“Of design he was created thus, his own waste providing his own food, and all that he did or suffered taking place in and by himself. For the Creator conceived that a being which was self-sufficient would be far more excellent than one which lacked anything; and, as he had no need to take anything or defend himself against any one” — Plato
I spent most of Saturday night canning tomatoes from my local farmer’s market (yes, yes I know — I’m a wildman). They are the most expensive canned tomatoes I have ever heard of with a cost of about $10/jar after all fixed and variable costs are allocated. The whole process took me about 3 hours start to finish and yielded three 12-ounce mason jars from 4 pounds of tomatoes.
It makes absolutely zero economic sense when I can buy a can of tomatoes for $2.39 while saving about 2 hours and 59 minutes in the process. Additionally, mass preservation makes the entire process much more resource efficient. So why do it?
I did it because I’m tired of not knowing where my food comes from when I open a can. I did it because I’m tired of knowing that the metal can I just opened is NOT being reused. I’m tired of relying on other people.
That’s the bitch of self reliance in the era of cheap food and automated processes that systematically strip the planet of the remaining resources while simultaneously stripping this country of basic self-sustaining knowledge and skill. Everything becomes easy — too easy. I was amazed how many tomatoes it takes to fill one jar, and I had several “no duh” revelations during the process:
- If everybody was responsible for her own food, there would be extraordinarily little food wastage. It simply takes too much effort to be cavalier.
- Instead of expending little energy and eating overly-enriched food, the opposite is the rule when doing your own food prep.
- When you’re responsible for your own food, it tastes better.
- I understand why food prep becomes a community event because although the work is not difficult it is time consuming but fun when shared.
I’ve come to view self reliance as a very active form of defiance. I believe we’re living through an age where the incentive to take of ourselves has been purposefully eroded. As an example, I live in a city where DIY home improvement is actually illegal and licensed contractors hold a sort of mafia strangle hold on the most basic repairs.
The less we rely on food shipped 1500 miles, chain store mechanic shops to fix your unnecessary car, and mass distributors of clothing that favors form over function, the more of a threat we become to a failed state. Reliance makes us disassociated children that become cranky if we don’t get our whole milk bottle and afternoon nap. Unrealistic expectation is a disease that needs harsh weather and blisters to cure.
FUCK DEL MONTE:
I found a wonderful website that gave me all the resources I needed for canning and preserving plus detailed information on local pick-your-own farms in any region (pickyourown.org). The image of the ouroboros is by Chris Lowe.
{ 38 comments… read them below or add one }
Too true. On a lot of levels.
My wife is kind of amazing at these things. She can sew amazing stuff. Has done professional costuming for theatre. But won’t because it actually costs us waaaay more for her to DIY anything. When she does sew, it’s using sheets on clearance at wally world, because raw fabric is so expensive. The funny thing is, the clothes kids are wearing nowadays take no skill to sew anyway. It’s almost so simple a five year old in thailand could sew it.
She has been cooking and making stuff in the kitchen since D2 thrashed our family budget. She can make yogurts, cheeses, cooks all sorts of wildness. And in that vein she has saved us a ton of money, because most of this is pretty straightforward stuff. But again, most of what we buy in the store a) isn’t real, and b) the real stuff isn’t that complicated.
Anything we try to do ends up costing as much as the thing you would buy it seems. Unless you give up and get sucked in, in which case it costs an arm and a leg. I once built a canoe. It cost a couple hundred bucks and was kind of an ugly disaster. But I did manage to take it to the boundary waters once. If I woulda bought a used one, it would have cost the same. But if I was going to buy one, I might as well buy a decent one, and then all of a sudden, you’re at grand.
Same thing with keeping my old cars running. Seems like there’s always some sort of cost, and I am always waiting for the next thing to break. But once I surrender, I am sucked into hundreds of dollars a month in payments, just so I don’t have to fight with it? No thanks.
“I’ve come to view self reliance as a very active form of defiance.”
Amen, and there are politicians that feel the same way, and they are vehemently against the idea. Case in point: bill S. 510
Ha ha ha… you silly hippies. Didn’t you hear? We’ve (They’ve) discovered other planets that can sustain life. The preliminary evidence suggest that there are probably millions of these planets. That makes this planet far more expendable.
