Watched a documentary last night. Fierce Light. It was produced by Velcrow Ripper who also did Scared Sacred. He’s Canadian, born in Gibsons, BC. Good cinematographer. Last name is really ‘Ripper’. ‘Velcrow’, I am not so sure about.

Anyway, his doc was about the ‘Occupy’ movement before it was called the ‘Occupy’ movement. Seems the whole civil disobedience thing goes back a long ways (duh!). But, somehow, he managed to convey the difference between a Ghandi or MLK-led peaceful march and a real no-name-leader protest. I don’t think he saw his documentary as the beginning of the ‘OCCUPY’ movement but, from this perspective, it seems that way.

Seems (for him, anyway) it started in Oaxaca, Mexico. Seems the people got ‘mad as hell’ and ‘occupied’ the city centre for a few weeks. No real leaders. No real message. Just ‘we’re mad as hell!’

And that was 2006. Mind you, I seem to recall that the Bolivians did the same thing over water some years before that. It is hard to say when a local protest morphs into a provincial one and then again into a national and international one.

It is definitely media determined. But what is it that the media needs before they see the writing on the wall?

Interesting, don’t you think?

I watch this kind of stuff because I still have a few drops of activist in me. Not much. Just a bit. I’d rather write my protest than actually paint myself in fake blood and stand on a street yelling slogans and waving signs. That just ain’t my style. I’m not photogenic enough, anyway. But the sentiment is the same. Kinda.

I was ‘that way’ back in the 70’s. I got involved. Protested. A little. But I was always more inclined to protest for change from within the structure than from without. Seemed like a good way to get in on the inside. Start there. And so I did. I got to the epicentre of local politics and even provincial politics briefly but I burnt out. The work was intense, the politics unfathomably stupid and immoral and there was always daily proof that one person CAN’T make a difference. It got depressing after 12 years. And I got depressed.

So, I left and did other things.

But, ya know, if you’ve got a dissent gene, it will continue to show up. It’s in your make-up. And I can’t deny it, I’m a whiner. May as well face it and proceed to complain as I am so inclined. Plenty of material to work with. I’ve tried ‘going with the flow’. It ain’t easy. But I may have found a little trick, thanks to an 82 year old Vietnamese Buddhist monk with an unpronounceable name. He said (and, of course I am paraphrasing),

“Social work is too hard. Burns you out. I would have to meditate more and more just to get enough energy to go back into the battle. It was draining me. I had to find a better way. So, I did. Now I see the battle as having a rhythm all it’s own. It is a ‘being’ I have to get into harmony with. Like a dance partner. I have to be one with the problem. I have to love the problem and all that makes it a problem. Then I can work without getting exhausted. I am no longer resisting it, I am ‘loving it’, instead. I don’t fight it. I dance with it. And that makes it fun and easier to do. Big difference.”

“What the hell does that mean, Dave?”

I dunno. I am just easily influenced by documentaries, I guess. Maybe it’s another genetic trait.

The older you get, the slower your financial understanding or perspective becomes. I think it is clear that we find it harder and harder to process monetary facts of life as we age. Especially since the ground rules are always changing. As a consequence, we are being invisibly nickled-and-dimed to death. There is a design of sorts at work here.

This awareness of my awareness came about by accident. Yesterday, a friend of mine was lamenting the lack of a few thousand dollars in the community chest and I suggested that a grant request be made. After all, all the money requested would only go to materials. No one gets paid to do community work out here.

“Oh, gee. I hate going to the government for a handout. That’s $10,000! It’s a fortune. It’s also demeaning to beg, and anyway, why do we deserve to get a grant? It’s too much!”

OBSERVATION: His morals are in good shape but his financial cognition is impaired. Somehow he continues to think $10,000 is a lot of money. It hasn’t been a lot of money for a very long time. Worse, I was starting to think the same way. We were both ‘founded’ in the past!

But, if you think about it…………..

“You go to the local greasy spoon for breakfast don’t you? The one we all go to in Campbell River because it is cheap, the food is home-made and the ambiance is straight out of a frayed-at-the-edges diner from the fifties?”

“Yep.”

“You and your wife have bacon and eggs and a cup of tea and you find that, somewhat surprisingly, you are leaving behind $25.00 to pay the bill. Right? And you are always a bit shocked that it is so much but, because you are an honest man with a sense of ‘paying as you go’, you pay and leave a tip and try to put it out of your mind, right?”

