I present to you; Rover:
Founding Questions is a much appreciated fount of rationality and humor in this, the third year of the Bidenverse (and the seventh or ninth or thirtieth year of the long drawn out swirling of the drain). Among other wise thoughts you’ll find there is the First Rule of Clown World: “No matter how fake and gay you think it’s going to be (for any value of “it”), it will always somehow end up being so much faker and gayer.”
So true!
I spent January riding out a boring old fashioned winter cold, burning my inadequate firewood supply, and stacking canned goods. I was forced by circumstance to sit still. I used the time to idly ponder what stupid thing would roll around after the mid-winter cold snap wrapped up. (I think last mid-winter had Texans freezing their ass when windmills froze up?)
It tried ever so hard to think of the dumbest, most pathetic, lamest, stupid thing that could happen but the First Rule is never wrong. Clown World did it’s thing by diving beneath the lowest bar I could imagine.
A balloon? A fucking balloon!?!
Great raving gibbons of Gloucester*! The stupid thing was a fucking balloon?
I’d pinned my guess on a limp dick AI generated article that proved CPUs are racist. Or maybe a boatload of “non-documented totally anything but illegal migrant blessings of diversity” would have a tragic whale based accident near offshore windmills.
But no… it was a goddamn balloon.
Early last week it “suddenly” appeared; just lot like certain myocardial issues… see what I did there? It appeared in Montana. Virtually nobody in any press mentioned how it crossed from the Pacific to the Great Plains without anyone noticing. Since our press is nothing but propagand-tainment nobody bothered to ask why the entire nation of Canada didn’t pick up the phone and maybe give us a heads up. Nor why NORAD didn’t flag this issue long ago. (Are they literally doing nothing but tracking Santa?) Don’t we have an air force? (Or God forbid couldn’t the space force do something? Bwa ha ha ha the space force! I crack myself up!).
Nobody dropped that fucker because nobody is in charge.
When I see a raccoon heading for the chicken coop I handle it. I see the threat, I assess options, I consider where the creature is headed and evaluate possible outcomes. If the critter is about to take out a chicken I know. I know what to do. Most importantly, I do what I know how to do.
Invariably (if I see it) the raccoon is dispatched within ten minutes or less and not a feather is riled on a single chicken. If a raccoon was made of fabric, three stories tall, radar indicated, and moving at walking speed it would be even easier.
Yet in Clown World the balloon seemed to have the upper hand. The most highly funded military on planet earth couldn’t handle the same decision made by a dipshit blogger with a chicken coop.
The balloon just hung around. Noticed by all and addressed by none.
I’m not particularly worried about spying or even Chinese spying. I’m especially not worried that Chinese Lidar is going to scan a midwestern cornfield (or even the adjacent missile silos) and figure out something they don’t already know.
However, there’s one thing they might have learned. In case there was doubt before, it’s now proven that our chain of command can’t do shit. It literally couldn’t handle the basic and stupid situation of a balloon in our airspace.
“General Sir, there’s a balloon the size of a Winnebago floating near Billings, shall we blast it to smithereens?”
“Stand by soldier, I need to check my nail polish and then make Powerpoint slides for a hundred meetings.”
The dumb, stupid, slow, lazy balloon outwitting a whole nation is what happens when nobody’s in charge. It’s not that we lack the capacity to handle a stupid balloon, we lack the command structure to decide to handle a stupid balloon.
I tried to think of the fakest and gayest possible resolution to this situation. Letting it coast at the speed of USPS all the way to the Atlantic is about what I imagined. Unlike a lot of people, I’m not worried about a fucking balloon. It does what satellites do, just slower and cheaper. Lacking any more information than anyone else, I figured someone in China tossed it into the stratosphere as a sort of test; “lets see how long it takes the morons in American government to detect and shoot this thing down”. I’m sure they got a laugh out of it; “What do you mean it got the way to Montana and now it’s a trending meme on F***book? How is is still floating? Are they all too busy watching the Finnish Figure skater fall over?”
Over a couple of days it became a waiting game and I had a bit of hope. One neat idea would be to let that fucker just plain float clear to France. It would be a pretty chill response. Show the world that the US isn’t easily panicked. Ideally it’d drift from stupid America to stupid Europe and heck… it might make it all the way back to a completely baffled China.
I thought the lowest level of fake and gay would be to let it drift as if undetectable clear to the heartland, then let it lumber across the eastern seaboard, then earn back a little redemption by watching to see what everyone else did. After all, the best way to look like we weren’t so incompetent as to be unable to decide what to do about archaic technology might be to let archaic technology float on by.
Has anyone here ever done any sparring? If your opponent’s punch ain’t gonna’ land, you don’t have to expend energy blocking it. Sometime that’s the boss move. By the time it got to the coast I was expecting that to happen and I was mildly optimistic that we hadn’t behaved like total jackasses.
We could learn something. Since formerly mighty and now completely inept America had let it pass like it had zero fucks to give, what would come next? Would France flatten it eleven nautical miles from Brest like a proper nation? Would Portugal pick it off from the Azores like a proper nation? Would Spain consider it a new from of green energy and have a parade as befits the Clown World. Would it drift over a bickering, irrational, indecisive EU only to wind up vaporized the instant it got within view of the Russian Federation (which for better or worse appears to have adults in charge)?
Ha! This was going to be fun. Canada (as far as I can tell from American propagand-tainment) either didn’t know it was there or was too busy picking out new socks for Trudeau to do anything about it. America hyperventilated while doing nothing. My nation’s government used the excuse of “it could hurt someone if it fell on the densely populated civilians of Eastern Montana”; which convinced absolutely nobody who’s seen the empty spaces of Montana. So now we could enjoy the show. What would France’s reaction/excuse be?
But I forgotten the first rule. There was a faker and gayer resolution. One so incandescently stupid that I hadn’t been able to conceive of such a thing.
“General sir, we’ve had days to ponder the situation. Are we just going to let the balloon float to Europe for the exclusive entertainment of an obscure blogger?”
“No! I’ve consulted with Captain Pike… I mean I’ve spoken with a very popular president who won more votes than any other candidate in history and is clearly in charge of everything. He says we should let it float over every single inch of the continental United States but then, just when the wreckage would fall into salt water where retrieval and reverse engineering would be hardest, blast it.”
“Yes, sir. We will call it operation First Rule!”
So it was done. A nation of 350 million people, once the most technologically advanced society in human history, a people that could put men on the moon 50 years ago, used a 35 million dollar fighter jet to eliminate a fucking balloon that had finished it’s presumably super secret spy mission across an entire continent. We failed to either quickly dispatch OR stoically ignore technology first demonstrated in 1783. We picked the dumbest possible option out of a huge universe of slightly less dumb options.
