Adaptive Curmudgeon

[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:

1. People who deeply wanted the vax are happy. They exercised freewill, made a decision, and got what they wanted. Nothing (possibly including death) will change their opinion. Also, should their opinion change, there’s not a damn thing they can do about. Once the vax is in the blood it can’t be “removed”.
2. People who deeply did not want the vax (and were strong enough to remain intact) are happy. Nobody wanted the beating surrounding their decision but they definitely exercised freewill. They made a decision and got what they wanted; often at a heavy price. They aren’t likely to change their opinion. When you stand up to oppression, bullying, mistreatment, possibly got fired, and were literally told you’d die… you don’t choose that path lightly. No new information will likely change their mind. Ironically, they’re the only people on earth that can still do something if their opinion changes. They can always get the shot if they want.
3. Many people in the middle ground had the decision (to one degree or another) inflicted upon them. They’re the least likely to be happy. Nor is there a damn thing they can do about 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.]

In my last post I mentioned people who really truly wanted to get the vax. They’re happy. They got what they wanted.

What about the people who had the opposite and almost unthinkably harder path; those who didn’t want the vax and had the strength of will to hold out?

People who didn’t want the shot and also didn’t get the shot are happy with their decision.

Notice that people who deeply wanted the shot are happy and people who deeply loathed the shot (and held out against absolutely brutal pressure) are happy too.

Happiness comes not so much as a result of a medical procedure, it comes from the exercise of free will.

Life is not fair. You ought to know that by now but if you don’t have it tattooed on your ass so you never forget. Nothing about the vax was fair. Wanting the vax took no courage or effort but avoiding the vax never happened by accident for even one single human. It took a ton of personal will. None of society’s heavy hitters were on the non-vax side. Jobs were lost. Friendships were broken. To exercise personal agency in the non-vax direction was unpopular, prosecuted, and largely unsupported. This means nobody took that path by accident.

By now, everyone without the vax in their veins fucking means it. Every single person who’s vax free has personal agency. They’ve also got balls of steel. To be vax free required facing down social engineering, lies, propaganda, marketing, advertising, and political manipulation the likes of which I’d never seen in my life.

It’s still not over. The pressure still hasn’t let up. I still see pro-vax ads on YouTube. It’s still on billboards. I’m not sure why.

Anyone who could be swayed by an ad has been swayed by the ads.

Everyone on TV and Facebook and Twitter and every employer pushed the vax. There were (are!) ads on every form of broadcast, politicians insisted if you didn’t get an injection you were killing grandma, family court judges took custody away, hospitals isolated people on their death beds, doctors refused treatments, and churches claimed God wanted everyone to get the vax. This is one of the more unforgivable sins of the recent past. Churches (of most denominations) closed when people most needed spiritual support. An absolute failure of spiritual leadership!

Overall, it’s one of the hardest times to exercise free will I’ve ever seen. What a horror!

It would have been better if people were allowed to make their choice privately (as they make most of their important choices). That was stripped away. HIPPA regulations (created to protect AIDS patients a few decades ago) were utterly ignored. People tried to use walking around with bandannas on their face to ascertain other people’s compliance. When that wasn’t good enough governments created medical identification papers; immoral, illegal, and unforgivable. They did things over the vax that would be 100% prosecuted over other medical choices.

This was a bridge too far and in retrospect a lot of people acknowledge it. (Not that I forgive a mob for what they do when they’re in the thrall of being a mob.) Even now the pressure is just barely fading. Vax mandates in the military and so forth are only gradually ebbing; at the speed of reluctant bureaucrat.

Imagine an employer demanding ID related to other personal medical situations. Your boss wants a “ID card” with proof you’ve had or not had a procedure. “It says you wear contacts. You’re fired.”

Imagine the same “ID card” for abortion! “This document says you’ve had an abortion, you can’t enroll in college.” Such a thing would seem unthinkable yet “no vax, no college” was official, somehow legal, enforced, and it affected kid’s lives.

I’m forever amused (and warned) that the “our bodies our choices” crowd had zero fucks to give about any other bodies or choices involving the vax. People who freaked out when Roe v Wade devolved to States wanted a needle jammed or my public execution. They weren’t faking it and they weren’t subtle. I think they meant it. Never turn your back on people who can pivot like that.

