup in the evening. She used the microwave for both (which I promptly banished from the house). The walk in pantry had nothing food related in it, just some cleaning supplies. In fact the only room in the house that she ever used was the living room. She spent all of her time sitting in her recliner, covered with a blanket, rocking. Every once in a while she would walk across the street to the Mad Madam's house to pay tribute to the Matriarch of Whoville. I've learned that in order for the Who's to abide your presence, somebody must be paying tribute on your behalf. The Who's are a rotten lot.

Luckily Aunt Bee had nothing in the two car garage that was right next to the house except for her 2006 paid for Chrysler 300 with only 10,000 miles on it. This is where we unloaded our POD, and this was also to represent my sanity for the next several months. Basically she didn't care what I did to the garage so long as she could park her car in it. If it hadn't of been for this recluse, I don't think I would have made it thus far. The other two car garage was full of some obscure cousin's sisters grandchild's Who's shit. The obscure Who was supposed to be picking their crap up within the month and I was to have another two car garage at my disposal. This second garage was where we planned on setting up the "Stone at Fox Haven," which has since been titled the "Gypsy House." The first couple of months I spent about 70% of my time in that top garage drinking beer, smoking weed and cigarettes, and just generally having a good time being resigned from the Matrix and having no job.

I turned that garage into a man cave that was from my wildest dreams. It even had our couch and my recliner in it since there was no place for them in the house yet. Basically I had my own apartment where all of my tools had their own place. It was February, what else was I going to do? I had a live in baby sitter and we had plenty of money in the bank from the rednecks at "Just Junkin'" with only a requirement of 600 a month to make ends meet. It was party time (much deserved after 8 years of EMS if I must say so myself). I got my work space situated and spent a lot of time planning for the spring. The onslaught of the vultures was about to kick off in earnest. Of course I was blissfully unaware of the vulture carnage Aunt Bee had been living with for the last 18 years. John Who had been one year past, and the vultures had been busily fighting amongst each other for their Aunt Bee's money pecking order. John Who was able to keep them at a safe distance while he was alive. It wasn't just the Who's siphoning her money either. There was also a leech of a brother with his pulse on her bank account. He would represent the most intense affront to my happiness I have ever experienced.

Sunday, October 28, 2012

Standby...Authenticating

Bad faith (from French, mauvaise foi) is a philosophical concept used by existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to describe the phenomenon where a human being under pressure from societal forces adopts false values and disowns his/her innate freedom to act authentically. It is closely related to the concepts of self-deception and ressentiment.

This is how Jason Heppenstall finished up his last blog at 22billionenergyslaves. This sentiment is surprisingly synchronistic for me, which ironically is becoming no longer surprising. Why is this irony? Or perhaps a better question to ask is why is this synchronistic? It's ironic because I should not have to be reminded of this truth, but I found myself in great need of it. It's synchronistic because of the timing of the reminder. I had the need just now to be reminded of it's truth. Forgive me if I have misused the term irony. I've heard that it's a terribly misused literary term which I have hopefully bullshitted my way around misusing. Perhaps I should say the whole thing is simply serendipitous and leave it at that. Whatever the case may be, that is to say whether this whole thing is ironic, or synchronistic, or serendipitous, or the most likely combination of all three...it has sparked an unforeseen hitch in the giddyup for the story at Epiphany Now. So forgive me while I indulge in an ironic post on the matter (since this should be a continuation of the Whoville clusterfuck I find myself living...and since I now find myself trying to misuse the term). I'll return to the regularly scheduled program after this unforeseen gallivant unfolds (also one should read this blog to have a further understanding of the verbal spewage ahead).

In his last post, Jason breaks people down into four categories, which I will sum up succinctly. Those categories are the predator, the flake, the robot, and the genuine person. The predator is the guy who will bomb your ass and take your gas, or a typical American. The flake is the guy who will simply shit himself and then attach himself to the nearest predators asshole as a hopeful self preservation tactic. Or he'll just simply decompose in place and blow away. The robot is the guy who operates 100% in the American Hologram Program. He's the worshiper of the myth of progress paradigm I wrote about here. The authentic person is as rare as a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. He's the guy who is trying to, as Joseph Campell outlined, live authentically. This is the guy I've been trying my damn hardest to be my entire life. Yet I've only known this consciously for the last year or so. I knew it when I resigned from the Hologram (I think it's time to put "the Matrix" to bed here due to my overuse of the term...I'll now be referring to it as simply the hologram). I also forget from time to time and find myself a victim of bad faith. Thanks to Jason I think I will be successfully navigating around this pit fall for once. Which is a great thing seeing as how I don't exactly have a gps for my actions out here in the Wasteland I have inherited due to my resignation. Personally I think the majority of the people out there are predator flake robots which would be a fifth category. That is to say that when the chips are down they'll fuck you cause they're scared shitless robots with no operating system left since it blinked out of existence cause America ran out of juice to program the hologram. I think one would be wise to understand this so as to not be deluded about things. To be clear, I'm unfortunately an American, so I'm talking about Americans in America cause this is America...and these colors don't run. America.

