Political-Ecologies of Guerilla Hydration TPS-0013

Lone wolfing permaculture is antithetical to the idea of building community, but sometimes that's just the reality you're in. If you're trained, you should be able to be a Swiss Army knife of resilience.

My true life story has been for quite a while that I tend to be leaning into an austere future a little more than my peers. I feel very alienated in this moment by my surprise at some of the reactions of people to the pandemic.

I'm missing a sense of really tightening affinity groups and circles of friends to where everyone becomes a very diligent think tank and information filter that's bringing the best out of a synergy of collective intelligence, as opposed to the divisiveness that's happened.

I've always had people, lots of volunteers, lots of friends who would see me spearheading a permaculture project with a survival gardening aesthetic within the punk scene, and I could rally troops so epic projects were done. I've been rolling all of those years of practice into this. The real thing, surviving and surviving alone. That's unfortunate, but thanks to all of the blessings and all of the support that I've had over the years, I feel pretty confident.

However, once you throw yourself into the fire, or into the arid landscape, into the wild under extreme climate conditions, extreme everything conditions...

The safety rails, the safety net that is being in the first world, I'm getting a taste of how the other half lives. I wanna do it in a way where I take off the training wheels and I take off the guard rails, and I start to actually have to endure some exposure to some pains and some sufferings and put everything to the test.

As different as things are today than they were a few years ago, I remember what it felt like in 2008, when people were stealing gas and gas prices went up, and people were killing each other and themselves and their families and losing it. That's when I decided I really needed to get scientific about studying survivalism.

That's how I got reintroduced to permaculture. And I have taken it very much more seriously since 2008. So if I've been serious about it for that long, I better survive or whatever hurts me or makes me sick or kills me, it better be pretty sneaky, pretty smart to have evaded my hard earned skills at surviving.

But I get surprised. I get knocked down. I try not to take things for granted and try to prove out what's still theoretical. Whatever I have not practically endured and survived, that I know theoretically, what I gotta do to adapt, and what kind of skills and knowledge and equipment, processes, protocols, procedures...

I'd say about 25 is when I started getting more and more serious about gardening, about health, about fitness, about really pushing myself with martial arts training more than ever. Then getting also into spirituality and kind of new age self help stuff and human potential stuff.

Lots of experimenting and being a lab of life hacking everything. But it took me till about 25 before I got to maybe about a one, on a one to ten scale of where I want to be in terms of being very survivable. I'd say where I'm at now is probably a seven. But I'm moving faster towards what I think is ten now, then the scale will change, and that will become a five on the next scale.

There's part of me really wants to do that idea of Man Vs Permaculture, where you take your permaculture training and you go with just that knowledge and just the skills that you've developed. Paul Wheaton is doing a lot of this kind of stuff with boot camps and all kinds of programs, immersion beyond the PDC, the permaculture design course.

There's a lot of people doing the nomad lifestyle that's its own way of breaking off of systems of support and figuring out how to navigate austere survival and figure out all the little mechanics and dynamics, the subtleties of human existence, of human survival. It is social skills, a lot of it is mechanical skills. A lot of it is knowing how the body works, knowing how to diagnose things happening with the body. There are just so many domains, but when you throw yourself out into a survival situation, whether that's van life or being homeless, or hiking a trail, or getting on a sailboat, whatever it is, you put yourself deep into the wild, or far away from the surburbs or whatever you know.

If you get into dangerous human urban environments or dangerous austere wilderness environments, then you learn quickly what you're made of and what you wish you would have had and what you wish you would have learned.

So there's nothing like experiential application of theoretical knowledge and learning the hard way and making lessons easier over time.

This motif of man versus permaculture, I like it. But, also if I'm again contemplating the other direction of focusing on what I'm calling tactical permaculture, I'm feeling that it's better to frame my adventures with that focus. Because it's not just borrowing from an existing meme. It's not just adapting that existing man versus etc., man versus X-Y-Z meme, it is it's own thing.

