... UNTROUBLED

I Moved My Blog ...

2009-06-02T18:05:00.002-04:00

... over here: http://saltcathedral.wordpress.com/

A good reason to be a lousy blogger....

2009-05-24T08:07:00.006-04:00

Spent three weeks slogging gracelessly through two deadlines so I could get out of town clean this afternoon, because I'm going to Scotland to visit Kevin and Anna! (And Barrow and Strummer!)

I arrive at around 8 a.m. tomorrow morning and then it's into a car and on the road to the Isle of Skye. I wasn't all that familiar with the Isle of Skye until Kevin mentioned it, but through the past few weeks, I've been using its official website description of its scenery as motivation to get through some low, work-related moments. One paragraph, for example, starts like this: "Aside from the magnificent mountains, tumbling rivers, colourful rugged moor land, rich sea-lochs, intricate coast, and bountiful wildlife are its climate, light, weather and evening skies. ... One short day can witness a tranquil morning sunrise burst over the mountains, shortly later bringing wild south westerly wind to blow waterfalls uphill capturing misty rainbows in their flight."

Kevin and Anna are regular bloggers—there's a link to theirs over there on the right at the top of the white box—and it's possible I will elbow my way into a cameo at some point if you feel like checking it. (At the very least you'll get a heavy dose of rosy-cheeked cute-monsters Barrow and Strummer, which is well worth it.) I'll be back June 1 with a lot of exposed film, and meanwhile, here's a photo of the duck in the Giant Eagle parking lot who sidled up next to my ankles and tried to sell me a timeshare. I bought it and paid in a summer currency called Bun.

Love,
Laurel

I Got Grazed by a Tornado

2009-05-06T17:39:00.008-04:00

It's true. At a race this weekend in Birmingham, Alabama, the skies went dark and a terrible black wall of clouds tore up from behind the treeline and towered overhead while TV screens flashed a bright red cell sawblading over our exact location with these words scrolling underneath: "Severe and dangerous tornado schedule to arrive at Barber Motorsports Park, 2:10 p.m." It didn't, but along with the other journalists I did some legitimate cowering for a while, and—because as most of you know, I'm lucky enough to work the same events as my father—I made him leave his nice, cement garage to come cower with us, just because it made me feel better. I heard a handful of fans took cover in the racetrack's inflatable church, for reasons that ranged from the lightening-resistant properties of rubber to the the importance of location vis-á-vis faith.

I took the Holga along, obviously, but by the time the storm hit Sunday I was using 100-speed slide film, which 1) probably means everything will be too dark, and 2) had to be mailed away to a lab. If you'd like to see a few other images from earlier in the weekend, though, I posted them here. And if you'd like to read a kind of ridiculous work-related blog that details my ride in the pace car (and reiterates the tornado thing), it's here. And speaking of slide film, it turns out that stuff is velvety and miraculous. Just got my first roll back—the results are here and I have three favorites from it. One of them is:

I Found Religion for $59.99

2009-04-29T13:14:00.013-04:00

I had two profound thoughts this morning:

1. I wish I could direct Somali pirates toward a New Kids on the Block cruise.

2. Wikipedia's definition of religion—"an organized approach to human spirituality that usually encompasses a set of narratives, symbols, beliefs and practices, often with a supernatural or transcendent quality, that give meaning to the practitioner's experiences of life through reference to a high power or truth"—means I got god when I got my Holga. (It came with a book of photos and a roll of film, too!)

Living in West Virginia isn't always easy, and returning to West Virginia from trips out of town and overseas often takes a kind of brutal, rusty resolve (as opposed to a steely resolve, I guess) that's difficult to summon. Like most landscapes, it has its own kind of beauty, but like most landscapes with people in them, the way you feel about a place is largely determined by the extent to which the general populace's ideas and mindsets and world-views line up with you own. If you've been lucky enough to live in dramatically beautiful places like the the Northwest and Southwest, this area's more subtle beauty is easy to miss or overlook or get used to (unlike, say, Mount Rainer from Highway 5, which can make you crash your car in awe once a day). And if you've lived in places that are diverse in terms of ethnicity, restaurant offerings, political views, arts scenes, and so on, that last part about mindsets can really, really wear on you. So I am not always as cheerful as I should be, and I think it's fair to say I'd ceased to see the place I live.