The point of Jason's last blog, in my opinion, was to point out that the best strategy for living in these uncertain times is to meet authentic people and befriend them now. Surround yourself with authentic people to insulate yourself from the predator flake robots which have fruitfully multiplied thanks to all of the petroleum (these people are what I commonly refer to as zombies...or Americans). This is great advice. The only problem is the bit I outlined about the authentic person. They are rarer than a lyger unicorn. Even when people think they are being authentic they are still operating under the American Hologram Program. I know this because I actively pursue authenticity as a lifestyle, and yet still find myself occasionally being sucked back into this black hole out of a perceived need because of bad faith. It's my belief that societal pressure is mostly the hologram asserting it's dominance on people.

The truth is that we all have the freedom to act authentically. We also have the freedom to be sick poor and hungry which is what the hologram wants you to believe will happen to you if you don't tow the mark. On the outside looking in this appears to be the truth. It takes money to live. This is true regardless of your awareness of the holograms active thaumaturgy (as an aside, if you don't know, thaumaturgy is how the hologram controls your mind and John Michael Greer has written pretty extensively about it at the Arch Druid Report). Money is the vacuum that constantly tries to suck you back into the Hologram. It's been said that nature abhors a vacuum, but money is not natural, and what nature abhors are the whores of the myth of progress paradigm. The parasites on the surface of Gaia. It's sickening how we waste, and in that waste become diseased. However, as Pepper has said, it takes money just to live. I wish this were not true.


Lately I have found myself seriously contemplating a job. This makes me feel hypocritical and inauthentic. It doesn't make me that, but it makes me feel that. My wife is preggers with our second child. She is the one in this union whom has shown a willful talent for collecting the money that we need. I am only good at managing the money once it arrives. I'm good at making a dollar spend like two due to an inherited financial thrift. A financial magic. However, inflation, and the lack of a job on my part, has been fucking with that inheritance of late. Hence the contemplation, by myself, on the job. My prudent alarm has been going off because my wife is pregnant. I need a way to make money during the pregnancy...or is it just the hologram working its thaumaturgy via a back door? Societal pressure attempting to strip me of authenticity. I'm feeling vulnerable, and defensive, and so I'll take this opportunity to state that I'm not lazy, and I'm not afraid to work. What I am afraid of is losing the scent on this trail that I've been following. That's what results in bad faith. In my case, good faith would be believing that I'm following the right scent. I have faith, as well as some empirical experience to back this up, that the money will present itself to us in due time. That's one of the side effects of following your bliss.

Why should it be that a job would be inauthentic for me? Is it just that I'm allergic to groveling at the boot of Corporate America? Is it that I don't want a government check to arrive in the mailbox with my name on it? Many of those checks arrive in the mail box at the house I live in...they just don't have my name on them. They arrive due to disability and a dead Master Sergeant's pension. I'm just playing the part of family benefiting from this governmental pittance. This is how I managed to resign from the program and still get what I need. Only now I need 3500 dollars to pay the midwife (since resigning from the hologram awards you with no medical insurance for you and your family here in America) so that my wife can feel comfortable birthing our child at a birthing center. Not the hospital...Gaia willing. The hospital is more dangerous than trying to give birth in Afghanistan shortly after 9/11, and it comes with antibiotic resistant staphylococcus and a $10,000 bill that you must pay so as to avoid financial ruin, all cause you wanted to procreate . This pulling in the direction of the hologram is being caused by the pregnancy. The problem is not that I'm scared to work, it's that I'm scared to lose my authenticity. They will pay me around 10 dollars an hour. That's the going rate for menial servitude to the hologram. I'm at my wits end where this whole thing is concerned. I've been seriously contemplating tending bar again because it's the only thing I can imagine doing without devolving into full blown depression about my lot in life. An unemployable nuclear engineer medic. Unemployable because I don't play well with the program. Never have. What is a father to do?

