Kitsune Bamboo Nursery

This is the first Epiphany Now post to emmerge from my space phone blogger app bluetooth keyboard device.  I hope all goes well, and the many batteries it requies stay charged long enough to complete this communication (although currently I could just plug in and recharge but that doesn't sound as dramatic).  I plan to write much more here at Epiphany Now, but for now I'm just unveiling some intention into the digital cloud.

Shortly after dropping out of the Matrix I moved to my current residence.  My intention for my new unplugged lifestyle was to learn Permaculture and to create a garden of eatin' into the landscape.  I was following my bliss (and still am) and activeily writing the story of my destiny.  My words shapped the land and fostered the birth of an ecologically healthy landscape filled with intentional spiritual energy and meaning.  Essentially I've created a Druid food forrest painted in the Ogam ( the Ogam, or Ogham, is a celtic tree alphabet I happen to study).  

I bet I sound crazy as a shit house rat to a lot of people reading these words.  I don't care really what I sound like.  I'm authentically on fire and refuse to apologize for it.  

Anyways, when I moved here I dubbed my abode, outside of the actual house, "The Fox Den."  I mostly live outside.  Being that I'm domesticated I am forced to spend time indoors, but I am constantly attempting to minimize that time.  I blame it on Aspergers, at least to use the modern psychiatric explanation for my irregularities (than's an entire other bag of worms).  I'm a shaman at heart, and I have a theory that Aspergers may be displaced shamans, displaced by suburban sprawl and cookie cutter jobs complete with required behavior patterns.  It may be that I'm not an aspie, but a shaman, and it just so happens that the diagnosis for Aspergers overlaps qualities of a shaman.  Whatever the case, I have a very strong need to minimize my interaction with people.  I'm perfectly fine one on one, however, which would make sense following my shaman theory.  

I want to make it clear that I have no desire to fill some egoic need to be special.  I'm no more, or less special, than you or anybody else.  However, I am fundamentally different, and science explains that via a neurological difference...so be it.  

Kitsune is the Japanesse word for a fox, but it has strong mystical and magical associations in Japanese folklore culture as well (if you want an interesting read on the subject than I'd reccommend the wiki article for Kitsune).  When I moved here, and essentially devoted my life to Permaculture and Druidry, I had just found the fox to be a spirit animal that was following me around.  I resonated with fox, and so embraced that friendship and guidance that was being offered.  

Then the Bamboo Monster revealed itself to me.  I fell in love with that monster and was unable to resist the overwhelming need to suddenly begin digging up bamboo to plant it at the Fox Den.  Bamboo even began showing up at the Fox Den in pots due to a serrendipitous friendship that started one magical day in the woods at a near by park.  I have since began an internship with Keiji Oshima of Haiku Bamboo Nursery.  He has been teaching me everything he thinks I'm ready to learn about bamboo.  I am interested in the culture of bamboo and not just the growing of it.  Bamboo is very familiar to the shaman in me, and I know that is because I have known bamboo intimately before, just as I have known Kitsune.  

Therefore, to honor the relationship that I have with fox, bamboo, and Japanesse culture, I have decided to dub this bamboo nursery (with very heavy Permaculture overtones) Kitsune Bamboo Nursery.  To kick off the declaration I figured that I would share pictures of all the characters of bamboo that reside here.  I also want to publicly decree that the Bamboo Monster regurlarly hangs out here at Kitsune, but don't worry because he's a nice, and useful monster.  

Here at Kitsune Bamboo Nursery we have 11 varieites of bamboo (not counting two which we're trying to propagate rhizomally which are Moso, and Makinoi).  Two of those varieties are in pots only, they are Green Onion, and Koi.  Currently we have only Buddha Belly and Medake for sale, however next fall we will have several other varieties for sale.  Within four years all of our varieities will be for sale, hopefully.  I'd also like to note that I plan to have only four varieties growing at this site.  We will be moving bamboos to our Rock HIll property as they grow and we run out of room.  Kitsune Bamboo is already expanding habitate for the Bamboo Monster to inhabit.  

The picture below is a fall Madake shoot (phyllostachys bambusoides), planted August 2015, given to KBN (Kitsune Bamboo Nursery) by HBN (Haiku Bamboo Nursery) and showing how bamboo plays with water.  The presence of morning dew on bamboo auricles is considered a sign of good health.  This, however, is rain water.

