[902] But Seriously, Like, Read This One

I really want you to pay attention to this blog. I'm going to try and approach it very deliberately, run some numbers, and speak to some of my highest aims. I had a momentary resolute surge of hope for the future, and longtime listeners will know how much I dislike the word “hope.”

I genuinely want everyone in my orbit to be organized in a way to “maximize” themselves. This is not a small or simple feat. It's also not synonymous with being “efficient” or presupposing some level of opulent lifestyle aims (which, to some extent, I have).

If you have goals in mind at all, they are likely to vary in as individuated of ways as you conceive of yourself. Maybe you covet a certain kind of decadence or environment. Maybe you want the simple pleasures indefinitely. This is “fine,” in some broad, existential way, but it also might mean you are not my audience. Or, in the spirit of “hope,” you're a $1/month subscriber that functions as a kind of thumbs up for the greater political project and contributes to an ever-more-imposing supporter count.

My bills, at what I consider something of a modern subsistence level, are $106.50 for the internet, between $117-$374 for electric (3 space heaters for months straight - not typical), and food, which were things to get dire, could be supplemented by the food bank or food stamps. What this translates to practically is, at bottom and in splitting the bills, I'm only obligated to pay $240/month, in the worst of all possible space-heater worlds. Do I need a cell phone? It's a kind of luxury, but that would push the bill to $265/month. I don't ever need to leave my house with the amount of books, movies, and instruments I've amassed, so gas and car insurance/maintenance/registration would drop precipitously. Property taxes can't be ignored, so $326/month if I don't pay them in a lump some. Every year, being a hermit who wants the internet and to wear his contacts too long, it costs me just under $4,000. Unplugging the space-heaters knocks that down to just over $3,000.

Of course, that's kind of ridiculous, right? I like eating at restaurants, leaving the house, and playing with new toys and tools. It's not “realistic” to expect myself to hunker down for the entire year and really feel “human,” unless I was oddly gratified by becoming a mythical miser. I designed my lifestyle to try and account for what might happen if I had to work at McDonald's, and still wish to feel like “me” in pursuing my larger entrepreneurial and world-takeover goals. I'd cover the basics in 3.5 months flipping burgers.

I currently occupy this weird space that is filled with increasing amounts of potential. Last year was amass the supplies and tools. This year, they are in the next room or sitting outside. Last year was dig up the hundreds of saplings or dump piles of driveway stone one wheelbarrow at a time. This year it's detailing with soil amendments and shoring-up muddy holes. I'm *excited* to build experimental structures that are blowing over to ground me in what I can and can't do with salvaged wood.

So much of this process has been a pain in the ass. Who wants to drive to the middle of nowhere? Who wants to learn how to compost if you grew up “normal” and flushed your cares away? Who wants to deal with Trump flags, fast-food 20 minutes away, and ticks? Who enjoys the aesthetics of a shed for their living arrangement? Who wants to get nominally used to water that smells like sulfur? Any one of those things would have stopped me from bothering with this project had I maintained the point of view prescribed to me through a “modern” upbringing. I'm supposed to have a mortgage and car payment, right? SHEDS AREN'T HOUSES!

The failings of our capitalist system have turned “tiny houses” and shed-living into not-so-niche points of pride and creative excitement. Poverty re-branded as a lifestyle choice is a coping mechanism. It's not more or less an effective one than the polite pleasantries we offer to excuse our behavior in service to austere neoliberal capitalism or “conservative” thought. The antidote to those modes of being has been fashioned as a kind of “radical socialism” in which even marginally giving a shit about one another is branded as un-American and begetting the inevitable road to... communism? We get boxed into this rhetoric, paralyzed and exhausted by endless working hours, and become distracted indefinitely, if only to survive.

And then what?

I think I unconsciously ask myself this all the time. What happens after I make “enough” money? What happens when my dog catches the car? A wheel makes a revolution, always returning to where it began save the wind around it or the wear-and-tear. How fast do I want to spin, and what kind of air do I want to stir? When I stop spinning, will I have worn myself down for something worth it, or did I just spin too long because I could?

I've spent 3 or 4 years to go from buying the land, to the shed, to turning it all into something resembling a house and degree of comfort I look forward to driving back to each day. I vividly remember staying here without power, without rocks to walk on, without running water, and without any idea of when or if anyone would be joining me...ever. It's a level of focus and work-ethic that I take a lot of pride in speaking about. I also simultaneously SAVED THE CHILDREN if that counts for anything. It chases back further to being able to save enough money to buy the land, and discovering that I did, in fact, want to spend as little amount of time being subjected to “normal” as humanly possible.