People that wake up to the mess civilization is in all want to know what to do about it? It's the first reaction one typically encounters when faced with our civilization's petroleum induced clusterfuck. Where do I go? What do I do to assure I'll be able to acquire my needs for life? Food, shelter, warmth, stability, security. After all there are Zombies in dem dare woods. Those zombies make that cabin sort of dangerous don't they. People generally don't get along intentionally which is why most intentional living situations require lots of sitting around arguing about money...essentially. It takes money to live. 

 I can tell you that the fuckers with all the money know that this ship is sinking. While I was learning and practicing permaculture this last spring and summer, I had the good fortune to receive proof of this. Three business men who's business it is to insure insurance hired our leaders to create a "cabin in the woods" to support three entire families off of the land (approximately 30 people). They want it to be a self sustaining mountain oasis outside of Asheville NC. They intend on flying their jets from Florida to the location when the shit hit's the fan. They think this event is a couple of years away. They insure insurance. Remember AIG? The whole order is tall and impossible, but it isn't stopping the leaders of permaculture from taking their money and doing the best job that they can designing this impossibility. The average person can't afford to delude themselves about what to do. These pricks happen to belong to that club. You know the club where your membership makes as much money as you want appear in your bank account forever. Eventually the jokes gonna be on their rich predator flake robot asses. They don't even want any grounds keepers to hold this permaculture miracle in place in the interim between now and the completely fucked global financial collapse that they have foretold. Why? Because they are afraid that if they employ any locals then the zombies will know about their mountain oasis and come take all of their elderberries, mushrooms, and chickens once the apocalypse happens.


The question remains...what are we, the awakened ones, to do about it? Am I to tend bar in this interim? I hope not. I'm going to hold my position out here in the wasteland. The price of admittance back into the hologram for money is too steep. I don't see how serving people their poison for money is going to increase my authenticity. I can't get back on the meat wagon because it's powered by governmental bureaucracy bull shit. All of the work I could go grovelling for is corporately owned and operated. So what do we do? We look for the ternary to break the holograms binary between bad credit and a job. A way to make money that does not require any loss of authenticity or service to the hologram. Here is to conjuring the Druid Permaculture Gypsy Magic Hustle. Hopefully it will pay for the next beautiful life that my wife is busy with, just now, creating. One thing I know to be true. One thing that I know is not bad but good faith. You have more to lose working a corporate job then you have to gain. I'm doing my part to turn the power off from the hologram generator. Are you?



Good Faith (as defined by me):  Faith that following your bliss will result in everything you need to live a happy and fulfilling life. 









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."

Friday, October 12, 2012

Black Snake Drone


I've written nine pages thus far telling the story of the events in my life since my resignation from the Matrix. To get an accurate picture there are a lot of monotonous descriptions about certain people who have made themselves part of my story (and I use the term “people” loosely as I'm not sure many of them actually meet that description short of they are homo sapien). I want people to read this story, and so I must first hook you if you haven't already been hooked. That's why I have found it necessary to start this story out of chronological order. It will be just this once, I promise. Chronologically the story begins at the start of 2012 in January, but I'm going to start in early spring. The end of March of that same year to be precise.

I was in the shower getting ready for my first weekend of “Permaculture In Action” (PIA) when my wife came to me with the news of the Black Snake (I won't be capitalizing again...but I felt it deserved a stronger introduction than the title of this essay). I had to get up early the following morning to drive 70 miles up the mountain from upstate SC (Palookaville) to Asheville NC for the opening ceremony of PIA. Permaculturalists tend to be an eclectic lot I've come to find. PIA was a big deal for me because just before I turned in my resignation to my supervisor I signed up for this class. I was going to give up my career as a medic for the uncertainty of permaculture. All I knew was that Permaculture appeared to answer all of my questions about our uncertain, petroleum deficient, future. What I'm getting at is that because PIA was the start of my permaculture adventure, I was a bit apprehensive and nervous about the whole thing, and the last thing I needed to do was to slay a mythical beast. However, looking back, it's symbolic on many different levels. It's quite literally the stuff of myth.