Great post, Tommy! I touches off a string of memories… I was lucky to grow up in the country, not on a farm but surrounded by them, with enough of a yard for quite a large garden. One of my earliest memories is helping Dad plant tomatoes, then watching him use what he called a push-plow to make rows in which he planted beans & corn. We always ate the tomotoes & corn fresh, never canned them, but beans, yes, and as you say, a community event. I can picture my mom and her mom (Nannie) and maybe an aunt or neighr or tow, all setted in those folding aluminum lawn chairs, the kind that can snap a kid’s finger off, under the shade of that huge ash tree in the back yard. Several brown paper grocery bags, the tops cuffed over for easy access, would be distributed, brimming with fresh picked green beans. The women would commence to stringin’ and snappin’ the beans, all the while discussing family history & relations, or maybe what some of the folks at church were up to. I would most likely be nearby on a blanket applying calamine lotion to the many chigger bites I got from being primary bean-picker. They tended to cluster around the underwear elastic, occaisionally making it past that tightie-whitie bearier.
After the women finished prepping, the canning process took place. I remember lots of steam as the empty jars were sterilized then filled with raw beans. Was there a pressure cooker involved somewhere? I recall that it was treated as something as potentially dangerous as a nuclear reactor. Had to lay in front of the fan, never had AC. Quite a process, but in mid-winter mom could pull out a mason jar, unscrew the ring and pry up that lid with a “toink!” of the vacuum seal opening. Heat ‘em up, no butter – Nannie had a special little kitchen cannister embossed with the title “bacon grease” and kept on the stove top. Yum!
And you also mention mafia strangleholds on DIY – here’s another angle on that. A neighbor went to a fabric store and purchased fabric with a Disney print, legitimately licensed and all. She used it to make pillows which she sold in yard sales. She soon got slapped with a cease and desist order from Disney. It’s a small world after all, eh?
Tommy,
So you actually cooked and canned the tomatoes? While fasting? You are CRAZY. I can’t even look at food during the first couple days of a fast, much less smell the aromatic amazing-ness that is stewed tomatoes. You are a glutton for punishment, my friend!
I’m in the zone, man! The worst is making food for my little girl then feeding her. That drives me near insane. Three days and counting!
Tommy, you’re a stud man.
We canned tomatoes this year. Our crop is somewhat low probably due to weather. We have 7 quarts and will probably get 5 more quarts before the frost kills the plants. We put 4 tomato plants in with our landscaping and the sprinkler waters it so we can travel and still have a garden. At Winco the tomatoes are abot $1.20 for a 31 oz can, pretty hard to beat. We use a lot of tomatoes so we buy a lot of cans. We used to plant enough to can for the year but our new house has a small yard and it is completely landscaped and I like it enough I don’t want to tear it up for a garden. So I will buy canned tomatoes.
Scattered reactions…
My favorite part of this post is the ouroboros itself. Thanks for the link. Do you agree with Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann that it represents your pre-ego “dawn state”?
From the same Plato text: “…and he was made to move in the same manner and on the same spot, within his own limits revolving in a circle.” I suppose we all have our own tail to eat. I’m honest enough to tell you mine isn’t tomatoes, although I have harvested, prepared, and eaten oysters from Hood Canal before, and I agree with your “no duh” revelations based on that experience. Best meal I ever had, but I still relied on the tools, apparel, and energy produced by others in order to enjoy the revelation.
What happens post-tail dining when we get around to eating the brain inside our own snakey skulls? More crawling, moulting, and undulation? Another punishment for bringing people back from the dead as we continue wrapping ourselves around the Rod of Asclepius? Despite harsh weather and blisters, we still rely on the Mason jars. We still rely on a refrigerated place to store the anti-venom needed to cure the disease.
Why scrap literally thousands of years worth of trial and error that was handed to us in the form of mason jars and high carbon steel? We rely on as much as we choose to.
A friend of mine was in the Navy and told me a story where mid-level officers on a battleship would stand on the bridge in one place and only report what he could see from that vantage point. The whole system of inputs makes the individual very easily replaced. This is like Adam Smith’s pin factory model. My point is that by at least understanding first hand what it takes to survive, we are able to think around the mason jar.
