Mordred and Tina LeFay Spencer

Here we are. We've finally arrived at the event that the Black Snakes coming foretold to me. I'll just jump right in this time. My wife had just left to Charlotte NC to photograph a wedding when coincidentally enough her uncle Mordred and his wife Tina LeFay decided to schedule a lunch with Aunt Bee. They showed up to our house and the mood was off, but I couldn't figure out why exactly. It had been a good eight years since I'd had the misfortune of dealing with Mordred and his family. He's a sickly looking man in his early 50's. He's got a gray beard that he keeps about an inch long complete with beady eyes that exist in two holes of sickness. Misery exudes from every hair on the man's head and you can't help but feel the terrible magnetism as it attempts to pull you into its suffering.

They came into the house and he appeared to be angry at something, while she had a fake plastic smile that scared me even more than his miserable facial expression. I had no idea what or why. Aunt Bee wanted to show my wife and I's new bed off for some reason. Just as we moved, my wife managed to score us a 4000 dollar king size Kincaid bed with a memory foam mattress for 250 dollars. One of her friends boyfriends parents were selling their house and farm to move to Virginia to be farm hands there. They were downsizing their lives, just as we were, only they were going to be less comfortable doing so while we were planning to be more. They had to liquidate all of their things at fire sale prices so that they could get on with it, and that is how we ended up with that beautifully ornate and expensive bed that Aunt Bee wanted to show off. We all went to my bedroom, which was weird, but Aunt Bee is nothing if she's not idiosyncratic, so I just pigeon holed the weird behavior between her brother and her at that. It was extremely weird with all four of us in my room looking at my bed. Mordred walked in and just as quickly walked back out. "Did you see the bed?" asked Aunt Bee of Mordred. Tina was standing there with a creepy large shit eating grin on her face. "Yeah, I seen it," quipped Mordred as he departed from the room more aggravated and miserable than before.

Shortly after this strange scene they were on their way to Chick-filet to have some chicken biscuits for lunch. Mordred and Tina had several plans for that day. One of the main plans was to extract as much of Aunt Bee's money as possible to help pay for their sick daughter Rapunzel's medication no doubt. Which of course is a crock of shit since they have medicare and medicaid and all other manner of government check on account of their sick daughter. They have simply gotten used to Aunt Bee giving them money to help with Rapunzel. That money train had ended shortly after our arrival, which had little to do with us except for the Who's upping the pressure on Aunt Bee's money because of our presence. Tribute must be paid in Whoville. I called my wife while they were at lunch to report on the weirdness and to get her opinion on her uncle's strange behavior, but she didn't answer because she was busy with the wedding. Ayden Zen and I decided that we would take'er easy and watch the "Fantastic Mr. Fox," sometime after they had been gone. That's what we were doing when the three of them came back from lunch. Tina kept insisting that "Fantastic Mr. Fox" was a "strange little program," and I kept on insisting that it was not a program but a movie. We went back and forth with this behavior for a minute or so, and I realized then that something was terribly off with this woman. She was watching the idiot screen with the movie on it like I imagine I would watch a Donkey show in Tijuana, and she kept repeating "this is a strange little program."

Mordred was not present, just Tina and Aunt Bee. Aunt Bee informed me that Mordred was outside having a look at some of the damage on the back garage. The wood around the door frames to the garage had begun rotting at the bottom where the wood meets the ground. It's just exterior wood that's not foundational. Mordred had quoted Aunt Bee 900 dollars to fix it which amounts to 20 dollars or so in 2x4's and his time. I told her I would fix it for free. However, that, apparently, was why he was not in the house upon their return. "Maybe you can go out there and talk to him about it," said Aunt Bee innocently enough. That was a good idea I thought. After all, the man's work was contracting and I figured I could pick his brain and learn a few things about what I needed to do to fix the garage. I didn't know at the time that the man hated my very existence.

I went outside and he was not at the back garage. I walked over to the top garage, the one near the house which features my man cave inside, and just as I approached the garage out came Mordred. He was in my man cave, snooping. He came barreling out of the garage having no doubt sensed my presence outside and therefore having his snoopathon cut short. "Did you have a look at the bottom garage?" I asked. He just sneered at me with a look of hatred as he passed by on his way back to the house. He didn't say a word, but the look on his face sent my defense alarm off into a high pitch scream. Something was very wrong with what had just happened. I turned around and followed him into the house fast on his heels. I had herbage in that there garage. I had reason to be worried beyond that look on his face. Aunt Bee is old school, and while she is on a powerful regimen of prescription frankenchemical fukitol pharmaceuticals, they are all prescribed by a doctor and legal. Herb on the other hand is not recognized by her as anything other than "Refer Madness." Consequently, after this happening, I began the practice of keeping all herbal medicine and paraphernalia under lock and key in a safe. Luckily for me, his look had nothing to do with my modest herb stash for he found it not.

He entered the house and quickly traveled into my bedroom. I was right behind him. "Hey, where are you going man?"