Legal protections applied to other medical choices were completely ignored and that’s not just illegal, it’s evil. When you ignore laws, customs, and honor to subjugate someone, you’re doing evil. “Rights and protections X, Y, and Z don’t apply anymore because we feel like curbstomping this particular group today.” That’s the voice of evil. They could have said “We’re going to work this change through the legislature slowly and deliberately”. Had they done so there would have been at least some chance to maintain the basics of lawful society.

I keep coming back to how this medical issue became more than any other medical issue. Imagine a grocery store involved in other medical choices. “It says in our database that you purchased a hearing aid from a banned manufacturer. No food for you.”

Doctors were the worst. They have the most to answer for (in this world or the next). “I refuse your request for Ivermectin (which is known to be safe) because fuck you.” They tied compliance in one choice with all other treatment. Since when is this allowed? “Motorcycles are dangerous but you still ride one. I cancelled your oncology visit. You will die of leukemia because you didn’t do my bidding when I told you to stop riding motorcycles.” The government (both in USA and elsewhere) created profit motives to manipulate patients. Hospitals made more from a dead covid patient than a dead motorcycle rider. So, of course, we have data where “dead with covid” is commingled with “dead because of covid”. This is just what you’d expect. How else could an inhuman bureaucracy react?

Privacy was destroyed, dignity was shredded, trust was crushed, and every force in society in many different nations converged to force one and only one decision. Nobody stands up to that by accident.

Because the pressure was relentless, every refusal of the shot was with intent.

The personal feeling of making a choice is better than the horror of submission.

If you didn’t get the shot, you damn well meant it! Even if it was a dumb choice, it was not an unthinking one. To think is to be human. When anyone specifically makes a decision based on their own values and goals they have an internal locus of control. They are doing their best to be full adult humans. Vax refusers did not wimp out. They made their choice and they backed it up in a world against them.

Making your choice. Based on your values… feels right.

It’s a mark against everyone else that vax refusers were treated so harshly. Vax refusers did not deserve such treatment. Regardless, they made the right choice for their preferences and goals. A person earns pride when they act like a true human and make a personal decision from within. Perhaps there is no greater thing than to stand tall for your own beliefs.

Also, there’s an amusing twist. They have options that nobody else does! They can always change their mind. They could get the shot today. They can change their mind any damn time they want. Since they haven’t, you know they’re happy with the outcome so far.

In the next post I’ll ruminate about the sad, abused, beaten middle. People who didn’t have strong preferences either way. They all got an injection about which they were ambivalent.

[Note #1: My last post rambled about things that are within your control and things that aren’t. Now I’ll elaborate about choice and free will. Is not the new year a time to think?]

Regardless of the outcome, it feels better to have made a choice than be a victim of external forces.

Whenever you can, you ought to make your own decisions. It’s unwise to take the easy path and “let it slide”. Pretty soon someone else will have taken over the decision. This absolves you of responsibility but also makes you a less complete human.

From the minute you failed to make your own decision, you lost some personal control. Whomever made the decision gained control. They will not and cannot (even if they mean well) make the right choice for you. They’ll make the decision that aggregates their own power, wealth, authority, and control. Your reaction will be only one among the many to which the choice is applied (or inflicted). Thus your preference will be irrelevant, inconvenient, and ignored. If this happens too much, you’ll be miserable.

[Note #2: I intended to use car purchases and homestead gear as examples. However, there’s a topic that steamrolls all else. It can’t be ignored. My muse walloped me with a 2″x4″ and forced me to address the elephant in the room. My muse is a hard ass.]

Lets consider one of the most personal choices a human can make. “There is a new illness and an associated new experimental injection. Both have uncertain parameters. Do I get an injection or do I not get an injection?”

I faced that decision. You did too. What a special time to be alive! All of humanity had a moment when God (or fate) gave each and every one of us a clear experiment in the exercise of or absence of free will. How did your experiment work out?

It’s a classic binary decision; almost like something out of a textbook. There’s no middle ground with an injection; you either got the shot or you didn’t. Also, injections are “forever”; like losing your virginity.

So, did you make a decision? I did! Many others did too. Sadly, a tragic majority let the decision happen to them. How did it work out? Let’s examine ways it could play out:

Everyone who really deeply truly wanted the shot got the shot. They are happy.

Because they got what they wanted, they are happy. They will continue being happy. Whether the shot worked or not is practically irrelevant.