None of it matters. The balloon will be forgotten by next week. Sooner or later something similar but even dumber will happen again. Why wouldn’t it? If you were the Chinese government and had inexplicably outwitted the Americans with a balloon you’d logically experiment with something even slower and dumber. Maybe they’ll put a chihuahua in a kayak and see if it can take out Tacoma? (Based on the balloon, a chihuahua might work!)
Tomorrow the president who got more votes than any other candidate in history will provide the next example of the First Rule. He’ll give his state of the union speech. I don’t know what he’ll say but his last two memorable speeches have been a doozy. One involved getting me fired while cursing me to a winter of severe illness and death. The next involved blood red lighting while flanked by soldiers in a setting that would make Darth Vader cringe at the negative symbolism.
At this point I can only imagine what he’ll do and I simply can’t imagine the ultimate level of fake and gay that is certain to happen. Kittens being thrown into a wood chipper due to climate change while executing gas kitchen stoves for racism? Interpretive dance while on stilts?
There’s something out there that’s so fake and gay I cannot possibly imagine it. Tomorrow we get to experience it.
Stay tuned. And lets offer a silent nod of appreciation for the Chinese engineers who did pretty well. They flummoxed not just one but two nations, encompassing most of North America… using fabric. I’ll bet they know calculus in a way our military doesn’t.
Good luck y’all.
A.C.
*It doesn’t have to make sense. Nothing has to make sense.
My last post came about because I’ve been thinking about the “spectrum” of self reliance. It amused me to post the video of the girl who thought Obama would fill her car with gas. Then I realized she lives in the same world as some of my readers who (wisely and impressively) grow heirloom crops. She thinks the president has a “Bureau of Filling Cars With Gas” while others gather their own seeds from their own crops. Meanwhile, I have twelve cans of peanut butter but I’m running out of firewood.
That’s a huge spectrum to be acknowledged. Folks seem to think “prepping”* is either yes or no; but it’s nothing of the sort.
This is exacerbated by “prepping media” which emphasizes the extreme over the mundane (as do enthusiasts in any hobby). Someone will always bitch about any level of anything as “inadequate”. Here are a few samples I’m sure you’ve heard: “If you carry a .22 for self defense you’re almost certainly screwed.” “If you don’t own a lifted Jeep with a winch you can never bug out.” “If you haven’t EMP proofed your Jeep while carrying nothing less than a .45 with a backup AR and twenty loaded mags, you’re zombie meat.”
I figure if you get shot with a .22 it’ll still hurt like hell. Unless you’re on the Chuck Norris side of things any firearm hits harder than a punch. Sure, a .45 is better than a .22 but anything is something. My cheap squirrel hunting 20 gauge fits somewhere in there. Nobody would recommend it as perfect for home defense but I damn sure wouldn’t want to be in front of it. For that matter if someone bails in a Toyota Camry all that really matters is if it works. If they watch the tsunami on TV from 100 miles inland, I guess they successfully bailed out. It’s important to avoid perfect becoming the enemy of “making good progress in the right direction”.
Failing to see a spectrum is a weakness to which I am prone. For example, in 2022 I cut less firewood than I wanted. Now, in the coldest winter months, I’m running low. There’s no surprise in that; ant and grasshopper y’all. But it still sucks. (Relax, I’ve got a furnace too.)
I could fret that I, like Germany, allowed myself to become dependent on oil. I could fret that (predictably!) the cost doubled or tripled after certain events in early 2021. But what good would that do?
I should focus on the positive. I should shrug and be happy that I cut 60% or 80% percent of what I needed. Less than I wanted, more than most.
So what does “more than most” really mean?
Bad question! Trying to find out sent me down the rabbit hole. I tried to think how many people are 100% dependent for their heating (or in warm climates cooling)? Or 100% dependent for food? Or struggling paycheck to paycheck? And for that matter isn’t “paycheck to paycheck” elevated self-reliance compared to “EBT to EBT”?
I started playing with numbers and just plain gave up. I’ve sought (to varying degrees of success) self-reliance so much and so long I’ve lost touch with how utterly dependent most people really are. I can’t quite picture a “normal person” anymore. How are they still alive?
Is this why they were fighting over toilet paper in the first week of Covid? Is this why they signal group affiliation on F***book as if their life depended on group membership? Is this why people act so… for want of a better word… stampede prone?
I don’t have any answers. I just got sucked into this line of reasoning and decided to share.
A.C.
*I hate the term “prepping”. Newspeak couldn’t hack the manly stoic term “survivalist” and sought a lame, gutless, alternative. “Prepping” sounds like something you can do from your couch. “Survivalist” sounds like someone who actually does leg day. Since our language is as manipulated as our media they gradually associated “survivalist” with someone running around the forest re-enacting Rambo… which wasn’t the original intent. I tend to settle on “homesteading” but what do I know?
Level -99: Obama will pay for everything.
Level 100: I want to make a sandwich. Oh look! We have a dozen jars of peanut butter!
Level 99: I’ve slightly depleted our supplies but this peanut butter sandwich is delicious.
Level 100: Mrs. Curmudgeon replaced the missing jar!
Level ???: Just now six cases of canned goods arrived! (The UPS guy hates us.)
Bonus tip: If you stack plentiful canned goods throughout the year and visit the range regularly, Burt Gummer will come on Christmas with his deuce and a half. He leaves a brick of .22s for every good survivalist.
My last few posts related to my scheming to buy a seed drill (an expensive tractor mounted implement of agriculture) and complaints that Hollywood took a steaming dump on the sweet and dopey but also lovable Scooby Doo. Then I went off grid.
I vanished to ride out a case of the sniffles. I’m still working on it. Don’t fret, I’m alive and fine and all that, but I’m not my usual bushy tailed self. In light of being slightly under the weather, I won’t do any literary heavy lifting for a while.
Today’s post is “catch-up”; a few small topics from this, the first month of the third, or fifth, or twentieth year of the swirling of the drain that is our modern world. Thanks for joining me.
Velma: It’s Nice To Know I’m Not Alone
It’s unnecessary to point out that Hollywood, and indeed every media outlet, actively, deeply, completely, and utterly hates us. It hates plain American citizens with the white hot loathing usually reserved for war criminals and genital warts. Why? That topic could fill a book. Lets just say that if you are an “average” person, they hate you. You’re targeted if you hold down a job, have positive relationships with family, married and/or like the opposite sex, raise your own damn kids as best you can, pay your bills on time, and can get through the day without bitching at everyone about everything all the time.