Having a Holga has changed everything. Organized? I've never been so organized. I even got a special bag for my spirituality that holds camera, film, and filters perfectly (and has a nice lavender interior). Narratives? Everywhere I look I see narratives, and suddenly they all seem to matter. Beliefs? Practices? I believe that if I look at my local grocery store long enough—the one I've found crushingly depressing since moving here; the one where the produce is only slightly more wilted than the people sifting through it and where I once saw lettuce infested with lice—I will see something else entirely, and I practice the clumsy, clattery loading, advancing, and rolling of film in the further belief that when the prints come back they will demonstrate a higher truth. And they do. A glowing, hazy, out of focus, supernatural, transcendent higher truth that brings added meaning to my experiences of life.

I know, for example, that the view from my $121-a-month, seventh-story writing space doesn't look like this to everybody, but this is what it means to me:

and it's satisfying to see it that way.

I posted the rest of Roll 2 on a Flickr account, so there are more here if anyone else is feeling fond of squares.

Holga, Roll 1

2009-04-24T12:03:00.015-04:00

Shot with these, my favorite piece of plastic ever:

The acceptable members of my first attempt:

Streaked Tenrec!

2009-04-21T12:31:00.017-04:00

It's a lowland streaked tenrec, to be exact, called "tandraka" in its native Madagascar, which means "spiny insectivore that resembles a hedgehog." They live in the rainforest on the east side of the island, while highland tenrecs (which are not as exciting-looking) stick to the central uplands. There are other kinds of tenrecs out there too, all subject to different sorts of fate. If you're a greater hedgehog tenrec, for example, your name also sometimes translates as either "family pet" or "dinner."

You can do a lot of interesting reading about the lowland streaked tenrecs if you're in the mood, or you can walk away with my two favorite facts:

1. The tenrec produces three sounds audible to humans: a high-pitched keening noise known as "stridulation" (made by rubbing middorsal quills together and theorized to help mothers and babies find each other); a "crunching sound during agonistic behavior" (I read that as "during agnostic behavior" the first time, and it made perfect sense to me); and finally, a "putt putt." No explanation offered.

2. They sometimes stamp on the ground with their forepaws to increase earthworm activity.

I love #2. It's like Dune, on a 1/20th scale.

Cousin Max guessed baby porcupine ...

2009-04-16T09:28:00.007-04:00

... but no.

And the truth is, I know what it is now. Word came in from Washington.

I'm in a tiny house on stilts ...

2009-04-13T17:59:00.027-04:00

... and recently bid a teary goodbye to my high school BFF, Missy Eagen (nee Steinhilber) and a whole bunch of other Eagens, including Sean, Quinn, Colin, Gracie, and Kieran, with whom we spent Easter weekend here. That'll be the subject of my next blog, but since I forgot my camera's upload cord—and since I'm in a house on stilts, which would preclude messing around with a laptop entirely if I hadn't needed to work today (which was actually fine; if I have to work, I'll take working in a house on stilts with a view of the woods over working in an office any day), I'm going to make this one short.

So short, in fact, that I'll just mention Dan guessed the tiny question was a baby kiwi. And boy, was he wrong! Because that thing, as far as I can see, only has two legs, and one of the only things I know about creature 4-7-2009 is that it has four. Maybe kiwis have tiny vestigial wings hidden away somewhere, but I've seen kiwis wobbling through the underbrush and don't think so.

I saw the kiwi in a wildlife park in N.Z. at age 16 while visiting a long-time penpal, and on that same day, her father though it would be funny to feed Alka-Seltzer to a duck. It really, really wasn't. I still hate that guy so much it makes my hair crackle.

Regarding the tiny question....

2009-04-08T13:52:00.032-04:00

The mystery mammal at the bottom of yesterday's column has prompted two suggestions so far. Uncle John—who's meandering toward Calgary at the moment through some kick-ass national parks (yes it's true, "kick-ass" is redundant when you're talking about something Canadian)—guessed baby aardvark, then promptly withdrew his hypothesis when he found this photo:

Cousin Anna (who invited me to visit them in Scotland late-May—whoo-hoo!) commented, "If that ain't a baby hedgehog I don't know what is." Some of you know I actually owned a hedgehog, named Rosebud by my little cousin Quinn, for about seven years. (Quinn picked the name "Rosebud" because Rosebud was tiny and pretty and spiky, but it's true I let certain smarty-pants film fans think I was so Citizen Kane that I'd flatten a pygmy hedgehog with the weight of it.) Rosebud ran free in my various apartments and liked to eat pieces of hard-boiled egg off the end of my nose. She did NOT like it if you sneezed while holding her. After a long and happy life full of heated log homes, hard-boiled eggs, and crunchy mealworms, Rosebud died of Wobbly Hedgehog Syndrome (which, contrary to its name, is about the least-funny thing in the world if you're a hedgehog lover. It's hedgehog MS). She's buried on a beautiful bluff overlooking Puget Sound and wants you to know baby hedgehogs look like this:

So, a pretty damned good guess, but the mystery remains. (Pam, do you have any dry-land biologist friends who can help?) I stole the baby-H photo from my friend and fellow hedgehog-adorer Stacey's MySpace page, by the way. I also wanted to steal a sticker image someone posted there, but "There's no love like hedgehog love" sounds too dirty to share a post with a two-day-old baby aardvark. I'm not even sure I know what it means.

The tiny question in question is just a few inches long, if that helps, and full-grown, and I'm prepared to email the museum staff if no one comes up with the tiny answer in the next week or so. Probably I'll tell them I'm asking on behalf of a five-year-old so they're patient with me.

My dad also wrote in, but he didn't have a creature-related suggestion, he just wanted to tell me I'm an amazing person. Oh wait, make that an "AMAZING person," emphasis his. (Mom is traveling through the Four Corners area of the Southwest with a group of museum members at the moment, or I'd wheedle her into saying something nice about me too, for symmetry's sake.) And for the record, my parents are AMAZING people.

Which reminds me that I'm working on a family tree to post, since some relatives don't know other relatives and friends don't have a chance. Because I'm Canadian it should, by definition, be an aesthetically kick-ass-looking family tree, but these things are not easy to draw. Rulers are useless, though a lot of that is my relatives' fault. They seemed to have insisted on not having kids in straight lines. My first attempt is below, but I'm going to make it too small to read since I probably messed up or left out the names of some people's ex-spouses and ran some cousins and cousins' kids off the side of the page accidentally. (Now it's up to you not to click-and-enlarge.) It's more like a family shrub, and if it was legible it would probably be offensive.

But well intentioned!

A revelation, late in the game

2009-04-07T13:04:00.024-04:00

I'm crazy about my family and friends.

I've done a pretty lousy job of letting them know it, I think, which bounces back as a kind of self-mugging. In this awful metaphor, suddenly noticing your wallet is gone is the same as realizing that because you haven't let family and friends as far into your life as you could have, you've robbed yourself of the comfort of having them in it.

Mistakes that big and dumb aren't always easy to fix, but I think I feel okay about this one, because waking up is the same as being awake—and I am now, all at once. Like, wakingupisthesameasbeingawakeandIamnow. Allatonce. Phase 2, I'm thinking, is to use this space to say hello, all the time, to whoever is interested in being said hello to.

I registered this blog about a year ago but got bored with and confused about it after posting four pictures of birds' nests and one email exchange about the peak oil movement. It's the same problem I always had with diaries as a kid, which went: I was interested in having an audience but had a fierce and angry need for privacy. Or, I didn't understand who my audience was and was afraid I had one. I didn't actually want anyone to read my diaries (even the idea that I'd read the diary myself ten years later struck kid-me as an unbearable invasion), but if no one read it, it all seemed very boring. Plus, format tends to dictate prose to some degree; when I read a certain flowery, pink-and-white diary with a gold lock not long ago, all I saw was a pink-and-white kid trying hard to be flowery and golden. I'm sure I picked that diary out myself at the time (I know my mom didn't)—I was too young to understand how it would exhaust me.

This blog exhausted me too, at first. I kind of wanted to do it but wasn't sure why (I think I told three people it existed), and I had a lot of tedious, tiny fits during which I'd delete things I'd written that seemed criminally uninteresting. My posts had an average life of less than 24 hours, and I soon got annoyed enough to forget about it for eight months.

Then I found my beyond-cool cousins Kevin and Anna's blog about spending the year in Scotland with their daughters, Barrow and Strummer. (The blog from which I stole this dangerously cute photo.) The last time I visited K & A, their first daughter hadn't been born yet, and how that disconnect happened is a grim and depressing mystery to me considering they are two of my favorite people in the world. You can say people get busy, or you can say humans' tendency toward self-absorption demands that the rest of the world stay still when not in view. Which of course it doesn't. So all of a sudden you can't answer a stranger's most basic questions about the people you love, and you've never met their obviously incredible kids. As far as evidence of a mistake goes, that's a whopper.