Why wouldn’t a pro-vax person be happy? It just makes sense. They got what they wanted. They were first in line. They got the shot long before governments started forcing them on people. It didn’t cost a dime! They were treated as heroes. They got to post on social media about how they’d heroically, awesomely, gotten the new thing. (Note: I’m talking here entirely about their choice and only their choice. Other factors, such as a widespread abhorrent behavior toward people with different preferences is a different can of worms.)

When a person stampedes to get the thing they most desire it’s still an internal locus of control. They felt in control. That’s why people who really wanted the vax are still happy to have the vax.

Even if it’s not working out as it was marketed, the fact that they got what they wanted is basically all that matters. If they subsequently got covid, they’re still happy. If they subsequently got covid twice, they’re happy. They’ll be happy no matter how many times they get covid. Even if they had a bad reaction, got covid twice, watched acquaintances suffer even worse reactions, someone keyed their car at the parking lot when they got their fourth booster, and their left testicle imploded for no reason… they’re still happy.

They. Got. What. They. Wanted.

I don’t try to change the mind of people who eagerly wanted the shot. So long as they leave me alone, it’s all good. I’m glad for them. They made a choice of their own free will. It’s none of my business if it differs from my preferences. If people who wanted the vax had extended the same courtesy to me we could be the best of friends.

Think about the opportunity we lost! There could have been a world where the people who stampeded for the shot could have been good friends when the ones who never got the shot. A world full of humble, mature, intelligent, kind people would have played out peacefully and in a spirit of goodwill.

Of course it didn’t happen and the reason is that people suck. Many people are narcissistic, immature, unintelligent, and cruel. That’s why things went off the rails. A planet filled with better people wouldn’t have turned a simple medical issue into a totalitarian shitstorm but we don’t live on that planet.

For the folks that got the shot, their happiness is cemented in stone. Further information is unlikely to change their opinion. Every bit of new information will be filtered through a mind that wanted the shot and also can’t change even if they wanted to. They’ve got the vax it indelibly in their veins for life.

It is almost impossible for them to be affected by contrary sources and experiences. Near-dead NFL players, spooky actuarial charts, happy healthy Amish communities, swarms of homeless that seem oddly unaffected, the unvaxxed neighbor that’s doing just fine… these are likely to be dismissed. It almost has to be. It’s in their damn veins, it’s not going away. It’s very hard to change your mind about a big decision that you willingly made and can never change later on.

This is hard for folks on the anti-vax side to recognize. Let it go. It’s part of what makes life interesting. The world is filled with people who make decisions I can’t understand. Face tattoos, disco, EV trucks, and $300,000 degrees in puppetry are all decisions. So long as nobody forces it on me; I’m cool with it. (You’ll note that politics tries to force me into supporting EV trucks and paying for someone else’s student loans. That’s why government pisses people off. I can only assume Federally subsidized face tattoos are somewhere in the most recent omnibus bill. Why not?)

You can see this confidence in their decision very easily. When someone who got a vaccine (a thing formerly defined in terms of immunity) subsequently gets covid they’ve got a go-to answer; “Imagine how much worse it would be if I didn’t get the shot.” Short of death (and maybe not even then) they’ll be happy. That’s how the human mind works.

So, if people who wanted the vax are happy because they got the vax, what about the other side. Are people who didn’t want the vax happy if they didn’t get it? Tune in for the next post.

[Forgive me, for I am about to philosophize.]

“There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.”

It’s a line from an old movie starring an Austrian bodybuilder posing as a death-robot sent from a post-apocalyptic dystopian future (a future scheduled six years from now). I could pick a similar line from Marcus Aelius but I’d probably mess up the Latin. Regardless, it’s true. Whenever I make my own fate, I’m happier. You are too.

There are things I control; such as certain financial decisions. I embrace these situations. Nobody’s perfect but an average, normal, reasonable adult is right most of the time.

There are things I don’t control; such as the overall economy. Notice the examples I gave are two sides of the came coin. I embrace personal financial decisions because I have some control but I can keep fretting over the overall economy to the minimum I can. I have no control over the overall economy (according to some theories, nobody does). As for who either controls the economy or thinks they do; I’ll quote George Carlin “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it“.