The people who I want to build alliances with now more than ever are former military personnel who are going to be very complimentary with me.

That's really the education that I was on track to get. It's a difficult paradox that I've joked before, like can I get the training? But just like, not have to take orders or go to war, you know?

Can I make my own orders and declare my own wars, and only participate in the training?

If we're in alignment about foreign threats or the need to mount up...people would say, well, just look at the National Guard or look at the Reserve Services and whatnot, but still you sign away a lot of rights and.

I come from a background of punk and metal, there was no way that I was going to...I was very powerfully dissuaded from the path of wanting to be in the military, from childhood, from all the GI Joe and all the Rambo... and all of the.

The mystique of the soldier was very simplified in cartoons and action figures.

All of the romanticized combat of the childish, cartoonized war fighter hero, all that stuff. Then as you mature, for me maturing, getting into radical politics, still wanting to be a warrior, still lacing up boots, still wearing fatigues, still being a guerrilla but for your own cause.

Not just childishness and a juvenile posturing within punk that leaves a lot to be desired...it's very aesthetically militant but it's very, very weak in terms of delivering on the militancy, at least in a lot of the U.S.

There are subcultures within punk, very radical, Straight Edge, Riot Girl.

Those are probably the two that where militancy wasn't necessarily expressed through being tactically trained, but was expressed through, being very assertive and very forceful about grassroots movement building in a very methodical way and effective way.

It's interesting because, I think about psytrance people, at parties you see a lot of Israeli people and a lot of Israeli men who are all GQ, cut up, so squared away. They go through a crucible, a rite of passage, a patriotic duty. They serve in the military in some capacity, they get kind of sorted.

As far as I understand, I don't know all the details of it, but it is a country where everybody devotes some time that's mandated to be in service.

Despite my indoctrination as a Utopian pacifist over many years, whatever is left of the peace punk in me doesn't like to hear this, but I do think in in my heart of hearts now, as I've matured from beyond my juvenile, militant, anarcho-punk, the album covers of rioting...

A lot of the movement was a drunken exercise in futility, some great bands, some great music, and definitely was good times, but not much to show for it outside.

It should be acknowledged that the militancy within Anarco-Punk that actually delivers, that has been mostly outside of the US for a lot of reasons.

But it's not just the aggressive aspect of militancy that I'm trying to exalt here. It is a military manner that I was mentored in by those who had gone through the getting yelled at, having orders barked at them, and some of them being on the battlefield.

There's something lacking about not having those team building exercises and formal training. The course work, the land navigation, wilderness survival, small unit tactics, all of the technical stuff, all of the wherewithal with climbing and ropes.

Skills of resilience that so many people lack which makes them so helpless.

It's such a night and day difference from people who are confident in their survival skills, confident in their medical skills.

I'm going forward with this tactical permaculture concept to show respect to veterans and show respect to the militants and the militaries of the world.

Regardless of the politics, I'm willing to be like Bruce Lee and learn from anybody who has thought through and lived through and in some cases fought through circumstances that we should all be thinking a lot more about these days, like surviving in austerity and thinking through multiple backup plans.

The sense that things could go wrong at any time and things are going wrong, a lot of things appear to be getting worse.

When the the pandemic hit, by magic, luck and serendipity I was already living my dream of a remote wilderness, bug out, off grid permaculture site. I was positioned to be living that dream.

There was an eerie moment when I was feeling like, whoa this project that I was starting to join forces on, a permaculture farm rehab project, far from the city..

Feeling like, wow, I'm immersed in a season of The Colony where people have to survive apocalyptic scenarios, in both seasons it was a pandemic scenario that they had to come together as a group and pool their resources and their skills to survive and to build things and to solve problems, it was epic. My favorite all time TV program.

Basically it's been like that for me. Ever since I saw those, I've been wanting to implement what I learned in those shows.

