Post-Apocalyptic Thoreau - the way he was meant to be.

Really, the idea of getting away and becoming more self-sufficient intersects with another of my long time passions. The Apocalypse. From the Tripod Trilogy by John Christopher through the Mad Max movies and then onto the Zombie uprising.

Self-sufficient. A strange concept to ponder in our current society where trades have been broken down into tasks via assembly line thinking. I doubt that I'll ever become completely so, not without vastly streamlining my life well beyond what I'm willing to sacrifice. One would have to embrace the primitive hunter-gather lifestyle and enschew all modern technology opting instead for whatever one could make with their own hands. To survive without needing to rely on the untrustworthy others.

This is the only path to true self-sufficiency. In the words of Thoreau “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” Cut down your affairs to the bare number possible to keep yourself alive. (Thoreau argues that you need to live a good life, be good for something – largely he seems to have some suggestions while leaving the reader to define exactly what that means.)

Food and shelter. Your life will be a constant search for these if you wish to live the simplest life possible with the fewest possessions. And, in the case of the apocalypse, this may be how many people are left to live. Either as hunter-gathers or as scavengers on the bones of society(I prefer the latter, but it is the more treacherous of the paths).

Bah on that noise. In this respect I don't want to simplify but rather to expand. I want to learn more about the world, to feed my curiosity(sadly I am easily distracted and quickly flit away to the next shiny object that drops in my path). I want to build myself a mountain of knowledge and save as much of the memory of humanity as possible. This is why I'm building my library. I am an introvert and a hermit, but I still want people around. People who can share the burden of learning and knowing.

Only an utter fool goes through life alone and turns away help from friendly hands. In many cases I have been this utter fool. I think I shall try to change this. I think that I will likely fail. I wonder if I could gather and set up my own self-sufficient community of Future Apocalyptic Survivors. Or does that sound like a cult? Or worse, the plot to The Village.

My Skills blog lists some of the areas of knowledge that might come in handy. My own pallet is largely useless and difficult to apply in the modern world. I'm left hoping that my experience in weaving chainmail will be a valuable asset after the collapse.

*if you wish to join kindly compose and mail an essay relating your applicable skills along with a recent headshot.

In 8^th grade we read the novel “The Girl Who Owned a City” (Objectivist Propoganda) about a plague that only left prepubescent children alive. That fired my imagination for years, until my voice changed and I began collecting my own odd assortment of body hair. Afterwards, I had to drop my admittedly silly plans of trekking to Alaska and fetching food with a BB gun. Oh well, other scenarios were always there to fill in the gap.

In recent years, I've settled on the idea of finding a parcel of land away from a population center. This is in part where the previous post comes into play. Find land, and produce food. Ok, I suppose that is easy enough, I live in America and we've a lot of space and if we get a proper apocalypse where the lion's share of our species ceases to be, well then more for me. Still, I should quite prefer to get a few years of practice in afore the end. A dress rehearsal before going on.

*I predict that the world will end soon after Sarah Palin is elected president in 2016. Soon after she'll somehow release the zombie plague while visiting a secret CDC facility. I like to imagine it will involve her tripping while trying to walk and chew gum at the same time. That leaves me with 4 years to work with. Better get cracking.

So my to do list: Find land. Build house. Gather knowledgeable companions to join me in my mad quest. If video games have taught me anything, I will meet them along the way and after a brief interaction we'll become fast friends and trusted allies. I'll need a healer, builder/mage, fighter and thief to round out my party proper. I'm working on my Mandolin skills so that I can fulfill the role of Bard.

To date I've not managed to accomplish any of these Herculean tasks. A few hurdles stand in my way.

Firstly there are the years of student loans that I need to pay off. I suppose I could follow in Thoreau's footsteps and find a wealthy benefactor to donate the land, but I am the suck at schmoozing. Though, I would love to see the business plan that sells that one. “So, you're going to collect a ragtag band of hippies, bikers, survivalists, farmers and doctors and build a settlement out in the boonies. What sort of profits are you expecting after you get started?”

Yeah. Better do this myself. Come on lotto!

Assuming I do manage to scrape up a place to homestead, I've often wondered how to go about it. And where. I've had long discussions on the subjects, as well as debating myself. Locally I'm fond of Traverse City, mostly due to a partiality to the landscape. Climate is iffy and soil is sandy. Move on.

