The SUN's Youth Rebellion

On my way to deliver the letter with the magic EIN number on it, I looked at my truck radio display and it read 3:33. My wife, whom was at home, looked at a digital clock at that same moment. The radio station 93.3, that I was listening to had decided to play Metallica's "Sad But True" for the journey. I pulled into the post office and watched that letter go down the post office box memory hole as the last chord from that song rang out. That song from my youth, when I was angry about life. It was cleansing.

 

Days before my 32nd birthday I placed my resignation letter on my supervisor's desk. This was more than just a resignation from the career I had worked for 6 years as a street medic for Piedmont EMS in the Upstate of South Carolina. This was my Resignation from the Matrix, which was picked up by Michael Ruppert and published on collapsenet as a free feature article for several months. It wasn't particularly well written, because I wrote it one night half drunk as a journal entry, and then emailed it to Ruppert. Apparently he read it and liked it. I worked a one month notice because that's what my supervisor asked of me. Her point was that I was going on vacation for two weeks on the next day, and so would I actually "work" a two week notice. Just days before resigning from my career I signed up to take part in a Permaculture class in Asheville NC called "Permaculture In Action." It was a 10 day, hands on, gathering of like minded people spread over five weekends from May to August. We learned permaculture methods while implementing design from paper to the land. We didn't create the designs, the instructors did. This was to be my new career. Permaculture. I resigned from the Matrix so that I could take permaculture seriously and devote all of my free time to it.

Starting in 2007, after reading James Howard Kunstler's, The Long Emergency, and gettin' edumacated to the concept of Peak Oil, I learned that infinite growth on a finite planet results in a particularly sordid predicament, and what was I going to do about it? Our civilization is completely dependent on a shrinking non-renewable resource. Look around you and notice all of the objects in your view. It's a safe bet that every single one of those objects has been in a trailer on the interstate at some point on it's likely over 2000 mile journey to you. It's also another good bet that some part of all of those objects has been on a large container ship from China as well. The power you are using to participate with your computer, the cup of Joe you're enjoying, and the food that keeps you alive, all have fossil fuel energy in common (even nuclear power is not possible without fossil fuel energy...at least as it's currently practiced). We have built our modern day global civilization on a limited resource! There are a LOT of ramifications from this one easily understood fact that's placed on us by the mandates of our physical reality.

Nearly five years after reading Kunstler's eye opening book, I was in front of my supervisor turning in my resignation. Five years of rabidly searching for the answer to the question "what am I going to do about our infinite growth paradigm on a finite planet?" I had become a father, and now the ante was raised by several orders of magnitude. In a label, permaculture was what I found to be the answer. Permaculture actually addresses a future where there is no longer any affordable fossil energy. It realizes the precarious nature our free energy inheritance is leaving us in. Staying alive as a material being requires energy via food. All 8 billion of us stay alive right now because we still have the cheap energy to run the large tractors and combine harvesters, and to manufacture and use the petroleum based pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and natural gas based fertilizers. Our agricultural land has become a moonscape of dead dirt that does nothing other than act as a chemical sponge. Nothing can live in the dirt except for the genetically modified organisms that we've created to withstand the chemical onslaught. The bulk of the calories that keep us alive, the wheat in our pasta and bread, the rice in our bowl, the soy bean baby formula in our dairy allergic newborns, and the hundreds of corn derived ingredients in the nutrition free high fructose petroleum sugar, and the animal meat that you eat are all possible because of our massive monocroped agriculture which requires petroleum energy to exist. Permaculture recognizes that this is not a sustainable arrangement.