Hollywood, in this case HBO Max, decided to ruin a 50 year old plot about a handful of teenagers and talking dog. Why? Because they hate you. Also they’re too damn stupid and perverse to make their own plot about teenagers with a talking dog so they have to find one that exists and fuck it into the ground.
Incapable of creation they’ve ruined everything else. Star Wars? James Bond? Lord of the Rings? Name any 50 year old plot and there’s a Hollywood entity bending it over the table and shoving “the narrative” up its “plot”.
I usually ignore Hollywood’s depredations. I didn’t respond to Lord of the Rings because of course it sucked. Like Satan, Hollywood can never create, only copy and ruin. The Lord of the Rings was crap because how could it not be? If anyone in Hollywood had the creativity of Tolkien they’d have him drawn and quartered within the week. They’re pissed at J. K. Rowling and all she did was write Harry Potter fer crissakes. Nobody in Hollywood can do anything but suck.
The amusing thing is, Scooby Doo is so fucking simple it takes deliberate effort to ruin it. A six year old with a crayon could run another cycle of Scooby Doo that’s “barely average but not reprehensible”. Hollywood can’t. Some folks learn through reading and some have to pee on the electric fence themselves but Hollywood shoves itself feet first into the woodchipper. “Velma” didn’t have to suck, except that the participants suck so completely that anything they do pulls disaster straight out of the universe and concentrates it into a steaming heap of putrid failure.
They can’t talk this level of failure into non-being. Not only does everyone hate it but it’s bad on such a galactic level that even people who fully control all media can’t hide it.
Here’s how it was going on October 22, 2022. Mindy Kaling’s ‘Velma’ HBO Max Series Assembles Its Scooby Gang:
“HBO Max also released a teaser for Velma that pokes fun at complaints over changes to longstanding IP.”
Here’s how it’s going exactly 4 months later. Velma Pushes Aside Dragonball Evolution to Officially Become IMDb’s Worst Ever Entry:
“…the Mindy Kaling-led series has hit a new low and spectacularly taken its place as the lowest-rated piece of entertainment ever…”
Lowest rated entertainment ever! Yet, they’re still discussing the possible second season.
“…will Velma get a second chance to make a first impression? While not as expensive to make as many of HBO Max’s live-action scripted shows, there is a doubt over whether a second season of Velma would be financially viable for a platform who have recently undergone so many cancelations in the name of cost-cutting and financial realignment.”
Isn’t that hilarious? If “lowest rated ever” doesn’t get a project killed, nothing will. Which, now that I think about it, is why I know how much Hollywood hates us.
[Also it’s the source, not me, that misspelled “cancellations”.]
Thoughts On The Seed Drill:
I had a small fiscal setback. It’s not a tragedy, just an event. Shit happens and so forth. After a thorough review, I had to jettison the idea of the grain drill. Too expensive.
It’ll be more expensive in the future, but I’ll deal with that when the time comes. Economic choices are about the best option within constraints, not the Utopian ideal. (Unless of course you’re spending tax dollars in which case you can do whatever dipshit thing you want with unlimited money.)
I’m sad that the seed drill won’t happen this year but it’s not insurmountable. I have a hand seeder for broadcast planting (it’s more work than you’d think but it definitely does work) and I’m in the market for one of those wheeled cultivator gadgets (plus a bottle of ibuprofen). I also will buy or build a stand planter (recommended in the comments). Also I’m not above employing a dirty hoe (see what I did there)?
I should also note that I am NOT gardening in the traditional sense. I have a zillion irons in the fire and just don’t have the time or labor available to garden. (If we all start starving, I’ll rethink my labor allocation.) I’m just noodling about with “stuff seeds in the ground to see what happens”.
Also, some of what I plant is hunting/nature plots. I jam a seed in the ground after spring thaw and wind up with a steak by Thanksgiving. It’s not gardening but it’s not wasted effort either. I’m thinking of planting something tall (like sunflower) with a hand planter in the middle of plots of stuff that’s short (like brassica) that was seeded with broadcast seeding. I don’t know if that would provide huntable game with more cover? Also I’m wondering if sunflower would encourage songbirds. I figure a smattering of sunflower seedheads (if they stay above the snow-depth) might attract cool birds.
I’ll post more details when summer returns.
Thoughts On Preparedness:
I got a lot of helpful comments when I mentioned the seed drill. An interesting observation was that everyone who commented was amazingly squared away. Give yourself a pat on the back! Thank you all for that ray of sunshine!
Here we are in early 21st century clown world, where the lights are on only because of inertia and the last six serious hard workers that own work boots. Growing parts of the populace tear down everything. They may be motivated by racism or global warming or voting rights for Himalayan swamp rats but the real thing that ties them together is the assumption that civilization runs due to magic and it will continue to do so even if the whole world is busy fingerpainting.
Not so for the readers of this blog! I’ve been producing my own food for a while and fret only that I’m 50% or 30% reliant on a grocery store. Meanwhile, I got comments from folks who make my weed beds and half assed bacon and egg ranch look like random flailing. Not merely gardeners but serious ones. I’m pleased to see that.
We should all take a moment to reflect how well we’re doing. There’s “muddles through just fine” and “got your shit together” and there’s even “this ain’t my first rodeo” but I got comments such as “consider your seed source”.
That’s a level of “well prepared” that’s way off the charts! Way to go folks! We live in a world where “I just noticed eggs are expensive” is probably the mean. Beneath that there’s a vast herd of “I can’t wait for the EBT to pay my next trip to the dollar store”. I’m far out on the tail end with “I canned game meat I hunted”. But there’s always more. At least some of this blog’s readers ponder planting heirloom seeds so they can replant the same strain next year. Awesome! Talk about going off grid!
Thanks everyone. I knew you were there, but it was good to hear it.
Incidentally, for the short term I’ll keep planting evil GMO seeds from Burpee (mostly so I can use my pressure canner with some corn). That puts me at the 99.9% percentile of preparedness. If shits gets weirder (it will), I’ll go further (eventually). In the meantime I’m happy just knowing there’s someone in the 99.999% percentile of preparedness. If you’ve got packets of heirloom seeds stacked in your pantry, God bless ya!
[Warning: inside thoughts of a creative type follow. Feel free to ignore them.]