“Yeah! How did you know we had bacon and eggs and it costs $25.00 with tip?”

“Because we all go there and we all order much the same thing and the price remains the same unless it goes up. Which it always does. Like the BC Ferries. Like White Spot. Little ‘ price increments’ every few months. PLUS HST! They have accountants on it all the time so that they can keep up with the cost of things. You don’t! Your little mental accountant retired a long time ago. In case you haven’t noticed, the cost of things is always increasing, even in recessions (gasoline, taxes, food), and usually much more than the cost of living laughingly stated by the government’s basket-of-goods official price index – AKA the LIE.”

“Yeah. Right! But what is your point?”

“Well, you are retired. Fixed income. Your sense of ‘pricing’ is at least a decade old and most likely two decades old. Your sense of the ‘value of a buck’ is so dated, you’ve lost the ability to know what is a bargain and what is too much to pay. You don’t even know how your ‘buck’ is spent! You certainly don’t know how to comparison shop anymore. Or how a bill works. You are ‘out of it’.

“And because of that – for example – you think a small grant of $10,000 is a lot of money. Well, it used to be. It ain’t no mo’. There are hockey players and actors and criminals and corporate pigs that make $10,000 a minute! Your local government probably spends well in excess of $10,000 an hour every day! Ten thousand dollars is chicken feed nowadays. But it’s not the numbers, it is what it will buy.”

This monetary dissonance, this skewing of perspective, this inability to calculate is a natural part of aging but it is made especially hard these days. These days, they are also messin’ with our heads.

These days things that used to be cheap are expensive and those things that used to be expensive are cheap. Gasoline used to be cheap. A TV used to be expensive. If I do a ‘comparison’ to the seventies, I recall paying $700 for a mediums sized screen TV. That same $700.00 would have bought me in excess of 1000 gallons of gasoline. Today, the value of 1000 gallons of gasoline would buy me five huge home-theatre-sized TVs. The price relativity of things is askew – to my perspective, anyway.

If I buy a slab of steel about 8 inches square that is a simple baffle made for my woodstove (locally made and a crude, small-market item), I will pay $200.00. There is about five dollars worth of steel (maybe) and less than one hour of labour. I can buy a HP mini-computer (notebook) for the same price (high tech, incredible computing power, micro-engineered). How does one compare that apple and orange value-wise?

Of course, that ‘skew’ is especially manifest in electronics and modern appliances and such. But the whole price-relativity perspective has been turned higgledy-piggeldy over the years. We are faced with some things that seem cheap by our ‘sense of value’ and other things that seem ‘outrageous’. Tools are cheap. Restaurant meals are expensive. Prices and expenses don’t seem to have the relativity to one another that they once did and whatever the relativity is today, it seems like it will be different six months from now.

Even a dozen eggs has almost doubled in the last five years.

Bear in mind, too, that pricing is no longer ‘simple’. We used to see a widget for ten bucks and that was the price. Take it or leave it. Now the widget is electronic and you may need to add a ‘service pack’ or a ‘set up fee’ or pay extra for a warranty. Even after all that, you may have to subscribe to a ‘service provider’ so that your widget works.

And let us not forget the taxes, the hidden taxes and the carbon, transportation, and HST taxes that seem to be added willy-nilly. Or the fuel surcharge. I am sure you are aware that airlines are now charging ‘extra’ for taking your luggage, letting you listen to the sound system and for edible food. The sticker price is no longer the pay-at-the-till-price. Not even close.

It is almost impossible to figure out how much per litre I pay for propane delivered by barge. And it is impossible to forecast what I will pay three months from now.

Unless you are ‘in the market’ every day, it is almost impossible to keep up and, if you are older and less involved in day to day activities, your price perspective is very likely all wrong. Old people are not only subject to this strange dynamic, they are very vulnerable to it.

And, if you are ‘on-the-grid’, ‘they’ haven’t even really begun to mess with you yet. The cable companies, BC Hydro, your water. All of these will have surcharges and ‘premium packages’ and use-fees. In addition to the licenses and taxes and other ‘niggling’ charges that add a few percentage points.

You can thank the ‘convenience’ of digital money for much of this. This will blow your mind: most banks don’t even carry much cash anymore. Ya wanna rob somebody? Good luck. The money is all electronic and, as such, all the extra costs are levied without you even knowing.

And you wonder why it is getting harder and harder to make ends meet?

I’m just sayin’………….