After a few weeks of reading their blog, though, I felt like I knew a little more, and even though what I knew were things like what they did on Tuesday and what they ate for lunch and who had a cold or didn't want to go to sleep, it made me feel closer and happy. (Facebook and MySpace and Twitter never made me feel anything—except overwhelmed by RRX readers I'll never meet and friends I don't know—and I'm glad to be out of there.) I wish more of my friends and family would start blogs so I can see what they see, read what they're up to, and stay fully apprised of who does or does not have colds, but in the meantime I'm going to try to get in on the close and the happy by posting things here.

I spend a lot of time either at my desk, editing stories that contain phrases like "holeshot artist" and "inside pass," or in anonymous Hampton Inns near American racetracks, so there's some risk this won't always be fascinating, but I'm going to make the effort. (And my job isn't always that thrill-free, to be fair. I'm really fortunate.) Because while I always found the writing-teacher-type advice to keep one's audience in mind pretty unpleasant, I can't think of an audience I care more about than you guys (or yous guys, for those from Buffalo). I miss you.

Love,
Laurel

PS: Does anyone know what this is? I snapped it in the National Museum of Natural History while with mom to DC, but didn't write down his name. Need it for a poem.

The worst kind of mystery

2009-03-25T11:19:00.004-04:00

I have three cups of coffee on my desk—today's, yesterday's, and one from the day before—and now that today's has gone cold, I don't know which is which. I don't even know why they're all still there, and all half-full. Maybe 11:23 a.m. is roughly the time I give up, each day, trying to figure out where I left off—like maybe this happens to me all the time; maybe every day, Monday through Friday, I find the courage to throw away one mysterious cup of coffee but not enough to commit to one of the remaining two. I don't have memories of that sort of thing, but it seems to me there's been three cups of coffee on my desk for a very, very long time, even though I bring in a new one each day. They're looking at me like an already-opened door greets a sleepwalker in the morning; like evidence of a life secret even from yourself.

I wish I was sitting here wondering about an unexplained, size-6 superhero leotard instead.

Bullet holes, cranes, trailers dropped on roofs, and deer blinds are the language of the coming apocalypse.

2008-07-09T08:58:00.001-04:00

This is the time to gather your friends and family (if they are armed) and make plans.

In August 2006, I read an article in Harper's Magazine entitled "Imagine there's no oil: Scenes from a liberal apocalypse." Its focus was the Peak Oil Movement (motto: "Deal with reality, or reality will deal with you"), and it contained the following nicely written passage by author Bryant Urstadt:

Heading to my rental car, I found myself immersed in a now familiar feeling, one I have experienced many times during the months I have spent reading books on Peak Oil and conversing with Peak Oilers. At those times, I move through the world in wonderment at the commonplaces of my life that are slated to vanish: the plastic pen in my pocket, the clear holder for my nametag, my fleece sweater (all made of plastic, largely derived from natural gas, the supplies of which are closely linked to those of petroleum), my shoes, pants, and shirt (all shipped at large energy cost over thousands of miles), the money in my wallet (soon to be worthless paper), my car (naturally), and even the road it is parked on (asphalt's major component is petroleum). It is unsettling to watch the world disappear, though a little exciting too.

I totally get that last part, because when I look around and try the same exercise—there goes my far-flung coffee, my contact lenses, my Converse, my bicycle tires, my everything—the vanishing process is a sparkly one, accompanied by a sprite working the high registers of a xylophone.

But here's another passage, which leads more directly to the subject at hand:

As for what happens after the oil runs out, [unofficial Peak Oil movement leader Richard] Heinberg presented an unnerving outline. The economy will begin an endless contraction, a prelude to the "grid crash." Cars will revert to being a luxury item, isolating the suburban millions from food and goods. Industrial agriculture will wither, addicted as it is to natural gas for fertilizer and to crude oil for flying, shipping, and trucking its produce. International trade will halt, leaving the Wal-Marts empty. In the United States, Northern homes will be too expensive to heat and Southern homes will roast. Dirty alternatives such as coal and tar sands will act as a bellows to the furnace of global warming. In response to all of this, extreme political movements will form, and the world will devolve into a fight to control the last of the resouces. Whom the wars do not kill starvation will. Man, if he survives, will do so in agrarian villages.