Even the "organic" agriculture in this country is really just the same old "green revolution" shit dressed up in a delusional "we're gonna save the Earth" drag. They spray chemicals just like their Monsanto dependent counterparts. Granted, it's better than conventional agriculture, but it's still not enough. It's not "sustainable." Monoculture agriculture, devoid of the cheap energy, collapses under the weight of it's own gargantuan flesh. Permaculture provides the answers to this mess we're in. I'm always weary of saying such a thing. That this or that provides ALL of the answers, but it's true in this case...this is a too good to be true actually being true. Mark Shepard, the architect of "New Forest Farm" and author of Restoration Agriculture, provides proof to my claim. Perennial forest agriculture is a sustainable practice that is capable of withstanding a changing climate. It can provide us with the calories and nutrition that we need to live. The bulk of the calories in this system come from perennial tree nuts and animal products like milk, eggs, and meat. Petroleum inputs of any kind are not necessary (although they sure do help getting the system up and matured). My point is, Permaculture provides the solutions we need for the post-petroleum world that we're standing on the brink of. I know of no other entity which can make this claim.

Given that you understand the predicament we are in as a global civilization, and given that you want to do something about it rather than nothing, what are you going to do? Permaculture can save us, but it can't save us if we don't practice it and implement it on our landscapes. I have two children now, Ayden Zen whom is 3 and Harper Tribann whom is 5 months. They are collectively the most beautiful thing I have ever done (aside from the Goddess I did to create them). Next to my family the most beauty I have ever created I have done in my backyard using permaculture principles. I have no doubt in my mind that given enough time I'll be able to use this 1.6 acre lot (and hopefully the six acres that surround the Fox Den that are currently owned by in-laws) to keep my family thriving, alive and healthy, and to create a surplus to share with the surrounding community. I'll be doing this using permaculture principles and strategies. Permaculture may not provide my family and I with the money we need to buy the things we buy in this current perpetual growth paradigm, but it will provide us with the food, medicine, raw natural materials, shelter, energy, and community that we need to live a life that is more than worthwhile, but exciting and full of meaning. With any luck it will keep my tribe out of any kind of government line.

I have concluded that there is no better way to spend my time than permaculture. I can practice it every day in the company of my family while creating beauty and regeneration. I believe that is possible. It's already happening. My plan has been a two pronged plan. Practice permaculture and go to school for a nursing license in order to ensure my family will have access to the digibits that are required of us. The problem with this plan is that it lands me in another wealth care career that I will not be able to stomach. I burned out after six years on the meat wagon. But I didn't burn out because of the death, disease, and destruction that comes with knowing the Reaper intimately. I loved that part of the job. I revealed in getting to know what the Grim Reaper actually looks like, and I even got in a few fights with him.  

A quick anecdote from my real past:

 I managed to kick the Grim Reapers ass out of the back of my meat wagon once.  He made himself my business when someones grandma dropped dead while shopping at Walmart. She walked out of the hospital a couple of months later on her own two legs (well, she was wheeled out cause it was hospital policy, but she was able to walk). One time in six years I actually got a "save." I burned out due to the bureaucratically generated bull shit that came from the Bull Shit Black Hole that feeds our wealth care system. We went from being taught that our job began and ended with "patient care" to being told that we were responsible for the happiness of our "customers." That is how our rotten health care system looks at you now. You are no longer a patient to heal, but a customer to keep happy. That's because the lawyers, medical insurance, and big international pharmaceutical companies dictate the nature of our wealth care. It's ALL about making money. End of Subject.

I'm not plugging back into the Matrix. I'm going all rogue Permaculture on the Matrix's ass. And at any rate I destroyed the ports on my physical body that allow me to plug back in, anarchy happened to my Matrix equipment. I'm a permanent inhabitant of what Jason Heppenstall calls Realandia. The place you come to inhabit when you take the red pill. People are too afraid to do anything meaningful about our meaningless perpetual growth paradigm. I'm no longer afraid. I was recently told that I've "got some balls" to do what I'm doing. Giving the Matrix the finger and all. I responded to that claim, "well, they stuck my ass in a solitary cell, and fed me nothing but bread and water, due to my protest about killing thousands of people via bombs from the jets launched off of the US Navy carrier I was splitting atoms on...so I guess I know what I'm up against." Maybe I do have some balls, but I don't frame it that way. I see it as that I am doing what I am supposed to be doing. It is my responsibility to help in this transition that our species is going through. I have the tools and the mindset. I have the training. In truth, I have been bred for this my entire life. I have been searching for something worth my time ever since I can remember. Even EMS failed me, and I was able to find myself in a moral dilemma with being the help?!?! That speaks volumes to me.