I don’t want to stand in one place and be a machine for 40 years, retire, then die. I’d at least prefer to always be capable of feeding and clothing myself and not be dependent on others for basic needs.
We may still rely on the refrigerated place, but at least it’s a step back — or more accurately forward — to curing a disease that I observe stagnating our society.
The reason to scrap it is so you can be more self-reliant. You could learn how to make your own jars. But it wouldn’t make sense to me either, because I see no point in scrapping canned tomatoes to begin with. I can buy them at the market. Store bought cans aren’t an issue because the can gets recycled, a mute point, because I don’t buy them anyway.
I don’t think “reliance” is such a bad thing, and I’m skeptical you can escape it fully. It’s relying on the inefficient and unreliable that’s disturbing. We’re all dependent on each other, as indicated by the source of our paychecks, for one, and I don’t think that’s a disease you’re going to cure any time soon. But step forward acknowledged. I’m not sure which “individual” you’re talking about, but it doesn’t matter, because I didn’t miss your point, as I tried to relate to it with my own example.
Unless I’m mistaken, you’re NOT a machine standing in one place for the next 40 years. But maybe you feel like it. Sorry if that’s the case. The society I see is Seattle, not New York City, and I see progress being made. Nonetheless, I feel trapped too. I think if we could get away from our respective prisons, we’d both feel more at ease.
Okay. We could go back and forth until we’re both eating dirt or putting stone shanks in our throats — so long as we made them ourselves. I’m just advocating learning something new or resurrecting something old. I think we are overly reliant on cheap food.
Enough said then. I agree, so I probably didn’t need to say anything to begin with — something I should have foreseen in the ouroboros itself. I’m on your side, TK. Best of luck with your canning, and thanks for sharing the process.
Hi Tommy, I just read about 6 posts on your site and your manifesto. Bravo man, bravo.
One great way to get closer to the food producers is to move to a developing country. I’ve semi-permanently moved to the Philippines. This may sound ridiculous, but last night I was eating a stalk of celery and I commented to my wife that it had a much better flavor than celery in the US. It was likely grown within 100 miles of where I’m at on a small farm rather than 3000 miles away on a factory farm.
Since I’m new here, I’ll mention that I’m on very much the same sort of quest, but I took a different angle. I lost a metric shit ton of money in real estate, which of course hardly makes me unique. I still owe my family 60k plus whatever it costs to house my elderly parents for their remaining years. They had enough faith in me to put their retirement money into my deals that failed. I bankrupted off everybody else and walked away from my McMansion (well not quite, but close), but I’m gonna totally take care of my parents.
I was totally on the treadmill – I had a >100k a year job, but still managed to spend as much or more than I earned. Last year I finally saw that it was a trap, and that home mortgage interest deductions and “good debt” were a big lie. I decided to find a way to make more money and spend less until my debt is gone. I was able to parlay my IT skills into an expat job in Manila, Philippines for about 10% MORE than I was making in the US.
One month ago I sold most of my junk, dumped the big house, gave away my cars and hopped on a plane. So far so good, except that housing turns out to be surprisingly expensive in Manila unless I want to spend hours per day stuck in hellacious traffic.
But it’s progress. I have a roadmap to be completely free of debt and paid ahead on every obligation in my life within the next two years. At that point I’ll re-evaluate what I want to do with my life – I’m pretty sure that working for an international mega corporation is not it.
Tommy, thanks for your passionate reminder that following the other sheep into debt slavery and mindless consumption is not preordained. Avoiding or escaping that trap allows you to live far a better life than all the consumer goods in the world can ever offer you. Bravo man, Bravo.
Wow, Mike, that’s remarkable. Thanks for that story, and GOOD LUCK in Manila. I was just thinking the other day how great it would be to get some foreign perspective here regularly.
Thanks for the account. I hope you reach your goal of becoming debt free.
