Journal of the End of the World and the Beginning of My Life
For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.' —John Greenleaf Whittier
The End
Things were alright, until - SNAP - they weren't. When the crash of modern life came it really felt that fast. One moment we were eating at restaurants, going to the movies, drinking $5 coffee…and then the lights went out.
When they flickered back to life we were fighting for our lives.
Here is my story.
I vividly remember a time not so long ago when the money in my bank account had value, when the fuel at the petrol station wasn't contaminated and you could rely on it to not only not destroy your engine, but to get you where you wanted to go so you could spend that money - money that still held meaning - on things you thought you “needed”.
But this was before everything unraveled and nothing could be trusted. We put our survival into the hands of corporations and it turns out that the billionaires who own and control everything are not sane and thrive on causing harm. And boy, did they have us right where they wanted us.
Unknown to us we had made an offering of nearly all of our soverignity to the alter of convinence, and like feckless flies had wandered into the parlors of spiders:
Not long after the monsters willfully crashed everything I learned what a "need" truly was. Had I learned this and other lessons even a month sooner than I did, we (and a few others) wouldn't have starved that first winter.
But then, most lessons in life are hard learned. Wisdom does not come free. You must fall before you can walk, and the blood you spill along the way is sort of a non-negotiable payment to the proprietor of that secret knowledge. But sometimes you can bleed too much. Sometimes the lessons cost more than you bargained for and the knowledge gained turns out to be something you never, ever, wanted to learn.
Knowledge such as this, is the pain of first watching the suffering and then the death of friends and loved ones, and I’ve seen and lost many. If I had just prepared in advance they could have been spared. But I hadn’t and I cannot go back and repair the damage—Life after all, can only be understood backwards while it must be lived forwards—I can only move forward and strive to ensure it never happens again.
Forget regret, or life is yours to miss.
—Jonathan Larson
But that isn't to say that there is no silver lining in all of this because there absolutely is—you just need the right kind of eyes to see it.
Unprepared & Unconcerned
Before the grand metamorphosis that left us straddling 19th and 20th century living, I waltzed through life relying on others for literally everything without even recognizing it. Little to no thought was given to the complex infrastructure which allowed me to carry on in such a naive way: I knew without question that the store would always have fresh milk, that the fridge would never run out of electricity to keep it cold, that when I turned the knob on the faucet (clean!) water would flow...these certainties left me lazy, unskilled, disarmed, and … conceited.
After all, the wisdom of the TV assured me that only crazy nutters worried that this serpentine engine of modern exuberance could ever perish and so outsourcing every ounce of responsibility for my survival to an apparatus owned by wealthy psychopaths made sense….…right? Why not sit back and enjoy a carefree life when they had my back?
Well the mosheen did die. Actually, it didn't just die, it was brutally murdered. On purpose. And nothing has been the same since. And that knowledge gained about what life is really about has been a bitter/sweet pill for all of us to swallow. Some even choked to death on it.
Turns out going from a life of luxury to one of constant struggle is not for the spoiled and pampered and most definitely not for the unprepared. Which I've come to realize, almost all of us were.
Some have handled themselves better than others. The younger generations, however, were caught completely off guard and the abrupt shift away from smart phones and easy living hit them from both directions like two freight trains colliding at full throttle at the bottom of a steep hill.
While the children were once wizards with a now useless gadget, more practical skills such as using a can opener may as well have been magic. And the more left unsaid about their cluelessness when it comes to fruit trees the better…
And yet, upon reflection the signs of our decline were glaring. We - students and parents alike - were just too busy with our noses stuck in life sapping inane screens and purposefully addictive social media to notice.
The next bitter lesson hit like a lightning strike when almost overnight it became crystal clear that 'money' and 'currency' are entirely different animals.
"If only I had learned these lessons sooner!"
Even now two hellish years later, this ^ thought plays over and over in my mind like a broken record. Currency, I had. Money, I had not.
Nothing Can Be Trusted Any Longer, Except Us
There was a time when the food at the store wasn't filled with parasites and you could trust giving it to your children without meticulously checking it first. This was one of the first salvos in their war against mankind: While the stores were still stocked the provisions inside were often intentionally corrupted with chemicals, meat glues, mysterious liquids to “increase” their measurable marketable density, and heaven only knows what else. Who knew you couldn’t trust a group of psychotic culinary foodstuff CEOs with your nourishment? And things have only dramatically degraded from there.
There was once fresh gleaming fruit, and salmon, and fat steaks, and chocolate. All of that is now long gone—a faint echo growing ever fainter.
Today, when the stores are even stocked you can fill your cart with ground up grasshoppers, recycled human waste, and mealworm flour. As the corporations continue to do all they can to humiliate and devalue us, we stick closer than ever to our farming.
And Again, the Signs of this Degradation Were All Around Even Then, Glaring Brightly in Our Faces … We Just - In Our Ready Made Painted by Numbers Convenience - Failed to Notice Them
There is the moral of all human tales
'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,
First Freedom, and then Glory—when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption—barbarism at last.
