Conspiracy Theory, Peak Oil, and Fukitol

Before the 9/11 truth movement existed I knew what we were being told was bull shit. I knew that because I was on the vessel that dropped the first bombs on Afghanistan as a result of 9/11. I knew in my bones that the American population, and the world, was being lied to, but I didn't know the specifics. I wanted out of the navy before 9/11 happened. I had realized that enlisting in the military was a grave mistake for me because I valued self exploration, autonomy, and intellect; none of which the navy provided, gave a shit about, or allowed to occur. I choked down the contracts I had signed until 9/11happened. It was one thing to be slaving away as a nuclear automaton relatively benignly as far as the world was concerned, but it was quite another to be assisting in the killing of invisible innocents. I wanted to know the truth badly.

After about a year of alcohol and drug use, I started to actively pursue the truth (in those rare moments of temporary sobriety). This search led me to Alex Jones and his infowars. It didn't take long before I became a card totin' prisonplanet member. I listened to his broadcasts and watched all of his documentary films. For a couple of years I was an Alex Jones disciple. He verified my anger and my actions concerning the navy. I knew that I was right to do what I had done, but I didn't have the proof until Alex Jones. When patrons came to my bar they got an ear full. I ran a lot of people off, but I opened a lot of eyes as well.

I was all about exposing the Illuminati for their NWO conspiracy to imprison the planet as an intellectual thing until I viewed "The Passion of the Christ." Shortly after viewing that film I had a dream where I met evil incarnate in the form of an old female demon that looked a lot like Zelda from "Pet Cemetary" only scarier. It was a vivid dream that felt more like reality than my waking life. It scarred the shit out of me and caused me to run back to the eager arms of Christianity, the religion of my child hood. Yes, for about six months I could be seen sitting behind my bar during the slow times reading a pocket sized copy of the New Testament. Then I started reading the likes of Tex Marrs, whom if you don't know, is a Christian evangelical conspiracy theory nut job. He takes the Illuminati seriously on a spiritual level and applies it all to Revelations and the end times. Now, I was a Christian conspiracy theorists, which is the original type of conspiracy theorists. In fact, the Illuminati really is a Christian conspiracy theory and doesn't make much sense out of that context. This is Satan operating amongst man. I even got into reading the "Left Behind" series at this point in my life (I don't mind if you laugh at my expense...I would). Then one day, and I don't remember the day or the moment, because I don't think there was one, I just stopped with the Christian nonsense. Basically the fear from meeting Zelda wore off and I came to my senses. All that meant was that I dropped the spiritual implications from what the Illuminati was. Now it was framed in a more secular content, but otherwise I was still ate up with it.

I met my wife in October of 2002, 10 months after flipping the penny that brought me back to the South. I was drunk, as usual, and I walked into one of the several bars I frequented looking for companionship. I was by myself this particular night. I noticed an ex-girlfriend of a friend of mine playing pool with a smokin' hot vixen (pictured above). I always liked Summer (the ex of the friend), and knowing her gave me the courage to start talkin' shit to that vixen. I was so broke at the time that Joey and I's fifth apartment didn't even have the power turned on yet (we had been living there for about two weeks). Our first date was financed on a roll of quarters belonging to Wendy. We went to a hole in the wall pool hall where they have .25 cent games and you can't see cause all of the smoke and bad country music, and then we went to the Waffle House where we drank coffee and she ate hash browns. I told her that I had lost count at 23 women, had done just about every drug under the sun, and usually scared women away because I was too "deep." I still have that paper coin roll in my wallet.  

Six months later Wendy and I were living together. Three months after that Wendy was gone and I was left with a Goodwill couch, an entertainment stand with nothing on it, and a computer. She had vanished due to a torrid affair that I had gotten myself wrapped up in presumably for being too "deep". I had fallen in love with a bar patron of mine who reciprocated those feelings. It is a long story, and one that I'll spare you the details of. However, for whatever reason, Wendy did not want to give up on me, and so a few months into the new relationship I was cheating on her with Wendy. It was a mess. When it was all over, Wendy and I were back together, and she was living 70 miles away. I had a drivers license and a broke down car that didn't work at this point. Wendy did a lot of driving on account of my sorry ass, and I still don't know why.

When we were engaged was when I got hauled off to the slammer for being a stupid drunk. I continued going to my job managing a shit hole bar via my bike. Luckily for me, the cop who had pulled me over had resigned from Spartanburg PD and moved to Charleston. Case closed. I got back my license and didn't get charged with a DUI (which would have sealed my fate as a loser cause I never would have worked in EMS otherwise). However I did lose 2500 dollars to a lawyer who required 5000 to represent me. He let me off the hook with just the 2500 dollar retainer on account of his punk ass didn't have to do a damn thing for the money.

