I'm recording this now because I hope you're able to hear the gentle sound of the rain in the background.
Finally, after at least, I believe, three separate intervals, cycles of me deploying these very cumbersome and heavy 16 mil tarps that are 20 by 20, often with smaller, moderate to extreme winds, that when trying to open that sail, it's exactly what it does. It starts to fly away, knocks you over and makes it hard to get in place.
It has been a struggle, at least for the last several weeks. Just the compounding, crushing effects of 24 seven heat torture, heat illness on the edge of the fine line between heat exhaustion and heat stroke just forces me to be bedridden.
For all but a few possible upright movement tasks before the sun gets out overhead, which is just a couple hours in the morning.
If I get up at four, five, move around. But this has not happened ever before in my life. It's only happened this summer, where I don't know if it's just the fact that you can't go from one year to the next and think that your body is gonna hold up in the same way.
It seems like in some ways, you can get acclimatized. In some ways, you get tougher, but in other ways, you're actually just getting ground to dust and maybe taking away some ability.
And this summer, for the first time again in my life, I've never experienced anything like this.
All around the upper thighs, deep in the joint, and all the way out to the muscles closest to the surface. I don't know if it's a combination of something lacking in my diet but it's certainly a factor of atrophy.
So I've been researching atrophy and just hoping that it's as simple as just me aging.
I think you can't forget that factor. But aging, like there are dog years, maybe there's desert rat years, once you migrate under these conditions.
The heat, the climate crisis makes everything a wild card. I survived a hundred and 25 degree temperatures and didn't go below a hundred degrees, even at the coolest time in the middle of the night, early morning.
I think it knocked a few marbles loose upstairs. TI know that for sure, it took a lot to get to even this point where finally it's cool enough for me to have a blanket because of the rain.
That's the first time, in two and a half months. It's been the most, the most brutal crucible to get through. Nothing easy about it. Certain things were easier than the last couple of years, but certain things are harder, and those harder things are are, are definitely taking there toll.
It's really agonizing pain. It's painful to walk and to move at all. If I had to describe it it doesn't look painful the way that Robocop would walk in that suit.
It seems like it was something that was rehearsed.
I know that I've watched the behind the scenes and the commentaries and what not. I know that it was very hot where when they were filming in that suit was so kind of suffocating and heat trapping that he could only do so much at a time and only film for so long, and had to be constantly rehydrated.
It seemed like a lot of the times.
I don't know what they're thinking. I can understand low budget films where they just don't have the flexibility but if it's a full on studio backed production, you always hear about them putting actors through hell.
Usually it being extremely hot, and sometimes being extremely cold.
I don't know what they're thinking not to choose different times of the year.
But the thing about Robocop, the way he walks, it was like, it seems like he said he studied birds, and that's why, because he wanted to get this sort of very primal, yet very robotic.
You saw a lot of the gait of human figures in video games and animations, computer generated graphics.
I don't know how many decades ago you would see CGI people, and they would be walking in this really kind of robotic way, where it just didn't seem smooth, just really forced and really deliberate.
I don't think that they put nails and spikes in that suit to give him pain so that he would walk only in a certain robotic fashion, because to do otherwise would be agonizing pain.
When you see somebody limping, usually it's because, whatever awkward way that they have to maneuver as they walk, they may be trying to avoid a painful stimulus.
So they walk a certain way that's shaped and determined by the threshold of pain on one part of one leg or both, or more multiple areas.
Some people could just be, oh, I'm paralyzed or something, I'm partially paralyzed so that's why there's a limp on with crutches or a walker.
For me, it's the opposite. It's an alternate situation where the way that I have to walk...it looks like Robocop, not because I'm trying to be a robot, for whatever reason, it just happens to work out that the pain that I have to try to avoid in terms of where the weight shifts as I move, the only explanation is the atrophy.
I did not experience this at all before.
So the first thing I started studying, researching was atrophy from being bedridden.
I was no less bedridden over the last two summers. But this time, for some reason, some combination of factors. I can only imaginey it made me susceptible to atrophy.
It's weird, because I was doing stretches, morning stretches, I felt fine. I felt great. In the cooler months before the temperature went off the charts, I would stretch and I would feel fine.
I certainly wasn't experiencing any pain beyond what’s recommended to breathe through a stretch.
There was no acute injury whatsoever. But I feel like once the heat set in, what would normally occur with muscle repair...I'm not a sports medicine doctor.
Just speaking from experience, never before in my life would I end up in a situation where a relatively mild stretching regimen would leave me feeling like the areas that got stretched that was totally fine, all of a sudden... when the only correlated factor was just the heat, so maybe it's dehydration as well.
Something lacking in the diet, I'm telling myself, I just need to eat more meat. I’ll have to try more things if it doesn't go away.
I have to expect it now for another month. And if it doesn't go away after that, then either the heat caused it and it's gonna be persistent for a while, at least I'll have one factor removed, and I'll be able to to do more to recondition and fight atrophy with the only way that you can, obviously, with a nutrient dense diet.