This is not my resignation to the Matrix. I turned that in already. This is my "fuck you" to the Matrix. I'm not afraid of you. What I am afraid of is what you're ensuring will happen if I, and many people like me, don't do...something. If we don't resist your stupid dictates than we will get what your incompetence has planned for us all. We will get a climate that won't support human life, we'll get more and more super bugs resistant to our drugs and chemicals, we'll get nuclear contaminated radioactive material blanketing the globe (this has already happened...did you know that 14,000 deaths in America are attributed to the fall out from Fukishima Daiichi), we'll get a completely collapsed fishery as our ocean loses the ability to buffer the carbon levels due to acidification thanks to our dependence on petrochemicals, well get more and more neutered and dysfunctional governments, well get less and less nutrition in our food, and we'll get sicker and sicker as Big Pharma crams more and more frankenchemical fukitol derivatives down our collective throats. The Matrix has no answers for a world on the backside of perpetual growth.

I will not be acquiring a mursing license from the Ministry of Health. From this point forward I will be practicing permaculture principles. I'm now an agent for a non-profit corporation called the SUN Foundation (sustaining universal needs). The foundation is headquartered here, at my current residence in the Palookaville sector of Whoville. I have a gaggle of geniuses on my side over at the Doomstead Diner. Essentially the Diner has become a think tank. We talk about Realandia and what we're going to do and are doing about it. The SUN Foundation is the result of more than a year of this think tank activity. It has fermented into the SUN and I am one of it's agents. I believe that the SUN Foundation is a magnate that is attracting the most brilliant thinkers and doers available. 

We have members in Australia (which is good due to it being in the southern hemisphere, away from the potentially 15,000 times more nuclear radiation than the atom bombs dropped on Japan, ending the second world war, that is damn near fated to happen with one of the next earth quakes, or tsunamis, that are happening at increasing frequencies around Japan), England, and all over the U.S. Our ideas and tactics will go viral and we will make the Matrix obsolete. We're attempting to use the Matrix against itself by playing the game by their stupid rules. If you're interested in learning more about the SUN Foundation (we're still working on the website because we just got incorporated) you can go here and read till your hearts content. We're gonna fix this mess one tree at a time. One durable and inexpensive shelter at a time. One Foxstead at a time.

But my Fox Den is still alive and thriving, and it's beginning to multiply and grow. Like Gremlins, the more bull shit they get on us, the more we will become. The Fox Den is metamorphosing into a Foxstead which will in turn replicate into many Foxsteads. Or I'll fuckin' die trying. They're gonna have to pry my cold dead fingers off of this Fox Den. I've got a Vixen and Kits to keep healthy and happy, and I've got a community to build that can withstand the post-petroleum future they are guaranteed to inherit. What are you gonna do about that? Dear reader!

A Compass for Where the Wasteland Ends

I've decided to put the "Whoville Chronicles" to bed, for the time being at least. I have the feeling that what's left to say is more of the same. The Whos and the Spencers have been outlined, and their dysfunction and insanity has been exposed to the internet. Revenge is mine!!! The broader subject that deserves specific attention is my attempt at escaping this thing called The Matrix, or the American Hologram. It's a story that encompasses more than just the first place I landed after my escape, the Whoville sector of Palookaville, and more than just the people who reside here and their ridiculous antics. To continue with this specific story I would most certainly have to begin fictionalizing it, and I have contemplated doing just that, but I've finally elected not to. I've been told by just about everybody who knows me well that I should write a book. I always respond with, "I have written several books." What they mean is that I should publish a book and get paid for my efforts. I'd love to get paid for writing, but I'm afraid that's not in this deck of cards. I'm just too pessimistic to believe that publishing a book, especially in today's world, where everything is monetized, is worth the effort.