I'm in the shower washing my ass when my wife informs me that there's a huge black snake on the garage right next to our new backyard chicken coop. A couple days before this day the 70 something year old chicken maverick down the road from me, the guy we had been buying our eggs from, called and asked if I wanted to purchase a flock and coop from him for a very reasonable price. His health was declining and he didn't want to make his wife tend to his several rather large flocks. The coop is a 10' by 10' chain link dog kennel that's been turned into a coop via tarps, bamboo, and a home built nesting box. We brought home 10 Delaware hens ranging from a year to a year and a half old, and a Rode Island Red Rooster (who later got dubbed Archimedes). Behind our house is 100 acres or so of pasture (used to be farmed but now it's just bush hogged twice a year). I guess that makes it 100 acres or so of native weeds and grasses...a field perhaps? It's perfect habitat for field mice, rats, snakes, coyotes, turkeys, hawks, and yes Mr. Black Snake (whoops...I did it again). Not exactly ideal for keeping chickens, but it's what I've got to work with, and I haven't lost a bird to predation yet.

So I'm washing my ass and my wife informs me that “there is a massive snake climbing the garage by the coop...he's like the size of the garage.” I hop out of the shower (thinking that my wife's smoked a little to much green bombastic), dry my ass off right quick, throw some clothing on, and head out to deal with this unfortunate unfortunosity. I saw that fucker before I even got out of the house. He was massive alright. He was climbing the god damn garage vertically, and he was just about to the roof and still on the ground. Our house is about fifty yards from the back garage, and I was looking at him through the kitchen window. My pulse quickens as a chemical cocktail is getting squeezed out of various endocrine glands. I'm getting ready to do battle. On my way to battle I stop off at the top detached garage, right next to our house, to acquire a weapon to slay this beast with. I grabbed a hoe that I had recently purchased at Lowes, as in it wasn't sharpened yet...as in it was dull. I figured this was a better option than my 12 gauge cause I didn't want to put any holes in any chickens, or the garage, or the trailer park right next to our property line...or people for that matter.

Having acquired my weapon, I hurried on down to the battle field. I arrived at the coop just in time to watch the beast slither on into the coop by twilight. “What the fuck,” is what I was thinking as I watched this 7 foot (might of been eight, I never got a chance to measure) snake go shopping at the Chicken Shack, a one stop shop to meet all of your snake needs. He moseyed on over to the nesting box and had a sniff, then took notice of the 11 birds roosting a few feet above him, then continued on out into the run. I'm still trying to get out of not killing this beast...in denial about the whole thing actually. My wife and aunt-in-law are both watching from the deck at the back of our house by this point. I enter into the chicken run and watch Mr. Black Snake nestling up next to a log that I had used to keep the green, plastic, gardening fencing, that largely composes the run, in place (the run is scavenged 2x4's set in the ground with that fencing zip tied to the posts and logs all around it to keep the bottom of the fencing in place...I didn't pay anything when I constructed the run...just used what I had). I guess he figured he had just hit the jackpot and was going to move in right next to the Chicken Shack where he'd sustain himself on a diet of chicken egg and even chicken ass if the mood struck him.

I don't want to kill this snake, but I'm not trying to keep chickens to feed the local wild life either. I hadn't reckoned this bit when I agreed to come get this flock from the chicken maverick down the road. I didn't think that it was also going to require me to slay mythical beasts, but there he was, and there I was, armed with a dull hoe. I finally climb out of denial and enter into acceptance. I had to get him out into the open, away from the log, so that I could dispatch his life. I pushed the log with the hoe to let him know I was there, and that it was time to pony up and die. He took notice, and I think it was the first time he had taken notice of me as well. He was too enamored with his good fortune to realize that it was actually the opposite. Having taken notice of me, he decided that he was not going to leave, he was going to stay. He slithered towards the coop into the run. No sir, I thought, time to die. I raised that hoe above my head and all the way down to my back to get as much force as possible and WHACK!!! I hit him about a foot behind his head. Of course he wasn't severed, and now he was pissed off. I quickly raised the hoe up above my head, but just barely this time so as to be more precise with the literal whacking of this snake, and whacked again, this time obviously breaking his spine. I whacked once more, and again, and I think I whacked about five times before I finally got the poor fuckers head off. I stood there and watched his served head. He was opening and closing his mouth while the rest of his six feet of body thrashed around.