You watch the characters, real people and ask yourself, who do you wish you were? Who are you not?

That's me speaking as a man who feels inadequate for wanting to have had my manhood be forged in an experience of being trained in what any military in the world would be training in. I was just not willing to sign up, and certainly, at that time of my fight age, to me it was blood for oil.

I did volunteer work at a peace works nonprofit, I was in the streets protesting bombings. I cannot imagine myself being at my age of warrior prowess, fighting for anything other than peace.

I don't look back and regret that and say, oh, I should have dumped all of my politics and all of my skepticism towards US foreign policy, forgot all the radicalizing studies I had done, all of the radical critique.

I don't regret not signing up to follow orders and be a tool of the state to do its bidding.

But I do wish there was another civilian option than the National Guard. Let's say, there were two types of boot camps or tracks. There are those who want to die for the flag, those who want to be put in harms way, those who want to run into danger.

Or you can have basic military training and just be a citizen defender and be basically, be a reserve first responder, similar to the Community Emergency Response Team training.

I think we definitely all could use more first aid training. I think that would lead to a lot more fitness and a lot more self care, a lot higher regard for other people, for public health, for public safety. It would eliminate a lot of recklessness.

I've had the blessing to train in martial arts with ex-military folks and done forest defense with people straight out of the military who taught me a lot of Ranger type skills, but it's all been piecemeal, not very structured.

So what I would like to do as a civilian who will probably not join the military unless there's a really good cause, or a mandatory conscription.

If I was called to defend my nation now, I would be pretty disappointed with what I have to offer. So I'm trying to do the right thing and not take this sort fantasy insurrectionist stance.

Some people really do train hard. Other people, they just get the garb, the kit, the weapons, but they don't train properly, and they get themselves in trouble. Bad things happen. So of course, I'm walking a fine line. I don't want to invite more scrutiny than I've already invited.

I'm not forming or joining any militias as it were, a more appropriate word would be a bio-regionally resilient private security force.

You don't have to be in the military to be tactical.

You have to be tactical in every situation, in every moment. Driving has a lot of tactics involved. If your mission is to survive and get to work and get work done, then you better be very defensive in you're driving.

There's tactics in everything.

There's a voice in my head saying, you're not the one to do this. But I would say, I'm exploring a topic, making a life adventure out of it. I will be continuing to collaborate, as I have throughout my life, with people who can speak from levels of credentials and types of experience, to where, it's humbling and it's bona fide.

I'm more than just a civilian complex where I'm not worthy.

Where I can take pride and I can be bona fide is in the word guerrilla, in solidarity with indigenous resistance and people fighting back all over the world.

Why? Because a guerrilla is fighting in asymmetrical warfare, using unconventional tactics. They are not able to go and engage in symmetrical warfare.

You are not from an equally matched power with all of the branches in the military fully funded, fully operational, fully equipped, and trained, in a deployable condition, fighting it out with relatively matched hardware in some theater of war, with the hierarchy of all the branches working together in what's called conventional warfare.

Guerrillas go across the spectrum, because you could be a guerrilla that was trained by US special forces, being a guerrilla doesn't make you a bad guy.

You could be a guerrilla ostensibly trained by the good guys to fight the bad guys, but you are still engaging in guerrilla tactics because you are the underdog. You have to fight against bigger numbers, bigger artillery, more ammunition, etc.

So it brings out the very courageous. It brings out the very down to earth, the very passionate, the very committed, the very creative, the very resilient.

Those who were very much under supplied and cut off from just endless flows of resources, and relief troops cycling through.

So I call myself an eco-warrior guerrilla because I have been, very mindful about my tactics. I chose the path of being an above ground activist, which meant that I did not engage in what they call nighttime activities.

To me, it was obvious that you choose one or the other. The people who tried to do both go get caught and imprisoned.

It's a paradox. How do you get radicalized without joining a scene?

