The simple life

Yea, well anyway...

Hey S.H.,

Something you said here about a week ago reminded me of something I said to one of my sons and his friends. I was answering some of their questions about living a simple life.
I said, "For the most part, life (or living) is easier in the city and simpler in the country." What do think?

Peace,
poor_old_dad

 

I'll answer for the Virgin Cow-- she's probably either running a trot-line or whipping on some biker dudes.


If one has plenty of money, it's easier living in the city: no electrical outages (everything's underground), buy your meals, landlord pays utilities (after, of course, you pay him extra in rent), stores are open 24-7, no grass to mow, no snow to shovel-- all one has to do is mind one's business and stay out of the ghettos. Looking fabulous doesn't hurt, either; but I'm at the age where just looking presentable works. I know-- I lived in both SF and NYC.

Now, it's not easier nor simpler living in the country-- I also know: I lived in the country for 54 of my 59 years. Do you think making home-made scrapple or sauerkraut is easy? Butchering deer and steers? Driving 10 miles for a pizza? Doing without REAL Chinese food? Hell, no!

But, it is cheaper, especially if you already have your property paid for and heat with wood.

That's assuming one doesn't let some sex-starved, cigarette- smoking, beer-drinking 39 year-old woman into one's house who wants a baby! ( I was spending close to $35 a week on condoms!) On second thought, I should have bought them by the gross.

Oh, well! Condoms are cheaper than babies, but not as much fun, though one still has to change them.

 

man i make sure my sex starved women are std fre an have there tubes tied before i let them in my house,, saves 140 bucks a month..

an im only 41,, geeze thudly,,when ya gonna grow up??

 

HippieHillBilly-- I'm like Peter Pan-- I'll NEVER GROW UP!


Of course, I ain't Peter Pan-- I'll die.

BUT, I'll always think when I go to bed, sober or drunk, that I'll live forever.

Isn't it amusing, these lies we tell to ourselves?

 

Sloth Outta Here!

 

Sloth, love--- my ex-wife went through the same shit that you did. She lived; so will you. Colitis, I think it was called-- she lives. So, shall you.

Of course, I got mucho pussy from my wife and mother of four kids-- will you, love-dear, give me anything resembling mucho-snatch?

Aie, aie, aie: what a drunken, nasty man I am,!

I apoligize.

Now! LET'S GET DRUNK! (Pass out and sing Hank Williams and Ernie Tubb,)

 

only problem living in the country is the time it takes to go to the store .......and it's only a mile away ....oh well by the time i get back i know who's sick and how this years crops are going to be doing and just about every other juicy tidbit of information about what goes on in town .........never let it be said that the town folks here are aloof ...lol

 

Money makes all the difference in the world. With it you can live comfortable anywhere. But to me money doesn't bring experience, just trappings.

Living in a place that is all hustle and bustle makes it hard to find any peacefullness. The most excitement I've seen around here is when the neighbor's pig got loose last week and they tried to run it into a trash can to catch it.

Now where in the city can you see something like that. Or the farm alarm, now here's a treat. At 6;45 am every morning my cute little ass goes off. He gives us all an HEEHAWW HEEEEHAWWW for about ten minutes. Now iffen you have never heard a donkey bray, well it would scare a city slicker to death and has..heh heh..

POD I'm so glad to hear your doing so well, I was worried a little when you were not posting, glad to see you back

Brightest Blessings
sh

 

I remember the back to the land mood, and I was part of it, but never could afford land! Frustrating. Money makes a difference! We've lived on farms etc but did not own. Recenly we aquired our own land. Its great! but I would not be able to do it anymore the hard way, not at my age. I want indoor plumbing! LOL And toilets! And electric lights! So call me what one may, this is how I can do it as I age - and its the deer outside make it worth it, the organic gardening we are finally starting, the calmness that has finally come to my significant other. Maybe we aren't doing it the way hippies are suppose to do it (roughing it, or doing 'only' that which is natural), but we are doing it! It feels great!