And History, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but ONE page
The writing was on the wall when, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the CEO of Nestle, who thought that water is not a human right and that believing otherwise was an “extreme position”, was appointed the chief of what was at the time, the most influential NGO on earth: the World Economic Forum:
And then there was DARPA, being DARPA:
And alas, what some would call the inevitable circle of mankind, is yet again unbroken:
Hard times create strong men
Strong men create good times
Good times create weak men
Weak men create hard times
It's so cold this winter. Unlike last year when the lights shined more than they didn’t, the power now only works for a couple of hours each day - if we're lucky - and this window of warm current is closing all the time. Anyway, the heater is making weird noises more and more often now. When it inevitably dies there will be no parts to fix it and we all know it.
One of those aforementioned silver linings is that as the last remnants of our old accommodating life fall away - as the last of our machines finally fracture and the energy flowing from the walls fades to nothing - we become progressively more hardened and self-reliant and as a result care less for what we've lost and are destined to lose.
It's winter. It's freezing cold. Our heater likely won't survive another week and the electricity is barely functional. There is no use crying about this. So we just layer on everything we own and go about our business.
What business is that, you ask? If it were spring or summer the answer of course would be farming. Fall would be the harvest. And winter... Well, aside from keeping alive, protecting what little we have left is our primary focus when our warm lonely star makes its way to touch base with the residents on the southern hemisphere.
Those that do not bother with agriculture from April thru November naturally have their own business to tend to and this is unfortunately where, they and we, find ourselves at cross purposes. With winter comes no food, with no food comes hunger, and with hunger come the raids.
What was that old maxim?
When there's food on the table there are plenty of problems. When there's no food on the table there's only one problem
Yes. The good news is that we have plenty of problems this winter: our harvest was the best its been (we're finally getting a handle on this whole agriculture thing). The bad news is that our biggest problem is that our grasshopper assailants have only one problem. And just as we've gotten better at gardening so they have gotten better at retrieving the spoils of our efforts.
Bullets are in short supply and that supply is getting shorter. What was that old saw?
God made man, Sam Colt made them equal
We learned very early on that without good ole Sam Colt and his ilk, all that hard work of tilling, planting, weeding, and harvesting was just us gathering supplies for the strongest bloke on the block.
But no man is bulletproof.
Damn! Wish I'd of bought more bul...
STOP! With the wishing already! Never forget:
If wishes were horses beggars would ride
And if wishes were fishes my daughter would eat
Angels aren't coming to save your hide
So get your gun and make them obsolete
I never wanted to hurt anyone, and often I've fantasized that if it were just me, I would throw myself to the wolves and then go trekking through that undiscovered country on the other side of this miserable reality. But I have people who need me and I've made promises: Sacred oaths that cannot be revoked or rescinded. And so I will stand at my post and keep the outlaws, the wishing, and the kicking myself at bay.
The Beginning
And to be honest, it isn't so bad. Our family has become connected in once inconceivable ways that I would never trade and we spend far more time together than we ever did before—what with no more gadgets to enslave our minds and with us huddling close for warmth and protection in the winter and working the field as a team for the rest of the year.
Never regret. It’s good. It’s bad. It’s wonderful. It’s horrible. It’s experience.
—Victoria Hold (paraphrased)
The truth is, we are far more alive than ever before, and certainly far more useful and resourceful than we ever were in that old world where the dishes washed themselves and search engines did the thinking for us. In fact, I do not even recognize who I was back then and when I do try to focus on that life I cannot help but laugh at how weak and fruitless my existence was.
Still, if I could send this letter into the past to reach my old childlike self, I would mortgage everything I have left in order to do so because every ounce of prevention would have been worth a pound of survival in this cold harsh and unforgiving land. But no such magic stamps exist, and so my loved ones shall rest in peace.
Coulda, woulda, shouda.
Outside of my frosty window a man is creeping in low from the south woods.
Locked and loaded.
I'd say wish me luck, but i'm through with wishing and with luck.
It's on me. Finally, things are on me. On all of us. No more convenience no more rescuers no more sacrificing self-reliance and growth for comfort and a Skinner-Box with a screen. We are back in our element: stronger than ever and getting stronger all the time.
Grown-up at last.
The thief is inching closer.
Gotta go.
Solutions: Ounces of Prevention & Pounds of Cures
The solution is to get local, get self-dependent, get the common unity back in community by building webs of resilience with your neighbors, get control of your school boards, mayors office, and town councils, get to know your sheriff and suport your local farmers, get a garden in your lawn no matter how small, a single tomato plant is better than nothing, get a well (water is your most important resource hands down), get ready, get moving, get doing, and, if so inclined, get God.
Many more crowdsourced solutions linked at the bottom of this article:
We have a rotary phone that we keep active just for the nostalgia. Watching teenagers try to figure out how to use it is very amusing.
Great piece of writing, TT. I recognize those lessons and revelations. They are boon companions now.