The First Diner Convocation

In 2007 I read James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency, and my life changed irrevocably due to the information I received from that book. Shortly after, I joined the Kunstlercast forum and posted many threads and had many in depth conversations about collapse, peak oil, and the ramifications of our infinite growth on a finite planet paradigm. I also began digesting collapse related books with precision and efficiency, and I would often order five or six books at a time by authors like Richard Heinberg, Dmitry Orlov, John Michael Greer, Michael Ruppert, and Jared Diamond just to name a few. Figuring out what the collapse of our modern petroleum dependent civilization meant to me was no easy task. I'm an Aspie, so it wasn't an emotional affair for me to deal with, but it was stressful nonetheless, and collapse became a "special interest," and it's a special interest that is still current for me. Mostly because I'm unable to not abide in the truth of things. It seems this to is part of my Aspie brain (I'll be writing about Asperger's Syndrome much more in the coming months because I have just recently stopped being in denial about the diagnosis...but this particular blog is not the time to do that).

I was a daily contributor over at the Kunstlercast, and it was the first forum I'd ever been a member of. I greatly enjoyed communicating with like minds on that forum via the written medium. I fell in love with it actually, and the regular contributors became my friends (which was great since IRL friends are difficult for me to acquire). This was a set of people whom would talk about the truths surrounding PO with me for hours on end, which is still next to impossible to do with people IRL. Threads that would stretch for days and days. I was a conspiracy theorist at this time in my life and had been for about five years. The "Kcats," as we called ourselves, helped open my eyes a bit about the nature of conspiracy theories and their many half truths. Around 2009 or so I got tired of the same old shit being discussed over and over again via countless incarnations on the Kunstlercast forum. It got boring and I decided to leave the forum without a word about it really. I just sorta left one day and never went back. I also deleted my facebook account around this same time and focused all of my writing on this blog.

The only blog I was reading at this time was John Michael Greer's Archdruid Report. He came up with the concept of the Green Wizard, and a forum was devoted to the project, which I frequented for a while. I had shifted my focus from understanding the nature of our predicament to wanting to act on the information. What became important to me was the answer to the question "what am I going to do about collapse?" The Green Wizard Project (GWP) was exactly what I needed. The GWP was mostly designed for solitary green wizards, and it was about using appropriate tech and about developing strategies that would help with minimizing the impact that the Long Descent would have on the GWP participants. The psychological component of the GWP can be summed up by JMG's own acronym "LESS." Less entertainment, stuff, and stimulation. JMG advises us all to step back into voluntary simplicity and learn how to live more in tune with the natural world and it's cycles and it's renewable pace. I became a Druid as well. For the next couple of years practicing green wizardry was sufficient for me as a response to collapse, but that to began to change as my understanding of our predicament began intensifying.

I realized that the only chance of survival in a shit hits the fan scenario, or even just a long descent scenario, would be real community. As far as I can tell, real community has gone extinct in our imagadget, narcissistic, techno delusional, American Hologram deployed and Matrix controlled consumer waste generating stank of a society. I had found fellow blogger William Hunter Duncan's blog, Off The Grid in Minneapolis, via a comment he left over at the Archdruid Report. William resonated very strongly with me (which interestingly enough, William now works with autistic people as his job). I began following his blog, and he began following mine. He may well have been the first "follower" of mine on this blog. We became good virtual friends and even exchanged books we were writing for back and forth criticism and suggestions. He told me about a new forum that he was an administrator for called the Doomstead Diner. I went and had a look, but I still had a sour taste in my mouth after boring with the Kunstlercast forum. I looked around and it appeared to be just about the exact same thing as the Kcast forum with different avatars. After a short visit I decided that I wasn't interested in joining as a member (and I just found out, via going to the kunstlercast forum to copy the web address for the hyperlink for this blog that I've been banned from the Kunstlercast Forum for some unknown reason).  