 

Hey. I'm all for creature comforts. You don't have to live in a cave to be hip, it's a state of mind.
I'm 55 and I sure don't want to regress into living in the stone age.. well not that stone age anyway.. heh heh..
We live off the land, but we live in a house with all the modern facilities. When we camp tho we are in the midsts of living in the wild. After a few weeks roughing it in wild I am glad to be home where I can soak my bones in a tub of Hot water and lushes essential oils.
I have grown accoustom to spoiling myself with the easy life. I think I have earned to right to kick back and enjoy life while I still can. Kids are raised and just me and the hubby.. life is Grand.
Brightest Blessings.
sh

 

Stone age lol, good one! Yeah, I can't do that anymore, tho did at the time and it was fun!

I agree its being a hippy is all a state of mind, but seems to need to be verbalized. Anyway, don't care what way it happened, just that it happened.

Essential oils are wonderful! Expensive tho. Want to grow my own herbs on the land. Wonder how hard it is to make my own EO's?

We just got our land this year so its all in the process. Hope we can get a full garden in soon.

 

http://www.boulderrelocalization.org/documents/Relocalization%20and%20Community.pdf

 

"The requested URL /documents/Relocalization and was not found on this server."

Hey, Gate, ya might want to check that link.

Peace,
poor_old _dad

 

Thanks dad,fixed it.Try it again.

 

Very, very interesting reading. Thanks Gate.

Peace,
poor_old_dad

 

The Coming Islamic Superpowers?

This weekend, our so-called leaders finally began using words like "crisis" to describe the oil-powered shotgun we Americans have stuck in our mouths. Many indications are that we've crossed the point of "peak oil" worldwide, and production is now diminishing by a couple percent per year. (According to the IEA, oil production is now in decline in 33 of the 48 largest oil-producing countries.) Couple this with skyrocketing global demand, and whether you think we have ten years or one hundred years of supply remaining, it means one thing for prices: an upward trendline until it is gone.

And we Americans, while good at many things, are not so good at planning ahead. So, we are likely to keep doing what we've been doing: driving our SUVs, full of cases of cheap Chinese goods, along our sprawly commuter routes from our well-lit downtown workplaces to our ARM-financed suburban homes until the music stops. I am not an economist, so I don't know quite when the model "breaks" - but my hunch is that it's closer to $100 a barrel than $200, and no matter where the breaking point is, we stand closer to it than we ever have.

I'd like to propose an idea that doesn't seem to be in very broad circulation at the moment: the massively empowering effect of the imminent acceleration of wealth transfer from western societies to smaller Islamic nations such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, UAE and Kuwait. Depending on the depth of supply, their relatively small populations will benefit much more than they have in decades past. This new wealth is capable of fueling unparalleled economic and technological growth and spawning major new social, economic and military powers on a scale never before found in that part of the world. We are now seeing new military glimmers of this in Iran, and it is not stoppable.

There's been a great deal of chatter about China as the world's "next superpower", and it certainly has the population and potential to support it. But for this particular transfer of wealth, China is serving more as a moneychanger. Their own ballooning energy needs are forcing them to send their money (and ours) in the same direction - to the Middle East.

Well before the unstoppable price of oil wreaks havoc on the indolent American way of life, we will - like the addicts we are - continue to pay the going price for it until we drive off the economic cliff that supports our ability to do so. We have no other choice. Therefore, the incredible amounts of wealth that will find their way from Western economies into the coffers of sheikdoms and Islamic theocracies will make recently-bemoaned US oil company profits look like small change.

This could force the United States into an unenviable socioeconomic and military position. Having exported most of our wealth, and ultimately seeing the dollar's back broken by the inevitable Euro-based oil trading we're dying to prevent, we might no longer have the resources to outgun, outsmart, or outthink the rest of the world. Our ego will have some adjusting to do.

As a result of all this, more than one of these Islamic nations could ultimately emerge as nuclear and economic superpowers; several will become new centers of gravity for culture, the arts and technology; and their governments (elected or endowed) will wield more global power than they ever have before.