Who out there is possibly able to get fully radicalized in a vacuum?

Back in my day, there wasn't enough enough of an internet culture to make that really plausible.

If you wanted to get radicalized, you had to go out to public places where there were a lot of different types of informants and agents and under covers and infiltrators, a lot of exposure, very porous and leaky social containers.

And just public campaigns, anybody could walk in. I remember there being people that forest defense campaigns who were falsely accused of being informants.

People who were behaving in sketchy manners, so that they got blacklisted as being informants, whether it was known for sure or not.

So I went through a lot of that stuff very early on.

It was clear for me that I was going to stay on the propaganda war side of things, create music, create art, create literature, disseminate information, rally the troops.

I stayed out of big trouble and some people didn't.

I'd like to think that over the years, I have become far more risk averse, and I have matured beyond the cult group think, and the peer pressure of being young and being in scenes where people put each other up to things, and people have these very cartoony militant fantasies.

I remember watching a documentary on the Iraq War, one of the first operations, the fighters were so gung ho that they sped past and they basically ditched and lost their support convoy, which was bringing, I believe, food, water, medical supplies, probably intelligence.

These guys were so amped up to get into the fight that they sped ahead of their support. Their support then got lost and ended up going straight through an extremely hostile territory, got blown up, kidnapped, and there's a whole historical chapter.

I've made mistakes in my tactics over the years. I didn't get blown to pieces. I didn't get captured. I haven't done time.

The reason I bring that up is just to say, there's a maturation that happens when you get older and your hormones change. The politics of your group of very hormonal peers change, and therefore what you put yourself up to, what you do to impress people...All of that psychology starts to change when you grow up. Some people, they build families, they have careers.

It's a totally different game. It's no mystery that the military is not waiting for people to build families and become very psychologically mature.

It's the opposite impulse. It's the impulse to get them on the battlefield while they're young before they have families, and while they're still at the peak of their delusions of invincibility, and while they're still putting each other up to stupid pranks, and one-up-manship.

Straight out of the locker room, straight out of the sports team, the jocks in high school, that's the pipeline.

I think everyone should watch The Man Who Planted Trees, a beautiful animation about the interplay between life paths.

The subtext, to me, is that, you could be harmonizing with the Earth and doing profound works of mass creation, divine works of mass creation by planting trees, planting forests, repairing the earth, devoting ourselves to that, versus the obligatory destructive urge that militaries play out.

In the most cynical sense, it just burns through the toys and the gadgets and all of the technology that's being cranked out of the military industrial complex.

That's not academic, it's not as conspiracy theory.

A lot of veterans get diagnosed with PTSD, PTS, they wanna heal from and have a purpose.

So I think it's a really synergistic concept.

I think it's a real yin and yang.

If I have a lot of experience being creative with ecology, and I feel like I lack the discipline, the training, the skills, some of the fitness.

But basically, I would wanna be competent to serve alongside the enlisted, where we're defending the community garden, where we live, or we're defending each other's homes. Like they would if I was a neighbor and they wanted to learn how to grow food, I could teach them.

They would reciprocate and say, man, I should really teach you how to be a soldier because all that food you're growing it's a target and if can't defend it, what's the point.

If I was a total Utopian pacifist still, and wanted to do nothing but yoga and maybe tai chi, but they had to convince me, they would have good arguments for it, and I would probably be convinced.

I'm already convinced. I'm already convinced that I am inadequate tactically, and that I've been like the line from The Twelve Monkeys. When Bruce Willis says, the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, basically they're just a joke. There a bunch of kids running around trying to play revolutionaries.

I was very disillusioned with the movements that I had joined, that I realized we're only serious about the tactics and the battlefield of verbal, literary, intellectual sniping.

Intellectual combat in magazines and newspapers, at conferences, talking about the the intelligentsia. It was nauseating, and I was one of the worst wind bags.