"To the bathroom," he gurgled as he entered my room. My wife and I have the master bedroom which features a pretty large bathroom area. It's got a large tub, a separate shower, a toilet, two sinks with a large mirror, and a very large walk in closet. It's not a bathroom that's meant to be used by guests as you have to go through the master bedroom to get to it. There is, however, another full bathroom in the living room. He was completely aware of this.

I later found out that Mordred, Tina, and Rapunzel had lived in this house with Aunt Bee for a six month stay a couple of years before our arrival. They left on their own accord, and it was never meant to be a permanent situation. Their house had been foreclosed on and they needed a place to stay while they got their free government housing lined up. Upon their departure from living with Aunt Bee, Tina LeFay took the opportunity to tell Aunt Bee that they would never live with her again. Tina LeFay did not appreciate the way Aunt Bee didn't let her rule the roost in Aunt Bee's house. There was no thanks for letting us live with you, just a fuck you very much we'll never live with you again.

"Wait, I don't think you understand, this is Wendy and I's private bedroom. There's another bathroom in the living room." This kicked off the psychological battle that was to ensue. I had no idea. He turned around and quickly appeared in my personal space with his big gnarly finger waging an inch from my face. "Let's get something straight" he growled. "This is my sister's house. You are a guest in this house, and I'll do what I want to while I'm here." He turned, entered the bathroom, and slammed the door. I experienced a sharp pain as my lower jaw slammed into the floor in disbelieve. What, pray tell, the fuck had just happened? My brain shorted out as it tried to wade through the disbelief. I paced back and forth in my room, next to my bed, next to my dresser, next to my wife's dresser, next to our stuff...in our bedroom, and tried to figure out what the hell to do now. I exited the room after envisioning myself kicking the door down and strangling that piece of shit, but I had plenty more wherewithal to remain all tactful and diplomatic like at that point. My son was home, and I didn't want him to witness me strangling somebody and consequently being cuffed and hauled off to the slammer.

I exited the room and headed to the living room where Tina and Aunt Bee were to report my disbelief about what was occurring. "Mordred is in the bathroom in our room," I said to Aunt Bee. She looked up and said "there's another bathroom right there if you need to use it," and she pointed at the bathroom in the living room. "I know that," I said with my brain still shorted out by the weirdage, "I live here." Tina was looking at me with a very large maniacal grin. It was all going according to plan. I went back to my room and paced some more just outside of my bathroom. "This is not cool man," I said through the closed door. I turned and went back out to the living room to wait for Mordred's punk ass to finish doing whatever he was doing in my bathroom. Or walk in closet for all I knew. I keep my guns in a trunk in my closet. I keep a lot of my personal stuff in my closet as does my wife. It's in the bowels of my bedroom. It's a pretty private location to keep my private stuff. This ass hole was not respecting my space. I was standing in the kitchen after about ten minutes had passed with him in my bathroom when he finally emerged from my bedroom. The look on his face was now more of a grin. It was now more of a you're gonna get used to this behavior boy, and you're gonna do what I say. Only "no, no I'm not fuck stick. I'm gonna fuck you up if you don't change your tone" is what I was thinking as my brain clicked over one more notch towards savagery.

He walked passed me and sat down in my lazy boy, the one that I had replaced the one that was given to the Matriarch with. It was about to be on like Donkey Kong. I stood there transfixed on Mordred. I could hear Tina's cackles echoing in her mind as her plan was so beautifully working. Mordred pointed his worthless finger at me, and then pointed it at the couch just next to him, looked me in the eyes with his sickness and boomed a large "sit downnnnn." I just stared in amazement. "Sit DOWNNNNN" he popped off again. "SIT DOOOWWWNNNN" he commanded for a third time. I could see in his face that he was a scared coward only doing what he was told. "Who do you think you are?" I asked still trying to sort this behavior out. After all, this assault was coming from family...at least technically. Not blood, but family nonetheless. He just snickered at me in reply and looked to his witchy wife, Tina, to take the helm of the plan to be rid of me.

Grandpa's Whipping Boy

I was going to wait until Tuesday to post this next segment of the "Whoville Chronicles," but I've got the next three posts finished already.  I see no point in just sitting on them.  

Evil is a real thing, and I know that because I have met it face to face a few times in my life. I've even been tricked into helping it from time to time. I'm indirectly responsible for an unknown amount of innocent death by bombs in Afghanistan. The carrier I was on, the U.S.S. Carl Vinson, dropped three million tons of ordinance on that god forsaken desert mountain land. I did my part helping the nuclear power plant function to make the steam that made the whole thing possible. Evil goes by many names and comes in all different shapes and sizes. Although I participated in that evil, it didn't feel as diabolical as a much smaller breed. The insult of the evil I'm speaking of now pales in comparison to that boat evil I participated in while serving in the USN, but it shook the foundation I stand on just as powerfully. This evil was dished out by Mordred and Tina leFay Spencer...in-laws.