And how ironic would it be if this transfer of wealth enabled these nations and their young startup companies to engineer viable, sustainable ways out of the fossil fuel mess before the lights really do go out?
Posted by anthony at 04:14 PM | TrackBack (0)
tags: energy oil

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Great post. This is why we must start moving towards sustainable energy.
Posted by: Jason Gooljar | May 1, 2006 05:36 PM

The catch-22 though, Jason, is that if we create a sustainable energy solution and thus free ourselves and the world from oil, then the global demand for US dollars (which are the only way to pay for oil now, and thus must be held by every nation in the world that wants to buy oil), will plummet. If the demand for dollars plummets, so does their value, and the US system based on consumer and government borrowing collapses.

In essence, the dollar is no longer gold-backed, it is oil-backed; which has been better for us. Foreign lenders who had accumulated dollars through our voracious borrowing could redeem their dollar notes not at the US central bank for stagnant gold bars, but for constantly-consumed oil, which is the lifeblood of every economy. With no need for the oil that backs dollars, there is no demand for dollars, and the mighty greenback quickly begins to become more like the lowly peso. Indeed, the very pro-US IMF is already now recommending that the dollar should suffer a devaluation to get things back in balance. To oversimplify, if the value of the dollar drops by 50%, we as a nation can only afford to buy half as much stuff as we do now. Could you live on half your present salary? Could your church, school, municipality survive with half their present budgets? What does America look like then?

Just as we can't afford to have Euro-based oil trading, we can't afford to have oil replaced by people creating their energy locally from non-commodity-market-controlled sources like sun, wind, waves, etc. If they do, our currency withers and we can no longer afford our powerful military, our brilliant universities, our excellent roads, power, water, and telecom infrastructure, our schools, our well-paid jobs, our vibrant housing and mortgage market...

Are you willing to sacrifice the wealthy, safe America we know for a world living on sustainable energy? Our boys aren't dying in Iraq for oil, they're dying for the very survival of the dollar, and thus, the United States.

We're out on a crumbling ledge, and rushing to renewables will just crumble it faster. Believe me, if the world finds an alternative to oil, the US will become extinct far, far faster than the polar bear. Is that a price you are willing to pay?

For reference, just google things like "Euro oil bourse", "IMF dollar devaluation", etc. You have to be able to read some academic texts above a four-grade reading level, but the sobering information is there.

For an easy read summarizing it all, you can start with The Proposed Iranian Oil Bourse By Krassimir Petrov. A touch viscerally America-bashing in his closing paragraph, but otherwise a very imformative primer on the issue.
Posted by: Harry DuBois | May 2, 2006 03:14 AM

 

We live in the pines on an island off the East coast with five cats and have our own small business to support ourselves. I don't even like going near the city, anymore, and my husband never did. I'm not so simple, though, as you can see by my presence here on the internet. Still, I think we can keep it down even with technology around.

We don't ask or expect much, some people can't understand that, but to each their own.

 

I grew up in the country and lived in the country until about 11 years ago. My wife decided that we should live in town to benefit our two girls in school, activities etc. (town is a state of mind...3500 people)

We drew water from a cistern for the first two years after my dad bought the farm that I grew up on. Then he bought a cistern pump from Sears and we had cold running water to the kitchen. The other facilities were outside. We had our first indoor toilet when I turned 11 years old and I vividly remember burning the old shitter down. We had two milk cows, grew a huge garden and raised a couple of hogs every year. We burned wood and I remember having an almost cronic case of poison ivy from cutting wood and working in the brush until my "indian" great uncle came down and gave me the cure...thought I was going to die from that but it worked and I am still immune to poison ivy. Prior to that we used biled ironweed root to put on the rash...no ivy dry or trips to the doctor. We worked hard but it was a good life.
After living in town for about a year I decided that I didn't like "town." I couldn't move again but that is when I started planting bamboo. My back yard is surrounded by 35' tall bamboo leaving me in an oassis in town where there is no town. I sure miss the farm though.

 

After having lived both THE SIMPLE LIFE, which is how I grew up, and YUPPYVILLE for a short space of time, I am back to the simple life, surrounded by grandkids ,and dogs,and cats and rabbits and guine pigs and chickens and planting and canning and hanging wash out to dry and trying to save what crops I can from the elements, and battling the dirt for my kitchen floor!!!!
BUT I LOVE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

land iz the mozt xpencive thing on earth.