There is the incessant rub; money appears to be the only thing that The Hologram cares about. How simple of an epiphany to make, and yet it has been almost 33 years in the making for me. I can tell you that by the age of 18 I had already made the majority of the "epiphanies" I would make in my life. It was like I had already formulated the chapters of my spiritual and intellectual life, and what was left was for me to understand them all with more depth. You can drink a wine after a couple of weeks of fermentation, but if it's done right, after years of resting in itself properly, it will taste magnificent. Still, you have to have the refined palate to taste the subtle and nuanced differences. In the beginning, after the initial fermentation process, it's still fundamentally the same substance it will be after years of resting, yet it's not the same is it? It is qualitatively very different. Now, when I read what I wrote from the view point of an 18 year old, I can appreciate that I really had no idea what I was talking about, yet I did. I understood in a very single visioned, flatland, horizontal, Cartesian and youthful way. How could I understand any differently? The lion's share of epiphanies have to be lived.

I struggle with the need I have to read and write. What I've come to understand is that what matters most in life is how you conduct yourself. What do you spend your time doing? That is how you are the change that you want to see in the world. What can be more important than that? I've read a lot of books and written thousands of pages searching for that one epiphany. What matters is what you do with your time. When I'm reading, or writing (or participating in my favorite escapism which would be movies), what am I doing? I'm sitting on my ass not being the change that I want to see in the world. Yet it doesn't have to be as rigid and defined as that, and it isn't. I can just as easily argue that the sage sitting in meditation in a cave is changing the world in the most important way possible...spiritually. The answers I have come up with to the question of what change do I want to see, are mostly a product of Permaculture. The reasons for that being my answer are many, but Permaculture is also not my destiny, and if it is than I can't see it. If it is my destiny then why have I landed in Whoville?

I can't state with enough conviction what it means for me to have finally realized that there is a reason why I have always felt so different from my fellow human beings. It feels like a homecoming, and it makes me very emotional, which is very ironic given the specific condition I'm referring to. This condition makes it impossible for me to register unspoken communications that are supposedly received through things like facial expressions and body language. Now, I have learned how to read these things over the years, but I am unable to read them in any way other than intellectually. It's not something that comes naturally. This deficit goes a long way towards explaining why I have always avoided people in general. Again, probably as a matter of survival, around 17 years old I developed an intense interest in understanding human psychology. Now I know that I was searching for the protocols that would allow me to "fit in." All of this is only gained in retrospect after receiving the key that belongs to the lock that has kept me in this cage. With Aspergers exposed to the light of my conscious awareness, I feel like I now have the last remaining puzzle pieces to the puzzle of my life.  It feels like figuring out my destiny has gotten much closer.

The thing is, I have had my entire life to adapt to this condition. Psychology was one of my intense obsessions. I learned how to hide in societies day light. I waited tables and tended bar successfully (of course I think my regulars were just entranced by my eccentricities and that's why they continued returning...cause they couldn't figure me out). These are activities that somebody with this condition are not supposed to be able to do seeing as how they deal with other people. I do just fine with people, so long as it's one on one, or it's a well defined social situation. Put me in a group of people that I'm supposed to interact with (like the permaculture tribe I spent time with this year) and a minute feels like an hour. I feel like every person in a group is a vampire that is feeding off of me, but that can't possibly be true...and it's not true, it's just my way of being in this world. To be clear, I have not been diagnosed, but I know it's true like I know that I'm a male human being on planet Earth. I know it with enough certainty to know that I don't need to waste my time, and lack of money, on paying professional shrinks with certificates and licenses to verify it for me. Although I imagine I'd get a LOT of money from the government due to their failure to detect it while I was in military entrance processing. Definitely since I got kicked out with an "other than honorable discharge" when it should have been a medical discharge for psychological reasons. I also don't want some incompetent ass hole telling me that I'm wrong and sending me back into that cage of lonely isolation.