Really, there are going to be positives and negatives to just about any local I can dream up. The north east has a cold climate and poor growing season. North west has a superior climate but is prone to earthquakes and volcanic activity. Fuck the South(east) – More eloquently, the climate is far too hot for my preference, and the last decades have been dry, not to mention the bevy of overly religious folk. Religious folk are scary enough in quiet times, I fear that the end of the world will send them over the edge. The southwest is hot, dry, and hot and dry.

I of course have my preference after weighing the options. No I won't tell you. I will however move onto the last part of this muddled tirade.

Housing. As I don't plan to wander, I will need some permanent housing. Something sturdy that works with the land. Many ideas have come and gone.

For a while, I had a passing fancy for Microhomes. For those who aren't enlightened, they're a spin off of the Thoreau inspired Movement for Simple Living. Thoreau himselflived in a Microhouse. Generally to be considered a microhouse the domicile needs to be around 100 to 750 square feet. That's right, many of these places are the size of a studio apartment. Some are as small as my dorm room. Still, that should be enough space for one or two people – so long as they Simplify and slough off their unnecessary baggage.

A microhouse would be perfect. I am a hermit and need but little space and could easily get by with a mere couple hundred square feet. Mostly. Even without the imminent Palinocalpyse. I want a home that will be warm in the winter and cool in the summer. All with the least resources possible. To be honest, I've been fascinated by the concept of the underground home since I was a kid. Back then we lived near an underground home and it was an exciting landmark that we would point out on the daily commute. I don't recall that seeing the place ever got old, it was so damned exotic.

Then I found Earthships. They are a range of earth sheltered homes that were constructed of walls of earth filled tires. The creator, a raging hippie, claims to have designed for sustainability. He's been working on the project for 30 or 40 years now, learning and advancing through trial and error. Heated with passive solar, they collect rainfall for water and are outfitted with sources to manufacture renewable energy(solar panels and wind turbines). He claims that even in the harshest Taos winters that residents don't need to spend a dime on heating the home. Same goes for cooling in the summers.

*Pardon if I'm a mite obsessed with the idea, but we just had a heatwave where the temps topped 105. There have been many days this summer where I've wished my apartment was really one of these structures.

The south face of the house is a wall of windows that forms a greenhouse. The roof collects water and stores it in cisterns. These two features are combined to make a natural water treatment system as well as food production area. Fresh water > Shower > Planters(to filter) > Toilet > Outdoor Planters > Septic tank and field.

Fresh food 365 days a year from the greenhouse. Resistant to fires, tornadoes and earthquakes. These are the claims that the hippie architect makes, and I want to believe them. The houses were designed to allow the inhabitants to live their lives off the grid. The possibilities tickle both the inner hermit and survivalist.

I want to try it out.

A really half-assed adventure.

On the subject of moving.

It's easy to tell who a good friend is. They're the ones who will willingly help you lug twenty-some boxes of books, plus furniture, plus everything else in your house up a flight or two of stairs that are barely wide enough to accommodate a large man. Thankfully, in this case at least, I'm not a particularly large man. Then again, being big and beefy would help the cause of moving as I summoned the power of Heracles and hurled book laden boxes through the second story window, barely breaking a sweat as I did.

That push-up I did a couple years ago didn't really help as much as I had thought.

Stupid exercise.

Evil and I had been living in a house on the northern side of town, in a peaceful neighborhood on a dead end street for like two years. We were there with a third friend, Zombie-Clone42(here on ZC42). ZC42 is a friend of Evil's from college, they were in the local Renn group together, and after I decided to move down from the great white north they got together and we went in on renting a house together, a 50s era Bungalow made built by a man who didn't know jack about building houses. The walls were a literal three inches thick, interior and exterior. Hell, it took us eighteen months to finally find the one electrical outlet jack in the bathroom. I won't miss the house.

But I do hate moving, and in March ZC42 informed us that she was going to move in with another friend to go back to school - after her beau finally got into his house. That process wasn't easy and pushed back our move from April/May to August. It's rather stressful not knowing where you're going to be and when, but in the grand scheme of things, no big deal.