Now I hunt deer, and hog if they show up while I'm hunting deer, and I take responsibility for my kills. I honor the animal by using every bit I know how to use. I don't kill just for a trophy, but I kill to feed my family. I don't like killing and not eating is what I'm getting at. However, it's dusk now, a few minutes from dark. I've got to get up and drive my ass up the mountain in the morning to start my permaculture life. I don't have time to be cooking a seven foot black snake over my fire pit. If it hadn't of been for the fact that I had PIA to attend in the morning, I may have tried to cook and eat the snake. If I had been here longer, I would have at least composted him in the humanure pile. But I had only been here a little over a month, and I had no humanure pile. I apologized to the snake for murdering his sorry ass, got him on the hoe, and walked him to the edge of our property where I slung him into the field. “Circle of life...birds gotta eat to.” I've since had to kill one more snake, but fortunately he was only a couple of feet. My miniature dachmund found him in a box in the back garage.

What I didn't know at the time was that the snake that I had just killed was a harbinger for a very real threat to my bliss. On another level, he had arrived to foreshadow an evil that I was about to have to contend with. In a few days I was to contend with the most insane, dysfunctional, and down right dangerous attack on my life that I had ever had to face. It would come speaking in tongues. It hailed from the back of the Southern Baptists revival tent. The part of the show that your light weight bible thumpin' hick doesn't even get to bear witness to. This threat would come from a place of depravity I had not seen before, and I was a medic on the street for six years. I would learn that the inner circle of Southern Baptists (and it ain't catholic or protestant boy, it's Southern Baptists) are actually demon worshipers. I know, I didn't believe it either, but there it is. These people were beyond card totin' shit house rat crazy. These people were my in-laws, and they didn't take kindly to my kind round these parts either. I would soon learn that they weren't the only ones that didn't take kindly to me. I would soon learn, in fact, that there were a lot of people that didn't take kindly to those of us who have the “earth spirit in'em.” You're damn right I've got the Earth Spirit in me. Now, I'll go back to the beginning of this story. 

Mr Black Snake

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Waiting for Godoom

Here is some more cathartic and monotonous droning for you to read. It's cathartic for me at least. The topic is one that has been rode hard and put up wet over and over again all over the doomosphere for the last five years or so it would seem. That topic is the question of when will this state of suspended animation of business as usual change for our global experiment failure? I can't be the only one sitting around waiting for the ball to drop. I'm not talking about waiting for doom either (Godoom maybe). Just a change in consciousness for the average human would be nice. We know this shit ain't sustainable so what gives?

How could it be that the entire world thinks we can just continue on brow beating and strong arming the planet into feeding us evil alchemical petroleum snacks? How could it be that everyone thinks petroleum will just continue on indefinitely? For cryin' out loud, "Augmented Humanity"?!! Why don't they cut the bull shit and just call it Orwell meets Huxley's shared vision of a dark humanity where we eat each other's brains in an attempt to not have to think at all....for any reason...ever again. People actually want to plug in to the Matrix literally? The geekiest Google geeks want to fucking plug into their phones and ignore real reality in exchange for virtual reality? This is the future they want?  For more on this topic go on over to an excellent blog fresh off of the type pad of Jason Heppenstal of "22 billion energy slaves."  His latest is titled "Googling the Googlers."  Reading his latest was what set me off on this rant actually.   I highly recommend the read (although I'm aware that you're probably already aware of his blog, and you have probably already read it, but there it is.   My humble endorsement). 

 Fuck it, we gave up on traversing the universe on the Axiom and now we'll just collectively plug in and drop out. Eventually we'll just get rid of our bodies and be in an electronic bliss where everyone is your "friend" so long as you're their "friend." What does "friend" mean? It just means that you "like" whatever stupid shit they are doing and they like yours. Click click click, drag drag drag, like like like, left or right and nothing else...horse blinders. Can't you here the conversation our bodiless race will have at the virtual pub "and what was that thingy overhead we used to need again that used to keep all life on planet earth alive? The s-s-sum...somthin' or rather that the sooooo 20th century human used to talk about. It was up there in the sty or something like that. People used to worship it. Can you believe that? Our ancestors were such barbarians." Hell, there are people who think spaghetti noodles grow over there in guadalasomthiny. I'd love a fuckin' pizza plant myself. Or maybe even an iphone plant.