That's what it's recommending to do, reading up on protocols, because this happens to everybody. It happens to war veterans. It happens to people with sports injuries, happens people in car accidents. There are a million reasons why you would end up even less mobile than me for even longer periods of time, I'm still able to get up and move around.
It's not the purest form of atrophy, it’s just the only explanation that I can come up with. Because the weird thing is, it's only in those areas that that the stretching have been done.
My back has been a finicky problem to solve. But I've adjusted in many ways to mitigate chronic back pain, and I've been very successful at that.
It was 2019 when I said to myself, if my creative works and my attempts and to chase my dreams and try to, I don't wanna say be a star, but be supported for what I thought was my heroes journey by the world.
If I don't have wind under my wings and I'm just flapping them off, flapping my wings with no wind beneath them until they are starting to break apart and fall off, and I'm gonna die trying to do this.
I should at some point make a cut off where I say this is not realistic and at least you tried and you can't regret having not tried because you tried. But you also can't continue to chase dreams.
I can't even continue to chase girls, really. You have to accept what you achieved in terms of your career, chasing dreams, your career chasing girls.
Stop F-ing around, act like an adult and you can't keep behaving like a teenager, 20 something chasing girls and dreams.
This random chain of events led to tinitis in one ear, it’s still with me today. I wouldn't say it comes and goes, but my perception of it makes it so most of the time, I'm not aware of it.
Rarely does it feel very loud and very prominent.
But it was a shock because it changed everything for me, and a lot of people lose their mind over it.
That was the first thing I found out, reading up on it, and I have some theories about what caused it.
I've been a drummer and bands for most of my life, really, and always wore earplugs, but sometimes they fall out, and sometimes they don't work perfectly, and that's a factor.
Then there were other acute factors at that time. Part of it, the morning that I woke up and I had ear aches, was a time when I was car camping and trying to avoid the worst elements that are threatening when you have to be car camping in LA on skid row and it ended up that where I was posted up at was were these cement semi trucks idling all night long.
I even had ear plugs in. But my theory is that the vibrations they were happening just right next to my head, literally, a lane or two away in that center lane just one after the next all night, just shook something loose in one of my ears, one of those tiny bones, or some delicate material.
Before that I did have some kind of flashes that were coming out of nowhere.
It would happen in the shower for some reason, but they would just come and go, they would get as loud as it would eventually be, and stay that loud and never stop, and only only get perceptively less loud because you're not paying attention to it.
If I am listening to music or I don't feel like I have much hearing loss. I haven't had a test done to know for sure if there's any difference between the ears but. Part of Me thinks eventually it will go away. One really really anomalous event that occurred after its onset where it seemed to just migrate, I hadn't slept, I was sleep deprived, and I felt pressure shift from my left ear to my right ear. That night it actually moved from the left ear to the right ear and back again.
Which made me think that possibly it's something kind of more neurological, or maybe something that could be affected, I don't know.
Maybe a hypnotist could just clap really loud, or pop a bag or something, the way they try to cure hiccups or something, and it would just go away again.
It wasn't an acute injury other than that one night. So if I had to blame it on being impoverished and having to live in a vehicle on the side of the road on Skid Row, then that's kind of the story of my life, or that's some people would say, it's political justice. You deserve it.
Sooner the better, put us out of your misery. I don't think I have that many enemies. I don't think there's that many witches trying to do voodoo doll curses on me.
But no matter what, I'm gonna just soldier on and complete whatever mission I have set out for myself.
But the statement I made to myself at that time, I just had to think hard and look in the mirror and go, what's next?
Where do you wanna collapse? To Who do you wanna be a burden if and when other things on your body start falling apart because of your age. Now I'm at the age where it’s standard practice to be worried about prostate and colon cancer and all kinds of other things just falling apart.
That's why you enter a health insurance premium bracket. However much of a leap in cost because of these decade life chapter brackets.
So, yes, it's a painful thing if you're younger than than 40, live it up and have fun and just drive the wheels off of life.
Do not be so timid and lack bravery to not follow your dreams while you have time to F around and fail financially, in romance and in business and and art.
Just try everything and keep failing at everything. Be carefree, about everything, except for the fact that at some point you're gonna be forced to pivot and grow up and start to live with some battle wounds from the cost of pursuing your dreams.
I thought I was a spiritual person and was having good karma and maybe was over zealous or over leveraged into the belief that I was all holistic and new age in that I could just will disease and illness and pain away with the right vibes the right mantras. But no, we're flesh and bone.
Just like wild animals, they get tore up, they get infections, they die, they break limbs, you see it all the time.
They don't have the hubris about the laws of the jungle to where they're gonna create some sort of cockamame healing modality to sell snake oil and be a grifter about.
So I talk about my pain and my ailments now, I try not to be bitter, and my spiritual teachings that I live by are such that, just try to purify your mindstream and be grateful and try to accept things and don't blame anybody else, certainly take responsibility, those are just all mentally healthy ways of managing your biochemistry.
Because if you are a negative thought pattern person about anything, you're basically squeezing your hormonal glands to produce toxins that will prevent tissue repair, increase the rate of aging and cell death, get you turning grayer faster, slow your digestion, mess up growth.