We got the new place about four days before we were expected to move out of the old. Cutting it close, I know. In the end were were reduced to searching the skeaziest place on the net, well one of them anyhow, craigslist. NerdMoment Surfing Craigslist for housing felt like hitting up Mos Eisly Cantina, dirty, grimy and sketchy. All while wondering if you were going to be raped and murdered by a profoundly ugly man with an attitude problem. /NerdMoment

But we found a place, in the SE part of town, in a place where the old Money meets the ghetto, literally, we're between two neighborhoods, with Hippi-land off further East. The streets are lined with giant old Victorian Era homes. Yeah, we found ourselves a colorful neighborhood, one with multiple personality disorder. But it seems to be safe and mostly quiet. With the exception of a couple of loud neighbors. (One dude woke us up at around 3 in the morning one day, yelling at someone across the street that she owed him money and that he didn't like her any more - that went on for fifteen minutes.) Oh, and the house next door? That seemed to house a geriatric dude who was selling pot. Schizophrenic neighborhood indeed.

There was a clear window of weather on Saturday, where the heat of the day rose to the threshold of a mere high seventies low eighties. Even some spots of rain, so we lucked out and got ourselves a good day to move. We rented a truck from UHaul - a seventeen footer, that wasn't available till around 4PM. That we loaded up with the furniture. I was exhausted by the time it was full, after three or so car loads of the heavier boxes(damn my OCD nature when it comes to my library. War and Peace abridged? I'm never going to read that! Why do I still have it? In case of a zombie uprising, duh! Gonna need a wide variety of reading material to pass the time when the world ends.).

So, I was beat before we began to make the biggest and largest push, so I left the really heavy stuff to the people who are actually in reasonably good shape. Curse the last month of sitting on my ass as I waited for the never ending heat-wave to pass. It has not aided my endurance. Sad day. Worse because Josh of the Goth was running in circles after we got the last of the mess hauled in. Running in circles. Aren't members of the Goth counterculture supposed to be generally against physical exertion and other activities that might take them out under the fearful the sun?

Needless to say, I was rather sore the next morning.

We've been here for two weeks now, the house was about squared away. That first luxury, broadband internet, was installed six days after we moved in. How I miss the internet. It is my connection with the world at large. It is a luxury that I can live without if need be. I am not yet so far addicted that i can't take a few days off without logging on. But thankfully I didn't need to since one of our neighbors had an open port on their wireless router. Huzzah for free internet! At least until our own came. Huzzah for a solid internet connection and a freedom from the paranoia that the open port has a packet-sniffer attached.

The biggest loss in the move? My super gunky comfortable couch of awesome. The cradle of my ass. The place where I ensconced myself and wrote at least two different novels, played countless games and watched even more movies. Super awesome couch of extreme comfort: You will be missed by myself and my extremely discerning ass.

A slight stumbling block on the road to comfort was when DTE informed me that it would take them ten days to finally switch on our gas. Ten days without being able to cook meals(correction, we used the crockpot for two weeks - note: cooking rice in a crock pot was inadvisable, 2 cups took three hours and turned to a mush). Ten days of cold showers. Hot showers are the symbol of civilization itself. To hell with sliced bread. But I can live with cold showers. Or even going without, though I like my comfort, and who doesn't?

Several days was all it took before the house was more or less in order. Two weeks were out before I made my last visit to the old house. Now I begin to wander around with some familiarity, as I navigate in the darkness to find a drink of water. I know where everything is already, not difficult since the furnishings are rather sparse in this apartment, leaving a lot of open floor space that has yet to be commandeered by any piece of furniture.

I was wondering though, how long does it take for a house to become a home? I still refer to this apartment as 'the apartment' rather than home. Though I've not really thought to any of my last several domiciles as homes, but houses and apartments. Maybe because I rented? Or didn't intend to stay too very long to make it a home? That isn't to fair, I stayed in my crappy rathole studio apartment for around five or six years and maybe I considered it to be home. But how long did it take before I stopped waking up in the middle of the night and trying to remember where I was? Only to wonder when it came back to me? I did that quite a bit at the old house, but not at all here. I rather like the new apartment, it's open and airy. We have a library/game room. The rent is cheap, though the digs are a little run down. Hey, it perfectly suits my needs, and even some of my wants.

But how long until the newness fades completely and I begin to think of this strange new house as my home? What does that take? What sort of things need to click in the mind? Just day in and day out boring old familiarity? Like a new pair of underwear? Or does it take willingness on my part?

A pity we're still in GR I guess. But then, in more interesting environs, we wouldn't get this space for the right price. Everything has a trade off.

Unless something drastically changes, such as my finally deciding to move out to the Pacific North West, or Evil gets married, I don't plan to leave any time soon. The one bright point is that moving boxes downstairs has to be a lot easier than carrying them up.