If you’re a regular viewer of this blog you’re aware I’m slowly* writing Attack of the Lesbian Activist Squirrels. In case the title didn’t clue you in, it’s satirical and intended for fun. It’s probably going to get me drawn and quartered whenever the woke buzzkills detect it but I’m not too worried about that. The woke can’t help themselves. They do nothing but bitch and they’ll instinctively bitch at anything fun. It feels like you could smile at a sunset and a Karen will materialize to suck the life out of you, having been drawn, vampire-like, to the scene of joy.
(Look at how Millennials and Gen Z turned on the author of Harry Potter… the most beloved book series of their youth is now a harsh political issue. Instead of fond memories of a cute story from their childhood, they’ve created another scene of scorched earth. There are a lot of people who read the story when the young adult writing of J. K. Rowling was actually age appropriate. Now I would guess they don’t read at all.)
My story started with a joke about a bear in my birdfeeder. After that the plot took on a life of its own. I’ve followed it through twists and turns and the last chapter parked the characters to the edge of the home planet of dipshits, Portland Oregon. I’ve got one or two chapters left to wrap it all up with a pretty bow. I look forward to those chapters.
Part of the story is Velma. The plot needed Velma and I enjoyed creating her. She is the counterbalance to the two main protagonists.
Billy is pretty darned sharp but also within the range we’ve all met. The sort of fellow that would inherently gravitate toward engineering only to find himself cast out of the cesspool of mediocrity that is the modern midwit university. A tragic man who would have been welcomed with open arms some decades ago is an outsider in today’s dumbed down clown world.
Doogie is different. He’s “several standard deviations beyond the mean”. If you’ve met (or are) such a creature you know they’ll never fit in at any location or era. Doogie is so damn brilliant he likes to play mind games with sentient (and dangerous!) wildlife. His is the sort to move mental markers around the physical world as the NSA hunts for wrongthink within the realm of pure data. He might have been tolerated at a past university but is rarely welcomed anywhere.
Velma came to being because I wanted the poles of my fictional world to have balance. I also wanted to shit all over the dumbasses that think intelligence equates with dumpy, boring, nerds. (I assume that sentiment is sour grapes from the less intellectually fortunate.) Hollywood has pounded the trope to death; “She can’t be hot and smart”. With Velma, I have declared “she can be so hot your eyes fall out while possessing a brain that can vaporize your mind.” Hollywood is limited because its creative workforce is mentally limited. Thus the reliance on tropes.
Velma, like all characters, took on a life of her own. She drifted from mental risk taker to a walking undetonated nuclear bomb. I didn’t see that coming! I’m delighted. One loves to see their creations grow.
As befitting a hot, blazingly smart, shit-stirring, goddess, Velma has powers in the dark arts of bullshit. This includes her backstory with a group of siblings that are the “Scooby Doo” gang. There’s no finer bullshit that the happy, dumb, sweet, innocent, poorly animated, Hanna-Barbera, accidental hit that is (or was) Scooby-Doo. Who better than my Velma to wield the pre-programmed bullshit laid down by the Five Man Band that is Scooby-Doo? She can tap into our memories of the girl that spent her time Brain-Splaining simple plots to a stoner and his talking dog.
Alas, Hollywood digs through the graves of the past, grinds the bones it finds into a thick paste, and then smears it on the bathroom stall that is their current lack of creativity. Scooby-Doo existed from 1969 – 1976. Hacks have been squeezing that IP for the subsequent 47 years. (Not bad for a cartoon with basically one plot!) I assumed, sooner or later, someone would trash Scooby-Doo and my beloved Velma’s bullshit avatar. This year, the third or fifth or twentieth of a long panicked bullshit decline, is the year when Velma gets ruined. How unfortunate for the hot, genius, that I created.
The Drinker Recommends says that Velma is the worst thing (so far) in the shit sandwich that is modern “cinema”. I trust The Drinker.
My Velma shall soldier on alone. I knew this time would come but I hoped to have a few more years before they wrecked a happy childhood memory. Eventually all that was ever written or performed will be shit upon, but I didn’t plan for the accelerated timing.
The bummer is that it dilutes the power of bullshit, which is related to the power of shared experience. Now there are two populations in the world. Those that witnessed the real thing. And those that witnessed the undead mess that was made of its corpse and don’t know what they lost.
Allow me to draw a parallel: A few years back mobs of women appeared out of nowhere wearing a strange uniform. They were the watchers of 58 episodes of something called “The Handmaid’s Tale”. These weird women (and it was entirely women) stopped wearing pussy hats at Anti-Trump demonstrations just long enough to cosplay some sort of wish fulfillment dominance fantasy where they (women in the modern world that make up the majority of college graduates and rule almost any office job environment) are exploited victims. None of them read the 1985 book by Margaret Atwood. They don’t know the details of the book. They don’t have the mental engagement of the written word. What they saw was not what the original conveyed. I didn’t watch the TV show so I don’t know how closely the plots match, but I damn well know that no woman in 1985 wore costumes to cosplay her part in Atwood’s story.
As they upended Handmaid’s Tale they upended the simple but delightful character of Velma. The smart freckled redhead that was the integral part of a five man team 50 years ago has become a bitchy Indian single unit mocking four hapless dipshits that were (in the earlier incarnation) her friends.
Dammit. I hate to see my Velma’s small but happy bullshit connection (which was satirical but also respectful of the old stories) severed by the chainsaw of shitty narratives. Alas, it happened.
Tonight I’m going to toast my independent and fierce fictional being who’s 50 year old connection to the populace has been shredded. Lucky for me, my Velma is fearless. She has absolutely no sympathy for society, she has no remorse, her family is less a five man band than two siblings, a random stoner, a miscast dog, and her presence with the wattage turned waaaay low. My Velma has zero shits to give. Were she real, she’d see me in my cups, challenge me to a game of chess, and (when I inevitably lost) burn my house down.
If you’re of a mind, join me in a glass of bourbon to mark the moment.
A.C.
*I’m sure the slowly part is infuriating. I’ve got a day job and all that. Thank you for your patience.
THIS IS HOW IT’S DONE!
I’d never heard of Colter Wall until today. The absence was wrong and stupid. Now I’ve heard it and share it with you.
Some comments from his YouTube feed will put you in the mood.
“My glass of bourbon just refilled itself when he started singin”
and
“it is my personal belief that Colter Wall is the living, walking, and singing middle finger to Autotune.”
Probably the best Crossroads retelling since Robert Johnson! DAMN!
I would normally schedule my next post to go live in the morning. But if you heard this song before your morning coffee… you would die.
Enjoy!
[I thought I’d never get to the seed drill. Yet here we are! This is the last post in this series. The whole thing came from the conversation in the last few lines. What do you think?]