This means when things based on the overall economy interact with my life it sucks. (This is true even if I benefit.) The overall economy is inflicted upon me. To the degree I can’t adapt or evade I’m just cannon fodder. The overall economy is managed (or mismanaged) in ways that were never meant to fit my preferences. I get pissed off even by little stuff. I can’t buy incandescent light bulbs because someone I never met decided I can’t do it; meaning that there’s an official light bulb bureaucracy that’s more powerful than my lightbulb preference. As a practical matter, heroin and incandescent bulbs are equally banned (unless I’m in Oregon where heroin might be ok?). If a stupid thing like light bulbs annoy me, imagine how angry I get over big stuff like printing money until my savings and retirement plans are diminished by inflation.

Consider a personal financial decision over which I do have some control. Lets assume my car still runs and I could also finance a replacement. What’s my best choice? Do I finance a new car or keep the decaying vehicle I’ve got?

External forces have a preference; oh God do they have preferences! They’re not subtle about it either. I’ve been awash in marketing and propaganda since I was born. (One of the first “big words” I could spell was “Chevrolet”.) The cretins at the bank would happily strap my ass into horrific debt. The sales drones at the dealer make a living talking people into a “trade ins”. They all have the same preference. Spend, spend, spend! Several consecutive presidents have suggested it’s my patriotic duty to buy something from Detroit and if I were a true patriot it ought to be an EV.

I want a new car. But do I really want a new car? Maybe I’m just so badgered I assume so? When you make a choice, consider if you really made the choice at all. Internally oriented decisions don’t necessarily match society as a whole. If you make a decision that’s easy and supported by society, it was probably not created out of your own heart. It was an external locus of control. If one fish in a school of ten thousand makes the same move as 9,999 other fish… was it truly making the choice?

The world absolutely loves controlling you. Governments and organizations want to manage all of your decisions! Their decisions might make you miserable but that’s irrelevant. They don’t care about you. They can’t care about. It’s literally impossible to make blanket decisions for millions of people and still care about your preference.

Surprisingly, given that nobody can know you better than you, a lot of people let someone else take the wheel. Personal control is indeed hard work. So weak people fall to the temptation of avoiding self-reliance. They don’t want the responsibility of decisions so they turn to some external force. Whether it’s the Pope, a President, or Google whatever happens next is done in the service of external forces. A person’s path in life becomes what someone else did to them. Maybe it works out and maybe it doesn’t. What it certainly did, was erode their sense of self.

Once you’ve evaded a decision you’ve reduced your role in your own life. You’ve become domesticated. You’re someone’s pet or widget or piece on a playing board. The ultimate indignity is to become a unit on a vote farm. No matter how the chips fall, when you let someone else decide, you lose a measure of control over your own life.

That’s the source of the helplessness that infects our populace. Many people aren’t steering their own ship. They gave up and now hope and pray that someone is steering. At first they’re worried that someone is steering poorly. Later they fear nobody is steering at all. That’s why every election is “the most important election ever”. The more things the government controls, the more we sense it’s inflicting events on us. The more things inflicted upon us, the more random and illogical they seem. Citizens encounter events in a natural and understandable manner only when they themselves do the encountering.

That’s the drawback of “just going along”, the desire to shirk personal decisions creates an infantilized non-adult; a failed sad thing that’s hopeless and prone to depression. Taken to extremes it creates a zombie that’s long dead and just doesn’t know it yet.

We who are still self aware are surrounded by people and systems that don’t have our best interests at heart. We must protect ourselves against that by managing our own affairs.

When “they” steer the ship (whoever “they” are), “they” don’t steer to our desired port. Learning this is part of becoming an adult (and if one is pushed too far, a cynic).

I’ll elaborate in my next post.

Mrs. Curmudgeon is the cook of the household. She’s far better at food than I. (I think that’s a matter of priorities. In general, if I’ve produced adequate healthy calories, I’ve done enough. If it’s bland but you’re not going to die… well that’s good enough. Flavor and spices and shit are nice to have but once I’ve cleared the “no starvation” bar I start to tune out. I’m not the only guy that’s like that.)

In the holiday season Mrs. Curmudgeon shines like a rock star! She goes apeshit cooking food. She cooks in what feels like buckets and truckloads. She could feed an army; and what a lucky army it would be! We regularly have more dishes than we have guests. She makes absolutely stunning food. It’s a sight to behold! It baffles me. Also it’s all done on the fly using skill (or magic) because I swear she’s never followed a recipe in her life. When she sees me messing around with a measuring spoon her first thought is to slap the offending implement away. From my uninformed point of view it looks like she “wings it” to culinary success.