I do realize how harsh I sound. I don't consider myself to be any special intellect. I dropped out of college six times I think. Hell I even dropped out of the Navy followed by dropping out from the idea of a job entirely. How the hell am I supposed to get the things I need to live and keep a healthy household without a job? Well, I'll tell you...magic that's how. Just like a Disney wizard or sorceress. I do it the same way your iphone will feed you when you drop out from real reality. I make a pentagram on the floor in my garage with the blood from a slaughtered chicken and then chant in tongues to Beetlegeuse for a check to arrive in the mail box. It arrives and I go buy fried petroleum possum buttholes covered in Ranch with American imitation cheese food melted in the microwave for a dipping sauce. Goes down real nice and keeps my family nice and gargantuan just like our energy bill. I don't have to worry about my health because the scientist make pills for that, and at any rate we're not going to even need our bodies or brains once the technogeeks figure out how to plug our stupid asses into the matrix for good.

Doesn't anybody care about nature anymore? I don't mean the co-opted save the whales green deauchery type of nature either. I mean the go outside and put seeds in the dirt nature. The sun and moon and stars nature. The listening to water flow over rock nature. Shit...just fucking go outside where the pavements not...nature. I guess I should look on the bright side. Once we get our stupid fat asses plugged in we won't need cars anymore, and we won't be fat anymore, and we won't need fried petroleum extra spicy racoon snot from the convenience store anymore. What's more convenient than not even needing a body? Who cares about nature anyways? That's sooooooo 2000 and late. Shit...my iphone is dying...where's the nearest magic plug hole in the wall? I need some magic energy to keep myself alive and entertained in the intersuckhole that's brought to you by the techno wizardry of google geekdom. Who needs a drink?

You'll be happy to know that the above concludes my ranting for the day. Now, I'd like to take this opportunity to make an announcement about the future of this blog. I'm thinking of writing the story of my drop out from the Matrix. By that I mean less commentary and more reporting on how things have gone for me since I decided to resign from the rat race. Part of me thinks that nobody would enjoy reading the story of a society flunky, and that I shouldn't even bother with publishing it on the web. That is the pessimistic side of the optimistic pessimist. The optimist side of the optimistic pessimist thinks that it may be entertaining and informative for some to read. It features slaying 7 foot long black snakes with a dull hoe, satan worshiping southern baptist ra-tards, 50 year old lesbians in a blue tin can trailer with penis envy, and all manner of I couldn't make this shit up plot made possible by the extra special stupid that breeds around these parts in Palookavile...where I live...unfortunately for me. I think it needs to be told. That's what is on the menu at Epiphany now for the next undetermined amount of time.

Looking through the list of my past blogs I've concluded that I've pretty much said enough about reality of the reality persuasion. I've said enough about the doomalypse that we're all waiting for. We all know the magic go juice tank is on empty. The Archdruid is writing about how the American empire is going to get it's fat ass beat down by the likes of Won Ling and friends (there will be no apocalypse however...so don't worry yourself about that). Apocalypse Not, Epiphany Now, Apocalypse Now...now, now, now brown cow how now? Where was I going? What day is it? Is this a week day? Unfortunately I do mind Mr. Lebowski, and now back to my point. I don't think writing about how fucked, stupid, and depraved we are as a species is going to benefit anybody any longer. At least not here at Epiphany Now. I say that, but you know that I know that you know that Ima gonna continue bad mouthing this shit for brains species cause I can't help it. I'm just saying that I'm going to try my damn hardest to write a story here instead of bitching all the time. 

"just one more thing dude."

"Yeah, what's that?"

"Do you have to cuss so much?"

"What the fuck are you talking about?"

"Have it your way dude."

(if you don't know, by way of explanation, I have what I refer to as "lebowski turrets."  That's why I cuss so much...and I just think it's funny) 







Monday, October 1, 2012

Fiercely Alive



Every once in a while I take it upon myself to attempt a slightly more optimistic smattering of words. Due to my nature being predominately ruled by optimistic pessimism (which is really a misnomer seeing as how I'm actually more along the lines of a raging pessimist where just about all things human species are concerned), I tend to gravitate towards what could be considered a negative outlook on things. Now, it should be said in my defense, that things are pretty fucked up and therefore I'm actually just reporting on reality in a realism sort of way. In other words, it's not my fault that our species has decided to conduct ourselves like a bunch of drunk teenagers trying to find a hole to stick our pricks in on prom night whenever and wherever possible all the live long day. I think it's rather unfair to be considered a pessimist just because I make it a habit of calling a spade a spade and not some other gooey and ridiculous euphemism designed to woo the masses into believing whatever retarded garbage the American Hologram is selling for the day (that last sentence had to of broken some rules of grammer...I'm certain of it). However, all of reality generally sucking and therefore lending itself to pessimism aside, I do realize that attitude has a lot to do with how your life plays out in general. That is to say that if your attitude and overall disposition is shitty, than you shouldn't be surprised when things turn out shitty all of the time (this is where a very special herb can be appropriately used for medicinal purposes for psychological health...I find).

