Adaptive Curmudgeon

One key to knowing the current mess is almost entirely contrived from bullshit is to know it happened before. I’ve linked to a fictional example of the show we’re watching in real life. Watch this clip:

It’s a powerful scene from an excellent movie. (If you haven’t seen the movie Network, from 1976, you should watch it.)

In Network the man on the set is desperately struggling with his inner turmoil. You can feel his loss. He shouts “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” It’s not pure unhinged rage, it’s a cry of freedom. He’s telling the world “I’m not your fuckin’ pawn!” He’s not completely insane. In fact that’s the tragic part. It’s his sanity that causes his misery. His is the frustration of a man swept up in events beyond his control. His misery is exploited by everyone around him.

TV newsman Howard Beale is acting out not just because he feels like a pawn in other people’s games but because he knows it and doesn’t like it. He didn’t choose to join the parade. He cannot find a way out. He feels trapped.

That role was played (beautifully!) in 1976. I don’t think it feels outdated in 2022. I’d point out that Beale was a man of some accomplishment. He wears a suit and tie. He’s reasonably wealthy, has a position of some respect, pays his taxes, and so forth. He’s articulate and is thinking about the world around him. The thinking is the part that causes trouble. He’s a full fledged adult in a place where adults are seemingly not in charge. He’s upset that everything is going to shit but he’s also upset that the situation was neither caused by nor can be resolved by… him. He has been robbed of agency.

[Note: there was a time when a man who controlled or at least had influence over his own affairs was said to have “agency”. Online dictionaries lack this definition. They see agency as they would see bureau. Orwell called it! Words are robbed of meaning whenever it’s convenient. Tough shit, I know words and “agency” works here. Online dictionaries can kiss my ass.]

Anyway Beale hasn’t lost it because he made dipshit unwise decisions. He’s not a drug addict, bankrupt, or deeply unwise. He was pushed over the edge. In fact, he has a trace of dignity and he’s bravely holding on to it. He won’t simply submit to the madness that surrounds him. Beale would have been a straight arrow in a world that made sense to him. He could be a straight arrow again if given the chance. In the parlance of the internet in 2022; he didn’t take the ticket and therefore he resents the ride.

The movie was made in 1976. Half a century has passed.

I was alive in 1976. I was just a whippersnapper but I remember the feel of the era. It felt like that movie scene. 1976 was not a time of stable, reasoned, people doing stable reasonable things.

Everyone from that time starts their story with the oil embargo. This made the price of fuel very high. There was a recession (we’re in a recession right now if you use the original definition of “recession”). Inflation was rampant. Unemployment was high. Absolutely everything I just said is equally true of 1976 and 2022.

Economic collapse hurts. I remember my parents worried about bills. I remember plans for a house addition that never happened. I remember my dad rolling out building plans and saying something about loans. I was a smart kid. I remember hearing the interest rate he mentioned and thinking immediately and without hesitation “I guess that’s not going to happen”. I knew it instantly. And of course it didn’t happen. Inflation becomes a current that makes you stop swimming forward. Sometimes when things suck, it’s enough to tread water. (If we calculated inflation the same way we used to, we’d have a number about the same as the 1970’s. Notice how the definition of “recession” and the calculation for inflation have both changed recently. This has no effect whatsoever on the true situation. All it does is tell you the folks in charge aren’t interested in solving problems so much as appearing to solve them.)

Scarce fuel meant that for a few winters the house was chilly. After some cold winters my family installed a wood stove. I remember that wood stove fondly! It felt oh so warm to stand next to a wood stove! I remember my dad working his ass off to haul wood. I haul wood now for my own house. It’s just as hard now as it was then. From then until now, I can’t feel safe in a house that doesn’t have some sort of auxiliary heating system.

Just as now, school got funky. It went through a cycle I can only call “proto-woke”. All of a sudden my teachers started saying strange things. Most of my life they’d said things that wouldn’t be out of place in 1940 or even 1740. Fractions and letters and basics remain the same… so of course school dispensed with them and focused on “the current thing”.

First, they beat us to death over the metric system. I didn’t (still don’t) mind the idea but they went at it with the zeal of true believers. I was (am) perfectly happy measuring in centimeters or inches or fucking parsecs; units are units. The teachers were just super extra on board as if an invention from the time of Napoleon was the greatest idea of the 20th century. I assume that was an order from on high?

Later, I remember reading pamphlets generated for kids by newspaper companies and National Geographic. The pamphlets said strange things in a strange way. They had an egghead tone I eventually associated with Al Gore. The “I’m an expert so believe this crazy shit I’m saying” tone. I, a young innocent Curmudgeon, believed what they said. They were teachers and experts; how was I to know they were idiots?