I’m not kidding when I say it’s impressive. She’s been known to churn out more delicious pies (in various types) than people at the table!

“After dinner is over, everyone pick their favorite pie!”

No shit! A zillion assorted pies. Just pick one and have at it! Is that not awesome?

This Christmas she was a tired as I. At my prompting, she sensibly rested by the fire while I took the wheel in the kitchen. Since I’m me, I tried an entirely different approach than her dazzling creations. In a development near and dear to my Cro-Magnon heart, we had what I called a “down home, inflation-proof, bunker level, meal o’ heartiness“.

My plan was simple, I’d feed us all with food I’d raised or hunted. Why? Because real food is delicious. Also, I have a lot of it and we might as well get used to it. We’re probably already in a world where supply chains are… um… not what they once were. So let’s embrace it. There was to be nothing elaborate but plenty of what we did have. That’s how I roll!

One can go overboard with games like that. (I’ve yet to figure out how to hunt butter and I’m not going to make a rice paddy in the yard.) Like a sane man, I leavened idealism with realistic expectations. Regardless, I still got to where I wanted to go. Everyone was happy so I didn’t fret too much over the details. Also, there was no pie. I couldn’t make a Mrs. Curmudgeon level pie if my life depended on it.

Preparation for my Curmudgeonly Christmas Feast took all year and just a few moments on the day itself.

This summer I “experimented” with corn; planting half assed rows in an abandoned pig pen. I more or less ignored the crop after that. I specifically limited my labors because I’m already too busy; I wanted corn but not another job. I spent the summer wondering if the weeds or the corn would win the arms race. When the time came, I waded through a jungle to find corn doing ok right in the middle of the mess!

I didn’t get a huge yield but it tasted great. One afternoon we had more corn than I felt like eating. We’d already had corn on the cob several times. So Mrs. Curmudgeon and I “saved” several ears worth. We did it about the most primitive way possible. We cut the raw kernels off the cob, crammed the results in four large ziplock bags, and hurled them into the freezer. That’s it. Would it work? Only a Christmas meal would tell.

In November I readied the main course. I shot a deer and then did all the steps of butchering and preservation.

Butchering is an area in life where I’m “leveling up”. It took forever to become a reasonably competent hunter and I humbly think I’ve finally accomplished that. However, I’d formerly ignored butchering. For years I brought big game straight from the forest to a butcher. My main involvement after the hammer dropped was to drag the animal to my truck, haul it somewhere, and cut a check.

That’s not particularly cool as woodsman but I’ve no regrets. I’ve got only so many hours in the day and butchers are the only readily available labor pool. I’d much prefer doing my own butchering and spend my money on skilled services like plumbers. But there are no plumbers. Since I can actually find a butcher, I happily hired them! I wanted to take stress off my busy schedule and they’re literally all I can hire.

That was then and this is now. Now, it’s a recession. (Don’t let anyone tell you different!) For that reason and others, I wanted to level up. I’ve slowly been upgrading my butchering skills (it’s not hard but it’s a lot of physical work!). I after a few years “being my own butcher” I expanded into canning.

With the helpful mentoring of a friend who knows his shit, I gingerly ventured into “the pressure canning zone”. Pressure canning is not rocket science but I sure appreciated a nudge in the right direction.

Sealed pressurized vessels are a thing to which you ought to pay attention. Follow the instructions, don’t overpressure your vessel, don’t blow up the kitchen, be patient, etc… It works well with my personality which zones out when told to “add a pinch of salt” but targets like a laser when told “heat at X pounds for Y minutes”. Incidentally, I love pressure canning. It’s pretty cool to start with a critter and end up with a perfectly sealed jar.

Everything from the deer that was good enough to be steak got wrapped and tossed into the freezer as steak (thus burying the forgotten corn). Everything slightly less awesome than “steak” got cut into stew meat chunks, pre-cooked, and put into the canner. I used virtually no flavoring except some salt; which is fine because it smelled heavenly and tasted better. The remaining critter bits went through the grinder to become “burger”. Don’t think that’s bad stuff! I’ll take a deer-cheeseburger over cow anytime.