Thanks Tommy! I appreciate the warm welcome, and I love what you and your community are doing here. If I recall correctly, I came over here via a link from a comment on Sovereign Man (sovereignman.com). That community is also focused on freedom from the current system, but with much more of an international flavor. I like the vibe here, so I think I’ll stick around for a while
I’m kind of in an interesting quandry on the debt free thing right now. I could cash out what’s left in my 401k plan and be debt free today. But I’d have to pay a huge amount of tax and penalty next year, and I’d have no retirement left.
One part of me says the US economy is so messed up that I’d be better to just pay the tax and move on, but the other part of me says all I have to do is keep doing what I’m doing for two more years and I’ll be debt free with the retirement plan still out there which will be nice if things hold together for a few more years. We’ll see…
Welcome Mike : )
: You were there when the farmer grew the tomatoes?
: Move to a community with recycling. The metal caps will have to be recycled; the rings can be re-used by you, but not the caps themselves.
: Except that the farmer grew the food, using seed, fertilizer and other inputs that other people created, transported to the farmer market with energy and equipment that others created, built and sold. The market itself existing because there is a sufficient concentration of people to make it worth setting up there in the first place. People made the glass jars, the retaining rings, and the metal caps (which have a special seal themselves — it wouldn’t be fun to try to replicate them).
Division of labour is what gives society wealth. None of us would want to live in a society without division of labour.
Don,
You completely missed the point, but that’s cool.
Yes, I was standing there the whole time the farmer was growing tomatoes. I transported all the fertilizer myself and created all the markets. I do everything myself.
I didn’t use the word, “recycle” I used “reuse.”
I guess there’s no reason to do anything myself after all. What a relief. I’m off to go divide some labor, move to a community that recycles, then eat a glass jar.
Tommy out.
http://www.reusablecanninglids.com/
Yes, Tommy. The point is to get involved in the resources required to be alive in this body, this life, this town, this world.
Cheap food disconnects people from the universe that spawned their consumptive asses, and learning what it REALLY costs to produce and store food is critical to a reality-based society.
When all of the subsidies, roads and bridges, as well as the wars to keep our government in power are considered, there really isn’t a clear way to know what things cost.
This means that decisions are almost always based on faulty data combined with some very serious propaganda.
Tommy, Just got done with the ebook even though I got it Friday. I feel you brother, is what I have to say. Keep up the good work. I had this epiphany in 2000 and it’s taken me a bit longer to get it done, but I’m in the home stretch. I have been debt free for over seven years, but am just now getting the paid for homestead going.
Here is what I have accomplished, not to brag, but to encourage those of you that have fully bought the idea that it can be done. IT CAN!
1999, make 72K a year in the Detroit area. Not shabby, but I owed and I owed. Had a real big house two car payments and lot’s of debt. My wife didn’t work outside the home, we hadn’t bought that B.S. line from society, although my step mother was being real BITCH about her getting a job. Anyhow, I lost my job and it got me behind on our Mortgage. (Old French Mort=Dead, Germanic origin Gage=To pledge.) Mortgage=Death pledge.
Well I got a new job within four months, but it was too late, we couldn’t catch up, but we tried. We had mortgage insurance, so when we HAD to walk away it got paid off. Never went into our credit bureau for some reason. Paid of the the cars and sold our other house we had down in South Carolina, then rented cheap. By 2004 we were out of debt. Then my grand pa got sick. My daughter was in college and we rented and apartment for her and now my freshman son and moved in to take car of my aging/ailing grandparents. On top of my job, my wife got a living allowance and we got free room and board. (BTW This house never had a mortgage) We had money running out of our behinds. Bought both our kids decent cars for college. Cash. In 04 my daughter got a 99 Buick Century. (This was her third car from us, she wrecked the first and damaged the one I lent her.) My son got a 2002 Chrysler Sebring LS. We got is at an auction for $3500. Book was $7500. We know this because once he got it back to Nashville, two weeks later some guy rear ended him and the insurance company cut us a check for $7500. We bought a 2002 Explorer at an auction for $6000 for him then. I say all of this, NOT to brag, far from it, but just to illustrate what can be done if you have cash and don’t have to finance anything. Because your salary is now gravy money. If your expenses are low, then it can build up in the bank quickly. I’m not really into giving the Banksters my money, but that is the hand I’m dealt with, so I make the best of it.