I forgive myself for buying their crap. I was just a kid. I’m lucky they were enthused with millimeters instead of sexual identity. As for buying crap as an adult, how many adults tuned in to Fauchi. How many checked weekly to see if the rules from this week were different than last week, as if a virus has a calendar. How many people followed rules by Governor A and thought the dumbasses under Governor B were all going to die? How many assholes hoped those lose and risky shitheads in State B would die to prove the point? How many folks quietly grinned when the annoying uptight Puritans in State A died just as fast as the beachgoers in B? All over the world, how many elderly died alone while their full grown kids stood on the other side of a glass wall? What the fuck is wrong with society that we’d let people die alone?

Back in my youth in the 1970’s, as I had my first experience watching society crumbling, I was sure I’d never drive a car. Gasoline was running out when I was barely old enough to pedal a bicycle. It would be long gone by the time I could get a license. So sad. On the other hand, my parent’s gas guzzling Chevy turned into an efficient Volkswagen and I liked it. It was a lot cooler than the big dumb Detroit iron. It’s hard to remember, but back then most cars were made domestically and domestic cars universally sucked. They were just future rust wrapped around gutless engines. The little VW I liked so much was strange and foreign.

In 1979 America bailed out Chrysler. I was just a kid but I wasn’t dumb. “If Chrysler made shitty cars shouldn’t they go bankrupt? We bought a VW because it’s awesome. Why prop up a factory that makes junk?” A kid too young to buy beer could figure this out. The question for a cycle of bullshit is this; could adults surrounded by bullshit reason as well as naïve kid just trying his best? The answer wasn’t reassuring: “Shut up kid, this is an emergency and a one time thing.” It sounded like crap to me. I wondered why they didn’t have a better answer. Did adults just say whatever they want to get whatever feels good?

Now that I’m older I know that’s exactly what they do. What sounded like crap turned out to be crap. Always was, always will be. Detroit tanked then and has been tanking ever since. The Chrysler bailout was a “one time emergency” until it was a “happened twice” emergency. Chrysler’s second bailout came in the second wave of bullshit I’ve experienced, in 2009. General Motors got on board too. Why not? It’ll never stop so long as there’s a population of votes to be purchased with someone else’s money. [In case you’re wondering what these cycles of shitty cars and bailouts are like, here’s a post yours truly made during the second cycle (2012). (Note: Like the changing definition of “recession” and the altered calculation of inflation, the YouTube video from 2012 was memory holed. That’s the thing about bullshit, by definition it’s more for show than an actual legitimate effort to do something.)]

As happens in most shit-cycles, the food supply ebbed. Mismanaged economies always damage the food supply because mismanagers like to tinker with things. Foods popped up with packaging that looked exactly like something served in Soviet Russia or a prison. (Oh the stories I could tell about the blocks of cheese!)

The shitty packaging somehow made it cheaper in ways that weren’t clear to me. It doesn’t cost more to make packaging with a happy font or a clever word… but generics tired hard to look ugly. That was the point.

It wasn’t enough. Generics weren’t sufficiently demoralizing. Eventually school told me I’d eat bugs when I got older.

The bugs things was necessary because of overpopulation. You might think crickets on a plate is a new thing but it’s not. Every time eggheads have too much power they fuck things into the ground. Every time they fuck things into the ground someone gleefully announces their new improved variant of “peasants eat bugs”.

I was too young to know the backstory. Long before fictional Newsman Beale started shouting, Paul R. Ehrlich an incompetent dipshit professor wrote The Population Bomb. He wrote it in 1968. He predicted mass starvation at exactly the time when human beings were on the cusp of eliminating mass starvation. No kidding, the man was the most wrong a human being could be in any timeframe from Neandertals to last Tuesday.

Everything he predicted didn’t happen but it was pure crack to the elite. It “went viral” and authority figures freebased that shit like a President’s son doing coke. Elites love stories of mass die offs. The Georgia Guidestones, fretting over automated workplaces, and Fauchi all bask in the same Malthusian doom Ehrlich was peddling in the 1960’s. (Note: In the 1970’s the coked up president’s son was George Bush Jr.. Now the coked up President’s son is Hunter Biden. Different political parties, similar behavior.)

My school teachers liked to predict massive and unpleasant changes in the future. In retrospect I see a clue in the timing. All those massive and unpleasant changes were always slated to arrive after the teacher or professor or politician has exited the scene. Nobody talks about how they’re going to enjoy the bug eating future. They talk about how you’re going to enjoy a bug eating future. They harped to me (an innocent little Curmudgeon) that he’d be eating bugs before he was old enough to not drive the cars that no longer had fuel. Thanks guys!