Everything gets disregulated because your body is tricked by your mind in distress, thinking that you're in some form of evolutionary existential stress, to where it shuts down all of the normal functions in order to just have this biochemical tunnel vision around survival, but it's supposed to wear off.
And when they talk about stress and the studies of stress done in nature, baboons, it was proved that stress can kill, studying one of the most violent and hostile and just terroristic primate societies out there. Studies have established the link between stress and illness.
I don’t need questionable half bake pseudo science spirituality to arrive at the same conclusion, which is that you should purify your thought stream, and you should live with an attitude of gratitude, positive mental attitude, whatever fortune cookie bumper sticker, slogan, that works for you, but it's gotta be something that keeps, that keeps your blood alkaline.
In a very physical sense, keeps your cortisol level down and keeps you from acidifying.
Stay relaxed internally and externally, or psychologically and physically.
A lot of people hold a lot of tension because of holding resentment and trauma.
So there are ways to physically intervene that don't require a narrative of buying into any spiritual tradition.
I'm not saying I'm atheistic. I'm not saying I've lost my faith in what I believe in and what I've encountered in my life that makes me a believer of what I believe in, but it's not front and center, and I certainly don't preach about it anymore.
The more ground to a pulp by the elements I get, the more I arrive at what John Zerzan pointed out about the hunter gatherer, band level societies.
The few remaining that haven’t been driven into cities and forced into farming and animal husbandry. I studied them extensively earlier in my days. We were friends in the same community while I was going to University of Oregon. I had his back and he had my back. In certain ways in our communit, it was us against the world, because we were the most zealous about the implications of studying anthropological literature to understand and critique civilization from that set of data.
For the people who were in denial about it, we were all friends and we would all collaborate, but we would have these sort of performative rifts as friends even just as intellectual sparring partners.
I respect their critiques of us and their critique of me, just they didn't wanna be over reliant on anything that's a Western science.
And certainly anthropology does not have a pretty origin story. It's very racist and very disturbing, but I think it matured and grew out of that and became one of the most important saving graces of academia.
There are a lot of reasons why I feel that way. I've talked about it before, I don't wanna go into it too much now, but I will say something that John said not too long ago was, pointing out something that I knew full well, but kind of strayed from, which is that just critiquing the sort of neurosis and inherent OCD of religious practice of any kind.
The idea of evolving culturally out of this perversion of the relationship to wild nature, that is agriculture and domestication of animals, to where you become dependent on such a limited, small number of crops and animals.
When they get diseases, or there are climate fluctuations, you end up with your teeth falling out and dying and famine and just total population collapse because you were out on a limb and over leveraged into simplified ecosystems.
Whereas your ancestors, and the living representation of all of our ancestors, had a sweet spot of population density, where they could afford to live in total abundance year round, and had a great buffering of drought and flood and disease and whatever else in the environment.
Because they had such a diverse diet, even in a barren desert, they had enough biodiversity.
And their impact was so low and so dispersed, being nomadic, only carrying what they could comfortably carry with them, their children and some of their tools, but even all their tools were so easily reproducible wherever they went.
That's how adaptable they were to their environment. Finally tuned. The tools that they needed, digging sticks and stone tools and cordage. Etc could be recreated as needed.
They were so dynamic and so free. And they were free from the neurosis of having to pray to fabricated deities and mythic beings to sort of save them from their own disaster that they created, which is to be defiant of the natural order, of being a nomadic hunter gatherer in a small band of 25 to 50 people.
If you don't like that, and it seems eco fascist for me to even dare to speak the truth about our our ancestors, that lived that way for 99 % of human history.
Because the agricultural “revolution”, wasn't a typical revolution.
It was a slow, gradual process of only a few cultures in a few places.
Making a fools errand of a path into animal and plant domestication, which was a bargain with the devil and they had hell to pay for it. Teeth started falling, out bones started falling apart the fossil record doesn't lie.
Switching to a grain based annual crop agriculture was a massive energy sink of people having to work and be slaves to the land, and then ultimately enslave animals to be slaves to the fields, and then enslave themselves to the machines to work the fields.
People think it's great that now we have symphonies and pyramids and skyscrapers and division of labor that allows the working class, basically slave farmers, to produce all the food.
And now, chem ag has shifted that dynamic, but not in a way that serves anybody or serves the Earth or serves humanity.
It just makes the problem even worse in a lot of ways.
Even if it was slave labor and slave human labor and slave animal labor for thousands of years of agriculture, at least it was all organic, because there were no toxins, there were no chemical labs. That's also very recent.
But the poignancy of that sentiment that John pointed out, about the fact that the hunter gathers would be able to laugh at the settled societies and their rituals to pray to the gods, the gods must be crazy.
That's literally the essence of this thesis.
You're domesticated, farming and hurting neighbors who are defiling the environment, making themselves sick, exposing themselves to animal diseases, suffering and living on a far sharper razors edge of survival and defiance of the Hobbesian nightmare theory of nasty, brutish and short state of nature, primitive chaos.
It's actually the opposite. There was far more resilience and stability and adaptability and dynamism.