When I was growing up, my mother used to repeat to me "it's not what you say it's how you say it." I never could understand what the hell she was talking about, and it always just pissed me off even more. "What the hell are you talking about...how I say it...how the fuck am I supposed to say it," followed by storming out of the house to escape in my newly acquired personal transport vehicle to do something crazy like jump off of a rail road trestle head first with a bit of rope and metal. In my marriage, my wife has been brought to the brink of insanity for the same reason. It just doesn't register with me. It's cold, calculating, and rigid reasoning. I could make the best defense attorney the world have ever known if I didn't have a soul and could play the game. Or is it just because when I was five my father abandoned me? It's all bound up and hidden in the dysfunction of my own life. Yet I know it to be true, and the fact that my half brother has been diagnosed is enough of a diagnosis for me.

My son is different already. He's two and a half and Wendy and I both know it as well as we know it of me. Sometimes he covers his ears up for no apparent reason. He walks up to adults at the park and sits in front of them and babbles on as if he knows them. He refuses to be contained in one space and likes to run off to the fringes when in a group of people...like a wild animal trying to escape a cage. He already has an obsession in all things king. In a bit of synchronicity, at the park the other day, a ten year old girl with Aspergers showed up. She walked up to me and started telling me about a little girl who was running around the park with no underwear or pants on a few days prior. Her dad instantly pops off with "she's talking about that because she's autistic." I responded with "aspergers?" He looked at me as if I was psychic. How could I have known that after only a minute of interaction. It's easy, I recognized it in her because it's in me as well. I was just recognizing my own kind. How mysterious that is to me, to be around somebody that I recognize in that way. Did I mention that she's ten?  Her and Ayden hit it off like fleas on a furry dog.  

How does this all fit into permaculture and what my destiny is? Asking me to be a community leader is sort of like asking a fish to live out of water. I'm simply not cut from that cloth, and now I understand why. They say that Aspies should concentrate on their abilities and not on their disabilities, and my ability is not in groups of people. If I could take the community and explain it to them each one on one, maybe, but that's not the way it works. It simply takes too much energy from me to be responsible for fostering community in person. It takes too much talking to people about trivial things.  I would rather dig a very deep hole all day long.  Writing on the other hand. I am definitely suited for rallying the troops in this form, with the written word. The irony is that the one thing I have determined is needed in this world is the one thing I am simply incapable of. I can do Permaculture, but I can't be concerned with convincing the zombies of the hologram that they should do permaculture. Yet permaculture is more than just putting the right plants in the right places while capturing rain water and building soil. It's about a way of life that centers around community.  

When I become interested in something, it quickly becomes an obsession. I read about it and do everything with it until I am exhausted and bored...usually. Permaculture is starting to fall into the exhausted with it category, and yet it can't be because everything I know intellectually says that it can't be. I came to Permaculture because of my obsessive study about the future of our planet. Yet what am I, one man, going to do about it? Plant some trees in my yard, grow some soil, collect some water? I want the entire thing intellectually, but in reality it's the last thing I want. It's like I told Dylan, one of the instructors of the Permaculture In Action class I attended, "I'll dig a hole a hundred feet deep wherever you want it for permaculture, but don't ask me to talk to people." I don't know, it's a conundrum for me. I've painted myself into an intellectual corner.

The "Whoville Chronicles" are now complete. Epiphany Now has never been about anything other than my epiphanies. So it is, and so it shall continue to be. I'm not sure where I'm going now, but I want to know my destiny, and so I have to figure it out. Unfortunately money has something to do with where I'm going, and that has nothing to do with what I want, because money is the last thing I want to be concerned about. Yet, I'm a husband, and a father...with another on the way, and the hologram does not care about my ideas about the change I would like to see in the world. I can't move to where the permaculture is right now because of money, and I can't spread it in Whoville because nobody gives a shit, and dealing with people in a community way is just not possible for me.