Is it different now? Not even a bit! Here’s Nicole Kidman (inexplicably dressed like a vampire) happily eating bugs. Watch her talk about how great it is. She’s on Vanity Fair (I think) and using words like “microlivestock”. She’s proof that no matter how hot you are, you’ll eat bugs if the boss tells you to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYhlxo6ezwE

Here’s Southpark making fun of Matt Damon eating an Impossible Burger with a cup of piss.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHVWzYWejMs

When I was in 5th grade there was a pamphlet about how we’d all eat bugs in the future because it was necessary. Someone right now is in 5th grade watching Nicole Kidman choke down live worms. Same stupid shit from the first and third cycles of bullshit in my life.

One last note; the world can go to shit but doesn’t necessarily matter to an individual. When I was a kid, the president was a loser and the economy sucked and society was crawling up it’s own ass. Yet I was a happy kid having a good time. I was happy right in the middle of a crumbling society; as are many kids right now. I had a dog and a bicycle and I went fishing. I wasn’t going to eat worms, I already knew how to catch fish.

I was growing the psychic armor I wear today…

[Note: This post was meant for Biden’s scheduled “just before Labor Day weekend” speech. Everyone was wondering what crazy hail-Mary shit would come out of the drugged up dementia patient at the podium. The speech is over now and I haven’t heard it. What was it? An air strike on Baltimore? Mass executions of Deplorables? Concentration camps for Republicans who own trucks? Declaring chicken McNuggets a banned substance? The form of the destroyer will surely be at least a little funny.

I laugh because it doesn’t have to make sense or be constrained by logic. Biden greedily sniffed the hair of Nuremberg just a year ago. “Vaccine compliance or you’re fired.” Really? He picked a fight with half the nation. Smart people don’t pick fights with millions of people at a time. Cornpop was amusing fiction, gutting the workforce wasn’t.

I sought to offer words of hope. Alas the post took on a life of it’s own and I branched out to show the dark cold misery of the 1970’s. Carter’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day was darned near the same as right now. That’s how I know that stupid times aren’t necessarily forever.]

Did you notice? Was it pleasant? For most of the summer I’ve tried to keep my blog in a “lower politics than usual” mode. I’ve posted stories and essays about motorcycles and corn as much as I could. It’s not a perfect system. I think too much and fall off the wagon, but can you blame me? It’s not like one can tell a story in modern America without politics in the background. The self-inflicted decline of society is a canvas upon which we paint the true substance of our lives.

Comment: “I liked your story about going fishing in 1938 Germany but can you leave out the social unrest?”

Response: “Not in 1938 Germany.”

There’s good news though. The current chaos is not as “real” as it seems. Serial emergencies and wild swings in policy are precisely what happens when the people in charge are not in charge; particularly when they’re not in charge of themselves. Chaos isn’t an accident. Nor is it due to external forces. Shit goes wrong for everyone sometimes but when everything is going to hell all at once that’s how you know it’s self-inflicted. The universe doesn’t re-arrange itself to ruin a political theory; the theory was already shit and nobody else was dumb enough to try a shit theory. This cycle has happened before; at least three times in my meager lifetime. (There might be a fourth instant but I wasn’t paying attention so I won’t mention it.)

This is where age gives perspective unavailable to youth. I’ve watched this movie before. I made a point to remember as much as I could. That means I’ll never be quite so “hair on fire” as folks who think the world was born yesterday and it’ll end tomorrow. I endured once, I will endure again. I know this because I’m old-ish and not dead yet. Youth will someday see the other side and if they’re smart they’ll start thinking old-ish too… probably.

The advice is the same as always. Keep your wits about you. Take care with debt and other encumbrances (both fiscal and emotional). Cut lose those who would drive you mad or pull you down. Hold tight to those with whom you share a bond. Be kind to adults when you can and children all the time. Don’t lose your shit. Try to avoid dumb decisions. Know that you can’t avoid all mistakes but don’t get in the habit of maintaining bad paths. Let the lunatics flame out but don’t flame out yourself.

Buy canned goods.

Trite advice isn’t it? Well yes, it does seem trite but I’m not wrong. Do those things and you’ll be OK. Act well and you’ll be glad you kept your head on straight.

Now for the truly lost souls out there (especially youth) I offer a clue that will serve them well. If it sounds like a good idea now but it’ll make no sense when you’re old, don’t do it. Most living beings try to get old. You should to. Don’t listen to the stupid lyrics from the Rolling Stones… they got old too. Don’t screw up permanent shit when you’re 15 because it’s going to really suck when you’re old. Taking up smoking is stupid. A face tattoo is never a good idea. Doing weird shit to your face and body nudges you into a life where you’re perceived to be a thug or a moron. Unless you’re a shaman in Borneo don’t overdo the tattoos. Also, don’t cut off your dick. I really shouldn’t have to say it but now you’ve heard it. In fact, don’t cut off anything unless there’s a damn good reason for it. Don’t stick a horseshoe up your nose. Don’t drive your car into a wall. Don’t lick light sockets. Don’t knock up the wrong woman or get knocked up by a dipshit man. If you think you can’t tell the difference between man and woman, get your head of your ass. This is all basic shit.

