grandpa will survive

GRANDPA WILL SURVIVE

I don’t know how obvious it is, but the title to this article makes fun of the country song.  I mean, I’m not crazy about country music to begin with ( not that 90% of classic rock is any better-worse than book publishing, lowest common denominator sales push pap to the near exclusion of quality.  With pressing vinyl or binding pages, I have a hard time understanding the business model.  You create ten thousand units because it costs $1 each rather than $3 each if you did one thousand, so when you only sell two thousand you think you’ve lost money when really you only lost profit if you had minimized production.  How about lowering the retail price rather than trying to minimize loss by trying to sell so much extra?  Everything has to boom or bust with these people ), but I can handle some of it ( wasn’t “Grandma Got Runned Over By A Reindeer” a country song? ).  What I have a hard time handling is people thinking survivalism needs a theme song.  Do you really need the soundtrack of a country boy surviving or how you feel fine at the end of the world as you know it?  Perhaps some folks are audio wired, as others are visually.  Hell, I’m still making fun of the whole concept.

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Some time back I wrote on how you should prep with your wife in mind, and recently a minion suggested I write on Old Timers preps.  It is the same concept either way, that frail less strong members of your group are going to need to be catered to.  The bulk of prepping advice assumes rightly or wrongly that its practitioners are young vibrant adults.  Not necessarily in their prime but able to garden all day long, pull a guard shift, cut wood, dig a latrine and all other manner of steady if not too strenuous physical activity.  Well, certain Idahoan Yuppie Scum Experts don’t do this.  They constantly push for Tim Taylor power tools to be used.  I’ve made fun of this no end, calling folks who can’t grind a cup of wheat manually unable to survive past the first few weeks of the apocalypse.  Well, of course I’m right, but what I didn’t realize until this very minute was that our good little butt buddy up north had very slyly cornered the market on old prepper humpers.  You have to admire his marketing savvy even if most of his advice is suspect.

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Here I was thinking Yuppie Scum preppers were just award winning lazy bastards.  They are.  But by pushing for motorized everything ( to include the cyclic action on firearms ), Yuppie Prepping is also folding into its tent the growing legions of old bastards hoping to survive.  As Black Cat Dude stipulated years ago, most preppers are late forties on up in age.  So if some tottering aged decrepit hump wandered on over to my web site and read about hand grinding wheat, digging underground homes with only a pick and shovel, cutting firewood with hand tools and NOT warming your house to 95F to save money, of COURSE they are going to leap away as frightened as can be and go as fast as their arthritic hands can click on the YSSS ( Yuppie Scum Survivalist Site ) and soak in the perceived wisdom over there.  I suppose when you’ve been on the government tit all your life ( serve in the military, get free college, work for a defense contractor, get Social Security and a 401k backed by tax dollars ) you have plenty of money to do so.  Not that I’m bitter, or all that young.

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Look, I’ll tell you if you are a rich welfare recipient ( working for a government paid corporation ), a moderate comfortable welfare recipient ( social security ) or a poor welfare recipient ( food stamps, section 8 housing ), all the same advice.  Get every penny you can while you can, because it won’t last much longer.  The last time your tax dollars actually went directly to a welfare recipient was in the 1970’s.  Reagan damned the balanced budget and went full unplayable debt to meet the bills, and every president since then to include Clinton-who like the parasite he is, took credit for events and decisions made prior to his term but coming to fruition during-borrowed to run the government.  Welfare is paid for by unplayable debt.  It is literally free money as it can never be paid back.  Even paying it off by hyperinflation ruins the very economy you are trying to save so in the end it is still unable to be paid off.  So take every benefit you can get your grubby hands on.  And I’m not being sarcastic. 

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When we go through a systematic collapse almost nothing nor anyone is going to survive.  The free government money you take now ( or, free central bank money you take by loading the credit cards up with prepper goodies and then “selling” to avoid owning assets, then declaring bankruptcy ) will help a few hardy folks actually survive the die-off and will be the only resources not destroyed.  Think of it as a few Oil Age relics that are an investment in helping the species survive ( the die-off will be 99.999%.  Which will be more breeding pairs that survive than did after the 70k years ago Bottleneck Event.  But every extra breeding pair that makes it through increases the odds of the species survival by maximizing the genetic diversity, which is the only kind of diversity that is healthy.  Do the species a favor and kill off any surviving lefties that love gays and Muslims.  We don’t need that kind of dysfunctional thinking to survive ). 

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So, no, I don’t hate old bastards for being old.  I’m right on that doorstep at 52.  I don’t hate them for being on welfare.  I make fun of them, which is not the same as hating them.  I act hateful, but I have little fondness for the youth, either.  Who the hell thinks it’s a good idea to poke a pin through their eyebrow?  What insanity is that?  Lots of tatoos, I can almost see that.  I’d never do it, even on a dare.  A thirty year old hottie ( I have a hard time seeing gals in their twenties as sex objects as my daughter just turned 25 ) could promise to be my sex slave the rest of my life if I got more tattoos and I wouldn’t do it ( if I was younger with more of a sex drive, hell yes I’d it, a few hours of pain for lots of pleasure later.  Now, an emphatic no way ).  But the flesh piecing?  I mean, flesh rather than cartilage.  What self inflicted barbarism is that?  And what is the point?  Okay, I suppose if you won’t ever get a job anyway, why not get freaky to spook the oldsters.  But can’t you just get a Mohawk haircut and put eyeliner on one eye or something similar?  I look at grandpa filling his diaper on the golf course, then at some freak with lip piercing, I can go either way with my maximum hate and discontent.