Wednesday. ‘Community’ day. That’s the day we seem to choose for ‘doing stuff’ together. The mail plane comes in on Wednesday, the school is in session, yoga is held in the gym or the bunkhouse and any volunteer projects usually get scheduled for that day as well. And, in the summer, the ad hoc café operates from the Freight Shed. It’s a loose system but it seems to work.

This Wednesday, for instance, the public nurses came in and gave us flu shots.

Saturday, however, is the AGM for the community association, SNACA, the epicentre of all things not-supposed-to-be-political. You see, SNACAs main purpose is to care for and manage the community buildings of which there are three. They initiate maintenance and schedule events for those three buildings. That’s supposed to be it. Basically simple and minimal administration of not-so-much.

But SNACA has history, longevity, stature. And SNACA is also the biggest organization out here so other issues of concern to the community were often ‘run through’ the auspices of SNACA and, of course, a building maintenance organization became the teapot in which to hold the latest tempest. SNACA became political. In the past, anyway.

This group of officers changed all that. They re-declared their mandate as ‘buildings-only oriented’ and deferred or referred ‘tempest’ issues to some other ‘cauldron’. And, of course, other ‘cauldrons’ sprang up to fill the void as required. No tempest went unhoused.

Typically, of course, the latest issue gets resolved to the point that nothing more is being done so the ‘cauldrons of current interest’ come and go. But SNACA remains.

It is a good system but for one thing. The ‘cauldrons’ are mostly for issues of concern and conflict. They tend to be a bit negatively oriented. There aren’t too many ‘teapots’ for constructive issues. So, we have a minor vacuum on positive issues.

Which is OK.

Positively speaking, most people are happy as they are and don’t really need some constructive, positive, do-good initiatives like meals-on-wheels or walkathons or bake sales. Generally, the good just happens and no ongoing organization is required.

And where there is a strong positive initiative just bursting to come forth, SNACA has stepped up to be the ‘umbrella’ for such an effort. SNACA was and is the ‘mother’ of the Q-hut, the bunkhouse, the newsletter and, even to a large extent, the Freight Shed Café, just to name a few. The ‘kids’ did the work but SNACA was the parent to it all.

So, for the most part, we are pretty well covered out here, in the way of government. An excellent regional representative, SNACA and a few other groups for all things constructive and splinter groups and cauldrons for everything else. It’s a pretty good system. But weird, when you think about it:

We are mostly governed, such as we are, by the Building Maintenance Department.

It is a stretch, I know, but I am going to try to make a case for why our world is undergoing a quiet revolution as I write.    By ‘our world’, I mean what is commonly referred to as the First World.  Some of the Third and Second worlds are involved as well but they aren’t as quiet about it as we seem to be.  See:  Middle East.  See: Greece.   

‘The times, they are a’changin’.  Radically!

Generally speaking peasants don’t revolt.  They resist.  They run.  They avoid.  They hide.  Peasants are, historically, only driven to armed rebellion by starvation and, even at that, many millions accepted even that horrible fate passively .  See:  The Great Leap Forward (China).  See: Russia.  See: Ethiopia et al.

This ‘peasant peacefulness’ was especially true after the advent of the franchise. Since the vote any collective dissent has been ‘well-managed’ and, with our inherent sense of fairness at work, the results of the inevitably divided vote would be accepted by all and we’d all just ‘carry on’.

Can’t revolt in our system!  It is in the social contract.  That would not be fair!  It is hard to even complain when you and your neighbours had a chance to cast your ballot and the side you supported lost ‘fair and square’.  It is even harder to complain when the side you supported won!

But the parties and the system are corrupt.  That negates the contract.  And I don’t mean: crooked.  That is a sub-category.  I mean the democratic system.  None of us chooses the people who rule us.  Parties choose those people.  There is no democracy.  Not in the true sense of it, anyway.  This recognition of corruption-in-the-process hasn’t officially been stated by the majority of peasants yet in any cohesive or LOUD way.  But it will. Political polarization is a symptom of that.  The OCCUPY movement is yet another hint of it. We are beginning to collectively reject the system.

And I am making the argument that, even though they don’t know they are in resistance, the people are already quietly revolting in a number of ways.  That’s right.  The REVOLUTION is happening right under our very noses.  It is being conducted by us and we don’t even know it!!  Weird, eh?

“How is that possible?  I am a peasant.  Wouldn’t I hear something if all the other peasants were  revolting?”