It appears that my destiny, at least in the near term, is to re-enter into the Matrix for a prolonged mission with the objective of money extraction. That means downloading some more credentials from the mainframe. It appears that come January, days before my 33rd birthday, I'll begin the download. The program is called EMT-Paramedic, and it's my families meal ticket. At least until the world starts caring about the future of our planet, sustainable food production, and our progeny's survival in the not too distant future. I'm not returning with my tail between my legs, and I think it's important to put that out there. When Neo was learning how to bend the rules in the Matrix, after he had unplugged, he hit the asphalt after falling from a building. It bloodied his nose, but he learned. Justin of the blog "Americana" said as much in a comment to one of my blogs. It's true. One thing I've learned from my resignation, and my dealings with the inhabitants of Whoville, is that the skills to reside outside of the Matrix require that bloody nose. This is by no means recognized by me as a defeat. Quite the contrary, it's only made me stronger.

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

Culture of Denial

Afterward 

3/12/13

The Post Petroleum Human Tribe is continuing to evolve.  We are unplugged and wired in without wires.  We drop down the memory hole and immerse our minds in remembrance.  So that we don't forget where we came from.  

The American Hologram is a real program being projected within the Matrix.  There are other programs, but this one is dominant in the industrialized senseless suburban consumer consumption  wasteland artifact of 20th century chemical monkey man.  

We're coalescing for the future of the Post Petroleum Nation at a little place called the Foxstead.  We'll be hiding in plain site.  When you look at us we'll be directly ahead, in the woods, visible in your blind spot.  Don't bother looking to hard because we have vanished in our 21st century anonymity. We are legion and you can't even see us.  Hiding in plain site.  Waiting for you to blink to make our next move.  And you thought you would always remain in control of the masses.  

Also, let me just say, in this afterward that's happening in the forward spot, that I made my way back to "Where the Wasteland Ends" and it expanded my mindscape greatly.  

The last bout of books that I have acquired and began perusing have come to me through two sources, Morris Berman and John Michael Greer. The book I'm currently reading is titled "Where the Wasteland Ends"and is authored by Theodore Roszak. It was first published in 1972. I'm 30 pages in and I'm already beginning to lose interest and for different reasons than one might expect. In fact, I've never even experienced a lose of interest such as this and it's what I can only term as a type of exhaustion. It's an intellectual and emotional exhaustion that protrudes from a dawning realization that the world is suffering from a legendary case of denial. As I read these books that were published years before I was born (in this case 8 years before I was born), and as I look around at the world today to see the furtherance of our march into the wasteland, I can only throw my arms up in despair and then drop my hands into the soil. I put them into animal shit and dead and dying biomass. I mix it all together with the steam rising behind me from the hot compost pile. I mix this all into red dirt in an effort to make cultivated plant seeds a nurturing place to grow. This brings me peace and hope, and the need for these necessary books is fading. I know what needs to be done and why things are the way they are. There is simply no reason for me to read about it any longer, it's just depressing.

The fact that over 40 years ago books were already being written about the "Wasteland" or the Matrix or the American Hologram is proof enough that nothing is going to change or save our empire from this downward spiral. It's a pretty hopeless realization. Yet it's true none-the-less. The easy way out is through denial, and I've noticed that this is indeed an innate reaction, a knee jerk reaction. Intelligent people simply know on some unconscious level that there is very little meaningful action they can take to change any of this truth. They are wrong to think that unconsciously, but that doesn't stop them. And so the realization just never happens for hundreds of millions of people because it's just too depressing. The 100th monkey is not going to wake up from this chemical induced coma of denial until the death march of our empire is over. 40 years ago maybe, but now...it's simply too late. 