Several months later I left a comment on Morris Berman's blog and RE, the man responsible for the existence of the Doomstead Diner, saw it and it peaked his interest enough to come over here to see what I was about. William had commented on that blog and RE saw this and apparently formed the opinion that I may be a good match as a cross poster on the Diner. It felt good to have somebody seek me out for my writing, and I was more than happy to have my essays published on the Diner. I figured since I was going to be publishing my blog on the Diner that I might as well have a more focused look around to see what was shakin' in the Diner world. I've been an active participant and a Diner ever since. Not long after I arrived at the Diner fellow Diner Roamer arrived and posted a thread titled "Community OwnedDoomstead." That thread lit a spark that found good tinder and began smoking. Roamer knew about 150 acres in NC that an elderly couple owned and were interested in allowing more able bodied individuals to cultivate the land in permaculture fashion. My wife Gypsy Mama and son Ayden Zen and I all drove to NC to meet Roamer in person along with his on again off again lady friend. We met in a coffee shop across the street from the university my wife graduated from, and we all instantly liked each other. It was the first time I had ever met a virtual friend in real life...making Roamer an "in real life" friend as well. This was a very exciting and important step for the Diner. As it turns out, Roamer, GM and I's meeting was foreshadowing the now not too distant future. The 150 acres didn't work out on account of dementia and Cat Food Carol, but that's a long story (and you likely already know it if you're reading this blog). We came a pubic hair away from the first Sunstead (at the time it had been dubbed the Foxstead) within weeks of the first attempt that the Diner's made for a community owned doomstead.

We've since been working towards figuring out how to bioneer our way into a petroleum scarce world. We've been trying to figure out how we move forward from this point. How do we structure a new way to inhabit the land and use it's resources to meet our basic human needs in a sustainable and healing way? We don't want a commune, but we want something intentional that empowers the Sunsteaders, and gives us autonomy and meaningful community at the same time. Eventually the new effort was dubbed the SUN project (sustaining universal needs). Our driving ethic is to "save as many as you can." This translating into a tribal unit we are currently calling the "Sunstead." We want the Sunstead to be a self replicating template that will pop up like mushrooms in spite of the Near Term Human Extinction (NTHE) meme. NTHE being the idea that all life on Earth will be going extinct sometime in the next two decades (as soon as five years from now) due to run away positive feedback loops running amok in the climate control mechanisms of our planet. They may be right, but I refuse to live in a world with no hope, and I recognize that there is no way anybody can know what the planet will do. While our civilization is definitely collapsing, and while we are doing our level best to shit all over the planet that sustains us with our incessant chemical creation and consumptive waste generation, our planet is a living organism which we cannot study under a microscope.  We can't possibly know how the Earth will react.

The Sun Foundation is now a 501c3 non-profit organization, and we are currently waiting for the magic government letter to arrive so that we can begin accepting charitable donations from people like you, whom care about the reality outside of the Matrix, and our engagement with the wasteland we've inherited. In a little under two weeks a select few Diner members are going to converge on the Toothstead in Texas for the purposes of the first Diner Convocation, and for training in Monolithic Dome construction. 

The coming Convocation is proof that we're not just a bunch of keyboards circle jerking into the endless night about how fucked it all is. We want to do something in the real world about the predicament our civilization's in. The writing is on the wall, and food prices are fit to bust any time now due to drought and ever increasing super storms. I could go on about all of the problems our crumbling civilization is dealing with, but I've done that countless times here already. If you don't know what the problems are at this point than it's because you are willfully deluding yourself, or just don't have the desire to extricate yourself from the Matrix's mesmerizing hologram. We're going to meet in Texas, in person, as a symbolic act, to look each other in the eyes and validate the reality of our typed expressions, desires, goals, and to engage with reality of the real, rather than reality of the virtual persuasion. We're going to drink beer and break bread at a real Doomstead Diner table. We're going to study Monolithic construction and plant some real seeds of change. We're going to build a rocket mass heater, have a hole diggin' contest, possibly film a spoof on the NTHE movie trailer 22 After, and get to know a handful of Diner's in person. I'll be bringing my family and my boomerangs.