Mordred Spencer is the youngest of the Spencers, and his depravity has no bottom. Even after the assault I'm going to write about, as terrible as it was to me, I still feel sympathy for his misery and pain. Nobody should endure the type of suffering that he has endured, but I'm convinced his suffering is the hand of fate. We make our own beds, and we sleep in them. Mordred's suffering started with Grandpa Spencer I'm sure, but I know very little about it. I'm quite certain that it involved grandpa's whip, and Mordred does a good job perpetuating the Spencer Crazy. His wife, Tina LeFay, is an exceptionally witchy witch. She is one of the only people whom have ever brought me to the reptilian core of my brain. After her, I learned what the saying "seeing red" really means. I was never as close to killing another person as I was with her. I could easily be writing this from a prison cell for 2nd degree murder because of that witch, Tina LeFay. But enough chirpin' this shit up...let's move on with the story.

It was some time in early spring, just after the Black Snake Drone incident that kicked this whole clusterfuck off. I went to Asheville and initiated into permaculture via an opening ceremony that featured a fire, and the calling of ancestors in a quasi new agey ceremony meant to add depth to the experience. I brought a piece of maple wood from our new home in Whoville to burn in that fire, and I called the spirit of my recently deceased maternal grandmother (who died a week before) to that ceremony. I blew on that piece of maple wood and threw it into the fire. I was supposed to state my watershed as I did so. This was a practice deriving from some Native American spirituality. Apparently "tribe" derives from "tributary," and this all has to do with the watershed dictating where you belonged. I wasn't positive about my watershed, but it didn't matter. I stated that I was from everywhere and that my watershed was the rain that fell from the sky. My people are all people who can treat one another with mutual respect. This is my only requirement...respect. If you treat me with respect, I will abide your presence next to mine, and I will reciprocate that respect. My people are all people who practice this simple ethic for conduct, but my tribe was etched out that day as a Post Petroleum Human Tribe of Permaculture.

I drove back down the mountain after initiating into this new tribe, and I immediately had to deal with Mordred and Tina Spencer. The day after I returned from Asheville a storm blew threw Whoville. 60 mph winds and quarter sized hail laid waste to my fledgling permaculture design. The roof blew off of my chicken coop and I watched as the birds faced the brunt of that storm unprotected. Archimedes, the rooster, stood tall as a beacon for his hens, as they were pummeled by climate change. Just after the storm passed, my wife and I were busy replacing the coop roof when the Mad Madam Mine, high matriarch of Whoville, called to work some of her evil magic. We were down at the coop replacing the tarps that composed the roof, and Aunt Bee hollered down to us frantically. "The Mad Madam's roof blew off," cried Aunt Bee, "can you go over there and help her fix it."

The Mad Madam had been hard at work fucking with me since the day I arrived. A few weeks prior to this storm, the Matriarch had Aunt Bee send me over to her house to get a free, like new, computer that she had no use for. It was left by some family member. I went on over to the Matriarchs dilapidated farm house, and was shown to the attic via the stairs that led up to it. I poked my head up into her attic and there it was, an old CRT computer monitor from the 80's. It didn't even have a power cord to it. I grabbed a hold of it and brought it down from the attic. "I can't use this," I said to the Mad Madam, "and even if I could there's no power cord." "Ohh," she said "I wasn't sure about it and I thought you might could use it. What about any of this other stuff?" She pointed to a pile of refuse that she had put together for this moment. I picked threw it just to be nice. It featured an impressive supply of worthless junk that needed to be hauled off to the dump. There was an old c.d. case from the 90's, some tacky clothing, a particularly worthless and flimsy cooler with a tear in the side, and various other consumer widgets just past their expiration dates. "I'll sale you the whole lot for 30 dollars," said the Mad Madam.

"No, I can't use any of it...thanks anyways."

"Well alright, so you don't want the computer then?"

"No," I said.

"Well just set the computer down and I'll haul it off to the dump." Now keep in mind that this thing weighed in the neighborhood of 40 pounds and the Mad Madam is in her lat 60's early 70's. I'd just be an ass to not take it at this point.

"No, that's alright, I'll haul it off to the dump for you, I've got plenty of trash that needs to be hauled off anyways so it's no trouble." (it turns out that I had to illegally dump the damn thing at the dump due to new regulations. In order to be rid of it legally I would have had to have driven to the main dump 30 miles away rather than the satellite dump that I make use of 4 miles away. I basically smuggled the damn thing into the dump via a contractor bag...which was illegal, this is the Mad Madam's type of magic).

"Well thank you" said the Mad Madam Mine as I turned to leave with the piece of shit CRT monitor with no power cord. That bitch new what she was doing. She got me over there to force me into hauling that piece of shit off and to try to sell me some worthless shit. The whole thing was an attempt to pinch some money out of me. She learned that I was pretty impervious to being taken advantage of directly. But she still ultimately got her way by forcing me, through my kindness, to haul that computer off (which by the way, I would have freely done if only I was asked...but that's not how things are done in the south).