It took a long time for me to get practical and serious about things, other than just the ideological aspect of things.

When it comes to the military, it's not enough just to read a pacifist book and then hand wave it all off, because they're the ones making it possible for you to be a pacifist.

There's no free lunch. There's enemies of this country.

I respect the people in uniform. And now I'm ready to bring something to the table, other than just disdain and hollow rhetoric and juvenile anarchism, that tried but failed to really feed anybody sustainably.

I did my share of Food Not Bombs, dumpster diving food. The sketchy warehouse shows were fun, though we were actively creating a nuisance, a public health crisis. It was every form of hypocrisy and contradiction. I do really applaud the punks who who became paramedics, the punks who became first responders. I don't know if I wanna say punks who join the military, but I know they're out there.

For all I know there are people in the military who listen to some of my music.

The irony is not lost on some of them that the music is anti war, a lot of it has been anti military, but it's good music to drop bombs and shoot guns to. It's all very paradoxical. It's just like a Full Metal Jacket, the Peace Sign and the Born to Kill, it's a paradox.

But let's get serious about really defending our nation, because it's time.

If you're gonna call the troops home, let's do some civil engineering, let's do some permaculture on the homeland, that's Homeland Security.

So moving along to the practical stuff. I'll put a disclaimer here.

My corporate CEO, founder, mentor. He saw the guerrilla marketer in me, saw the eco warrior guerrilla in me and handed me the guerrilla marketing book.

Gotta get the VC funding. Gotta get the numbers up. Gotta show the financials. Gotta have the business plan. I never encountered a force of nature like that. And he was all about any and everything you could do to get an edge bootstrapping your own startup until you got venture funding.

So the guerrilla in me was very apt. But I was still very anti-capitalist.

I was anti-money, I was broke. But I had to get a job.

So the disclaimer if if I say I identify as a guerrilla, hey, let's just say, I identify as a guerrilla marketer.

It's adapted from warfare. But what it really means in today world is that you are the underdog, and that you have to be very adaptive because you don't have an infinite budget.

That's what it comes down to. It is the poor person's adaptive strategy to the mission, whatever it is surviving adversity or building a business.

Guerrilla gardening is great. So anybody can be a guerrilla gardener, and you don't have to join the military to do it, and no one can say it's stolen valor.

You can make a seed bomb, we used to make home-recycled paper airplanes with seeds embedded.

How's that for an insurgency, guerrilla insurrection. There's your insurrection.

Now back to the present, for me it was a recent guerrilla mission to procure water in a very awkward condition.

The tactical condition was not to rehydrate combat soldiers in the theater of war.

It was how do you get water if you're off grid, there's a drought, and all the rains that you've been dancing and praying for and designing rain catchment systems for have yet to be even really tested, because there have been no rains yet, and your water tanks are being depleted.

In my exploration of urban guerrilla strategies for water procurement I ask, what does it mean to be an urban water guerrilla?

Well, if you're not operating in a manner that you choose to put yourself through the crucible of I'm going to work on a project far away from any residence, let alone whatever your residence is if you have one. Let alone your friends residences, or any other crutch of a connection point to the grid...

It gets to be a situation where you have a spectrum of options.

In the colony, they built a charcoal sand multi layered alternating charcoal sand filtration system. They would boil it but they would filter debris out of Los Angeles river. That's probably the bottom of the spectrum, barely up from raw sewage or pure toxic waste.

It could be worse, but the LA river is basically diluted toxic waste and raw sewage. They survived doing that, which I thought was a quite a feat, and there's a lot to be gleaned from that.

A step above that would be the sort of survivalist prepper gravity powered stand alone water filtration systems.

What I have chosen to do is combine a strategy.

I've alternated between full size counter top tower filter systems and a tiny sports bottle filter in a stainless steel water bottle that fits perfectly. It's about the size of a small candle with a straw tube attached to it. I've used it with some sketchy water sources and it worked very well.