I grow / harvest / raise a lot of my family’s food. My success varies. Sometimes it’s “nearly all”. Other times it’s “maybe 15%”. I used to fret when I didn’t self-generate as much as I wanted. This was unwise. Nature doesn’t work on our stupid human schedules. I gradually learned to ride the ebb and flow of nature. Now I produce quite a bit but I also have the wisdom to keep my workload within a (barely) reasonable level.
The first thing any homesteader learns is that “some” is a big deal. It’s a huge rush of pride! It really does cut down on grocery store shopping. And it tastes like heaven. “Some” is vastly superior to “none”!
Homegrown food creates an internal locus of control. My food’s supply chain has many inputs and I control several of them:
Food = freezer + pantry + hunt + fish + livestock + grocery store
I can increase or reduce any input. The bad news of a wet spring or the good news of a neighbor selling a butchered cow are not life or death worries; they’re just options. I pick and choose among various options.
The equation for most people on earth is simpler:
Food = What I can afford – What isn’t in stock
That freaks me out. There’s not one damn thing under the control of the consumer! It’s why people bitching about the price of a dozen eggs are so bitter. Inflation sucks and there’s nothing we can do about it. A consumer allocates inflation dwindled dollars to whatever is in stock until the situation improves or they spend all their money. It sucks to have no control!
(Note: starvation was more or less eliminated in modern society. I emphasize the word “was“. I formerly assumed it would never come back. I still think it’s unlikely but now I think nothing is impossible. Look how far we have fallen. See how fast it came? Suppose in February 2020 you told people the truth about the future? Schools, colleges, supply chains, and businesses shut down for many months, two consecutive weird elections, people fought over toilet paper, political prisoners in America, concertina wire around the capital, burned cities, nuclear threats against Russia, unpredictably empty shelves, attacks on power grids, $5 gas, $7 eggs, $9 milk… people would have thought you mad! What formerly impossible degradations remain in our future?)
Homesteading is fiscally sub-optimal. People think raising your own food saves money. It does and it doesn’t. The peak moment in cheaply feeding a human might possibly have been Walmart in 2005. (Despite Bidenverse inflation it’s often cheaper buying shit at Walmart than making it yourself. There are exceptions but every farmer, gardener, fisherman, or hunter knows the score.)
I’m cool with spending a little extra to assure my own food. I like control and I’ll pay to get it. More importantly I like the quality! A creepy tube of ground up slimy “burger” at WalMart may be cheapest but it’s never better (or healthier) than homestead food.
Making your own food isn’t. People who refer to homesteading as “voluntary simplicity” are idiots. Any dumbass can pick a box off a shelf and hand over cash (or swipe an EBT card). Buying shit is simple. Sorting out an electric pig fence’s transformer in the middle of a rainstorm is not simple at all!
I gradually increase my skills, gear, and production. Slow and steady is the best way. You can easily work yourself to death otherwise. I started small and worked up. I’ve learned to accept setbacks graciously because I’ve had so many.
I assess what works and what doesn’t. Were turkeys better than chickens? Are meatbirds too gross? Should I have ditched the hens when they were younger?
My assessments put corn as my next target. Corn on the cob is delicious, pigs love it, I can pressure can it, and you get a lot of food per unit of labor. I’m not talking about gardening. Forget your pre-conceived notions about pretty rows of well tended vegetables. I’m too busy to “recreationally garden” like a normal person. I travel often and invariably have to abandon crops at key moments. Plus I’ve got so many irons in the fire that leisurely weeding and simply enjoying the plants is always cut short. A mere 45 minutes weekly, strolling through the garden yanking weeds, is a luxury I don’t have.
Unlike say carrots, I see my neighbor farmers cranking out corn in 40 acre units. They never get off the tractor! I believe corn is uniquely suited to / bred for industrial processes. (I’m aware that farmers plant different cultivars and use Roundup by the ton but there’s overlap with “sweet” corn.) Last summer I tried an “industrial approach experiment”. I edged into a “plant many, let a lot die, hope for the best” variant of “not-gardening”.
It worked!
My corn experiments of last year suggest that corn does ok under some level of being ignored. This year I want to plant more corn and still mostly ignore it. (My new enthusiasm for pressure canning motivates me. Canning corn is a thing people do. I’ve never done it but I’m sure I can learn. Who doesn’t want a zillion jars of yummy canned corn?)
My weird “not-gardening” approach is because I’m limiting my labor input. I’m only human, I only have so much time. I don’t take that into account I’ll just work myself to death.
I planted last year’s corn more or less on a whim. I had an empty pig pen. I can’t mow that area so it was destined to be a weed jungle. Why not sow corn and let it fight it out against the weeds?
My “low labor” method was to hitch my tractor to a disk, run around in the “no sod but not a garden either” soil until most of the weeds were toast, slap some seeds in the ground, add a random half assed bit of mulch a few weeks later, and otherwise call it good.
The first bottleneck is that I put the seeds in by hand (with a hoe). Such a pain in the ass! It wasn’t brutally physical but it was definitely hard work. Any time I’m working that hard I’d be better off cutting firewood. (Firewood is worth roughly $200 a cord and it directly replaces $4/gallon furnace fuel. I get more “bang for the buck” out of firewood than anything else.)
With the corn thing, I’m in it for the long game. Even if I can muscle it out now, what about the future? In 20 years will I have the strength?
Last year, I was rushed for time. Gardening in a rush is frustrating! I planted the last few rows while my truck was loaded for a trip, ready to go, and practically had an idling engine! Maddening!
I want to automate. But how much? I’ve pondered this a lot.
I can plant with a hoe, a manual planter, or a seed drill. These will plant at speeds of turtle slow, semi-slow, and industrial-fast. The physical effort is hard, semi-hard, and sit in an air conditioned cab. Every step up in automation is roughly one order of magnitude more expensive.
Painting with a broad brush a hoe costs $20, a planter is about $200, and a seed drill is about $2,000. (Don’t get pedantic on me… it’s just a relative scale.)
In case you’re not a farmer, here’s some backup information:
Below is a photo of a medium quality hoe. (I didn’t insert the obvious joke. See how classy I am?) This one costs $28 on Amazon. A cheap hoe (the JOKES I’m suppressing!) is a pain in the ass. They wear out if used hard. I’d probably beat it to death in 4-5 years.
Here’s a super bad ass hoe (I’m dying to make a joke… must resist). Now we’re up to $48 on Amazon but it’s a true “forever tool”. It’ll probably outlast the original purchaser, all of his progeny, and the rest of human civilization as we know it.