Around the same time she managed to steal a 600 dollar micro suede recliner from Aunt Bee. She did that by convincing Aunt Bee that she needed it more. Wendy tried talking Aunt Bee out of it, but by the time we were informed it was too late because Aunt Bee had already "gave her word." We had two of these recliners in the house. One of them was somewhat broken because the ottoman had a bad habit of not staying in the up position. When the weight of your legs is applied it limply lowers to the ground. The one she gave to the Mad Madam was identical in every way except the ottoman actually worked. Not only did the Mad Madam cry her way into this recliner (that's how she manipulates Bee...by crying to her on the phone about how poor she is), she also managed to force me to deliver it to her house. I put the damn thing in my truck and drove across the street to deliver it. She directed me into the mysterious Who daughters room. "You don't want this in the living room," I asked. "No, just put it in my mysterious Who daughters room...she's going to use it there." I delivered it to the mysterious who daughters room, just in front of an idiot panel. I was more than a bit incredulous as there was barely any room for it and no need really. It was just that she enjoyed taking whatever she could get from Aunt Bee. Shortly after this incident I found myself delivering a 500 dollar kitchen table to the Mad Madam courtesy of Aunt Bee. My wife and I began to fear that the Matriarch of Whoville would somehow talk her way into having us deliver our shit to her house for free. This was the only behavior I saw from the Mad Madam Mine. Just, how much can she take from Aunt Bee just for the sake of taking. It's very difficult behavior to abide because it's very transparent. Aunt Bee is aware of it, but she doesn't mind due to the 19 years of Who conditioning. She's been conditioned to not mind that it requires tribute to live amongst the Whos. I, on the other hand, do not pay tribute.

So when the Mad Madam called up to the house after the storm to try and force me into helping her, I told my wife that the Matriarch of Whoville could go fuck herself. My wife saw that I was at my whits end with the Who's, and walked up to the house to explain to Aunt Bee that I was busy dealing with the carnage of the recently passed storm at our own house. She told her to have the Matriarch call over to Admiral Dumpy the Chicken Liver Extraordinaire's house and have her fat dumpy ass get up on the roof and fix it. That's just what happened. Admiral Dumpy took her fat ass over there and fixed the siding that had blown off of the house, not the roof. Fuckin' evil ass triflin' witchy bitch and her god damn conniving Who brood. I know she was over there with her fuckin' binoculars watching us fix the coop and that's why she called with her "roof damage" cackling the entire time. That's the kind of trifflin' shit the Who's practice as a way of life. Just how bad can they fuck with your no tribute payin', interloper, not from around here ass. Just who do I think I am living in Whoville and not paying tribute anyways?

The Mad Madam has managed to take advantage of my kindness since the "roof damage" incident, but I'm constantly ever vigilant against her black magic. Another time she managed to get me to haul all of her trash off for free because she was sick with a bladder infection from drinking nothing but soda religiously. Somehow that translated to me hauling off all of the Who's garbage to include the Chicken Liver's due to her association with the lesbian Who. I even offered to haul off her trash every week, when I haul ours off, if she would only start recycling. In this county it's commingled recycles as well, so it's just two separate containers that you need. Paper and cardboard is one and glass/aluminum/plastic is the other. The Mad Madam Mine, shitty Matriarch of Whoville declined my offer on account of she couldn't be bothered with that liberal douchary practice of recycling. She'd continue hauling off her own trash, thank you very much, and don't get any of that liberal douchary on me.

I meant to go into the story of Mordred and Tina LeFay Spencer, and ended up being sidetracked in more Whoville Who's weedy growth of conivationing conivations somehow. I don't know, maybe it's therapy for me to tell it. The world needs to know how shitty the Who's are...what can I say. The storm had passed and wrecked a lot of my labor. The house was a wreck on the inside from having leaves and various other outsidery tracked in after the storm. Two maple tree branches a good eight to ten inches in diameter and 20 to 30 feet long snapped off and took flight in our front yard due to that storm as well. Luckily they blew to the south therefore missing our house just to the east and 20 feet away from the tree. The two branches flew about fifty yards before stopping just at the fence that surrounds the perimeter of our property. Another foot or so and we would have been paying a lot of money to replace the chain link fence that would have been demolished.

The next day I got up and saw my wife off to Charlotte where she had a wedding to photograph. Aunt Bee informed me that her brother Mordred and his family were going to be showing up to take her to lunch. There relationship is a very unfortunate one. Mordred has been sucking on her bank account tit like a feral leech for quite some time now. His main excuse is his daughter. She is 18 years old now, miraculously, seeing as how she had her pituitary gland removed when she was around eight years old. I had met Mordred, Tina, and their daughter Rapunzel a couple of times in the past. I had gone to their home for a thanksgiving shortly after my wife and I started dating. This was one of the only Spencer events I can remember all of the Spencer's together. They don't even like each other, so it's rare to have them all together. In fact, it hasn't happened since and that was around eight years ago. At any rate, I wasn't particularly impressed with either Mordred or Tina. I thought Mordred was kind of a push over wussy who was just more pathetic and miserable than anything. I thought Tina was exceptionally annoying and superficially nice, and not very good at either. I just chalked them both up to being shaped into who they were by their tragic daughter Rapunzel's plight.

Rapunzel Spencer is unfortunate all around. She has no friends and her parents have kept her confined to their home her entire life. She's been home schooled by her witch of a mother Tina leFay. Due to her pituitary gland being removed at a young age she has had little to no growth. Her body is that of a 10 year old, and any growth that she has achieved has been due to hormone therapy. She's quite difficult to be around due to her social awkwardness due to her lack of interaction with the world outside of their twisted home. Luckily for this tragic lot they have Jebus to take them by the hand and lead them to heaven. How you worship Jebus and Satan at the same time I'm still trying to figure out. I guess it doesn't have to make sense, but seeing how this is the beginning of page five, I'll have to get into that in the next segment of the Whoville Chronicles.