I don't want everyone to “suffer” like me, but I do want people to appreciate the level of dedication and detail in their own stories as well as mine. One of the things I took for granted - especially talking to a mostly-white middle to upper-middle class group of kids in how I conceived of what our futures might be – was that there was an appreciation for how many tools we'd been given and how lucky it was that we had found each other. The “goal” or “obligation” seemed clear, don't fall into the habits and traps that got us all waxing about the folly of the past. Build sustainable things. Work together. Pragmatically pursue a kind of life that enabled what everyone was saying was going to be hard to impossible given our corrupted and (literally) crumbling conception of ourselves.

Oh to be young. And, really, I get why people in their 30s hesitate to call themselves “old,” my knees or general circulation be dammed. In truth, I've had less than 10 years to, not only attempt to circumvent the circumstances I was born into, but navigate all of the new psychological drama of algorithm-infused myopic “hatred” combined with a political project to ever-institutionalize American fascism that's been churning for 50+ years.

Like a conservative laser-focused on overturning all that is good and true in the world, I, too, have an indelible focus that believes I can achieve my ends. I think I can recognize my place on the wheel. What is yours?

I have land I'm offering for you to live on *rent-free. That comes under the condition that you do the same amount of work and sacrifice in service to your largest goals or narrative as you've watched me put into mine. There's room in between, I'll happily collect rent, but you know we're both better than that. What is your money going to? Where is your time spent? I want you to be exacting in your budgets. I want you to imagine what it would mean to take over the world.

When I look at my friend list, I don't precisely know how to understand it. There's people I've been familiar with, worked with, and a couple strangers. There's people I know a fleeting amount of their bill or life obligations. There's people I've gotten drunk and dreamed big with. There's people I'm waiting for my big birthday party invite no-one's going to show up to to delete the day after. They've probably still got student loans, donate to charity, or you wouldn't believe how complicated kids are! I see occasional personal wins or celebration. And then what? What is the goal? Wait for Joe Manchin? Die old and in your sleep?

I want to drop rocks, rehab a couple trailers, and rent free-to-cheap. Do you want “passive” income? Help me. Buy in.

I want to scale up worm production.

I want to grow food and live off-grid.

I want to build sustainable little communities on small and large acres that supplant the impact of the larger power brokers and psychosis of myopic depression and anxiety.

I want to sleep and wake up at whatever times I want.

I want to be left alone to practice a small measure of difficult music for as long as it takes my fingers or lips to figure it out.

I want to be busy with things that give me energy and get me up early in the morning.

When all of that comes under threat I want to organize my vigilant and accountable crowd to beat back the enemy (Guess where we are on the wheel.)

Then I want to get back to building the infrastructure that lends itself to letting me piss off and play music or sleep until the next Rush Limbaugh is born. Or, I want to have created such a robust and meaningful system, it incorporates the Rushes and the Trumps and the Hitlers in such a deliberate and awake way, we avoid bending ourselves into jagged spokes being turned against our will.

What does that look like for you? Where in my goals do you see any of yours? How much time do you want to waste doing 1/10th alone what we might do together? What's your budget? How much do you spend on rent? How precious is your locale?

16 or 17 years ago, I sounded a lot like I do now. The macro-picture has not improved, and I don't mean to dismiss the musing or statistics of a Bjorn Lomborg, Stephen Pinker, or Coleman Hughes, but they don't seem to have a way to account for what seems like the heart of a sickness. I can't “persuade” well-enough-off people to form a more aggressive Rainbow Coalition around a shared truth or identity that renders the ticks and funky waters of life as mere details. I can't persuade people to even *speak* to their goals for fear of provoking the embarrassed resentment that begets the flood of excuses for their behavior.

Keep asking yourself – and then what? The wheel is going to turn regardless. Where are we going?
In 3 or 4 more years, I bet I have another camper or 6 set up. In 10, I suspect I'll have stopped associating with the vast majority of every eye-ball that might be looking at this now. In 16 or 17, I hope to not sound piddling and pathetic about the state of the country, environment, or my prospects because we all saw what was coming, and couldn't be bothered. I am bothered. I am doing something. It won't be enough alone.

And if you can't figure out how someone so “bleh” like me could ever be worked with, borrow from Am's or BT's example. I'm basically just an obnoxious proxy for their behind-the-scenes calculations.