Not necessarily.  It seems the peasants are revolting on a number of different fronts. None of it organized, little of it is even conscious.  Much of it is invisible.  Still, we are quietly fighting back in our own little ways.

Most of us don’t know that we are partaking in a revolution even though we are.  That is because most of our resistance is passive and benign.  Some of it is private and secret.  Much of it takes the form of apathy and depression.  It definitely takes the form of NOT voting.  But, if you look around, you’ll see more.  And what you’ll see is the peasants revolting in the manner they have always chosen: little steps, little acts, safe protests, quiet rejection, passive resistance.

We are dropping out, seeking alternatives, cheating the system, disregarding it, ignoring their messages.  We no longer believe their message.  We are revolting, resisting, rejecting, avoiding and not engaging in the system that is purported to be our own.  We are opting out of what they say we want.

Think about it…………

We’ve lost respect for our institutions, even the media

We’ve lost respect for our poiticians

We’ve even lost respect for the RCMP

We are angry.

For example: Referendums almost always result in rejection of the proposal.  See:  California.  See:  BC.  Is that because the proposals are always bad?  No!  Greece’s economic reform proposals are supposedly ‘good’ but their referendum will likely reject it.  The HST in BC was perceived by many ‘experts’ as better economically but we rejected it anyway.  Why?  Because we were mad at the government and wanted to tell them that we were mad.

Voting for the red party or the blue party just doesn’t do that for us.  So we reject referendums as a safe way to rebel.  It’s a protest.  These are not rejections of ‘political positions’, they are rejections of the government.

Wait!  There’s more.  People cheat on their taxes more than ever.  They try NOT to pay if they can avoid it.  Ask almost any citizen and they’ll say, “I pay taxes but I am not happy.  I’d stop paying if I could.  I am afraid to cheat but, if I could safely avoid paying tax, I would!”  That is an attitude of passive resistance.  But when they actually succeed in NOT paying a tax, that is active resistance.

People are buying local and organic.  Eating the 100 mile diet.  That is a passive way of rejecting the system – for whatever reason – health, supporting neighbours, saving the planet from oil consumption, sticking it to Monsanto……whatever…….it is resistance.

Many Americans are homeless.  Over one million are full-time homeless and two more million are estimated to be part-time homeless.  And that does not count those who walked away from their over-mortgaged homes.  These people are not system supporters.

And everyone hates the oil companies.

On the dark side there are a whole bunch of people who are full-time criminals.  And the USA has more people in prison (percentage) than any other country in the world.  That has to be some form of rebellion.

You’d be surprised to learn how many ex-pat Canadians and Americans there are living in other countries.

And so it goes………… rejection, tax evasion, quiet revolution, passive resistance, youth rebellion.  Even the buying of gold is a passive rejection of our currency!

And now – the OCCUPY movement.

“Something’s happening here and we don’t know what it is.  Do we, Mr.  Jones?” 

No.  No we don’t.  I don’t know either but I suspect that there will be more.

Cleaned up the work shop yesterday. Took all day. Screws in the nail containers, tools in the wrong spot. Things out of place. Dirt everywhere. Sal has really been letting things slip!

“Shouldn’t you be a bit more diligent in tidying up around here, Sal?”

“What are you talking about? It is your workshop!”

“I thought everything was ours? That is what you say about the dishes. Doesn’t that mean these are our tools and that you own your share of the mess just as I own some of the dirty dishes?”

“Ooh……you are soooo bad! You are the worst, you are!”

Funny how much pleasure I get from such exchanges. Makes the work go better. For me, anyway.

It took us a day to clean up a workshop that is only 12 feet long and four feet wide. You’d wonder how that was possible. I certainly do. ‘Course, the dogs had to be played with. We had a couple of tea-and-muffin breaks and Sal went down to check the boats and tie up a loose log. That cut into the work somewhat.

Plus, I confess, I like to sharpen things as I find them before I put them away. So, every once in a while all cleaning stops while I fire up the grinder and ruin the edge of some tool. And add to the dust and mess, of course. One step forward, two steps back.

(Learning to sharpen is really quite an art, ya know? I got a book on it. But it is really hard to do it right. And not cut yourself when it works out – which it rarely seems to do. More than a few blood stains around my grinder, though, I can tell ya! Tip: Never take out a book on sharpening without also checking out a book on First-Aid!)