Most importantly we're going to ferment in a real life think tank. That's what the Convocation is ultimately about. For me, it's a vetting, and it's a chance to look my fellow Diners in the eyes (I know, ironic considering my Aspie status, but I've always been atypical even amongst the atypical...consider that the majority of the medics thought I was weird when I worked EMS to gauge how weird I am...as it turns out, not weird just not neurotypical) and see what I see. Is the SUN Foundation worth my time? Is it something that can be real? Can we actually bioneer a Sunstead, or a Waterstead, or a Foxstead, or a Doomstead? Can we actually be the force that begins fixing this clusterfuck of a predicamentation civilization? Does RE really smoke six packs of cigarettes a day? Is William really bald and in love with the Goddess? Can Eddie fix my fucked up mouth full of metal (just kiddin' Eddie...at least this time). Will Haniel and I see Aspie to Aspie and relate to one another?

I'm looking forward to finding out the answer to all of those questions. For me, the Convocation is my chance to show everybody that I really am a 6' 4" bad ass Aikido ninja permaculture green wizard druid Aspie Diner. It's my chance to look them all in the eyes, Haniel included, in an attempt to pull as much of their true intentions out so that I can shine my hyperfocused understanding of the human psyche onto them. Here's hoping we'll all be comfortable, and that William won't get his feelings hurt when I dig a bigger hole in the Texas dirt. My wife Gypsy Mama, and my children Ayden Zen and Harper Tribann will be there as well (as far as I know they're the only children Diners...hell, Harper Tribann was born a Diner). Several Diners will converge in two weeks. To hear RE tell about it, you'll all get a chance to participate in real time on the net. I hear he's bought all of the recording devices he could find. If nothing else, for the first time, Diners will break bread at a real Diner table...in Texas...and I'll get too drunk and throw my boomerangs.

Zombie Snake'n a Box

One of the main questions that came up in the discussion about Zombies, over at the Doomstead Diner, is whether killing them is advisable or not. The main concern is that the title "Zombie" is a demonizing title that places blame for the American Hologram in the wrong place. Rather than blaming the rich, sociopathic, Corporatocracy Masters that have the good fortune of being on top of the pyramid, we are blaming the "Zombies" who are too worthless to live. Apparently the Libertarians have co-opted the word to describe retired government workers with pensions. Cause, you know, the retired government workers with pensions are the main reason why we can't get the budget balanced? Never mind the hundreds of billions a year just keeping the military machine kickin' ass and takin' brown people's gas, or the billions in government subsidized CEO bonuses, or the trillions of printed dollars given to the same sociopathic assholes running the too big to fail banks, it's the government pensioners that are the Zombies suckin' the balance out of the budget. Fuck politics...and that concludes my response to the libertarians and their co-opting of the word "Zombie." I've gone to great lengths to outline, describe, and define what I consider Zombies to be, and I will not be doing so again. I want to talk about the possibility of killing zombies in a post-collapse scenario to protect and defend your post-petroleum tribe's resources.

Naturally the discussion about killing zombies ended up in the realm of religion. "Man does not live by bread alone," inevitably came up. True, man doesn't live by bread alone, but he can't live without it either. He will die without the bread, and the zombies want his bread, so what's man to do? Especially a man with children and a wife to keep alive. Recently I've had cause to reflect on the action of killing due to participating in some killin' myself. Basically, best I can tell, life requires death. This is true all the way to the level of virus (which aren't technically considered living organisms). In order for the virus to replicate cells must die. Seems the only life forms that don't directly require death are plants and autotrophs. The rest of us need shit to die in order for us to live. To illustrate my point, I'm going to use an anecdote from my recent life.

I have 3 Rhode Island Red hens, 11 Deleware Hens, and a Rhode Island Red rooster named Archimedes all living in a chicken shack that I've created via Scavenge Engineering named "Eggmahal." It's been dubbed Eggmahal cause that's where my hens poop out the nutritious back yard chicken eggs that I feed to my family and sell. I sell the eggs for 3 dollars a dozen in an attempt to cover my costs for keeping said chickens. This allows me to have a steady supply of better quality chicken eggs then I can buy, as well as fertilizer and stored meat to feed my family (no better way to store meat than on the hoof...or in this case, on chicken feet). Keeping chickens requires you be willing to kill to keep them. If you aren't willing to kill the occasional chicken, or chicken egg, predator, than you might as well not bother keeping them. I'm the only thing that's going to kill any of my chickens or take any of their eggs.