I could absorb stress from climate change and from food shortages and whatever else.
There was just way more of a diversity of options at that more primal level.
If you are not aware of this, I will clearly state that the consensus at this point is that anatomically modern Homo sapiens, sapiens, you and me, have had the same brain capacity and the same physiology, such that if we went in a time machine back at least a hundred thousand years, if not 200000 years. Estimates are even going back further, but I think it's safe to say the consensus is around 200000 years, we would be able to successfully mate with an anatomically modern human.
So that means that we've actually been here, even if we're modest, and we say a hundred thousand years, then that 10000 years of agriculture is only ten of those hundred thousand years.
So that's a fraction that doesn't represent our true way of being, how we've evolved.
I bring that up because as I'm rewilding, and I'm living closer and closer to the raw elements, even to the sound of the rain on my corrugated sheet metal roof just a few feet above my face, I feel the winds, the sandstorms, coyotes don't have any plastic, anything to protect themselves.
They don't seem to be all dropping dead of valley fever. They don't seem to be all just weighed down by lungs full of sand and eyes just ground down by dust. Somehow, it seems like being a wild animal, even the critters, the rodents that urinate a kind of a crystalline gel so that they don't lose a lot of their hydration. Everything is fine tuned.
There are desert dwellers, humans that are fine tuned for that environment and their physiology, we're still Homo sapiens sapiens.
There are adaptations that are very idiosyncratic to the environment, they've evolved in for a very long time.
So for me, a white dude, with a permanent farmers tan being baked red out in the desert.
I gotta expect I'm gonna be suffering, and I am suffering.
I chose this. I wouldn't have any other way. This is my rebellion. This is my standoff with modernity. And I can pray all I want for pain to go away, and I can chant mantras all I want, and I still do. I do believe in the power of mantras to focus and purify and discipline the mind.
Whether you believe in the deities or not, you could be chanting a mantra about Mickey Mouse. But the fact is, the effect of it, the physiological effect of it is provable and has been proven in terms of regulating all kinds of systems, just in the physical body.
If you don't believe anything metaphysical, which is fine. And because I'm in this lane of permaculture...
I wouldn't call it a rule, but it is ill advised and frowned upon by the establishment in permaculture, which I respect, to not teach permaculture with anything other than science and ethics.
Leave metaphysics out of the course material if you're teaching the permaculture design course.
But that doesn't preclude a Christian camp from having Christian permaculture.
It’s worthwhile to learn to respect other people’s religious beliefs, you can disagree without being disagreeable.
Even FBI hostage negotiators have a whole thesis about the way that they're successful at hostage negotiation is to learn the art of showing you understand someone even though you don't agree with them.
And the way you do that is to actually listen to them and then repeat back to them what you hear them say, and ask them questions that are informed questions based on the fact that you listened to them.
That alone will warm them up to you, because that's kind of all they were really trying to do all along was just be heard and be understood.
Maybe they don't even care or expect you to agree with them. Maybe they expect you to fully disagree with them. They just wanna be heard and they wanna be understood. Once they know that from somebody, maybe the hostage negotiator was the first one ever in their life to do that.
And that's what talked them off the ledge, got them to swap their civilian hostages for something else or some other scenario.
But it was a successful formula. Now, the guy is doing corporate retreats or whatever, being a life coach or whatever, and more power to him, he changed my life, thinking of things that way.
So to be less antagonistic and be more able to stand in someone's shoes. You get a lot further, you get a lot more done.
I would rather hack my enemies by impersonating them, but with not in a cynical way, but in a CIA case officer, operative kind of way, the job is, you learn a language, and you learn customs, and you you try to blend in and fit in.
If you want something out of somebody, you're gonna have to build report with them.
It comes from NLP as well. So whether it's sales or flipping an asset behind enemy lines, or talking someone off the ledge, or whatever it is.
I remember when I had the opportunity to be a co parent, not a step father but the closest that I was for the longest period, there were other periods where I had relationships where where I was in a stepfather role.
There were some real soul building moments with that family unit that I was a part of and I was integrated with the ex husband in a very interesting way that was very soul building as well.
It became very mature and evolved. I just think it was a powerful learning and growth experience and in some ways it brought the best out of everybody involved. We were able to heal some of the messed up dynamics there and it was through permaculture.
Permaculture helped that broken family. And I was an instrument of that, a delegate of that.
Those were the things that we all bonded over, all of us, the son, the estranged ex husband, and the mother and ex wife, who was my lover and business partner.
I'm kind of all over the place tonight, but this is my little party, my little solo celebration party, of this legitimate rain falling, extending my survivability and the ability for me to even have a growing season.
Of all the seeds I have stored away this rain guarantees that I will have a growing season this fall.
It guarantees that if I don't wanna leave here, because it's financially dangerous to do so and I don't feel financially fit to risk financial ruin by anything at all going wrong out there in the world.
Safer in the wild, there's a good mantra for you, for me, maybe for you someday too, but financially more secure and safer, less value at risk.
