good time charlie

GOOD TIME CHARLIE

Subtitled, How To Giggle Like A Schoolgirl As Western Civilization Crashes And Burns To The Faint Faraway Sounds Of A Fiddle. Not a banjo-let me make that abundantly clear. In the apocalypse, as in life, you never want to get your banjo played. Far better to be the banjo player. Anyway, let's not get sidetracked there. An oft returned to subject, enjoying life now and after the collapse. I think I covered this not too long ago, but as the collapse intensifies I still find the need to return to it as a dog to his vomit.

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I'm actually starting to have a good time here. Not because I have more subjects to write about. I don't, not really. That is always a struggle, and I can't plan ahead too far because I always look at old notes and wonder why I wanted to write about THAT. My best articles are on matters I can't stop thinking about currently. And it isn't because I just spent a good amount of money. I mean, it is in that I worry about cash savings inflating to toilet paper, but it isn't in that NOT having as much savings is stressful in its own right.

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And I don't get a shoppers high from buying crap. I'm enjoying the prospects of a new project, but that is fleeting and I HATE projects that continually suck out cash. I could have written an extra article or three, all long winded, on how devoting myself to a secondary arsenal was a terrible move because of the commitment. Now I won't stop worrying until I expand on it until complete. You know, much more damn ammo ( several k more ). Mounts and scopes, pistol version, twenty round steel mags ( I like the increased robustness and ease of prone position ). Spare parts kits.

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Or, perhaps I NEED to have something to worry about. Not for dramas sake, but because I am one high strung individual and always have been, even ( or especially ) as a child, and cannot stop. I suppose that could account for some form of happiness. But I don't think it is that either. I think it is a combination of thinking I'm going to be proven correct ( oh, how I long for the day as the hue and cry across the land laments ignoring Peak Oil-not that I'm bitter I was ignored and pitied, oh no!, not that ) finally after all my efforts, and the fact that the worrying can end finally.

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Worrying about a strange lump on the side of your dingus, worrying about the in-laws visiting ( and I'm not sure which one is more worrisome ), worrying if Hilary was going to get elected-all that worrying is so much worse than the actual event. We don't like uncertainty and we can adapt to any situation ( our species is rather good at it ), so of course the wait is worse than what eventually happens. That is why we almost always pick The Devil We Know over a possible angel. Change blows. We try not to change.

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And I think perhaps therein lies the source of happiness. Far too many folks think that the collapse or the apocalypse is a change, but really if you think about it, it is a return to normalcy. The Oil Age was the change from stability. The Agricultural Age, for the little better it was and the lot worse, was still normal for ten thousand years. The Oil Age, for all its luxury, was abnormal. Even if a change is for the better, in general most folks do NOT want to change anyway.

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Just think about that old pair of shoes. There is no more tread, a toe sticks out and even the tiniest bit of fog causes your feet to become soaked. But you love your old shoes. Not because they are broken in-they are at that point merely broke. But you KNOW what the shoes delivery, how they perform. There is no stress about how a new pair will feel. They are anxiety free ( you aren't anxious over soaked feet or an awkward gait-you expect them. And hence it cannot be as stressful as the alternative ).

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Why would you want a new spouse? Well, you want a new spouse, by which you mean you want the old one to act differently according to your specs. You certainly don't want to replace the old body, just the old performance. With a new spouse, you don't know what is in store for you. With the old one, you have already written the owners manual. The whole ordeal of watching them morph from Dating Cocoon to Real Life Butterfly is always better in theory than practice.

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You certainly don't want a new dog, even if the old one is all broken down and spends all day alternating between farting and sleeping, even if a new puppy is so cute. The old one is a known quality. You know his quirks and habits. It isn't that you are lazy as much as you simply don't like change. Because back in “real times”, pre-insane energy surplus, change represented danger. That is what that quirk of evolution did for us, avoiding that danger. Right now it looks silly but back then it looked smart.

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And I think as soon as you recognize how sane our system was prior ( sane as in stable state non-changing in its fundamentals ) and how bizarre this one is, the tendency is to relish a return to it. That is why people IN the current system seemingly embrace the bizarre, the odd, the Not Normal. To them it IS normal, and as they are unaware of any problem ( having bought into the Perpetual Advancement myth that the advocates of Growth Uber Alles push ), to them they are avoiding change.

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There have recently been a few books out on the Retro Movement, the two from Greer ( one fiction, one non-fiction ) and the one by Lind. I haven't read any of them, so I don't know if I am reinventing the wheel here. It seems to me, just from having read most of Greers other prepper-ish books, they would be about cultural reversion with a cherry picking of less harmful/more sustainable technology ( I don't mean “tech” as in advancement in tools but rather as in “carbon fuel dependent” ). I think that would probably work just fine.

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People don't fear tools changing, per se. Tool advancement has always been normal. People obviously didn't fear change as far as what they ate. Just from witnessing WHAT we now eat, you know experimentation was constant. How else to explain how folks learned to leech poison from acorns, know to add bovine stomach lining to create cheese, etc.? We don't fear all change, but change that brings danger ( did they feed the acorn experiments to slaves? ) or instability. One wonders the mechanism to decide in that aspect. It only seems obvious now in retrospect.

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Perhaps that is how the Oil Age came to be so widely adapted. At first, it was JUST tool change. Look at the world expo's celebrating the new tools ( the events themselves visited by traveling in the new coal feed Iron Horse ). It was later that the social changes were shoved down our throat. That didn't start or end well ( the middle was paved over with an extra layer of energy surplus to hide the unease. For instance, look at the drive-in movie industry ), because while we can learn to use new tools, we cannot learn how to act against our human nature without severe disruption.

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Continued tomorrow.

( .Y. )

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