[Warning: this story touches on spirituality, elections, and hunting. Third rail topics all. If you’re the sort that freaks out over such things, run.
Actually, if you’re the sort that reads “trigger warnings” why are you even here? In fact, I’ve changed my mind about the first paragraph; if you’re here, you’re an adult and I don’t need to tell you to relax and have a good time. If you’re a dipshit, a “trigger” warning won’t help anyway. All the false and pretend “trigger” shit is yet another layer of self-censorship foisted upon us by people who’ll keep “tweaking” society until we all have Munchausen by proxy. I’ll just keep wordsmithing as well as my pointy little head can manage and post as if I still lived in a society of adults.]
I had second thoughts after I wrote my last story. It wasn’t helped by the reaction of an acquaintance with closer connection to the zeitgeist than me. For example, he’s a normal human being and therefore would never use the word zeitgeist.
“You did what?!?”
“It was a metaphor.”
“Jesus shows up at a campsite. He’s hammering cancer sticks. Then you ride a motorcycle in a forest and it’s church? Are you mad?”
“It was a form of communication. People need a story of inner peace, just as I needed to live it.”
“People need soma* shoved up their ass. There’s an election in a few days and you just know it’s going to be a shitshow. They’ll be all riled up. Put your dumb little story on the internet and you will be savaged by the woke mob!”
“Meh, I’m not popular enough to be savaged. Plus, it’s the truth, metaphorically speaking.”
“Nobody tells the truth. Even losers like you aren’t unpopular enough to tell the truth!”
“I’ll risk it.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“It’s been said.”
Pause…
“So, aside from outing yourself as an idiot, what are your plans for the week?”
“I’m going to vote and then go off line and hide from everyone. I want to spend some quality time with my pressure canner.”
“Off line!?! During the election! Are you mad?”
[*Note: The universe has gotten so fake and gay that when I Googled “soma” it didn’t come up with Huxley’s Brave New World. (Technically, I have a non-Google search engine but that’s not the point.) The point is that there are people who think “soma” refers to “a drink having intoxicating properties from ancient India”. The poor bastards lacking context are clueless and our reference materials won’t help! Ironically, that’s part of what Huxley was talking about!]
Anyway, I wrote a story that ranged from shitting in a bucket to encounters with the eternal, timed it for release with the auto scheduler, and then ran like I’d lit a fuse. I had some concerns but I’d already planned outdoor time and the cure for internet concerns is the real world! However, maybe I’d take Election Day to sit on my ass like a “normie” and watch the results on TV. Who knows, things might happen in a reasonable manner? (Quit laughing! Everything turned to shit, but it didn’t have to be that way.)
During my planned off-line “vacation” I was very busy with real world issues. My truck is still on the spare and my furnace ran out of fuel. The latter became non-trivial as the weather turned chilly. You might think I’d just call 1-800-frozenballs or fill out a form at furnacefuelatBidenrates.com but that’s not the way of things. Fuel delivery never worked well in my rural area. Even before society crawled up it’s own ass it was frustrating. For decades I’ve made calls to fuel delivery people and for decades they’ve arrived late, refused to go down my driveway, showed up at inconvenient times… or (most commonly) just ignored me. This time, they promised to call back, didn’t, and never showed at all.
That’s OK. The thing about declining society is that it’s (in some ways) predictable. Simply assume a world of incompetent dumbassery and plan for that. This is why I own a tank with which I can manually retrieve my own furnace fuel.
It’s a bitch to mount it in my truck so I hadn’t used it for several years. Then some components broke. That’s my own fault. I got weak during a time of plenty and stopped using the tank.
The Orange Menace’s brief window of thriving economy was a time when fuel delivery was cheap and reasonably efficient. Sandwiched between Obama’s non-existent but perpetually reported “green shoots recovery” and the death spiral of the Bidenverse it was a time when I ordered cheap fuel long in advance and was never in a rush. That was then, this is now. I’m in a strange dying parallel world where I’ll bleed hard to fill a 250 gallon furnace tank. (I found a receipt for about $450 to fill the tank just a couple years ago. It’ll be TRIPLE that now! Unless I’m almost maniacally carefully about it, I’ll burn more than one tank per year. Drop well over a grand and a few months later do it again!?! As Obama said in 2009, elections have consequences.)
Like one does in a tough economy, I played at the edges. I couldn’t swing a refill this spring. I ran real low hoping for cheaper prices during the summer. (Furnace fuel usually drops in price a little during the summer but not this time. Seasonal cycles don’t apply when politicians are fucking the supply chain like a cheap hooker.)
Anyway, I made a dozen calls, got nowhere, was told to expect a call back (which never happened) and ran out of fuel on the very day it started snowing. Poetic no? Now I’m going to have to bleed the lines before the furnace will start, but that’s a second order hassle because the tank is still empty.
So I said “fuck it” and lit the woodstove. Sadly, my wood supply reflects another moment of weakness. For many years I cut and stacked all the wood I’d need for the long winter. It’s an absolutely herculean task. During the rule of Cheeto Jesus, which still has people quaking in their boots for some reason, fuel was dirt cheap. I went from stacking 120% of my needs to about 85% of my needs. That 15% of “give” made a big difference in my life. It’s just plain easier living in a time of sound governance and thriving economics.
Before you mock me and my inadequate wood supply, remember that a man who supplies 85% of his heating needs in the cold north, entirely with his own efforts, is still doing a pretty manly task. Nobody gets to laugh unless they’ve done more; and if you have done the deed you already know all about your personal your awesomeness. I briefly enjoyed the less intensive workout and even now I figure I’m more self reliant than 90% (or is it 99%) of the populace.
Anyway, I dug into my inadequate woodpile and lit the fire. This is when I made another discovery. The TV was dead.
I don’t watch much TV; as noted by the fact that the TV hasn’t been on for months. I hadn’t realized it but I’d fallen into the habit of sitting in my chair, toasty warm and sipping whiskey, while I watch YouTube. Nothing goes with a warm fire like a video of some dude freezing their ass off. All hail Lars from Survival Russia! A shout out to Emporium Outdoors. Well done Lonnie. Etc…
Also, I’d decided to watch the first post-2020 election in real-time. Would it be a return to reasonably ordered transfer of power? Would it be another shitshow with weeks of half assed excuses and strategic truckloads of mystery ballots? (As an aside, I’ve often thought of that night in 2020 as a step into the looking glass. I went to bed in what appeared to be a reasonably orderly world with a more or less routine election. I woke up on the first steps in the path to the Bidenverse. The disenchantment of strange statistical anomalies stings more because I, for a brief moment at least, stayed in a world where things in politics seemed to follow my experiences in real life. Subsequently, I got to feel that naïve belief ripped directly out of my body and I was forcibly plunged into the clown world we inhabit now. Which is to say, it’s one thing to read a newspaper about Chicago’s permanently corrupt elections and it’s another to watch them spring up everywhere on animated maps.)
With the TV dead, my main connection to real-time “moron level news” was severed. This seemed ominous. It was at that moment I started thinking “this is definitely going to suck”. Predicting that the election immediately after 2020 would go full retard isn’t a difficult guess, many people were more cynical than I. Yet, for some reason I felt pretty optimistic right until the dead TV seemed to bring forth sorrow in my mind.
More to come…