Youth should endeavor to emerge as an adult with mind, body, and soul more or less intact. You should be free to pursue any path once you’ve started “adulting”. Try not to commit murder, star in a porn shoot, or scramble your brain. If you’re missing parts because you lopped them off… you chose badly.

That said, lunatics flaming out is nothing new. It’s only when they’re treated seriously that we even notice. Look at the person below. Before the internet would we know this person existed? Would we care? Before the internet would this person get in a car and drive clear to Washington just to scream? If an idiot screams and there’s nobody to post it on the internet did the scream matter? Does a scream ever matter?

Close association with this person will do no sane person any good. Sane people prefer to avoid idiots and maniacs.

Th image you just watched is what happens when a person publicly demonstrates their mental illness as part of a herd. God intended us to be more than herd animals. Do your part by not being a joyless zombie. Humans should be able to work together without becoming a hive mind that stampedes off a buffalo jump.

Remember what your mom said; “If everyone else jumped off a cliff would you?” In a time of decline it’s a serious question.

It’s 2022. You know the answer to the question. When everyone jumped off a cliff were you there with them? Don’t tell me your reasons. I don’t care. If you stampeded off the cliff, that’s on you. If you did something stupid, re-evaluate your choices and strive do better.

Stand on firm ground and hang tight.

More to come…

Holy shit!

It worked. It worked fairly well. It worked so much better than it ought to! It was a dumb idea but it worked… so it’s not entirely dumb.

I went into the pig pen of weedy chaos and came back with 3 ears of perfect corn. I had no idea if they were ripe and wanted a simple test run. They were delicious!

The next day I went back and came back with 6 ears. Equally delicious. Yum!

I’ve already picked more for a third meal!

It looks like 2 ears per stalk and I know I had 23 before the weeds got deep enough to hide gorillas. I will probably get 40+/- ears from silly experiment. If I’d gotten full germination of all my seeds it would be a homesteading lottery win. I’d be firing up my canning equipment right now! But I’m not complaining, even if it’s just a half dozen meals that’s something.

It’s definitely not a conventional garden. For one thing it looks like shit. Then again I got to eat the results and they were delicious. As an experiment it’s a success. Call it proof of concept!

My pig fence is still shot but now my attitude has changed. I’ve an inkling what could be done. I lack money or time but now I have ideas and dreams!

I’d like to upgrade the fence and going to a “two pen” system. Put pigs in side A while corn and stuff grows in side B. Alternate the every year. Maybe that’ll help the “too rich to germinate” thing?

I’ve always wanted two pens for a bunch of other reasons. For example, backup in case the fence on one goes to shit or one of the pigs gets injured and has to be isolated. (That can happen.) Ha ha ha! Can you imagine the irony of an injured pig that’s put in a small corn patch to recover? My critters have great lives!

I’d like to set up the fence or gates or something so I can use my tractor without performing ballet level maneuvers. If I could take a straight shot at it without tight turns I could do miracles. I could run a disk back and forth in the pig nuked soil. Then plant TWICE as many seeds! Then run a 6’ brush-hog on the east and west boundary of the planted strip. Leave a 6 or eight foot wide strip in the middle that’s whatever corn can germinate and a bunch of mulch and of course… the damn weeds.

Or maybe I could have room to really try the sisters companion planting method. I need room to build hills with the bucket and I did learn that mulch works very well. Plus, I’m pretty sure whatever bean runners, corn stalks, and squash roots I don’t eat would be a tasty treat the next spring for the incoming piglets.

Don’t blame me for “thinking outside the box”. I’ve grown corn in the weirdest way possible but it shows signs of being viable.

A.C.

P.S. I’d also note that I used no fertilizer, no pesticides, and no watering. This was nothing like the roundup laden perfect rows you’ll see on a farm. But I did plant hybrids. For an annual like corn I don’t see why I shouldn’t go with the hybrid seed.

Anyway there were no piglets this spring and I was worried. In spring the pen was mostly dirt but it wouldn’t last. It would be a nearly impassible jungle in a few months. Why not try something different?

I hit upon the idea of free range corn.

I got in there with my tractor and disked a small area. I did about what I could manage within the turning radius of a tractor. In the post pig springtime, the whole place was soft soil. As a seedbed it looked great! A million generations of cowshit (from before I bought the place) and many dozens of pigs I’ve raised there have made it an organic madhouse of fertility.