The same Madake plant showing rhizomal character.  Phyllostachys like to snake in and out of the ground.  I'm performing an experient with this rhizome.  If you look closely at the left hand sid eof the picture you can barely see a rhizome leaf about to hit that rock.  I placed that rock there, and one under it in the ground, to study what the rhizome will due upon encontering it.  It appears that it is already aware of the rock and is simply going to go up and over it...but I'll see as time moves forward.  

Same Madake plant with a gift given to Ayden Zen by Stefani Oshima at the final intern day of the 2015 season.  Madake is one of the two most useful bamboos (according to Japanesse Culture, the other is Medake featured later).  Madake is a timber bamboo capable of 72 foot tall canes that are 6 inches in diameter.  Madake is very hard and it grows straight.  It's great for building structures or for splitting and weaving.  Madake is my favorite bamboo because it's the most useful to humans.  It's also used to make flutes (which Keiji Oshima makes and sales).

Koi (phyllostachy aurea 'Koi'

Some potted Buddha belly (phyllostachys Aurea).  This was the first bamboo plant I ever dug up.  Buddha Belly is valued due to its ornamental appeal for crafts because of it's compressed internodes.

Some more Buddha Belly, in the ground, with Hairy Vetch planted as a nitrogen fixing cover crop.  I'm trying to keep the bermuda at bay.

Medake (Pleioblastus simonii) purchased at HBN and planted here spring of 2015.  Medake and Madake are considered the most useful bamboos in Japan, and with good reason.

This is Phyllostachys Vivax which I propagated rhizomally.  The rhizomes were given to me by Gary McPhee (the serendipitous friend I met at the park)

This is fall growth.  Here you can see how beautiful this variety of Vivax is.  It's a timber bamboo that is celebrated for it's beauty.  It's wood is not very hard and often breaks due to the weight of ice in the winter.

Phyllostachys Aureosulcata f. Spectabalis.  This bamboo has the most character and a lot of beauty in my opinion.  It has variagation on the leafs like Koi, it geniculates (the can zig zags as it finishes the growth of the last couple of internodes), it changes colors in the sun, and it has the green sulcus with bright yellow canes.  It truly is a spectacular site to behold, but it is not a very useful bamboo...just beautiful.  

Showing the green sulcus of Spectabilis

Another timber bamboo I propagated early spring of 2015.  This is Phyllostachys Nigra Boryana, also known as snake skin bamboo.  Right now it's a sleeping giant capable of 60 foot canes that are 4 inches in diameter.

Bamboo island with two species of bamboo.

This is Phyllostachy Nigra Henon.  This is another bamboo that is considered to be one of the most beautiful, especially in Japan.  This is the original "Nigra," although it does not have black culms.  It's a very useful bamboo.

Close up of a Henon culm showing how it plays with slight color variations.

Psuedosasa Japonica, or Arrow bamboo, so called because the Japanesse used to make arrows with it due to it's straight growth and perfect diameter for crafting arrows.  It also makes a very effective screen for making neighbors dissappear.

This is yet another planting of Buddha Belly with some new growth.  This growth is from the last month.

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.

Have A Meaningless Holiday Cheap Plastic Shit On Me.

 

There was a time, not so long ago, where it seemed the only limiting factor for what you could accomplish was your own laziness. Maybe this idea has always been an illusion, but I don't think so. A four year college degree doesn't get you employment now. The only thing you can expect from a four year degree now is a monthly bill that has to be paid. My wife got a four year degree in communications and all it has done has been to generate a $117.63 bill every month which is comparatively low. That's mostly because she worked and paid $800 a month towards college while she was attending. We have another 10 years to go before her student loan is paid in full. What are we to do now to better our financial situation? What kind of meaningful work is there in our meaningless society? If you were to argue that our civilization has meaning, what kind of meaning would you argue for?