My wife just returned from a three day and two night getaway with two friends from college. She plans on blogging about it over at “thebutterchurn,” so I'll just be latching onto a few topics revolving around the disaster that was her weekend. She thought she was going to the mountains of NC, Boone to be precise, to stay in a cabin and commune with nature while in the company of good friends. What she was not banking on was how much people change as time marches on. What she got was a weekend of consumer hell whilst sleeping in a cabin on the edge of mountain suburbia with two friends that were afraid to go outside because they might get some nature on them...need I say more? One of her friends might as well have had an American flag stamped on her head with something like “only spews American Hologram garbage from mouth” tattooed somewhere that would be easily visible to all those not of the American Hologram persuasion. Apparently this girl thought that “American processed imitation cheese food” was cheese, and bought it (seriously, according to my wife this is what the packaging said). This same girl was afraid to drink organic whole milk (for curiously unknown reasons...I mean even she didn't know why) and couldn't understand why back yard chicken eggs are better for you than concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) eggs. To sum up her weekend it was spent mostly driving around suburbia hitting all of the shopping spots up, eating fast food, and, while at the beautiful cabin they watched “Friends” on the idiot screen. This same girl brought seasons 1 through 10 on dvd which was a good thing, for the friend, due to there being no cable in the cabin which was apparently a major source of contention for her. Needless to say my wife is now recuperating from a 200 dollar getaway to mountain suburbia hell.

I brought that short anecdote up because it helps illuminate the depth of retardedness that permeates all throughout the hologram. Dropping out of the Matrix can be very lonely, and the longer you stay out of it the harder it can be to find intelligence. Why is that? It can easily become a positive feedback loop as well. The more you can't find intelligence the more stupid shows up and the more you can't find intelligence...and on and on it goes. The hologram has been a fabulous success if consuming everything that can possibly be consumed is the goal. If you haven't seen Disney Pixar's“Wall e” yet, you should, as it takes all of this to it's logical conclusion with one caveat...we don't run out of fuel and are able to send a spaceship the size of a city into space. The basic premise of the movie is that we made too much garbage and Earth became to toxic to live on. Of course all of this garbage was generated by a multi-national corporation that apparently produced everything called “Buy n Large.” BnL sends thousands of people on a 5 year space cruise while robots are left behind on Earth to clean up the mess. That's where the little robot Walle comes in. 700 years later a reconnaissance robot named Eve is sent to earth from the ship to find proof of life. Walle falls in love with her and presents her with a seedling that kicks the journey off. The first half of the movie has no dialogue and is artistically phenomenal. I bring it up because the inhabitants of the ship, the Axiom, are all quite literally plugged in to the ship, not unlike the majority who are plugged into the hologram in reality. Quite literally my only issue with the movie is the idea that a robot can love, but allowing that, I'd say it's one of the best Pixar films I've seen.

Shit...I just realized that I'm on the fourth paragraph of a blog that is supposed to be optimistic and I've only talked about American Hologram ra-tard-edness and a dystopian movie...I think I need to sit down and talk with a professional about my level of pessimism. I would if I'm not certain that their conclusion would be a chemical lobotomy since that was what I was offered just before I exited the Matrix. So what does my wife's terrible getaway and Walle have to do with me being optimistic for once. Well, I'll tell you, it...um...to be honest it's just what's coming out of me while attempting optimism. I'm not very good at it. Let me try again. My wife learned how intellectually isolated one can become in the Wasteland and Walle is an amazing film about how the Earth became unfit for life. Shit...I need help.

All joking aside, being unplugged can open up possibilities that you can't imagine from inside the hologram. One thing I've learned recently is that you can't be afraid to live differently. Unplugging pretty much demands a counter culture leaning on your part. Most people do not understand what my wife and I are doing with this fledgling homestead. We have to be careful what we tell people so as not to have the government bureaucrats unleashed on our home for trying to live life naturally. That's one thing my wife, Wendy, learned from her plugged in friends this weekend; if you did not know, nature is a dangerous thing that must be conquered and avoided at all times. The last thing you want to do is get some nature on you. So when we tell people things like we're pregnant with no health insurance, plan on having the child at home, and aren't going to get he/she vaccinated, all while not being employed, well it can cause heads to explode. How irresponsible can you be.