The worst part of cleaning up is the ‘catch-all’ box. It is the place where I put small things like extra nails, screws or parts left over from repairing something. It is temporary storage, before I put them away properly. Later. Like, today. Then I am faced with the daunting challenge of sorting through hundreds, if not thousands, of bits and pieces – none of which are valuable or are needed at the time – but that I have learned are essential to keep for later on. Like, when I am repairing that same thing again. So I am sorting through pounds of bits. What a crazy-making but necessary thing to do!

Then there’s the part or something that you don’t recognize but you know it belongs…some….where…? And so the search begins to find the ‘right’ spot which, of course, means nothing because fifteen minutes later you haven’t a clue where it is.

“Hey, did you see that little bronze thing with the hook and adjustable lever attached? Where is it?”

“Geez, I put it somewhere. Ya know? Somewhere where I won’t forget. Sheesh! Where is it?! I had it just a second ago.”

And so time passes as you both search for the thing you didn’t know you had until you found it and now you lost it.

“I must have had a series of mini-strokes or something. I can’t remember a bloody thing!”

“Ooh, yeah! That reminds me…….what was it that I asked you to remind me of?”

“Can’t remember. Was it getting out the dog food? Phoning someone. Putting something on the to-buy list?”

“No……………………..Oh yeah! …………………………. I remember now!”

“What? What was it?”

“Uh, it was to remember to clean up the workshop.”

In fact, it may just help – as a start – to find a place where you can watch the bees and the butterflies and grow some flowers while you are at it.  Gotta start somewhere.  

The following blog is intended to be a small, tiny cry of warning.  Indulge me.  I just have to say it out loud to people I care about.  I have no idea if it should be taken seriously.  But I take it seriously.  

There is no doubt that some things today make me optimistic.  Others pessimistic.  But, in the end, I have to look at ‘the system’ we have invested in (or better put: been conscripted into).  And I don’t like what I see.

The system is not designed so much for ‘the benefit of the people’.  It is designed for the management of the people.

Before I ‘drag’ you through something you don’t want to read, please see Alex Morton’s piece on salmon.  It was the subject of an article in the New York Times.  What she says about salmon is what I am saying about just about everything.  I am just not saying it as well as she does.

Please see: http://alexandramorton.typepad.com/ 

If, after that, you are still willing to read further, let me take you back a smidge…

Private property has always been in the hands of the rich and powerful but it became entrenched in law after the Enclosure Act in England.  And they didn’t do that back then for the common good, you know.  They did it to manage the common man.  Prior to that legislation, the people had access to the ‘common lands’ on which they farmed, gathered, grazed animals and hunted as they pleased.

After the Enclosure Acts, the peasants had so much less ‘commons’ that they were impoverished.  If they ‘poached’ or otherwise trespassed on the private land, they could be punished or even executed.  They needed to be managed and so they were herded into factories and mines.  And wars, of course.

Private land ownership was not a reward for the peasantry.  It was management of the peasantry.  And it hasn’t gotten any better for the poor or the middle class of today.   Imagine being 25 and looking at a half-million dollar mortgage to have a ‘starter’ apartment in downtown Vancouver?  ‘Handcuffs’ and ‘jail’ and ‘life term’ come to mind for me.  Über managment!

In fact, owning a home isn’t really a good idea at all.  It’s a mug’s game.  Owning real estate is a con!  You never stop paying for your house.  In fact, in 40 years most people have paid in taxes again what they originally paid for the house.  Live there longer than 40 years and you pay for it again in a much shorter period of time.  And if you don’t pay your property taxes they take the house!

Was it ever yours?  No.  It never was and it never is.  It is their house.  That, too, is part of the system.  Property ownership is just a subtle form of enslavement.  It is ‘capturing the taxpayer’.  You paid for your own jail (so did I)!

More evil is done in the name of paying the mortgage than all the crimes of theft and fraud rolled into one.   

And they don’t stop herding the sheople there.   Remember: they only ‘keep you to tax you’.  Think:  Matrix (the movie).  It was Ronald Regan who pointed out that there are 151 taxes in just a loaf of bread!   Eat the bread, and pay them the tax!  That is the system.
    
Friends of mine are selling their house for almost $900,000.  It’s a simple cul-de-sac type house in a boringly flat neighbourhood.  Nice place, actually.  But no mansion.  2000 sft.  They are doing this to ‘downsize’.  1200 sft.  Good idea.  They are going to buy the new house for $800,000.  But they won’t ‘pocket the difference’.  There are taxes and commissions and professional fees that will eat up at least half.  Not to mention moving expenses and ‘making the new-place-home‘ expenses.  Plus HST all over the place!  They may break even.  The government and the real estate industry will make out like bandits.  Because they are bandits!