Spencer Crazy

There is another human element to this story and it's what my wife and I have dubbed the "Spencer Crazy." The Spencer's are my mother-in-law's family making Aunt Bee a Spencer by blood. There are two brothers and two sisters. My wife's mother was the youngest. The most dysfunctional (well maybe not the most, but the family is so dysfunctional that you'd really be splitting hairs to try and figure out an order of dysfunction) aspect of the family is that they don't talk about what's bothering them directly. They either don't talk about it and let it boil to a psychotic breaking point, or they talk about it by talking around it, hinting at it in code, then denying it when you figure it out. It's an infectious psychosis that will drive you mad if you aren't constantly on guard. Now I've never had any official psychological training, but I've always had an ability with it. People have always decided to confide their problems in me, and so I've learned a good bit about psychology over the years. I've read books and dabbled in quasi shrink rolls like tending bar and dealing with the highest level of human tragedy imaginable on the streets. Ever told somebody that there obviously dead spouse that's lying on the roadway with the mandible showing and one leg over their head after hitting a truck head on while joy riding on their Harley one fine Sunday afternoon, 100 yards from their bike, is dead? It takes a certain psychological ability.

Back to the Spencer crazy. My wife was brought up in a house where you didn't talk about your problems...you ignored them. That's what her parents did, and I suppose that has a lot to do with why her father blew his brains out with a 30 aught 6 in their garage during Wendy's senior year of college. Not talking about your issues has been the largest challenge for my wife and I. My mother brought me up in such a way that we didn't go to sleep until whatever source of contention was dealt with...I consider that a healthy way to be, as does my wife...but a lifetime of being taught dysfunction doesn't dislodge over night. Aunt Bee is infected with this type of dysfunction, but her meds help a bit. Aunt Bee broke the mold and that's why the family considers her crazy. Aunt Bee was much older than Susan, Wendy's mother. In fact Aunt Bee left the psycho Spencer house while Wendy's mother was a small child and never looked back. A bit of background on the starting place of the Spencer crazy may be in order here.

Grandpa Spencer might have been mad before WW2, but he most certainly was afterwords. While there he suffered some shrapnel to the brain and actually never had it removed. Whether this contributed to the cat of 14 tails that he used to beat his children with we will never know since he died quite some time ago. At any rate, the cat of 14 tails, best we can determine from some of Aunt Bee's stories, was not the worst of it, but I'll leave it at that. We've asked Aunt Bee about it, but she has compartmentalized her childhood. Basically we can dislodge information by getting her to talk about it, and things come out of her mind about the past that she has forgotten about. Horrible things, and I can tell that she isn't listening to herself while she is telling it. She can't because the memories are too painful, but the meds let her tell it while keeping herself at a safe distance...I suppose. There are things about my wife's childhood that I won't even write about out of respect for her. Suffice it to say that Grandpa Spencer was an evil, psychotic man, and he infected all of his children as well as his wife with it. It's oozed down through the years and his children infected their children. My wife is having to do the hard work it takes to stop this cycle. She has an overwhelming need to have a large family because she wants to experience a loving one, and I have no problems abiding that wish because I want the same. I was an only child, and Wendy's sister is ten years younger, pretty much making her an only child. We want our son to have siblings.

I'll give one more example of how fucked up this family is to sum up the Spencer crazy for now. Wendy's mother, Susan Spencer, has seen her only grandson, Ayden Zen, less than my mother who lives on the other side of the country. My entire family is in California, we live in South Carolina. When we were in Suck Hill we were 70 miles away from Susan. Now we are 8 miles away from her house, but she drives within five miles of us on her way home from her job at the Super Walfart where she moves boxes all day long. She has been to our home in Whoville, her older sister's home, three times since we have been here. The first was because we brought some of her crap from her house to here and I needed help unloading it due to weight. Her boyfriend of the last six years or so, a redneck with long hair and a white beard named Rick James (this is the man's actual name), had to help, and so she came to the house. The second time was because we invited her over for some home cooking. The third time was for Ayden's second birthday. The fact that she has no desire to see her first born child's son, making him her first and only grandchild, has made me pretty much no longer give a shit about her. I just can't understand why you would not want to spend time with your only grandchild. My mother flies from California to SC at least twice a year for 10 days at a time to see her only grandchild. I understand that Susan has had a traumatic life, but we are all responsible for ourselves. It's not acceptable to me that she wants nothing to do with her grandson.