So a couple of days ago I went into my coop to do the daily routine of feeding and watering the chickens as well as collecting the eggs. I walked over to the nesting boxes to collect the eggs and there was Mr. King snake with an egg half way in his mouth. He had found him a wonderful all you can eat king snake buffet equipped with a comfy new home to live in. He couldn't ask for a better set up. All he had to do was lay in the nice cozy nest box with a bed of hay, and whenever he got hungry he'd just reach on over to one of the other boxes and snatch an egg. Hell, he didn't even have to move more than a foot. He had quite literally found himself a snake paradise. Not on my watch Jack. My identifying him set off a chain reaction of immediate snake dispatching. I went straight into the Gypsy House, got my Earth Scalpel (a flat tipped short shovel) and a trashcan. I went back into the coop and jabbed the shovel into the snakes neck trapping him in the nest box. I then began, with my upper body, pushing as hard as I could. My shovel has not been sharpened so I simply broke his neck. This made him a bit more docile, and I was able to get him into the trashcan where I then took him out of the coop, dumped him out on the grass, and finished the job with my machete (which is one I found backpacking a few years back and never got around to sharpening...sooo it was a little messy).

Now, I don't want to kill anything. I really don't. I derive no pleasure from killing, but I also eat meat. Do you eat meat? Cause if you do then you kill every time you eat it. It's not violent for you, you just go to the store and get your sterilized meat that comes from the grocery store refrigerator. Or you go to a restaurant where all you have to do is shovel said dead meat into your meat hole. Eating meat, in the reality outside of the Matrix, requires you to violently kill, gut, skin, quarter, and butcher whatever meat you want to cook. We have lost touch with this reality.

Unfortunately the very next day, I went into Eggmahal to take care of the chickens, and there was King Snake number two...he was an upgraded version of Mr King Snake #1. I noticed that the nest box just to the right of the one the other snake was in, had a new snake in it. He was twice as large as the first as well. I went and got the Earth Scalpel and attempted the same method I used the day before. However his neck was much larger in diameter and so all it did was piss him off. He tried to make his escape by going to the coop floor to rather hurriedly slither off. I jabbed with my shovel and separated his head from his body like Disney's Hercules did to the Hydra of Lerna. It took him about 30 minutes to figure this out for himself. I apologized to him while he was laying there watching his headless body slither around oblivious to it's new headless status. I thought about having the common courtesy to at least remove his head from the situation...so he at least didn't have to watch...but failed to do so.

Now I didn't want to kill either of those snakes. In fact, after slaying the first snake, I went into the Gypsy House and announced to all of the snakes in ear shot that they could eat all of the rodents they wanted to, but that if they touched my chickens, chicken eggs, children, or family, that they would end up like captain headless over there watching his headless body aimlessly coil around. It's nothing personal I said, just...you can't have my damn eggs. I'm not starving. I don't have to have those chickens or those eggs to feed my family right now. I may, in the near future, require them to feed my family, but right now just in time truckin' is truckin' along just fine (well it's not fine, actually it's anything but fine...but it doesn't know that...and neither do the zombies). So I didn't have to kill either of those snakes (nor the two I killed last year) for my survival. I killed those snakes because their presence makes a mockery of my chicken keeping. The bottom line is that I'm not keeping chickens to feed the local fauna. I'm keeping chickens to feed my family nutritious food, and to provide them with some food security. You see, when JIT truckin' stops truckin' just in time...I'll have a source of food to keep my family fed.

Only there is a problem with keeping those chickens to keep my family fed in that post-collpase world I see potentially around any corner anytime now. That problem is that I'm not the only one who wants to eat those eggs and chicken asses. In a post collapse world there will be zombies who will want to eat my chicken asses. I'm not doing the work of keeping those chickens to feed zombies. Yet if I were not willing to use force to keep zombies from eating my chicken asses, then they WILL eat my chicken asses, and then what was the point in having said chicken asses to begin with? I don't want to kill anybody, or anything, but I want to ensure my family is fed more than I don't want to kill. My killing the snakes isn't exactly a product of that, since I admit I don't need those chickens right now, but it's still something I must do to make my chicken keeping efforts not pointless.