My friends will pay the same if not more (similar tax rates and strata fees) to live in their down-sized home.  Who wins?

As I said, it ain’t just the real estate business.  It is everything.  In the early United States, nature provided all the meat and protein the populace at the time could want – given a little management.  Deer, pheasant, turkeys and wild produce were plentiful.  The bison herds of the plains covered the areas as far as the eye could see.  But then the American ”Enclosure Acts” came along with the railroad.  And all the deer and the antelope and the bison were slaughtered and replaced by cows, sheep and steers on ranches.

Ever seen a modern chicken factory?  A modern pig factory is even worse!

The landowners raised domesticated meat and charged the peasants for it.  They didn’t bother to restore the free bison herds.  Who would profit from that?  What was free for the poor person (Native American mostly, in this case) was now an expense for everyone.

The system: most of our protein was privatized.

Fortunately for the powers that be in Canada and the United States, the population embraced the industrial revolution (AKA captivity) with increased gusto and soon most everyone could buy their Wonder Bread while wearing a grey suit and living in a ticky-tacky box instead of living off the land.  But, of course, people had to work 8 hours a day back then to be able to do that.

Now we have to work that and more.  So does our spouse.  So do our kids.  That allows us to buy the suit, the box and the Wonder bread.  Well, smaller houses, maybe.  All stuck close together.  And Big Macs instead of real food.

151 taxes in a loaf of Wonder Bread helps perpetuate the system but you can be assured that it is not only bread and real estate that is ‘controlled’.

Monsanto is trying to privatize seeds!

GE was and is trying to privatize water!

Fish farms are trying to privatize fish!

And our (?) government is collaborating with all of it!

Just in case you are missing the point still: they do not own the bread!  It is not theirs to tax.  They don’t own the salmon.  They didn’t own the bison.  They don’t own the land or the water or the air we breathe.  They think they do but they don’t own us either! 

Don’t get me wrong: if you are going to have hundreds of millions of cattle, ooops…….. people, then ‘providing for them’ is necessary.  I guess.  And, of course, there is no point in having them just to provide for them, is there?  Ya gotta work ’em!  They are not pets!  They have to make a living, earn a profit and feed the machine.   The system makes sense to the system.

Not to me.

Capitalism.  It is not about the money.  The ‘system’ is also about keeping us ‘in our place’.

It seems that when we organize and ‘do business’, the only ones who benefit are those who ‘tax’ or control the basic necessities.  But the small producers (farmers etc.) don’t do well.  Neither does the fisherman.  Hunters went the way of the dodo (fittingly, I suppose).  Gatherers are now minimum wage exploited wet-backs from Mexico.  And even artisans and skilled producers are being replaced by cheap overseas labour and automation.  The rich get richer.  The poor get poorer.  Those who tax are responsible.

And the wild fisheries get privatized.

Soon the professional class will feel the constraints.  According to the ‘Occupy Movement’ they already are.

This is where the warning gets more close to home:

With modernization and globalization, we have also become even more dependent on the system and we peasants of the 1st-world are also fast becoming redundant to it!

Pretty soon, the rich won’t want to keep some of the more demanding peasants around any longer.  Why should they when they have plenty of eager, work-for-less peasants all  around the world from whom to pick?  Do you really think that the governments that bring you war, enclosure acts, lies, corruption and taxes are going to ‘treat you good’ when you are no longer useful?

They won’t even do that for the beautiful, harmless, free resource of magnificent salmon.  And they didn’t do it for the bison or the cod.  Or the dodo.

They ain’t going to do it for you.

No, they aren’t going to kill you.  Not directly.  But your pension will evaporate in some slight-of-hand.  Your cost of living will exceed your ability to meet it and sections of the ‘system’ you rely on will be withdrawn.  To do that, they will bolster the police, the laws and the regulations.  Hint:  some governments will go bankrupt so they don’t have to pay the people what they owe.  I know that only because that is what is already happening.  We can measure that today.

I have no idea what more they have up their sleeve.  But the writing is on the wall.  It reads: Warning! 

The ol’ Honda had a frayed starting rope. I used to ignore that kind of thing. ‘No sense fixin’ ít if it ain’t broke, eh? I’d say that with country wisdom just ‘a-oozin’. And I meant it, too. But that is just procrastinating with charm, really.