My vehicles are staying put right here and functioning as homesteads, tiny homes and pantry and shelters and ant and scorpion escape platforms and everything that you could possibly maximize the potential of. I don't wanna put them out on the road if I don't have to.
The last and only thing now that would force me out of my position here for even a day, is my water supply getting close to running out, forcing me to resupply with water and import water, which is what I am trying to break free of.
Because everything else I need, which isn't much, some replacement parts and gadgets and tools and whatnot. Some kitchenware needs to be replaced.
I realize what I need to optimize certain things, but basically a tiny car load of some boxes of bulk food and some deliveries of some components, irrigation tubing and plumbing fittings.
Some electronic parts for the office, the humble, minimal solar office I have, there's not a lot, I don't need to do a lot of big projects.
I don't wanna spend the money to do it in this market.
I'm waiting for markets to recover so that my net worth rebounds, then I can flex a little bit again.
But right now, I can't. So I don't wanna leave for any reason.
The only thing that will force me out is like horrific injury or illness, or the failure of the rain to refill all my tankage, which I now know, the tankage capacity that I purchased and imported into this site is more than enough with just a little bit of rain captured the way I'm capturing it to take me from one year to the next.
So this time this year, I topped off all that tankage with water from the outside, and I was able to refill some of it with rain water, but not all of it.
I'm hoping that if this tropical storm, it's already kind of started for me, I don't know if it started for anyone else.
This is just sort of the opening act, and it's about to get a lot crazier in the next couple of days.
But for me, I can only hope that there's enough periods of calm with the winds, the water and the the rain doesn't just all go sideways and doesn't land on any of my catchment systems.
That's happened a lot where it's just this diffusion almost like a thick fog, because the rain, the wind is so violent that you're not even catching rain, because it's all going sideways.
Pretty much it's a wall of mist at that point. Even if it's heavy rain. What works great is light and heavy rain with little to no wind, and then that just gets vertically directed right into my catchment systems.
It's a drop in the bucket. But I've made it scalable so that the next supply run if they give me two more 20 by 20 foot, 16 mill tarps that I can lay into the giant, 25 foot diameter multi concentric circle depth level pond.
Systems that I've dug with the last of my functioning legs and functioning back now.
It's almost like the Roman architecture, the aqueducts, all the things that were marvels and lost.
The technology was lost, and engineering was lost during the Dark Ages, so called the Middle Ages.
People who lived among the Roman ruins for hundreds of years after they lost a recipe for concrete or cement, whichever one of the two I get those confused but in the, collapse of that empire.
I don't know who built them, giants from another world, ancient aliens built my ponds because there's no way I could even think about doing them now.
Or at least the way I feel right now. I can barely walk. I can't lift anything heavy. When I walk, I have to do it very, very slowly.
And it's not pretty, it's agonizing pain.
Luckily, when I'm still and relaxed, I can move around, but I just can't stand upright and put weight on my legs.
It looks more like C3PO, very hindered.
It's like walking on coals or something, or just pins and needles whenever I'm upright fully, it's something, just all these things compounding.
It's agonizing, excruciating, humbling. I can walk for 30 min and just in a grimace and breathe and try to do tai chi and just try to push energy.
It is a little bit metaphysical but I guess this this is coming now full circle with just reconciling wishful thinking in metaphysics and prayer, with the reality of rewilding and the reality of working the land.
We're not built to last forever. With the right nutrition in the right community, we can offset injuries that I'm probably inducing myself, just because, no person's supposed to be an island, not supposed to have to survive like this.
This for me, is the fact that I'm rejecting and rebelling against civilization, and I don't have a lot of friends who care to do it this way or do it where I'm doing it. That's certainly a factor. But nonetheless, here I am, and I take pride in this experiment. It's the longest I've been away from Babylon. And I have less and less desire every day to go back.
It'd be nice to have visitors someday, but they would have to have really gotten rugged and hard core, because they wouldn't last a minute from June to September, that's for sure.
They might not last a day or a week and at any other time, because of what it takes to get by in this climate, in this biome, the dangers and risks but to me, the freedom, the beauty, the wildness, the ancestral mystique, is what I dreamed of and what I preached about my whole life. Intellectually speaking, that is, but to some degree spiritually. But the spirituality that I wanted was the spirituality of the wild animal, which is, live by your wits.
I can't speak for them directly, but I know a lot of them make art, they make tools, but they don't seem neurotic about wishful thinking and magical thinking, about gods punishing them or saving them, and miracle cures and whatnot.
I do have some metaphysical-ness left in me.
And I do believe in things like pranic healing, and reiki.
I do believe that mind over matter is a thing, and that magic is as real as anything, in the sense that consciousness can function at a level that alters physical reality, that the depths of the subconscious mind, when it's mastered can have effects downstream into the physical realm.
But rewilding has brought me closer to the more primal spirituality of animism vs theism.
If you're using the secret to get a mansion and a Lamborghini and have all the clout and all the women and be rich and famous and be a leader, be an influence, or whatever it is, if you get struck down with cancer or injury or anything humbling.
Nothing wrong with praying. But I can't put all my eggs in that basket. I've gotta think about the crushing, harsh reality of just aging and being exposed to the elements.