When talking about intense competition for resources—competition fueled by starvation and terror and backed by violence—the one thing I'm sure of is that "agrarian villages" is a wildly incomplete phrase. Even to those who haven't seen Mad Max, it should be clear the answer is more correctly "agrarian villages surrounded by 50-foot walls that are topped by people with crossbows, who are flanked by people with boiling flaxseed oil, who are supported by people with trebuchets."

Urstadt's article obviously stuck with me through the past two years, but I think it's fair to say I've been planning my own post-apocalyptic agrarian fortress since age 7 (probably a practice common to kids whose fears—sharks, zombies, strangers, night, etc.—cannot be counted on two hands). It was always my intention that the fortress should be self-sustaining, that everyone inside would have a job to do, that its many solar panels would flash hot and angry while the thing as a whole bristled with large, rusted spikes, that it would be surrounded by a pit filled with more spikes, and so on. In retrospect, it counted too heavily on the spikes, and on me growing up to be smarter and more militaristic than I actually did.

Decades later, it's time to settle the logistics. What follows is a series of email exchanges between myself and a friend whose brain fires far above average on both the left and right side, and who, as a father, has a vested interest in making his walls strong. I think these conversations represent a good starting point. I begin, with a question about gold Kruggerands. After that you'll have to get through a 1,004-word treatise on man-viewed-as-economic-actor before the fortress business gets going in earnest.

L: So I'm thinking about getting into gold coins, as insurance against the falling dollar and the apocalypse in general. So I have something to barter with when I plead entrance to one of the self-contained agrarian fortresses that will keep out the zombies in 2021.

I have a friend in San Francisco who does it—goes to dusty little shops staffed by angry old men who only sell when the stock exchange is open in New York. One-ounce South African Kruggerands are apparently the way to go. I've been reading, and it's all pretty interesting—I was having a hard time getting over my non-positive associations with South Africa but then I saw that the coins have springboks on the back. Which I like.

My friend XXX just goes and buys one every time he has an extra $700 or something and then puts them in an envelope in a sock drawer, but I'm thinking it's the excuse I've always wanted to get a safety-deposit box in a bank vault. And then I would go there sometimes just to look at my gold.

*

D: gold. does have a magical allure. i think it's good for ones soul to look at and touch the shiny stuff. safe deposit boxes are nice. my bank has a little waiting room you sit in and visit whatever it is you keep in your safe deposit box. i sometimes bring a cup of tea with me when i go. there are these nice windows with these funny one way blinds that look out at this tiny garden. and then the baking or frozen parking lot beyond. why they went to the trouble i can't really know. but i assume others must enjoy sitting in this room and visiting their valuables. i have one gold coin, it's english, i don't really know what its called either. something that came from my grandfather. it's not very big. i also have a loose diamond. it's quite small. it's in a little velvet bag. and then i have all these musty and smelly euros, pounds sterling, and canadian dollars. mostly euros.

i too felt the dollar was on a downward slide. for quite some time. i kept most of my foriegn cash i earned in europe and never coverted it. i've ended up with a decent little stockpile for that post peak oil cement block redoubt with archer slit windows i am gonna build in the mojave desert/

i figured the euro and pound would probably be worth more than the dollar at that point. and i could buy plenty of solar panels and 55 gallon PVC water storage tanks with that money.

i am not having fun at your expense. in fact i've always admired mormons for keeping a year of food on hand.

have you read the black swan by nicolas taleb? a great meandering musing on our inability to prepare for the "unknown unkowns", on the madelbrotian (see benoit mandelbrot) disorder of modern human endeavours, the charlatans of economics and finance and other such unwise men, the hubris of science and learning, and living in the ante-chamber of hope. it's really quite amusing totally anecdotal and uplifting despite his general misanthropy.

taleb was an opiton trader once upon a time. he has written these really brilliant technical essays and papers on mathematical finance and trading that have made him an academic star now, but his real talent is for explaining and analyzing the human condition, even if his specific examples pertain more to homo economus ( i think i made that up, but man viewed as an economic actor).

so you want me to get back to kruggerands?

in this neophytes opinion this is what's going on: as you have correctly observed it's not so much gold that is rising, but the dollar is slowly collapsing in value. because of the intricacy of the world economy now, we need a pretty nasty shock to produce something like the great depression. the dollar isn't gonna just collapse all in one fell swoop. instead it's gonna slowly deflate with all those weird and unpredictable side effects. for various techincal reasons it might actually be better if it did lose 40 percent of it's value abruptly. rather than what is happening.