Our lifestyle is dependent on a wealth pump with the intake end rooted by coercive trickery in the third world. It's come down to a cheap plastic lifestyle assembled in China and imported to America. All of this cheap plastic shit is designed to make it's way to a landfill where it will outlive the human race as cheap plastic shit. My house is awash in this holiday plastic shit that was generated through a perverse celebration which requires everybody to perpetuate this cheap plastic shit paradigm. The fact that it's meant to be a celebration of the birth of our salvation is just too ironic for further comment. What does the Winter Solstice have anything to do with cheap plastic shit made in China and Jeebus? Apparently there is a link, or I wouldn't be literally tripping over it now. To make matters worse half of these gifts just end up going straight back to Wally World where they are exchanged for store credit because trailer park America can't even abide the cheapness. They'd rather have store credit to buy cheap American beer and cheese puffs so that they can anesthetize their minds from the onslaught of how cheap their lives have become.

I suppose it's a good thing that all of this worthless crap is so cheap because minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. That's $290.00 a week gross at 40 hours a week. That's in the neighborhood of $230 a week take home which is $920 a month. Are they fucking serious with that shit? What the hell are you supposed to do with $920 a month? About the only thing you can do is buy some cheap American beer and cheese puffs at Wally World to go with your kid's cheap plastic made in China gifts. It's no wonder America stares at the teevee at night, after working for jack shit at a job that doesn't matter. All so that we can live in a place that's not worth caring about and is destined to rot as soon as climate control goes away. That cheap plastic shit is going to outlive our residences.

The only thing the world cares about is money. Have you ever really let that sink in? I remember making the decision, right about the time I dropped out of college with a 4.0 gpa, that I wasn't going to live my life being concerned about money. I didn't want to make decisions that had to do with the acquisition of money because it felt so cheap and trivial a thing to be concerned with. I thought there were ideas and causes that needed my attention more than money. I was wrong. Those ideas and causes require money. It's strange how if you have enough money, than you don't have to worry about making money because the bankers just give you money. I wish I could live off of the interest from all of the money that I have. But when your bank account looks like it was made in China, all the bankers do is nickel and dime you $5 dollars a month for the privilege of keeping your money there. I had a negative balance in my savings account a couple of months ago from those charges growing more than my "savings." This is just the way it is. It's sad.

How is it that I've made it to 33 years old and I am just now figuring all of this out? I got married. Somehow that meant buying a house and being concerned with something called a "career." I wasn't very good at the career bit. I had one, it lasted about six years until I had to chose between being medicated with a career or not medicated with no career. I chose the later. Now I'm going back to college for the eighth time in my life. Hopefully with my new found knowledge about the way the world works, I'll be able to actually acquire a degree and a career after said acquisition. It's not a career that I want. I never once said "self, I think we should be a nurse." It's a practical decision that revolves around what the world requires from me. I'm doing it for the money. I've never done that before in my life. I've never done something so blatantly about money. When I'm studying medical terminology, anatomy and physiology, probability and statistics, and intro to computers this semester it's all going to be motivated by the end goal of a job that will pay me well for my time. It has nothing to do with my ideals, or about the change I want to see in the world, or about helping people...just money. Just the root of all evil. That's what I have to concern myself with at 33 years old. Why? Best I can tell it's because I was so brazen as to want to reproduce and have a family. Apparently that means I have to be concerned first and foremost with money. Because without it...well that doesn't make me a very responsible family man now does it.

Now here I am, studying to be a nurse. In this case I like the euphemism of RN. RN sounds less gender specific (or how about a murse), which is a quality I like since I don't have tits that can feed a baby. Where else does the term "nurse" come from? If you think about it I will be nursing my family with money. So my tits will feed them money instead of milk. I wish I could nurse my family by building soil, keeping livestock, and growing food...or farming, but that's not in the cards. Not for me at least. How foolish of me, all these years thinking that the unexamined life was not worth living. When you examine it, if your going to be honest, what other conclusion can you come to other than that your examination better come up with the rent and utilities. For 750,000 years paleolithic man didn't have to worry about rent and utilities. Money wasn't even a concept. Life was a somatic experience with meaning all around. Now the only thing that matters is money, and the only meaning is cheap plastic Chinese pointlessness that lies about waiting to be tripped over. I can hear it now, "yeah, but he had to worry about getting eaten by saber tooth tigers, killing Woolly mammoths, and not freezing to death." Sounds like a meaningful existence to me. What do we have to worry about now? Taxes, terrorists and football? Inconsequential drivel and cheap plastic Chinese made crap.