My prayer is that I said, I'm not being cursed and I'm not being punished, but that I'm learning with the gloves off, what it's like to reintegrate with nature alone, it's suicide. It's signing your own death warrant.
I'm just at that point where my mantra...because I don't have my whole life ahead of me, and I have that much less life to lose whatever happens.
Now, some people take that in the wrong direction and that makes them into sociopaths to do harm to society.
I'm the opposite. I'd say to myself, it's okay for me to face death and deprivation and suffering in these ways.
Because, you know, I had a lot of good, true love and romance.
I don't need to chase that at the expense of my health and my wealth. I don't need to chase girls anymore because I was successful enough at that.
For intellectual or ideological reasons mostly I chose not to build a family so I'm kind of an evolutionary dead end. I really shouldn't be taking up much space in society anyway.
It's better that I live in exile if I'm done chasing girls, and if I'm never gonna build a family with them and just waste their time anyway.
I even have a vasectomy. So it's just up front and center that I can't build your family for you, so you're just wasting your life and F-ing off and F-ing around with me.
That's not to put down people who are same sex so that they're not gonna biologically reproduce. They can certainly adopt. And even the most conservative of the people who I’m influenced by now would say things like, “you do you”, just don't try to change me if I don’t want to be changed.
It’s almost as simple as that in a lot of these cultural war circumstances.
I hate to put it that way but if, even some of the most conservatives can be cool with same sex adopting families and just live and let live that's great they don't need to live with hate and phobia in their heart.
I certainly don't.
But I make that statement because you don't have to be a breeder. People who choose not to reproduce biologically because of their sexual orientation. That's one reason to not be a breeder. I'm gonna practice with what I preach about overpopulation, and I'm gonna say it's not necessary. If I ever wanted to build a family, I could be a stepfather again, or co parent again, or I could adopt, and that would not be reversing the vasectomy.
So there's that, but basically, again, that much less life to lose. I chose this path. It doesn't really matter. It doesn't really matter to anybody else, how long I live. I've severed most ties with most close friends to where, the people I still talk to, I've even said, I'm gonna decline to see you because I want it to be easier on anybody if I die out here alone for them to go well, it hurt, maybe I shed a tear or two. But it wasn't like we were hanging out everyday like we used to.
It wasn't like we were sleeping together and in love like we used to be.
We all know that was how he wanted it to be.
He wanted to live out a natural life and die gracefully, peacefully in nature, in the wild, not getting hit by a bus, not hopefully dying of carcinogens by sucking in fumes from the city, or carbon monoxide from vehicle exhaust or anything, the result of human built environments.
If I'm gonna die, it'll be in the mouth of a wild animal, or certainly I'll be devoured and scavenged by wild animals of all kinds, no matter where I die here, even if I die inside the cab of a truck.
I already know that they're motivated, they can go anywhere for a meal. It's not air tight, it won't be watertight for very long once those rubber seals wear out in this climate.
So even if I were to die in a vehicle cab, I would still get found and hopefully be eaten the bone, so no human sees the puffed out rigor mortis.
But I'm not trying to shorten my life. I’d like to live as happily and healthy as I can.
If I'm hobbling along, if I never get my full natural ability to walk and my back never really fully recovers, I will feel proud about the life I lived with full ability.
I will not lean on anyone else, I'm not gonna try to burden anyone else or expose anyone else to my barbaric yalps as I scream in agony.
I've never had so much pain and so much torture of the body just starting to give out.
I'm just grateful that I did the mainframe, hard scape earthworks by hand, digging those ponds.
I was able to deploy those tarps, get them hooked in with the paracord and the carabiners to the anchors, spread them out, fight the wind, get them in place, huffing and puffing, grimacing and screeching and shouting from the pain, but getting it done. Then just lick in my wounds afterwards.
They've been in place waiting, being teased by tiny, little, several minute bits of rain dropping, and it's just been partially cloudy and little moments of just trickles of rain, and it's been a mind F because I'd go back and forth folding up the giant, heavy, awkward tarps. Throw out your back, and now just end up in tortured, pain with not being able to carry your weight or stand up properly when you have to get down to put it in place.
That's just extremely agonizing but I still force myself through it. I do it and it gets done.
If that's gonna be my life until it gets worse and something else gives out, it seems like the pattern is with time, it'll get better.
When it cools down, I'll be able to do more.
I did force myself to run, and it was extreme torture and agony, it was mechanically possible.
Mmy heart didn't explode. I didn't just like, pinch a nerve or twist or break something so that I just collapsed and then had an actual injury.
There appears to be no injury. It just appears to be some something off.
But during the winter, I would walk for 30 min in the morning, I would do a lot of projects and do a lot of heave, ho, building stuff.
I was digging those ponds out, so I was getting ripped. It doesn't look or feel like I'm losing muscle mass. It doesn't feel like a nutritional deficiency, although maybe there's just some really obscure, random vitamin or something that's just making it so that the muscle repair process, the rip and repair cycle...