How could it be anything but a great spot to jam a few corn seeds?

I had the idea of doing a “three sisters” companion planting. To do this you make little hills. In the hill you plant corn, beans, and squash. The corn grows tall, the beans climb on the cornstalks, and the squash flows out over the area keeping competing weed in check. It seems like a genius move and one that will make the usual “cartesian plane or die trying” mechanized gardener have a heart attack.

That was the plan but I didn’t have time. Just when the soil was the right temperature to plant, a thousand other things became urgent. This happens every summer. It would only take an hour or two to push up little hills with the tractor bucket. I wasn’t sure of the timing for planting. Do you plant the corn, beans, and squash all at once?

I gave up. The meager hour or two to make little hills for the sisters was more labor than I had to give. I literally planted half of two packets of corn seed in straight lines almost at a run. I did it one morning when I had to get going fast. The last seed hit the dirt and was covered with soil literally minutes before I departed on a week-long trip.

Call it a half-success. Only a small percentage of the available area got planted but something got planted. Something is more than nothing. I wound up driving to my destination wearing mud coated boots. I honestly used every possible moment I had. See what I mean about being busy? (Also, I’m the kind of guy that will arrive on time but with mud on his boots.)

By the time I returned from my trip, the weeds were already beginning to advance. I couldn’t do much about it. First I had to fight the lawn to a draw. Then, I hurriedly stacked some firewood. By then the pig pen was already awash in vegetation.

But some of it was corn!

I went in there with the disk and made some of the most delicate and precise turns you’ve ever seen a tractor make. I crushed some of the competing weeds; maybe half of the competing biomass. That gave the corn a chance to grow.

Alas, my germination rate sucked. I planted (I estimate) 150 seeds and only 23 germinated!

Shit!

I think that’s exactly the problem. The soil was “too rich”. I’m not sure the technical term for “too rich” but I’d planted corn seeds in pure corn cocaine and the seeds just didn’t find their ass with both hands. Those that did germinate grew just fine… but I wish I’d double or triple planted. Then again I’d planted in a huge rush and it was more an experiment than a production run.

Lesson learned. Shitty germination is a thing I need to plan for if I’m going to do free range corn in the richest soil I’ve got. That’s why I did the experiment. You need to try things to learn things. I have almost no spare labor so I wanted to try “almost no labor” corn crops.

I was hopeful my tiny cohort of stalks would survive but also was full of doubt. I wasn’t even sure if they’d be able to pollinate each other. Corn are wind pollinators, they need a certain amount of other corn. 23 was pretty sparse!

For the next several weeks I did very little maintenance/gardening; literally the absolute minimum. Knowing the other weeds would go apeshit, I stomped a few foot radius around each of the two dozen little corn stalks. I didn’t dink around with a roto-tiller (which I don’t own) or burn my precious time lovingly caring for the corn. This wasn’t helicopter parent corn. It was Gen-X corn. It was “raise yourself, I’ve got shit to do” corn.

It held it’s own for a while but then started to lose the fight. I dumped some rotten hay bales around the corn stalks as mulch. That seemed to do wonders. Each stalk had about 2’ radius of area to dominate. 3’ would have been better but I ran out of mulch.

It looked nothing like a garden. It was an abandoned pig pen with a few odd looking weeds among the more mundane weeds with uneven globs of rotten hay underfoot. Butt ugly! But I was trying something new. I wanted to let things run their course… for science!

“Good luck 23 corn stalks,” I sighed, “you’re on your own.”

Someday when I retire I might have time to indulge in actual gardening. I’m sure it’s fun.

The weeds grew and the corn grew in a constant arms race. Occasionally I’d wander through it to stomp down amazingly aggressive weeds that were in the near vicinity of a corn stalk but I didn’t do much. Nor did I water anything. It rains. Fuck hoses!

One day I blasted my dirt bike through waist high weeds for no reason whatsoever. I was probably under the influence of Metallica and bravado. I barely dodged the few corn stalks and wound up wrapping chest high weeds all over the bike. It seemed like the thing to do. It was a hoot! It barely damaged the weeds which seemed to get torn to bits and I thrashed over them but then pop up more or less unaffected in my wake. I got out of there before I broke me or the bike. I don’t recommend “weeding with a dirt bike” but at least I tried it.

Which brings me to now. Some of the weeds are well above head high. Straining my eyes from the battered pig gate I can see some corn stalks jostling for position. They are doing OK bit there are nearby weeds that never fell to the disk or motorcycle or mulch and they’re easily 2’ taller. From a distance I’d say the tallest stuff is 8’. I think most of it is a weed called “pigweed”. Pigs love that shit. Next year, the piglets are going to be very happy! (If I get the fence built!) Don’t quote me on botanical information… it’s a tall green plant that ain’t corn and I’ve seen pigs eat it. That’s all I really know.