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Jesus swinging on a tire, where the hell was I?  Even for me that was way off topic.  Okay, how grandpa needs to prep differently, other than motorizing everything and hence needing to invest in your own power station to do it.  Look at your older daughter that weighs a hundred pounds.  That is who you need to prep for, to prep for yourself when you are old.  That means no Mosin-Nagant long gun ( which also means no bayonet fighting.  You’ll have to splurge on a handgun of small caliber ) with its heft and kick.  You don’t have to go to semi-automatic if you lack the money, even though that would solve any issues for your firearm.  Little brown kids in third world crapholes can fire an M-16 all day long, so it stands to reason grandpa can too.  But if you’re used to thirty caliber bolt action battle rifles, just downgrading to a carbine round should also do the trick for you.  Now would be the perfect time to sell your old war surplus full size rifles, given the prices.

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You can go from 357 to 38.  Just sell off your bigger rounds if you already own the gun.  That is actually preferable as you have a heavier gun shooting a lower power round for less recoil.  You don’t necessarily need a 9mm, or a plastic gun.  If you still haven’t dug your underground shelter, now is the time to rent that backhoe.  Renting is a heck of a lot cheaper than owning.  Sorry you have to go up and down a set of stairs, but it will allow you to stay warmer with a lot less fuel.  Less fuel means less wood cutting.  The trick isn’t to store ten thousand gallons of propane, it is to need almost no propane.  Also, a rocket stove uses deadwood branches from the forest floor so there is no need for a chainsaw and heavy cutting/lifting.  If you can hike in your old age you can gather small wood.  Have a means of transport so you don’t hold the load constantly.  How about a mini-travois built out of the firewood?  Stock lots of bungee cords.

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Hauling water is going to be more problematic in old age.  If you have a bicycle for transportation now, you have your water hauler.  It just takes axel grease and inner tube stockpiling.  Go with minimizing food storage containers sizes.  Two liter soda bottles would be good for water and food.  Have plenty of those snap on tops for your five gallon buckets that twist open and close, to keep from having to haul the weight.  Rather than having to worry about how to electrify a can opener, minimize the cans you need.  Don’t stop working or moving, just be able to minimize it.  Keep in mind arthritis and lose of muscle mass.  But in the end, if you are more crippled up that that your chances of survival are crap.  You can’t really get around that.  Motorizing everything is a modern invention enabling old buzzards to survive, and post-apocalypse motorization is problematic to say the least.  For one thing, that is how you live now and since energy is government subsidized ( just as much if not more than the Saudi’s with their quarter a gallon gasoline.  Our “high” gas prices don’t mean we aren’t subsidized, it just means given per capita decreases we have to free market supply the demand to some extent.  Our subsidies are for volume, not unit price ) we have no intrinsic notion of its true worth.  We waste.

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You don’t think a five to minute shower is wasteful?  That is energy to pump and treat water and to fill a tank for gravity pressure, then the home heating.  That is a lot of energy wasted.  Driving five minutes rather than biking fifteen-very friggin wasteful, from the refining of overseas fuel to the cars metal ore to the paving of the roads.  When you live like that, when everything in your life is energy wasteful, trying to duplicate that at a retreat is nearly impossible financially as you are removing the subsidies.  And since you are going to be old for a long time, you can’t live the way you can now on grid.  It is just simple math.  You need to improve your diet, stay exercising and minimize the energy you need, both physically and mechanically.  You’ll need to do a little bit of the manual labor, but minimize that amount as much as you can by investing in the tools now.  But not petroleum using tools.  For instance, if you know that grinding wheat will be a problem, you don’t electric motorize the grinder.  Just transfer it from a hand grinder to a foot grinder ( powered by a bicycle ) as your leg muscles are far more capable than your arm muscles.

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Just as you invest in things to eliminate a cost later on, invest in eliminating a manual labor later on.  Not using electricity or fuel to run it but eliminating the motion entirely or as much as possible.  You still have to do your part later by staying in shape, but that can only take you so far.  A solar water heater, the box with glass to heat Mason jars of water, still involves some physical effort.  But a Mason jar of water weighs nearly nothing.  If you can shuffle along you can transport it.  That eliminates gathering more wood.  Still effort, but less effort.  Those are the kinds of things you think about for old age ( like installing a steep roof now, for automatic snow removal later-and don’t forget to cover the door entrance to eliminate shoveling there ).  An added bonus here even if you aren’t surviving the apocalypse as an old fart?  You use less calories on everything.  Food first, right?

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