What would happen if you do some form of exertion, a workout, or just a day where you did more walking, or more lifting, or more whatever, because maybe you were moving, and you were lifting a bunch of boxes...
If that soreness didn't wear off and just stayed that way. That's kind of what's happened where my legs meet my pelvis, my knees are fine.
It's nothing about my knees. So it has to be that that stretching, which would normally cycle itself through...
If you've had the experience of exertion to where you have sore muscles, and you know what that feels like. So just imagine that repair cycle just never comes back.
So that's been me over the last few weeks, and now I'm in this existential, philosophical moment, just sharing, I'm not candy coating or over romanticizing the myth of the noble wannabe savage.
I'm being totally honest, and I have been since the start. I'm just using this forum hopefully, if anything, the take away for anyone is just, please, god, let people learn how to get along with each other and find synergy and alignment so that no one has to do this alone.
There are reasons why, to me, this is my destiny and I needed to be excused from society because of my disdain for it, and because I have always been a misfit and a real misfit.
For one thing, I'm not a poser at its being a reject and a misfit.
That's why watching that movie Suburbia, where they get the rejected tattoo so that they can be a clan of squatter warriors in Orange County, then that's the initiation.
I grew up on suburbia, and I know what it feels like to be a squatter and to be rejected and to be a runaway and to find your tribe, but then to have that tribe always be corroded by trauma and drug abuse.
Polite society hating you and wanting to run you out, run you to extinction, and the cops doing the same thing, the system grinding you down and breaking you apart.
The point where they say, everyone knows families don't work, and they say, all we have is each other.
That's a really important film, and that guided me spiritually and socially.
I would say the best times in my life were where we did have our squats and our co ops and our just punk ghetto community communes.
They weren't always the most hygienic places, but there was a lot of love and solidarity, and not even much violence.
Safer than you might imagine. And when we got gardening in the mix and we got into permaculture, that's when things really shined for me.
Those are the things that I have in my heart that I carry with me, that I remember.
I’d sure love for some of the eco warriors of those earlier chapters in my life, to one day, at least some of them...I would say you're welcome here and you have the warrior mindset such that you would listen to these things I'm saying, and you would totally understand.
You're like, I'm the same way. I wanna be left alone. I don't wanna be F-ed with, I'm ready to die.
I make every day a good day to die, so it's a better day to live.
I'm trying to be independent. But I also wanna collaborate. I also wanna synergize so my hope is that other people from my past, and maybe people who I will meet in the future, that they will choose to live in the vicinity, if they wanna be on grid and have AC and have refrigeration and have stove tops and all the amenities it's not that far away from me.
We could still walk or bike or off road vehicle or ATV to trade crops and stuff like that.
If I survive, and I'm not so crippled that I can't do any of those things, and I just literally, one day wake up unable to move.
I don't think I'm gonna call for help at that point.
I think I'm gonna say it was a good run. Thank you very much.
The people who will find my corpse and do what they gotta do with it, they won't be doing me a favor. I won't be burdening them, my taxes paid for their work. I paid my share to have those folks who do that job be able to put their kids through college and give them their 401K and their health insurance so that they could have a relatively middle class income from the insurance sort of pool.
That is taxpayers giving them a salary. So I won't feel any shame about dying alone, and I won't be begging anyone to hear me belly aching about this.
I hope I don't sound like a drain I hope I sound like someone who is ready to meet their maker and I’m pretty at peace with it. Like I said I did the heavy lifting up front and made this place livable.
That was kind of the whole point. I'm not gonna be young and robust forever. I worked and broke my back and spent my best years being a wage slave to build other people's dreams and their businesses, and their landscapes, and growing food for them and their yards, and making their the place for their family beautiful.
And as a working class wage slave, on that trajectory I was gonna be ground to a pulp until death, and just have things start falling apart, and I'd be aching and suffering with compounding ailments, and still have to get up by an alarm clock and be in traffic and have a boss.
I got lucky with a little bit of skill in the mix, to have some amount of my back and my legs and my life energy to terraform a desert wasteland and turn almost every splinter of the ruins of the old house on the land into my current shelter and my tree growing boxes and my regenerative permaculture infrastructure.
I was able to do all that over the course of two years and dig those ponds.
Now all I gotta do is have enough money in my nest egg to shave off bits at a time, to have a once, maybe twice a year delivery of food supplies until I'm able to grow my own food.
But the key limiting factor is my rainwater storage capacity. I know that even in extreme weather conditions, whether it's cold or heat and extreme, debilitating pain from atrophy or back being thrown out, or just totally perplexing Bermuda Triangle, what the F is going on?
I did this my whole life. I used to do the splits, what the F is going on.
People told me, you're able to do those high kicks and do the splits and be because you're young and you better not slow down on that.
I was able to get my kicks back after years of not stretching regularly in my thirties and I was able to get almost fully down to the floor with the splits.
But I then, yes, the window is closing, and the longer you wait in between maintaining that, I wanna age with grace, the way that Shaolin kung fu masters age with grace.
You stretch and you do kung fu so that your chi is able to flow.
I'm not at the tai chi age right now. I mean, I will do some of that type of slow movement.