 

I didn't sit down with the intention of writing a depressing blog, but even amidst my liberation I have been fighting this underlying current of depression lately. It's taken me some time to figure out why I feel this way. I am taking all the actions I can to learn as much about growing food as possible. I have changed my entire life around to meet these mandates, and I have taken my family with me. As a result I am able to tend to plant life on 1.65 acres as my job. My job is now to learn as much as I can about growing food and that is simply amazing. I have had the good fortune to learn the truth behind the saying that the best fertilizer is the gardener's feet. I'm present and unmedicated for my wife and son. Yet still there is this dreaded sadness that erupts through the fissures in the psychic ground that is supposed to protect me. The sadness is coming from a place that is much larger than I, and it has the capability of strong arming all of my defenses and there is nothing I can do about it. Ahhhh denial, it's one hell of a drug.

I have come face to face with the source of this sadness. It's become more tactile to me because I have had time to tease out it's form and it origination. We've always had the answers about the antidote to the machine, to the wasteland. We put all of our cards into building the Wasteland and now we're going to take them to bed for a self induced nightmare. How is anyone to deal with such horrible truth if not with denial? The only way through it is to feel it and that means a heavy blanket of sadness. I understand that what I am doing is the best I can do. It's not only the best I can do, it's the only meaningful course of action for me. I'm following my bliss. I know that food production is the most important element of this mess. It's the one thing that I know with certainty is necessary now and in the future. It's the one thing that allows me to be a whole person. Everything inside and outside is aligned though me with the simple act of growing soil. I am not in denial, and yet that comes with an immense cost because just about everybody I know is in denial about this. My friends, that is a recipe for loneliness, and no doubt one that I'm sure most of you are intimate with.

I suppose this means I have grown to big for this round of skin. I no longer feel the need to read books about how fucked up it all is. The truth is that it's always been fucked up cause our species is, and worse than that even because we don't have to be. Our species chooses to remain agents of destruction because of cowardice. Nobody wants to deal with the mess we have made, and so they hide in their convenient suburbanland and are at peace with trading their humanity for consumerism. Our species has made a Faustian deal...their humanity and honor for the numbness of complete denial. Not only do they lose their dignity, but they lose their future progeny's as well.

Waking up from the Matrix becomes a sad ordeal rather quickly. I knew I was alone in the Matrix, but I had no idea about what it was like outside of it. I do have a small kernel of hope however. I don't want to leave ya'll with nothing but depressing truth. I have hope that I will find others like me because I already have. The problem is that I have met them 70 miles from where I'm at in Asheville NC. I'm referring to the group of souls I met at the Permaculture In Action event that I have been attending. For the first time in my life I have met a large group of people whom all view the world through the same type of eyes. We are all different. We come from different places, backgrounds, and times. This group spans from 18 to 60 something years old. The easiest way to describe it would be to say that we are a tribe, but in the 21st century a tribe can exist only with it's members spread out in a vast region....a pack of mostly lone wolfs. I'm on the outskirts of our region with only one couple a few more miles further out than I. Our people are spread out in a 100 mile long diameter around Asheville NC. It only took one day for us to all bond into this tribe. The one guiding principal has been permaculture. We have all met each other because we share that one interest, but that one interest spans the breadth of a people whom have been freed from that cultural denial that I have been speaking of. We are united in our decision to do something about this culture of denial. I have plans to write about this Permaculture In Action Tribe that I have found, so I won't continue much about it now.

I think we are the beginning of humanities long muddling trudge into a new environment. Our empire is just beginning to approach the back side of Hubbert's curve. We have been on the bumpy plateau since 2006 or so. To my mind Hurricane Katrina was the harbinger for this new reality. We've probably got another five years left before we begin our descent in earnest. Those of us who are aware are already at the bottom of the back side of Hubbert's curve. That's where you find yourself upon waking up from the Matrix. We're looking at a culture, an empire, of denial and trying to figure out just what the hell we're going to do about it. The fact is that we're going to have to just let the empire plummet to the flat ground after Hubbert. The best we can do is have things ready for when they arrive. I think I'm going to continue asking this question here at Epiphany Now. If you are reading this, and you haven't acted on the information you know to be true, the information that hails from your soul, then what are you waiting for? We of the Post Petroleum Human Tribe need all of the help we can get.