Now in the pandemic, I'm not a minimizer or denier, I'm doing my best to avoid crowds and therefore my water strategy has to be stealth.

If I was able to capture more rain, I wouldn't have to go back out into the world and practice epidemiological guerrilla tactics to survive and to avoid crowds, Bottlenecks of enemies of good public health practices.

I'm not naming anybody. I'm not attacking anybody. I'm not aggressing on anyone.

I'm just being very defensive, acknowledging the threats and knowing, there's more of them than there are of me who are in denial about the transmission of the virus.

So I have a very defensive posture towards that. If I have to go out into the world, into the public, I'm not saying I have impeccable everything...I have my kit, it fits in the side of the door. Spray alcohol, water mixture bottle. I've got my fresh N95 masks, I keep my distance in a lot of different ways. Keep my distance from peak hours.

I'm very ill at ease still when it comes to people's attitude, whether it's very lazy or very aggressively anti public health. I prefer not to have to leave to go get water, I would prefer rain but now I was forced out.

Of course I got a lot of things done in one little micro-adventure, a lot of important errands and re-supplies, pounds of seeds. If I leave here, I'm coming back with pounds of new seeds.

I got arugula mulberry coriander, anything I can get in massive bulk supplies if possible. .

I'm very happy that I was able to procure a bunch of seeds that I ordered.

I had to restock as many containers with as many gallons as I could haul, basically hundreds, not thousands of gallons, but hundreds of gallons.

As a COVID urban guerrilla, trying to avoid contact with the enemy as much as possible, how do you get large quantities of water?

I could get pretty much any water source and feel safe and confident filtering it through the filtration systems that I have.

It would be just a matter of preference. I would prefer to have, obviously, the best possible.

That would be rainwater, but from LA river river water at one end and rain water at the other end, there's a lot of gradations in the middle.

It was haphazard learning as I go, learning the hard way.

It's mortifying and shocking how difficult it becomes to get large amounts of water when you don't have logistically viable nearby access to a garden hose for filling up your survival water tanks.

I had imposed simulated off-water-grid scenarios on myself in the past where I'd have to fill garbage cans up and then just irrigate from those.

So I've done the drill of filling things up but I was never cut off from a source of tap water at some point at a facility even if was really far from where I needed it.

I had experience with limited water convenience, austere use of water for bathing and laundry and hygiene, cooking, and washing dishes.

I've learned how to minimize those factors to the tiniest amount, just enough to eliminate most pathogens and for clothes not to stink.

I have cut that budget down to the bone. The water budget gets cut down to the bone. You find out you have a microbiome, microbiology on your skin, maybe you shouldn't scrub off and poison and disinfect twice a day.

That's pretty guerrilla, if you are surviving on water tankage and not turning a faucet, turning a spigot on demand, you're already guerrilla.

In the city, you could top off more easily with friends and access points were more ubiquitous. It wasn't an ordeal to get to it.

When I was living in my car, running my online business, being a digital nomad, doing gig-work...I'd have two five gallon plastic water jugs, kept out of the sun.

I would keep one of them full at all times, and I would administer the other into smaller one gallon containers.

I would just go to the water dispenser machines and fill them up every few days.

That was no problem and good training for being sparing with it, not wasting itm very good training for that.

It was just a matter of staying aware of the reserves, keeping an eye on the inventory, and then having the emergency supply that never gets used, but rather gets rotated.

So, if there was, let's say, the big LA earthquake, I never wanna be with less than five fresh gallons, to get me through a few days, if necessary.

And then moving up to trucks, you get to carry more, but where I'm at now and doing what I'm doing now, I don't wanna leave here. I don't wanna get down to where there's less than a hundred gallons at any more any time either.

I don't wanna leave here and come back without hundreds of gallons that are gonna last me months until I have to get down to a low point where I'm gonna wanna restock.