At this point, engaged, and not a damn thing going for me short of tending bars, I decided I better do something a little more in line with a domesticated lifestyle. This was when I finally decided to become an EMT. Just before we got married I got certified as an EMT-basic and began working for a local convalescent transport company making 11 dollars an hour. I worked for them "Granny Snatchin" for a little over a year before I got hired with Piedmont EMS in Rock Hill South Carolina. Getting the job was the fruition of my goal to be on a real meat wagon working EMS. Shortly after taking that job we bought our first house, which they wouldn't allow us to buy with me on the mortgage. Wendy financed it herself with the income from her successful business as a wedding photographer. We got a really good deal. 3.65 acres surrounded by woods in the middle of the city of Rock Hill. The house was 1450 square feet with a detached 800 sqft garage. We paid 110,000 dollars with an APR of 7% fixed, which wasn't that bad for the time. A year later the housing market collapsed.

2007 was also the year that I ran into JHK's "The Long Emergency," and got schooled on peak oil. Up to this point I had never heard of the idea and had never even thought about infinite growth on a finite planet. Up to that point I was unaware that our problems were much more ominous than the Illuminati's NWO. Reading TLE was the first step on the stair case of reality and not conspiracy theory for me. I didn't let go of the Illuminati easily at first, but Alex Jones and I had to break up. He's a peak oil denier, and I couldn't deny the truth of peak oil and therefore couldn't reconcile why he would deny it. I moved on to Richard Heinberg, Michael Ruppert, Dimitri Orlov, and John Michael Greer.

Up to this point in my life I had never owned any land or seen the need to grow any food. I started gardening organically right out of the gates. Then I started prepping and dealing with the roller coaster ride that learning about peak oil becomes for anybody who doesn't decide to bury their head in the sand. I debated for a long time about whether to procreate or not. Wendy pretty much just took my word for it on the PO front. She was too busy running her business to notice or really care about PO and mostly just placated my concerns about the future. She wanted a child, and so did I, it was just the future I was concerned about. How could I willingly bring a child into a world that was on Hubbert's bumpy plateau? A couple of years of PO study and obsession goes by and we decide to have a child. In 2010 my son Ayden Zen was born.

My wife's business began to tank due to negative returns on technology. Digital camera technology is so good now that any dumb ass soccer mom can take 5000 pictures at a wedding and then photoshop 500 or so of them into descent pictures. Talent is rapidly dissolving into technology in photography. Camera equipment is very expensive, and this is part of the reason why photography got so expensive. Now rich soccer moms get their 3000 dollar camera along with thousands of dollars in related equipment and editing soft ware and they're in business. They can undercut the professionals because they are just playing for egoistic reasons and not concerned with paying bills cause their husbands handle all of that. In our case, my 28,000 dollar a year (gross income, I brought home 2000 a month) just paid for the vehicles and our house and I was out of money before I was even paid. Our son arrived and Wendy's business was on the downward spiral.

I was extremely stressed out by all of these changes. Wendy felt guilty about her money going away which put her in a bad mood, which further strained our relationship.  I was stressed out trying to live a 40,000 dollar lifestyle on 28,000 dollars with no feasible way to better my situation. My son added an entire new layer of stress to all of this. Healthcare was slowly changing from something I loved to something I hated due to all of the governmental changes. We went from patients to customers, and I began hating all of the new bureaucracies that became inherent in the new healthcare landscape. What I had was a house that was falling apart. A house that was a ticking time bomb fit to explode and leave us with a leaking roof, no heat, cockroaches, and thousands of other things that needed to be maintained with no money to maintain any of it. All my career working on the meat wagon was doing was keeping us from drowning, for the time being. I broke and ended up on fukitol for a short period of time. If you've been following Epiphany now for the last year, than you'll likely know what's transpired since then. It not, have a look around.

This post pretty much concludes my autobiographical stint, at least in any kind of chronological order. I'll be wrapping it up with one more post along with Jason Heppenstall and WHD (who's apparently going to begin and end his auto offering in one post soon). I'll save you any suspense cause we've got enough of that waiting on Jason. I'm just going to be writing a conclusion blog. I won't be concluding Epiphany Now, but I'll more than likely be slowing down. January 9th I'm going to be taking 13 hours of college prerequisites for the RN program at our local community college, plus I'm gonna be going back to work granny snatchin' part time. It's come to that. I've got to pay the monkey. My wife is five months along into our second pregnancy. We have no income for 2013 unless I go back to work.  We just found out yesterday that we're having another boy and the ultrasound revealed no abnormalities. After all of this, I'm going to be plugging back into the Matrix. I'll be talking about that and my plans for the future in my next post.

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.