Now, killing snakes in times of relative peace just on account of my chicken egg count is something entirely different from killing a zombie (or zombies rather) in a post collapse world. I'm not comparing the value of the life of that snake to that of a hypothetical zombie. What I'm saying is that I didn't want to kill either of those snakes. When I identified that there was a "snake in the box"... it ruined my day instantly because I knew that my day now required me to kill something violently (I mean...how else does one kill anything really?) and with extreme prejudice. The matter is further complicated by the type of snake. King snakes are a great snake to have around because they eat other snakes (hence the "king" in the title). They are thought to be immune to the venom of poisonous snakes. Also, which annoys me in this case, they are of no threat to humans. This is a good snake to have around if you're going to have snakes around. I feel bad for killing both of them. But they can't have my eggs. There is no way I know of to get them to understand that they can live if they just leave my eggs alone. So they must die. I'm not going to want to kill any zombies either, but I am going to want to feed my family

Man doesn't live on bread alone. I believe that. I really do. There is more to life than this life. There is consciousness beyond my brains. I believe that as well. However I'm a father, and that's in this life. I can't make sure my children are fed if I'm dead, and I won't watch my children starve in this life either. I'll do whatever I need to do to make sure they are well fed. There are grave dangers in labeling the majority of people zombies. They become infected and less then human. It becomes alright ethically to kill something that is already dead. This is damaging to the human psyche. It's really the same process that goes on in the mind of a soldier who's convinced himself that these people are somehow less then people. Or as the Nazi's labeled the Jews, "Lebensunwertes Leben" or "life not worthy of life." When is it ever justifiable to kill people? I would answer that by saying it is justifiable to kill a person whom is trying to kill you, or yours for that matter. So it's justifiable to kill in order to stay alive. We do that every time we eat meat. Granted we aren't killing humans.

In just about every case of a society collapsing there has been cannibalism documented. We are at a point in the history of our species where we are talking about near term human extinction due to run away anthropomorphic global temperature rise. It seems WW111 is lookin' to start up over in Syria, and we have nuclear power plants that are spoogin' radioactivity into the acidifying ocean environment faster than you can say "death by cancer." Our world is in a terrible way just now. Everything we take for granted as normal in relation to our quality of life is built on a network of non-renewable resources that are becoming scarcer by the second. Every day there are less species on our planet than there is today, and that as well can be placed at the feet of humanity. The fact that zombies are real is a sad and depressing fact. But it is a fact. Like those snakes attempting to take up residence at Eggmahal, and therefore forcing me to kill them. I can imagine zombies doing the same in the near future as a reality I will live to see. I can guarantee my sons will see it...if I don't. Those zombies will force me to kill them if my son's starvin' belly is on the line. It will be their decision. I will do everything I can to not kill them. I will give warnings and wait till the last minute. But in the end, when it comes to my children being fed or me killing a zombie...I'm sorry to say the zombie will have to go. Just like those snakes.

The best we can do is attempt to curtail that eventuality by fostering community. Get the zombies involved and try to wake them up. But that's a waste of time. They can't be made to have the Epiphany Now. I've tried. The only zombies that wake up are those that decide they want to wake up. The hard cold bitch of a fact is that our world is FUBAR and getting worse by the day. Life requires death and nature doesn't select organisms whom readily die. The fact of the matter is that we are headed into times that could easily feature such things as cannabalism...just like the last complex societies that collapsed and began eating one another. I'd rather be a zombie slayin' professional than a person eater. Guess what zombies are good at? They're good at turning you into a cannibal cause they ate all of your chicken asses and taters. So maybe I'm an ass hole for talking about such things. Maybe I'm delusional and our society is not doomed to the reality of zombies. What I know is that I'm a survivor. Before I'm eating other people I'm gonna be the meanest, toughest, most calloused, bad ass professional zombie dispatching agent you've ever met. Cause fuck eatin' another human. That's not my idea of a world I wanna be in...or that I want for my sons. Here's to the hope that renewable energy will curtail World War Z. But so far...and this is the most important fact, it seems just now that Zombie Whispering is working just fine. Zombies aren't really that dangerous until the shit hits the fan. 

Here's a video I made after killing the second snake.  Warning...the video features a snake that has been decapitated...although you can't see any blood and it looks like it hasn't been aside from the shovel that's separating the head from the body.