Canning was a lot of work but the process appeared to be a success. However, I hadn’t yet cracked open a jar to taste it yet.

You won’t be surprised that I get a whole lot more food out of a critter when I butcher it myself compared to when I hire it done. It’s an almost comically obvious discovery, but I verified it as true.

Well before Christmas our guests heard about the canned deer. This prompted a lot of inquiries. “How does it taste? Is it safe? What’s it look like? Does it have good texture?” I had no idea. Why not join us to find out on the holiday? It became like a present. “Lets open this jar and see what happens.”

I think of canned meat as “pioneer food”. I didn’t have any expectation it would be better than frozen. I was wrong! It was waaaaaay better! Pressure canning was developed for a time before reliable power girds and freezers but that doesn’t mean it’s bland. (Also, we might as well get used to jars. Reliable 24/7 power grid conditions came from a society run by intelligent serious adults. What will you do when dipshits make the whole grid “green” and your freezer goes without power every third week? Q: “What did socialists use for light before candles?” A: “Electricity!”)

I didn’t expect anyone to care about my experiments but interest was palpable. Then I tasted some. I get it now! Our elders were onto something. I was tasty! Just plain delicious!

In November, (after the deer) as “practice”, I canned a big bag of carrots. My second use of the canner and another addition to the meal!

A few days before Christmas I attacked a ten pound bag of potatoes. I prepared enough to fill all the quart jars I had left. I annoyed Mrs. Curmudgeon by leaving 4 unused potatoes in a 99% empty bag but that’s what happens when a nerd carefully celebrates his “canning volume”. Over a mellow afternoon I peeled, chopped, boiled, and canned several quarts of potato. It’s work, but it felt rewarding.

Like the carrots, this wasn’t a crop I’d grown, but you have to start somewhere. Potatoes were my third “batch” of canning. They came out pretty well if I do say so myself.

The Big Day:

On Christmas day we had guests coming, so I did the right thing and took a nap. One can get overworked trying to make holidays perfect! I decided to go “low stress” and I meant it. I enjoyed that two hour snooze!

After guests arrived I started opening jars. I expected the meal to be “quasi-instant” and I was correct.

The potatoes and carrots were stupid simple to prepare. Drain the fluid, dump the jar contents into a bowl, nuke until hot, add salt and pepper (if I remembered). A monkey could do it. Start with a pantry filled with righteously canned foods and you can’t go wrong.

I found a couple bags of the raw frozen corn under a ton of other things in the freezer. I dumped it in a bowl and nuked the raw frozen kernels. Just as everything else, it was stupid simple to cook and it came out delicious. It tasted like a summer afternoon!

The meat was too valuable for my attentions so Mrs. Curmudgeon took over. Even so, it was dirt simple. I drained the liquid into a saucepan. Mrs. Curmudgeon jumped in front of me lest I do something terrible like measure ingredients or consult a recipe. She did some sort of magic voodoo while I wandered around the kitchen getting in everyone’s way. Whatever she added turned the saucepan liquid into delicious gravy. For all I know it was uranium.

Meanwhile, I dumped the meat into a skillet and stirred lazily. I kept grabbing bits out of the skillet (even cold and unseasoned the meat was delicious!). Mrs. Curmudgeon grabbed a spatula and tried to defend the skillet from my predations. She also added a handful of elixirs and powders (she calls them spices but they’re magic to me). As soon as it was warm, the saucepan of gravy went on top. Yum!

Fresh bread appeared. I have a wheat mill but I was too lazy to make dough. Mrs. Curmudgeon somehow conjured the bread. I assume she has a magic wand or something.

Meat, gravy, potatoes, carrots, corn, fresh bread. Everything the product of simple cooking. Nothing we ate would be out of place in 1920 (or 1820). Most of it came from my own efforts and all the effort was on the front end. Once it’s in a jar, reheating is a monkey level task. (Aside from the gravy which is probably more complex than cold fusion.)

It sounds crude and it was… but everything was amazing!

We all had a great meal. I was pleased. If I’d been in a fancy restaurant I couldn’t have had more flavor. If I’d been a king I couldn’t have felt more wealthy. If I’d climbed a mountain to get the potatoes I couldn’t have felt more proud.