Below is a photo of a medium-high quality “manual corn planter”. You can get cheaper ones. They cost about half as much and will last about half as long. This one is about $170, it’s a pretty good version of the type. It can plant one row at a time and can plant many types of seed. I suspect it’s 1/2 the labor of a hoe… and easier on my back too. But it’s not even remotely effortless. A high quality brand (such as this) should last for many years (but not forever).
The next object is more or less the cheapest thing a tractor can use to plant corn. I have doubts how long it would last. It costs about $1600 on Amazon. It can plant two rows and it can only handle “big” seeds like corn and beans but it requires almost no physical labor.
Finally we enter true “real farmer” gear. Below is a small (perfectly sized for my tractor) seed drill (also called a grain drill). This one is a little over $4k. (There’s a used market with the associated “used market uncertainties”.) This device can plant up to 10 rows at whatever spacing you want. It can handle basically any kind of seed. I don’t think I could “wear it out” even if I tried and I would be sitting in a cab while the device did the work. (Note: Do your own research! Don’t buy it just because some fool blogger posted a photo!)
Each step up is vastly more expensive which sucks. Each step requires vastly less manual effort which is awesome. What to do?
I know what you’re thinking; “nut up and just do it by hand”. Easy for you to say. I hate manual gardening. This is what it feels like to plant crops with a hoe.
I still haven’t decided what I’ll do. (“Do nothing” is an option too.) Mrs. Curmudgeon helped me think it over but I’m still uncertain. This is a paraphrase of a real conversation we had:
Curmudgeon: “I dunno’ what I’ll do this spring. On the one hand I value a locus of control that’s…”
Mrs. Curmudgeon: “Stop! I’ve heard it before! This is why there’s usually chicken shit in the yard and why you were pressure canning big game in the kitchen. I get it.”
Curmudgeon: “Yah, so I was going to buy a $200 manual planter for corn. But I keep thinking it’ll mess up my back. Maybe I should go big with a tractor implement?”
Mrs. Curmudgeon: “I’d like to see you survive the spring without needing a bottle of Ibuprofen. How much for an implement?”
Curmudgeon: “Anywhere from two grand to twice that. I’m sketchy on how they work.”
Mrs. Curmudgeon: “Ouch! That’s a lot of money to get corn.”
Curmudgeon: “I agree. It’s stupid expensive… but…”
Mrs. Curmudgeon: “But what?”
Curmudgeon: “I think about all the things that seemed inconceivable in 2019 that are real life now. These things make food…”
Mrs. Curmudgeon: “And?”
Curmudgeon: “So how deep does the rabbit hole go?”
Mrs. Curmudgeon: …
Curmudgeon: “Homesteading is just a silly hobby until it’s not. Then it’s the most important thing ever. When do we hit bottom? Is there a bottom?”
Mrs. Curmudgeon: …
Curmudgeon: …
Mrs. Curmudgeon: “Get the implement.”
I want to explore the importance of “internal locus of control”, particularly in the chaos of the Bidenverse. My wordsmithing hasn’t been focused.
So let’s start again shall we?
Waaaaay back when the son of a single term president was mismanaging his way to being a second generation single term president I bought a motorcycle…
Dammit! I just can’t come at it from straight on! If I say the obvious too cleanly some folks can’t see it. It’s shockingly Plato’s Cave-ish. Oh well, I’ll keep typing and see what happens.
Back when it wasn’t considered racist to compare the president to a monkey, Chimpy McHitler was the president and the American people were blessed with cheap gasoline. (This was much to the horror of Al Gore who likes nothing more than Powerpoint slides and expensive oil.)
Anyway Chimpy McHitler started out a pretty average and ignorable president. He was likely to have an average and ignorable one term presidency. But at least gas was cheap.
I didn’t know those were the last few years of partial sanity. Do you remember sanity? Pepperidge Farms does.
It’s hard to remember that short chunk of peace after Clinton and before the Light Bringer. It wasn’t yet official that everyone white was a racist asshole. People could take a dump without a political debate over which bathroom. Gas became so cheap that Al Gore grew a beard. Hippies bitched (as they always do when the president is an “R”) but that’s just what they do. They whined that the President was an idiot and I didn’t necessarily disagree; but it was still relatively calm.
I miss the good old days when not all crimes were caused by the FBI. “Maniacs setting shit on fire” was wisely called “arson” instead of “peaceful protest”. Back then the X-Files was fiction!
Americans enjoyed relative peace the way Americans should. They bought BIG CARS! Everyone and their dog financed 4×4 monstrosities. It was the era of the SUV. The greatest of them all was the H1 Hummer; a military truck which looks like it’s two lanes wide and gets incredibly shitty mileage. Hummers were used to signal how manly one was’ back when being “manly” was legal. Of course Hummers mostly sat leaking oil on paved shopping mall parking lots. (I was a 4×4 guy… you never saw an H1 on trails!)
Who wouldn’t want to bet on cheap fuel forever? Me!
I bucked the SUV trend with a motorcycle. My cruiser is just as ridiculous as any mall cruising Schwarzenegger-mobile. Yet it had practical aspects. It got 45 mpg (much better if I rode slow, which I didn’t) and it cost somewhere between a fifth and a tenth of a H1.
It seemed silly to conserve gas, given its low price, but I did. I chose to avoid depending on cheap gas. Good times don’t last forever.
I joked about my bad timing; a world where hulking military trucks were parked at Barnes and Noble is a weird time to have a daily driver with a 4 gallon tank. I had bad timing. Then again I was fine perfect timing; a year too soon is better than a day too late.
A clever fellow can make biodiesel but making gasoline is pretty much impossible. So I bought an ancient diesel Mercedes for non-motorcycle days. It gave me another option. If the world went Mad Max I could learn the dark art of biodiesel.
Then 9/11 happened and everyone lost their shit. Sound familiar? Panicked nitwits installed a police state . It’s the panopticon hell in which we now live. Bush flaked and there was war, then a second front, then increasingly centralized power, and then state sponsored torture. The icing on the cake was domestic spying on innocent civilians! (Sound familiar?) If you questioned any of it you were a terrorist.
Bush, who otherwise would have been toast, was re-elected. A surprise terrorist attack apparently makes a half assed president more electable and indeed every president since has hoped for another attack.
He muddled through until hurricane Katrina spiked gas prices. Cheap gas was over. My cynicism had come true.
Prices set records and everyone bitched about “big oil”. Except me. It makes no sense to blame my dealer for supplying the drug I requested. I rode my high MPG motorcycle until the Hummers disappeared. Soon the Malls faded too. I guess there was nowhere left to drive Hummers anyway.