and what is happening is not so much because of the ridiculous fiscal policies of the current admistration. ( the EU runs a really high deficit also-but then again their deficit is more likely to be adding future wealth to their nations) it's just the rest of the world is getting richer while we are not. and this is not gonna change anytime soon. "their" money is just as good as ours and we have to compete with "them" to buy all sorts of commodities. all commodity prices have been rising and probably will continue to for some time.

you would actually have been better off returnwise to buy something like wheat or rapeseed oil, but i don't know where you would keep it. plus it might spoil before you

need it to barter your way into that self contained agrarian fortress in 2021.

other precious metals could be a better investment. i haven't checked but you should compare the average historical price ratio of platinum, silver and other precious metals to gold. i suspect there is an "emotional" premium for buying gold right now. (hmm... this suggests a classic option arbitrage strategy: sell gold buy other precious metals in proper ratio, wait for prices to return to historical norms).

but getting back to your kruggerands. i'm gonna safely say that the entire financial system is not gonna collapse. it didn't in the great depression. you could still safely own something that represents gold or some other commodity.

EZA is the stock ticker for one of the South African stock market index funds. my friends have actually been trading futures on this index. It "seems" undervalued. South Africa may or may not have a lot of gold. i don't know, but their economy is heavily based on extraction, and it's got lots of good exotic stuff that our high tech world needs right now. also a lot of money has gone to the off brand 1st world currencies, canadian dollar, new zealand dollar, australian dollar, norwegian crown etc. The south african rand really should count as one of these but it "seems" undervalued if you compare it to these. PLUS the rand was once considered one of the worlds "safe" currencies. but it may have been gold backed then. south africa is currently experiencing an electicity generation shortage. it's stock market and currency have tanked as a result. but the hidden upside is that they have a shortage of electricity because they can't keep up with what the world wants from them.

i haven't suddenly become an expert on south africa, it's just it was the topic of a lot of discussion the last time i was in chicago. i'm parroting what i've heard. as far as moral hazards go you'll have to look that up yourself.

i think you got more than you bargained for.

*

L: That's all pretty interesting. But if I were to hurl gold, platinum, silver, or rapeseed oil at zombies, which do you think is most likely to repel or slow them, is what I want to know. I have a serious horror of zombies. What about grenades as currency?

Maybe the best thing for me to do is start sending in some sort of monthly payment to purchase a few eventual places in your future "post peak oil cement block redoubt with archer slit windows." You'd set up a pretty good one. Tidy and efficient. I could write the fortress newsletter, foster a sense of community. (I would like to know how high you plan the make the walls first, though.)

*

D: i actually think my fortress should be in the mojave desert, but i was thinking that the studio building in XXX would make a pretty good satellite fortress.

i've had three or four bullet holes in the front upper story windows fixed in the last 15 years so i think archer slits would be appropriate there as well. but you know most of those bullet holes were from 9 or 10 years ago. since the police station moved a block away the neighborhood has lost a little of its edge. sold out you know.

the fortress newsletter is hilarious.

seriously check this out: http://www.loftcube.net/

i've found these nifty prefab italian spiral staircases, and i was gonna make a roof garden at my studio then i came across this.

it's got me inspired to just buy an old camping trailer, hire a crane and put it on the roof of my building. i could probably do the same thing for about 10k.

i also though a couple deer blinds on the roof would be good.

*

L: I saw those roof cubes--they were in Dwell magazine, which we receive at our decidedly non-Dwell-like house. (Although it has some neat corners these days, and we have a Incan-inspired stepped-field-like plan for the downsloping back yard. See attached.)

Bullet holes, cranes, trailers dropped on roofs, and deer blinds are the language of the coming apocalypse. You're doing really well so far.

Also, I think when the new fortress in Mojave is set up, the first thing to do is shoot at it a lot from the outside so that future attackers will face a battle-scarred, hulking monolith that bears the proud marks of many failed previous attacks. They'll be demoralized even before we trebuchet our first vat of boiling rapeseed at them.

You can see already how valuable I'm going to be fortress PR.

*

D: yes and pyschological operations.

*

D: I think because we finished this [audio file attached] yesterday i signed a petition for the libertarian party to compete in elections in XXX. i think you'll get it after you hear the song.

*

L: A theme song for the future fortress! Excellent.