I bought 20 ounces of Gold and 220 ounces of silver for a rainy day. Well I just sold the Gold and most of the silver and bought two acres in rural Tennessee with lots of huge hardwoods and a 98 F-250 and a 32′ Camper to go on it. All CASH. Dug the basement for a house and am moving the camper to my land. The county this land is in has no real coding or permit process, except for septic and that is state mandated. I plan on building a nonstandard type home. Earth bag, Straw bale, Timber frame home. (Timber from my land) This will be paid for completely as I go. When done there will no mortgage. I would love to be off the grid, but for now I have to have city water and grid electricity. Oh I forgot to mention, I haven’t worked for a company since March of 09.
Like you said Tommy make a plan and get to it. I tried the no TV, Internet thing, but had a hard time with it. When we moved to our apartment in Nashville in June of 09 we didn’t have those things. Used our Cell phones and had no land line, but I was Jonesing for the internet. Caved on that. Gave away my two 32″ tube TVs when I moved, so was good for a few months there, well I caved on that too. Mostly for movies though. Got a 42″ flat panel and a Blu-Ray player and signed up for Netflix. Paid cash for those items too. Turns out that the we have a basic cable too, but I don’t watch that much. I don’t drink or smoke, so I’m entitled to one vice right? Although I’m not up for paying for satellite TV and Internet in our new Camper in the boonies, but it will be funny looking with that TV on the wall in the VERY small bed room it has. I used to read like crazy, and I have gotten back into that. I have read five fiction and one non fiction in the last two weeks. Once on the land, I may not have time or energy for movie watching or reading, but it will be a good tired and lack of time. Cheers all.
From up-to-the-ass debt in Detroit to rural Tennessee.
That’s quite a tale. Thanks.
You might like this:
http://www.countrysidemag.com/
Just cruised that link… it’s very helpful and loaded with ideas.
Yeah, I finally had to stop getting Countryside: no place to put all of the back issues I saved…
Tommy, you pussy.
You give up after three little cans of tomatoes? And then you let everyone talk shit to you while your shrinking stomach ties your brain in knots. Fuckin wimp.
I took my boys hunting this morning, in a constant rain at 5000 feet. Quietly moving through the woods, searching, checking our back trail, patrolling. You know what I mean. My kids were absolutely miserable. The rain water dripping into their skins, through their clothes, running off their hat brims and chins. Then it happened, we saw movement. It was two large does, but not legal for our purposes. The kids got to see what happens when you spring into action, when you forget your pain and misery and willfully engage in more as you seek sustenance. “Dad, you just crawled through a mud puddle and snuck up to those deer! That was insane! I forgot it was raining it was so insane!”
Self sufficient means more than just the first step of canning. If everyone else wants to bitch about buying shit, then fuck them. They missed the point. Walk into the forest with a pocket knife for a month and see how you do if you think canning food is too dependent on others.
I bet those of you who are bitching loudest are the same one who want the forests kept free of human encroachment too. You can be self sufficient at the fucking grocery store picking out your own great deals on canned tomatoes.
I can hunt and forage to sustain myself and my family. Fuck you shopping bastards who think you know so much, but can’t save yourselves while your talking out the side of your necks to someone who is working in the right direction.
Fuck You.
Ha ha… this is pretty funny, although I am not sure it is on purpose. No no. Don’t worry about encroachment. Go in the woods with your pocket knife. Stay there.
I don’t think the post is so much about how tough one can be, as your survivalist expose brags, as much as the importance of not being so removed from those things which are essential to life.
For example, many people will regularly buy a pound of deli ham without ever having the realization that it was once a pig.
As marketing and consumerism makes everything so easy, we forget where the stuff comes from. We are getting closer and closer to the fat bloated people in the space ships in “Wall-E” that float in space chairs, are injected with sustainance, and never knew that their legs were intended for walking.
But hey, that’s cool. I like to take posts with positive insights and turn them into Fuck You’s as well. Happy Hunting.
Even when I think I’m writing something non-controversial, we get into it. I think it’s awesome, you fucking back-talking nonconformists.