Obviously, I’ll never compete with Mrs. Curmudgeon’s gourmet pies but that’s not the point. This year’s meal was just right for the world in which we’ve been thrown. We ate like farmers from three generations back and it was perfect. It was better than the most expensive meal money could buy. Everyone was happy.

It may have been one of the best Christmas meals ever! Never forget the joy (and wonderful taste!) of simple things.

[Please forgive the disjointed nature of this post. Usually I have more time to think and thus arrange my words. This time I just typed and let it roll.]

Forgive Me For I’m About To Bitch:

[Feel free to scroll to “The Good News” below.]

Christmas is one of those variable experiences where I almost always take a vacation but the reason for the vacation changes. Sometimes it’s because I will enjoy the break. Sometimes it’s because I need the break. This year was the latter. That’s not great but it is what it is.

I started out strong but the year was long; all years are long lately. I might have gotten a second wind but the rear half of December dished out hard weather. Regardless, I give myself some credit; I did pretty well. I mentally and spiritually held my own line against the creeping malaise of a society determined to fuck itself into the ground. Who can do more? Unfortunately, no man is an island. I find it exhausting living among the suicidal.

We’re all feeling the exhaustion. The society that was the richest, freest, and more or less most pleasant to live in compared to all of human history is already half trashed. It’s cracking up not because the Huns are charging over the hill with swords and horses, it’s bending under the weight of people who’d rather rule over ashes than make the next layer of civilization. Whether you blame the Boomers as a cause or think it’s just coincidence of timing, the thing that rises in the wake of their passing is inferior. The nation that landed on the moon 50 years ago struggles to keep the lights on in a generic snowstorm.

It’s not just us. It’s everyone. Europe does the same. (This week there were videos of French streets with mobs setting cars ablaze. Paris should not look like a riot Bangladesh.) Australia had vaccination concentration camps just a few years ago. New Zealand has outlawed smoking beyond a certain generation. Imagine a person who’s 50 years old but simply not “mature enough” to make the decision to light a cigar! Canada is… well it’s Canada. I never expected Canada to lose their shit… but they did. Canada used to be stable and dull and my favorite place. It’s run by a clown who is proud of his socks. He started this year willing to set his own nation on fire lest a couple hundred truckers keep a few freedoms. What happened to you guys? I miss Canada, the fishing was great.

I wonder if it’s the Gutenberg Press Volume 2? Mass hysteria oozes from propaganda laden devices and humans don’t seem to have an immune system ready to handle it. Elon releases data that confirms what most of us already knew. It is all lies. Pretty much everything on social media is in the service of one party. Always one party. Always more centralized, always more authoritarian, always more control.

Serve up enough lies and you break people. They foam at the mouth; practically in synchronization. In the past a sizeable portion would have been removed, even if by chance. Back in the recent past a person could miss TV News that evening and inadvertently go 24 hours without programming or indoctrination. Such people might instinctively think before acting. Now the current fad is all encompassing.

Anyone with a sense of history knows how this will go. People who know what’s coming have no impact. They say “hey, this is a bad idea” and it’s lost in the howls of people desperate to vax-up, or manipulate children, or rat on the neighbor for having incorrect opinions, or do whatever the next thing happens to be.

Virtually every group has lost its way. Groups of people ignore basic core purposes. Football teams fret over racism instead of touchdowns, churches mask up and forget about saving souls, anything bigger than a bowling league is in service to politics. Lemmings, even when they’ve gotten precisely what they want, suffer. They’re victims of their own choices and so are we.

The Kool-Aid drinkers erode the firmament; the stoic try to be the firmament.

This… this is the mood that made me take an extended Christmas vacation.

I watched a video of looters tearing apart a dollar store in a Buffalo snowstorm. Everything in a dollar store is cheap shit. You can walk into a dollar store with $100 and buy more than you can carry. Looting from a dollar store is like stealing your neighbor’s trash can.

So now you’ve got a shiny new… trash can?!? Why?

Envy is sin, stealing crap because of envy is not only a sin but also remarkably stupid.

Even the most woke douchebag in creation knows this won’t end well. The fools trained to burn Target and Walgreens in 2020 are moving down the food chain. A society that can’t maintain a fucking dollar store is pretty much on its way to mud huts. Maybe it’s worse than that… would mud huts be superior to the tents used by the homeless on the left coast?