I hadn’t gotten around to making biodiesel but the plans were in place. While everyone else shrieked about “big oil”, I read books and tried to remember high school chemistry. This is how you get an internal locus of control. I can’t change the world but I can change my relationship to outside forces.
Gas crept up. I paid higher prices just like everyone else but I didn’t feel like a helpless “victim”. I’d partially avoided dependency and thus had a measure of freedom.
Fuel prices ebbed a bit and then started a steady rise again under Obama. I can’t remember for certain but I feel like it was in his first term. Finally, I made biodiesel.
Biodiesel worked great! It was like magic!
People viewed my project through a short term lens. If I made biodiesel when pumps were charging $2.50 people thought I was an idiot. If I made biodiesel when pumps were drifting toward $3.50 I looked smart. See how that works? The same act is perceived differently based on things I don’t control. The solution to that is to ignore other people’s opinions.
I chugged around on homemade fuel and the grin never left my face. It was awesome! I felt so smug and superior you could see my ego from space! I’d earned it. I’d mastered various skills. I’d built equipment. I’d achieved something. Achievement feels good. It was a fun hobby. Even so, I knew it was temporary. Bad times don’t last forever.
Smart people in North Dakota started fracking. Pipeline protesters and regulatory brick walls couldn’t stop them. Private fuel off private land dropped the price of gas. The President tried to throttle things but he couldn’t keep the prices high. I stopped making biodiesel. Fuel stayed cheap-ish during a long long slow decline that the press carefully avoided calling a recession.
There was another election. Just like the one Al Gore lost, this one wasn’t well received either. Yet again the press woke-splained that it’s patriotic and legal to question an election but only if a Republican wins. Former president Clinton’s angry wife unleased throngs of harpies on DC. They wore pussy hats and set fire to cars on inauguration day. You know that meme where the spastic girl screams at the sky? That really happened. If you want to understand a person who has a completely external locus of control that would be it. Flaked out lunatics screaming in the middle of the street control literally nothing (not even themselves).
Fuel prices dropped during the horror of a thriving economy after the election. The press insisted we were doomed but Orange Menace created the best economy in 40 years! America became a net exporter of energy. Gas was so cheap that Al Gore wept every night!
By then my first motorcycle had outlasted virtually every H1 sold. Between high mpg vehicles (which were paid off), a garage full of biodiesel gear, and a head full of knowledge, I’d built a wall between myself and the price of fuel. This wasn’t necessary. After all, fuel was cheap. On the other hand, good times never last.
Then came covid. (We are required by law to believe nobody has ever tried a covid-type panic before. That’s why the predicted mass death over SARS, Swine flu, Ebola, Zika, Bird flu, Mad Cow Disease, and West Nile Virus are memory holed. This time Orange Man Bad needed to be defeated and therefore we’d all die!) Civilization deliberately punched itself in the balls.
Remember when civilizations didn’t lose their shit every few years? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
After nuking the economy and spending all summer of peacefully burning cities, we had another election. This one was such a mess that spreadsheet programs spontaneously combust when exposed to it. Orange Man Bad got more votes than any other candidate in history. Whoops! At 3:00 am, while nobody was counting anything, because the pipes were clogged, Captain Dementia broke Orange Man Bad’s brand new record. Biden, who barely left his house, set a super duper record! What are the odds?
I’m required by law to pretend that Biden got more votes than anyone (including Cheeto Jesus) since the beginning of time. No human has any reason to doubt it and to do so is (inexplicably) racist. As the woke-splainers instruct, if a Democrat “won” it’s illegal to complain. Them’s the rules!
As with any other third world election, political prisoners were rounded up and a swearing in ceremony happened behind concertina wire.
What happened to the cheap gas?
You know where this is going…
…the price of fuel doubled. BOOM! Good times never last.
Within a year, America went from a net exporter of energy to begging Venezuela for a tank of go-juice (which worked about as well as you’d expect). Before the second year the petroleum reserve had been drained. Gas isn’t cheap and it won’t be again for a while.
It’s funny how quickly economies respond to good management and bad. An eight year Obama-slog was exhausting and slow. Trump’s economy soared like a rocket. Biden drove it back into the ditch within months. You were there. Don’t let yourself be gaslit. Remember what you saw. Trust your observations above all else!
So gas was at eyebleed prices last summer and it’ll stay in that vicinity until someone new runs things. Raise your hand if you didn’t see that coming; if you raised your hand, use it to slap your face. You ought to know better.
It’s a good time to have internal locus of control. It gives me mental and spiritual distance from the lunatics in politics who deliberately ruin all the touch. This doesn’t mean it’s painless. I too suffer over these costs. But I’m not merely a punching bag for idiots. I have a few options and a bit of independence.
Also, I still have sufficient knowledge and tools to make biodiesel. Anytime I want I can start mixin’ up biodiesel. It’s hard work and so far I’m still lazy but the option is priceless.
That’s why I recommend an internal locus of control. I don’t feel helpless because I’m not. There’s only so far the pendulum can swing. An external locus of control is the opposite. You spend every day wondering what fresh hell will be inflicted this time. Eventually you wind up screaming in the streets and wearing a pussy hat. If someone you’ve never met controls your life from a political office, why not throw tantrums?
How does this relate to farm equipment? I’m getting there. It takes work to start in Plato’s Cave and wind up free. I’ll drag this series to conclusion in my next post.
[This post took on a life of its own. I didn’t set out to write anything controversial but that’s how it might sound. A person might possibly read this post and think; “This jerk is talking about me!” I’m not. I’m thinking only of a terrible wrong done to a lot of people. If what happened was ok for you and/or it came to a resolution that pleases you then that’s great! If it sucked, I’m not trying to throw stones and compound your misery. I mean to offer sympathy.
I sit under trees and think. Whenever I foolishly share whatever I’ve supposedly figured out it’s a risk it’ll come out bad or poorly written. If the positive intent I had in mind fell flat, I apologize in advance.]
We just watched a planet wide experiment: does freewill matter? I think so. Here’s how I figure it:
The middle ground was a rough spot. After you eliminate the people who willingly stampeded to get the shot and the ones that won’t take the shot even if you put a gun to their head, you’re left with people who didn’t make a firm call. Those poor souls have an external locus of control. Many got the injection simply because someone other than themselves wouldn’t shut up about it. None got the option of simply ignoring the whole thing.
Everyone who didn’t make a firm call got injected. All of them. If you were mildly opposed but not invested, you got the shot. If you were mildly in favor but dragging your feet, you got the shot. No quarter was given.