I've got an announcement to make (you must be pretty bored if you've made it this far)...cheap plastic Chinese made crap (for good measure, and to help drive my point home). I managed to get diagnosed by a psychiatrists with Aspergers syndrome. That's right, I'm officially an Aspie. Just barely mind you. It wasn't an easy case, but at the end of the day I met all of the criteria as outlined by the DSM5- 299.80. Presence of: A2,3, 4. B 1 and C,and absence of: D, E and F. I was right. At least I'm justifiably different from the rest. I have a reason for this shittier than usual attitude. I have just enough Aspie to make me intolerably in the world, but not enough to make it a disability to get me off of the hook that's attached to the rent. Finally I have a psychological reason for not liking my own species much. Still, I have to buckle down, and go out into the pointlessness to extract money so that I can have a family. The only way to extract that money is to participate in yet more pointlessness. When society is soulless can there ever be any hope of meaningful activity? How fucked is it that the last thing I want to do is to deal with people (here again explained by Aspergers) and yet just about any work I could get will require me to deal with people. Our society is a service one. All we do is make up a bunch of needs and then service them. I've been thinking that maybe I'll try to get a job at a grocery store since at least eating is a need that has to be met. A nuclear engineer turned medic turned grocery store clerk. You don't really have to deal with people. Just ring up their shit and say "have a nice day." Maybe I could get a job stocking shelves. That would be even better. Talk about wasted talent. Yet I never found a job that was worth any talent. Eventually I'll be nursing, which will occasionally provide me with the opportunity to do something worth while, granted only occasionally. At least I'll be paid well for my effort. I'll just have to learn to become impervious to the rude patients who view the hospital more like a hotel than a hospital. I was thinking I might like to be a hospice nurse. At least then people will be dying and less prone to acting like ass holes. It should help keep my life in perspective as well. Plus, being an Aspie, I don't suffer much from empathy, which is a positive attribute when seen from this angle. I'm just trying to focus on my strengths.

That's gonna be some time from now, given I reach that point in time. Our society isn't exactly healthy. What do I have to bitch about really? I've got a roof over my head and food in my belly. So what if I have to go out and spend my priceless time on this Earth cultivating and fostering a lifestyle that's not worth caring about. The least I could be is grateful for the opportunity to line the man's pockets. After all, it's not as if I'm entitled to anything other than taxes. I'm just bitter that my ideas about right living don't matter at the end of the day. What matters is the acquisition of money. After that, if I'm left with any, I can use it to be the change. That's the point. Without money, you can't be the change...not if your me, and definitely not if you have kids depending on you to keep them safe and healthy.

This Monday I'll be off to fill out applications for a job that will hopefully be more than minimum wage. Grocery stores and restaurants. I could go back to granny snatchin' but it will only pay $11 an hour, and I'll have to put up with the smell of lotion and doodoo that's so ubiquitous in those geezer freezers where we stuff our elderly for big pharma to profit off of until they stop breathing.  Granny snatchin' is too depressing for me to go back to. I'd rather flip burgers at McDonalds where I'll at least not have to deal with the public. I can just stand there and do a menial task over and over again while not dealing with what it is that I'm actually doing there. Besides, those burgers are no more poisonous than allopathic medicine is (and I won't be tempted to eat them either). I'll just go from poisoning people for minimum wage to poisoning people for 60 grand a year right out of school. I think I can deal with people for that amount of money. The most I've ever made in my life is $28,000 a year, so I'll be more than doubling that. That's 60 grand? $4000 a month take home thereabouts? I'll be fuckin' rich, and I get to wear scrubs as a work uniform. My wife will be able to stay home and raise our children, and I'm going to have a lot. If I'm gonna be out there participating in the meaninglessness of a society not worth caring about than I'm going to at least come home to meaning. I'll have time, and money left over after the bills are paid. That will enable me to afford to be the change I want to see in the world. Great advice Ghandi, but some of us have kids to feed. Granted, I chose to have kids, but isn't that a large part of the human experience? Aren't you glad your parents had you? And if you have any siblings, aren't you glad your parents had them?

So what is the meaning of life? It seems the answer to that question only matters if you can afford to ask it in the first place.