I stopped eating pork shortly after the first time I slaughtered a pig. It was just plain nasty compared to gutting an animal in the field. It was PROCESSED. But, I started again after slaughtering the second — I guess I got over it. You’re totally right, CAGE — I meet all sorts of people who have absolutely no idea what they’re really eating let alone where it actually came from.
BTW, I had to eat half an apple this morning (day 4 w/out food) after I went down hard and my stomach started convulsing. I jumped up this morning, started running around getting shit done, grabbed a big glass of cold water and chugged… then crashed hard. Powerful lesson — your body will make you its bitch if you aren’t careful. I simply forgot that I hadn’t eaten food in days, and I could have gotten through it, but was about to start vomiting — probably not a great idea. But don’t worry, I grew the apple myself using worm castings that I made myself.
One other “no duh” observation that becomes keenly relevant when you’re hungry — fucking food is EVERYWHERE in this city. I can’t go 10 feet without a serious smell trigger that’s about to make me lose my mind. Humans are eating machines, and our lives revolve around it in many ways.
For Joe — Yesterday, I heat treated a knife I’ve been working on (started over 3 times) I made from scrap. It is literally the sharpest knife in the drawer, and can lay waste to any tomato in its path (hasn’t even been sharpened yet). You should email me your address — I want to send you a hunting knife made from a leaf spring that I got out of a scrap yard in Brooklyn. I found the steel — I just need to start heating and beating.
Kill the deer, bury it in a hole in the ground for a couple of months (undressed). When you are hungry enough, you’ll come back and eat the tenderized meat.
This is the essence of food preservation. Jars are what we call “civilization”.
HAHAHAHA! Excellent response….and you come close to hitting the mark as well. The point is not to brag about toughness, or win the survivalist prize. To me the responses above about the cans/ jars not being completely home made as well, is smugness wrapped in ignorance.
Don’t presume to know what is best for everyone else. It’s not anyone’s place to try to tell me or Tommy or anyone else what we are doing is incorrect. That level of busybody is ruining us just as much as the economic destruction being played out by Bernanke and Geithner. We all know localized processes are going to fix the problem, and that we are going to end up in the midst of a slow motion train wreck until we can get it re localized. But I don’t need the smarmy self righteous school yard tattle tale telling us we need more government to design this type of retro community. Localized economy, like the 1940′s with internet? Canning for fun and survival? I don’t know. But my point was, and is, like you said above. The blob that doesn’t know what its legs are for, is a segment of our society that is trying to dictate to the rest of us. They are the ones first in line to criticize and to redistribute on what they think is best. Not on work ethics or market forces or needs that match the land. Yet they use the land to justify their divisions, save the earth. They don’t know why or what that means because they have not ever lived as close to the earth as I described above. And to them I say again, Fuck you.
Everyone else gets a “fuck you very much”, and have a great week too.
I’m off to my own kind of survivialist training in the local YOGA studio – but couldn’t resisit shooting off a quick comment in reponse to:
“The blob that doesn’t know what its legs are for, is a segment of our society that is trying to dictate to the rest of us. They are the ones first in line to criticize and to redistribute on what they think is best.”
Wrong! Disagree completely. The blobs are the pawns of the Corporatists/Elite. They are powerless on their own, yet easily manipulated to serve those who are protecting the status quo.
More to say when I return.
Susan Marie: I agree and then some, though. The blobs are at the mercy of the corporate/elite, but the corporate/elite get their power/money from the blobs, also. The apathy of the blobs is critical to the process of fear/manipulation/marketing. That’s why we have schools and churches: to teach conformity and paternalism.
All answers will come from ‘on high’ if you simply do what you are told…..
“Let them eat cake” was just a simple version of “Let them eat cheap food.”
So that’s all true and I agree. Even Joe’s in agreement -thanks Joe!, fuck you very much too
So let’s stop talking and debating, it’s not the be all and end all. It’s just the beginning. And I’d like to suggest it be the end of the beginning now… it’s time for action, it’s time for each and every conscious man and woman to step into their power. Not to, as Joe points out, tell others how to live – but to fully live yourself, to identify what issues in your life and in the world cause you pain and distress and address them constructively and positively.