But I'm still of fighting age by the military standards of most of the nations of the world.
Maybe they would draft me, but they wouldn't allow me to enlist.
They would prefer to have younger recruits.
I'm not trying to go on that path. But no matter how old you are, whether the military wants you or not, you need to be able to defend yourself no matter what.
So the more flexible you are, the more you train for real street combat.
You’d almost never be as foolish to kick above waste level, thus exposing yourself to being easily pushed off balance and grappled with on the ground, which you would never want.
Or more simply, your leg gets trapped, and you're pulled in to be pummeled, or worse, and almost easiest, you get struck in the groin. So all that performative martial arts...I still want to have my kicks and be flexible.
I don't wanna give it up. I'm haunted by this documentary where Jason Scott Lee, who played Bruce Lee in the film Dragon. At age 45, he went to the, the Shaolin Temple to put himself through that crucible as a martial artist.
The people who are able to be most masterful are the ones who make a career of teaching, because then they are literally doing it all day, every day, and they never get stiff.
But for me. I had my kicks growing up. I lost them for a number of years. I got them back, and I started training with Jeet Kune Do masters in southern California.
Bruce Lee said, if you’re talking about combat, then, baby, you better train every part of your body.
One of his most devastating maneuvers was this sort of leaping sidekick.
It was used in several of his films where you see him literally sending people flying.
He worked on that. He said, something like, don't fear the man who knows a thousand kicks, beware of the man who practices one kick a thousand times.
I'm just kind of doing some disclaimers and trying to justify the fact that I'm not gonna let being in my early forties, which is really young in kung fu years, this is the time where I have the freedom from outside obligations. I should be really catching up on all of the kung fu mastery that I had excuses to not catch up on.
That's why I've gotten back into it and I feel like the land is very much what you see in those films.
I'm doing combative maneuvers with the way I move the earth.
The only thing that is not very optimized in terms of my physique and my fighting skills and my very naturalistic martial arts. There were so many films where they were comparing the high tech, modern fighter, whether it's kick boxing or Western boxing or karate, that motif of watching the traditionalist, primitive, traditionalist, ancient style master, even Rocky training in a log cabin and marching out into the mountains on the snow.
But for me, I'm like, of course, I'm going to be living in this permanent training montage.
The fact is, digging ponds will put meat on your bones and sculpt you very nicely.
The thing that crushes me is three months of being tortured by the sun and bedridden, and now, apparently my timing was bad with trying to do those, do those stretches.
It's kind of like they got stuck because everything was fine. Everything was going along smoothly. The procedure that I would normally use to gradually ease into with a stretching regimen.
I was doing it by my previous successful standards. I'm not that old. It shouldn't be that much of a big deal.
I’ve been researching medical terms for atrophy like disuse, unloaded, those are the keywords coming up in medical research studies about atrophy.
I didn't think about how the plasticity of the nervous system and the brain is such that “use it or lose it” is the reality.
I was starting to really ramp up my stretching and working out those kicking muscles, where the legs meet the pelvis.
I was starting to ramp up that usage throughout spring, and then I was using it, then the heat of the summer laid me out to where I can still do some sort of calisthenics and yoga like stretches while I'm laid out on my back.
But that repair is not happening. And so just wish me luck, I guess.
Another reason for me not to leave, because in a street fight, I'm useless. I cannot defend myself right now.
There are peacemaking devices that level the battlefield, as it were, I'm not deprived of by any means, if you know what I mean, but I don't wanna be in that situation either.
If you wanna come and threaten me now that you know that I'm physically weak, just know that I'm also, mastering the kung fu that I call Flood sport.
I have a beast mode switch.
I know when I hear rain, like I hear it right now, if I heard this rain right now, I would be kitting up to go deploy those tarps, even if I was screaming in agony the whole time to do it, which I pretty much was this last time.
But I've got footage of it. You can even hear me huffing and puffing, and you can hear the footsteps, and know that I'm in tortuous agony, but I'm gonna push through it.
If I it doesn't kill me, it'll make me stronger.
I will, like Jason Scott Lee, push myself through a crucible in my forties to catch up on the discipline of Shaolin kung fu.
I have it in me. I've done it before. I've had that fluidity of movement and the flexibility.
So it's all there.
All that muscle memory is there.
I just have to earn it to get it back. And if the cost is pain, then I will pay in pain.
And it would be nice to be spoiled with dakini masseuse lovers, the way I have been in the past.
But for now, I just gotta do self care.
If you're older than me, then I hope you find ways to salvage the dignity of an able body to the extent possible, where you're able to defend yourself, and you feel like you have as much combative prowess as you can possibly muster.
If you're younger than me, live it up cause it only gets uglier and not prettier as you start to fall apart, and there's not much you can do about it.
So good luck to all of us. And be kind to yourself and others and try to purify your thought stream.
Because last thing your body needs while healing and adapting is for it to be toxified by your negativity or by a tolerance for other people's negativity.
So hopefully you can resonate that, whether it's through metaphysical means or purely physical and scientific means.
I still sing. I still dance, even though it hurts. I still train.