*

D: although aesthetically i like the idea of a agrarian post-peak-oil-apocalyptic fortress in the mohave desert, some research i have been doing for XXX has hipped me to the fact that there is a large amount of natural gas in the large geological formation known as the marcellus shale which cover 3/4 of pennsylvania and 95 percent of west virginia.

although not as aesthetically pleasing perhaps a cliff dwelling like structure in one of the "hollers" with a gas well would fare better. we'd need a lot more muscle and weapons though as we would be a more lucrative target. and the theme song might have to be a little more martial.

just something to think about.

*

L: That's going to take some adjustment. Most of the planning I've done so far has counted on being able to see them coming. Also, I admit aesthetically I was sort of into the idea of a lone stronghold whose steel reinforcements glinted menacingly in the desert sun. I really didn't think I'd have to hear people say the word "holler" post-apocalypse and I do not like the idea of unseen attackers slithering up through the sticky West Virginia woods past the rusty trappings of our gas wells and related equipment.

I know you're the practical one; not trying to argue. Are you sure, though, that there aren't any resources in the Southwest that could be equally valuable? Maybe it would help if you just wrote the more-militaristic theme song first.

*

D: i think it was just momentary insanity. the gas wells and all. the agrarian fortress in the mojave desert is definitely the more aesthetically pleasing option. especially after i started thinking about it as an updated anasazi cliff dwelling, perhaps made from de-commissioned shipping containers bound together by some kind of siemans next-gen carbon fiber superstructure.

perhaps we just form some sort of alliance with a shale gas fortress in west virginia. a foriegn exchange-type program where we learn deer skinning and how to pack powder into our homemade 50 caliber shells. those mountain types seem to know how to do these kinds of things.

*

L: I am really relieved to hear you say that. I would almost rather die than spend the remainder of my years learning to make stew out of earthworms and ramps. And what with the dense woods and all, there is also not much room for a decent trebuchet around here.

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L: PS: My mom can help out.

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D: everyone including the newsletter editor must be proficient in the use of firearms. —from proposed bylaws.

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D: Sorry, I didn't finish writing that bylaw, it was supposed to have also "including immediate members of their family."

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D: BTW definitely don't by gold now. the run is definitely over for the time being.

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L: All in all, it seems likely I'll be more valuable post- than pre-apocalypse. PR and PsyOps, plus I like to sew and weave and pick up those sorts of homestead skills easily. I'm very good in a managerial capacity as well—I could organize the women-folk for the purposes of agriculture and defense and decide who should be allotted more or less food based on work output or overall value to the fortress (though of course every life has value. Mostly).

I should point out that all of this relies on contact-lens factories staying in business. I have, like 20-200 vision.

But wait—what are we going to do about water? I'm sort of shocked and concerned that we didn't cover this subject earlier in discussions. Unless you've already got it figured out or we're counting on the pre-Apocalypse incoming California/San Andreas-earthquake-apocalypse to re-map the Southwest in convenient ways.

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D: Water and contact lenses. Definitely two things I had not really thought about.

My wells in the Mohave produce enough water for ten to fifteen people a day. Easily. But I've never pushed beyond that to find the limit. Looking at 3d terrain it appears that the wells are fed by quite a substantial network of canyons and decent snowmelt. This probably won't be a problem.

It would be best if our crops were substatially modified to be drought resistant. Hopefully companies like archer daniels midland get this accomplished before the apocalypse. I prefer rice to wheat or quinoa.

Contact lenses are very important. I really don't want any reflected moonlight reflecting off my glasses when I'm manning a sniper post.

Plus with my complex perscription. Its tough to walk in rocky terrain with anything less than a blended bifocal soft lense.

*

L: That's precisely what I was worried about, re. snipering with glasses. I spent way too much money on these frames for them to get me shot in the head. Anyway I don't think it'll be problematic to stockpile enough contact lenses to get us through the next however-many decades of our lives, if we start soon. They (our lives) are likely to be shorter than expected anyway.

I think maize, wheat, and soya will all be ready to go in time now that scientists have this "erecta" gene to mess with. Meanwhile, there's prickly pear cactus, jojoba (lamp oil and the new chapstick), tepary beans, Amaranth, persimmonnes, Hopi pink corn, and others.

Also, I've been thinking it may not be a bad idea to start assembling some blackmail-worthy dossiers on one or several of the employees at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.

Good

2008-06-29T18:00:00.001-04:00

Bird nests in all four corners of the house.

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