To a different degree for each person (shall we call them victims?) folks in the mushy middle were humiliated. Maybe they barely care what’s in their veins. If so, the humiliation was just a small one. Easy to shrug it off. That’s good. Maybe they were strongly opposed but not willing to risk their job or piss off their wife. In that case the humiliation was bigger. That sucks!
Possibly the most tragic were the ones that might have eventually gotten the vax of their own volition but just hadn’t firmed up their decision yet. If a person was slowly drifting in mild preference for the vax they got it accelerated to the State’s schedule. That’s humiliating too.
To subjugate a person is to humiliate them.
I like chocolate ice cream. It’s delicious. If soldiers kick in my door and make me eat a bowl of chocolate ice cream at gunpoint… that’s humiliating. Making an adult do your bidding humiliates them. It feels like that was the point of the vax mandates.
A person without strong preferences one way or the other was doomed. People flipped over rocks and pried into private lives trying to ferret out and “fix” every single human being that hadn’t yet complied. Anyone without will of steel was found and “fixed”.
It didn’t stop until people stopped it.
Rampaging bureaucracies only stopped when they ran out of easy victims. They didn’t stop for any other reason. Truck convoys in Canada, concentration camps in Australia, locked down cities in America… governments didn’t stop forcing things until each of their the countries was teetering near chaos. (Possible exception for Sweden and maybe some African nations.)
In the end, the great big middle ground of people were mistreated.
Every person who could be “forced” was forced.
We should pay attention to this experiment. It’s the biggest of its sort in centuries. The results are clear. The urge to subdue was a filter applied to the entire human population. A fearful angry mob subjugated every single person who was in the middle ground. Anyone who didn’t have a strong opinion and stronger will did not control their fate.
In less than a year, the only remaining unvaxxed population was a minority remnant. This is true at the planetary level. The remaining unvaxxed are (by definition) intensely committed. Most of the world wasn’t that committed and some of them are mildly or deeply nursing the suspicion that they’ve been misused… because they have. Only two groups came out more or less happy; the people who wanted the vax on day one and the ones that refused no matter what.
The refusers are particularly hard core. Everyone with weak preferences was isolated, pressured, and injected. The remnant is iron. They’re (still!) willing to lose jobs, lose friends, lose family ties, be ostracized, ignore their pastor, fight back against frozen assets and other forms of dirty pool, face jail time, get kicked out of a grocery store, be expelled from college, tell the president to fuck himself, and do whatever else they have to. They were told they stood at the precipice of death and they didn’t blink! America’s president Biden (who won more votes than any American president in history) gave a live speech insisting he was going to get me fired because I had exceeded his tolerance. The press laughed that I’d be dead by mid-winter. I’ve heard the press exaggerate but I’ve never heard a president speak so cruelly to me personally. It was a new world.
Yet, I’m still alive. Ha!
How far was this going to go? My answer came to me in late autumn 2021. While pondering my fate and waiting to be fired, everything clicked. It all made sense. I still remember that moment. Resolve led to relief.
I was beneath a tree (where all good thoughts originate). I desperately didn’t want to lose my job but it unemployment was just about a done deal. Regardless, I just couldn’t accept forced medical compliance. Then it came to my mind like a revelation: There’s no shame in falling in battle but walking into a medical facility and requesting your own subjugation is nothing but shame.
I can’t believe it took me so long to see the obvious. Everyone who’d complied against their wishes had done so merely because of a speech or paperwork or a memo.
I might get injected by force but I’d never subjugate myself. That’s all I needed to know to feel a measure of peace.
This didn’t mean I would prevail. I’ve seen what cowboys do to get an injection into a bull. The bull is unwilling but teams of mounted riders work against him. What had I faced? So far nothing a bull would understand. I’d faced nothing threats and mind games. Everything was aimed to make me give up on me. Would I? Nope! It was rodeo time!
Why not? Teams of cowboys routinely inject huge thrashing dangerous bulls. It’s a known technique. Meanwhile, the bull at least tries to defend itself. Why should I bend the knee just to make someone else’s life easier? I would demand the same battle that the bull gets! They’d have to find me, chase me down, absolutely overpower me, and do the deed themselves. If there was going to be a needle in my arm, it would be in the hand of a man who knows precisely what he’s doing and his moral place in the world. Ideally he’d spend the rest of the day wondering where his missing teeth had landed.
God was probably frustrated at how slow I was to figure it out. Nor was my little revelation unique. Millions of others reached their own moment of understanding in their own way. Each dwindling increment of unvaxxed people had to consider their own line in the sand. As each safe haven was eliminated, the remining unvaxxed became more rooted
Here we are. If you’re gonna’ do this… do it!
As far as I know, only China (and North Korea) actually went full rodeo. Europe went loopy but nobody wandered around France with a veterinary injector. Australia put people in camps at great expense instead of a $5 whack with an injection gun. Canada stole money and froze bank accounts but Mounties weren’t riding down fleeing Canadians. America didn’t forcibly inject prisoners who were already in jail. Why should I accept based on an employer’s policy what was not done to a convicted criminal? Why would any of us? I don’t think militaries literally dogpiled refusing soldiers. Fired, discharged, and censured, but the very people who owned a literal Army didn’t actually use force.
I’d discovered something very important:
Governments wanted submission, not merely an injection. It was the whole point. You had to walk on your own legs into a room. You had to sit quietly while something you didn’t want was done to you. The meanest shrieking Karen out there might demand the Government physically restrain a victim and slam the needle home but Governments mostly wouldn’t cross that line. Jamming a needle into the arm of a screaming fighting man doesn’t mean he submitted.
The only thing that could make me submit, was me. That’s what God wanted me to know. What a weight off my shoulders!
I’m not the only one of course. Bureaucratic monsters turned toward the last few remaining people and saw they’d sifted through the world and isolated a different kind of person. They backed down… just a little. That’s where the wave crested. To everyone’s relief, the madness stopped (at least temporarily).
Sadly, the people in the middle got none of the great relief I felt. How many wish they’d held on a few months more?
Now everyone knows exactly what can be done to them and precisely who could do it. That’s gotta’ hurt for that squishy middle ground person. Many of them will spend the next ten years wondering what has been done to or inflicted on them. Every healthy athlete that collapses for no good reason will make them nervous. Every statistical blip that’s censored online might hold a horror. It won’t get better. That’s their future.
It really sucks. I wish it never happened that way.
[Hm… this all started with a seed drill. It’s in the title and everything. Presumably I’ll re-route this essay back to less dire thoughts. Stay tuned.]