So what strategies do I have to use now that I'm talking orders of magnitude more water to resupply.

It's a really un-optimized retail expense to be buying one gallon at time from those dispenser machines.

If I've got hundreds of gallons of tankage that I'm gonna try to all get at once, I don't wanna do it piecemeal. This is the most expensive water I will have ever had in my life because the cost of gas is going up, and the miles to the remote area where I am.

If it doesn't rain, it costs me a lot of money to go and get water.

So I'm definitely gonna wanna get bulk rates and top it all off at once. It's very precious. To me, it's worth more than gold.

Water is the real survival asset, my water portfolio, my index fund, my basket water resources.

So to procure water at scale, some people carry around those keys that you can use to open the secure spigots. But I'm not talking about stealing water that's not appropriate to my risk appetite, and it's not necessary.

I should be able to purchase water, not borrow it from friends, not lean on anybody, but be able to find a way to buy bulk water at a reasonable discount and fill up my tankage and have it not be an issue, but unfortunately, and this could be my big blind spot. It is my big blind spot.

So I looked up boon dockers, people who are doing the hash tag, van life, etc.

The best I could find was people talking about rest stops and truck stops. I called a truck stop, maybe I need to call more of them. But they told me I was misled in thinking that it's common for truck stops to have bulk water dispenser machines or side deals where you could fill up with a normal hose and spigot.

It's been claimed online that there is some chain truck stop that says, you can hook up a hose to our spigot and we'll charge you by the thousand gallons, or hundred gallons, it flows at the rate of a standard garden house, and they charge you by the gallon. That's what I should be doing.

Though it wasn't able to find this option. It seems there's not enough of a market for that to where that niche is supplied.

In the current market, that standard is you have to buy one gallon at a time, or five gallons at a time.

I said to myself, okay, how bad could it possibly be to go to a self service car wash and use the pressure washer on rinse mode and hope that there's not gonna be so many toxic, corrosive, kill you dead residual particles of wax and tire cleaner and whatever kind of soap is in there...

And just hope that it will be okay if I rinse for a few seconds. I was trying to convince myself that made sense, because I thought about the alternative of getting only one gallon at a time at a high price.

I'm not gonna want to fill up hundreds of gallons, one gallon at a time

I almost convinced myself that I should do that, but when I went to two of them, and I looked at the I read the signs. I'm gonna do this right.

I'm gonna read the rules. I'm gonna look, I'm gonna assess everything I can.

Because I'm not trying to get stopped by anyone and risk viral exposure, that makes me an impeccable law buying citizen overnight, instantaneously, because I do not wanna be caught up with people who don't take it seriously.

I had already been pulled over by law enforcement officers that were flippant about public health measures. That's gonna make me far, far more risk averse, and that's gonna make make me not wanna be engaged in questionable activities.

So I checked out two of these places, I'm not trying to be in a hurry and get away with something because I don't even want that attention. I don't want that to be a possibility that someone questions that what I'm doing there.

I would be doing something that while they may not have explicit instructions not to do it, the biggest risk is that they think what I'm doing is rinsing out containers and I'm dumping toxic chemicals there illegally against the signs saying it's a federal offense, and with a 24 hour surveillance camera on me.

All that changed my mind about this option, it probably saved my life because if I would have been able to convince myself that there's no way in hell anyone's gonna notice what I'm doing or care...

I don't need to get COVID explaining that I'm not doing something illegal even though it's a little bit weird and a little bit different, like hey I'm practicing my urban guerrilla tactical permaculture, do you mind?

Back when I was trucksteading on the side of the road in Hollywood, before the pandemic, I could get away with a lot of weird survival stuff and just blend with a lot of the weird stuff going on in Hollywood all times.

Now I don't want anything I'm doing to be questionable in public.

So what do you do? You be a customer and that gives you some protection.

But now I'm back to the drawing board on water, and now I'm down to my emergency reserves, which I don't wanna touch. Now I think about going out again, driving all that mileage again, to go do some other strategy and it was already past midnight.