Let me sum up what Spencer crazy is so that we can move on. Due to the fact that talking about what's wrong is not possible, and therefore asking questions about what's going on is not possible, the only thing that's left is assumption, speculation, and pure untrue fiction. The way it works is something is said, and then it's taken the wrong way due to internal assumptions, and can't be talked about, and therefore spirals out of control into a psychotic mess. I end up having no idea what the fuck is going on, but because I was raised to continue with a problem until it's dealt with, I go into my own madness. I imagine it's like a boarder collie trying to herd water coming out of a garden hose. Now I have to try to figure out what exactly the problem is, which is usually figuring out where the assumption started so that I can root it out and expose it to light. Fortunately Wendy has recognized this dysfunctional aspect of her personality and has begun the work of stopping it. The fact that I have a hint of Aspergers doesn't help matters much either. I don't feel emotionally about these things, just logically. This makes me very good at arguing, but blind to her feelings, which results in me always "winning" any dispute. This doesn't help matters any. However, this story is not about my wife and I's marital disputes on account of our psychological issues, it's about Whoville and our experience in it. I just use this aspect of our story to illustrate how deeply the Spencer crazy has burrowed. There is no telling where it started. Aunt Bee was the first Spencer we know of to dislodge herself from the crazy. My wife is the second. However Aunt Bee checked out a while back and ended up medicated. I'll tell her story now.

While Aunt Bee was in high school she was made to work at a gas station by her parents. She would get done with school and go to work. She would get home around nine or ten at night and have to do her homework. There would be no supper for her when she got home. That's just one of the layers of cruelty that abounded in that hell house. She learned that there would be no supper for her when she got home so she began buying herself a milkshake on the way home and that was what she ate before bed. This was her only comfort, sugar. This is why when she gets sick now, she eats nothing but ice cream and drinks nothing but Coke, and I mean from morning to night, waking to sleeping. Sometimes she would suffer the wrath of Grandpa Spencer's cat of 14 tails when she got home, and sometimes she would watch Susan get her ass beat. Their mother would just abide this behavior so as not to get her ass beat I'm sure. To make matters worse, when Aunt Bee got paid, the money was taken by her parrents.

This was what Aunt Bee's high school years were like. Naturally she stayed away from the house as much as possible. As soon as she graduated from high school she was gone, and this goes a long way towards explaining her dysfunctional relationship with her younger sister Susan. Aunt Bee feels guilty for leaving her in that hell house, and Susan hates her for it (although she doesn't know that's why she hates Aunt Bee, she just hides behind "she's crazy" and leave it at that) but she continued to work at the gas station as a clerk. Eventually she married an older man because he bought her things. Mink coats were her favorite, and she developed a taste for the finer things...needful things. Her first marriage lasted a year. She was pretty much a trophy wife. She was beautiful, in her 20's, and married to a successful business man in his late 50's. He kept her in an apartment while he was gone, but she had money to buy her fur coats and jewelry. However, he got sick with lung cancer from chain smoking and began developing lots of debt for some unknown reason. Their marriage broke up just as soon as it began. It lasted just over a year. She divorced him and was rewarded a small fortune which she promptly blew on a car and her needful things. It was back to the gas station for her.

19 years went by and there she was, working at the Spinx. It got to where she was working 16 and 18 hour days 7 days a week. Why? I guess because when they called her she didn't say no for fear of losing her job. She's told us that it was common for her to get home at 1 in the morning from working since 6 only to be called back in at 3 in the morning. She began developing sleep problems like insomnia and restless leg syndrome. They kept on squeezing all of the blood from that turnip relentlessly. Eventually she got hauled into jail for the sale of alcohol to a minor. This type of thing doesn't bode well for a divorcee female in the hypocritical belt of the south. She kept on with the impossible work schedule all the way to the inevitable psychological breaking point. We're not sure what happened exactly, but it has something to do with her and a knife and a certain family member. Aunt Bee just knows that when it happened she had been up for three days without sleep. The sleep deprivation psychoses landed her a stay in the nut house. Since then she has been considered crazy by the crazy Spencer family. She has also been pretty heavily medicated ever since.

Shortly before the break, however, John Who showed up at her gas station and asked her to marry him. As aunt Bee put's it "God sent me my sweet baby John to take care of me." Just like that. She knew who he was, but only as a customer of the gas station. He was building a new home (the one we are living in now) and he was very proud of it. He showed her the plans for the home, in the gas station, as part of his strategy to win her hand. He needed a wife to complete his American dream. Aunt Bee said yes. A year into their marriage the house was hit by lightning and nearly burned to the ground. The home owners insurance should have replaced the modular home with a new one, but insurance being insurance, they took the cheaper road most frequently traveled and hired sub contractors to rebuild, thus creating many irritating nuances to this house (like a hood vent over the stove that blows hot air back into the kitchen because the ventilation pipe wasn't installed). Shortly after the lightning strike John was diagnosed with Parkinson's and began his 18 year descent. Eventually she asked her beloved John if she could quit her job, he said "yes," and she was rewarded a "disabled" qualification from the government along with a check. However, none of this stopped the two from loving each other immensely. Maybe Aunt Bee is right and God did send John to her.