In our defense, I'm self employed, and I can say that because I am receiving no governmental benefits. Just because I don't work for “the man” and punch a clock five days a week shouldn't mean that I'm “unemployed.” Receiving a check in the mail from uncle Sam would make me unemployed in my opinion. And since I receive no check...well I'm self employed. As an ironic aside, I recently received a 10,000 dollar American Express card in the mail. I stated that I was self employed, made 60,000 a year and had 100,000 to 200,000 dollars in assets. It took about five seconds for them to approve me. I've got over 20,000 dollars worth of credit and I have no job. Back on the topic at hand...the pregnancy. This is where the rubber meets the road for me where walkin' my talk is concerned. I'd be lying to say that I'm not very concerned about what it will mean to have a child at home away from the sterile, controlled, and surgical environment of the hospital. We had our first child in the hospital, but I was employed with health insurance at the time and we paid nothing (well except the 600 a month that was taken out of my check for health insurance while working for a for profit hospital corporation as a medic making 28,000 a year).

The hologram wants us to believe that we are being borderline criminally irresponsible by doing what we are doing. Here's the reality. We are going to have at bare minimum an experienced dula and possibly a midwife. I am professionally trained, and according to the state of SC and the National Registry of EMT's, I'm qualified to lead a delivery in the field (and have done so once or twice). If shit goes from bad to worse we are 10 miles from a major hospital which is about fifteen minutes from 911 to hospital bed. What about no insurance? My answer to that is fuck it...I went to war for this country. Granted I quit and got kicked out for “wrongful use of marijuana,” but I still indirectly dropped bombs on innocent nomadic people while splitting atoms in the engine room of a carrier. So what's going to happen if we need to go to the hospital? Well they'll send us a bill for one million dollars, and I'll send them a one dollar check once a month for the rest of my life and there won't be a damn thing they can do about it. I'll even send them a photocopy of my dick and balls along with the check every month. I won't even charge them for the picture. God forbid I lose my 22,000 dollars worth of credit cards and get labeled with “bad credit.”

Here's the deal. I refuse to back down from a complete burning passion for life. That is the courage it takes to lead outside of the matrix. You have to be able to tell the system to go fuck itself and live life on your own terms. Should I be afraid to live? Should I be afraid to reproduce and have an actual family? What is more human than making babies with a mate that you love and are dedicated to? What is more human than procreation? The way I see it is that if intelligent people don't breed than we'll get the idiocracy that we've got now. Idiots that are afraid to get the “nature” on them and think that “American processed imitation cheese food” is fit for human consumption and a bargain deal at that. My son just turned two last June 19th. He made me a father on father's day of 2010. He will sit down and watch Walle, a movie with little to no dialogue, and be enthralled by it. He jumps up and down and asks me all kinds of questions that I can't answer due to the 2 year old to English language barrier that we got goin' on right now. He'll do that after spending hours outside with me, or his mama, playing in dirt and puddles and picking up sticks to use as swords (which he calls “ting,” in fact anything relatively straight he'll use as a ting so long as he can pick it up).
Ayden Zen McCarty

Let me sum up this rather long blog O mine. My optimism is my son, and the fetus that's not even resembling a human yet (she's about one month 3 weeks along). It's knowing that I'm doing my best to add some intelligence to this fucked up gene pool we've got on Earth. I'm not going to be afraid to live just because I refuse to plug in and play along with the hologram. If I ever had to plug back in to feed my family, I would, but I don't think that will ever be necessary. Living intentionally requires competency, skill, and wisdom. If you can keep your priorities informed by wisdom, and live intentionally out here in head out of assicusville, than there is no reason to think you can't find joy and equanimity. This is where I'm at and this is what I'm doing. I'm fiercely alive and refusing to back down from my birthright...our birthright. I'm going to have children, and I'm going to be responsible for each and every one of them. My wife and I are going to provide them with love and guidance. What else do children need? I hardly think we can do any worse than “American processed imitation cheese food.” We are going to ferment our genes into a fucking culture and there ain't a damn thing the hologram is going to do about it (pending they don't make me disappear for being contrary and free).