This is what I’m doing: http://oceanrescueproject.wordpress.com
We have already talked about it a bit, and we know than Susan and her husband are excited about joining the west coast flotilla, and that Tommy has a lovely Yacht to launch the east coast flotilla with… prior to that (and if you have a boat, please come and let me know) we need to win a competition – we are designing a mechanized floating machine to suck the plastic out of the oceans.
Don’t fucking dare be dismissive about the goal for being too ambitious. There are only two or three things that are really worth getting concerned about on this planet (putting all the tress back is another, and dismantling the corporatocracy is another). If you think this project is too big, too crazy, or not worth the effort – you are already one of the legless blobs… and your heart is hard in your chest. You no longer have the courage to dream, or to believe. Too fucking bad, but this call sign’s heart is beating loud and clear and will do everything in his power to right the wrongs around us all (and within himself).
This is a choice. It’s called ‘live’ or ‘dead man walking’
Those who choose to live – I’ll see you at the design forum, and see you on the high seas…
To those who choose to be zombies – I can’t see you anymore.
Is your wordpress blog open to people to sign up, talk about it, etc.? Or is it more to update the folks interested in what you’re doing?
I’m land locked bro (Colorado), and I don’t own a boat. I’ll tell you what though, I’ll donate some money to your cause. I’m pretty much broke and can’t afford anything, but I can send you guys $20 or something – hell, buy yourself some lunch at a local place there.
I have no idea if what you’re doing is even possible, but I don’t care either. Someone has to do SOMETHING about that floating shit pile. I commend you for DOING!! I’m behind you – of course not literally (though I wish I could be there to help!) but I’m behind you in spirit & faith.
Anything I can do to help your cause (minus the boat & ocean of course) let me know – I believe in what you’re doing.
It should be open Sumo – come on over, and contribute your $20′s worth in thought and participation… Or, if $40 is a reasonable hourly wage – spend 1/2 an hour talking or blogging about this. I only ask you do so with some hint of optimism…
Thank you for your support Sumo, it means more to me than you can possibly know. It makes a difference. Thank you.
I have always liked “survivalist toughness” though I don’t know how to hunt, dress an animal (well – I could do clothing I guess – but no clue about the ‘guts’), canning, gardening, etc. Hell, Auntiegrav said something about killing an animal (not taking out the guts/blood?) and dumping it in a hole, covering it w/earth, then going back 2 months later to eat it? I don’t even know WTF that is – he could be serious or joking, I have no idea, sadly.
I am the blob that everyone is saying ‘fuck you’ to, and I’m ok with that because I’m learning, changing, and growing. I’m also learning about myself (a lot!) and I am excited about the journey (for the first time in my life) and that’s a great feeling.
My wife and I slimmed down to one vehicle, and we chose to buy a USED hybrid. Turns out it’s a Saturn and pretty much a shit pile, but – it is what it is. If we get a second vehicle (and we may have to w/me working so far out of town), I was thinking about a classic VW Bus so I could try to learn to work on it on my own?
I welcome any thoughts/comments/feedback on the VW Bus idea? (or anything else about my post for that matter). I was thinking 1960 something up to 1978. I love the split window bus (67 and earlier) but prefer the shoulder strap seat-belts, and seats w/a headrest (whiplash isn’t cool, I hear), which is 1974+ if memory serves.
Cheers all : )
You get it Con-Sumo. You made your first step, and now you are going to be amazed when you can finally stand on your own two feet and do it for yourself. Whatever you decide “it” is going to be.
Welcome to the disconnect.
Thanks Tommy for the knife offer. I hope you got my email with the address.
A.F. Walking…..how about a solar powered rig that loads solar powered shuttle barges. Like a Roomba vacuum cleaner robot that goes back to its charging base. The barge hauls the trash from the floating shit piles to the recycling port, then returns automatically to the loading boat/ robot, docks itself and once full, completes its trip back to the dock. All on electrical provided from the sun.
I haven’t looked at your site yet, so I probably just identified the machine you are working on, or it’s something much more sophisticated.
Best of luck to you all. Except for the jackasses.
Thanks for the ideas Joe, sounds good. Come over and let us know more at the site I publicized. It’s open.
As for the deer, here’s something you could try with the knife what this man used to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Stirling – and that was stalk deer and dispatch them with his knife.