Is there corn to eat? Today’s the day I find out.

I’m goin’ in!

It’s pretty sketchy. It’ll be no fun wading through waist deep weeds and skirting around much taller patches. Some of it is prickly. Thistles? For all I know there could be a damn gorilla in there. Wish me luck!

[Not that kind of weed, ya’ hippie!]

My homestead’s fenced area should have pigs but doesn’t. All I’ve got is a rickety half collapsed fence around soil that’s notable. The soil has been shit on by pigs or cows most of the last century. I assume it is stupidly fertile.

Evidence of fertility is how amazingly fast weeds grow in there whenever pigs are absent. The pen’s soil is also absolutely filled with seeds and roots of every plant which has ever existed. It has seeds from everything native and every crop on any farm anywhere. A month or two without pigs and that rich soil will create big tall weeds that could hide a rhino. It’s insane how big the weeds get. Left unattended, they’ll be taller than me by halfway through summer.

This is only a problem during years without pigs. It gets out of hand and I can’t easily get in there with a mowing deck to nuke the weeds. I’ve tried with a riding lawnmower and it banged up my mower deck something fierce. I’ve tried with a tractor and a brush-hog but it’s tight maneuvering. One slip up and I’ll bang up the electric and physical fence.

It’s not really fun to wander around in there. I like to think the little jungle is occupied by songbirds and frogs. It has some of that but it’s also a fire hazard filled with ticks and probably quite attractive to skunks and wasp nests.

None of this applies when the pigs are present. Pigs handle weeds like a boss. There’s nothing more gratifying than watching a 30 pound piglet trashing through 3’ deep weeds like a happy oinking roto tiller. I have sometimes bought piglets that were raised on concrete. When I set them down on soft dirt surrounded by young spring weeds you can almost see the little piglet’s eyes widen with joy! Inside of a week they’ll have dug trails in the undergrowth. By August they’ll have eaten anything above or below ground that sparks their interest.

They don’t quit. By fall the much bigger pigs will have vacuumed up every tasty plant (including roots). They’ll excavate the churned dirt into a scale model of WW1 trench warfare. If you want ruts that’ll trip up a tractor, mud pits that’ll sink you to your knee, and irregular miniature mountains of churned soil… pigs are for you.

It’s also all pigs or all mechanical but never both. You’d think that if I tried to mow the weeds while the pigs were in there I’d scare the pigs… not so at all! They know the tractor brings food. They know that the guy who owns the tractor brings extra special treats like pie crusts and stale Doritos! The little bastards get real close to the tractor and they’re fearless. (Why have fear? I’m their pal!) They gather around the tractor as if they could climb in the cab and help me drive. I’m afraid they’ll get hurt! No machines can go in the pen when the overly friendly pigs are there.

What I’ve got most years is a happy if chaotic cycle. The pigs eat the weeds until not a leaf remains standing. (Exceptions for burr docks… pigs hate them… and don’t tell me about how hippies eat the roots, I hate burr docks too.) After the pigs are gone I’ll make a half-ass attempt to smooth the craters and holes with the tractor bucket and a disk. I’ll get it at least level enough that I can service the fence without twisting an ankle.

But nature abhors a vacuum and next spring the weeds will try to take over again. Which leads to me screwing with fence wires while football sized escape artists run around in the muddy springtime.

Homesteading is closer to ecology than any ecology class in college… I’m just sayin’.

Stay tuned…

I not-so-humbly think my readers are smarter than the average bear and fairly self-reliant so I need to pitch this out there. If you’ve got great advice about gardening, particularly the proven solutions used by gardeners for centuries; don’t tell me. I’m an idiot. Put it in a book and sell it. I’m serious! We need that shit written down and stored for current and future generations. Don’t just tell some rando blogger, teach the world. Mentor a kid or make a YouTube video or sell seeds or whatever.

I’m not a gardener by choice. I’m too fuckin’ busy all summer to deal with damn plants. Unless I’m starving, at which point I’ll get deadly serious very fast, I prefer non-plant activities.

Also my summers are insanely busy. I barely keep the lawn mowed and sometimes fail at that. I can spare the time to keep animals alive, some of my vehicles working, hunt during the right season, stack as much wood as I can, and occasionally sleep in a tent. Beyond that I’m booked and overbooked. Every minute of summer has a dozen urgent issues and many competing fun things which all want to happen at once. That’s why I’ve been posting about dirt bikes. You know what I’m not posting about? Turnips; I’ve had zero turnip posts so far.