All that’s left is to adapt; which I encourage you to do. You didn’t loot a store in a snowstorm. You did your best. Your life happened in a particular era, that’s not on you. Society encourages chaos to happen. Don’t deny that the chaos is happening but don’t put it on your shoulders either. Eventually the lights go out and a mob is wandering the streets looking to see if there’s cool shit to steal from a dollar store in the middle of snowdrifts. Some of us live very far away, but nobody is immune. Adapt and prepare, but don’t fret over what might have been.

Adapt isn’t all about beans and ammo. This is key, take a week off if you can. You might need it.

The Good News:

Even as I piss about society, I was trying to light a candle. That’s the good news.

I took hammer to anvil and beat a new Squirrels chapter from my overworked head. Humbly, I don’t think it was half bad. Shortly after that, I pulled up the drawbridge, declared it “vacation”, and went mostly offline.

The timing of my posts was intentional. What may seem like a tactical error was a choice. The posts went live the week before a big holiday, a time when I traditionally get far fewer “hits”. Indeed my hit count wasn’t particularly impressive.

In general, when you’ve labored hard on a series of posts you try to serve it up at an optimum time to get the maximum impact. I didn’t. I posted my small offering to the world in a time when I judged it most likely to brighten moods. This could go two ways; either pleasing people already happy and celebrating or perhaps (and more importantly) a free chuckle for the few who might find the season less than glittering.

Did it work? One never knows. The best you can do is try.

So there you have it. In a world of TicTok “influencers”, I ignored “hits” in pursuit of something indefinable.

Wise or dumb, I made a choice that reflected my goals and not that of the device on which you’re reading this post. That’s what it’s all about folks!

Incidentally, this doesn’t mean I’m a monk. I got a handful of kind donations during my Chapter posts and that was grand. Some tips were very generous! I wanted to happily howl at the moon when I got them. (I live in the country, if I want to howl then by God I’m in a place where it’s legally and socially acceptable to howl. And I do!) Several other tips were small but still deeply appreciated. Y’all made my day! Thanks to everyone!

As I turtled into seclusion, nature played a bigger role than usual. I got the Squirrels out just as a cold snap and serial blizzards laid siege to my rural homestead. I scrambled to keep furnaces fueled, firewood stacked, driveways drift-free, vehicles running, and myself thawed. It was like tacking a second entire life on top of one that is already busy.

None of this is unusual for late December. It was a hectic time but it is December. Occasional crunches during storms are the nature of rural life. I’m still alive and my pipes are thawed; who could ask for more?

Just days before the Christmas, another curveball came across the plate. The whole family had plans to travel. One by one, every detail fell apart. Eventually we all agreed, by mutual acceptance of external forces, that travel just wasn’t happening. Frankly, the collapsed plans were good fortune in disguise. The snow put us in a mood to stay put. By chance or plan, Curmudgeon Compound became a haven of relaxed happiness. Even better, some nearby and well loved guests were more than happy to show up and brighten spirits.

It was probably the best and least stressful Christmas I’ve had in years! Rather than a nightmare of cancelled flights and frustration we became a joyous little bunch of guests smiling at the pretty snowdrifts. How cool is that?

I didn’t do much (any) decorating. I kept the house standing and that was work enough! By Christmas eve I was toast. I’d spent all day struggling with my tractor. Sometimes it operates wonky in the coldest weather. At -20 it complained mightily when pressed into service.

Nor had I properly dressed for conditions. Usually the tractor’s cab will eventually warm up to tolerable. At -20 it stayed cold. The glass box was like the frozen foods in a grocery store. I worked the controls and shivered.

My labors were compounded by hauling wood that was frozen and drifted. I wound up sore and tired. But I’d done my duty. The driveway was open for guests and the woodstove was merrily active. Success!

Again, this isn’t unexpected and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Brutal winters keep bossy people far from my life. Also, when you’re having an argument with a tractor’s iced hose clamp you’re “in the moment”. Unlike the world at large where formerly adult human beings claim to fret over concepts like “birthing persons”, I had intelligent and logical interactions with the real world (a frozen tractor).

I’d rather argue with a tractor than endure the shrieking of a purple haired college professor. I got the tractor to run. The tractor did useful work. I couldn’t make a purple haired college professor useful to society even if I had six months and a crowbar.

Rural life is amazingly REAL. If you’re missing that in life, you know where to find it.

My next post will make a lot more sense. See ya then.