These are the two strands that weave a healthy helping of insanity into our Whoville experience. When we're not dealing with the greedy blood sucking vulture Who's, were dealing with some aspect of the Spencer crazy, and often we are dealing with them simultaneously. The good news is that perseverance can outlast misery's love of company, and we are finding that out now. This also concludes the "getting to know you" aspect of this story. All of the actors have been met, the stage has been set, and the Black Snake, a foreboding foreshadow, has been slain. The chickens are safe in the coop and the garden has been sown and has since began sprouting. The Who's have been making themselves a nuisance to us, but nothing we can't handle diplomatically. I'm in my man cave planing my permaculture heaven, and my wife is off out of town making good money to take pictures. The dead Grandpa Spencer is not happy with me. Misery loves company, and he's got one last lashing from the grave with his cat of 14 tails to dish out. This is where the Satan worshiping southern baptist that I wrote of at the end of Black Snake Drone makes his appearance known. But you'll have to wait for the next installment to find out who his crazy ass is.

Peak Oil in the Mainstream?

Just saw this news article while checking my email.  It seems that Sandy is forcing the issue.  I expect there will be a lot of people waking up to the reality of a civilization that has painted itself into a corner by requiring a limited resource on a finite planet for its existence.  I wonder if there are other stories similar to this one out there in mainstream hologram land?  I'd go looking but it's not worth it to me.  One must limit one's exposure to the hologram so as to not get sucked back.  Anyways, here's the yahoo news link.  I figured I'd share it now before it gets pulled due to too much truth being reported. 



Here's the last two write ups from the article.  It reads like PO fiction.

DENVILLE, N.J.—The temperatures are dropping and tempers are flaring here in northern New Jersey.

Residents are siphoning gas out of parked car. Gas lines stretch seemingly for miles. As fast as I help one friend find gas, there are three more in a panic that they can't find gas! This will certainly be compounded as the temperatures will be in the high 20s tonight and a winter storm capable of bringing snow is scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday. People in New Jersey are losing their cool

Police are monitoring the gas stations up here in Morris County as people cut lines and tempers flare. My sister watched two men fist-fight over line-cutting last night at a gas station in Parsippany.

— Gioia Degenaars
Why the mess? Have we not learned anything?
BRIDEWATER, N.J.—We got power back Thursday evening, but parts of my neighborhood are still without power. Five days have gone by and this level of response and action is very lackluster and frustrating.
There are long lines for gas. My husband has to travel 45 miles each way to get to work, and he is running on half a tank of gas. He has been looking to fill up since Wednesday, but no luck. He can't even find air for the tires.
And there are people who are driving up to Pennsylvania to get gas. It's easily a 50- to 55-mile trek. If you are already low on gas, even that trek is impossible. How many can afford to skip work because they are low on gas?

Then you hear about the situation in Staten Island and parts of Manhattan: It just adds to the frustration people are already feeling. I have heard many, even the usually laissez-faire folks, ask questions about why there is no talk about alternative energy sources and energy back-up plan for the country and for other states.

It is hard to believe that we are in this situation after living through 9/11 and Katrina. Have we not learned anything?

— Bhumika Ghimire

  "Have we not learned anything?"  Apparently not.  First you need to wake up to the lie you've been spoon fed by the hologram.   Then you need to learn some elementary awareness.  Infinite growth on a finite planet does not work well.  I'd like to hope that the people suffering from Sandy will open up their eyes and let the truth in, but I'm too pessimistic to believe that...even on my most optimistic day. 

Meet the Whos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Standby...Authenticating

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Who's Who of the Whoville's own Whos

When I resigned from the Matrix I had a plan that was pretty simple. My plan was to grow as much food as possible (using permaculture principles that I had yet to learn), keep some animals, and take care of my son, wife, aunt in-law, and self. This fall marks the fourth season that we have been here on this domestic homesteading expedition outside the bounds of the American hologram. We've had mostly successes but the cost has not been free. There has been no shortage of craziness and much psychological warfare with those who have not been happy to have us around. I had no idea what I was getting into with this particular situation...although I thought I had one at the outset. I was wrong. I've decided to do a series of posts about the journey thus far. This is the second of those posts. I don't know how many entries it will take, but I'll try to keep each one around 3 or four pages long.

It's unfortunate that a career that I'm perfect for has been ruined by corporate/government bureaucracy. When I started work as an EMT, I was certain that EMS was the life for me. Nothing that I saw in the field in the eight years I was on the meat wagon gave me pause for longer than a day or two. I was impervious to the gore and high tragedy an EMT must witness. Even now, when I see an ambulance, I miss it. It's ironic that dead babies, amputated limbs, body decompositions, and complete disrespect from the majority of our clientele had nothing on the amount of stress that was generated in me due to bureaucracy. In fact, the bureaucracy brought me to the point of near insanity. It was either medicate on fukitol or quit my job. I medicated on fukitol because I had a wife, one year old, and a house to pay for. My wages paid all of our household bills. There was no feasible way out until my wife came home from a Christmas visit to our hometown. While she was there her aunt Bee offered my wife a place for us to live if we ever needed it.