In fall I’ll fit hunting in to my life with glee. My take is not as impressive as a gardener. I wish I could go out there and stalk a big bag of carrots; maybe sneak up on a salad. I’d be ever so happy if I could take a crossbow into the forest and come back with ten pounds of potatoes. Sadly, that’s not how it works. Even for hunting I’ve got big game but after that things get sketchy. I hunt squirrels for fuck’s sake. Nobody hunts squirrel well enough to fill the freezer. I do it because I like the link to nature but if I could go out and maybe shoot some pancakes I’d be all over that action! Alas, beyond a few wild blueberries and whatnot, I’m stuck with meat.

Then winter comes and kicks me in the balls for 9 months. That’s the biggest driver of things; my main occupation in summer is doing all the living that winter makes hard or impossible. Winter really is the season of death.

Now I can start the story:

Shit went down this spring and my pig fence was even more trashed than usual. Which is OK because some other shit went down and I couldn’t source piglets.

Piglets were just plain unavailable. Sometimes the universe is like that. Recently the universe is A LOT like that. Lets face it, society abandoned even the pretense of intelligence in 2020 and there’s no two ways about it. The world has been crawling deeper up its own ass ever since. By now I’m not upset I couldn’t find piglets. I’m just happy the lights are still on and there aren’t tanks on the streets… yet.

So, the boat had sailed on my critter plans. What to do? By the way, if you’re reading someone’s survivalist/homesteader/back-to-the-land blog and shit never goes wrong, you’re reading fiction. I’m just sayin’.

Anyway the pig pen is a never ending problem. The fence is older than me, and like me, it is completely shot. It’s always shot because I have the bare minimum available labor time and a budget of pocket change. Is that not the eternal challenge? Each spring I struggle to patch the fence together with whatever components I can scrape together. Each spring I barely get it done a day or two before the piglets arrive.

Piglets are cute little escape artists. Not every spring but far too often, they outwit me. They escape and I wind up chasing them through the forest like an idiot. Once I had to track them after they were gone overnight. I was less a farmer than a damn bloodhound (but that’s another story).

I like piglets. They’re smart and inquisitive… like happy intelligent children. Piglets in a new environment will explore. They’ll find whatever part of my physical fence is has sagged too much. They’ll find whatever section of the electric fence has shorted out (sometimes within minutes of arrival!). They’re also fast. They’ll zip under the fence and tear ass for the county line in a flash! I wish I could distract them with a box of Legos or something.

After a few weeks things will have changed. I’ll have trained the little footballs to avoid the electric fence. Once they learn what a zap feels like they’ll avoid the wire even if it’s dead. They’ll also have trained me to find and repair all the shorts in the fence. Also, I’ll have gone a long way in teaching them that I’m a nice guy that brings food. Or you can say they’ve trained me to serve their every whim.

Within a few weeks, if things go according to plan, I’ll have trained them even more. The risky part of the season is over. Even if the pigs do escape I just call their name and lure them back into the pen with a treat and a pat on the head. I’ll stand at the forest edge calling to my wandering livestock. “I’ve got student loan forgiveness! I’ve got socialized medicine! It’s all free today!” I’ll have a bucket of treats… often sugary breakfast cereal. They love that shit! You think I’m joking but I really do call out social programs and government “gimmie” programs. It amuses me and the pigs don’t care so long as they get their Honeycomb.

Once I’ve got their attention, the pigs will race to me to say “hi”. I’ll pat them on the head and assure them they’re nice pigs. They’ll trot right behind me like I’m the pied piper. I lead them back into the pen and give them their Honeycomb / free student loans. If you think I’m exaggerating to score points in a political argument, I’m not. Pigs are just as smart and just as dumb as a lot of people.

As the pigs get a little older they quit trying to escape entirely. They’re older and lazier and gradually ignoring their brain’s computing power; like teenagers. They’re still fit and healthy but they’re settled into a new routine and they won’t rock the boat. I keep teaching them that I’m a nice guy (and I really do like the little beasts). They’re closer to pets than pigs by then.

Eventually they’re like college students; they wouldn’t escape even if they could; which they can’t because they won’t bother. They’re happily living in a large comfortable area and a nice guy brings them food and cares for their every need. They don’t seek bigger worlds because they’ve got Netflix and a couch. They’re friendly and nice but transition from clever speed demons into lard-ass dipshits; which is why they remind me of college students.

(Have you noticed that college students don’t exercise their will to leave the University? They cling to that nest like a baby bird who won’t fly. They could go anywhere, anytime, for any reason… but they don’t leave until they have to. They’re in a place with easy classes, recreation facilities, food plans, and dorms with awesome broadband. Why would they leave that for a shitty apartment and a job? Comfort sucks their initiative right out and fills the gap with complacency.)