I had thought through other other approaches. I could stay out longer and just keep calling more places.

I finally decided I would the ergonomics of filling up gallon jugs, and carrying two at a time back and forth from a dispenser to my tanks. I had just watched The Shaolin Temple again, the 1982 film.

You see how they get their water and how they make it into a kung fu exercise of holding these beautiful wooden water baskets. They go to a waterfall, and when they get the water, they make it into an an exercise of holding it at the most awkward and painful position and running back with it across difficult terrain, everything is part of the training. So after watching that, I think, I better man up. I have my one gallon jugs with me.

I will see how costly it is, how time consuming it is, how dangerous it is with people around, having to encounter tweakers and beggars, realizing that this is very tactically disadvantageous to have this much exposure period, and then for it to be very ergonomically and just logistically, literally the definition of a bottleneck.

I can't plumb a hose into this thing. It would have made a lot of sense.

But I had to just systematically max out the allotted limit of three to five gallons over the course of several gas stations and convenience stores just thinking, the Shaolin monks had to do it. This is good training for you. This is, this is good for your kung fu to have to fill these hundreds of gallons up one gallon at a time. Use both hands. Use both at the same time, jump in and up, jump up and down, off your truck, practice your footwork and just make game of it.

All right. So I did that for a couple of hours.

It was probably around 3am when I remember that I had considered a marginal option before, though I had disregarded it because I thought I'd find better options. By now this almost forgotten option was seeming much more attractive.

I'm not going back without at least 20 to 50 gallons to give me time to really go back to the drawing board, give me a little bit of time.

But I hit the jackpot. I finally found one gas station that had a very logistically advantageous air and water dispenser. The water cable was much longer than I would normally expect. Whereas before it was barely thinkable for to want to refill from this water unit, it just seemed so likely to be polluted. Though really there was no reason not to just assume it was connected to the same plumbing as the bathroom sink.

By that point, I had been broken and humbled during the one gallon action.

Now I know it's basically impossible to do this one gallon a time, even if I was willing to do it. The limits are, are too low.

I had to gamble on the safety of the air and water machine, the water that's normally used to fill up overheating radiators.

It's gotta be cheaper than the filtered water machines. You are still paying a lot for that few minutes of water, a $1.50 or something, whatever it says on there. I was stoked on how long it ran for with one payment.

After two or three cycles, it became very clear you get 10 gallons of what appears to be unfiltered tap water per cycle.

This is actually probably the best strategy.

I did consider posting an ad online and trying to just find anyone who'd be willing to sell me water from their private residence or business.

Back in East LA, it would be no problem to work out a deal like that. Where I'm at now, I don't know if people would be very hostile to that kind of thing or if they think it would be great. I'm not not trying to find out right away, because I'm not ready to commingle in the nearest settlement.

I even thought about renting a commercial property just to get water, or even get gallon a time out of the hotel room.

But I don't wanna arouse suspicion of any kind.

So filling up hundreds of gallon for a few hours until dawn at a gas station, being mindful to let other people use it as needed, it was a little awkward jumping up and down off my truck and restarting and repaying, swiping the card again and again and again and again to keep getting more and more.

It's a very interesting psychology of victory and sense of appreciation you get for an option that you didn't fully value at first, like the way food tastes when you haven't eaten for several days.

This is way better than gambling with the car wash.

It didn't give me a limit. I'm getting water plumbed right from the main of the city municipal water supply, there's no reason for them to not take money for me.

It was a blessing to get ten gallons at a time coming through this, and just sit here, my hands were freezing. The nozzle, I had to hold was leaking, the hose was leaking, there was an icy cold wind, but despite that, I actually felt great.

Holding a tight grip for those hours, I'm really glad I watched that kung fu movie before this, it was there for me, giving me resolve to stay in the fight for survival.