Every family is dysfunctional, but my wife's is exceptionally so (and she'd tell you the same). This is what I knew about her aunt before we moved here. I knew that she had been married to her husband, John Who, for 19 years and that he had passed about a year before we were to move in. I knew that Wendy's (Wendy is my wife) family considered aunt Bee to be crazy. I had met her a few times in the nine years I had known my wife, and I had no reason to believe that she was crazy. I knew she was on psychological meds. These days all that means is that she's been seen by a general practitioner who's protocol is to increase his big pharma kickback money. I also knew that she was Christian but doesn't go to church because she can't afford the 10% of her income tithe her preacher requires of the members (it's not the preachers fault that the bible requires this of it's followers). Because the family considered her to be crazy, and therefore never talked about her other than to say that she's crazy, my wife knew very little about aunt Bee herself. What I knew was from a couple of conversations with her over the last nine years. Suffice it to say, I knew little to jack. I especially knew nothing about the people in her life (which has been the source of nearly all our frustration). My understanding was that she was dying of loneliness and grief from her recently passed husband. This was true on one level. That level was the first of many.

We decided that before I put in my resignation it would be a good idea to go pay aunt Bee a visit just to make sure we wouldn't uncover anything we couldn't live with. It was January of 2011 when we went to Whoville, where aunt Bee lived. The visit was mostly too good to be true, but we had made a decision to follow our bliss and just chalked it up to that. What I saw was 50 acres or so directly behind the house of pasture. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Aunt Bee informed us that it was all in the family and that 14 acres of it belonged to her dead husbands brother, Jack Who. It all belonged to Aunt Bee and her husband before he died, but he left only the house and a fenced in two acres to his wife. The rest of the land was left to his brother and son. Aunt Bee informed us that we shouldn't fool with the land belonging to John Who's son, Tater Who. She informed us that Tater Who was the type of man whom opened a credit card in his father's name, while his father was on his death bed, to the tune of 10,000 dollars with no intention of ever paying it back. However, Jack Who was a good man, and he would have no problem with us tending his land. I couldn't believe what I was being told. I had 16 acres of land at my disposal to do with what I wished. I started plans to keep goats and chickens. To further add to the layer of unbelievable good fortune, aunt Bee informed us that we would need to pay no rent or utilities. She owned the house and two acres outright and only had to pay 100 dollars a year in taxes. Due to John Who retiring from the Airforce as a Master Sergeant, and her disability check, money was not an issue. This meant that my wife and I would have to come up with 600 dollars a month to pay our bills. It looked like everything was falling into place for me to drop out, resign from the matrix, and homestead. We went back to Suck Hill, where our house is, and I turned in my resignation followed by signing up for a cutting edge permaculture program in Ashville NC for the spring.

We were prepared to simply walk away from our house. I wasn't going to stay in a job I couldn't remain working without fukitol just because of a mortgage. We decided that my being present and unmedicated for our family was more important than good credit. However, we weren't going to just leave it without at least trying. My wife posted our house for rent on FB and within one day we had renters. One of my wife's colleagues had a daughter that was in her early 20's and just out of her first trimester. Her baby daddy was trying to do the right thing by manning up and getting a job and a home for them so that they could leave their parents homes. He had no credit and her's was destroyed due to medical bills for cervical problems. It would seem that the baby was a miracle baby seeing as how she was not supposed to be able to conceive. They were unable to find anyone that would rent to them without a very hefty nonrefundable deposit. All we wanted was for them to pay the mortgage. They joyfully agreed and so it was. We knew we were taking a risk with them due to their age and lack of experience in life, but we were prepared to walk away and it seemed like a much better path to take. So he looked me in the eyes and agreed to rent for a year and we shook hands on it.

I didn't start packing up our house until after my last day of work. When we got married in 2006 we didn't even have enough stuff to fill a one bedroom apartment. We had to buy a couch to put in the apartment. We lived in that apartment just at a year before we bought our house. We lived in our house for five years and my wife managed to fill just about every inch of available space with stuff. You have no idea how much shit you have until you start packing to move. While I packed our house up my wife busied herself with hustling all of our junk via a local network of rednecks on facebook called "Just junkin'." I was amazed at the amount of money she made selling shit that we had laying around our yard. The last meet that she went to she managed to make 500 dollars off of junk, some of which was literally laying in our yard having been forgotten about. She must have had a secret portal to another dimension that she housed all of this junk in because I had never seen half of it. I didn't even know we had this stuff. Five years of thrift stores, Goodwill, photography business equipment, plus a consignment business where she took photography props and supplies from local photographers and sold it for a percentage, stuff that had simply been given to her, stuff she pulled out of dumpsters and off of the side of the road, and most importantly stuff from the galaxy's stuff generator. I thought I was going to lose my mind trying to get all of this junk 70 miles down the road to our new home.

Let me just say that it was a good thing I was keeping myself on a strict drug regimen to keep my mind limber (cigarettes, coffee, alcohol, and marijuana to be precise). It's been eight months since the move and we still have shit in the attic and our garage back in Suck Hill. A large part of my job has been organizing and stowing all of the junk that we have since started calling "inventory," due to my wife's gypsy magic abilities. I suppose she knew something I didn't while she was amassing all of this junk. We make a good team because I am hyperOCDanized where organization is concerned and she is not. However, I hate money, and it hates me, but it loves her. She gets the money freely and I organize it. Without me, she'd spend the money on more junk and therefore have no money, but without her I would just have no money. Together we usually get what we need. In the next post we'll take a closer look at the inner workings of my corner of Palookaville known as "Whoville."