hermitage salvage

HERMITAGE SALVAGE

This article owes a shout out to Wrenchr2-thanks bud.  How to salvage for a living as a hermit.  This solves many different problems, such as Food Stamps becoming less of a solution for practitioners of genteel poverty, the need to socialize even if you are a hermit, and camouflage for your preps.  As W2 said, trash picking and cigarette salvage let people know you don’t have a pot to piss in.  But you have to be extremely friendly.  Crazy and mean make you a target.  Crazy and friendly make you an institution of the town.

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Just like every other survival strategy, salvage has a shelf life.  You can’t duplicate those strategies that used to work under different circumstances.  For instance, a homogenous white middle class nation could get away with having fallout shelters in the suburbs.  Do that now and all the Other Colors will target your ass.  You used to be able to get a job in a nearby small town and Hippie Farm on an affordable lot of land.  Now, property taxes alone will force you to commute to a big city to work in a corporate job.  You used to be able to live in the country and take twenty years to build up a mail order business and build up your homestead and pay off your somewhat reasonable mortgage.

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Not anymore.  It wasn’t enough for the elite to send all the jobs overseas.  Now they had to triple house and rent prices and make health care unaffordable.  The end is so friggin nigh economically.  You don’t have five more years ( going by the fracking oil peak ), let alone twenty.  Your best bet now is to buy cheap junk land and put all the expenses into a commuter vehicle. Better a repo’ed car than a sheriff auctioned farm.  So, every era sees a different economic collapse coping strategy.  I bring this up to acknowledge that one day, even the hermit salvage strategy won’t work.  There will be no more surplus to salvage.  But until that day, it might be for you.

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Right now, folks can afford $7 packs of cigarettes and to throw away aluminum cans.  That means you can salvage tobacco and get grocery money from metal recycling.  The restaurants can throw away half their food, so there is some salvage there ( not that I would recommend it-if for no other reason the general hygiene of everyone handling or eating that food is worse ).  Everyone can still drive, so you look like a Special Ed on your bicycle.  Until everyone is walking or biking.  Than you don’t look so eccentric.  But coming into town isn’t just about making $2 on aluminum salvage and getting your tobacco for the next day.  You might be burning more calories than you earn.

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This is also a good way to socialize.  Now, a lot of us reading this rightfully hate other people.  Other people suck.  But you can’t take hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and give it the middle finger.  The plain fact is that under stress you have no control over brain chemistry and can’t just “fire discipline” your way around the inherent weakness of the semi-automatic.  You can’t force an erection away when you are 18 years old.  You can’t turn off the baby factory siren when you are a 22 year old female.  These are hardwired behaviors.  Backed up chemically.  What, you think you are monk that can control his body through meditation?  Good luck with that one, Grasshopper.

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Our hardwired need to socialize cannot de denied without hard consequences.  It might only be once a week, or every third day, but eventually you will need to get face time with another human.  So you might as well make the trip worthwhile and make some money and score some free stuff.  This is working smarter rather than harder.  You come back to your bolt hole with water, your clothes washed, a basket full of aluminum cans, a pocket full of cigarette butts ( save the shreds of tobacco left, then put aside the filters.  You can probably pull apart the filters and use as fiber in mud bricks.  I mean, if you are trying to waste nothing.  You can also pulverize Styrofoam to add to cement to make aircrete bricks, so I would imagine this would most likely also work with mud.  Hey, its free-experiment ) and your grocery shopping and library books.

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Yep, I’d seriously consider a bike trailer over bike baskets if you become a hermit.  Normally, I can’t stand trailers as they are another money and maintenance item, but if you can salvage the parts, and you obviously have the spare time, it shouldn’t be an issue other than the hills.  The trailer full of salvage might also be a conversation starter.  Once you get to be known as Happy Hermit ( and, obviously, help this along by reaching out to greet and help others ), hell, folks might send you to places they know of extra salvage, to odd jobs or the like. 

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One strategy might be to collect free paperback books, and then give them away as a mobile library to supplement your salvage activity.  The cops might harass you if you were selling them, but most likely won’t if you are giving them away to the poor and deserving.  This should garner support around town.  Decline money ( or they will think you want to get high ), but thankfully accept “garbage” folks offer.  Most people throw away their aluminum.  They see you coming around they might donate it to you for your community service.  Think about how most folks would appreciate it if you went into the hospital waiting room and offered free books so they could pass the stressful time better.

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The free book service is just one idea.  Surely there are other things you can think of.  Volunteer at the old folks home or thrift stores that support crippled kids or whatever.  Word gets around you are a helping decent fellow, and you are no longer a smelly homeless guy, but a eccentric living a stress free low impact lifestyle.  You might even find a sugar mama you volunteer with.  You can stay overnight at her place when you come into town ( although, obviously, go with “starving artist” rather than “lazy slacker”.  Have an artistic activity you can prove.  This excuses being poor.  Being a slovenly bastard is no excuse for a woman ).

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Anyone can be a drug and alcohol abusing moron too lazy to breath.  You work just a tiny bit at it and you can be that harmless guy folks love and support, as you bring a smile to their faces and a nostalgic remembrance about how the country used to be.  You stay busy, support yourself, completely hide your prepping, get plenty of exercise and probably still get laid.

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