Vignettes From Post-collapse America: Part 1

I was reunited with my truck. Checkbook bleeding but new transmission installed, I happily set out to do errands.

Where to go? In our new world, decisions involve different variables than “before times”. I needed stuff best found in the nearest city. Yet cities feel cruel and unfriendly to me. Did I really want to go to there? Were my errands worth getting dipped in groupthink?

It’s a trivial hassle… for now city dystopia remains largely hypothetical. The chaos is mostly smoke and mirrors. That may be all it ever becomes. Everyone suspects our future is written stone but it’s not. One side pokes the bear; sometimes in earnest but often with listless ineffectuality. The other side grumbles and does nothing. Most humans are nice people who want to live in peace. Places that have utterly crawled up their own ass are still anomalies (i.e. Portland, Detroit, etc… Or observing at larger scales Paris, London, Stockholm, etc…).

Until all hell breaks loose, which may never come or maybe it already happened and we haven’t caught up with the reality, we pretend everything is fine. The keyword is pretend.

The man who unquestionably won more votes than any other candidate in history is mentally solid, firmly in charge, and making wise rational choices… because he has to be. Is not the alternate horrific? Epstein really hung himself, the power grid is stable, adults are in charge, there is no inflation, and the press never lies. It would be best if these things were true, so we say they are.

I need a new shower head. I’m sick of buying shit from Amazon. I wanted to buy a physical object from a store run by human employees.

Also, I was desperate for hippie coffee.

About coffee; we all have irrational desires and this is one of mine. Paradoxically, I like hippie coffee shops and overpriced coffee. There’s no reason why overpriced coffee is the exclusive domain of elitist twits. Don’t redneck farmhands like coffee too? Can’t I drink a latte while listening to Hank Williams Sr. instead of thirty year old folk / poems by Bob Dylan? Apparently, not. Things are what they are and this is something which simply is.

I’ve grown to like the paradox. Young and schooled but unlearned and otherwise unemployable, “baristas” add to the coffee experience. Haven’t you noticed?

We’re all thinking it but I’ll say it aloud:

Coffee tastes best when served by a pierced snowflake with no job prospects and student loans they’ll be paying until their tattooed boobs sag to the floor.

Now that I’ve said it you know it to be true. If a “barista” has neon hair, answers to Zer, and thinks socialist dinosaur Boomers like Bernie Sanders will fix “zer’s” problems, the brew is better. Coffee just isn’t the same when served by sane humans.

I’ve no idea why I think this. Maybe I like to visit the zoo?

The truck hummed flawlessly. I’d burned thousands of dollars to make it exactly like it was a month ago. Even in this matter, our “new universe” informed my decisions. Should I repair an old truck or buy a new one? Part of that calculation was “what options have faded or are already gone”? Our world is bereft of ammo and grocery stores periodically become sparse in ways I’d never seen in America before 2020. Political speech is now our biggest industrial output. Talk will never construct a torque converter. I can get a remanufactured transmission today. Will that be true in six months, a year, five years? Are we slowly depleting our stocks of truck parts? Are we eating the seed corn?

Uncertainty also means buying new is unthinkable. What maniac would take on unnecessary debt in 2021? Six (!) years of payments starting… now? Who knows what’ll happen but if there’s a year when Chicago or Portland will become a crater… 2021 is a reasonable guess. New long term (or longish term) debt in a nation that “elected” Joe Biden? To quote a one term president; “Wouldn’t be prudent at this juncture”.

Better to stick with what I know. Best to enjoy the option while parts are still on the shelves. If the world is going to shit, I want a good truck immediately. Wise? I’ll know in a decade. If I’m still running the same truck, it was worth it. If everyone else is limping around in gutless electric toys (which I don’t expect but is a literal and clearly stated political goal), I’ll have won the game.

Hm… there’s a thing to notice. Think about my big diesel and imaginary fleets of electric puddle jumper car-like-objects. I don’t expect everything to go electric. Why? Because I understand mechanics and energy density. Pretty much nobody else believes we’ll go all electric either. Yet, leaning that way is officially “the plan”. We all hear the words and half the nation nods as if saying a thing makes it true. Nobody believes it but everyone believes it. Neat!

For shopping, I had a box store in mind. Run by Kool-Aid drinking woke fuckheads, the place is a corporate marketing bitch-fest. You just know they’ve got an official mission statement about every possible political choice. I don’t want to hear discussions of LGBTXYZ sexuality while I’m examining drill bits. I don’t care if they have a position on abortion when I’m buying a Torx wrench. What’s wrong with these people?

Correlation is not causality but everyone in the store is always grim. I don’t know if the bullshit makes people unhappy or the bullshit attracts the already unhappy. All I know is that nobody, shopper or worker, ever smiles. Did I really want to shop in East Germany? I pulled into the mostly empty, acres large, parking lot and pondered.

Nope. I can still avoid grim cold miserable people. So I did.

(More in my next post…)