Continuing the analogy, by mid summer, I’m just like the student loan bureaucrat at the registrar. I’ll hand over virtually anything the students… er I mean pigs. I don’t care how much it costs because I’m fattening them up. They’ll pay for all that fancy feed in the end. It doesn’t mean I hate pigs (or most college students).

It means I know the difference between a clever inquisitive free being and livestock.

I seem to have gotten off track. I’ll re-orient in my next post.

I’m going to start this post with a preference and two statements. First, the preference:

I prefer raising or hunting critters to gardening or gathering plants.

That’s just my opinion. You can do your own thing. The world is full of awesome gardeners and I’m totally cool with that. I endeavor to make some or all of my household’s food but I generally limit myself to critter-centric approaches. Avid gardeners can probably beat me in a pounds produced per year comparison. More power to ‘em!

This year things got wonky and my critter based food production went to hell. Now I’m buying food from grocery stores. If they run out I’m as fucked as everyone else! (I’ve got a fully stocked pantry of course… I’m not an idiot!)

Ironically, grocery stores are how everyone everywhere lives all the time but I’m jittery about it. I find dependency on ANY supply chain weird and a little unnerving. I’m not saying it’s logical, I’m just saying how I am.

Given that nothing else is going on (homestead food wise) I might as well try unconventional things. The point is, I’m an ADAPTIVE Curmudgeon and to live up to that name I ought to be willing to try anything once. That’s how it came that I grew what I call “free range” corn. I’ll elaborate in a moment. Before that I need to add two statements:

It is easy to tell the difference between a good idea and a dumb one but it’s very hard to tell the difference between a novel or genius idea and a dumb one.

And.

If it works, it’s not dumb.

Stay tuned to see if I’m dumb or not.

I’ve been conventionally unproductive this summer, which means I’ve been a whir of happy inefficiency. I raised no pigs, sold my chickens, the homestead looks like shit, and the firewood ain’t stacked. Do I care? Not really. Why care about little shit when you’re in the Bidenverse? Whatever tectonic movements are afoot, they’re huge and happening well above my pay grade. It’s a good time to go fishing.

Don’t shoulder the burdens you didn’t make! Gone Gault? Burned out? Chilled out? Leveled up? Gotten lazy? I can hardly tell the difference.

My Walkabouts page tells me I’ve written 29 posts about not much of anything; mostly about camping with my cheap little farm bike (affectionately named Honey Badger). (Some posts involve other things; like a roasting ride on my “adult” sized motorcycle, random bitching about Covidians, and sushi robots.)

What the hell does it mean? No idea! I’ve done nothing serious. Which is either dumb or gloriously wise.

I’ve been swarmed by mosquitoes, menaced by ticks, outwitted by fish, marveled at flowers, listened to birds, ran over a snake, and frightened a mama bear with her cub. I’ve been dehydrated, rehydrated, chugged ice water from a motorcycle mount, and drank myself silly while completely alone.* I’ve pissed on rocks, tripped through mud, played with chainsaws, did field expedient motorcycle maintenance, and started a fire with flint. I’ve scouted, camped, hiked, explored, wandered, ambled, shuffled, and drifted. I’ve been rained on, got lost, got found, cooked good food, cooked bad food, cooked expensive freeze dried food, cooked cheap canned food, and got cooked in the sun. I spent a pittance on motorcycle fuel, whined while topping off my Dodge, spent a fortune on a jacket, was too cheap to pay for a campsite, and paid off my bike. I ripped a fart with my ass hanging out of ripped chaps, met Odin and his side piece, avoided UTVs, slipped unnoticed past hikers, made a scene at a bar, and setup two tents for one guy. I’ve listened to blues from another time zone, ignored National Public Radio’s infuriating propaganda, enjoyed bassa nova on Radio Free Cuba’s propaganda in Spanish, and listened to nothing but the wind.

What better things could I have been doing? I think none.

I probably sound just as lame as Calvin’s Dad:

Hat tip to The View From Lady Lake.

A.C.

*When I was a kid they said “never drink alone, it’s a sign you’re an alcoholic”. When I was young I believed them. I’m older now. I’ve concluded they can go fuck themselves. You’re a grown ass man. Drink alone if you want. Don’t if you don’t. The sign that you’re an alcoholic is being an alcoholic. Drinking alone might just mean you’re not a clingy little bitch who’s afraid of his own company. Plus, it’s a good song. Nothing sums up the Bidenverse like the fact that the only link I could find to the very well done 1985 video is a sketchy link out of Russia. Maybe someday we’ll only hear George Thorogood on shortwave from Radio Free Moscow?