And then there’s the old wive’s version that makes much more sense: ‘A stitch in time saves nine’.

Once again the old double-y’s have it.

I could have gone to the Honda dealership but that would have entailed carrying the generator into town and then picking it up again a few months later. ‘Course, even then, they’d screw it up and I’d have to take it back again. Worse, I’d be a $250.00 lighter at the very least. I have long opted to ‘go it alone’ on this sort of thing.

Anyway, ‘how hard can it be to replace a starter rope?’

A Honda 2000 looks like a big red bar of soap. But it has screws and bolts, tabs and slots, clips and cinches just like the rest of us. I’ve been getting past clips and cinches since I was 16. Nothin’ to it.

Start with a smile…………

But I looked on the net just to be sure. And sure enough, it ain’t as easy as it looks. I won’t bore you with the sequence of events but suffice to say, Sally and I worked on that little genset all afternoon and we didn’t waste a move. Well, maybe a couple (like when Sal dropped a bolt under the deck). But, basically, we just followed the steps, put the parts in a tub and then replaced the pull-cord and reversed the order of steps taken to put it together. Piece o’cake.

But there are dozens of steps! Honest to God, I can remove your appendix with fewer steps. Fewer tools, too.

You see, the whole generator has to come apart. You don’t get gensets to look like soap and have easy access as well, ya know. Ya gotta take off the feet, take off the sides, take off the ends, take off the fuel tank and disentangle the electrics. Then you take off the pull-cord assembly. Plus you have to do this with bolts and pins that are rusted. One little blighter was so tough I had to drill it out hollow, use an easy-out and then make a bolt from another (metric, don’t ya know) to replace it. No big deal but not a 20-minute task.

But it impressed Sal. That’s pretty good after 40 plus years.

Living off-the-grid means doing with what you have, making do or doing without. It doesn’t mean ‘dealerships’. It doesn’t even mean always ‘getting parts from the parts supply’. And it sure as hell doesn’t mean ‘knowin’ what you are doin’.

It means ‘gettin’ by’ with what you got.

It is kinda fun (when it works out).

Difficulties in cyberspace

Worse, we’re doing this by e-mail.

It is worse because he e-mails me things like, “Yeah.  Ya gotta get in behind it if you wanna change the background colour.  You know?  That’s, like ‘admin’ dad!”

“Right”, I say, “admin.  Of course.  Gotta get behind it.  Right!”

I call out to Sally upstairs.  “Hey, Sal, Ben wrote and told me to ‘get behind it’.  What does that mean?”

“Dunno.  Gonna ask him?”

“Not yet.  I’m afraid to.  You know how he is.  He thinks I should figure it out.  He thinks it is good for me.  Sorta like when I was his dad and I’d say, ‘figure it out, son.  It’s good for you!  Well, this is payback.  ‘Big time’.  Damn his vengeful little heart!”

I am starting to think I will have to take an IT degree or something to earn back my status as the dad, ya know?  Right now, I am the doofus and I have been for quite awhile.  It’s starting to look like a permanent position.  I can’t let on that I haven’t a clue as to how to ‘get behind it’ or I may get further demoted to imbecile or something.  I’ll bet everybody under forty knows how to get behind it but me.  

“You wanna ask him?” 

“No way!  When it comes to computers, he just yells at me too.  I am also afraid.  Very afraid.  At least you don’t look scared.  I start to shake.  I’m thinking of going back to pen and paper, myself.” 

This is crazy!  I am NOT afraid.  I am gonna ask him what he means.

E-mail: “Ben, this is your dad.  Ya know……….I was well, getting ready to get behind it, ya know and, well, I don’t really know how to do that.  What exactly do you mean?” 

“Oh yeah, right.  I gotta make you an administrator. (tap tap tap in the background) There!  That’s done it.  Should be able to get there now.  Gotta go……….” 

“Hey, Sal.  That wasn’t so bad.  Seems I didn’t have a ‘get behind it’ pass but Ben just made me one so I am good to go.” 

“That’s great! He yell at ya?” 

“Nah.  He was great.  Abrupt but great.” 

And so I go to the new website.  I look around a for a button to click.  Any button.  Anything.  I can’t find a way in.  

“Hey Sal.  Still can’t find a way in.  I can’t write to my new blog!” 

“You gonna call Ben and ask him?” 

You crazy!  He’ll yell at me!”